Donna Joy Usher - Chanel 01 - Cocoa and Chanel (5 page)

***

‘Relax, breathe,’ I said to Susie. We were in the mess hall waiting for our physical exam to start and Susie was slipping ever closer to hysterics. ‘Rick said you’re fit enough to pass.’

It was true. With Rick’s forced diet (you are what you eat) and his strict exercise regime, Susie had transformed over the last five months. She still had the helium balloon voice, but she no longer resembled one. I wouldn’t have recognised her if I hadn’t seen it happen.

We had sat the weapons exam the day before. I had aced the theory but only narrowly scraped through the practical. (It turns out that aiming at the target is far easier than actually hitting it.) While confident with the theory exams from that morning even I was a little nervous about the physical exam. No-one – not even Rick – would tell us everything it entailed.

‘You have to eat something.’

‘I think I’m going to vomit,’ she said weakly.

‘If you don’t eat something you probably will vomit,’ I said.

The beginning of the exam was the part we had been expecting: sit-ups, push-ups, and a strength test. Then there was the beep test – where beep is not a replacement for a swear word but is instead the timed beep a machine makes as you sprint back and forth between two lines. The beeps get closer together making you sprint faster and faster until you’re well and truly beeped.

It had always been Susie’s weakness so I breathed a sigh of relief when she made it to the minimum requirement time for passing.

‘I wonder what the last part is,’ I said to her. The only thing Rick would tell us was that there was a surprise at the end of the exam.

We watched as Rick approached a white line painted on the grass. He had a box in one hand and a stopwatch in the other. ‘Right,’ he said, gesturing for us all to gather around. For the last part you’ll be doing the five kilometre obstacle course. But,’ he added, ‘it will be timed.’

They always were so that was no surprise.

‘And,’ he added with an evil grin, ‘you’ll be doing it handcuffed to a partner.’

That put a bit of a spin on things, but it still wasn’t too bad. I was sure Susie and I could handle it.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘I will be choosing the pairs.’

We waited while he pulled our names out of the box and paired us up. Susie was cuffed to Liam, the tallest boy on our course. She looked ridiculous with her hand hanging suspended at chest height.

My name was the second last one to be pulled out of the box. Rick tipped the last piece of paper out, took a look at the name and then shot me a cute grin. Geez I still couldn’t believe he was gay. When he didn’t read the other name out immediately I glanced around, looking for the only other free person in our course, and immediately all thoughts of how spunky Rick was were driven from my mind.
Oh dear Lord no
.

‘Nastaaaciaaa.’ It must have been the buzzing in my ears that made it sound like he called her name out in slow motion. Surely he wouldn’t be that cruel. The only consolation, and it was a small one, was that the look on her face was what I imagined was on mine – total horror.

We stood as far from each other as was possible as he handcuffed us. Even then it was too close. We hadn’t had any contact since the day I saw her girlfriend and I had really liked it that way.

Rick sent us off with two minutes between each set of couples. Liam and Susie were before us and the two minutes between felt like a lifetime, partly because I was nervous and partly because it was awkward as hell being handcuffed to Nastacia. My nerves made me want to crack lame jokes, but somehow I didn’t think she would find my pink fluffy handcuff quips amusing.

We had done this course numerous times during our training, but from the first obstacle it became apparent that it had all changed. It used to start with a log climb, now there was a long tunnel of netting. Commando crawling is hard enough when you’re not handcuffed to someone, when you are it requires a huge amount of coordination. Unfortunately Nastacia and I were employing zero teamwork in our bid to pretend this wasn’t happening.

We got half way through the tunnel, yanking and tugging at each other’s arm, before she got far enough ahead of me to whip my hand up towards my face. My fist was clenched and it made a sickening crunchy sound as it connected with my nose.

‘Yeeoww,’ I screeched. Even though it was
my
fist, I didn’t see it coming. I stared cross eyed at my nose trying to determine if there was any damage.

Nastacia stared back over her shoulder at me, an exasperated look on her face.

‘Am I bleeding?’ I said.

‘No, you’re still perfect.’ Her voice was snippy.

‘This obviously isn’t working,’ I said.

She looked like she wanted to disagree purely for the sake of it but there was nothing to disagree about. ‘We need to crawl opposite each other.’

‘No we need to go in the same direction,’ I said.

She huffed. ‘Of course we need to go in the same direction.’ She shook her arm attached to me as she said it. ‘You need to crawl with your left leg up while I have my right up.’

‘Oh. Like walking and holding hands.’

‘Trust you to think of that.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

Rather than answer me, she started crawling. It was a toss-up between making a stand and punching myself in the nose again or continuing. I’d like to think it was the diplomat in me that decided to go on, but I suspect it was the cowardly lion.

I managed to stay in opposite time with her and the rest of the tunnel progressed smoothly. We emerged and navigated the next few obstacles while stoically ignoring each other, which, given our circumstances, was quite a feat. That all changed when we got to the mud pit.

‘I do not want to fall in that,’ I said, as I grasped one side of the flying fox t-bar which would carry us over the pit.

‘Wouldn’t want to ruin your hair.’ Nastacia pivoted to face me and grabbed the other side of the bar. Her body pushed up against mine feeling awkwardly intimate.

‘You know there’s more to me than how I look,’ I said.

She raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Most people don’t classify mindless bimboism as a talent.’

‘You … total … bitch,’ I said from between clenched teeth. A red haze started to obscure my vision of her smug expression.

‘Oh look, it has teeth.’

I felt her body tense but in the heat of the moment forgot we were hanging from a flying fox. She pushed us off the edge as I was saying, ‘I don’t know what I ever did to make you hate meeeaaahhhhhhh.’ We whistled through the air and landed in a tumble of limbs on the other side of the mud.

‘You were born,’ she hissed, climbing off me.

I’ve always been a bit of a pacifist, make love not war and all that, but she had pushed my buttons for months and now I didn’t know why I had let her. All of a sudden I wanted to teach her a lesson for bullying me. I wanted revenge and I wanted it badly.

I kicked a leg out, sweeping her feet from under her, and as she landed on her back I jumped on top of her. I’d never been in a fight before and I realise now the ones I’d seen in movies were all perfectly choreographed. So it came as a bit of a surprise to me how awkward and ineffective a fight can be.
Especially
when you’re handcuffed to the person you’re fighting.

I used my free arm to pull her hair as she slapped at me. Then she shifted her weight and rolled over, forcing us onto our knees where we shoved and pulled while shrieking and squealing. The force of our movements opposing each other caused our handcuffed arms to swing around like a crazy pendulum.

‘Take it back,’ I yelled as we clambered to our feet.

‘No.’

‘Take it back or else.’

‘Or what, you’ll tell Mummy on me?’

I let out a bellow of rage and threw myself at her in my best impression of a football tackle. I felt my shoulder connect with her stomach, heard the woof of air express from her lungs and had a second to feel pleased with my efforts before we were flying backwards, airborne again as we flew out over and then down into the pool of mud.

I landed on top of her with a mushy splat, pressing her into the gooey mess. It was perfect. Putting a hand on her face I shoved till the mud seeped over the top of her cheeks. She roared and locked out her free arm, wrapping her hand around my throat. It hurt, but with only one arm it was a pretty ineffective choke hold. I slapped my forearm into the inner part of her elbow, breaking her hold on my neck, and pushed her arm down under my knee where I pinned it with my weight. Then I grabbed a handful of mud.

‘Guess you don’t do girlie stuff like mud packs,’ I said as I dribbled the muck onto her face. I took great delight in smearing it all over her head as she shook it from side to side. ‘Oh no,’ I said, tssking at her. ‘Look what you made me do. You made me goop.’

She screeched and shoved her handcuffed arm out to the side. The manoeuvre took me by surprise and threw me off her before I could compensate by shifting my weight. I managed to land on my knees but she jumped on my back and started forcing my head down towards the mud. I braced my body and resisted but she had her whole bodyweight on me and painstakingly slowly the mud got closer and closer.

‘This is how we do a mud pack where I come from,’ she snarled.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes just before my face entered the mud. The cool sludge flowed over my skin and in a different circumstance it probably would have felt quite nice. But it wasn’t a different circumstance, it was a fight. As things stood I was losing, and if I didn’t do something in the next thirty seconds I was going to lose more than just the fight. Panic bubbled to the surface with my overwhelming fear of drowning and in pure desperation I let an elbow drop, throwing my weight to the side and her off my back.

I took a deep breath of air, wiped the mud away from my eyes and said, ‘Oh and exactly where do you come from? Hell?’

The weight on my arm slackened and she made a gurgling noise. I opened my eyes slightly, blinking rapidly to dispel any mud, and looked at her. She was slumped in the mud, laughing so hard that tears were making clear little rivers through the mud on her face.

‘You look awful,’ she managed to choke out, pointing at my face.

I looked at her in amazement, so shocked by her laughter that I forgot to be angry, and then I started to laugh as well. We were totally covered in mud. There wasn’t a square centimetre which hadn’t been coated.

‘You look like a giant dog turd,’ I said, throwing more mud at her.

‘You look like a ginormous cow pat.’ She hurled a wad back and it smacked into my chest.

‘Oh no.’ I brushed ineffectively at the lump. ‘You got mud on my shirt.’

She laughed again as she clambered to her feet pulling me up with her. ‘Look at the state of us.’

‘What is Rick going to think?’ I said as we started to run again.

‘I didn’t think you’d mind Rick seeing you all dirty.’

I snorted. ‘He’s gay.’

‘Rick?’

‘Yeah. Total shame.’

‘No he’s not.’

‘Andy, the head of the Police Dog Squad, told me. And he should know because he’s his friend.’

‘Andy’s a shit stirrer,’ she said as we climbed over a pile of wood.

‘But he talks about his boyfriend Sam all the time.’

She started laughing, and we had to slow down so she could run and laugh at the same time.

‘What’s so funny,’ I finally demanded.

‘Sam is short for Samantha,’ she said between giggles.

Well I’ll be damned
, so he wasn’t gay.

‘I wish I had known you thought he was gay,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘I would have gotten a kick out of it.’

The silence caused by the animosity behind her words hung over us like a heavy fog as we ran to the balance log.

We were half way across, her going backwards, when I finally summoned the guts to ask the question. ‘Why would you have gotten a kick out of it?’

She glanced down into my eyes and said, ‘I’m not sure.’ We wavered on the log for a few seconds before she broke eye contact and started moving backwards again.

The silence between us was different now as we dodged and weaved through the course. Initially it had been cold and distant. A silence born of two people ignoring each other, but we couldn’t do that anymore. Something had broken, and not in a bad way, and now the silence was loaded with tension.

We were traversing the zigzag ropes when she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

I was so shocked I hooked my foot on a rope and would have fallen if not for her support. ‘Sorry for the leaky pen?’

‘Yes.’

‘The men’s underwear?’

‘Especially sorry about that.’

‘The spiders?’

‘The what?’

‘The huge hairy spiders you put in my room.’

She shuddered. ‘I didn’t put any spiders in your room.’

Huh
. Maybe they did travel in packs.

We ran up a hill and could see the last obstacle looming in the distance. ‘Oh no,’ I said.