by Unknown
Storm laughs. ‘Where did I get you from?’ she says, shaking her head. ‘You’ll be packing an iron and a first-aid kit, next! We’re going to do the festivals, Dizzy – ease up, travel light! And no hairdryer, OK?’
‘OK.’
In the kitchen, the big jug of cider is almost empty. Ouch. Dad doesn’t drink much usually, so I bet he’s got a really sore head this morning. I put the kettle on for his coffee.
Storm’s raiding the fridge for travel snacks. I notice her stash away orange juice, butter, cheese, coleslaw, yoghurts. ‘Well, you’re not vegan, are you?’ she says defensively. ‘Anyway, Pete won’t mind. Hurry up, now, it’s almost six – we need to get moving.’
‘Right. I’ll just take Dad his coffee.’
‘Right. But Dizzy, listen – don’t make a big deal of it, OK? We don’t want him to change his mind. Don’t go on about missing him and stuff, it’s not like we’re going to be away for long…’
‘No, sure,’ I agree. ‘But I have to see him, y’know? I have to say goodbye.’
Storm shrugs and goes back to ransacking the fridge.
Dad’s room stinks of curry and cider. The air is thick and stale and heavy, and Dad’s asleep with the duvet over his head and his feet sticking out over the side of the bed. He forgot to take his socks off.
‘Dad? Dad, wake up!’ I hiss, peeling back the duvet and shaking his shoulder. He’s fully dressed, yesterday’s T-shirt crumpled and grubby.
‘Gnnnhh?’
He groans and tries to hide under the pillow.
‘Dad, Dad, listen,’ I tell him. ‘I just wanted to say thanks. I can’t believe you changed your mind, but I’m so, so-oo happy. Thanks, Dad.’
I hug him, breathing in sweat and scrumpy and curry and clay.
‘Urggh… mouth feels like the bottom of a birdcage,’ he moans. ‘That scrumpy’s evil stuff. My head…’
‘Never mind. I made you a coffee.’
He props himself up on one elbow, wincing at the effort. His eyes are all screwed up against the light and his hair is sticking out in clumps. His hand shakes a bit as he takes the coffee, so I take it back again and put it down on the bedside table.
He’s looking kind of green.
‘Good birthday, then?’ he says in a wobbly voice, covering his eyes.
‘The best ever,’ I promise. ‘The guitar, then Mum, now… this!’
‘Hmmfff?’
‘Seriously, Dad, you are totally the best. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. Look, I have to get going, now. You sleep in, take a lazy day, you deserve it. I’m gonna miss you…’
Oops. Storm told me not to get all soppy.
‘OK, see you later, sweetheart,’ Dad says with an effort, burrowing down under the covers again.
I pause in the doorway. I want another hug, a proper chat, a long goodbye, but Dad’s snoring gently. I close the door and creep away.
An hour later, we’re rattling along at forty-five miles an hour in the patchwork van. My bags and my guitar are in the back, cocooned in quilts, and we’re scoffing Mars bars from Hilton Park service station, where we pulled in for a fuel and toilet stop.
‘Not exactly vegan,’ Storm admits. ‘But this is a special occasion!’
I’m sitting up front, looking out at the open road over a dashboard draped with tinsel and bells and Blu-tacked seashells. A clump of dried flowers, ribbons and feathers dangles from the roof, swinging from side to side.
We’ve just turned off the motorway, heading north. The van rattles and coughs like it’s tied together with string, and Storm says we’re safer sticking to smaller roads in case we get pulled by the police.
‘When d’you think we’ll be in Wales?’ I ask.
‘Well…’
Storm takes a skinny, handrolled ciggy from her bag and makes a big production of lighting it with a red plastic lighter. She takes a few deep draws.
‘Don’t mind, do you?’ she asks, grinning.
‘No, course not,’ I say.
‘So. Did I say Wales, last night?’ she goes on. ‘Must be getting forgetful, Dizz. I meant Scotland. The solstice festival’s in Scotland, up in the mountains. I can’t believe I said Wales.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Well, you know, it’s just a tiny gathering, just us and some really good friends. Like a little family, yeah?’
I bite my lip. Wales, Scotland, it doesn’t make much difference.
‘OK, babe?’ Storm asks. ‘You’re kind of quiet.’
‘I’m fine. I was just thinking…’
‘Yeah?’
I frown. ‘Well, when I said bye to Dad earlier on…’
Storm snaps to attention. ‘What is it? What did he say?’
‘Well, nothing much,’ I admit. ‘He was sort of hung-over, like you said. But – well, when I said I was going, he just said see you later, like I was off to school or something. Does that seem… a bit weird, to you?’
‘Maybe he didn’t want to make a fuss,’ says Storm.
‘Maybe.’
‘Or – I remember now. He said he’ll try and meet up with us in a week or two. Stick around for a bit. It’ll be like old times!’
‘Oh… that’s great.’ I let out a long sigh of relief. ‘Where’s he going to meet us? When?’
Storm stubs out her roll-up on the jingly dashboard.
‘Oh, he said he’d come up to the Tree People Festival in a week or two. Don’t stress, Dizz, I’ll let him know where we are.’
A warm, happy glow seeps through my body, and I stretch back in my seat. I can’t stop smiling.
‘Sorry,’ I tell Storm. ‘I keep having to pinch myself to remember I’m not dreaming. It’s just too good to be true. For a minute there, I started wondering if Dad got mixed up about the holiday, if he agreed maybe when he was drunk and then didn’t remember…’
Storm rakes about in the glove compartment and drags out an old music tape, squinting at it as she drives. ‘You worry too much,’ she says, distractedly. ‘Pete knows you’re with me, and I’m your mum, aren’t I? What’s the problem?’
‘No problem!’
She shoves the tape into the cassette deck and a jiggy, rackety noise erupts, almost drowning out the van’s roar.
‘This afternoon we’ll be on a Scottish hillside, with wildflowers under our feet and nothing but blue skies above us. Just you and me, Dizz. No school, no rules, no worries, no hassles, just nature and music and peace and fun. How cool is that?’
Pretty cool.
You learn something new every day, Dad says. Most days, it’s French verbs and algebra and the life cycle of the frog, but today is different.
Today I’m learning about the most important day of the whole traveller year, the solstice. It all starts tomorrow, 20 June, and guess what? I’m on my way to a solstice festival to celebrate. The night of 20 June is the shortest night of the year. The sun doesn’t set till almost eleven, and then it rises next day at four in the morning.
Storm says that the summer solstice is when the earth’s energies are at their strongest. It’s a magical night, she says, a night when the curtain between the world of man and the world of nature is at its thinnest. It’s a night when dreams come true, when anything can happen.
We’re going to take lanterns up to the top of the hill and sing and dance and stay up all night to see the sun rise. I’ve never done that before.
‘Things are changing for you, Dizz,’ Storm says. ‘I saw it in your cards. It’s time to ease up, relax, live a little. Have fun, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyway, we’re nearly there.’
The track is so rough and steep and pot-holey, I think the patchwork van will probably collapse and die right here, right now. We’re bumping along at ten miles an hour and the engine is howling in pain, but Storm just smokes and smiles and steers the van onwards.
Every bone in my body feels bashed and broken by the time we arrive at the field marked ‘car park’. We veer off the track and cr
ash down across the rutted ground, and Storm squeezes the van in among an unruly tangle of ancient buses, vans and cars.
‘So,’ she grins. ‘This is it! Grab your bags and one of those quilts and we’ll get moving.’
I look around for nature, music, peace and fun, but all I can see are dusty old junkyard wrecks and a lone sheep peering over the wall at me. I struggle into my rucksack, sling the holdall over one shoulder, my guitar over the other, then try to wrestle a rolled-up quilt into submission. Storm laughs. She drags the quilt-roll off me, flings it over her shoulder and picks up the carrier bags of supplies we bought two hours back in a supermarket in Carlisle.
We trail up a smaller, steeper track, through a wood full of tiny, twisty trees with branches that reach out to us like fingers. My legs start to ache and the rucksack drags and the holdall keeps slipping off my shoulder.
In the distance, I hear a slow, soft drumbeat. Thin squeals and dipping voices float down towards us. As we come to the edge of the woods, I see the tepees, three towering canvas structures, surrounded by countless smaller tents.
Bright, ragbag people sit around the clearing, talking, smoking, laughing. A posse of skinny mongrel dogs scrounge around a scruffy child eating white bread straight from the packet. The smell of wood smoke fills my nose, familiar, comforting.
‘I remember that smell,’ I whisper.
Storm laughs. ‘Well, of course you do, Dizz! You spent the first four years of your life at festivals like this one, didn’t you? You’re going to love it.’
I don’t love it, though, as we walk across the clearing, all eyes fixed on us, interested, welcoming, curious. It’s worse than reading out loud in assembly, all those faces, a few arms raised in greeting. My heart thumps louder than the drumbeat, and my cheeks flame.
Suddenly, from nowhere, a big black-and-white dog charges straight at us, yelping, squealing, circling around. It jumps up at Storm and she swats it away, laughing, but when it leaps at me I’m terrified. I stagger backwards, dropping my bags and my guitar. Its face is long and thin and hairy, with sharp teeth and slavering jaws like a piebald wolf.
‘Leggit!’ Storm shouts, and the dog subsides, but not before it’s stabbed me in the stomach with its claws. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to bite my lip to keep them back, bending to rescue my guitar.
‘She didn’t mean it, love,’ a plump, dark-haired woman says, grabbing hold of the dog’s collar. ‘She’s just a big daft pup.’
The dog is still writhing about in excitement, trying to lick my hands. I can see now it didn’t mean any harm and I feel embarrassed.
‘I’m not used to dogs,’ I say.
‘You will be,’ Storm says. ‘OK, Leggit, OK. Bloody pest.’
She drops her bags and quilt on the grass outside one of the tepees.
‘This is Tess,’ Storm gestures to the plump woman. ‘She’s known you since you were – oh, well, since forever, I suppose. She made that rag doll you’ve got at home.’
‘Oh!’
It’s not much of a greeting, but it’ all I can manage. I thought Storm had made that doll. I thought…
‘Nice to meet you again, Dizzy,’ Tess says. ‘Don’t suppose you remember Finn?’ She points across the clearing, where a sulky teenage boy in a black hoodie and filthy frayed jeans is standing, hands in pockets, staring. As our eyes meet, he turns away.
‘Used to be inseparable, you two did. Still, that was a long time ago. This must all seem pretty strange…’
‘No, I…’
‘Hey, Storm!’
A tall man is striding across the clearing, tanned and lean with frizzy fair hair, flecks of gold stubble on his jaw and eyes like chips of green ice. He’s carrying an armful of wood, big logs and curving branches that trail along the grass behind him. A small boy; mousy, colourless, follows behind, carrying smaller, twiggy branches.
They ditch their haul beside a vast, central logpile, but Storm doesn’t wait for them to come towards us. She launches herself at the man, flinging her arms around him. They kiss, and I have to look away.
‘That’s Zak,’ Tess says. ‘She tell you about him?’
I shake my head.
‘He’s OK,’ Tess says. ‘The little boy’s called Mouse.’
My stomach lurches suddenly, and my mouth feels dry.
‘Is he… I mean, is Mouse…’
‘Oh, no,’ Tess laughs. ‘No, Mouse is Zak’s son. He’s only been with us a few weeks, he used to live with his mum. He’ll settle down.’
She lets go of the dog’s collar and it leaps away, circling Zak and Storm, its tail thrashing. Mouse has disappeared.
I sink down on to the grass, cradling my guitar. My face aches, frozen into a smile. I’m waiting for someone to tell me what to do, how to act. I’m waiting for Storm to remember I’m here.
I wish I’d never come.
I lie in my sleeping bag staring up into the tall, tapering roof of the tepee, where the long larch poles cross. Last night the smoke from the fire rose in a thick, choking plume, up and out through the gap in the canvas above me. Now the fire is sleeping, a mound of ash and cinders with a few blackened beer cans at the edge.
A dozen or more people were packed in here last night, laughing, eating, drinking, smoking. They sat around the fire, people with tie-dyed shirts and patched jeans, rainbow sweaters, trailing crinkly skirts, baggy trousers, skintight vests. I didn’t have time to be shy.
Tess dished out potato stew from a huge cauldron. I passed round the bread – we used up two whole loaves, plus a slab of cheddar and the bag of supermarket apples Storm had bought earlier. Then cans of beer and bottles of cider appeared and a man with a white beard started playing the fiddle, and the air was thick with songs and smoke and laughter.
It was gone midnight when the party eased up. People stood up, drunkenly, hugging each other good night before lurching off into the dark. A few people just curled up where they were, dragging quilts and blankets out from along the edge of the tepee, even though they had their own tents out there somewhere.
I heard Mouse creep in long after everyone was asleep – everyone but me. I heard him pick his way through the sleeping bodies, a tiny shadow in the dark. He curled up next to Leggit, the skinny lurcher, and pulled a corner of someone else’s red blanket over his body. Later, much later, I thought I heard him whimper in the dark, but I can’t be sure.
He’s gone, now. No Leggit, no Mouse, and the man with the red blanket turns out to be the white-bearded wrinkly with the fiddle. I wonder if he knows he snores? On the other side of the tepee, Storm and Zak lie wrapped around each other, a muddle of arms and legs and patchwork quilt. I can’t look at them. It’s not like I expected Storm was going to come home and live happily ever after with Dad. Not really. But still, it’s hard to look.
My watch says four thirty and daylight streams in through the pale canvas walls. My guitar hangs from a loop of rope tied round one of the larch poles. The inside of the tepee is draped with cloth, hung with bags, supermarket carriers, four-packs of beer. Yesterday, Storm showed me how to loop, hook and hang my stuff up out of the way.
It’s not the first time I’ve slept in a tepee. Storm says we’ve done it before, when I was little, at festivals like this. A tepee is a magical place to live, because it’s round, it has no corners. Everyone is equal.
They’re sleeping soundly, making little fluttery sounds, coughing, snoring. I lie wide awake, stiff and terrified, scared to make a sound.
I don’t belong. I want my own bed, my own bedroom. I want my dad.
If I got up now I could walk through the sleeping festival, down the hillside. I could walk along the country lanes until I found a village with a phone box and I could call my dad. He’d come and fetch me, and we’d be home by teatime, curled up, eating pizza and joking about how the tarot is never wrong.
I know I won’t, though. I won’t run away.
Quietly, so as not to wake the muddle of sleepers, I slither free of my sleeping bag. I
slept in my clothes and boots, so I stand up creakily, picking a path between the bodies. Accidentally, I kick the fiddle-case, and the old beardy guy sits bolt upright, glaring around fiercely.
‘Sorry,’ I whisper, but the old bloke’s eyes are milky with sleep. He looks right through me.
I duck out through the doorflap, blinking in the thin green light that filters through the trees. The camp is silent. The air smells sharp and new. A few birds skitter through the tree tops, their song drifting down across the empty clearing.
Last night was noisy and hassled and I was way out of my depth, but this morning it’s fresh and clean, like anything is possible.
Almost anything.
I wander through the tents, avoiding guy-ropes and empty bottles and the blackened, crackled wood from a dozen cooking fires. Beyond the tents, the woods are cool and green. I step through curls of soft green bracken and my boots crunch twigs, squelch into damp, mossy hollows.
I remember the kids’ story about a brother and sister who leave a trail of breadcrumbs to help them find their way back home through the forest. The birds flutter down and eat the breadcrumbs and the children are lost.
I leave no trail.
Instead of a gingerbread house, I find a stream, a tiny, ice-white slash of water, cutting through the trees. The water is fast, pushing past the rocks with a froth of creamy surf. I think of the standpipe in the camp clearing where I filled a kettle for Tess last night, and wonder how many of the festival-goers know this is even here.
Some do.
A makeshift den of fallen branches sits by the water’s edge. As I creep closer, hardly daring to breathe, I see bracken, moss and black bin bags woven in and out of the branches, as well as feathers, twigs, grass and gobbets of dried mud. Dead matches lie scattered across the ground, among the embers of a little bonfire.
Inside, there’s a dirty sleeping bag, a chocolate wrapper and a grey-fur toy mouse, streaked with dirt. A ragged black-and-white heap of spiky hair and bones lies huddled beside it, and two grey eyes blink at me from the shadows, black ears flopping to attention.
