by Adam Thorpe
The kids are impeccable on the pleasant half-mile walk through the dunes to the bigger campsite, as if holding their breath in anticipation. Steph and Luke hold hands, David holds Noah’s. Three mobility scooters pass them, one with coloured balloons tied to it, but Noah takes one look at their drivers and keeps quiet. The place looks even worse up close. The main paths between the caravans and camping cars and the odd tent are actually metalled, with judder bars every ten yards; it’s all zoned by letters and there are further signs indicating beach volley, karaoke, massage, mountain bike, two bars, disc golf, boule, zorbing and trampbilar. The last is a Swedish import, and the campsite is so like the same sort of place in Sweden, if not as cool, not as full of young, handsome types (understatement of the year), that David reads the signs unconsciously with a kind of Swedish accent.
‘What’s trampbilar, Daddy?’
‘It’s really hard to do, Steph. It’s ice skating but uphill.’
Lisa darts him a look. ‘Is it?’
Noah is agog. ‘Can we have a go? I bet I’d be really ace.’
David has no idea what trampbilar is, in fact. He pulls a stupid-dickhead face. Stephie slaps him on the bum and Lisa actually smiles. Another spring of contentment unexpectedly rises inside him. He is so lucky. So spoilt. Such a lovely family and it is all his. Well, ours.
Reception, with ‘Since 1925’ above its door, has proper tiles on the roof and flowers in hanging baskets outside and nice wooden window frames and an A3-size Fay in the glassed noticeboard, staring out at them with that much more force in her big green eyes. Dead but won’t lie down, he thinks irreverently. Again he sees Stephie in place of this kid he doesn’t know, precious Steph grinning out at the world and MISSING, and the pools left by the flood of contentment are instantly sucked away to a barren dejection.
‘We should’ve bought them the truffles,’ he says. He is so weak. ‘From the monastery.’
‘Truffles are basically whipped cream and chocolate,’ says Lisa.
‘Exactly.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
The sun is breaking through the great white fleets of cloud: the blueness beyond gives hope. The fitful glare feels almost as strong as the southern hemisphere’s, and Lisa wonders whether the kids should slop on some of the gloopy 100 per cent natural suncream factor 60 that lies on the skin like a cross between paper glue and clotted cream. David claims they need their vitamin D – leave it, the sun’s in most of the time. His mouth is bone-dry. He wishes he’d not forgotten his hat. Condemned to UV-challenged skin, he’s already had five benign carcinomas in his life; his mole-map is checked out every other year. Life is a minefield, bro.
Bulky dads stripped down to stomach-lapped togs and jandals are already using the barbies, set out in rows in a small field beyond a low wooden fence. In the distance, pulsating with screams and shrieks, is a huge swimming pool with slides. The kids don’t seem to notice. They are evolving well, he thinks. Or maybe Coke is their priority, and their brains are too small as yet to multiply intention simultaneously: the gunk has flooded their neurophysiological substrates, he muses, smiling to himself. As they approach the campsite’s fizzy-drinks source, housed in a fetching red clapboard hut, a teenage girl comes up with pamphlets.
‘German?’
Do they look German?
‘English,’ says Lisa, although they aren’t English. Or maybe she means the language.
‘Are you coming from far away in England?’
The girl could be anything: Serb, Latvian, Polish, Estonian, Romanian, whatever. Although aren’t Romanians dark-haired? ‘No, just from London, though to complicate matters we’re not English, in fact,’ Lisa tells her. ‘I’m Australian, my husband’s from New Zealand. You can tell.’
Why is Lisa getting so happily involved?
‘Cheers but no,’ says David firmly. He goes unheard as the girl is now leaning down and saying, ‘Are you wild kids? Would you like to learn about being out in the nature?’ She gives each of them a glossy pamphlet on which is written, WILD KIDS: LEARN ABOUT BEING OUT IN NATURE!
Lisa takes one and says, ‘Oh, this looks great, ta.’ The girl, a titanium blonde with caramel skin, is in a fetching yellow T-shirt tied with a knot under her breasts to reveal a sun-soaked belly that David clocks as not being firm and flat but slightly bulbous and probably spongy, although her waist is willowy enough. McJunk, high-fat diet, but she is somehow bizarrely attractive, despite his predilection for thinness in women. Her white shorts reveal thighs covered in a peach-fuzz down visible only because the sunlight makes it gleam like silk. She is probably on a zero-hours contract or even unpaid, an intern learning nothing except how to wheedle money out of innocent passers-by.
‘You kids will love this like crazy,’ she is saying. ‘It is an adventure that is so good. I know because I did it for three years ago when I was a kid myself in my home country? We learn you about birds and trees and sports in the nature like—’
‘Not really our thing,’ David interrupts, alarmed by how hot he is for her, suddenly, without warning. He starts to walk away but finds himself on his own. The girl – a child three years ago – is sitting back on her heels in front of Noah, Steph and Luke; Lisa now holds Luke’s hand. The pamphlet is headed with a logo for an outfit called WildNature. It must be an international franchise preying on campsites and so on, a kind of vulgar troll version of EcoForce’s moral warrior status. McNature, more like. MaccaNature with chips.
‘When are you all born?’ asks the girl, her bright voice making it over to him despite the electronic dance music thumping from someone’s caravan, or maybe it’s ambient campsite stuff to keep everyone happy. David can see the girl’s coccyx at the bottom of her long curve of spine.
suk my hard cokk dry.
Noah puts his finger on his chin, squirming in thought. This foreign girl must reckon his son pretty slow – not remembering his own birthdate. Lisa is encouraging him, looking slightly anxious. Noah has learning difficulties, but they are sure it’s shyness, oversensitivity, his mind too creative for the rigours of school. He is 100 per cent going to end up an artist, they reckon. This teenager would have no idea. In her world everything is perfect, her arse is perfect and her brown legs are slender and her teeth and her hair shine in the sun. Her labial hair, David thinks behind a protective white noise of irritation and alarm, would be spun silk, all but invisible.
‘Would you like a really funny swell time,’ the girl is saying, ‘in the nature?’
‘Yessir,’ says Steph, nodding fiercely, still flushed with her success at mini-golf. Yessir must be something she’s heard on the telly. She is losing her native speech.
‘What kind of stuff do you do?’ asks Lisa.
‘We have real fun scouting antics like doing a big fire, cooking marshmallows, seeing animals, grilling green frogs, finding treasures in the forest and leaves that are eating by people,’ says the girl.
What forest? Those spindly clutches of trees? Birch, aspen, pine, the usual?
‘We’re not part of the campsite, sorry,’ says David, walking back to his hijacked family with a firm tread. ‘We’re going to the dairy. I mean, the shop.’
The girl looks up at him. She has large grey eyes that seem to envelop him like mist. ‘You’re doing wild camping?’
David nods. ‘We’re just here to buy drinks, that’s all.’
‘A shame. It sounds like heaps of fun for the kids.’ Lisa smiles.
‘I really really want to do it,’ Noah says. ‘I want to grill some green frogs. Twenty-one November,’ he adds.
The girl is already glancing away, noting a family of five – three big-shouldered boys – strolling past in fluorescent jandals and striped shorts to just above their knees. They are rolling an enormous transparent beachball. They remind him of Lisa’s brothers all those years ago, who said things like ‘Jeez, it’s as dry as a dead dingo’s donger.’ These kids are a few years older than the Milligan brood, which makes the parents seem like
veterans.
‘Come on,’ David says. ‘Let’s go get some Coke.’
‘And some crisps?’
‘Maybe, Steph.’
He can smell the girl, a butter-biscuity muskiness of sweat and sun oil and maybe raspberry shampoo like something dripped onto a cake. Imagine a world where anything was allowed, where there were no moral rules: apes lived in it. Hominids, once. Chattering monkeys. Chimps kill and eat a rival group’s young, no questions asked. Most animals live in that kind of world. Birds, especially. Any rules in their world are survival-bred. Surveying the tree canopies for days and weeks in Kahurangi taught him that. And a kea may well have the intelligence of a four-year-old human somewhere behind its beady eyes, according to the studies. The sun-oil touch makes him realise how he misses the southern brightness and sharpness: they’ve had three grey days out of five. He’s been so busy finding his sea legs at work that he’s barely noticed, and London is London: you don’t scan the skies. Today’s showing has expired already behind a sudden thrust of gunmetal cloud moving faster than the high white galleons.
‘Coke!’ cries Luke.
‘Can’t we do the wild thing?’ asks Stephie.
‘I suppose,’ says Lisa, glancing at David.
‘Keen as, keen as, keen as!’ shouts Noah.
The girl has straightened up in one sinous movement, is turning towards the beachball family, her pamphlets at the ready. She has old rock-festival bracelets on her slender wrists. She is a schoolgirl. She is now laying a hand on the huge ball, almost the height of her.
‘Lisa,’ David murmurs close to her ear, ‘this isn’t our thing. They’ll charge us a fortune.’
‘I want to grill a green frog,’ Noah whines.
‘I don’t suppose they do that for real,’ says Lisa. ‘It was just her English.’
The girl is now talking animatedly to the family hunks, shaking her impossibly tumbling locks next to the shaven-haired dad, whose broad and naked chest is golden-furred, his eyes a laser-like blue in a face that is so regulation Aryan that David feels ugly and freckled and useless. The man has fiery tattoos all down one muscular arm, as meaningless and as ugly as graffiti. The guy can’t be English, but what is a Swedish or an Icelandic (or whatever) family doing near Skegness? They’d have the girl for breakfast, probably in turn or all at once. All at once, in and out, slippery and warm.
For Chrissake!
Noah adds, addressing Stephie with appropriate movements, ‘I really want to see it bubble and really swerm in agony.’
‘I think you mean squirm,’ says Stephie.
‘Noah,’ David snaps, somehow invaded by the girl so badly that his dick is pressing up against his thin hemp-fibre shorts. He lets the tube of photocopied posters rest idly on his groin in case. ‘You know you don’t mean that. Frogs are in danger of extinction. We don’t cook them; we don’t kill them in the first place.’
‘No,’ says Noah, miming even more vigorously, ‘we can cook them living. That’s why they swerm.’
He glares quite evilly, showing his canines, as if the extremely unattractive and even terrifying element in the human race, in the branch of it called Homo sapiens, which has effectively committed genocide on all the other hapless branches up to and including the quieter, more modest Neanderthals, and is right now trashing the planet to bits, has welled up in him and is claiming this small boy’s soul for its own. David taps his son’s shoulder with the back of the knuckles quite hard and Noah acts as if he’s had an injection.
Lisa frowns. ‘Did I see you do that?’
‘Well, did you hear? What our son said?’ The girl and the blond athletic family are looking at him. His dick has obediently retreated, but it was touch and go. He is not blushing. ‘Let’s split. This place gives me the creeps.’
‘That was a slap,’ says Lisa as they walk away. ‘Now you’ll be arrested.’
Noah is acting not as if he’s been injected but as if he’s been hit in a shoot-out with some PlayStation alien, gripping his shoulder and wincing and staggering along behind his father. The athletic family and the fragrant teenage girl are looking concerned. David is boiling inside, the dance music now switched to heavy metal, completely antisocial and drowning any vestige of whatever dim ideal this campsite originally stood for back in 1925, when it was probably all tepees and Woodcraft Folk.
The beachball was a zorb, according to Lisa, a hollow sphere with straps for your hands inside. You crawl into it and roll off down a slope. Sounds a bit like life, starting in the womb and ending over a cliff. There is a gentle zorb run for children on the far side of the campsite. Lisa could not believe that, as a Kiwi, he hadn’t known about zorbs. ‘Of course I do. I know about them, I just didn’t recognise it. I’ve had other priorities in my life.’
There are these gaps. No telly, no radio. Satan made the world. Jehovah would save it. Or a few thousand of us. The Brethren. So unbelievably right wing. Fascistic. Everyone not of the Brethren was evil. Dad and Mum – crazed fanatics.
The heavy-metal beat comes from the woods, where a fun run involving rope bridges, mud pools and slippery mats is being undertaken by a variety of ages, some of them advanced. The Milligans watch in the grass from behind a rope, sucking up their agonisingly expensive Cokes through plastic straws and sharing one bag of crisps, beef-flavoured at Noah’s insistence but at least these have never seen a cow. Steph has left most of her share after they gave her hiccups and has resorted to the banana-flavour chewie she inexplicably succeeded in buying with her own money against fierce parental disapproval. Noah consumes his Coke with the concentrated fervour of a deprived addict, then blows through the straw to make wet-fart noises amplified by the can. Luke holds his own enormous-seeming can like a Titan, legs straddled, upper lip stained, and swills his new teeth in a mouthwash of gunk sufficiently acid to clean a car’s engine. Lisa is reading to the kids from the volume of fairy tales she picked up second hand in a chaotic bookshop in Lincoln. ‘Crikey,’ she says at the end, looking up at David. ‘I didn’t know it ended like that. Where’s the woodcutter who saves her with his axe?’
‘I think there are different versions,’ David suggests. ‘It’s like evolution. In some it’s a hunter, right? With his gun?’
‘Why didn’t she just chop up the wolf herself with a big old knife?’ asks Steph.
Lisa chuckles. ‘You mean Red Riding Hood or her granny? These days it’d be the granny. Grey power.’
‘Wolves are yukkie yuk,’ says Noah. He has a handful of blue nurdles secreted in his pocket and is now counting them in his palm like beads, like treasure.
Lisa suddenly beams at the kids one by one like they aren’t her own. ‘Hey, the story tells us she took cake to her granny. What kind of cake was it, do you think?’
‘Chocolate poo cake’ is Noah’s creative contribution, with an evil cackle. Lisa tells him not to block, which to David’s mind is itself a block.
He doesn’t remember even reading any fairy tales when he was a kid because he was home-tutored by those creeping-Jesus nutcases. Even poetry was banned, unless you count the Bible as poetry. He only ever did one year at a primary in Witherlea when his mother was ill and he had to do actions for ‘Some One’ by Walter de la Mare and won a consolation prize. He still knows it by heart.
Some one came knocking
At my wee, small door;
Someone came knocking;
I’m sure-sure-sure …
Downhill ever since, bro.
‘Wolves shouldn’t be killed at all,’ he suggests. ‘They were here long before we were.’
‘But they’re really wicked, wolves are,’ says Steph. ‘Not like dolphins. Daddy, can we go to the pool? It’s really ace here.’
She’s got an English accent, David realises. She’s sloughing off her Kiwi skin. He won’t know her soon. He won’t understand her vocabulary.
‘Are they fragile, wolves?’ ventures Noah.
‘Faced with us, with the human race, any creature is fragile,’ David expl
ains, his heart swelling with love for his son, to whom knowledge and understanding has been miraculously transferred, making it past his Coke moustache. The nurdles have vanished, he hopes not thrown into the grass.
‘Do you mind,’ says Lisa in the harsh voice that always exaggerated her Aussie accent. ‘We’re reading fairy stories, not attending an endangered species conference.’
Steph pretends to stifle her laugh with a hand over her mouth.
‘I’m just defending the wolf from the usual pastoralist propaganda,’ David insists, genially playing along rather than taking a cricket bat to his spouse’s head.
Lisa just pushes him around the whole time. He is a typical Kiwi, too passive and accommodating. Some New Zealanders do beat their wives to pulp, admittedly, but they are a minuscule minority and unfortunately a fair proportion are Maori. Poverty. Domestic issues. A conquered race. Massacre and disease. He’d craved to be Maori in his youth. Anything but a filthy all-conquering white man. With fucking red hair.
The smell of Stephie’s bubble gum wafts around him in faint gusts, weirdly reminding him of his weed-smoking days. So long ago. Free to be an idiot. Let loose and roving. The discovery of girls. Way over the top, he went. Way over. Like a lacky band stretched taut all those years and then released.
He wishes he had his tinnie on him right now. Opening the foil package to pungent shredded home-grown leaves, rolling and licking and drawing on it deep. But he hasn’t smoked in years. He has temporarily ditched the prehistoric sandals and his feet are now bare, toes curling, liberated. He could just walk off and keep going, keep going, until, I dunno, Alaska.
‘Ready to quit?’ he asks, turning to his family. ‘We can put one of those MISSING posters up in our rear window,’ he adds, waving the tube about.
‘Noah wants to go zorbing,’ Lisa announces, lasering out his suggestion.
‘What?’
‘It’s a Kiwi invention,’ Lisa adds. ‘A part of his ancestral culture.’