Girl, 15: Flirting for England (19 page)

It ought to have been better having Edouard with her for company, but somehow it made it worse. It was just awful being marooned with him in a wilderness. If they were at home, at least he could have done the decent thing and locked himself in his room while she watched TV downstairs.

Eventually they found themselves at the edge of the wood, and, looking down, Jess could see the stream glinting below. She reckoned it must be the same stream, but it wasn’t the same place where she and Gerard had held hands. It was a different field, further along the valley, or something. Aargh! How she hated geography!

‘The stream,’ she said, and immediately regretted it.

Edouard unleashed a stream of his own: a tumbling, splashy flood of French words. It sounded a bit like, ‘
Honour truvila rivvy air may honour purrpar traversila
.’ He’d flipped. It wasn’t French now. It was a Hobbity version of Elvish.

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Jess. She particularly liked the sound of ‘
purrpar
’ and was already planning to have a kitten called just that. But first they had to get back to civilisation before dying of exposure. Just to get out of the wood and down to the stream, they were going to have to push their way through a dense hedge of thorns and clamber over some strands of rusty barbed wire.

Jess took a deep breath, and began to move slowly forward through the brambles. Eventually, badly scratched and by now in a vile mood, she arrived at the barbed wire. Suddenly Edouard sprang forward, taking the initiative.

‘
Jerper ton ear sa poor tassistay
,’ he said.

‘I can’t argue with that,’ said Jess. Masterfully, Edouard grabbed the top strand of wire and held it up, and placed his cute little right foot on the lower strand and trod it down. This created a kind of aperture through which Jess was able to crawl.
Wow!
thought Jess.
He does have his uses after all.

Perhaps it was just as well she hadn’t murdered him a while back. She held the wire for him to crawl through, but somehow, as she was letting go afterwards, the wire kind of sprang back cruelly at her and anchored in her sleeve.

‘Ow!’ yelled Jess.

‘
Merde!
’ said Edouard. Carefully, he disentangled her. She pulled up her sleeve and examined her arm. The rusty barbed wire had given her a nasty little scratch. It was bleeding.

Suddenly, and startlingly, Edouard grabbed her arm, bent down and sucked the wound, then spat it out. Jess was stunned. Was he a vampire or something? Then he let go of her arm and from the left pocket of his jeans he produced a handkerchief that, weirdly, was spotlessly clean. He shook it out and tied it round her arm, without ever looking her in the eye or saying a word.

‘
Honour purrpar lessay sallair
,’ he said, with a certain grim microscopic expertise.

Jess didn’t understand a word. But it was obvious he had, in some Hobbity kind of way, saved her from a slow death by blood poisoning or something. She felt obscurely touched. Just as long as he didn’t try to take things further and demand a whole afternoon playing doctors and nurses when her mum was out.

They climbed down the steep bank towards the stream. It looked deeper and more dangerous than the bit of stream at the bottom of the camping field. Jess was boiling with rage. How had they got into this mess? They weren’t little kids, for goodness’ sake. Why hadn’t they just stayed around the campfire, doing charades and being mellow?

Whose stupid idea had all this been? Jodie’s, of course. She obviously had wanted a chance to get Gerard on his own. How cunning was that!

They stood and glared at the stream. There was no rope here. There weren’t even stepping stones. They were going to have to wade to the other side. It wasn’t their camping field across there, it was a different field, but Jess guessed that the campsite couldn’t be very far away because she could smell woodsmoke. Unless it was somebody else camping – the annual field trip of the Mass Murderers’ Association, possibly? It would be just her luck.

She sat down and took off her shoes, swearing quite horribly out loud. It didn’t seem to matter – Edouard wouldn’t understand anyway. He also sat down and took off his shoes and socks. Jess ripped off her socks, got up and picked her way gingerly to the water’s edge. She didn’t even look at Edouard. She didn’t want to discuss it. Not in Elvish, anyway.

She dipped a toe in. Ow! It was freezing! Her foot almost fell off in shock. Still, there was nothing for it, no other way to get back. Jess set off, stepped on a sharp stone, lost her balance, lurched and fell, with a strange terrible squeak, into the water.

This is it!
she thought
. I’m going to drown. I didn’t even manage to scream properly. And, worst of all, Edouard is watching and I can’t be looking my best.
Of all deaths drowning was the one she dreaded most. She had hoped to die in about ninety years’ time, in private, in a four-poster bed in Hollywood, attended by a posse of adoring young men in white silk livery.

And now this. She would arrive in the afterlife, spluttering her guts out, garlanded with frogspawn and crowned with a veil of green slime.

Chapter 26

She felt a hand grab her. The hand was tiny but strong. Edouard had rescued her – again. As she struggled to her feet, Jess realised that the water was only about knee-high after all. But as she fell, she’d dropped her shoes and socks, and one sock, still rolled in a sort of ball, sailed off merrily downstream as if it was having a whale of a time, and disappeared around the corner.

Jess retrieved the other sock and her shoes, dragged herself to the bank and hauled herself out, hanging on to Edouard and dripping and shivering. In addition to her previous injuries, she was now wet through, and her feet were cut by stones and covered in mud. She had been comprehensively beaten up by nature. She would never leave the town again.

She sat down on the bank, too massively furious even to swear. Edouard offered her his socks. She looked up. He wasn’t smiling. He was just being seriously practical.

‘Take,’ he said sternly.

Jess hardly dared to disobey. Since they had been lost, Edouard had gradually acquired a certain authority.

‘Take,’ he said again, forcing his socks on her.

Jess smiled wanly and put them on. He was trying to look after her, bless his little cotton socks. Quite literally.

Edouard put on his trainers, and Jess tied her shoelaces.
Oh well
, she thought.
I suppose nothing worse can happen now.
Then they got up and turned round, ready for the long haul up the field. And that was when they saw the cattle. A
whole herd of cattle
had appeared and was staring down at them.

They were only about fifty metres away. Perhaps there was a bull! Perhaps they were all bulls! Jess’s heart soared up her throat like a skyrocket and actually appeared briefly in her mouth, pulsating away like a parasitic alien in a science fiction movie. She swallowed it. It tasted worse than anything.

She knew it was important not to look scared, but on the other hand, she was right on the very verge of pooing her pants. There was a hedge in the far distance. She could smell the smoke of a campfire somewhere beyond it. She didn’t really care if it was the Mass Murderers’ annual outing now. Anything was better than being gored by a pack of mad cows.

Jess set off in a crazy, lurching run towards the hedge. She hadn’t meant for it to be lurching, but the ground was strewn with rocks, big coarse tufts of grass and fresh cowpats, gleaming in the evening light. Jess could hear the cattle following at a frisky trot.

She was vaguely aware that Edouard had got left behind. Maybe he was being gored right now! She ought to stop and look round, just to see if he was OK. Jess tried to look back over her shoulder while still running forward – never a good idea. She saw Edouard some distance behind her. He was surrounded by cattle but still on his feet. She tripped on a rock and landed in a gigantic cowpat.

It could have been worse. It could have been a face-down situation. The cow poo was
only
all down one side of her top and jeans. Jess scrambled to her feet again and raced as fast as she could to the hedge. But it was impossible to get through. The hedge had been reinforced with barbed wire.

French Exchange Partners Gored on Camping Trip
, she thought. ‘
We’re Having a Bilingual Joint Funeral,’ Says French Teacher
. Maybe a drowning wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

Jess turned, panting, to face her doom. The cattle were a short distance downhill from her, but still following. Edouard was facing them. Suddenly he gave a weird high-pitched shriek and ran at them, waving his arms and screaming a wide variety of French words at them, like a banshee.

The cattle didn’t seem to like it. They came to a halt, turned tail and thundered off down the meadow. Jess breathed a deep sigh. A wave of relief washed over her. Edouard had now rescued her three times. It was almost biblical.

OK, she was battered, bruised, gouged by barbed wire and scratched by thorn bushes. She was wet, had lost a sock, her clothes were saturated and she was covered with cow dung. But let’s face it, nothing is worse than being chased by a pack of large animals. Jess decided she was going to give up that fantasy about the football team.

Edouard joined her. He only seemed a bit out of breath. Jess gave him what she hoped was a grateful smile.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘To be honest, I have a little bit of a thing about being gored by herds of mad cattle. Silly of me, I know, but the girl can’t help it.’ She shrugged in what she hoped was a friendly matter.

‘
Jaypassay dayvaconss alla compagngngne
,’ said Edouard.

Luckily this statement did not seem to require an answer. Jess just nodded and, in an attempt to convey her gratitude, gave him the thumbs up. He gave the thumbs up in return and they exchanged a genuine smile for the first time in their relationship.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it lurve
, thought Jess, with a secret giggle,
but we seem to have got over the murderous hatred stage.

They walked
uphill along the side of the hedge. Surely sooner or later they would come to a gate? How had the cattle got in there? Dropped by helicopter? Not unless farming methods had changed a lot since her childhood storybook
Old MacDonald
.

Eventually they did indeed come to a gate, and climbed over it without sustaining any injury. Perhaps their luck was changing? Yes! There, at last, was the campfire. She could see hunched figures round its cheerful blaze.

The others noticed Jess and Edouard and made kind of silly whooping noises to indicate that they had possibly been indulging in a romantic idyll.

Jess ignored them and just limped towards the fire. Gerard was going to see her covered in cow poo and flayed alive with thorns, but frankly she was past caring.

‘I love your new look!’ cried Fred in a high-pitched camp voice, as she drew near. ‘My dear! It must have cost a fortune! But it suits you!’

‘Oh, Jess!’ cried Marie-Louise. ‘You poor thing! You are dirty!’ She got up and started flapping about in a pointless but sympathetic manner. Jodie, for some reason, looked absolutely furious.

‘Have you seen Gerard or Flora?’ she demanded.