Theres no place like hom.., p.8
There's No Place Like Home, page 8
Ruth gave me a level look. ‘It’s not a cult,’ she said, and it was disconcerting, being schooled by someone a good ten years younger than me. ‘I don’t know what you’re imagining, but we don’t have to give money, we choose to, because it’s the Christian thing to do, to give to those who need help.’
She went past me into the main body of the tent and I sat back against the damp canvas. I’d got it wrong again. There I had been, imagining Ruth to be some poor innocent, taking part in this horror of a show to try to get money to keep some overweight pastor in white Rolls-Royces. But it turned out that she was doing it for the right reasons; to help others. Now I felt stupid and angry at myself for what I’d thought – of course Ruth wasn’t a member of some money-grabbing obscure sect, she was a good church-going girl who really believed in what she was doing. The pink socks should have given me a heads-up on that front.
So, she, Sebastian and Kanga all had perfectly good reasons for being here. Which left Mac and me as the outsiders as the only suspects for planting evidence. I was fairly sure that it wasn’t me planting fake pawprints in the dirt, unless I was sleepwalking. And even my dreams hadn’t involved mysterious walks across moorland; they had been a lot more prosaic. I’d woken in a sweat a couple of times, only to realise that I was safer, more secure here under a nylon sheet, than I had been in any house.
I hated to admit it too, but somehow, I’d grown to trust Mac. He’d come clean about the phone, he’d got stroppy first, of course, but he could have lied his way out of it. He’d seemed honestly relieved when we’d decided the prints had probably come from the dog, which I could hear again now, barking crazily into the weather from a distant farm somewhere behind the curtain of rain. Mac seemed genuinely annoyed at being here; co-opted by his brother.
So that meant the only outlier was me. So maybe it was natural that I should come under suspicion. Of course, there was also Junior, but, as the tracker and presumably on the payroll, he wouldn’t have any investment other than professional in finding anything that might be living out here. Or would he? I remembered how long Dax had spent in his tent earlier. Had they just been filming a longer segment, more in depth than the five minutes of ‘how is everything going’ that Dax had got from the rest of us?
Everyone else was already in the tent, which had fugged up with the smell of unwashed skin, mud and too many people breathing in too small a space. Kanga and Junior were there, sitting side by side but seeming a little awkward. He’d put a shirt on, tight over his biceps and shoulders, which looked as though it had been stitched onto his body. Kanga was a bit rumpled and was keeping her eyes strictly to the front, almost as though ashamed of herself. This struck me as odd, as she’d been the one to volunteer to persuade Junior to give up the gun. I wondered how that had gone, whether he was still armed, but when Kanga caught my eye and gave me a straight-mouthed smile, I assumed she’d succeeded in her mission.
Ruth and Sebastian were scrunched up together at the far end of the tent, making room for the rest of us. Mac had taken up a position in the centre, legs tucked under him as though he was about to swing into a yoga routine. I hunched myself into the only available space, inside the door, with the payment of a trickle of water damping my socks as it blew through the entrance flap every now and then.
‘Okay.’ Mac looked at us all. ‘Bad news. You all know by now that I’ve got a phone, so that Dax and I can message one another – he’s sent me a message today.’ Mac held out the phone, but the steamy mass of bodies meant that I couldn’t read what the screen said and I doubted anyone else could either.
‘Right.’ Sebastian heeled himself closer to Mac. ‘Looks like a weather forecast.’
‘The Met Office are forecasting blizzards with extremely cold wind.’ Mac tucked the phone away again. ‘And because we’re on high ground, it’s going to hit us worst, overnight.’
We all looked at one another. My scalp prickled. ‘So, snow,’ I said, when nobody else spoke. ‘And that’s worse than what we’ve currently got, because?’
‘Well, cold.’ Mac frowned at me. ‘And wind. The tents might blow away and leave us without shelter. But mostly the cold. Dax has asked what we want to do. We can abort if we want to, they’ll come and take us down off the moor this evening and cut our entire contribution from the programme. Apparently,’ he added, with a slight tone of bitterness, ‘the Cannock Chase team reckon they’re on the trail of something, and the Bodmin guys have got some hair samples. They can lose our section without any real loss to the programme.’
We all looked at one another. ‘So everything so far would be wiped?’ Ruth sounded unusually dismal.
‘And pointless,’ Sebastian added.
‘And we wouldn’t be on TV at all?’ Kanga looked horrified. ‘Oh, no, I’m not having that.’
‘Even if all you do get famous for is being a frozen corpse?’ Mac asked her.
‘Fame is fame.’ Kanga tossed her head. She’d still got her hat on, so it didn’t really have the desired hair-whippy effect, but her bobble swayed about and conveyed the general emotion.
We’d been out here for nearly a week. I was doing mental calculations. At £100 a day… no, it still wasn’t enough. I needed over a thousand to have a decent deposit, even for a room in a shared house. And that was only the start of it. ‘I vote we stay too,’ I said, trying to inject a tone of ‘I want to get to the bottom of the mystery’ into my voice. ‘We’re in the shelter of the rocks and we’ve got plenty of food.’
‘But… cold?’ Sebastian looked dubious. ‘I mean, I’ll go with the majority, I need the money, but is it wise to try to front it out? Could we not ask Dax to bring us off the moor for the duration of the storm and edit that bit out?’
Mac shook his head. ‘If we leave the moor, it’s all over. The show’s supposed to be as authentic as possible, and I get the feeling that us being snowed off would add a bit more spice to those who carry on. A sort of “this is why these cats remain unfound, because they live where it’s hard for people to find evidence” subtext.’
‘Fuck subtext,’ Kanga said succinctly. ‘I’ve got a presenting career to think about.’
Junior subsonic-ed something about evidence being easier to see in the snow, and Mac nodded. ‘Ruth?’
Ruth stopped fiddling with the toes of her socks and looked up brightly. ‘I put my life in God’s hands when I came out here,’ she said, and I was sure I heard Kanga give an impatient little sigh, ‘and I trust Him to keep us all safe. I’ll stay.’
‘Right.’ Sebastian seemed to remember that he was our sort-of leader. ‘Then we make arrangements to protect against the weather. I’ve been snowed up on the farm a couple of times, we need to make sure we’ve got warmth, food and protection from the weather.’ He looked around us all, crowded into the tent, most of us unable to stretch our legs out. ‘We can’t all stay in here, but I’d recommend pairing up; two people can keep one another warm and watch for signs of hypothermia. It’s also safer, if one of the tents goes down, we’ll have empty tents for immediate occupation.’
There was a moment of silence. I knew we were all mentally pairing ourselves up and not really liking the results. I felt sorry for whoever got to be sealed in a tent in a snowstorm with Kanga and her pneumatic chest, it would be like being shut in a cupboard with a bunch of party balloons.
‘Kanga and Junior can take one,’ Mac said, carefully not referring to whatever activities they might choose to undertake to keep warm. ‘Ruth and Sebastian in here and Izzy and I can take my tent. Dax suggested we pair up too.’
‘Shouldn’t Ruth and I be together and you and Sebastian?’ I offered. ‘To avoid any… well… anything…?’
Mac shook the phone at me. ‘Dax wants the frisson. He’s advised girls share with boys. Better viewing, apparently.’
‘Nobody is viewing my frisson,’ I said tartly. ‘Are you absolutely sure that there’s snow forecast and we’re not being manipulated into – well, a Situation?’
‘Nothing going on my end, promise,’ Sebastian said. ‘Ruth is perfectly safe with me.’
‘And I’m saving myself for the right man,’ Ruth said.
‘My wife will be delighted to hear that,’ Sebastian said and raised his eyebrows. ‘So, Kanga and Junior, are you two all right to share?’
There was a momentary pause, during which Kanga and Junior gave one another sideways glances, and then both nodded.
‘Right,’ Sebastian went on. ‘I’m spoken for, and Ruth is happy to stay with me. That’s just you and Izzy to agree then.’
Reluctantly, as though the air had become thick, I looked up and met Mac’s gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Keep your camera on if you don’t feel safe,’ he said, not sounding as embarrassed by my evident lack of keenness to be shut in a small tent with him overnight as I might have expected. ‘But I honestly think we need to regard the weather as the biggest danger here.’
‘Or you can come in with us.’ Ruth waved an arm to indicate Sebastian’s tent, piled with bodies. ‘If you’d rather.’
‘That would leave Mac on his own. There’s no room for four to sleep in here, and we really shouldn’t have one person alone. Hypothermia can kill.’ Sebastian was evidently not reading the atmosphere. Never mind hypothermia, I was going to kill him armed only with my expression.
‘And I’m not going in with Kanga and Junior.’ Mac winked at Junior, who looked away. Although Kanga was half-cuddled up against him, he didn’t put his arm around her, I noticed. But then, in this confined space, she couldn’t really help but be snuggled up into him. I was practically sitting on Ruth’s lap, and there definitely wasn’t anything going on between us.
‘I’ll stay with Mac,’ I said and saw him make some movement out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was surprise or a twitch towards me. ‘It’s only tonight, right? We’re not expecting a fortnight of raging arctic weather?’
‘Just a blast coming through,’ Mac said. I was determinedly not looking at him. ‘Cold, wind and snow. Not sure what comes after that, plague of frogs, possibly.’
There was a momentary silence, into which the renewed flapping of the tent fabric acted as a kind of punctuation. The wind was certainly rising, as though it wanted to make a point.
‘When do we start?’ Kanga bumped herself towards the entrance. ‘Because if I’m going to move into Junior’s, I need to bring stuff.’
Junior frowned. ‘What stuff? You know it’s a small tent, right?’
‘Well, yes, but there are things a girl needs for an overnight stay.’ She grabbed her hair and looked ruefully at the gritty ends. ‘My leave-in conditioner and my make-up remover and things.’
‘Well, let’s get ourselves sorted before dark, shall we?’ Sebastian intervened. ‘Body heat will be the thing that gets us through, so we need to be established by the time the temperature starts to drop. Everyone who’s moving, get what you need, and those of us whose tents are being moved into need to check their ropes and fixings, we don’t want anything blowing away.’
He left a pause, into which I supposed one of us was meant to insert a ‘blowing’ joke, but we were all too damp and tired to bother.
‘Right. Let’s get moving,’ Sebastian finished, when it became evident that nobody could force themselves to insert so much as the tip of an entendre.
As if in answer, the tent gave a shudder and there was a peculiar noise, a kind of rising wail. Presumably the gale was getting trapped under the rocks that protected our backs, and not liking it very much.
We all left. I went into my tent and rolled up my sleeping bag and mat to take with me. As an added precaution, I put extra socks in my pocket and, as I did so, I noticed that my camera light was blinking away. It took me by surprise. It was such second nature now to slap at your chest to turn off the camera before sleep and when entering the Portaloo that the presence of the tiny winking blue light mostly went unnoticed. But, as Mac said, it was my security. Everything was being recorded. And his awareness of my uncertainty also meant that he’d noticed things I would rather he hadn’t. I hoped he wasn’t going to try to quiz me about my life again, because the only weapon I had to hand was this rather crusty pile of socks.
The wind wheezed through my tent like an asthmatic in search of an inhaler. Any doubts I’d had about the weather forecast – including suspecting Dax of trying to force us to cohabit in order to stir up sexual tension – died away under the force of it. Whilst the day had been mostly soggy, there was now the suspicion of something colder and more destructive on the edge of the rain and the wind was practically solid when I made my way out of my tent and over to Mac’s tent next door.
I stood for a second on the threshold and looked up. The sky, invisible all day behind a duvet of fog, now stood pin-sharp above me. The first faint stars were emerging and seemed almost to move with the force of the wind, until I realised that it was me, pummelled into swaying, that made them wobble. I had to step and brace to stay upright. Further down the valley, the dog which was our Suspect Number One for the pawprints howled into the dark. I hoped he had some shelter to crawl into when the weather really hit.
‘Are you coming in then?’ Mac’s face had appeared at the tent flap. ‘I’ve finished double-pegging the top bit, hopefully that’s enough to hold us down.’
‘I was just looking at the sky.’ The rain had stopped too now, it was just the wind cutting grooves into the landscape with its sharp edges.
Mac crawled out of the tent and gathered himself to his feet beside me. We both looked upwards. ‘Are you suspecting Dax of lying about the forecast?’ Mac asked. He didn’t sound as accusatory as might have been expected.
‘Why, are you?’ Surprised, I looked at him, but he was staring out across the dale, to where the pale night sky was outlining the hills, haloing them with stars.
‘Little bit.’ Still he didn’t look at me, but he jerked his head, hopefully an acceptance that I’d also suspected his brother of manipulation. ‘But I double checked and, yes, gales and blizzards for tonight. Come on, let’s get inside, if “inside” is the proper word.’
He held the flap aside gallantly for me to crawl in first. For what it was worth, the tent was warmer than outside, and scrupulously tidy. ‘Sling your bag down over there.’ He pointed to a corner. ‘I doubt we’ll get much sleeping done, but we need to keep an eye on each other in case the cold gets too much.’
I put my bag down and then sat on it. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
‘Turn your camera off a sec,’ Mac said suddenly.
‘What!’
‘I want to ask you something and it’s a bit… sensitive.’ Mac slapped his own camera off. In the next-door tent, I could hear Ruth and Sebastian sorting belongings out, noisy and mundane. I turned my camera off too.
Mac looked at me seriously for a moment. ‘Were you raped?’ he asked, eventually, when our camera lights had both stopped blinking.
‘No.’
My blunt denial seemed to surprise him. His eyebrows rose to vanish under the flat fringe that persistent hat-wearing had forced on us all. ‘Oh. I thought…’
‘It never got as far as that. But he used to try to force his way into my bedroom.’
I’d spent long enough trying to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault that I should have been able to come out with the whole story by now. Just trot it out, upfront, straightforward. It wasn’t my fault. And yet, and yet – that inborn sense of shame, that feeling that somehow, somehow, I should have been able to stop it, still made me reticent about saying any more.
Mac blinked. After a moment, he said, ‘I had a friend who was raped. I didn’t handle it well – I didn’t know how to. Since then, I’ve learned a lot, including seeing the signs. And you are giving off a lot of them, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t do anything…’ he glanced around the tent, ‘to make you uncomfortable,’ he finished.
I looked around the tent too. ‘I think this entire venture is “uncomfortable” by its very definition,’ I said, not sure if I was trying to change the subject or not. ‘If we were living in luxury yurts, I suppose the viewing public wouldn’t be regarding this as “must-see TV”?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he sat back against his bedroll and cocked his head at the sound of the wind, which was gusting down the valley so that backwashes of squall caused the tent to bulge and flex like a circus strongman. We were mostly sheltered by the rock overhang, although I didn’t want to think about landslips.
‘So, no,’ I went on. ‘I don’t know what it is that you see in me, but it’s not rape.’
‘Okay. Okay.’ Mac rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve obviously got the wrong end of the stick. Sorry.’ He began unlacing his boots now, concentrating so ferociously on the task that I could see his embarrassment oozing through the three layers of coat, jacket and undershirt that he’d got on. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, sounding so abject that I wanted… I needed to set the record straight.
‘I’m homeless,’ I said. ‘That’s the real reason I’m here. It seemed like an easy way to raise the money to get myself a deposit for somewhere to live.’
One boot half-off, he looked at me. ‘Ah.’ A Tweetie-Pie sock slowly slithered into visibility. I wondered how long he’d had those on. ‘That can’t be easy. What happened?’
And it was that simple. Just a sympathetic question. I’d always thought it would be harder to talk about than this, that bringing up the subject would be enough to silence people into their own wonderings and imaginings. But Mac really, genuinely seemed to want to know.
‘My relationship broke up and neither of us could afford to keep the flat, so I moved home to live with my mum. She was on her own, the two of us sharing expenses made sense, she had a spare room I could sleep in and use for crafting. I made book rooms for bookshelves.’ I couldn’t help the note of pride slipping into my voice there. I’d been good. ‘They’re book-sized ornament things that are 3D, you put them in between your books and they look like little rooms, all lit up. I did personalised ones to people’s own designs, and it takes quite a bit of equipment and space.’
