The Name I Call Myself (25 page)

I found myself trying to pray about it, asking God to take away these thoughts. These feelings. It didn't work. I think God must have known I didn't really mean it.

The following weekend, I packed up my rucksack with a change of clothes, my warmest pyjamas, a torch, a first aid kit, and a family-size bar of dark chocolate, and hitched a ride in Marilyn's car.

It was time for our next choir activity. Two nights camping in Sherwood Forest. The air was damp and the ground muddy. The temperature might drop to near freezing. Our seventeen-strong troop included a wannabe sergeant major, a cosmetic addict who cried if she split a nail, two pensioners, a teenage delinquent, and fifteen-month-old twins. Twelve of us were camping virgins.

What could possibly go wrong?

Marilyn and I were the last to arrive at the campsite early on Friday evening. Things were already descending into chaos. We quickly joined the rest of the group, trying to pitch the first of the three tents Hester had borrowed from other members of the church. Accompanying the canvas sheet were a bag of long, flexible poles that needed assembling, a load of tent pegs, and a distinct lack of instructions.

The slots for the poles were colour-coded, and it all seemed straightforward enough, except that the late April wind roared through the trees, whipping our hair in front of our faces and causing the tent to flap about like a wild bird entangled in a net. It took half of us to keep the tent from taking off, someone else to push an unsettled Pete and Nancy up and down in their pushchair, someone to poke a pole through the right hole in the canvas, someone else to pull the other end, another person to tell them they had got the wrong pole or the wrong hole, someone to push the tent pegs into the mud, two of us to try and start a fire, one of us to keep her hair from getting messed up, another to try to find a mobile phone signal, and all of us to yell suggestions into the wind, most of which didn't make any sense and none of which helped.

By the time an hour had passed, we had one wonky, half-erected tent, two extremely fractious toddlers, lashings of mud all over our clothes, our hands, and some faces, a pile of damp wood that refused to light, and a bunch of rather stressed out, fed up, hungry women. Not a great combination.

“Where are the bathrooms?” Kim asked, after we decided to leave tent one and move on to tent two, refusing to believe it could be any more of a challenge to pitch.

Hester shook tent two out of its bag, rolling it out across the mud. “About fifty paces into the woods, turn left and you'll see a clearing surrounded by blackberry bushes.”

“Okay. I'll be back in a minute.” Kim picked up a washbag that was not much smaller than my rucksack. “I need to sort my face out.”

Hester pointed to a trowel, lying with the pile of cooking equipment. “Take that if you need to go.”

“Eh?”

Hester smiled and said nothing. Kim picked up the trowel with two fingers, holding it at arm's length, and disappeared into the woods. We started wrestling with tent two, slightly more aggressively than last time, and had managed to hammer in a couple of pegs and get the basic frame up by the time Kim returned.

“Hester!” she whined, marching up. “I couldn't find them anywhere. It's starting to get dark in the woods and there are no lights or signs or anything. I've used up loads of the battery on my phone 'cos I had to use it as a torch.”

Hester thwacked at a peg with the mallet a couple of times, while every hair remained in place on her head. “Did you walk fifty paces into the woods and turn left?”

“Yes. But how do you measure fifty paces? For a shrimp like Rowan, fifty paces would hardly get you into the woods. For Mags you'd be out the other side.”

“Did you find a small clearing surrounded by blackberry bushes?”

“I found a small clearing. But I don't know what blackberry bushes look like. I didn't find any blackberries.”

“Bushes covered in thorns? Like that one over there?” Hester pointed out a nearby bush.

Kim shrugged. “Probably.”

“Then you found the bathroom.”

“But I didn't though, did I, because there wasn't any bathroom!”

Hester stood up, slowly, and put her hands on her hips, just above her waterproof trousers. She looked at Kim, and waited. There were a couple of gasps from behind the tent.

“I don't get it,” Kim pouted.

We all looked about for someone to break the news to her. Marilyn stepped forwards, but Melody dove in.

“Kim. You, ah, found no bathroom in the clearing because, if I am not mistaken, the clearing
is
the bathroom.”

Silence for about ten seconds while nobody moved, breathed, or took their eyes off Kim.

“WHAAAAAAAAT?!” Kim screeched, sending all of the birds from the entire forest whooshing up into the sky en masse.

Her face turned dark purple underneath its faded foundation. She pulled a horrified, furious face at Hester, turned around, and hurled the trowel into the depths of the woods. “You… what… we… I… you cannot… no way… you total… THAT'S ILLEGAL!”

She turned to Ebony, who had driven her here. “You need to take me home. Now.”

Ebony glanced at Hester. “Errr. I don't think that's an option, Kim. The weekend is compulsory.”

“Compulsory! Hah! Polly's not here.”

“Because she has Baby.”

Baby had been officially registered as Esme a couple of weeks earlier. It was really time we started calling her by her name, otherwise she would end up Baby for life.

“Right! And it probably wouldn't be safe to bring a baby out into the middle of nowhere, in the freezing cold, with no house, no shower, no heating, no coffee machine, and a pile of dirt for a TOILET! I am not a BEAR!”

“No dear,” Millie chipped in. “A bear wouldn't bother with a trowel.”

She whipped out her phone. “Fine. You nutters can stay if you like. I'll call Scotty. There is no way I'm spending the night out here.
You can take your
choir bonding, competition winning, toughen you up, and make you champions camping weekend
and bury it with your trowel!”

“Kim, please stay,” Rowan said.

Kim ignored her. “Eurgh! I can't even get a signal in this wilderness. Who does she think she is? Bear bloomin' Grylls?”

She stomped off to the treeline as best she could in a pair of pointy-heeled ankle boots. They were more effective at kicking over the bucket, a cool box, and the pile of firewood as she went.

“Should I go after her?” Leona asked.

“She'll come back when it's dark.” Hester resumed hammering. “Which won't be long, ladies. So you'd better quit standing around gawping and get cracking. Once these tents are up you've got to find a source of running water. An inability to stick together spells certain disaster.”

“What does disaster entail, exactly?” Uzma asked, poking a pole through the last slot in tent two. “Cold? Starvation? Death?”

“I was referring to the Community Choir Sing-Off,” Hester said.

“Oh.”

“But I wouldn't rule any of those out, either.”

Ten minutes after the last tent was stood up, precariously leaning against the wind with the others, the heavens opened.

Thankfully, Hester had stocked up on drinking water. We set out the buckets to collect some rainwater for washing up (and washing us).

We were getting there, but with dusk creeping across the site, the temperature plummeted. We huddled in the central area of the largest tent. Hester had left us to go and make “preparations”, whatever that meant. We were abandoned, wet, filthy, hungry, and about ready to roast our choirmistress if it might provide the fuel to make a cup of tea.

“There is no way we're going to get a fire lit. What are we going to do about an evening meal?” I asked, cuddling Pete all snug in his baby sleeping bag.

“She's probably expecting us to catch it and cook it ourselves,” Rowan huffed, her hands stuffed in her armpits. “I did
not
expect my first night away without Callie to be like this.”

“We can't even forage for berries at this time of year,” Uzma moaned. “I'm starving.”

“You ate nearly a whole jumbo packet of tortilla chips an hour ago,” her cousin Yasmin said. “I was saving that for a midnight feast.”

“A midnight feast? What is this, an Enid Blyton book?” Uzma barked back.

“If it was an Enid Blyton book, we'd have lemonade, massive sandwiches, the sun would be shining, and there'd be a dangerous villain creeping about in the woods.” Janice leered at us from beneath the bobble hat Millie had knitted for her. In the shadows from the torchlight, she could have passed for a dangerous villain.

“Stop it!” April whimpered. “I'm freaked out already. I hate it out here. The bats and spiders and badgers are bad enough.”

“And what about Kim?” Rowan asked. “She's been gone for, like, an hour and a half now. What if she's lost? What if her phone ran out and she hasn't got any light, so she's stumbling about in the rain, freezing to death, and going round in circles all delirious?”

“Perhaps the dangerous villain will kidnap her!” Janice added.

“Ooh, I quite like the sound of that,” Millie said. “Is he a handsome villain? One who turned villainous because of undeserved circumstances beyond his control, but is really an honourable rogue underneath?”

“The dangerous villains back in my home were not like that.” Rosa wagged her head. “Nuh uh. If they caught a beautiful young woman wandering in the woods they would not have honourable plan in their mind.”

“I don't think there are any types of villain out there. Honourable or otherwise,” I said, trying to bring the conversation back to reality. Trying to ignore the fact that a dangerous villain might be wandering around looking for me.

“She could have fallen in a ditch! Or an abandoned well. Or been caught in an animal trap,” Rowan said, enjoying the drama. “When people get bad hypothermia they think they're really hot and take off all their clothes.”

“Maybe she's crawled under a fallen down tree and is slipping into a coma right now,” April squeaked.

“We've got to go and find her!” Rowan cried. “We can't let her DIE out there!”

April burst into tears, swiftly followed by Nancy, who had been woken up by Rowan shouting.

There were various murmurs and mutterings in response to this. The rain pelted the roof. Shadows danced and jerked as the wind buffeted the badly pegged canvas. The group began to argue about who would brave venturing outside to search for Kim's naked, icy body.

“I don't mind finding her if it's natural causes,” Millie said, stoutly. “But if the villain has done it? Stabbed her to death, or garrotted her with an ivy branch…” – she shuddered – “I'm not sure my constitution could take it.”

“What about me?” Leona said. “I've got high blood pressure. Something like that could finish me off.”

“That's if the villain doesn't,” Rowan added.

“Stop it!” I tried to stand up, forgetting I was in a tent and whacking my head into the roof, causing the whole structure to wobble unnervingly. “There is no villain!”

“You don't know that,” Janice sniffed.

“Why would there be a villain creeping about in the middle of Sherwood Forest in the pouring rain?”

“No need to get shirty.”

“You're being ridiculous. We have eight torches on. We're the only light for miles. Kim couldn't miss us if she tried. She's phoned Scotty and gone home. It was ridiculous to think she would last more than a couple of hours out here. Right now she's probably up to her neck in a bubble bath, sipping a glass of wine. Can we please focus on what's important?”

Everyone looked at me.

“When's Hester coming back, what on earth is she preparing out there, and what are we eating? And can somebody please come up with some way to make a cup of tea?” I sat back down again, steam rising from my all-weather anorak.

“There's a gas camping stove in the boot of my car,” Hester replied from outside the tent flap, causing April and Ebony to squeal in fright. We set about heating beans on one side and hot dogs on the other. After a short, sharp discussion, it was agreed we would be using bottled, not rain or river, water in our tea.

Halfway through my hot dog, Marilyn shuffled around to my side of the tent and whispered in my ear. “I need to find the blackberry bushes.”

“Right.” I took another delicious mouthful, wondering if the whole point of camping was its ability to transform sausages of highly questionable meat content and cheap white bread into heavenly manna.

“You're coming with me.”

“Wrong.”

“Faith! I gave birth to twins last year. My pelvic floor doesn't have time to argue about bladder matters. Have you seen Pete's head?”

“Enough!” I hissed. “That is too much information, Marilyn. Save it for your mum and baby group. I'll come if it means you stop talking about that stuff!”

I crammed in the rest of the hot dog, snagged a torch, and squeezed out of the tent behind Marilyn. After a few moments fumbling about, we orientated ourselves in what we hoped was the right direction.

The rain, which had eased off to a drizzle, barely penetrated the canopy of trees once we entered the woods.

However, two paces into the treeline we hit the darkness. The kind of darkness that makes our normal, urban, lamppost a plenty, glowing windows, and headlights darkness seem like the middle of a summer's day. This was a thick, oozing black that reduced the thin
beam of torchlight to a feeble tendril. Darkness so solid and real it had a smell, like must and dirt and deep dungeonous caves. Marilyn grabbed my arm and we crept through the woods, jumping when our feet snapped twigs with a loud crack, letting out involuntary squeaks as we heard a rustle to one side, followed by what sounded like the call of a night bird. Or the manic giggle of a villain. Or possibly a werewolf.

“Has it been fifty paces?” Marilyn whispered.

“Not yet. Seventeen.”

“Seventeen!”

“Yes. Concentrate on keeping the torch on the path, so we don't fall in any holes or end up in a bush.”

“I'm trying, but I need to keep it straight ahead so we don't walk into any giant spiderwebs, or rip out our eyes on a stray thorn branch.”

“Well, keep flicking it around then. Not that fast! That's better. Only fifteen paces left to go.”

We shuffled forwards a few more steps.

“Why are we whispering, by the way?” I asked.

Marilyn tugged me a little closer. “I don't know why you're whispering, but I'm doing it so the dangerous villain doesn't hear and come to pick us off as easy prey.”