Straight on Till Morning

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  The shack is reasonably well-appointed, as shacks go, but it strikes me, for perhaps the tenth time this weekend that this (and my part in it) will not inform a reading glasses prescription in the least. I think, momentarily, of Jonathan. I think of his rumbling disappointment with Kate. I think of him forgetting to take the Victoria sponge from the freezer. I think of him telling his mother for the umpteenth time that a duvet will not give her contact dermatitis or lice. I think of him trailing around Marks and Spencer with her while she pummels skirt fronts to see how much they crease. I think of him, period, and how much fun this break is. And then I think about Nick Brown and I concede that perhaps there is a purpose to this madness. My sanity. My freedom. My feeling like a teenager. Little unimportant details like that.

  Anyway, ten past three and the only little detail nudging my consciousness right now is the fact that I only have seven travel tissues left in my packet and that weeing al fresco is not high on my list of favoured leisure pursuits. Which is pertinent, because the deal is that this afternoon, by way of light relief, we are going to go orienteering. Orienteering is (apparently) simple, fun, challenging, healthy and not in the least dangerous as long as you tuck your trousers in your socks. It’s very straightforward. You gather into little gaggles of orienteerers (is there a collective noun for orienteerers? An enthusiasm? An uncertainty? A corduroy?) and are taken off in small groups, at large intervals, to some remote spot. Once there, you get given a map and a compass and a sheet of clues and all you have to do is work out where you are. Easy. Then, by virtue of your undoubtedly superior deductive and observational skills you will find your way via said clues en route from point A to point B, at which location (another shack, presumably) you will be patted warmly on the back, given a hunk of Kendal Mint Cake, and you will feel all jolly and pleased with yourself. Simple. Orienteering is FUN.

  Ten past six. No it’s not. It’s pants. Total pants. No, that’s not true, either. It’s not orienteering that’s pants. It’s us who are pants. Us as in Russell and I, at any rate. Nick (who I must concede is in no small way a disorientating factor) is otherwise engaged in doing whatever people like him have to do, i.e. not being very helpful and making little covert notes on a pad. Anyway, by virtue of the fact that we are pants at orienteering, it is now way past teatime and we are not even half way through our list of clues. And I have gone right off Russell.

  Scene 1. Somewhere in South Wales (possibly). Enter Russell, stage left.

  ‘Sal, you are wrong. There is the bridle path. The only bridle path. It has to be that way.’

  Russell’s voice, I noticed, had taken on a rather petulant quality. I could see him glance at Nick for corroboration.

  ‘Russell,’ I tried again. ‘It can’t be that way. You must be reading the compass wrong –’

  ‘I am not reading the compass wrong, Sally.’

  Correction. Aggressive quality.

  ‘Look,’ I began again, growing increasingly irritated at both his superior tone and Nick’s dogged refusal to take charge and take the bloody compass off him – a bullet point, no doubt, in his wretched teambuilding guidelines. The girl guide in me had long since departed. I was tired and fed up and I needed a wee. No way was I yomping any further across eighteen inch scrub in the wrong direction. I needed serious undergrowth and I needed it soon. ‘The thing is,’ I went on, ‘that if you follow that contour line North West you’ll see it gets to a point where there are lots of other contour lines all close together, in a circle. See? Which means a hill. Which means –’ I pushed the map pouch under his nose again, ‘a steep hill. Look that way now. No hill. There would be a hill. But there’s no hill. So that way can’t be North West, can it? The hill is over there.’

  Assuming, that was, that we were standing where we thought we were standing, which, by this stage, was no longer certain. Nothing was certain in this bleak and peculiar landscape. Where I came from there was countryside and there was seaside. The former characterised by sweet smelling herbage, picnic areas and cows, the latter by pebbles and promenades and chips. The distinction, in this place, was muddied and uncertain. Here a tree, there a sand dune, here a sheep, there the sea. And not a sniff of a chip shop anywhere.

  Russell shifted his weight on to his other foot and glared intently at the compass. Nick was still fiddling with his mobile.

  ‘Perhaps we should go Sally’s way anyway, Russell,’ he suggested. He had obviously now decided to abandon his laissez faire methodology in favour of getting something more constructive done than simply standing around looking rugged. ‘At least we might stand a chance of getting a signal up there. I mean, I take your point about the bridle path, but given that it’s going to get dark in an hour or so and that it won’t be long before we can’t make out any of the landmarks anyway, I’m just a bit worried that if we can’t get a signal then we’re well and truly stymied. What d’you think?’

  ‘I take your point too, Nick,’ Russell said in a tone altogether different to the one he’d just bestowed on me. A tone of blokey fraternity and after-match shower rooms and androgen-flavoured deodorant and sweat. ‘But if we’re all agreed that we’ve just travelled three miles North – which we are, aren’t we?’ He glared at me now. ‘Then we should be one and a half miles south east of there. Which means the ruined castle will definitely be –’

  ‘There are two castles on this map, Russell. Two. And I don’t think the one we are supposed to be finding – ’

  ‘I think,’ said Nick, clearly spotting the word ‘diplomacy’ on his tick sheet and feeling the need to leap in and be aggressively uncontentious, ‘that we’d better cancel any plans to reach the castle today. Don’t you guys? I think we should really be thinking in terms of trying to establish our position and, having done so, in terms of bypassing the rest of the landmarks and working out which way the meeting point is.’

  We were meant to get lost. That was it. This was hitherto undisclosed mettle testing component. That the quality of our responses to being up shit creek would decide who got slapped on the back and promoted and who simply got slapped. I would quite like to have slapped Russell just then.

  ‘Which is what I am trying to do, Nick,’ he reminded him in what I thought was a rather daringly abrasive tone. ‘Only until we can reach some sort of agreement about our position –’ He stopped. Contemplating small scale genocide? Who knew?

  I pulled the map out from its plastic pouch and slapped it instead. ‘Look,’ I said again. (Being an optometrist, I suppose.) ‘Let me just run this by you again. This is where I think we are. Woods, here. Hill, there. Bridle path possibly there, I do appreciate, but given that there isn’t a stick in the ground to say so, and given that we can see two other landmarks that definitely correspond to the map, I think we should go with my reading of it. Which puts us roughly here. OK? Which means we are about, oh I don’t know, a mile or so south west of this mound here. On that basis, we should make for the hill. The castle – the castle – should be visible pretty soon after we get up it a way. The meeting point is here. Therefore, if we head towards the hill, we should be able to drop down over the footpath there, and we’ll be on our way back by default. See?’

  Nick nodded. Russell sniffed. He closed the cover on the compass. Click.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Five minutes in the bloody scouts and you clearly know everything. Fine. Let’s go then.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Russell! Can’t we discuss this without you getting in such a strop for once?’

  But Russell wasn’t listening. He was already ten yards ahead and striding out like Mallory up some bleak Himalayan moraine.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nick, shouldering his backpack and winking at me.

  ‘And don’t you start,’ I snapped.

  But I smiled, all the same.

  So we walked, strung out like a circus tightrope act, for another forty minutes or so, the air growing colder and the wind growing stronger and the
whole afternoon disintegrating into exactly the sort of sulky stand-off that Drug U Like had no doubt wished to encourage, the better to hone us into crack spectacle retailers. The landscape, always undulating, was growing increasingly hilly. We were following the line of the coast now and the scrubby uneven ground was more sand than soil. The reassuring string of street lights that had wound beyond the trees to the north of us were, now, I realised, nowhere to be seen. But our route was at least taking us down a dip in the landscape, and the vegetation was at last growing thicker.

  I was just pondering my pathetic anxiety about calling for a wee stop in such aggressively willy-endowed company (and its possible consequences for my managerial style profile) when Russell, who was still way out front and apparently not talking to either of us, turned around and stomped back.

  ‘Great,’ he said, as we approached. ‘Now what?’

  We formed another fairy ring around his precious compass. The wind was piling in off the sea now, and blowing sand into our eyes.

  ‘What?’ asked Nick.

  Russell gestured ahead of us. ‘We have a river, is what. Any suggestions?’ He was looking very pleased with himself.

  ‘A river?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. It’s a long wide wet thing. You may have come across one. Though not on that map of yours, obviously.’

  I lifted the map and scrutinised it carefully.

  ‘There’s no river marked here. Not that I can see, anyway.’ I traced my finger along the line of our route.

  ‘May I?’ asked Nick. I pulled the cord from around my neck and handed the map pouch to him. He took the map from inside it and unfolded it, then scrutinised it himself for a few minutes. Russell stood about a bit more with one hand on his hip and his compass aloft.

  ‘There’s a river here,’ he said at last, pointing to a blue line on a different part the map. ‘Leading down into this estuary. Perhaps we’re not where we thought we were. Perhaps we’re here. Look, if you follow the route of the river in relation to that hill, then it’s possible – yes. Look. There’s the farm buildings we were supposed to have passed. Perhaps we should have taken that footpath after all.’

  I peered at the map. ‘Which footpath?’

  ‘When we were at that milestone an hour or so back.’

  ‘Oh,’ piped up Russell. ‘You mean the one I said we should take?’

  ‘No, not that one,’ answered Nick. ‘The one before that. The one when we were at that fork. By the sheep field.’

  Hah! The one I said we should take, in fact. Though clearly not strenuously enough. But there was no satisfaction in saying so, because I’d most probably get a black mark for having been such an acquiescent wimp. I said nothing. Russell spat a midge from his mouth. Nick wrestled with the now flapping map.

  ‘So I guess,’ he said, having folded it into some sort of submission,’ that it’s probable we are, in fact, here.’ He pointed. ‘Which means –’he scanned the hillside and traced a finger along the paper. ‘– that we need to head west.’

  Russell tutted. ‘Across the river.’

  Nick nodded. ‘Across the river.’

  So much talk of water. I couldn’t stand here any longer. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I have got to find a bush.’

  *

  When I re-emerged, minutes later, they both seemed in markedly better spirits, having shared the last of Russell’s contraband whiskey, and having decided, possibly as a result of the former, that they both now knew exactly where we were. I, meanwhile, had struggled with both my knickers and my conscience. Was the pink plastic packaging from my Drug U Like whisper even now choking a hapless wagtail to death?

  ‘OK?’ asked Nick. I assumed the question was rhetorical and not really a request for details. Even so, there was a note of mild amusement in his voice. I looked down at my boots for splash marks.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, feeling myself colour. ‘So. What’s the plan?’

  Nick handed me the map and heaved his back pack back on to his shoulders. ‘We’re going to head up alongside the river for a bit, till we find a good place to cross.’

  ‘Is there a good place to cross?’

  ‘We think so. According to the map the source is no more than a couple of miles away, so we reckon it’ll narrow down fairly rapidly. If it doesn’t, we’ll just have to keep going till we get there. There’s a bridle path that skirts the edge of the hill and seems to join a road further along.’

  I really didn’t want to argue with someone whose smile made various bits of me feel so mushy, but needs must . ‘Are you sure it wouldn’t make more sense to try and head back to the start point?’ I said. ‘I mean, we didn’t cross a river earlier, did we? And we’re still not entirely sure we know where we are.’

  Nick shook his head, narrowing his eyes against the wind. ‘No point. There’ll be no one there, will there? And it was a pretty remote spot itself.’

  I began re-folding the map to fit back into the pouch. ‘I suppose. But are we sure the meeting point is the best place to aim for now? I mean, aren’t there any villages or anything we could head for on this side of the river?’

  ‘Not within walking distance,’ said Russell. I opened up the map again to check for myself.

  Which proved to be about the stupidest decision in a day full of stupid decisions, because no sooner had I done so than the wind, now obviously intent on a no holds barred ruck with our collective spirit, snatched it from me and whisked it away into the air. Russell made a grab for it and fell over a tussock, forcing Nick to hurdle both as he set off in pursuit.

  It didn’t travel far, as the crow flies. But none of us being crows, it might just as well have. We caught up with Nick and peered up into the foliage. The map had finished up wedged among the boughs of a fat oak that was growing by the riverbank.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Russell. ‘That’s that then. Now we really are lost.’

  ‘No more lost than we were five minutes ago,’ I offered.

  ‘But with every possibility of getting more lost by the minute.’

  ‘And it’s beginning to get dark,’ observed Nick. ‘But I can get it anyway. If you give me a leg up, Russell.’

  The river ran through in a small gorge. The ground fell away sharply to the right of the footpath, the tree in which the map was lodged rising up from the steep slope and branching only slightly above our heads. But the map, infuriatingly, was still just out of reach.

  ‘Is there really any point?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘I don’t see how we’re going to find our way back without it. Once it gets dark we could be going round in circles all night. It’s not that high –’ He began shrugging off his back pack once more, his can-do expression in place. ‘– just a question of a couple of feet, really. Give us a hand here, Russell, and I’ll try and make a grab for it.’

  Russell laced his fingers and cupped his hands at knee height. His hair was all tufty from the now swirling wind, and he looked like a chimpanzee. Nick put his foot in and said ‘brace yourself. Ready?’ then, one hand splayed firmly on the top of Russell’s head, he launched himself upwards and stretched to get hold of the nearest branch.

  But failed to. Just a twig, which immediately snapped off in his hand. Russell grunted as Nick teetered, flailing wildly for a hand hold, before crashing back down, knocking them both off their feet.

  Which would have been fine – the tree could keep the bloody map, then – except that, in attempting not to stamp on Russell’s head, Nick did the splits, careered over backwards, and shot off in a muddle of limbs down the slope.

  I could hear him say ‘yow!’ then a flurry of leaf litter, then an ‘oof!’ then an ‘ouch!’ then a couple of loud snaps. Horrified, I sank to my knees at the edge of the footpath.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ I said, peering into the darkness. ‘Nick? Nick! Are you all right?’

  ‘Er…no,’ came the distant answer. ‘I’ve hurt my side and I think I’ve done something to my ankle
.’

  Russell scrabbled across to join me. The canopy of leaves was so thick and complete that we could barely make Nick out. A swathe of flattened foliage marked his route and a strong smell of soil filled the chilly air. He was about twenty feet below us. Close to the water. In it, in places, even.

  ‘What sort of something?’ asked Russell. ‘Have you broken it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he called breathlessly. ‘I twisted it when I fell.’

  He groaned and rolled over. He’d been brought to a stop by a thick fringe of bracken and saplings. Had they not been there, he’d have fallen straight in over the bank.

  I turned to Russell. ‘I think we’re going to have to climb down and help him up,’ I said anxiously.

  ‘God! Orienteering is the pits,’ he replied.

  We slithered carefully down. The slope was steep and deceptively treacherous. The jumble of spring growth and half-rotted leaves camouflaged numerous outcrops of rock. Russell got to him first, and squatted beside him. I scrambled across. Even in the semi-darkness, Nick looked grey. Both his feet were wet and he was splattered with soil and decomposing leaves.

  ‘How bad is it?’ I asked, fairly stupidly. I was beginning to feel seriously fed up now, and not a little anxious. He gritted his teeth and smiled weakly up at me. ‘Let’s just say I’m not going to be instigating any rollerblading initiatives in the near future. Jeez. What a stupid thing to do.’