by Andy McNab
“Do you think that’s her hearing aid making that noise?” I ask Lucky.
“Nah, more likely it’s her electric hip.”
Giraffles giggles. “It’s not just her hip that’s metallic. That Geri’s not human. She can’t be at her age. She’s a cyborg and that’s her brain you can hear. Her brain and her titanium skeleton.”
I weigh up Giraffles’ theory as I watch her strut to the next group. Seems unlikely, I think, but I’m not going to rule anything out.
“We don’t need instructions anyway,” laughs Lucky, “Cos look who’s got Google and unlimited data right here.” He whips out a phone so swanky it looks like it belongs in a Star Wars movie.
His fingers flash across the screen, but the phone is not as speedy. In fact, nothing happens. The screen simply turns blank, apart from two words.
Two words that strike fear into city kids like us.
No signal.
Lucky turns pale, and looks at us with dread in his eyes.
“I don’t like this, lads,” he says with a shiver. “I think I want to go home.”
The news spreads like wildfire.
There are wide eyes and slack jaws.
There are cries of dismay and a wave of phones being pulled from pockets because no one believes the rumours are true.
Jonny Walker actually falls to his knees and howls at the moon, which seems a bit over the top to be honest, but I’m more concerned with working out what this mess of poles and canvas actually turns into. Plus, the light is starting to fail and old Geri doesn’t look like the sort to bail you out just because it’s getting dark and that’s when the grizzly bears come out to play.
We make a start. Well, we do after we’ve looked at what everyone else is doing and we can copy them.
I even look to see how Dyl has tackled it, which makes me feel a bit sick inside. For some strange reason he has a three-man tent all to himself, but even without any help his tent is already upright and he’s hammering in the pegs and guy ropes. He looks proper smug about it as well, standing to attention as Geri approaches and snapping out a salute. I decide to check with Mum when I get home to see if he was actually adopted.
“No need to salute, soldier,” Geri barks. “You’re not in the services yet.”
“Won’t be long though, ma’am.” Dyl doesn’t let his salute drop, so Geri offers him a hand to shake instead.
“Well let’s see what you’re made of these next few days, eh?” and she closes her fist around his.
The result is slow at first but builds quickly, like when you eat a red chilli by mistake and your mouth gradually feels like it’s been set fire to. I see it in Dyl’s eyes. They narrow in confusion, then slowly, slowly widen as he realizes he’s actually shaking hands with something resembling a boa constrictor.
I don’t know if Geri’s doing it because she’s seen through our Dyl already, or just because she likes to test the strongest recruits, but she squeezes harder. And harder. And harder still, until it looks like Dyl is having trouble breathing. His fingertips have turned the purest white, but his face is kind of blue, and I’m imagining that his brain is racing, trying to work out how he’s been taken down by a pensioner from the Iron Age.
“Can you hear that?” whispers Giraffles. “Her hand, it’s whirring again… I swear that Geri is pure robot.”
“Then let’s get this bloomin’ tent up before she tries to shake anything that’s attached to our bodies.”
So we try. Really we do, for what seems like hours. And we do manage to make some things, but none of them are tents.
We create a canoe (kind of), a 1975 Volkswagen Beetle (if you use your imagination), and if you screw your eyes up really tight we seem to create a life-size version of the Statue of Liberty.
But seeing as none of them are a tent, and none of them use every single piece of kit in the bag, we realize we’ve not quite got it right and have to start over again.
Finally, after much wailing, arguing and innocent cheating by inspecting everyone else’s efforts, we have something that resembles a tent. There’s still one spare pole left (annoyingly), but we pretend it never existed and ram it back inside the bag.
“I’m going in,” says Giraffles excitedly, and folds his long limbs inside, only to start banging the sides of the tent repeatedly, like he’s trying to swat a particularly annoying fly.
“What are you doing?” I yell.
“I’m looking for the light switch,” he replies. “It’s well dark in here!”
I laugh. I laugh like I’ve never laughed before, not even that time when Dyl tried to wash his legs in the toilet then got stuck when he accidentally flushed it. And what makes it even better is that Lucky is as confused as Giraffles.
“You’re kidding me?” he yells. “It must be in there.” And he dives in too, with much thrashing and confusion.
“Never mind the light switch,” Lucky shouts, “I can’t find the electric socket either, or the wifi box.”
“And where are the beds?” adds Giraffles, just as Geri approaches. She smiles, but shakes her head.
“I think they might be in for a shock,” she says to me.
“Don’t think they’ve ever slept in a tent,” I reply.
“And what about you, Danny?”
“Oh yeah,” I lie. “All the time.”
She stares at me, hard. And I swear I hear a whirring as her eyeballs narrow, like they’re drilling into my brain, searching for the truth.
“I’d, er… I’d better explain to them what a sleeping bag is,” I stammer. Though to be honest, I’m not exactly sure either.
I’m not sure about much any more. But I’m sure it’ll all seem better in the morning…
I woke up super early.
So early I never actually went to sleep – how could I when the countryside is so flipping noisy?
All night there were grunts and groans and snuffles and wails, but only 37% of those came from inside the tent (though some of those noises smelt rank).
I have no idea what was prowling around outside, but I’m glad Jonny Walker wasn’t in our tent, cos in his head it was probably a T-Rex and a raptor having a disco.
Got to admit, though, that by three a.m. my sleep-wrecked imagination was going a bit mental too. I’m sure at some point I heard Dylan out there, wrestling with whatever was on the prowl, and I felt relief in the fact that the stegosaurus was probably going to rip him limb from limb.
“Euuuurghhhhhh,” comes a noise from Lucky’s sleeping bag, and for once it doesn’t seem to be coming from his backside. “I have not slept a wink all night.”
“Your bum’s been wide awake, believe me,” I reply.
“It’s this mattress, Dan, it’s like sleeping on a digestive biscuit,”
My tummy rumbles at the mention of food. We’d all been too tired to do anything but crawl inside our tents when we’d finished, and although Lucky had sweets aplenty in his bag, there weren’t enough to stop me being as hungry as I was tired.
So after wrestling with the zip for what feels like an eternity, I fall out of the tent to be confronted with a legion of the roughest-looking zombies imaginable, who are, in fact, just my classmates who have had as little sleep as me.
Many of them don’t have bags under their eyes as much as suitcases, while poor Jonny Walker is on his knees, weeping on to his mobile phone.
“I just don’t understand,” he wails. “How can there be no signal…?”
It’s not a conversation I want to get involved with, so I give him a wide steer, and instead accidentally fall into the clutches of Dyl, who is doing chin-ups from a tree so old that it looks like it was planted when a caveman spat out an acorn because of a nut allergy.
Dylan greeted me in a typical way.
“Sleep well, loser?”
“Thought you were exercising your body, not your tiny mind,” I reply, well used to our morning routine.
“This beautiful body has already run ten kilometres this morning. What e
xercise have you done?”
I think about telling him had survived a deadly gas attack, thanks to Lucky’s rotten guts, but I’m so hungry I stop myself and head instead to the others, who are grouped around a long, thin table, with tree trunks for chairs.
“What’s for breakfast?” I ask, as there’s no sign of any Coco Pops. Or a Weetabix. Not even a crunchy nut flake. Just a pile of spoons, bowls, and a load of old tin buckets.
We don’t have long to wait though, as Geri shouts from behind us.
“My lovely recruits … breakfast is served!”
We spin around, hopeful for cereal, toast or even some fruit if we have to, but – no, oh no – Geri is walking towards us flanked by a couple of the BIGGEST beasts I have ever seen.
“COWS?”I yell, before Jonny shouts rhino or tiger or something equally stupid.
They’re scary somehow. How did they get so wide? And one of them is pure white (apart from random dark splodges that I can only guess are poo), while the other is dark, dark brown.
“We’re having burgers?” says Giraffles. “For breakfast?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” replies Marcus, before Maureen adds, “Burgers aren’t made of cows. They’re made of meat.”
“Yeah, but the meat has got to come from somewhere, so where does it come from, eh?”
Neither M nor M has an answer to that, though Jonny tries to find out the answer on his phone before he gets yet another painful reminder of the signal problem.
Thankfully, old Geri comes to the rescue. “You all make an excellent point: too often we eat and drink things without a clue about where the food comes from. Well, not today! In fact, not while you are here at all. Burgers DO often come from cows” – at this, MandM look on the verge of passing out in shock – “but we will not be eating Flossy and Rossy here, we will simply be milking them. Or at least, you will.”
“For what?” asks Jonny, with a completely straight face, which even shocks Geri.
“Well, for the milk.”
“Oh,” grins Jonny, like the penny has finally dropped. He pauses, nods, then adds:
“So where’s the pink one then?”
“The pink what?”
“The pink cow.”
Geri looks well confused, and, for the first time, a bit irritated. “Why would we have a pink cow?”
Now it’s Jonny’s turn now to look at her like she’s daft. “Well, it’s obvious innit? The white cow is vanilla, the brown one gives chocolate. So where’s the pink cow, cos I’d like a strawberry milkshake?”
Jonny stops talking and there’s silence.
Deafening, tumbleweed silence.
And then laughter.
Loads of it.
So much laughter that poor old plonker Jonny turns redder than a scarlet cow. So red that I almost wish he was a cow, so we could have the finest raspberry milkshake the world has ever tasted.
Never in my life will I ever again walk past a supermarket without running up to it and hugging it like it was my mum.
For the past two hours I would have snogged a corner shop, never mind a full-size one. I can see their fridges now, with more milk than you can imagine: red top, green top, blue top. Heck, right now I am SO HUNGRY I would even drink almond milk (whatever that is).
It’s been ridiculous, emotional, tiring. I don’t know how I thought farmers got milk out of cows – I’m sure they’ve got machines that help, but Geri wasn’t having any of that.
“The only machines you need are these things,” she says, as she wiggles her arthritic fingers before showing us how to use them as pumps on the cows’ udders. Cue much yelling of:
“EUGH!”
“GROSS!”
“I AM NOT TOUCHING THAT!”
But I don’t mind, and anyway the milk pours out at such a rate when she touches them that I’m convinced there’s actually a hidden tap she’s turned to get it flowing.
“I’ll have a go,” I say, when she asks for volunteers, and I sit at this weird three-legged stool that she places next to Flossy (or is it Rossy? It doesn’t really matter either way).
“Now don’t be shy,” she says. “Their udders aren’t as sensitive as they look, so you can afford to grip tightly.”
I do as she says, flinching as my hands wrap round what look like an over-inflated rubber glove. With every muscle in my body tense, and my eyes welded shut in a grimace, I pull, and…
Nothing.
I pull again. Harder.
Still nothing.
So I try once more, though I presume I may have been a little too rough, as the cow bucks like a rodeo horse, kicking the steel bucket with more force than a Ronaldo free kick so it narrowly misses the right of Dyl’s head.
“Do that again and you’re flipping dead!” he hisses, and I make a note to pull slightly to the left next time. Well, I would if I wasn’t traumatized by what just happened.
“Let’s give someone else a go, shall we?” smiles Geri through gritted teeth. But everyone else is just as bad as me.
Giraffles can’t tease out a drop, and neither can MandM, despite milking Flossy and Rossy at the same flipping time. Jonny is rubbish at it, probably because he’s holding his phone at the same time, and even Lucky comes up short. In fact, his efforts make Rossy empty his guts.
“Good luck putting that on your porridge,” sneers Dyl, before pushing Lucky aside and sitting on the stool. “Time to watch a master at work…” He cracks his knuckles, blows on them, and wraps his fingers round the udders, moving with the speed and precision of a concert pianist.
Instantly, we hear a noise. A faint tinkling, which reminds us with a thump to the head just how bloomin’ hungry we are. We bend down to see a thin jet of liquid hitting the inside of the bucket.
“What is that?!” yells Jonny, like it’s the most disgusting thing he has ever seen in his life.
“It’s milk, you idiot!” we yell as one, before we break into a weird kind of rain dance. Except it’s not a rain dance, it’s a milk dance. And I know I shouldn’t be celebrating cos it’s Dyl who’s made it rain after all, but right now I want porridge more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, so as long as he doesn’t gloat or milk his success (sorry) too badly, I’m prepared to overlook it.
In fact, his success makes me even more determined to make it work myself, so I grab a stool, park myself beside Rossy, and pull and pump until finally, FINALLY, I get some milk out of her swollen udders.
It’s not a torrent. It’s barely even a trickle to be honest, but it’s my trickle, and I did it without use of Google. And when I taste the porridge that I’ve made with way too little (but incredibly fresh) milk? I’m telling you, it’s the BEST thing I have eaten in my flippin’ life. Even when Dyl sneezes in it on purpose, he doesn’t spoil it.
I eat it all. You bet I do. Because if this morning is anything to go by, I’m going to need every bit of energy I can get.
So I’ve eaten, kind of. And even though it was hardly a feast, I’m ready. You know, to climb stuff, and jump off stuff, or even fall off stuff (which is way more likely, given my career as a free runner so far).
But two minutes into packing my rucksack for the day I feel a rumble that isn’t hunger. I need to … go.
No, not home – no way.
You know … go.
And I realize I have no idea where the loo even is, but I’d better find out sharpish.
I duck out of the tent, failing to stay on my feet yet again, which doesn’t help the fact that I now really need to go.
I see MandM walking towards me, and for some reason it pops into my head to ask them what they do when one of them needs the loo. Surely they separate long enough for that to happen, but does one of them wait outside the bathroom door? Fortunately, another twinge in my belly forces the thought from my head.
“Where’s the bog?” I ask, doing the “I need the loo” run, which involves clamping your bum cheeks so firmly closed that you only move from the knees down.
They b
oth point towards them with such certainty that it makes me think maybe they DO go to the loo at the same time, but I shake off that thought and waddle urgently to a small but tall tent at the far end of the field.
It’s nothing like any kind of public toilet I’ve ever seen before, but I’m that desperate that I push the canvas aside and step straight in, only for my nostrils to be walloped by the most putrid, nose-eating whiff I have ever smelt in my life – and I know what evil smells like: it smells like Dylan.
The tent is tiny, so it only takes me 0.3 of a second to work out what smells, and it’s the loo itself. Well, I say the loo. It isn’t a loo. It’s a bucket. With a bin liner inside and a loo seat balanced precariously on top.
As if that isn’t bad enough, there’s no flush! Now I’m no snob, I live in a block with, like, a million other people, and some of those people have questionable hygiene, but I bet you that every single one of those people has a flushable bog, and that they wouldn’t share that bog with the rest of their class – and their cave man of a brother – if it didn’t flippin’ flush.
I tell myself not to look in the bucket.
Don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look…
But then I look, ’course I do, and my stomach flips and lurches and my porridge does the same and I have no option but to turn around and sit down – all without falling off the bucket.
But don’t worry, that’s where the detail stops, honest, cos I do what I need to do, and feel such a surge of relief that I’ve been and no one – in particular, me – died.
So I look for the toilet paper, cos the sooner that’s done the sooner I can breathe fresh air and delete the memory that this ever even happened.
But the thing is, there is no paper.
Not a piece, a shred, a particle. In fact, in horror I realize that there probably wasn’t any to start with cos there’s no empty cardboard rolls there either, not even on the floor.
And I start to panic. Wouldn’t you? All I want to do is get out of here and climb a bloomin’ mountain but I can’t, because of the obvious.