Enthusiasts EnthusiastsI fell asleep easily then woke with a start at two. I had a sudden premonition she would come into my room and kill me. She would have spare keys – of course – to both my doors. There was a bolt on the outside one, which I drew. I left the keys in both locks, half turned so you couldn’t push a key in from the other side. And I pushed the big armchair in front of the door to the hall. Blocking doors and listening for footsteps in the middle of the night was like having Fear, but Fear is about the unknown. Whereas I was simply defending myself against her. I knew who she was and what she looked like, her skinny arms and legs, her wrinkled hands, her glittering knowing eyes. A fight would be easy as long as I was prepared; all I had to guard against was her creeping up on me. (And part of me knew she wouldn’t attack me herself, that would be far too simple – she would have a way of making something else happen, something that made it seem my fault, like I’d accidentally walk off a cliff or get run over by the island tractor.) But still it felt purposeful to barricade myself in my room. When I was done I fell asleep again, I didn’t lie awake listening for anything.
In the morning it was raining hard. I lay in bed in the gloom for a long time listening to it pelting against the window, listening out for her. I didn’t hear the stairs creak. Eventually I got up and ran a bath, which gave me the excuse to prowl up and down the hall a few times. She wasn’t up. It was cold and dark as if the night had forgotten to end, but it was nine o’ clock in the morning. Why wasn’t she up? Was it possible – already – that she’d woken in the night feeling ill, fumbled her way downstairs to the kitchen, picked up her medicine bottle and poured it down her throat? I went to the kitchen door and listened. Nothing.
I had to be patient until Calum came. It would be too easy for her to be dead already. Far too easy. I locked myself in the bathroom.
It’s an old-fashioned white enamelled bath, very deep and stained yellow where the taps drip. Imagine always bathing in the same bath. Imagine growing up and knowing the shape of one bath. The wooden towel rail a bit wobbly on its feet, painted dark green; the washstand with the old-fashioned bowl and jug, the toothbrush mug made of that cloudy brittle early plastic. The big white towel, scratchy with washing and drying on the line, fraying at one end where it’s come unhemmed. A curly PM embroidered in the corner in pink. Imagine wearing things out. Or having things from new. Imagine the life span of a possession like a towel. Would she have had them as a set for her wedding? Thick initialled white bath towels? All the bottles and jars and tubes on the shelf were hers or Calum’s, they weren’t the leftovers of people who’d moved out last month and already been lost track of. No one else would use her perfume (I used it), she could leave the pretty bottle of bubble bath on display (a Christmas present from Calum?). Imagine cleaning a bathroom and saying to yourself, ‘My bathroom looks nice and sparkling.’
After my bath I lit a fire. The house felt deserted. It began to seem possible that she really might be dead. I paced around my room waiting for Calum to come for his dinner. There was nothing I could do until he found her. The minutes crawled.
At twelve he came in and went to the kitchen; after a while he plodded upstairs. And then I heard her voice – she was alive. A drone which very quickly got louder until she was screaming at him. His replies were low and rumbly. I put my ear to the wall, to the pipe – opened the door and stuck my head out – the words were still indistinct. Had she discovered the hemlock? Was she blaming him for it? There was a long low outburst from Calum and then a hearty slam. I heard him stomping down the stairs. I pulled open my door and waved him in.
‘What’s going on?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s cross.’
Der, yes. ‘What about?’
But he’d spotted my earrings on the mantelpiece and was picking them up and peering and turning them over to inspect. He dropped one and spent a while feeling around in the fireplace for it.
‘Calum.’
‘She just gets cross.’
‘Has she taken anything – anything she shouldn’t?’
He looked at me strangely.
‘What’s wrong with her, for god’s sake?’
He glanced at the internal door as if he thought she’d catch us talking. ‘Cancer.’ I wasn’t expecting him to say that. He waited a few seconds then he went on, ‘And she’s always had – sh-she–’
‘Yes?’
He glanced at the door again. ‘Nothing.’
‘She’s in bed.’
‘We have to g-go out.’
‘It’s pissing down.’
He didn’t reply, just moved back towards the doorway.
‘I don’t want to go out.’
‘Can’t talk here.’ He thought it was possible to escape her influence by putting distance between himself and her. I was tempted to tell him how far away I’d spent my life, and how her claw marks were all over it. I put on my jacket and went after him but he stopped as I was locking the door.
‘Mac?’
‘This is all I’ve got.’
‘I’ve got an-nother in the cottage.’ He led the way; at the corner of the garden something made me look back. There was a movement at the upstairs window. She was watching us from her bedroom. Watching to see where we went.
I followed Calum. His hair was tangled with a flat patch at the back where he’d slept, like a three-year-old. ‘The rain’s stopping, look.’
‘What’s she cross about?’
‘Sh-she didn’t like it when I moved out.’
‘So?’
‘I – I – it was my fault. I didn’t tell her.’ I followed him into his cottage. It was full. Food, clothes, piles of junk from the sea, sacks of potatoes and onions, mud, dirty dishes, old rags; on the table a heap of rocks like the ones on the shelf over my bed, and a packet of fish-hooks and a load of line and a trowel and a scattering of dirty mugs. He knew exactly where the mac was: he picked a cardboard box full of old fertiliser bags off a chair in the corner, rooted under a couple of blanket-type things that were over the chair, and pulled it out from underneath. It was green and blue with a STORM label, it was in good nick.
‘I found it last s-summer. Too short. You have it.’ There was a huge bucketful of ashes one side of the fire and a pile of driftwood the other. Not chopped into nice manageable logs like at his mother’s house, but in big lumps that you’d have to wrestle into the fireplace. A bundle of scrumpled up bloody newspaper resting on the cold ashes in the grate. He saw me looking at that and grinned.
‘F-five fish this morning.’ Next to the chair by the fire was an upturned tea chest and on it, dirty cup plate knife fork, half a loaf of bread and a tub of Flora, a jar with knives and metal things in it, to do with fishing I assumed. There was an open tin of metal polish and a heap of that pink wadding that comes in it, a saucer full of buttons, a dirty comb, a little pile of sea-smoothed pebbles and shells, matches, two lighters, an apple core and a seed catalogue.
He was ready to go, he went to the door. I had this sudden wave of complete nostalgia for my room, my first proper room, the room I made a tip of when I was seventeen. I remembered the smell of it and the way it looked so dense and crammed and layered with my stuff like it was my nest my outer coating. I’ve never done that to a room since. Since that cow cleared it up. I’ve never seen a room like it since; sure, I’ve lived in all sorts of filthy untidy dumps but they were like that through vandalism or wanting to fuck over someone’s property or the room not belonging to anyone (sitting rooms in shared houses, filthy soulless tips); not through one person living in them night and day and gradually building up layers of nice or useful things all around them precisely they know where and no one else comes in or makes you change it and you can lay your finger on the cigarette lighter or the pen or the knife and you are as at home in it as in your own skin your own head your own round furnished world.
‘I like your room.’
He glanced around. ‘She doesn’t come here. She – she used to make me tidy up.’
I could imagine. Everything stuffed in drawers. The vacuum cleaner booming in the chilly hall outside my door. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I’ll show you where the b-boat came in to take them away.’
‘Them?’
‘The crofters. To clear the land for sheep and deer.’
I wasn’t there for a history lesson. Any direction would do. We set off northwards then turned right along an unsurfaced track that rose and skirted the bottom of the mountain; its top was hidden in cloud.
‘I’ll take you up there when it c-clears.’
The path was already steep enough and rough enough for me. I was having trouble keeping pace with him. ‘You were saying. You didn’t tell her when you moved out?’
‘I knew she’d try to stop me and I just – I just–’
‘What did she say?’
‘She tried to kill herself.’
I stopped and he stopped and looked at me with his good eye. We sat on a broken-down stone wall, and I rolled us cigs. The rain had petered out but it was windy. ‘Why?’
‘Sh-she didn’t want me to move out.’
I was impressed by his heartlessness. But it didn’t make sense. Why would she try to kill herself? Of course, if she had succeeded she would have foiled my plan, but it seemed an extreme length to go to just to spite me. It would have been quite amusing, I suppose, imagining me putting time and effort into chasing her to the island, only to find she’d topped herself. She could have had a good laugh about that. If she hadn’t been dead. But she wasn’t dead. Which meant she probably never intended to be.
‘What happened?’
‘She thought I was just getting rid of the – the stuff she said was junk. But I cleared my room. She started crying and I j-just – I left.’ The lower edge of the cloud was rising slightly around the mountain, just clearing the top of a tree, revealing a jutting-out rock, revealing a higher band of solid stuff behind the mist. ‘I hadn’t got any sheets so I went back after tea. I thought she’ll be watching the news and she won’t know if I go in. Take the sheets off my bed.’
‘You found her?’
‘A-all the doors were open. It was quiet, no TV. I looked in the sitting room and she was–’
‘What had she taken?’
‘Something she made. One of her brown bottles. They had to take it to the chemist to test.’
‘She must have known you’d come back.’ What was wrong with waiting till night and poisoning herself at bedtime, if she was interested in dying? What was wrong with assuming poison might take a few hours to work? She wanted to be found alive, to make him feel like shit.
‘What did you do?’
‘Phoned the d-doctor. The helicopter took sixteen minutes.’
‘So they took her to hospital and pumped her out and sent her home again.’ We sat in silence staring at the mist inching up the mountain like a magician very very slowly pulling a cloth off a something he has magicked out of emptiness. A girl in the secure unit killed herself when they locked her in solitary. She tried to hang herself from the window bar with her knickers, she looped them through one leg to attach them to the bar then stuck her head through the other leg hole, but they ripped they wouldn’t hold her weight. So then when someone forgot to collect her plate after supper she smashed it and rubbed her wrists with the broken pottery. She wedged a shard between her feet and sawed away until she got through to the artery. She was more or less dead when they found her in the morning. They couldn’t resuscitate her. She meant to kill herself. What the old witch did was designed to bring Calum round, not to kill herself. ‘A cry for help.’
‘Now she has these tablets – anti-d-depressants. But she makes her own medicine, she says it’s better–’
‘Is she going to die?’
He looked at me gormlessly.
‘The cancer. Will it kill her?’
Calum’s good eye swivelled towards me then away. He set off along the path again. Was it unimaginable to him? We followed a track through a plantation of fir trees, they were huge and dark, their boughs flailing in the wind and showering us with drips. A baby dumped up there wouldn’t have stood a chance. You could see down the straight lines between them past trunk after trunk spinning away to darkness. The field in the light at the end of the track was luridly green, when we came out into it it seemed unreal.
‘Twenty-three families lived here,’ said Calum. It was empty, full of lumps and hummocks sloping down towards the sea and facing the steep blank hills of the mainland. He squatted down and began to probe with his fingers in the long wet grass.
‘Right.’
He examined a few stones and shards and slipped a couple of them into his rucksack. ‘The grass grows different, over the ruins.’
It was empty, emptier than empty. I didn’t much care about his twenty-three families but I was beginning to be impressed by his enthusiasm. People with enthusiasms are glamorous. How do they get them?
I mean, I can see the world is a fascinating place full of all sorts of things and I could be obsessive about say Indian miniatures or jazz. But I’m not. It’s a lack (another). Either they’re groupy enthusiasts and they belong to a gaggle of birdwatchers/bikers/born again Christians – or they’re lone enthusiasts like Calum. The lone ones are best because they’re pure, they’re not doing it to be one of the gang, they’re doing it out of genuine insanity. Genuine love for seventeenth-century snuffboxes. I would like to be passionate about something, have a hobby, an obsession: cake decorating, tap dancing, topiary. But I don’t. Which makes us Rejects excellent fodder for all the groupy enthusiasts. We’ll join things because we want to belong. We’ll fake enthusiasm, we’ll swear black is white to be allowed in to some charmed circle. From my peer group at the Underwood home Cathy G. joined the scientologists when she was seventeen and Billy Josephs struck up with a bunch of evangelicals who after a couple of months took him to live in their retreat in north Virginia. He was never seen again. I haven’t fallen into the religious slime (despite the best efforts of the Hare Krishnas who pursue me for miles down the street – like dogs’ll follow a bitch on heat, they know if you’re susceptible) but I did join a kind of farm. It never had a name we could agree on until in the last weeks Peter began calling it Stalingrad and that stuck because they needed it to, it wasn’t true but they needed it to be. Stupid to join something. Yeah. Idealistic people working together and sharing the proceeds and not exploiting each other or the land. In your dreams.
Gerald was the only one who wasn’t a nutter or inadequate; in fact, he was probably the only real enthusiast. Certainly if it hadn’t been for his enthusiasm we wouldn’t have reached that point, of being on a real farm. There was a lot of money tied up in it and most of that must have been Gerald’s because I didn’t put any in and I can’t imagine many of the others did. And it wasn’t just the money. At weekly meeting Gerald would have the ideas and make the suggestions, and the rest of us would try to look intelligent and kick them around for a while and say OK. Then Gerald would implement them.
Needless to say it didn’t work. Because of people like me? I fancied Gerald. I knew it wouldn’t happen because he was too classy for me, also he cared more about making the farm work and he didn’t want people to screw everything up with personal relationships, he wanted us to ‘make the big picture work to begin with’. Which was saintly but still people like to have an intrigue and fuck from time to time and he seemed to rather frown on all that which made it thrive the more. It was great for the summer, there were loads of people around, we grew veg and hay and we mowed the hay and dried it and we kept goats and milked them and made cheese and we kept hens and in the autumn we harvested the apples. A week of picking and packing and lugging the crates to the road, rich with them, laughing, getting drunk on our own achievement.
Then in the autumn people started to drift back to other places, other work, and it got smaller and tighter and grimmer and the jobs Gerald was putting up on the week’s list were things like Clean out and disinfect hen houses, creosote exteriors and repair fencing and replace rotten posts in field bordering main road and chop firewood. And they’d still be there on the list the next week. I always did stuff, I didn’t not do stuff, but I didn’t choose things like that because it was too cold and would have taken all day. He started making us take jobs then, dividing them up between us but there were rows. ‘The thing’s got to work because people want to make it work’ was the main bone of contention. And Gerald became the taskmaster. Then the guilt-Meister. We’d sit in the kitchen and he’d be striding off across the yard with a coil of barbed wire over his shoulder and the clippers. He wouldn’t be in till after evening meal and he’d eat on his own and fall asleep at table.
By New Year it was feeling bad. I knew I’d leave quite soon. People living together and respecting each other and respecting the land and sharing the proceeds was coming down to: you can’t sit near the fire tonight unless you’ve chopped some wood, and only people who can pay in extra for wine can have it because the apple money’s all spent now and there’s a red electric bill. We were supposed to have pooled all our resources. Why were some people still able to pay for wine?
And then Gerald said we all had to come out and help prune the orchard. Now, in January, we couldn’t leave it till spring. Everyone had to come and help because each tree took about an hour and there was no way one person could cover them all – also while they were dormant they needed spraying for aphids. And Liz said the cold set off her asthma so she’d cook for the rest of us and Rich said he’d promised his agent he’d write four more songs before Easter and he was sorry but that had to come first and Geri said she was scared of heights and couldn’t go up a ladder and did Gerald want her to break her neck and Si said he was fucked if he was working outside all day in this weather and Peter said fine he’d do it but then he never got up till three in the afternoon and Sandy and Karen said they had to go visit her mum because her angina was bad and they’d promised to go before Christmas. And Gillie said who the hell was going to look after the kids or must two- and three-year-olds go and prune trees in sub-zero temperatures too? And I didn’t say anything (why the fuck should I?) and in the morning Gerald came into my room begging.
‘Please Nikki, come and help me – you know how good the apples were this year, you know how much we need that crop and that cash – please’ and because he guilted me I went (although I know he tried the same thing with Sandy and Sandy told him to fuck off this life was meant to be about contributing what you could not being hassled night and day) and the two of us spent a bitter freezing day holding the ladder for each other in a tearing gale and snipping away at apple twigs and we did a row and a half, which left about 400 still to do. And on the way back to the house (I was so cold when I dropped the secateurs my fingers wouldn’t bend to pick them up again) I said ‘Those bastards’d better help us tomorrow or I’ll kill them.’
Gerald said, ‘I’ve worked it out. It’s my fault – it’s because I assume responsibility. We have to leave the apples and let the crop fail. Then everyone’ll realise next winter that pruning is important. They’ve got to want to make it work.’
And I said (I was really angry. I was frozen to the marrow) ‘How can you be so fucking stupid? They won’t still be here next January if the apples fail – they’ll all fuck off and not give it a second thought’ and he didn’t reply and I looked at him and there were tears running down his face.
When I woke up next morning I saw him through my window walking across to the orchard carrying the ladder all on his own in the driving rain. And I got up and packed my rucksack and left. It wasn’t ever my bloody enthusiasm so why should I have to feel guilty about it failing? I would have pruned the apples. I would have pruned the apples all day and night if it’d been just for Gerald and me. But I was fucked if I was pruning them so that those idle wankers could get the benefit next autumn.
Gerald went to India after that. When the farm was repossessed. That’s what happens to political enthusiasts. They attract people like me and we shit on them. It’s better to be like Calum. With an enthusiasm that’s just your own. His mother could complain about his junk but she couldn’t destroy his obsession. The treasure and the stories they were real to him and the reality didn’t depend on anyone else’s contribution.
Calum paced about over and round the hummocks like an animal, making sure it was still his territory. When he was ready he came back to me and spread his mac on a mound. It wasn’t raining at all anymore but it was damp, low skied and dingy. I was worried she might die before I could kill her. I perched myself beside him. ‘When does she go to hospital?’
His good eye moved from my face down to my neck and he stretched out his hand.
‘What?’ It was unnerving the way he did that.
‘Neck-lace?’ I’d forgotten I was wearing it – cheap Indian beads. I undid it and let the string slither into a green coil on his grubby palm. He held it close to his eyes for inspection.
‘Calum. Does she go for treatment often?’
‘She’s making herself better. She knows how to.’ He passed me back my necklace.
Sure. The first herbal cure for cancer. It was good she was ill I was glad she was suffering but I had to get in there before nature wiped her out. I couldn’t wait for her to get around to a sip of hemlock. OK. I’d definitely do it that night; whether she knew about it or not. Even if she was awake and trotting round the house I was still stronger than her. That first night I should have stabbed her going up the stairs – it was just the thought that she knew that fazed me.
Calum wanted to talk about the ruins. ‘This was the village. Twenty-three houses here, you see?’
‘I see.’
‘They grew all their food, oats and barley and greens my dad said. And the men went fishing and they kept sheep that were more like little goats. Th-the women had to spin and weave the wool, then the men took it to the mainland to sell.’
Just what I needed now, a history lesson.
‘You know they cleared them off?’ he said.
‘Go on. Why?’
‘The landlord wanted all the land for grazing. He wanted as many sheep as he c-could get – not little sheep but those b-big ones, the ones as big as cows that can’t get up when they fall over. They don’t come from here.’
‘Why?’
‘More profit.’
I let him carry on. But I wanted to interrupt all the way through. I like stories but not those bleeding heart ones you’ve heard a thousand times before. Not the ones where things simply go from bad to worse. What’s the point of a story like that? Oh the wicked landowner and oh the poor peasant. Why isn’t there a story about the poor oppressed landowner who’s struggling to do his best for his tenants? Trying to get them to modernise and stop all this stupid spinning and weaving lark because the cloth they weave is lumpy itchy shit and no one wants to buy it. He wants them to breed up some good hefty sheep with a bit of meat on them to sell as mutton at the market. And the peasants haven’t got the wit to do anything different than their parents and grandparents ever did. If the land can’t be made more profitable the landlord can’t afford to keep it because his income from it’s still only the same as what his grandfather was getting but he’s just had to pay his grandfather’s death duties. He’s had to sell half his land and the roof of his house (alright, mansion) is leaking and last year’s harvest was crap and he simply can’t afford to keep the island if it won’t yield a bit more. The peasants are a dozy bunch and they can’t be doing with these big sheep or with not having the wife busy over her loom so they carry on as usual and the extra dosh the landlord’s invested in fifty big sheep for them to fatten is wasted because they don’t fence off the cliffs and don’t bring the big sheep under shelter in the gales and object to giving them extra feed in winter.
‘It’s worth it,’ pleads the landowner. ‘If you give them hay over the winter they’ll fetch an extra florin each at the spring markets.’
But that’s too hard for the dim old peasants. So the landowner makes a year’s spectacular loss on the island and his roof falls in. He has to sell the island and it’s bought by evil landlord X. Who knows the profitable thing to do is to clear off the fucking useless peasants and put in four competent shepherds to look after an island full of big sheep.
There. What’s wrong with that? Whose fault was that?
Calum was intent on the pathos of his tale. Roof beams. These innocent crofters owned little or nothing. Not the land they farmed nor the earth their homes stood on nor even the stones and roofs of their own houses. However, they did own the roof beams.
How? Why?
Calum didn’t know – but he knew it was tradition that the crofters had no rights to fell trees on the island (being as every scrap of it was the landowner’s). They (or their parents, or their parents’ parents, or some old and scabby Viking thirty generations back) imported, stole or bought the roof beam, without which the building of a croft was impossible, from somewhere the other side of the sea, in all probability Norway. So when the factor and his men came (as we all knew they would from the beginning of this story) to the village this used to be and told the villagers to leave, a number of men said they wouldn’t leave without their roof beams. So there were stricken women weeping and tearing their hair, bewildered children running about screaming, brave men dashing back into their burning homes to drag out the looms with the cloth still in them, and the factor and his men demolishing the crofts. And when the roof beams crashed to the ground the crofters dragged them charred and splintered from the burning rubble and hauled them over the rocks to the sea.
This lot didn’t all get on a leaky ship for Australia or Canada, they got in their own little fishing boats with their roof beams tied up with ropes, bobbing along behind them in the water, and they rowed across to Durris which is the little rocky crag island to the north; to that very settlement Calum and I had walked around only the day before. The landlord had no designs there because you couldn’t run cattle or sheep on it or grow oats or anything useful because it was just a lousy barren windswept little crag. And there these poor indomitable crofters rebuilt their homes in the only sheltered spot available using the ancient charred roof beams and lumps of rock which were plentiful nearby. They planted three rowan trees for the magic, and went fishing and ate fish and stayed alive and from time to time traded fish for other kinds of food. Or from time to time (when the shepherds were busy) raided the north of Aysaar and poached a rabbit, a deer, a big meaty sheep.
Then came the Great War, and the men of rocky Durris, whose government had done nothing for them, not provided healthcare or street lights or even a street, let alone a bridge to the big island, were called upon to fight for king and country. Which they did.
And when they came back from the Great War (some of them did come back from the fields of mud and blood to the barren rocky island) they’d had enough. And they got in their boats and rowed to the south of Aysaar, where the land is most fertile and where the outlines of their ancestors’ strip fields were still visible under the surface and they dug the earth and planted crops: oats, barley, potatoes, greens. They built a little hut and each night two of them would stay there to guard their crops while the others rowed back to the crag they called home. They didn’t hide anything or steal anything, they simply grew fodder on the fertile land which had been cleared and farmed by their ancestors.
I knew of course that the story would end badly because these tales of heroic working folk always do. Calum the Brain honoured them for being victims. If I’d survived the trenches I would’ve gone straight back to my old home on the big island and I would’ve rounded up those giant sheep and had a barbecue. And I would’ve chopped down the landlord’s trees for new roof beams and built a load of new houses, a Barratt estate. I would’ve tied the arms and legs of the scab shepherds and set them off in a boat with no oars. And when anyone came to get me I would’ve said I was a shell-shocked war hero and refused to take orders from anyone but my General.
Why were they so creepily God-fearingly decent and humble? Why didn’t they raise hell?
Calum proceeded to the end of his pathetic tale. The police came from the mainland and asked them to leave. A party of crofting men came over from Skye to support them against the police. The men refused to leave (non-violently) and the police removed them by force and took them in boats to the mainland, and charged them with trespass and resisting arrest.
The end was completely unsatisfactory. When the thing came to court they were let off on a technicality so they were found neither innocent nor guilty. And when they came back they carried on exactly as before, farming on Aysaar and rowing home to their rocky crag to sleep, and the police couldn’t be bothered with them any more and neither could the landlord because he died and eventually the island came into the possession of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries and the next generation, the children of the Great War soldiers, were told they could buy crofts on Aysaar again if they liked. But as most of them were sick of crags and sea and fish and bored to death with the whole bloody saga they went to the mainland to seek their fortunes, leaving the ancestral roof beams to fall into decay on the rocky island where not even holidaymakers would want to stay.
‘Very sad,’ I told Calum. He looked at me completely gone out.
‘Sad. They were a bunch of losers. Why didn’t they fight? What were they doing killing honest German peasants in the trenches and leaving evil bastard landlords alive?’
My clever brother sat with his mouth half open and his eyes looking east and west. What the fuck was I doing, sitting in a dripping field having history lessons? I was way off course. I got up and ran back into the forest.
I could hear him calling after me. ‘Nikki! Ni-ikki!’
‘Fuck off. Just fucking well fuck off!’
I hurt his feelings. Why not? It’s what I’m good at. Trashing things. Trash trashes things.