Monkey Bars and Rubber Ducks (11 page)

He came over for a quick inspection, and suggested we add a couple more strips of wood at right angles to the main planks to make the structure more solid. We did it in a hurry, desperate to get on the river.

‘All ready, Mr Max,’ said Lily. She saluted – girls can be a bit odd.

Max shouted, making us all jump.’ Mr Morris, over here. We have our first contender for the river crossing.’ And then, ‘Can all the teams stop for a second and come and watch Tribe’s first attempt.’ I was glad he’d dropped the ‘+ Lily’bit ofour name.

The other kids came over. I had a look around to see how they’d got on. Two of the teams had tried to put the four barrels in the middle – bit random. Team GB didn’t seem to have done anything at all. I looked back at ours. I had confidence running through my veins like blood (I got that from a song my sister listens to, except the word’s ‘lightning’, not ‘confidence’).

The sun was making the water glitter. It wasn’t very far across to the other side. We were bound to make it if we pushed off hard enough.

‘Come on then,’ said Max. ‘We’re all waiting.’

As we carried our raft to the edge, I realised we didn’t have a plan for how to get on board. I whispered to Jonno.

‘Two at a time,’ he said. ‘And we have to keep low, maybe crawl on.’

I deliberately didn’t look at Callum. If I was going to have to crawl I didn’t want his face smirking at me, hoping I’d fail.

Jonno turned to the others. ‘Keener and I are going on first. Do the same as us, stay low, OK?’

I was starting to feel a little bit nervous, but there wasn’t time to think about it. We pushed the raft on to the water. Fifty and Copper Pie stayed on the bank and held it steady while Jonno and I crawled on. It wobbled madly, I heard some gasps from the audience, but we both instinctively went flat on our bellies, which worked. The raft calmed down. I tried to think of it as a surfboard.

‘There’s no room for us,’ said Fifty. (Of the six of us, he was the one who didn’t want to fall in.) So we wriggled, still on our bellies, to the outside edges so that Fifty and Copper Pie could slide on in the middle. So far so good. C. P. came my side and Fifty went Jonno’s side, to balance the weight. Two to go, and no room . . .

‘What shall we do?’ said Bee.

No answer.

‘Coming on board,’ said Lily. I turned my head to see Lily grab Bee’s hand and clamber on to the raft. I felt her knee crash into me, forcing a gap between me and Copper Pie. The raft lurched, my arms went up to my elbows in water, but amazingly someone must have counterbalanced it. Bee, I supposed. It took a few seconds to settle down, and you couldn’t exactly say we were floating, but we weren’t sinking . . . yet.

I think people were laughing, some might have even been yelling instructions, but it was all a jumble.

‘Do little paddles,’ said Jonno.

I moved my arms backwards and forwards. The raft moved too, in every direction except forwards.

‘Lily and Bee, can you paddle?’ Jonno asked.

They both leaned over, which was nearly the end of us. Fifty squealed.

‘No way. We can’t reach the water,’ said Bee.

‘But you could kick, Copper Pie,’ said Lily. ‘But I’ve got shoes on,’ he said.

‘What does that matter? And anyway they’re wellies,’ said Bee.

A few dangerous wobbles later, I’d moved forwards and was gripping the front of the raft with my head sticking way out over the water, same as Jonno, to help balance Fifty and Copper Pie who had wriggled backwards so that their heads and bodies were on the raft, but their legs were dangling in the river. Bee and Lily were kneeling, desperately trying to keep the balance every time one of us moved. If it hadn’t been so tense, it would have been funny. Ican’t imagine what we looked like, although there were plenty of photos being taken by Mr Morris, so I guessed I was going to find out.

It was slow, and our path wasn’t exactly straight, but with Copper Pie and Fifty kicking with their feet, and me and Jonno paddling with our hands, we made our way across. Jonno and I even managed to get off the raft the other side without the water going over our wellies. Unfortunately that meant the raft tipped. Bee and Lily managed to scramble off but Fifty and Copper Pie got soaked. They didn’t care (I don’t think). We were too busy celebrating.
Team Tribe was without doubt the most superb team ever to build a raft,
I thought.

And that’s exactly what Max said. He said in all the years he’d worked at Highwoods never before had a team got across on their first try. Wow! Double wow, in fact.

We watched the other teams try and try again with their useless rafts. Callum had given up. His lot had a go at copying our design but it still didn’t work. They didn’t even manage to get on it, let alone float. I think his team had a row after that. Jonno said we should offer to help but we all sat on him, so that was the end of that idea.

Eventually, the We Hate Spiders team actually got all six of them on the water, attached to the raft. Four of them were lying on the barrels with their legs dangling in the water (it was the only way they could stay stable), but Max decided that as long as their feet didn’t touch the bottom it was allowed. They basically swam across, but they got a massive clap anyway.

In the time left before lunch we messed about on two-man kayaks. It was an all-round top morning.

‘Does anyone want to help build the bonfire this afternoon?’ asked Max.

‘Yes. Absolutely. Me.’ Fifty wanted to make sure he got on fire-making duty.

‘Yes, please,’ said Jonno.

‘All right,’ said Copper Pie.

I think Team Tribe must have been the only team that heard as no one else volunteered. All four teams were walking back to the field, having dismantled our rafts so that the afternoon lot could have a go, but we were at the front. (Obeying Camp Rule No. 5 – to be the advance party.)

‘I thought we were all collecting wood for the bonfire?’ said Bee.

‘That’s right,’ said Max, ‘but I’ll need some of you to help me get the structure right. You can’t just bung a pile of wood into a heap. There’s an art to a decent bonfire.’

‘Is the wood coming from over there?’ asked Lily. She pointed at the dark forest behind us.

‘It is. So it won’t just be a case of collecting it. Transporting it will be a challenge in itself.’

Jonno looked over at the wood. ‘Actually, I’d like to go to the woods . . . if that’s OK?’

‘I’ll be a campfire builder,’ said Bee.

‘Same,’ said Fifty. ‘I’m good at fires.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his firesteel and made a couple of sparks.

‘We can use that to start the fire if you like, Fifty,’ said Max.

Fifty was in heaven. Fires. He loves fires (and Probably Rose and sugar).

‘What about you, Keener?’ Max asked me. He was good at names. He knew all of us already.

‘I’m for the woods,’ I said.

‘And you, Lily?’

‘Woods too,’ she said.

‘So Bee, Copper Pie and Fifty, are you my helpers?’

‘We are,’ said Fifty, with a massive smile on his face.

‘Good.’

We went off for lunch. I was hungry as a hippo, to quote my dad. As I ate my ham roll I realised I hadn’t told the others about the Tribers’ Camp Rules, so they didn’t know we were about to break one. The one that said we should ‘stick together’.

Fifty didn’t need a lesson in how to build a fire. He gave Max a lesson. On my first trip back from the woods, dragging a heap of wood tied in a bundle behind me, the fire team were all sitting cross-legged listening to Fifty’s lecture.

‘You forgot something, Fifty,’ said Max. Fifty looked a bit puzzled. ‘Putting out a fire. Making the area safe so no one gets burnt and it doesn’t relight.’

Copper Pie, Lily, Bee and me all laughed – Fifty isn’t interested in putting them out. The laughing stopped pretty quickly though as Max had something else to say in a deadly serious voice. ‘Never start a fire without an adult present. Never think of fire as a toy.’ He wasn’t just staring at Fifty, he was drilling a direct channel into the centre of Fifty’s brain.

Fifty nodded.

Max sent me off to find tinder. Jonno was put in charge of kindling. The other two teams (Missiles and We Hate Spiders) were on fuel – we needed lots of fuel. The other lucky team (Team GB) got to go down on the beach and collect driftwood.

The nurse who wasn’t a nurse stayed up in the woods. She was ‘supervising’ us to make sure there was no tree climbing, no wandering away from the group, no lots-of-other-stuff-I-didn’t-listen-to. I was more interested in the problem of transportation. I needed a bucket to collect the tinder. It was too small to hold. And there was a limit to how much I could get in my pockets.

‘Jonno, what can I use to collect the small stuff for the fire?’

He looked around. Was he expecting to see a basket, or a great big plastic bag hanging from a tree?

‘How about a huge piece of bark?’ he said.

Good idea,
I thought. He helped me peel off a long curved bit, like a piece of guttering. I filled it with dry leaves, twigs and more bark and held it with one end against my tummy and the other end in the air, so none of it fell out. We had to tell the nurse person every time we went back down to camp, so that’s what I did.

Jonno came down a few minutes later. He’d used the same idea to carry the kindling.

‘Good lads,’ said Max. There was quite a pile of wood that the others had collected, neatly stacked in size order. Lily and Bee seemed to be in charge of that. A few of the kids were having a rest – they’d obviously lugged too much heavy wood. Fifty was busy with Max, chatting, and Copper Pie was laying a stone circle. Made me feel a bit spooked, as though evil sprits might dance in it while we were asleep. I left them to it and went back up to the wood.

‘Hi, Keener.’ It was the friendly girl from the bus. She was looking straight at me so I had to say something back.

‘Hi.’

‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

I tried to walk off, but she came with me. I could see the other We-Hate-Spiders girls were with the nurse person a bit further into the wood. The Missiles were nowhere to be seen. That meant we were alone, me and her.
Yelp!
I bent down to gather up some more leaves for the tinder.
One more bark full would be enough, I
thought.
Then I could escape.

‘I could help you, if you like.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’ I scooped up some general leaf and stick mess. I had a horrible idea that wouldn’t go away. I thought maybe she
liked
me, if you know what I mean.

I picked up my bit of gutter, in a hurry to get away, and a load of the tinder slid towards the other end. She grabbed it, and stopped the whole lot from ending up back on the ground where it started.

‘It’ll be easier if we carry an end each,’ she said. She was right, but that didn’t mean I wanted to go along with it. I wanted her to leave me alone. I wanted to run back down the hill and find a Triber. I wanted Jonno to come back up to get more kindling and frighten her off.

But I said, ‘OK.’

Possibly the worst five minutes of my life began. Me and no-name friendly girl carried the bark between us, adding more stuff until it was full. She kept trying to talk to me, and I kept trying not to answer so she’d go away. My face was the raspberry pink that it goes in times of dire embarrassment. I was sweating, on the inside and outside, if that’s possible. I knew that any second I was going to be spotted, with a girl (Bee and Lily don’t count), and there would be teasing . . . for ever. I had to get away.

‘Thanks for helping. I’ll take it down,’ I said. I tried to yank it out of her hands as I said it, but she held on.

‘I’ll come too,’ she said.

NO! NO! NO!

An idea catapulted through the state of emergency in my brain.

‘You can’t leave your team,’ I said. I gave the guttershaped bark a really determined yank. She stumbled a bit, but still didn’t let it go. What she did was a whole lot worse. She shouted, loudly, over towards the rest of her group and the nurse lady.

‘Can I help Keener take the tinder down to the campfire?’

The nurse looked over at us.’ Yes, Zoe, go ahead.’

Oh dear! An even worse five minutes of my life seemed unavoidable.

Zoe started walking, still chatting to me. I was dragged along behind her, holding on to the end of the gutter like a puppy on a lead. I watched her biscuit-coloured ponytail swing from side to side.
Come on brain!
I couldn’t arrive at the camp with
Zoe
in full view of everyone.

We came out into the bright sunshine. I had about four minutes until my life changed. Four minutes until the whole of the fire team, and all the kids lying about down by the mess tent, saw me and Zoe TOGETHER. In my head I could already hear them singing that rubbish rhyme:

Zoe and Keener sitting in the tree

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

First comes love

Then comes marriage

Then comes Zoe with a baby carriage.

I trudged behind her wondering why she’d picked me, and wishing she hadn’t.

‘Hey, Keener,’ said Jonno. He was coming up the hill, his emptied-out bark slung over his shoulder.