He looked at me then, only a couple of feet away, and I swear some kind of weird vacuum in his eyes sucked away every last drop of air between us. My heart stalled, and it was one of those clichéd movie moments when time stopped, the sounds of the birds and the wind and the rushing water vanished, and for one crazy, awful, fabulous second, I thought he might kiss me.
He dropped his gaze abruptly, and cleared his throat. Yanking open the gate, Dylan gestured for me to go through first, those ocean eyes now only able to meet mine for a glance before darting away.
Get a hold of yourself, Faith. He pours out his heart to you, and you decide he wants to kiss you?
We finished the lesson, trying to act normal. Dylan laughed too hard at my jokes, and I responded to his tuition over-earnestly. The truck crackled with electricity. After dropping meoff at choir practice, he didn’t follow me in, or ask about another lesson. Nothing had happened, but it was something. For the rest of the week, as I rushed about organising Grand Grace Gala table decorations, chasing after the now toddling Nancy and Pete, addressing wedding invitation envelopes (one job Larissa actually trusted me with), and serving canapés to crowds of drunk, over-friendly businessmen, my head swirled. Not with Kane, whose shadow had slowly begun to retreat, or with my future husband. I thought about the nothing. And what I would have done if Dylan had made it a something. I wondered what I felt most scared of – another nothing happening, or one never happening again.
The following weekend, I packed my rucksack with a change of clothes, my warmest pyjamas, a torch, a first aid kit, and a family-size bar of chocolate, and hitched a ride in Marilyn’s car.
It was time for our next choir activity. Two nights camping in Sherwood Forest. The air was damp and the ground muddy. The temperature might drop to near freezing. Our seventeen-strong troop included a wannabe sergeant major, a cosmetic addict who cried if she split a nail, two pensioners, a teenage delinquent and fifteen-month-old twins. Twelve of us were camping virgins.
What could possibly go wrong?
18
Marilyn and I were the last to arrive at the campsite on Friday evening. Things were already descending into chaos. We quickly joined the rest of the group, trying to pitch the first of the three tents Hester had borrowed from other members of the church. Accompanying the canvas sheet were a bag of long, flexible poles that needed assembling, a load of tent pegs, and a distinct lack of instructions.
The slots for the poles were colour-coded, and it seemed straightforward enough, except that the late-April wind roared through the trees, whipping our hair in front of our faces and causing the tent to flap about like a bird entangled in a net. It took half of us to keep the tent from taking off, someone else to push an unsettled Pete and Nancy up and down in their pushchair, someone to poke a pole through the right hole in the canvas, someone else to pull the other end, another person to tell them they had got the wrong pole or the wrong hole, someone to push the tent pegs into the mud, two of us to try and start a fire, another to try to find a mobile phone signal, and all of us to yell suggestions into the wind, none of which helped.
By the time an hour had passed, we had one wonky, half-erected tent, two extremely fractious toddlers, lashings of mud all over our clothes, our hands and some faces, a pile of damp wood that refused to light, and a bunch of fed-up, hungry women.
‘Where are the bathrooms?’ Kim asked, after we decided to leave tent one and move on to tent two, refusing to believe it could be any more of a challenge to pitch.
Hester shook tent two out of its bag, rolling it out across the mud. ‘About fifty paces into the woods, turn left and you’ll see a clearing surrounded by blackberry bushes.’
‘Okay. I’ll be back in a minute.’ Kim picked up a washbag that was not much smaller than my rucksack. ‘I need to sort my face out.’
Hester pointed to a trowel, lying with the pile of cooking equipment. ‘Take that if you need to go.’
‘Eh?’
Hester smiled and said nothing. Kim picked up the trowel with two fingers, holding it at arm’s length, and disappeared into the woods. We started wrestling with tent two, slightly more aggressively than last time, and had managed to hammer in a couple of pegs and get the basic frame up by the time Kim returned.
‘Hester!’ she whined, marching up. ‘I couldn’t find them anywhere. It’s starting to get dark in the woods and there are no lights or signs or anything. I’ve used up loads of the battery on my phone ’cos I had to use it as a torch.’
Hester thwacked at a peg with the mallet a couple of times, while every hair remained in place on her head. ‘Did you walk fifty paces into the woods and turn left?’
‘Yes. But how do you measure fifty paces? For a shrimp like Rowan, fifty paces would hardly get you into the woods. For Mags, you’d be out the other side.’
‘Did you find a small clearing surrounded by blackberry bushes?’
‘I found a small clearing. But I don’t know what blackberry bushes look like.’
‘Bushes covered in thorns? Like that one over there?’ Hester pointed out a nearby bush.
Kim shrugged. ‘Probably.’
‘Then you found the bathroom.’
‘But I didn’t though, did I, because there wasn’t any bathroom!’
Hester stood up, slowly and put her hands on her hips, just above her waterproof trousers. She looked at Kim and waited. There were a couple of gasps from behind the tent.
‘I don’t get it,’ Kim pouted.
We all looked about for someone to break the news to her. Marilyn stepped forwards, but Melody dove in.
‘Kim. You, ah, found no bathroom in the clearing because, if I am not mistaken, the clearing is the bathroom.’
