FORTY-TWO

Silty light seeped through his half-closed eyelids and worsened the pain. Relentless in its encasement of his entire skull the agony made him feel sick, and bewildered, and unsure of where he was. His head and face and neck were wet and cold, dripping.

The shape of his head felt too big, ungainly and misshapen. Something wet hung over one eye and restricted the light.

A rucksack had been slipped like a pillow beneath his head. The angle hurt his neck. He raised himself to one elbow and squinted. Empty of anything but gas, his stomach lurched.

The awning of the tent flapped like a sail in a swift wind. He could see it through one squinting eye. Two sleeping bags covered his body. The little stove was hissing a blue flame under the steel pan not far from his feet. He reached up and gingerly touched the part of his forehead where the pain started its thunder, before it rolled backwards. Something soft and loose was arranged about his head, squashing his ears flat, and tied tighter at the back. He swallowed at a dry and swollen throat. Water. He was desperate for it. He coughed. ‘Dom.’

He heard the sound of rocks grinding together under someone’s weight. The clack of a stick followed, accompanied by a gasp of exertion. He turned towards the sound, then closed his eyes as the pain threw itself against one side of his head and nearly made him throw up. Skull fracture. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Suddenly dizzy, he slipped back down to his former position, resting against the rucksack.

‘Mate. Thank fuck. You’re awake. Wasn’t sure if you were in a coma,’ Dom said, close enough for Luke to smell his harsh breath and the pungent oily smell of his dirty clothes.

‘Any water left?’

‘Last of it is in the pan. I used most of it on your head. I had to wash it before I put the bandage on. Coffee and chocolate for breakfast.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Eleven.’

‘No.’

‘You’ve been out cold. It’s made a mess of your face. You need stitches.’

‘Is it bad?’ he muttered, and felt stupid. How would Dom know?

‘Good news is it didn’t come back after you hit it. What did you do, get it with a knife? Jesus, that sound. You hurt it. You must have hurt it.’

Luke squinted through the one eye it was easiest to open. ‘Threw a rock.’

‘Rock?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Shot.’

Luke tried to smile, but that made him nauseous too. ‘How bad is it? My head. Don’t B.S. me.’

Dom paused and looked at his boots, then winced as he returned his gaze to Luke. ‘I’ve never seen so much blood. But that can be misleading. Doesn’t mean it’s serious or anything. There’s more blood in the head than anywhere else in the body. I think. Which is why head injuries look worse.’

‘Shit.’ Head injury – the phrase made him tingle, then wash cold all over. It could be really bad: a fractured skull, or a concussion, which would explain the nausea. Maybe something worse; a blood clot, or a head trauma that required immediate surgery to prevent brain damage. Fluid had to be drained. Now.

Panic started to lurch through him again, to join the squeezing pain that pushed reddish flashes into his vision. He took a deep breath and shuddered down to his toes.

‘You are covered in it, mate. I didn’t know it was so bad until the sun came up. I nearly heaved. But we got through it. We made it to morning. Can you believe it?’

‘Painkillers. Any of those Nurofen left?’

‘Sorry. My knee’s been a bit greedy on that front.’

‘I don’t think I can even stand up.’

Dom stayed silent. ‘Then we’re fucked,’ he eventually said in a voice suddenly empty of any warmth or edge or inquiry. His words were flat and tired; the sound of despair, the voice of yesterday. Dom shuffled back to the stove and looked down at the water in silence. Two tin mugs were lined up beside it, next to the tub of coffee granules. The mugs were stained black inside.

‘We need water. Badly. I got to drink something. Then look at my head. I have a shaving mirror.’

‘Take it easy.’

‘Maybe sterilize the wound with some of that boiled water.’

‘Shush. Just—’

‘Antiseptic. There was some in the medical kit.’

‘All gone. Phil’s blisters.’

‘Jesus.’ His face screwed up. He thought he might cry.

‘Just take it easy. Drink this coffee. Get your head straight. It’s just a flesh wound. A bump. Looks worse than it is.’

Was Dom only trying to make him feel better, or did what he say make sense? He had no idea, but it reassured him because he had nothing else to believe in but unexamined statements.

Dom began pouring boiling water into a mug. ‘Let’s just drink this. Then we can think about what the hell we’re going to do next.’

It took them half an hour to stumble down the south side of the hill. At the bottom, they paused to get their breath and to wait for their respective agonies to subside enough to raise their chins and look back up at the side of the green and silver tent, rippling in the sudden cool gusts that washed over the hillock.

Except for two sleeping bags, the knives and the torches, they had abandoned everything else they had carried this far. Three rucksacks, an assortment of soiled clothes, an empty first-aid kit, and the empty gas canister and stove that had made them a final mug of bitter coffee, was all still in place up on the rocky summit. On the lonely and dreary place where they were supposed to have met their end, remained the final clues of what befell their hiking trip. Evidence of four friends who took a short cut.

They stood on a thin layer of soil covering the rocks at the foot of the hill and both turned and looked at the dark fir trees, solemn in the soft light, awaiting them. Further inside the dark cool forest, a wall of bracken erupted around the last few willows, before the taller spruce and firs resumed their blanket dominance where the soil was deeper.

As they peered into the woods and prepared to move south west, it was the sight of the uneven ground below them, tumbling up and down through the sentinels of trees, tilting from the sudden rocky crests made slippery with moss, that most disheartened Luke before they even began. Back in there for another day’s tortuous scrabbling and crying out with pain at every step and every motion that involved the carriage of a wound. And they would be moving slower today than ever before. Luke closed his eyes and readied himself. He was finished before he’d even begun, and knew it.

Dom’s messy bandage had fallen off his head at the first prompt. But at least it had absorbed most of the bleeding, a seeping that continued for the hours he was unconscious. The gash ran from his left eyebrow, up his forehead and into his hair. It was pink and open like a sideways mouth. Using his thin shaving mirror, he thought he had seen a glimmer of bone inside it. The gash was at least five inches long and desperately required stitches.

With the last absorbent pad from the first-aid kit, he had dabbed at the wound with the last dregs of hot water from the pan, trying not to cry out too loudly at every contact. Dom could not even look at him while he attended to his torn flesh. He’d then placed the gauze pad under the wrappings of the soiled bandage and gently retied it around the crown of his head. Dom had fixed the safety pin in place.

The most horrifying thing to Luke had been the sight of his own blood-stained face, barely recognizable when it peered back from the tiny shaving mirror. The water Dom had poured over his head had not washed his face clean; much of the streaky dried blood remained caked on. One side of his face was bruised purple, and further blackened with the grime already coating his skin right down to his throat. His left ear was plugged with dried blood and it was like having that side of his head submerged in a bath. If he ever stumbled out of here, he would be scarred for life. His bloodied face and the thought of a cruel white scar made him more miserable and sorry for himself than anything else.

And now they each held a crutch. Dom had found Luke his own wet branch, so they could both support their wincing, shuffling, wounded bodies with dead limbs from ancient trees.

As they walked, Luke could not talk to Dom. In silence, he would point a hand at gaps in the forest floor, where he thought it best for them to proceed through, in an approximation of the right outward trajectory. Inside his waterproof, he kept the compass close to his heart. More often than was necessary he would withdraw it and make sure they were close to the coordinates he’d mapped from up in the tree.

Talking to each other would waste what little strength they had left. Meeting each other’s eyes could vanquish whatever kept the other one going so slowly, and so carefully away from the hill. They stayed close together, but somehow avoided each other at the same time.

Luke kept the knife constantly in one hand, but had so little balance and so much pain throbbing against the walls of his skull, he had no fight left in him. If they were attacked, they were dead.

They just hobbled forward, unthinking and unaware of anything but the next footfall; both of them determined to walk in the direction that would take them out of the trees and on to the plain and towards the river below; or to just keep moving until that time when their pursuer decided to take one of them, and then the other.

When they found Phil hanging from a Scots pine, they didn’t linger. His butchery was worse than the condition of Hutch’s remains; was more akin to what had befallen the animal they all found together, so long ago.

Dom kept sniffing, mumbling to himself; Luke kept his eyes down. Just once he’d looked up at his friend, so wet and spread about the trees, but he would not look again after he’d seen Phil’s face. They’d even held each other’s eye for a moment.

Like frightened children, Luke and Dom briefly held each other, arms around necks; each leaning his weight into the other as they staggered under their dead friend’s cold pale feet, away from him and deeper into the forest.