Walking away from the river, we hit another series of rolling hills. More green waves, going on forever. Our adventure in the river had left me feeling dog-tired. My legs felt like lead as we trudged along. Not surprisingly, a bit of the spring had gone out of Spider’s step, too.
We were still aiming for a little knot of trees on top of a hill. I was beginning to think they were like one of those mirage things in the desert, disappearing just when you got near them, but eventually Spider got to the top of one hill and gave a little shout -“Hey, we’re here!”-and amazingly, we were. We scrambled down the other side and up the last rise, and into the relative cover of a little clump of woodland.
I sank down at the edge of the trees and looked back at the way we’d come. I couldn’t believe it was so far. “Look how far we’ve walked! No wonder I’m knackered.” I flopped backward, not caring what I was lying on.
“If we can see all of that, anyone there could see us. Let’s go farther in,” Spider said. I didn’t know what was happening to him: It was like he’d suddenly swallowed a sensible pill or something.
I groaned, struggled to my feet again, and followed him into the middle of the woods. He’d gathered up all the bags and found a place between four tree trunks to settle down. Although you could still see out to the fields when you stood up, when you were sitting down the plants and bushes blotted them all out. We were hidden.
The ground was hard and uneven. Spider had spread out the blanket he’d been carrying. You could still feel lumps and bumps underneath you, but it softened it a bit.
Spider was sitting propped up against a tree trunk, but I lay down flat and looked up at the trees above me. It was weird. Although I knew the trunks were pretty straight, they looked like they were bending together over me as they stretched up into the sky. Their leaves were black against the brightness, making a lacy pattern, almost too complicated to look at. It was like they were hypnotic. If you let yourself go, you started to get all mixed up in your head, and you could imagine that you were high up, looking down hundreds of feet to the leaves below you. The wind was swooshing through the branches, making this amazing spaced-out sound – it could have been wind or water or even traffic. Really soothing.
“I can’t believe we just did that,” I said after a while.
“What?”
“Walked all that way.”
Spider snorted. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool what you can do when you have to. Perhaps we’ll walk all the way to Weston.”
“How far’s that?”
“Haven’t got a clue. A long way, man.”
I groaned again, and shut my eyes, and let my mind focus on the noise, only the noise…
When I woke up, my head was aching and my mouth felt disgusting – dry inside and sticky ’round my lips. I had to struggle to remember where I was, and even when I sat up and looked around I wasn’t sure if it was morning or evening. My watch said five past four, which I guessed was the end of the afternoon, but it could have been the next morning, I just didn’t know. Spider was snoring away with his back to me, curled up like a baby. I could see the side of his face. Asleep, you could imagine him as a child – he was peaceful, kind of innocent. Just for a minute, I tested out the feeling: what it might be like to be someone’s mum. It made me feel scared – there was no way that was for me. I could never handle that much responsibility, and besides, how could I ever look a child – my own child – in the face and see their death before they’d even begun? Some people aren’t cut out for all that. I was one of them. No big deal.
I rubbed my eyes and my forehead, but the pain in my head kept on throbbing. I reached across and dug into the bags, looking for something to drink. The Coke was welcome, but I wished we’d got something hot to drink – a nice cup of tea or some hot chocolate. Something comforting. Spider must have heard me rummaging about in the plastic bags because he unwound and turned over.
“What time is it?”
“Just gone four.”
“God, we’ve slept the day away.” He sat up slowly. “I feel rough.”
I passed the Coke over. “We’ve not really been eating and drinking today.”
He took a long swig. “Aah, that’s better. Any sign they’re following us?”
“Dunno, I can’t hear anything.”
“We’ll have a look in a minute. Let’s have some food, then.” Once again, we delved into the bags and munched our way through chips, crackers, cookies, and chocolate.
Spider stood up as he was eating and walked around our little woodland, up to the edge on one side, and then across the middle to pick up another biscuit, and on to the other side. “I can’t see anything,” he said, chewing and talking at the same time. “I was thinking we should walk on a bit farther, but it’s going to be dark soon. I think we should rest up here, set off early tomorrow.”
I wasn’t going to argue with that. I didn’t mind if I never walked anywhere ever again.
Having decided we were going to stay put, we were suddenly faced with twelve hours of nothing to do. It became impossible to relax, to sit still, and there was no question of sleeping. We both wandered around the wood for a bit, looked out at the view from various points. I stood for a long time watching banks of cloud roll across. They seemed to move so slowly, but if you fixed your eyes on one, then looked away for a few seconds, it had gone farther than you thought. Bit like us, walking through the fields, going so slowly, like a pair of bugs crawling on the surface of the planet, and then looking back to find we’d covered miles.
“I’ve never seen so much sky,” I said. “It did my head in, walking out in the fields with all that sky above us.”
“It’s good when you get used to it. There’s so much air, you can fill your lungs with it over and over again.” Spider flung his arms out wide. “It’s like this at the seaside. Great flat beach, and sea and sky. You’ll love it, Jem.” He turned ’round to face me. “We’ll find a B &B, and have fish and chips every day. We can walk along the pier, write things in the sand, just have a laugh.”
He started clambering up a tree, but didn’t get very far before his feet slipped down. He tried again, with the same result. The light was going from the sky, like the color was being sucked out of it. The air temperature was dropping even lower, too.
“It’s going to be dark soon,” I said with a shiver. “What do we do then?”
“We’ll just have to go to sleep.”
“It’s only half past four.”
“I know, man, but what are you gonna do? Watch TV?”
The reality of it was dragging me down. I started thinking about the cold, the blackness. I didn’t want to be out there in the dark. It had been bad enough the night before in the car, but at least we had had four metal walls and a roof.
“Let’s not stay here, Spider. Let’s try and find somewhere else.”
“We haven’t got time, mate. Can you see anywhere? It would take hours to find somewhere, and we’d be walking in the dark. We haven’t even got a flashlight.”
Around us, the world was going from color to black-and-white. Soon it would be just black. I had no idea what went on in the countryside at night – animals? people with guns out hunting? – and I didn’t want to find out. I was starting to lose it.
“Why haven’t we got a flashlight? Why?! Wasn’t it just a little bit stupid to come out here without a flashlight?”