Junk - Melvin Burgess [75]
*
I got up early. I said to Lils, ‘Do you want a cuppa tea?’ and she smiled yes. She looked so beautiful lying there in bed. I kissed her and went out into the kitchen.
Tar and Gemma were already up, outside, drinking coffee. They called me to come and see and I went out.
It was tremendous. This soft, cool, clear air and now you could see it all, miles and miles of it, mountains and hills and forest. There was a buzzard circling about. Little birds hopped about in the firs nearby. No one said anything. We just stared and sipped our drinks. Then I went to get Lily up and she sat on a pile of logs and we all just looked and looked. It was like soaking something up. I felt I could soak it up forever and never be full.
Lils patted her stomach. ‘This is all for you, yeah,’ she said. We all laughed and I thought, Lucky little git.
We did the big breakfast, bacon and eggs and that, then we went for a walk. We were all still feeling a little run down, like you do at the beginning. Sals said in Bristol by this time, she’d be feeling shitty, but out here it was okay. It was this feeling that the air was so good we couldn’t feel bad at all. Which was a bit of a mistake, really, looking back.
We walked down this track, downhill. It soon ran into woods, big tall trees, quite a lot of light coming through. We saw squirrels and birds. It was nice. Then there was this walk up the hill and that did us all in – none of us had walked more than down the road for years, I suppose. Then we went down another hill and this time we were in a plantation, little trees all packed in together.
That wasn’t so good. It was man-made. It was dark, they pack those trees so close together. We carried on.
It was the woods, I suppose. It was all dead – dead little trees all packed in neat little rows, like a tree factory. Nothing growing underneath and nothing in between as if these baby trees were poisoning the ground.
Actually, I was all right. I’d had a little dab out of my packet earlier – you know, just wetted the end of my finger and stuck it in, not enough to get a hit. Just enough to keep the heebie jeebies away. I didn’t even notice the others, but I was thinking maybe I hadn’t done enough and I ought to slip off and do a bit more when Lily suddenly said,
‘Fuck this. Fuck this!’
We all jumped. Right out there in the middle of nowhere. She was standing there with her foot up to the ankle in this rut full of water. She was livid. She was only wearing these black felt shoes she wears all the time, not really what you go for a country walk in. I had a look round and I could see everyone was looking shifty and jaded and I thought, O-oh.
Lily turned round and stomped back up the hill towards the cottage. We’d been planning this really long walk over the hills and dales to get the toxins out of our systems. I could have carried on a bit, but you could see at a glance that the others had had it.
We didn’t talk much on the way back, but I did have a chat with Sally. She didn’t seem too bad either and I had an idea maybe she’d had a dab an’ all. I was going to ask her, but it was a bit risky. About halfway home Gemma suddenly turned round and she said, ‘God, I didn’t expect to feel this bad, this is awful…’
Me and Sals just laughed. It was funny – what did she expect? None of them was expecting it. Me, like I say, I’d taken precautions. But when Lils looked at me I stopped laughing because, shit, she really did look awful. Clammy. She’d been doing a lot lately. Well, let’s be honest, we all have. I’d have given her a dab as well, but they’d all been making such a big thing about getting right off it once and for all and I didn’t want to make it worse for her. You know, you build yourself up to do something and then you fail – it doesn’t help, does it? Besides, there was the baby. That was why we were all there, right? Not just for Lily. For the baby. And it was my baby too.
‘It’ll be easier tomorrow,’ I said. Lils gave me this dirty look, and I thought, I wonder if she knows?
*
We got back. We built a big fire to try and make it cosy and