I heard him head off down the corridor and moved quickly, slipping out of my bed and across the room. The ward is different at night, a strange place of half-light and half-noises. The gurgles and murmurs of tranquillised sleep, crazy people having crazy dreams, probably not even realising.
I walked slowly, hearing everything, the faint tune from a radio turned down low in the nurses’ station, my bare feet breaking free of the sticky floor. Movement further down the ward, the second room from mine, or maybe the third. The Doctor finishing his rounds, looking in on real patients, patients he doesn’t need to silence. I headed to the visitors’ room, thinking I would follow him when he came back past. I tried to move without making any sound, wishing I didn’t have to spend so long out in the open. I made the shelter of the darkened room and slid behind the half-open door, listening to my heart slowing down. I crawled to the chair with the screw-out legs and removed one. My heart sped up with the feel of it in my hand. I waited.
I heard his footsteps approaching and I imagined how he would look, his tall, unsuspecting strides, his exposed forehead and long face, empty of guilt. I imagined how it would feel to strike the first blow and my hand became slippery with perspiration. But the clicking of his ankles stopped before he reached me. By the sound of it he was standing outside my room, looking in. I had clumped the bedclothes into a ridge, so that from the doorway it would appear I was still sleeping there. Not if he went inside though. Click. His feet moved forward. A pause, then him hurrying out again, down the corridor, past me too quickly.
‘Nurse! Nurse!’ I heard him whisper urgently.
‘What? What is it?’ Margaret’s voice.
‘He’s missing. He’s not in his bed.’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think? The boy.’ No need for names or further questions. She understood straight away.
‘He might have gone to the toilet,’ she whispered. Not ‘so what?’ Not ‘it hardly matters’.
‘Why is he awake at all? He should be sleeping all night on fifteen milligrams.’
‘You can’t always predict...’
‘Don’t tell me my job.’
They were edging back towards the nurses’ station and their whispers became unintelligible. Not the feel of them though, the urgency, the hint of desperation from the Doctor, telling me that with Margaret he has nothing to hide. And her replies, short, clipped statements, spat out into the corridor like little arrows of warning. I stood there, not daring to move, wondering how much she must have worked out, how much she must have told him. If he knows I have stopped taking the drugs then he must be close to making his move. He must have a plan.
I heard feet moving off towards the toilets. Only one pair I thought, one of them left standing guard. I counted to twenty, willing them to move off too, but there was nothing. I moved out from behind the door and, crouching down, my head close to the ground, allowed myself a glimpse outside. The Doctor stood with his back to me, watching for Margaret’s return. He was five metres away, maybe less, suspicious and alert. A bad time for an attack.
I stood slowly and considered my chances of making it back to my room. The door was almost directly opposite, four paces away, maybe five on the diagonal. I had to try.
I gently balanced on one foot, then the other, rotating the free ankle each time, to make sure they were loose, so they wouldn’t creak and give me away. I moved. Quick bounds, landing and pushing off in the same movement, only the balls of my feet touching down. I didn’t have the nerve to do it slowly. If he had turned I would have kept moving, down the corridor, back around the other side, away from the ward, away from everything.
He didn’t turn. I made it back to the bed without hearing his voice. The fear had pumped me full of adrenalin and my mind was still racing, looking for a way out, a chance to keep the upper hand. I didn’t climb into my bed but instead lay down on the hard floor on the far side, where he might not have looked earlier. I closed my eyes and I waited.
It was ten minutes before they returned, together, still talking in broken, impatient whispers.
‘You see, I told you. He’s gone.’
‘No wait, look over here.’ Margaret’s footsteps came around to my side of the bed. ‘Here he is, look. He’s climbed down onto the floor, silly thing.’
There was a long pause, the Doctor looking closely, making up his mind about what he was seeing.
‘Has he done this before?’ ‘I don’t know.’
‘Get him back into bed then.’ Still angry. Still uncertain.
Margaret shook me and I let myself seem half-awake, groggy and confused. I saw the Doctor had already left. Margaret didn’t say a word as I climbed back into my bed.
Now I’m hurrying to get this down, writing so quickly I can barely recognise my words. It is the last thing I know, the only thing I am still sure of. Time is running out.
14
We heard them crashing about in their search, calling out to one another. They had lost track of us and there was no system to their hunting but that didn’t make me any less afraid. We kept our heads down and stayed silent. I listened to the men regrouping on the track above us. They were arguing about something. The voice I recognised rose higher than the others, shouting them down. Then we heard them moving back towards the hut.
‘Jesus Marko, what was all that about?’ Jonathon asked, and I could tell by his voice he wasn’t close to getting it. He was expecting a story, a full stop at the end, something we’d look back on and laugh about. Not what I had to tell him, which was just a beginning, with us right in the middle of it. I didn’t want to speak. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. I wanted there to be some way of them knowing without me having to say it.
‘Come on Marko, you’re scaring us,’ Rebecca said.
‘It’s Ms Jenkins isn’t it?’ Lisa guessed.
I nodded and opened my mouth, determined to form the words. Any way would do. There was no right way. Everything about it could only be wrong.
‘I saw them. They killed her. She’s dead. Ms Jenkins is...’
That was all I could do. I heard my own words and choked on the sound of them. I didn’t cry, I just stopped. Stopped talking, stopped feeling. There was emptiness all around me, on their faces, in the air, sucking us dry. We didn’t speak, we didn’t move, we couldn’t even look at one another. None of us knew what came next.
‘God.’ From Lisa. Not a word, more a whimper.
‘You wouldn’t joke about this would you?’ Jonathon asked, but his voice was too quiet, too soft to be his. ‘No, you wouldn’t. Sorry. Shit.’
‘You sure?’ Rebecca asked.
I nodded.
‘Well, how? What happened?’
It had to be asked and it had to be told. They gathered behind her question and I explained to them what I had seen, every awful detail of it. When I finished they looked confused, like I’d missed out some crucial point, the thing that would make sense of it all.
‘But who are they?’ Lisa asked.
‘I don’t know. You saw as much of them as I did.’
‘Not really.’
‘Just people. People who are fucked up. I don’t know.’
‘But why had they stopped her? What did they want?’ Lisa wouldn’t let herself understand.
‘What do you think?’ Rebecca replied, her voice so drained it sounded heartless.
‘No. No, that can’t be right. Nobody...not three of them. Not tramping. It doesn’t happen like that. People wouldn’t.’
‘They did.’
‘No, you must have got it wrong Marko. You must have misheard them. Or something else must have happened, before you got there.’
I knew what she was getting at. The same thing I wanted, some way of making it all not so bad, better somehow. Only there’re some things that can never be made better. It could have been a total accident. It could have happened while they were trying to help her. She’d still be dead. All the things that were Ms Jenkins, they’d still all have st
opped. She wouldn’t laugh now, or complain, sweat or even breathe. Never. So how can that be made any better?
‘But what exactly killed her?’ Rebecca asked me. ‘You don’t just kill someone with a punch.’
‘It was her head I think, against the tree.’
‘But you’re sure she’s dead?’
‘They checked. They said she was.’
‘She might not be then,’ Lisa decided.
‘She is, okay Lisa?’ Jonathon snapped. ‘She is.’
‘What’s her name?’ Lisa asked. I thought she’d lost it completely then.
‘Ms Jenkins,’ I replied, as gently as I could, scared she would scream, give our position away.
‘No, I mean her whole name. We should be using her name.’
But none of us knew her name. For me that was one horrible thought too many. The pain started in waves behind my forehead and washed out as tears, loosening every muscle, wasting every expression, until the sobbing was uncontrollable.
‘Hey, it’s okay Marko,’ someone said, only it wasn’t, so soon they were crying too.
We couldn’t stay like that forever. We needed a plan, but without Ms Jenkins there was no one to suggest it. In the end it was Rebecca who was strongest.
‘We can’t stay here,’ she told us. ‘We have to get back to the hut.’ She wasn’t ordering us around, she was just being our example. ‘We have to get our gear.’
‘Then what?’ Lisa asked.
‘We walk out of here, tell the police. First we should go back to where she died, see if we can tell what they’ve done with her.’ Rebecca was back to being Rebecca now, speaking with quiet certainty.
‘Sounds dangerous,’ Jonathon said.
‘We owe it to her.’
‘They might be waiting for us in the hut,’ I pointed out.
‘No, they’ll have panicked. They’ll be wanting to get as far away as they can, cover their traces.’ ‘I’m their traces,’ I reminded her.
‘He’s got a point,’ Jonathon agreed.
‘So what are you saying we should do?’ Rebecca snapped at him. The old tension, but with new reasons now.
‘I’m saying we should be careful, that’s all,’ Jonathon said, backing down from the fight.
And we were careful. We spent half an hour creeping the 500 metres back to the hut, and another half hour after that circling round, looking for signs of life. Jonathon volunteered to go inside first. He was meant to give a morepork call once he’d decided it was safe, a bit useless in the daytime but it was the only one we could think of. It didn’t matter anyway, because what he called out instead was ‘Fuck them!’ loud and angry. We were still trying to work out whether that counted as an all-clear when he appeared on the balcony.
‘Are you coming in or what?’ he called to us.
‘We didn’t hear your morepork,’ Rebecca told him.
‘The morepork says “fuck them”. Come and look at what they’ve done.’
They’d been through all our packs, taken the food, the sleeping bags and most of the clothes. The rest was strewn about the floor.
‘Now we’re screwed,’ I said, even though I knew it didn’t help to say it. Nobody disagreed.
I think when you’re faced with something like that, a situation so serious it could kill you, there’s a battle that goes on between two parts of your brain. There’s one part that always wants to keep on fighting, no matter how impossible everything seems. Then there’s another part that’s always only the smallest excuse away from giving up. I think those parts are always there, and most of the time we never find out which is stronger. For us, over the next ten minutes, in amongst the mess of our few discarded possessions, our heads full of shock, the giving-up parts started winning. We sat around and started talking and all we could say was how terrible it had all become.
Then something else started happening, with Jonathon and Rebecca. Whatever one of them said, the other one attacked, like there was a battle for control going on. Jonathon wanted to stay put in the hut. He said it was too dangerous to go out without any gear, that it would be the first place Search and Rescue would come looking when they realised we were missing. I think it was more just because Rebecca still wanted to move on.
‘You can’t rely on Search and Rescue,’ she said. ‘If there still is a Search and Rescue they’ll be too busy digging people out from buildings. The only people coming back here are those bastards and their guns.’
‘You’ve changed your tune.’
‘I’ve had time to think about it.’
‘Well you were right first time. They will have freaked. Think how you’d feel if you’d accidentally killed someone.’
‘It wasn’t an accident.’ She sounded so sure, for someone who hadn’t been there. ‘They’re murderers.’
‘So you seriously think we can walk out of here, without getting lost, or starving, or freezing to death?’ Jonathon challenged.
‘Yes.’
‘Away you go then.’
‘You’re all coming with me.’
‘Pass.’
‘You don’t speak for the others.’
I didn’t want to have to decide, same as I didn’t want them to argue. I wanted there to be just one option, and I wanted someone to explain it to me. Rebecca did her best.
‘We won’t get lost. We head east, into the morning sun. Two valleys and we’re out of here. What did it take to walk in here? Not much, right? And this time there’s no gear to carry. It’s two days max. We won’t starve. You can go weeks without food, if you have to. All we need is water and there isn’t exactly a shortage of that up here. And freezing isn’t going to be a problem either. Look, they’ve left the packliners. Jonathon, pass that stupid knife you’re always carrying.’
‘What are you going to do, Xena, hunt us some dinner?’
‘Just do it.’ Rebecca flipped open the blade and with three neat slits the bag became a raincoat. ‘So we go. Come on you two, what do you say?’
I wanted to believe her, because it was so much better than believing nothing. And I knew staying in the hut frightened me more than the bush did.
‘Yeah, it does make more sense,’ I said.
‘I think so too,’ Lisa agreed, but she sounded even less convinced. Jonathon looked at me like I’d personally betrayed him.
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ he muttered.
‘So it’s agreed then?’ Rebecca stared straight at him, forcing him to concede.
‘You’re the boss,’ he shrugged.
‘Good. Right then, let’s get everything together that might be useful and stuff it into this spare packliner. We’ll put it in Lisa’s pack, it’s the smallest. Marko, can you take us back to where it happened?’
‘What do we want to do that for?’ Jonathon challenged. ‘I thought we were in a hurry to get out of here.’
‘I want to find her body.’
‘Don’t see why. She’ll still be dead.’ I don’t think he thought about how that was going to sound. If he didn’t realise as soon as he said it, it came to him a second later in the form of Rebecca’s fist. Not a ‘stop pissing me off’ warning blow but a full-blooded punch that knocked him off his feet. When he stood back up his nose was bleeding.
‘What the fuck was that for?’ Jonathon asked, not just to Rebecca but to all three of us, standing in a line now.
‘No jokes about her okay?’ Rebecca said.
‘She’s right,’ Lisa added. ‘We have to find her body. For the family.’
‘And it will be evidence,’ I added. That came out badly.
‘Okay, whatever. I’m sorry. Lead on then, mighty one.’
As we packed together the few warm clothes we had, along with an extra stash of scroggin Jonathon had hidden in a sock, the air was tense. Tense with Jonathon and Rebecca, but more tense with Ms Jenkins, who was already getting difficult to mention.
I led them back to the place, not letting myself feel anything, preferring the numbness of the watching bush
, bush that could outlast blizzards or earthquakes, floods or fires, and could keep on coming back. Twice we stopped because someone thought they’d heard something but both times were false alarms. When we finally reached the rise in the track I had to walk back round the corner to be sure. It looked so unremarkable, so like everywhere else, as if nothing unusual could have happened here. Nothing important.
But it was the place and it was the tree. Jonathon got on his hands and knees and found a stone with dried blood on it. He held it out on the palm of his hand and we all looked but nobody touched it or said a word. He let it drop back to the ground. It became impossible to keep out the memories. Ms Jenkins, so far away from dying, just pissed off and tired and not needing their aggro. Death, with no sense of occasion, turning up anyway, uninvited.
‘They’ve hidden her somewhere,’ Rebecca said, sounding less sure of herself now we were there. ‘Somewhere easy. They will have been panicking. Any ideas?’
‘Bush is thickest down that way,’ I said.
‘Other side’s off the track though,’ Lisa noted.
‘There’s a slip over there.’ Jonathon pointed ahead. ‘That’s where I’d put her. Easy to dig up later, and it could look like she died in it.’
‘We’ll split up then,’ Rebecca said. ‘Yell out if, well, you know.’
‘I’m not going by myself,’ Lisa told her. ‘I’m going with you.’
We looked. I scrambled down the nearest slope, knowing how important it was to find her, but also hoping we wouldn’t. I didn’t know how I would handle it. I was already close to breaking down. The shout came from Rebecca, on the other side of the ridge. I met Jonathon on the way back up. He caught my eye and cocked an eyebrow. I shrugged. I saw his shoulders rise as he took a deep breath, preparing himself.
I suppose it should have been easiest for me. I’d already seen her. I was there when it happened. Still, I was the first one to turn for the support of a tree, and then, sinking to my knees, throw up. I looked back to the others, still standing over her, looking down like their eyes couldn’t turn away until their brains properly understood. Only that would take forever.
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