Num8ers

by Rachel Ward

  We bundled everything we could into some plastic bags. I frantically flicked through the map book, and tore out the pages showing where we were now and all the places between us and Weston.

  “Yeah, good thinking, thatta girl.” Again, you could tell Spider was buzzing with adrenaline. I guess I was, too, but it was like two sides of the same coin. He was excited, enjoying the adventure; I was eaten up with fear — they were closing in on us.

  We couldn’t get everything in the bags. I put the coat on, easier than carrying it, and Spider draped a blanket ’round his shoulders; then, with a backward glance to the car, we started up the lane. God knows what we looked like — a pair of dossers, I suppose. We weren’t like hikers with backpacks and walking boots, just ordinary kids with plastic bags, and a touch of the charity shop about us.

  The bags were a bloody nuisance. One of them kept bumping my leg, no matter what I did. I tried turning it ’round, swapping hands, nothing worked. Bump, bump, bump. The plastic cut into my hands, a cruel, nagging pain. And my feet and legs were all over the place. The track was so uneven; there were two deep ruts made up of stones, big ones and small ones, and a hump of grass in the middle, but all different levels. I started off walking in one of the dips, but my ankle kept turning over on the stones, so I switched to the grassy strip. That was OK, until it suddenly decided to slope or there was a hole or whatever, and then my ankle would go again. And all the time, bump, bump, bump, the bloody shopping bag. I got so sensitive to it, it felt like a sledgehammer hitting the side of my knee.

  After going on like this for half the morning, I stopped and dropped both bags. I turned my hands over to look at the palms: They were bright red, crisscrossed with fat white lines where the bags had cut in. Spider carried on, oblivious. It was like he was listening to music; he was walking along to his own rhythm, nodding his head, his legs kind of springy — but, of course, it was just in his own head. After a few seconds, he realized I wasn’t following and turned ’round.

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t go on any farther. I’ve had it. Can we stop for a rest?”

  He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for six minutes. If you went back to that bend, you’d still be able to see the car.”

  I kicked one of the bags. “I can’t do it! I don’t like walking!”

  “We walk miles in London, along the canal and the streets. Miles, man. You can do this.”

  “Yeah, but that’s London, civilization. They’ve got pavement and tarmac there. This is crap! My ankles hurt. And these stupid bags keep banging against my leg, and look at my hands!” I held them up toward him.

  “Look,” he said patiently, “we need to get as far away from that car as we can, find somewhere to hide out. Why don’t we follow this path for an hour and see where we get to?”

  “You’re not listening to me! I CAN’T DO IT!” I let out a scream of frustration; I may even have stamped my feet. Then I picked up one of the bags with both hands and flung it. It sailed gracefully through the air and lodged in the top of a hedge, about six feet up.

  Spider lurched over to me and put his hand over my mouth. “Shh! You’ll have them all running here, you divvy.” There was light dancing in his eyes, a broad grin on his face. He was laughing at me.

  He was laughing.

  At.

  Me.

  I went ballistic, lashing out with fists and feet, screeching and grunting. “Don’t you ever laugh at me! Don’t you ever…!”

  Instead of backing away or hitting back, he got his arms and legs ’round me, and kind of wrapped me up, and squeezed. My arms were held down by my side, my legs had nowhere to go. I was held in close, my face pressed into the smelly place under his arms, and he sort of sapped the fury out of me. I could feel it going, feel my body relaxing. His chin was resting on the top of my head, and we stood there for a bit, just breathing.

  “You alright now?” he said after a while.

  “No.” But I was, or at least I was better.

  Spider released me and went to fish the bag out of the hedge. “Let’s have a bit of chocolate and press on. I’ll carry your bags.”

  I couldn’t let him do that — I mean, I have got some pride. “Piss off, I can carry my own bags.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  In the end we compromised and he carried the awkward one, and we set off again, up the track, as a soft yellow light filtered through the branches and leaves above us, and the sound of sirens drifted over from the main road.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The lane ended with a gate and a stile. We put our bags down, leaned on the gate, and peered over. The path seemed to go straight on, through the middle of a field. It dipped down, so you couldn’t see the other side, but rising up beyond it were more and more fields, as far as you could see. I had never seen such a godforsaken picture of nothingness.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I asked.

  Spider shrugged. “Away from the car we just dumped. Anywhere.”

  “We can’t go across there.” I nodded my head toward the rural wasteland.

  “Why not?”

  “Look at it, soft git! There’s no trees, no hedges. Everyone for fifty miles around will be able to see us.”

  “D’you wanna go back? Sit in the car ‘til they find us, haul us out, and spread-eagle us on the floor with a gun in the back of our necks?”

  “What do you mean, a gun…?”

  “They think we’re terrorists.”

  I leaned my head on my arms and shut my eyes. I didn’t know what I’d imagined being a runaway would be like, but this wasn’t it. I felt so tired, an aching tiredness creeping through my arms and legs.

  “Can’t we just stay here for a while?” I said, my head still down, my voice muffled by my sleeves.

  Spider shook his head. “It’s too close to the car. We’ve got to get farther away.” He paused. “Look, there’s a clump of trees at the top there. We could get over to that, and then hide out until it starts to get dark.”

  I looked up. There was a dark smudge hugging the curve of a hill that must have been about twenty miles away.

  “What, that? Way over there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, take us an hour, tops. We can do it.” He got hold of all the bags and lifted them over the stile, then stepped over himself, his long legs making short work of it.

  I sighed and followed. The wooden step wobbled when I put my weight on it, and I let out a squeal. Spider laughed and put his hand out to steady me. I grabbed hold and swung my leg over, then let go, swiveled ’round, and gripped the top of a wooden fence post as I brought my other leg over. With my butt in the air, the bloody step felt like it was going to give way, and there was something squishy on my hand. I let go of the post and realized I’d put my hand on some bird shit.

  “Bloody hell!” I could hear Spider laughing out loud behind me. “It’s not funny, I’ve got shit on me now!” I reached down with one leg, feeling for the ground with my foot. When I was finally on solid ground, I turned ’round to see Spider doubled over, laughing his guts out. “What?”

  “I’ve never seen anything so funny in my life! You’re brilliant.”

  “Piss off!” I made to wipe my hand on him, but he ducked away. I chased him around the bags for a bit, before he managed to grab my wrist and pull me down to the ground to forcibly rub my hand on a clump of grass. Most of the stuff came off, and I wiped the rest on my pants. We sat apart from each other. My chest was heaving from the exertion, my lungs sucking in the air in great gulps, until gradually my body calmed down and my breathing got back to normal.

  Spider rooted in one of the bags and swigged at a bottle of Coke, then passed it to me. It was warm, and a bit flat, but it tasted like nectar. Then we gathered up the bags and set off along the path, out into no-man’s-land.

  You wouldn’t believe how uncomfortable I felt walking into that field. After all Spider’s talk of guns, I kept thinking of the space between my shoulder blades, just w
aiting for a sniper to put a bullet there. The farther we walked away from the stile, the more exposed I felt. I couldn’t have felt more vulnerable if I’d been walking along that path stark naked. There was nothing around us, just grass and sky, more sky than I’d ever seen before, an obscene amount of sky. You don’t realize in a city how much space buildings take up. When you take them away, there’s just sky, huge and empty. There’s nothing between the top of your head and deep space, and it’s only gravity stopping you from drifting up and up, away from the earth. I was thoroughly freaked out. The only way I could tackle it was to look down at the path and put one foot in front of the other.

  In front of me, Spider loped along with his familiar springy stride. I found myself studying the way he moved, his long legs going all the way up to his skinny arse. He’d always seemed so restless at school and around the housing projects, like it was difficult to contain his energy within those walls, those streets and buildings. Here, his legs seemed to eat up the miles. This tall black guy from London looked almost at home here. It was the right scale for him.

  Not like me. Where he sprang along, I plodded, my head full of I can’t…I don’t want to…I hate this. As soon as we’d reached the top of one slope and I thought we were near the cover Spider had spotted, another hill rose up. They were like waves, stretching back as far as you could see.

  Eventually we were walking along the edge of one field, with thick trees lining the other side of the path. There was the sound of water. Spider stopped and put his bags down.

  “Wait here a minute,” he said, took a quick head start, and vaulted over the barbed-wire fence.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted, but he didn’t reply, so I was left standing there like a prat. I sat down, facing the way we’d just come. If I saw people following us, what would I do? I didn’t have time to think of an answer because Spider was soon back, looking smug.

  “There’s a slope and then a river, Jem. This is good news for us. We just need to wade along it for a bit, and then if they’ve got dogs they won’t find us. They’ll lose the scent. I’ve seen it in the movies.”

  Well, I’d seen it in the movies, too, but did that mean anything? There was no stopping him, though.

  “Here, chuck those bags over, and then I’ll help you.” I heaved them over to him, and then looked at the fence.

  “I don’t know…,” I said dubiously.

  “Come here, put one foot on the wire, and your hand on the fence post, and then spring up. I’ll get you.”

  With no better idea, I just did as I was told. The wire bent under my weight, but I thought, What the hell, and tried to climb up. At that moment, Spider reached over and grabbed me under my arms and lifted me clean over, plonking me down safely on the other side. We smiled and high-fived each other. Then we gathered up the bags and set off through the trees.

  The ground dipped sharply down. Sure enough, there was a river at the bottom, only about ten feet wide, fast-flowing and muddy.

  “How deep is it?” I asked.

  “Dunno, only one way to find out. Why don’t we chuck the bags over to the other bank, and then I’ll go in, test it out?”

  “Why don’t you test it out first, before we go tossing our bags? If it’s too deep, we can’t get across, can we? So there’ll be no point having our stuff stuck on the other side.”

  “Jem,” he said seriously, “I think we have to get across. I don’t think we’ve got an option. It’ll be OK, I promise.” He picked up the first plastic bag, tied the handles together, and started swinging it backward and forward, then with a bit of a grunt, let go. It sailed over the water and landed on the other side. He grinned, and set to work on the others. It was OK until the last one. He didn’t quite get it together, and it went too far up in the air and then straight down into the river.

  “Bollocks!” he said and sat down, frantically scrabbling at his sneakers and socks. He rolled up his jeans and then kind of slid down the bank and into the water. “Jesus! “ he screamed, voice high like a girl’s. “It’s like ice!”

  The bag had floated downstream about thirty feet and got stuck on something over near the other bank. He started wading toward it, the water just up to his knees. “Chuck my sneakers over to the other side and then do yours. You can come across. It’s freezing, but it’s OK,” he shouted.

  I stuffed his socks into his shoes and lobbed them over, one after the other. Spider was making his way toward the bag. I crouched down to take my shoes off.

  “Whoa!” Spider was halfway across the river, flailing his arms about. “It’s a bit slippy. You have to be careful,” he called.

  “OK,” I yelled back, and went back to unpicking the knot my laces had got into. Spider was splashing about, swearing like normal, but I wasn’t watching him. Finally, shoes and socks off, I stood up to throw them across. The plastic bag was still there, bobbing about as the water tried to pull it away from whatever was snagging it. But Spider wasn’t. He’d disappeared.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I looked up and down the other bank. Nothing. My eyes scanned the surface of the water — there was no sign of him. The unreality of it was overwhelming. I felt like something in my brain had slipped and shifted: I was alone, Spider had never existed, because if he had, how could he have disappeared like that?

  Suddenly, away to my left, there was an extra movement in the swirling water. Something broke the surface — a knee, an elbow, or something. Spider was about a hundred feet away already, being swept along in the current. I started running down the bank. Different bits of him were visible as the water turned him around like a rag doll — his arm, his back, the back of his head — but not his face. His face stayed underwater.

  I was panicking, running as fast as I could. Branches along the bank whipped me as I ducked and dived my way through. I got level with him, screaming and running at the same time. He couldn’t hear me. I looked wildly around for something to reach him with. I pulled at a long branch, trying to break it off, but I wasn’t strong enough. He was away from me again. The thought of him helpless, breathing in water, made my own breath nearly stop. This wasn’t meant to happen. His number, 12152010, it wasn’t for a week yet. What the hell was going on? I started running again.

  I got thirty, forty feet ahead of him. There was no one around. No one and nothing to help us. I had no choice now. I plunged down the bank and into the water. It wasn’t just the cold that shocked me, it was the strength of it. The river buffeted at my legs with terrifying force. It was only up to my thighs, but it was all I could do to stay on my feet. Down at that level, it was more difficult to see where Spider was. I searched the water frantically, and at last got a glimpse of a dark shape heading toward me. He was going to pass to my left; I had to go toward the other side or he’d slip right past me. I started wading across, but the water was getting deeper. I was so slow, grunting with frustration. Spider was only a few feet away now — damn it, I was going to miss him. I lunged forward. I was there, but my feet were on slime, and as Spider’s body came barreling into me, I lost my footing and went down into the water, too.

  Everything was mixed up now — up and down, water and air, Spider and me. Even as I thrashed around, I held on to his hoodie. Whatever happened to us now, it was going to happen to us together — I wasn’t going to let go of him for anything. When my face broke the surface I gulped down some air. I kicked my feet around, desperately trying to find the river bottom, but the current was relentless. Spider was like a dead weight, bumping into me, pushing me under. I wanted to straighten him out, get his head above water, but it was hopeless. It was all I could do to find some air myself. Still holding Spider, I got onto my back, so that my face was upward. I tried to flip him over, too, but I couldn’t manage to. We were carried downstream, ’round a couple of bends. I was just wondering if we were going to carry on like this until we got to the ocean, when there was a sickening scraping feeling down my back, and I jarred suddenly to a stop. The jolt made me lose my grip on
Spider for a second, but I grabbed him again.

  We’d both stopped moving. The river coursed on around us, but we were wedged on some sort of stony bar, sticking out from one bank into the river. Spider was lying facedown on top of my legs. I hauled him off me and over onto his back, then gripped him under his armpits and pulled him up the sandy spit of land and out of the water. He was heavy, a lifeless weight. I knelt next to him, looking at him with disbelief. His eyes were shut. He was gone.

  This was all wrong — so, so wrong. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

  “Spider, wake up!” I yelled. “Wake up!” Nothing. “Wake up! You can’t fucking leave me! You can’t do this!” I brought my fist down on his chest in sheer frustration. His mouth fell open and water trickled out.

  I drew myself up, leaned over him, and pushed both my palms down hard into his stomach. More water came out. I did it again. And again. And again. Suddenly, a plume of water spurted out of him, like a whale’s spout, and he made the most godawful noise I’d ever heard as he drew a massive breath into his waterlogged body.

  I’d sprung away from him with the surprise of the water, and I just sat back on my heels for a while, watching his chest rise and fall on its own. He opened his eyes and seemed to be trying to focus, then he said, “What you crying for? What’s up with you?”

  I hadn’t realized I was crying, but when I wiped my hand across my face there were hot tears and snot there.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m happy.”

  He closed his eyes and opened them again. “I don’t get it. What’s going on?”

  “You fell in the water. I got you out.”

  “Right,” he said, “that’s why I’m all cold and wet, then. I don’t remember a thing. I thought we were walking through a field and then suddenly I’m flat on my back, soaking wet, and you’re crying — sorry, happy.” He started to sit up, looking around him like he’d just landed from another planet. “Here, you’re all wet, too,” he said, then a big grin slowly spread across his face. “You didn’t give me the kiss of life, did you?”