Owen on the hill:
Waterproof anorak (Trespass)
Waterproof trousers (same)
Hiking boots (Timberland)
Torch (Tiso’s)
Swiss Army knife (same)
Total est. cost: £120
‘See you, Mum.’
Owen held the torch and walked beside his mum; the very faint beam of light not providing a great deal in the way of guidance. With Ed’s help, Svetlana soldiered on under the weight of Morven. Annie had offered to stay in position, but Svetlana had insisted.
‘How far is it to the car park?’ Annie decided to ask.
‘Roughly two miles,’ Ed said. ‘Maybe less,’ he added quickly when this news produced a demoralised sigh from Annie.
‘We only managed two miles! With the DIY Hermes shoes and everything!’ Annie was horrified. ‘Just two miles!’ she repeated.
‘By the time we get back, you’ll have walked ten whole miles though,’ Ed told her proudly.
Before Annie could even remind herself about how much money this would raise, she felt the ground under her boots turn crunchy.
‘Loose gravel,’ she warned the others; she didn’t want Svetlana in her homemade moccasins to land in any trouble.
All of a sudden, Annie pitched violently to the side. She grabbed at the air with her hands and let out a cry which seemed to disappear into a gurgle.
In the darkness, she could make no sense of what was happening, but the rushing in the pit of her stomach let her know she was falling.
Before she could even think about where she might be falling – or why? How far? Or form any sort of question at all – she landed, hard.
In a crumpled heap, in disorientating darkness, at first all she could feel was pain: sharp, piercing pain travelling up through her stomach and into her lungs; low, grumbling pain in her knees, her elbows, her hands and a great burning pain right across both buttocks.
For several stunned moments, Annie didn’t move at all. She didn’t dare to. She waited, trying to gather her thoughts and wondering how the pains were going to develop.
Nothing seemed to be getting worse. Things were bad… but nothing seemed to be deteriorating, which was surely good.
Annie had landed on her bum. That’s why it was so sore. Her increasingly padded derrière had probably saved her from a really bad injury.
She sat up a little, breathed in carefully and realised that the pain in her stomach had a lot to do with being winded and with the video camera which was in her lap.
With growing waves of relief, she wiggled her fingers and her toes, then moved her knees, ankles and elbows. Nothing seemed to be broken. There must be huge grazes on her burning elbows and hands and her bum was going to be black and blue. But nothing was broken.
Now she just had to worry about the next thing: where the bloody hell was she? And how the bloody hell was she supposed to get out?
It was too dark to make sense of her surroundings. Looking up, all she could work out was that it was slightly lighter above her.
Taking a deep breath, she shouted out: ‘Heeeeel looooooo. I’m here. Heeeeellooooooooo!’
For a long, worrying moment, Annie heard nothing in reply. Then finally, from up above came the shout.
‘Annie!’
‘Ed!’ she shouted back.
She looked up and thought she could make out the outline of a head. Then came the beam of light from the torch.
‘Are you OK?’ he called down. ‘Are you hurt?’
She could hear the anxiety in his voice.
‘I don’t think so, I landed on my big bum,’ she called up towards him.
‘Why on earth did you…?’ he began but seemed to think better of the question.
‘Where am I?’ she shouted back.
‘I think you’re in a stream bed. Are you wet?’
Now, come to think of it, yes, she was.
‘Are you safe? You can’t fall any further?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she replied.
She looked up and couldn’t see the outline of Ed’s head or the torchlight any more.
Then, several moments later, they were back in place: ‘Here’s the plan,’ Ed called down. ‘We’ll take Morven down and get help. Morven has to go to hospital and… I’ll need help to get you out.’
Annie considered this. It was what Ed had to do. Get Morven down and then come back for her. It would take at least an hour… maybe more. She would have to sit in a stream on her bruised bottom in the pitch dark for an hour or more.
She wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect.
‘Annie?’ Ed called down, wondering if she’d heard him.
‘Could I have the torch?’ she asked, sounding embarrassingly wimpy.
‘Annie, I’m sorry but we need the torch.’
‘Could Owen stay and talk to me?’ was her next request.
‘We need Owen to carry the torch, and I don’t want him to fall in too,’ was the perfectly sensible reply. ‘You’ll be OK. I’ll see you very, very soon.’
‘See you, Mum,’ Owen called out a little too cheerfully. He was obviously enjoying every moment of this adventure.
‘I love you,’ she shouted back.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Ed promised.
And with that, they were off.
* * *
For some time, Annie sat in the pitch-black listening hard as the little group went away from her.
After a while, she couldn’t hear their voices any more. Then all sorts of thoughts came to her in the lonely darkness. Finally, she remembered the video camera in her lap. Feeling her way around the buttons, she switched it on. The lights came on and, although she couldn’t see the digital display, she hoped this meant that she’d broken the camera’s fall and everything was working fine.
She pointed it at her face. ‘Hello, it’s me, Annie. I just want you to know that I’ve fallen not very badly, slightly off the mountain, and because I was helping someone injured down, I was wearing hiking boots at the time. So there! If you hill-walk in heels, bad things can happen. If you hill-walk in hiking boots, bad things can happen. Best stick to the pavement if you ask me.’
She paused and then started up on a different tack.
‘I’ve fallen down into who knows what, who knows where, just as the man I love asked me to marry him… again. This time, I should definitely have said yes. This time, I think he got me when I was almost ready.
‘Now, I am definitely ready to say yes, but I’m stuck down at the bottom of some horrible drop, sitting on my big, sore, wet behind in a stream, waiting for them to come back and rescue me.
‘Maybe this was Tamsin’s plan all along,’ Annie added with some bitterness. ‘She’s my boss, by the way. Maybe she sent me up the mountain in my heels, hoping I’d fall off somewhere, and she’s probably going to leave me here at the end of the series. Maybe, if enough of you vote for me, they’ll come and get me out; if no one cares… then I’ll probably be left here, and you’ll get Myleene Klass instead.’