Treetop Buzz was another Sherwood Forest attraction that went bust when bandits frightened off the tourists.
Fraying rope bridges and zip lines had been engulfed by moss, vines and bird poop. At ground level, the tin-roofed sheds where people changed into safety gear and bought overpriced souvenir photos had become a base camp for Sherwood Women’s Union, or SWU.
Their food was veggie and there were Pride flags and feminist slogans draped about the big room they used as a lounge, but the number of weapons and stacks of boxed smartphones and polythene-wrapped cashmere sweaters gave Little John the feeling that politics took second place to stealing.
The women had tied his wrists, gagged his mouth and kept a brutal pace as they’d marched him deep into the forest. When they arrived at Treetop Buzz the gag came off, on condition he kept silent. They stripped Little John down to his tartan boxers, shoved him in a back room and used orange parachute cord to tie his wrists around a padded steel beam.
It was a room designed for kids’ parties, with low tables, a soft-play area and a Whack-a-Mole machine. Little John’s bindings had enough slack to raise a spoon to his mouth or unzip his fly, and he could stand, or slide down the post and sit. But neither position was comfortable and the tall woman – who the others called T – snorted and told him to suck it up when she came to empty his pee bucket.
The door of Little John’s room was propped open, so his captors could keep an eye on him. While he fretted about what would happen next, imagined his dad in a prison cell and wondered if Robin was alive, the women spent the evening on recliner chairs in the next room, popping endless cans of beer and singing along to the ancient musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, with a fancy soundbar and a giant projector screen.
John spent the night on a filthy tiled floor with his arms twisted awkwardly. He was anxious and only managed naps, the last one ending sharply when a soccer ball crashed against the outside of the wall behind his head.
Morning sun cooked the shack’s metal roof and left Little John with a sense of breathless panic. Contrasting with the freedom of the kids’ kickabout outside.
A seventeen-year-old called Agnes arrived in a Nottingham Penguins ice-hockey shirt. She gave Little John a pitying smile when she brought in a plastic bowl containing muesli soaked in milk that tasted slightly off. She seemed more cheerful than T, so he risked repeating his complaint and she flung over a couple of vinyl-covered cushions from the soft-play area.
The beam John was tied to was padded to protect kids, but the foam stopped just above his eyeline. Up near the ceiling the metal had rusted from a small leak in the roof.
After making sure there was nobody in the lounge, John used his full height and tiptoes, stretched the cord tight between his wrists and scraped it back and forth over rough, corroded metal.
The result was satisfying. Just ten seconds’ rubbing frayed part of the cord, and he guessed a few uninterrupted minutes would be enough to cut through. But there were people checking in all the time and they’d tie him in a less mobile position if they caught him.
If Little John was going to try to escape, he needed quiet time to grind through the cord, and a plan for when he broke free.