Sal

by Mick Kitson

  So I stopped striking and got my waterproof and got up from sitting and looked at Peppa and she was asleep and her sore hand was sticking out from the blankets with the vest still tied on it and the tourniquet. I loosened the tourniquet and felt her fingers and they were really cold. I slid my hand down her back inside her clothes and her back was warm. So I tucked her up in the blankets and then I went out into the rain with my hood up.

  I needed to walk and think and I went up from the bender where the slope starts with birch and spruce. I climbed up, slipping a bit on the wet leaves, and carried on along a deer path through the spruce. Further up there were really tall larches with big spaces under them covered in yellow needles. Larch is a coniferous tree which changes in winter and sheds its old needles and then grows new green ones in spring. It goes the colour of butter in autumn and grows straight and very strong and they used to use it to make ships’ masts.

  The rain was still coming down hard and I climbed over a little ridge of rocks all covered in brambles and ferns and came up on a flat bit where there were big spruce with branches that spread right out like huge skirts around the tree and were very deep green and glistening in the rain. Spruce is brilliant for waterproofing shelters and you can use the base of one for a shelter by taking out a few lower branches and using the ones above for a roof. I thought I’d cut some to try to make a platform of spruce branches to go high up over our fire and keep the worst of the rain off it. You need some long poles to make a base about two metres up above the fire between the trees and then you pile on spruce branches and they stop the rain getting on the fire below. I’d seen Ed Stafford make one when he was marooned in the Okavango Delta and it had kept his fire dry even in the African rainy season. I’d also seen him dry a tinder bundle by stuffing it down his pants for a day and letting his body heat dry the damp out of it. I wondered if I should’ve tried that.

  I pushed my way into a big spruce and started cutting out lower branches with my knife. Inside the branches by the trunk of the tree it was completely dry and the twigs on the branches snapped like Twiglets. Even though the rain was hammering down just outside, the inside of the tree stayed bone dry. That’s how waterproof the needles on the branches are. I snapped loads of twigs off them and filled the pockets of my jacket with them. Then I saw a bundle of dry twigs in a ball just where one of the branches met the trunk above my head. I pulled it down and it was a bird’s nest. It had a little hollow in the middle of it lined with soft dry grass and little white downy feathers. It was thin spruce twigs all woven and tangled together into a ball. It was lovely and I held it in my hands. It must’ve been from a migratory bird that came to the forest for the summer and was now somewhere like Africa. She spent the whole summer making it and having her eggs in it and feeding the fledglings and teaching them to fly.

  But it was also really dry and brilliant for tinder so I stuffed it in my jacket and got all the spruce boughs and dragged them back to the bender. Then I got some long dead poles of larch and wedged them up between the trees outside the bender. I made a kind of triangle frame as far as I could reach up, which was about two and a half metres above where we had the fire outside the entrance to the bender. It was still raining but the damp and slime on the tree bark helped me slide the poles between the tree trunks and set them horizontal.Then I criss-crossed smaller branches over it to make a roof and then I piled all the spruce branches up on it so they lay flat and didn’t let any light through. And it worked. The rain was still coming down straight and hard all around but the spot under it with the ashes from our fire was covered. It was like an umbrella. I got rocks then and made a platform to keep the fire off wet ground and then I put the bird’s nest on the rock and got the striker. I got a spark that took with the third strike and I blew the ember and it glowed and I blew more and got a flame.

  I piled on the dry twigs and it was soon going well and I used the dry sticks from the bender to make the pyramid and I stacked more sticks by it to dry in its heat.

  I sat on a rock and watched it starting to fire flames up and pump out smoke and crackle and spit. I said thank you to the bird for the nest.

  I got water from the burn and set the kettle on the frame to boil and set more wood to dry by the fire and then I got the first aid kit.

  Peppa was still sleeping but her arm was outside the blankets. I put on a head torch so I could see and I took off the tourniquet and slowly unwrapped the vest round her hand. She had three long slashes going right down her hand and onto her wrist and the blood was going thick along them but her hand and wrist were pale and clammy and the skin was crinkly and white like it had been in a swimming pool for a long time. She stayed asleep while I washed them down with cotton wool and boiled water. There were little red lines running up her arm away from the cuts that looked like they had been done with a red pen. I was starting to worry about infection so I got the iodine and dabbed it all along the cuts and her skin went yellow. And that woke her up and she jerked away from me and screamed.

  ‘I’ve got to Peppa or it’ll get infected’ I said.

  She screwed her eyes up and bit her bottom lip while I cleaned it with the iodine and she kept going ‘Sore . . . sore Sal . . . sore.’

  I got her two ibuprofen and codeine from the first aid kit and made her take them with water.They are really good painkillers and they would also make her drowsy which is good because her body needed to rest while it healed itself from the cut.

  I put cotton wool across the cuts and then bandaged it up. I moved across so she could see out and see the fire.

  ‘Look. I made a fire in a rainstorm’ I said and she smiled. ‘I made an umbrella to keep the rain off it.’

  She said ‘Clever Sal.’

  Then I made tea for us with milk and sugar and I opened another can of beans and we had beans and bread and cake. It was getting dark now and the rain was easing off a bit and I stacked up wood on the fire to keep it going and left more drying by it. I got the Pike and I hung it up over the fire with paracord from the frame to see if it would smoke and cook slow overnight.

  Peppa was drifting off into sleep and I got my things off and got in behind her and we snuggled down while it got dark and the rain dripped outside and the fire hissed.

  Chapter Eight

  Fever

  Peppa had a fever in the morning and she woke me wriggling and sweating. I got out of bed and got the fire going from the embers. The rain had stopped and I boiled water then got the vest and washed it out and soaked it and mopped Peppa’s forehead to cool it. And she was burning and writhing about and I had a panic pain in my chest and belly.

  She kept waking up a little bit and looking up and then closing her eyes again. Sometimes she muttered and said things I didn’t understand. I tried to get her to drink water but she wouldn’t and kept going floppy and falling asleep.

  I got the fire banked up with wood and then went and collected more. I went back and unwrapped her bandage. The red lines were going all the way up her arm now and all around the cut was swollen and red and there was pus in the cuts.

  I cleaned them all out again and used the iodine to disinfect it all and she didn’t even wake up. I put on a new bandage and cotton wool over it all. Her fingers were swelling too and the red lines were darker and nearer purple. I knew this was an infection from the Pike bite so I decided to give her an Amoxicillin which is an antibiotic and then made sure she had plenty of water and she was warm.

  I had to shake her awake and she opened her eyes and stared at me all glassy, like she was drunk. She was all wet with sweat but she felt cold and clammy. I put her purple jumper on her and she just let me and then I sat her up and made her swallow the antibiotic pill. Then I wrapped her up warm again and sat next to her,

  She opened her eyes again and said ‘Sal I’m ill.’

  I said ‘I know but you’ll be alright.You’ve got an infection from the Pike bite and I’ve given you an Amoxicillin.’ And she smiled and said ‘Good’ and then she went back to s
leep.

  It was colder that morning and the sun was out but there was a bit of frost on the leaves and twigs around our camp.The Pike was all blackened with smoke and was dripping little lines of white liquid onto the fire that hissed.The skin was getting crispy and you could see the white flesh underneath.

  I boiled the kettle and made tea for us both with the last milk we had and sugar. Peppa didn’t want tea but she drank a bit more water and then started pulling all the blankets off her and jerking about and I mopped her head again because she was burning up.

  Then she stopped and flopped down asleep again and I covered her. I sat by her for hours then. I only got up to feed the fire and once to go and have a pee. I wanted a phone or a tablet so I could find out about infection from Pike bites and if there was some kind of bacteria she had got and how I could kill it. The Amoxicillin packet said to take one two times a day and I had three left.

  There was no way of getting a phone or a tablet and the only way I could get online was to go to the library again and that was too far and I couldn’t leave Peppa on her own. She woke after a couple of hours and wanted water and she seemed more awake and said she was hungry so I gave her corned beef and beans. I boiled the kettle and made her pine needle tea from the long needles off Scots pine because it has got vitamin C in it. She liked it because I put sugar with it.

  I undid the bandage again and it had swelled up more and the red lines were still there and there was more pus. I cleaned it all up and she screamed again when I put on the iodine. She wasn’t as hot but she said she was tired and she went back to sleep.

  I sat and thought about what to do. I had tried to plan for something like this by bringing the antibiotics but I didn’t get enough and I didn’t know if the four I had would work. I couldn’t plan for the Pike bite but I knew it was what was making her ill.

  I always looked after Peppa when she was ill and I used to give her Calpol when she was a baby if she was teething or was getting hot, and I was only about four but Maw couldn’t do that stuff with her or me. Sometimes because she was drunk and sometimes because she panicked and started crying if we were ill or we hurt ourselves and then she got drunk and went asleep.

  When she got the letter that I was going in the vulnerable learners’ unit at school she panicked because she said they were saying I was retarded. I got put it in after P7 because I couldn’t write properly. Letters and words. I could read fine but when I wrote it looked like I was retarded. It didn’t matter what I was thinking, when I wrote the words they came out different and spelled all wrong and looked like another language. Sometimes I could write something and then five minutes later even I couldn’t understand what I’d written and neither could anybody else. It was better if I typed but even then sometimes I spelled words like I was pissed. Peppa had good writing and she could spell everything. I saw two reports they sent about me. One said I was above average intelligence but suffering from severe dyslexia and an inability to recognise phoneme clusters and patterns. The other said I was of high intelligence and had an advanced reading age but suffered from severe cognitive impairment when it came to writing and remembering the spelling of words. It said I would need learning support and a scribe in exams.

  I think I can’t write properly and I am very dyslexic because I am left-handed. And statistically if you are a girl and you are left-handed you are much more likely to be dyslexic, probably because your brain works the wrong way round from other people.

  I also got put in the unit because I never smiled, and stared at people, and other kids called me weird and they were worried I’d get bullied in the main school which was big and had about 2,500 kids in it. The report said I was ‘withdrawn, appeared socially isolated and seemed reluctant to form new friendships’. Which was true. I was like that. I still am.

  I didn’t have any friends in school and Peppa was still at primary. I stopped being friends with Mhari when I was about ten and she started going around with two other girls who thought I was weird and didn’t live near us.

  Maw never went to the meetings at school about me and she gave the letters they sent to me to read. Most of the other kids in the unit were headcases who hit teachers and threw things across classrooms. And there was also the Bloy twins who were two fat girls from a big family called the Bloys who were all headbangers and druggies and in gangs. The twins were a year older than me and they never spoke either but they battered kids all over the school and when they walked down the corridors everyone got out of their way. They both wore the same clothes and gold chains and shell suits and Nikes.

  But they never bothered me and neither did any kids at school because I was tall and I stared and other kids thought I was hard. And I am hard. I’ve never had a proper fight but I’m not scared of anybody.The only lessons I went to with normal kids were maths and geography because I liked them. The others kids in the class just sat on their phones all the lesson but I did the worksheets and read about glaciation and Third World poverty and climate change.

  Most kids are on their phones all the time because they can Snapchat and Instagram each other and look at porn. The internet is mostly for porn and sending pictures, but there is a lot of good stuff with information and finding out about history and YouTube videos for when you need to know how to do things or fix things. Most things I need to know are on YouTube and there are documentaries too about history and I know a lot of stuff from it. And you can also buy things online which is what I did.

  There was one boy in the unit I liked and sometimes had a laugh with. He was called Davy Mack and he was little and had pointy ears like a pixie and he smelled of fags and bubble gum. The only time I ever got a row in school was when he nicked a wheelchair from the disabled unit and pushed me all around the school corridors going really fast and screaming and shouting swear words. I liked it and it made me laugh flying along in the chair with wee Davy pushing me.We got caught by Mr Connor the deputy rector and Davy got excluded for two weeks and I got confined to the unit and wasn’t allowed to go to maths and geography for a while.

  The teacher in the unit was called Mrs Finlayson and she was quite old and little and she was nice and she sometimes looked into my eyes smiling, and once she said ‘There’s a lot going on in there isn’t there Sal?’

  Once a week we sat on the sofas in the quiet room and I had to tell her about my feelings. I couldn’t tell her anything about the flat or Maw or Robert so I used to say I felt fine and I was happy and sometimes I made up things I was worried about because she seemed to want me to feel worried about something. I once told her I was worried about climate change and I am a bit because we are right on the firth on the coast and if global warming makes sea levels rise by a metre then the shore road and Ian Leckie’s house and the wee shops by the wall would all get flooded. Our flats are on a hill up from town so we’d be alright. Mrs Finlayson nodded and said ‘Well, it’s something that we all need to think about . . .’ I told her about people I loved – Peppa and Maw and Ian Leckie – and I never told her anything about Robert or even said his name to her.

  Peppa woke up again when it started to get dark and I gave her another Amoxicillin and made more pine needle tea. She sat up in the bed and said her arm was sore and I did the bandage again, but I only had one bandage left so I reused the one I took off. There was still pus and it was still red and swollen up and the cuts seemed to be wider. She said it was really sore and it felt heavy and it throbbed.

  I gave her cake and nuts and raisins to eat because she said she didn’t want to eat the Pike. I ate a bit of it and the meat was white and tasted of smoke and it had a lot of bones in it. I gave Peppa a head torch and she read her book a bit and I got a head torch and went off into the woods to get more sticks and wood for the fire and to fill the kettle at the burn.

  When I got back Peppa said she needed the toilet and I took her outside and she had diarrhoea which sometimes happens when you take antibiotics so I knew I’d have to make sure she had fluids and salt and sugar. I ha
d to clean her up with the grass and I also used the vest soaked in boiled water, but it was getting cold so I got her back into bed and wrapped up. Her arm was still sore and swollen up and I gave her another ibuprofen and codeine. I sat and worried while she went back to sleep. I got the fire all stacked up with wood and sat watching it from the entrance of the bender for a long time. I kept the water hot and woke Peppa every two hours so she could have pine needle tea with a bit of salt and sugar in it.

  It got really cold.The sky was clear and there was a bright three-quarter moon that made everything silver and grey in the woods and I watched frost form and sparkle on the leaves and twigs on the ground. I stayed warm by the fire and Peppa stayed in the bed. Her temperature was down and she wasn’t kicking and jerking in her sleep, so that was good.

  But we had a bad night. I didn’t really sleep, I just sat watching the fire and checking on Peppa and I got one blanket and wrapped it around me. In the night I heard the Owl shriek and I heard rustling and moving in the trees towards the burn which I thought might be deer. The Pike over the fire was getting all shrivelled and was black. It looked like a bin bag hanging on paracord. Far off I heard a fox bark which is not really like a bark, it is like someone with a husky voice shouting ‘ack’. I am not scared of the dark or being outside at night. I like it. I needed to just sit and watch the fire to make me feel more calm about Peppa. I was thinking about what to do if she stayed poorly. I could go into the town and get a doctor but that would be it and we’d be found and I’d get arrested. I could go into the town and try to get more antibiotics and bandages and look up stuff on YouTube and websites about infections. But either way I’d have to leave Peppa. I also knew I’d have to go and snare something or catch more fish or shoot birds or our food would run out again.