by Tom Mitchell
‘What’s whispering back there? Zed doesn’t like the trees whispering. It’s freaky. If you have something to say, say it to me, trees. I’m not afraid and I will fight you.’
It wasn’t a ghost! It wasn’t an alien! It was Zed! The relief was like a hot shower (of normal pressure) and almost as lovely. Alexa and I stumbled past the last few remaining branches to get to him. He shone a torch in our faces. The light stung like cold water and dampened our excitement.
‘Please put that down,’ said Alexa, and he did.
It wasn’t so much a torch as one of those electric lanterns that posh campers hang from their posh tents. Its beam, now directed away from our faces, illuminated the space and, in particular, the raft. It had changed, it had evolved, it had spread. Zed had been to work.
‘Zed couldn’t sleep.’
He had connected all remaining woven reeds to the main platform, creating a flat but thick deck the size of about six school desks pushed together. It was rectangular in shape and at the two short sides, the front and the back, he’d secured the two barrels with the rope, their lids screwed tight to keep them buoyant.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, nodding with almost parental pride. ‘I’m going to call it Jupiter, after the god of sky and thunder.’
‘I think it’s great,’ said Alexa. ‘The raft. Interesting name choice … Powerful.’
What happened next was that we heard a snap that, I swear, sounded like a gunshot. My first thought? Paintball! Zed, as he killed his light, fell to a crouching position and motioned for us to do the same. My poor heart, really suffering by this point, raced at a mad sprint once again.
Know this: nature is bad for your health and rewilding is massively stressful.
Another crack, a rustling of leaves – someone, a stranger, an intruder, and definitely getting closer. We waited, and the noises got louder as we saw the figure approach through the trees. Obscured by the forest and the dark, we couldn’t make out who it was until the last minute.
Ellie. It was Ellie. Ellie stepped out. Ellie. That made four of us. Four.
(And I think me, Alexa and Zed all realised at the same time that crouching was only an effective hiding tactic if you had something to crouch behind.)
‘Ellie,’ I said, standing. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I was going to ask you three the same,’ she said. ‘Were you leaving without me? Really? Am I that annoying?’
There was a noticeable pause before anyone replied.
‘Zed couldn’t sleep, so Zed finished the raft,’ said Zed.
‘I woke up and saw Will was out of his bunk, so guessed he was down here,’ said Alexa, like it was nothing, really. ‘I thought … maybe … he needed a hand?’
Ellie waited for my explanation.
I cleared my throat. ‘As you all know, I’m escaping this camp to return—’
She cut me off. ‘You,’ she said, pointing at Alexa. ‘I thought you were meant to be the nice one. Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘Well, I didn’t know for sure Will was trying to leave. I’m confused. Are we going? Now?’
Ellie frowned, folding her arms. ‘Look, I don’t even care. I don’t want to spend a second longer in this hellhole. I’m being held against my will. Escaping will be like waking from a nightmare. What will they have us doing tomorrow? Squashing bugs on a piece of paper and calling it art? Making a cowboy hat out of acorns? No way. Let’s get out of here. My parents need to know the truth. About this not being a tennis camp.’
I couldn’t stop myself shaking my head. This was madness.
‘You must really love tennis,’ said Zed.
‘Look.’ I pointed at the raft, feeling as if I’d lost already. ‘I’ve no problem with escaping right now … but I really don’t think it’s big enough for us all.’
‘I’m sure we can manage,’ said Ellie. ‘It’ll be a squeeze. I mean, my dad’s got a Jaguar F-Type and that’s hardly big. How much social distancing do you need, Will?’
I ignored her. ‘And I’m planning on coming back here before anybody notices I’m gone, remember? We can’t get caught.’
Alexa sneezed. ‘We’ll be careful, Will. The sooner we get out of here, the less likely we are to get caught, right?’ She sneezed again.
‘Zed agrees. Besides, it’ll be mad fun. If ever you’re stuck with a decision, ask yourself: will it expand the mind? If it will, go for it. That’s the guiding principle of Zed’s life. Also, the food here is giving Zed terrible stomach problems. You’ve probably noticed. Also, Zed wouldn’t say no to a quick look at a laptop. Or tablet. The bigger the screen, the better. There are reasons. And Zed can walk to his house from town. Zed’ll tell his parents the truth. It sucked and Zed escaped on a raft. Who’s going to argue with that? And the website said that we’d be building treehouses.’
It was never easy to know how to respond to Zed.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But if this thing sinks with the weight of us all, it’s not only my life you’ll all be ruining, it’s my brother’s too.’
I suggested, as a starting point, that we move the raft closer to the river. We each took a corner of the deck and lifted.
‘Is this actually happening?’ asked Alexa, smiling, and I knew exactly what she meant. Things feel less real at night. You can’t be sure you’re not dreaming.
But maybe, just maybe, I was pleased that I wasn’t escaping on my own.
Since it was made mostly from dry reeds, the raft was easy to carry. The barrels were light too, being economy plastic that would probably last for 10,000 years. They looked like dustbins but bigger and, weirdly, less heavy.
Carrying the raft, we waddled as close as we could to the water without getting our feet really wet. We put it down.
‘What now?’ said Alexa.
‘Wasn’t Will meant to get a big stick?’ said Ellie.
‘I couldn’t find one,’ I said.
‘It’s a forest, people,’ said Ellie, swivelling to indicate the trees behind her.
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘You find one.’
She stared at me, lips squeezed tight like one of those high-schoolers with attitude from US Netflix.
‘We could just use our arms?’ said Zed, miming pushing against the riverbank.
And it was then as we stood in the night, each of us looking at the raft, wondering what everyone else was thinking, that there came a massive shock. Not a siren or gunshot or car engine exploding, but the realisation that nobody knew what to do, and, also, that not one of us, not even me, was going to jump on the raft and steal away alone. We – and this was the frightening part (save being in a forest in the middle of the night) – were going to have to work together.
‘I guess we’ll cope without a stick?’ I said.
Ellie thrust a hand into her pocket.
‘There’s always the sporf.’ I’m guessing we didn’t look as impressed as she’d been hoping. ‘I mean, I know it’s not big enough to punt but … it could be a tiny oar?’
And so:
The river flowed fast, reaching up to Zed’s knees. He gripped the edge of the raft to stop it escaping without us. Alexa was first. She got on and crawled across to its far side. It tipped, we screamed, but she didn’t fall in – phew. Zed, rope wrapped round both wrists, steadied the raft and stopped it rushing off like a wild (sea)horse.
I was about to go next but Ellie was suddenly saying ‘gross’ as she got her feet wet. She was quickly up on to the raft, lying close to Alexa and not making as huge a fuss about everything as you might have expected. Zed’s face contorted with the strain of holding on.
My Nike Airs were soaked through before I even touched reed. Mum wouldn’t have been pleased. If you remember, there was no riverbank, no drop to the water. The ground got steadily wetter until, before you knew it, it was fast-flowing river – though thankfully a fairly shallow one. As I clambered on, the platform sank, like the car as your dad gets in. I copied the way Alexa and Ellie lay, full stretch on my st
omach, all three of us facing Zed. Alexa had my torch and she held it up like a tiny floodlight.
Now, I’m not heavy, but as I lay down I could see that Zed was losing the fight. His arms were properly shaking and, in the torch’s glow, I could see veins popping out from his forehead.
Because this was it, this was his breaking point.
It all happened quickly.
The raft launched like a champagne cork, pulling Zed with it. He flew, briefly horizontal, but too soon hit the water face first. In doing so the rope jolted from his grip. Zed’s impact splashed water across us, but the river sped the raft away from him so rapidly that as soon as we realised what had happened, we were already too distant to do anything about it.
The last we saw of Zed was his wet face, lifted from the water, and it did not look happy.
‘Great Scott!’ shouted Alexa.
I couldn’t disagree.
The raft swept through the water like Mum down Tesco’s aisles. But faster. We three somehow stayed pinned to the platform, my fingers throbbing with the effort of keeping a grip. My head was soaked from Zed’s fall but I didn’t dare release a hand to brush the wet hair from my eyes.
Were there rocks under the water, shark-teeth sharp? Would we die of hypothermia if we fell in? What exactly was hypothermia? And who came up with this stupid plan in the first place and why hadn’t he found a big stick?
‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ said Ellie as the raft danced along the river.
I dared look to my left. She was lying there with this mad expression stamped on her face like she was on a roller-coaster but with a dental appointment when the ride was over. The worst thing – well, one of the many terrible things (it’s hard to narrow down) – was that we couldn’t see where we were going. We faced the wrong way. Alexa must have wedged the torch under her arm or chin or something and its reflection caught against the raft’s wake and the water rushed centimetres from our faces. It sounded like sarcastic applause.
I couldn’t help having this vision of, like, a huge waterfall downriver behind us, and us getting closer and closer to it by the second. Anytime soon we’d flip over the edge. You see it happening all the time in films.
We’d plummet.
And die.
The authorities would never find our bodies. We’d start trending and there’d be a hashtag too. There’d be a news report and Mum and Dad would be sobbing and Robbie would have failed for once and they’d never even realise that I’d died trying to return his hard drive.
Robbie’s hard drive! As I didn’t dare risk letting go of the woven reeds, I rolled my body a little sideways. Yes! I could feel its sharp contours against my stomach through my waterproof’s pocket. It was safe and dry. It felt like bumpy evidence of the potential for things to turn out all right after all.
‘How do we know when to stop?’ said Ellie, raising her head, looking kind of like a news presenter caught in a hurricane.
‘We can’t stop,’ said Alexa. ‘No stick.’
The reed raft wasn’t comfortable. I don’t think there was a muscle in my body that didn’t ache in protest. And the smell! Worse than that time Dad tried home-brewing beer.
But the smell was the least of our worries because in the next moment a tree branch appeared out of nowhere. The three of us screamed. It scraped against our bodies, its twigs like skeletal fingers drawing nails across our backs, desperate to drag us into the river, into Hell.
When free of tree, I bravely tried checking where exactly we were heading. I felt like telling my travelling companions that getting brushed by a branch was nothing when you compared it to tumbling over a waterfall that made Niagara look like a bath tap.
The platform rocked madly as I raised myself on an elbow. I could hear Ellie and Alexa’s regretful muttering – they may even have been praying – and, honestly, at that moment I really did think the whole raft plan might have been a mistake.
To make matters worse, I still couldn’t see where we were going. As we sped on, trees closed round the river like fingers round a baseball bat. The tunnel of branches shut out the moonlight, and the torch didn’t have much effect either – especially as, like us, its beam was facing the wrong way. As much as I realised that a waterfall was unlikely, it was too dark to definitely dismiss the possibility of one.
But if my memory of Google Maps was in any way accurate, we’d come sweeping into town in no time, right? Surely?
Suddenly there was a noise like your phone against concrete when you just know the screen’s broken. As the barrels scraped against the riverbed, the raft lurched towards the far bank and, from the corner of my eye, I saw Ellie reach out instinctively, like she was scared that Alexa might slip off. There was a shudder, and a jolt travelled through my body from toes to scalp, squeezing air from my chest.
Four things I realised as one:
1) The raft was no longer moving.
2) Our feet were wet.
3) Alexa’s side was dead close and parallel to the riverbank.
4) The raft’s bow (naval language for front), where our soggy feet were, had wedged against something.
‘We’re sinking,’ tooted Ellie. ‘The barrel’s got a hole in it! Abandon ship!’
She was the first up, pulling her knees to her chest and rolling off, over a yelping Alexa, almost directly from raft to riverbank. Classic Ellie. From my position I could see in the near-dark that the bank here was more your traditional sort: a miniature cliff at the side, a clear divide between wet and dry.
Ellie’s abandon-ship moment was great for her, sure, but the movement had pushed the feet end of the raft further under. And the water was deeper here. Alexa gave me a panicked look, like a kitten that had been made aware of dogs. Unable to keep tight hold of both the raft and the torch, she chucked our light source towards the riverbank.
Ellie was surely right about the bow’s barrel. It was no longer floating, meaning the platform, long side still parallel to the bank, had risen forty-five degrees into the air like the Titanic – a tiny reedy Titanic. We gripped the top edge as Ellie leant across and shouted. ‘Honestly, you dingoes, just give me your hands.’
Alexa’s Converse skidded across the reeds as her feet pedalled desperately for a grip. Something stuck, finally, and she half rolled, half flew, into Ellie’s arms.
Which was great for her. But less amazing for me. I slid down the reeds, the worst slide ever, and plummeted into water colder than even the camp’s showers.
You’re meant to make a star shape. I think you’re also meant to kick off your shoes. I did neither. I’d rather drown than lose my Nikes. Q-Tip had gone on record as saying he adored this exact type.
Thankfully the river only reached my thighs. And as I looked at Ellie and Alexa, they didn’t hold out hands to help me.
‘It’s okay,’ said Ellie, lifting her whittled piece of wood and speaking in a strange, quiet voice. ‘The sporf is safe.’
I stood there, half in and half out like an indecisive merman. I shivered as I watched the liberated raft catch the flow and speed away:
Little – less – nothing!
Gone forever.
‘Shitake mushrooms,’ said Alexa. ‘Shitake mushrooms.’
I pulled myself, dripping and cold, from the river.
‘We’ve lost the raft, then,’ said Ellie.
Alexa picked up the torch from where it had landed, thankfully still alight, and shone it around.
I checked what my backside would land on before committing, then sat down. My left buttock hurt a bit, like there was a thorn or a small sharp stone in my pants but I didn’t let either of the girls see my pain. You don’t want to show weakness.
I pulled my Nike Airs off. They were so wet they’d doubled in weight. After these came my socks, dripping like fish. And in a kind of reverse sleeping-bag motion, I wriggled my way out of my trousers like a snake shedding its skin, making sure, of course, that my boxer shorts, black and loose and dry, covered what they were designed to. I wru
ng as much water as I could from the clothes.
Ellie said, ‘Gross,’ and turned her back and made vomit noises, which was unnecessary. Alexa stood there, swinging the torch’s beam from me to the trees and making like they were suddenly the most interesting thing ever. After she was done pretending to be sick, Ellie said that she wouldn’t be able to manage with me walking about in my pants all night because it was obscene and illegal.
‘Wait. Have you got your brother’s thing? Is it okay?’ asked Alexa, forgetting my pants and looking genuinely concerned.
For the briefest of moments I forgot I was in a dark forest, effectively shipwrecked, half of me naked and wet. (And I mean really wet, like the way you get more wet in a shower than a bath – a what-kind-of-physics-is-that soaking.)
My right hand, a thawing iceberg, checked my jacket’s left side pocket. I pulled out the hard drive, safe in the sandwich bag that had somehow stayed dry. It looked like a precious rock. A perfectly rectangular precious rock, but you get the idea.
‘Is that it?’ asked Ellie. Standing not with arms crossed but wrapped round herself in a one-person cuddle, she forgot her sassy self for a second. Staring at the hard drive, she asked, ‘So what’s your brother like?’
I tightened my grip on the hard drive. ‘Everyone loves him,’ I said, more to the sandwich bag than anyone in particular.
Ellie relaxed her grip round herself and turned her eyes about the space. I should have stopped talking. Maybe it was tiredness that made me continue.
‘He got his A levels the same day as my birthday. Straight A stars. Mum cried, despite it being good news. We all went for noodles, his favourite. Even Dad came.’
There was a moment in which nobody said anything, and I wished I hadn’t spoken. But then:
‘I so get what you’re saying,’ said Ellie, still not looking at me. ‘My sister’s like a model. Everyone says. It’s like they can’t see her nose.’