Enchantment (17 page)

Some of the others, like Steve and Don, wore Army Surplus, but it was suitably worn and limp. One of the teenagers was in greasy leather, with a belt buckle like metal fangs. His pals wore black T-shirts with the sleeves torn raggedly out and old men's waistcoats gaping open on their bony chests. Thank God Tim had had the sense to wear his crummiest jeans and Jack's cracked old climbing boots with string laces.

Norman's bib overalls and silly red and white striped shirt looked too clean and new. So much for not being able to afford the course.

‘Load up, all you lot, and get used to the weight.' Steve stopped being a jokey sheepdog and became a serious natural leader.

They put on the heavy backpacks, with the vinyl sleeping mats rolled on top. Norman put his on kneeling down and could not get up: ‘Someone help me!' Teddy Bear's wife staggered to a fence post and leaned her pack on the top rail.

‘Listen to me,' Steve told them, ‘and go on listening for two days. Listen to instructions, and do as you're told. That's where survival begins, right? Right.'

Tim tried to look intelligent and willing. Norman had stopped listening already. He was gazing vaguely out over the view of
rounded green hills and looping hedges, his head tilted on one side to the birdsong. A thin line of saliva hung from the lower corner of the open pocket of his mouth.

‘Right, now many of you are strangers, but I want you all to get along with each other. Treat everybody as a friend, and they'll be friendly to you, right?' The overburdened group eyed each other suspiciously. ‘Right. Now, let go of the rucksack straps and take the weight on your shoulders. That's where it's going to be for the next hour or two.'

Groans and vomit noises from the boy in leather, whose jacket was armoured in studs and badges and chain links.

‘Shake hands with the people on either side –'

‘With 'im?' Leather's friend moved away.

‘– And tell each other your names.'

It was like in church. Tim had taken his mother to a service a few weeks ago, and nearly died when the overdressed woman next to him put her hand on his arm and commanded, ‘Peace.'

‘Julian? Hello.' Teddy Bear's wife's name was Janice. Her plump little paw put itself into Tim's hand like a child's. ‘What am I doing here?' she giggled. ‘I'll be awful.'

‘Help each other.' Steve was ending his lecture. He reached for his backpack, which was bigger than anyone's, and swung it easily up over his shoulders. ‘Don't give up on anybody. Trust each other. If we were really in a critical survival situation, that could be what saves you.'

‘You'll be great,' Tim-Julian told Janice, with a trusty smile.

‘Come on then, gang, we're going for a little gentle stroll.'

‘Ho ho,' said Chip, the boy with the cropped head that had a scar on it, who had been on the course before. Why would anyone come again, once they knew the weight they would have to carry?

They followed Steve into the trees and immediately plunged down a narrow rocky ravine, where Jack's boots slithered and stumbled as Tim tried to keep his balance, the weight on his back threatening to pitch him into the gorge.

Janice and her husband were behind him, with Don. ‘OK?' Don kept asking Janice, and she gasped, ‘OK,' and caught her breath, as if she wasn't. Tim could not turn round to look.

At the bottom of the ravine, the leaders went fast along the muddy level and then started to climb a perilous path, where some of the rocks were so big, you had to take a giant step and haul yourself up by clutching bushes and tufts of grass.

There was a muffled cry from behind Tim.

‘Hey up, everybody!' Don called out.

They stopped and looked down. Janice had collapsed face forward against the rocky slope, her backpack overwhelming her like a giant turtle shell.

Don helped her to get it off. Teddy Bear said, ‘I'll carry it, dear,' uncertainly, and was relieved when Janice said, ‘You?', laughing breathlessly up at him. ‘It's all you can do to get
yourself
up there, let alone carry two packs.'

‘I'll carry it,' Tim said.

Teddy passed Janice's pack up to him, and he toiled on upward with the extra load over his arm.

‘Well done, Julian,' Steve called down from far above, a mountain goat poised on a crag. ‘That's what I meant. Help the other person. You may need them to help you.'

‘In which case, God help you,' Janice panted, climbing the hill behind Tim on hands and knees.

Somehow he struggled on upwards. His back was breaking. His right arm was an agonizing lump of lead. I'll never make it. I'll die here. They'll have to carry my body out of the gorge. He breathed raw hot gases, like a fire-eater.

‘You OK?' People looked back from time to time. ‘Want any help?'

Tim shook his head, sweating, dribbling out of his gasping mouth.

Good old Tim, they were all thinking – that is, good old Julian. Little guy, but strong as an ox. He would die rather than give in.

On the grassy clearing at the top, Tim dropped the extra pack
on the ground, and sat down with his back against it, looking away from the others, so that they would not see his death throes.

‘I'll carry it down.' Janice had arrived at the top, red-faced, short curly hair sticking wetly to her round head.

‘No, you don't.' Chip grabbed her backpack and started down the hill with it.

‘Don't treat me like a woman!' Janice yelled after him into the gorge. The trees grew out of the rocks at odd angles, their roots clawing the air, and you could look down on the dense leaf-mass of their tops, as if you were an eagle, skimming the chasm.

With only half the burden, Tim dropped down more easily to the cool floor of the gorge, where a tiny secret stream found its way silently among dark wet undergrowth that never saw the sun.

‘Anyone know where we are?' someone asked.

‘Not a clue,' Chip said.

Disappeared off the face of the earth. Unfindable. Two whole days with no fear of Harold! I love this, Tim thought. I love it. I want to come every weekend.

Map-reading and compass lessons in an old barn at the end of the gorge were a bit boring and complicated. Tim made an attempt to understand it in terms of play-by-mail games, but he might have dropped off completely if Norman was not already doing that, his loose eyelids closed and his bristly pale lashes like a toothbrush on his cheek.

Now that they knew how to take bearings and divide the grid of the ordnance map into tiny squares – at least Tim thought that was what they had learned – they were sent off by Steve and Don to find their own way over a ridge of small hills to the caves.

‘You may never see us again.' Chip walked off, whistling. He was threatening to look at, with his scarred shaved head and his hatchet face and sharp body. If you met him in an alley on a dark night, you might think twice, but out here, he was just like everybody else. When his Hell's Angels mate had taken off his jacket and stuffed it into his pack as carelessly as if it were not a symbolic
breastplate, he was young and skinny and more or less normal too, with the inoffensive name of Eddie.

Tim, who avoided trouble in the town, reorganized his life style as they walked on the short turf towards the hills. He would talk to punks and skinheads on the streets, and make friends with them, discover the human being within the monster: a one-man crusade through the steamier parts of town where the police never set foot.

Norman tagged along at the back of the group. Tim pretended to study the map and compass with the others when they paused to consult.

‘Where are we?'

Norman saw a spire. ‘Winchester cathedral.' He lived in Winchester. No one paid any attention to him.

When they finally found the entrance to the caves, which was only a narrow crack in the dark rock rising out of the ground, Steve and Don were there before them, brewing up.

Brewing up was lighting a tin of solid fuel, like Vaseline, and boiling water and a tea-bag in your mess tin. It tasted awful. It tasted wonderful. It did not taste like tea. It tasted of earth and growing things and the trickle of stream at the bottom of the gorge, and the fumes of the fuel, which burned in the sun with an invisible flame.

Tim's camping pack had a bag of dehydrated food called beef curry and rice. He wanted to reconstitute it and brew it up, but Don said the serious food was for tonight, and they could eat only their snack bars and glucose tablets.

‘Blow out, those bags do,' Don said, in his slow careful way. ‘Fill you right up. You go into the caves after that, you'll never get through the drainpipe.'

‘What's the drainpipe?' Teddy Bear asked.

‘Like it sounds.'

‘You'll never get through, Bob,' Janice told her husband.

‘Watch me.' He was an anxious man, but determined. When asked, as they had all been, why he had wanted to come on this course, he had answered, ‘I've got to know that I can make myself do it.'

His wife had answered, ‘Well, I couldn't let him come without me, could I?'

As it turned out, he did get stuck for a while in the drainpipe, which was a very low and narrow passage through the rocks, deep in the bowels of the earth.

Janice took an easier route with Don and Norman, who had shone the miner's lamp on his helmet into the entrance of the drainpipe and had an attack of the shivers; but Teddy Bear made himself try the pipe.

Tim and the other skinny ones managed to wriggle through. Tim was a troll, a troglodyte, a prehistoric man, terrified of being buried alive in the caves, yet exhilarated to discover that he could slither and scramble, and propel himself through slanting fissures with his shoulders and bootsoles. It was either do that, or be stuck in this cold crypt for ever.

Coming last, Bob had to be pushed from behind and pulled from the front before he popped out of the pipe like a cork, telling himself, ‘I did it,' chewing on the words under his grey-black moustache, nodding his head, so that the yellow lamp-beam travelled up and down Eddie's skinny leather legs, caked in clay from the floor of the slippery caves.

Working their way out an hour later towards a slit of light ahead, they had to climb steep, wet rocks under a jagged roof. Coming out into the sudden sunlight, the leaders looked at each other and blinked, a filthy group of miners, surprised by the sky.

Tim took off his hard hat and switched off the lamp, and imagined that he had been down the pit all his life. He was hollow with hunger. Now he would tramp back to a row of blackened cottages, where a pregnant, nagging wife would scrub his back before the fire and feed him with meat pudding.

Some of the miners went down to the stream to get a drink. Tim and the others turned to watch Don and the other two resurrect themselves through the narrow exit in the rocks. At last, muffled thuds and cries brought the top of Norman's hard hat hesitantly into view, like a baby wondering whether it was worth being born.

‘Where's Janice?' Bob called to him.

‘Stayed back … with Don … have a rest … Oh, help.' Norman raised his helmeted head and the roof banged it down again. ‘Got to get out of here.'

His long incompetent fingers clawed at handholds and slipped off. He fell back a few feet and screamed that his ankle was broken.

‘I can't get out!' His voice was shrill and hollow, like a reed.

‘God, if he panics – ‘someone muttered. Steve was down at the stream.

‘Help me! Why won't you help me-e-e?'

Tim put on his hard hat and went back into the hole on his stomach, reaching out for Norman. His groping fingers found panicking cold hands, which clutched painfully.

‘All right, Norm?' He felt strong and heroic. ‘Come on, bend your knee up, find a foothold. I'll pull you.'

‘I can't,' Norman gasped. He was limp, a dead weight.

‘You can.' Tim moved his head to shine his helmet lamp on the ghastly stricken face. ‘You can do it.'

‘I'm done for.'

‘Shut up, Norman, you can do it. Look at me. Get your light on my face, that's right. Look in my eyes. Look at me. Push with your feet. I've got you, follow me.'

Norman struggled, Tim backed off and pulled him up a foot. His arms were coming out of their sockets. Just when he thought he would let Norman go, someone took hold of his own feet and began to pull him up and back.

‘All right, mate? Got yer, mate. Take it easy, Norm. Come on, Julian mate.' They got the boy out of the caves at last. Tim and Chip did, me and my mate, and laid Norman out shivering on the grass like a dying chicken.

‘Thanks, mate,' Tim said to Chip.

Norman didn't thank anybody. It wasn't his style.

In the woods where they were to camp for the night, pairs of people would put their ponchos together to make a rough tent over a ridgepole.

‘Plenty of dead wood about,' said Don, plodding about in his methodical way to find just the right branch to make his little home with Steve. ‘
Don't
cut any fresh wood.'

So the next thing seen was poor old Norman struggling to break a healthy, bouncing sapling.

Who was going to pair off with him? Bob and Janice were together, Chip and Eddie. The other boys chose spots to pitch tents, two by two. Tim was left with Norman.

‘Make your shelter, then eat,' Don said, but Tim wanted to eat first.

‘I'm starving,' he told Norman. He could almost faint at the thought of beef curry and rice.

‘I'm not,' Norman said. ‘I don't like the look of my shepherd's pie. It's all dried up.'

‘It's dehydrated, you jerk. You add water.'

‘I don't like shepherd's pie. You jerk too.'

Somehow they got a dry log wedged between two trees, and fixed their ponchos over it. Every time Norman moved about, unpacking his kit, he trod on one side and pulled the whole lot down.

After he had put it up again for the third time, Tim tipped his bag of curry into the mess tin, added water and lit the cooker.