Silence for about ten seconds while nobody moved, or took their eyes off Kim.
‘Whaaaaaat!’ Kim screeched, sending the birds from the entire forest whooshing up into the sky en masse.
Her face turned dark purple underneath its faded foundation. She pulled a horrified, furious face at Hester, turned around and hurled the trowel into the depths of the woods. ‘You… what… we… I… you cannot… no way… you total… that’s illegal!’
She turned to Ebony, who had driven her here. ‘You need to take me home. Now.’
Ebony glanced at Hester. ‘Errr. I don’t think that’s an option, Kim. The weekend is compulsory.’
‘Compulsory! Hah! Polly’s not here.’
‘Because she has Baby.’
Baby had been officially registered as Esme a couple of weeks earlier so it was really time we started calling her by her name.
‘Right! And it probably wouldn’t be safe to bring a baby out into the middle of nowhere, in the freezing cold, with no house, no shower, no heating, no coffee machine and a pile of dirt for a toilet! I am not a bear!’
‘No dear,’ Millie chipped in. ‘A bear wouldn’t bother with a trowel.’
She whipped out her phone. ‘Fine. You nutters can stay if you like. I’ll call Scotty. There is no way I’m spending the night out here. You can take your choir bonding, competition winning, toughen you up and make you champions camping weekend and bury it with your trowel!’
‘Kim, please stay,’ Rowan said.
Kim ignored her. ‘Eurgh! I can’t even get a signal in this wilderness. Who does she think she is? Bear bloomin’ Grylls?’
She stomped off to the treeline as best she could in a pair of pointy-heeled ankle boots. They were more effective at kicking over the bucket, a cool box and the pile of firewood as she went.
‘Should I go after her?’ Leona asked.
‘She’ll come back when it’s dark.’ Hester resumed hammering. ‘Which won’t be long, ladies. So you’d better quit standing around gawping and get cracking. Once these tents are up, you’ve got to find a source of running water. An inability to stick together spells disaster.’
‘What does disaster entail, exactly?’ Uzma asked, poking a pole through the last slot in tent two. ‘Cold? Starvation? Death?’
‘I was referring to the Community Choir Sing-Off,’ Hester said.
‘Oh.’ Uzma looked relieved.
‘But I wouldn’t rule any of those out, either.’
Ten minutes after the last tent was up, precariously leaning against the wind with the others, the heavens opened.
Thankfully, Hester had stocked up on drinking water. We set out the buckets to collect some rainwater for washing up (and washing us).
We were getting there, but with dusk creeping across the site, the temperature plummeted. We huddled in the central area of the largest tent. Hester had left us to go and make ‘preparations’, whatever that meant. We were wet, filthy, hungry, and about ready to roast our choir mistress if that might provide the fuel to make a cup of tea.
‘There is no way we’re going to get a fire lit. What are we going to do about an evening meal?’ I asked, cuddling Pete all snug in his baby sleeping bag.
‘She’s probably expecting us to catch it and cook it ourselves,’ Rowan huffed, her hands stuffed in her armpits. ‘I did not expect my first night away without Callie to be like this.’
‘We can’t even forage for berries at this time of year,’ Uzma moaned. ‘I’m starving.’
‘You ate nearly a whole jumbo packet of tortilla chips an hour ago,’ her cousin Yasmin said. ‘I was saving that for a midnight feast.’
‘A midnight feast? What is this, an Enid Blyton book?’ Uzma barked back.
‘If it was an Enid Blyton book, we’d have lemonade, massive sandwiches, the sun would be shining, and there’d be a dangerous villain creeping about in the woods.’ Janice leered at us from beneath the bobble hat Millie had knitted for her. In the shadows from the torchlight, she could have passed for a dangerous villain.
‘Stop it!’ April whimpered. ‘I’m freaked out already. I hate it out here. The bats and spiders and badgers are bad enough.’
