She pauses at the stile and waits for me to catch up, and this time she walks more slowly, matching her strides to my more cautious pace as we begin to cross the marsh itself, my narrow heels sinking into the soft ground. We walk in silence, just the sound of our breathing, my occasional stumble as my high heels turn on a stone. Where are the others?
‘She asked me to send Freya there,’ I say at last, more as a way to break the eerie quiet of the marsh and get Fatima to slow down than because I think she wants to know – and it works, in fact it stops Fatima in her tracks. She turns to face me with a mixture of horror and incredulity in her expression.
‘Miss Weatherby? You are shitting me.’
‘Nope.’ We start walking again, slower this time. ‘I did find it quite hard to respond.’
‘Over my dead body, is what you should have said.’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
There’s another silence and then she says, ‘I’d never let Sami or Nadia board. Would you?’
I think about it. I think about the circumstances at home, what my father went though. And then I think about Freya, about the fact that I can’t manage even an evening away from her without feeling that my heart is being put through an industrial shredder.
‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. ‘I can’t imagine it though.’
We walk on through the darkness, across a makeshift rotting bridge over a ditch, and at last Fatima says, ‘Bloody hell, how did they get so far ahead?’
But almost as the words leave her mouth we hear something, see a moving shape in the darkness up ahead. It’s not the shape of a person though, it’s a hunched and huddled mass, and a wet, bubbling sound comes through the darkness – a sound of distress.
‘What’s that?’ I whisper, and I feel Fatima’s hand close over mine. We both stop, listening. My heart is beating uncomfortably fast.
‘I have no idea,’ she whispers back. ‘Is it … is it an animal?’
The picture in front of my eyes is vivid as a flashback – torn guts, bloodied wool, someone crouched, animal-like, over the ripped corpse …
The sound comes again, a wet splatter followed by what sounds like a sob, and I feel Fatima’s fingers digging into my skin.
‘Is it …’ she says, her voice uncertain. ‘Do you think the others …?’
‘Thea?’ I call out into the black. ‘Kate?’
A voice comes back.
‘Over here!’
We hurry forward into the darkness, and as we get closer the hunched shape resolves itself: Thea on her hands and knees over a drainage ditch, Kate holding back her hair.
‘Oh bollocks,’ Fatima says, a mixture of weariness and disgust in her voice. ‘I knew this would happen. No one can drink two bottles on an empty stomach.’
‘Shut up,’ Thea growls over her shoulder, and then retches again. When she stands up, her make-up is smeared.
‘Can you walk?’ Kate asks her, and Thea nods.
‘I’m fine.’
Fatima snorts.
‘The one thing you are not is fine,’ she says. ‘And I say that as a doctor.’
‘Oh shut up,’ Thea says acidly. ‘I said I can walk, what more d’you want?’
‘I want you to eat a proper meal and get to noon without a drink – at least once.’
For a minute I’m not sure if Thea has heard her, or if she’s going to reply. She’s too busy wiping her mouth and spitting in the grass. But then she says, almost under her breath, ‘Christ, I miss when you used to be normal.’
‘Normal?’ I say incredulously. Fatima just stands there, speechless – too shocked to find words, or too angry, I’m not sure which.
‘I really hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means,’ Kate says.
‘I don’t know.’ Thea straightens and begins to walk, more steadily than I would have given her credit for. ‘What do you think it means? If you think it means that she’s using that headscarf as a bandage, then yes, that’s what I mean. It’s great that Allah’s forgiven you,’ she shoots over her shoulder at Fatima, ‘but I doubt the police will take that as a plea bargain.’
‘Will you just fuck off?’ Fatima says. She is almost incoherent, choking with anger. ‘What the hell have my choices got to do with you?’
‘I could say the same thing to you,’ Thea swings round. ‘How dare you judge me? I do what I have to do to sleep at night. So do you, apparently. How about you respect my coping mechanisms and I’ll respect yours?’
‘I care about you!’ Fatima shouts. ‘Don’t you get that? I don’t give a fuck how you cope with your shit. I don’t care if you become a Buddhist nun, or take up transcendental meditation, or go to work for an orphanage in Romania. All of that is entirely your own business. But watching you turn into an alcoholic? No! I will not pretend I’m OK with that just to fit in with some misguided shit about personal choices.’
Thea opens her mouth, and I think she is about to reply, but instead she turns to one side and vomits again into the ditch.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Fatima says resignedly, but the shaking anger has gone from her voice, and when Thea straightens, wiping water from her eyes, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a packet of wet wipes. ‘Look, take these. Clean yourself up.’
‘Thanks,’ Thea mutters. She stands up, shakily, and almost stumbles, and Fatima takes her arm to steady her.
As they make their slow way over the turf, I hear Thea say something to Fatima, too quietly for me and Kate to hear, but I catch Fatima’s reply.
‘It’s OK, Thee, I know you didn’t. I just – I care about you, you know that?’
‘Sounds like they’ve made up,’ I whisper to Kate and she nods, but her face in the moonlight is troubled.
‘This is only the beginning though,’ she says, her voice very low. ‘Isn’t it?’
And I realise she’s right.
‘NEARLY THERE,’ KATE says, as we clamber painfully over yet another stile. The marsh is so strange in the darkness, the route I thought I remembered in daylight retreating into the shadows. I can see lights in the distance that must, I think, be Salten village, but the winding sheep paths and rickety bridges make it hard to plot your course, and I realise, with a shudder, that if it wasn’t for Kate, we’d be screwed. You could be lost out here for hours, in the darkness, wandering in circles.
Fatima is still holding Thea’s arm, guiding her steps as she stumbles with a drunkard’s concentration from tussock to ridge, and she’s about to say something when I stiffen, put my finger to my lips, shushing her, and we all stop.
‘What?’ Thea says, her voice slurred and too loud.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Kate asks.
It comes again, a cry, from very far away, so like Freya’s sobbing wail when she’s at almost the peak of her distress that I feel a tightness in my breasts and a spreading warmth inside my bra.
A small part of my mind registers the irritation, and the fact that I forgot to put breast pads in before I left – but below that the much, much larger part of me is frantically trying to make out the sound in the darkness. It cannot be Freya, surely?
‘That?’ Kate says as it comes again. ‘It’s a gull.’
‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘It sounds like –’
I stop. I can’t say what it sounded like. They will think I’m crazy.
‘They sound like children, don’t they?’ Kate says. ‘It’s quite eerie.’