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 waiting 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.