I’d been shipped off to one of these Cubs weekenders. They essentially drop you in the middle of nowhere and force you to tie knots and shoot targets with a bow and arrow.
It’s Manson-esque.
In 2010, with the end of the world looming and childhood obesity soaring, the country’s collective mind hadn’t the time nor resources to fund the war on weirdos. Everyone was too busy bickering about Jamie Oliver.
Hundreds of kids from across the country were left with strangers in tight cargo shorts. No one batted an eyelid.
This time around it was a four-day ordeal. Day one, you arrive at compulsory team building. On day two, cliques are formed. By the afternoon of day three, someone had asked me if I was an “alien” after taking discomfort in how I ate my complimentary, post-archery orange. I’ve always thought the skin was tastier than the flesh within. My uncle was the same. He was moved away.
Anyhoo. Respectably, there was a good portion of time away from macaroni art and pretending-we-were-American dedicated to free roam. I used this time to skulk around as close to the forest’s perimeter as possible. Alone. All told, I hadn’t the chance to make any friends over the course of my treasured time Cubbing. Being friends with children who spent their weeknights making edible rafts out of sweets felt redundant. I wasn’t here to make friends; I was here because my mum brought me here.
These woods were great for sulking, with enough geographic complexity to keep the body entertained while the mind ran amuck. And boy, was it running. These woods were so perfect for loathing that I found myself just making up problems to be irritated by. One foot at a time, the world was being put to rights.
I knew I had to skulk as far away as Cub-anly possible from the main camp to get the most out of the experience. Each step across the moribund English wilderness felt regenerative as I strayed a good distance away from fucking Amelia, and Hugo, and Lottie, and Akela. They were the aliens, not me. All smiles, those weirdos were. “Ooooh, we’re having another campfire? Oooooh, another cup of tea, is it? My mummy and daddy do blah blah FUCKING blah, and my clothes fit perfectly, and I CAN’T stop FUCKING SMILING.”
Amelia had left quite a scathing review of my jogging bottoms just moments before I set off on my walk. 48 hours is a long time to spend with strangers.
Around 20 minutes into my tirade, I’d found a little hut that I imagined might’ve belonged to an oddly dexterous bear or reclusive smackhead. “Brilliant,” I thought, “some fucking normality.” Maybe he’d come home at some point, and we’d chat. Maybe I’d know him. We might even be related – I only live down the road.
There was loads of time until I had to be back, so I let myself in and got comfortable. There was fuck all in there, it was a wooden hut in the middle of paint-huff-East-Midlands wilderness. For those of you who think I’m going to flower that up: get real. That being said, I’d rather have slept in that fucker than another night shoulder-to-shoulder with the Beckhams back at the camp.
Sat in the hut, a good kilometre from base camp, I felt my mind warming to the prospect of atonement. Something in my life was missing, sure. No getting around it. Maybe things would be different now. Any grief or misunderstanding felt a million miles away in the solitude of that shack. I could hardly remember what I was so upset about. If ever there was a time to make things right, it was today, here. A faint smell of recently provoked human waste snuck into the space.
“Ah, God. I really hope this is his place. I genuinely can’t remember the last time I seen my da—” A loud thud on the exterior of his apartment interrupted my reverie. I flinched hard as if someone had woken me from a wet dream. The sort of embarrassed vulnerability you hope is lost past a certain age. Shaken and stirred, I went outside to assess the damage.
To my surprise (sarcasm), it was some disgusting bastard kid. He was throwing an assortment of debris at the structure, not a care in the world. Only just making him out through gaps in the wall of branches, I stepped out of the hut to get a better look at the perp.
Upon spotting his neckerchief and seeing its colours being far removed from my own, my fight or flight kicked in. Something was happening inside me. This chance encounter with a stranger in the woods felt seismic. Was it chance? Had my wrongdoing finally caught up with me? Was I in the process of getting whacked? I was bright enough to know that childhood conflicts are all about psychology: if he smelt fear, I’d feel his wrath.
I needed to get the hell out of there. Atonement could wait. I started walking away from the hut, taking time to kick the odd leaf across the floor to assert some level of dominance through nonchalance. I even discarded a few choice tones via whistle as I strolled. Psychologically, I was years ahead. I wasn’t running away. I simply had other places to be. Cool as a cucumber.
A few steps away, out in plain view, a stray twig struck my calf. Fucker. I let my eyes shut for a few seconds as I reassessed the situation. With a deep breath, I turned around to see him standing there. Small and blonde, frail like me. I’m fairly sure he was middle-class, judging by how well his clothes fit and the condition of his trainers. I’ll never forget how bizarrely wide his stance was. He looked like an anorexic sumo wrestler. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He wanted to escalate the situation.
I needed to get out of there, I was folding beneath the occasion like a cheap mattress, and he knew it. I’d barely turned back around to start running when I felt another pang. This time, he meant business. The back of my head. Felt like a rock, maybe even a coin. I jerked forward as it connected. The force of the missile felt unreal, like a dream. It was enough to rejig anyone’s ethical framework. It was one of those pains that can paint an entire landscape red, one of those pains that makes you fucking seethe.
Enough to initiate war.
My instincts left me with no choice. I wanted to escalate the situation. I wanted to submerge the forest in molten hate. I wanted to spend my life following this little boy around, throwing rocks at the back of his head. This feud would last generations. I would rear my spawn to follow my legacy.
Reading my body language from the critical strike, I felt the boy’s nerves echo through the woods. As I scanned the forest floor for an appropriate weapon, it was his turn to fold. “Sorry mate, sorry. I didn’t mean to hit your head. Please don’t tell anyone. Sorry.”
I’ll do more than tell anyone.
I picked up the nearest thing to me, a good thick branch, and swung it at him from about seven metres away. It surprised me as it left my hands; the weight of it hurtled toward the boy at a greater speed than I’d anticipated. It all happened so fast, like most tragedies do. The asteroid of impulse zeroed in on the Aryan youth. His mortified expression imprinted on my mind as the branch imprinted on his. Spinning, spinning, spinning – thunk. To this day, I’ve never seen an object hit a head with so much force. It was like one of those tragic blows to the head that you read about in local newspapers. Irreparable. Perfect.
My enemy fell to the ground with a thud, the stillness of the forest offering no consolation.
I’d killed him. I’d fucking killed him. My angst melted into fear at the sight. A little boy, though barely sentient and largely inconsequential in the grand scheme of the world and weekend, was dead. I darted back to the main camping area, palms glossy with fear, stumbling over invisible branches.
It was a matter of time before the authorities found out. A matter of time before the trial, a matter of time before I was some horrible little boy’s girlfriend in child prison. Stray rocks to the back of the head would be the least of my worries. I locked myself in a disabled toilet in the main community building.
Safe in the solitude of white porcelain, I thought of loads of things. I thought of my mum, my nan, my dog. I imagined having to send them letters from undisclosed locations during my escape from the law. Face tattoos, living on the road, the school of hard knocks. Welcome to the underclass: you don’t have to be crazy to live here, but it helps. I’d even started practising a new accent in the mirror before a firm knock on the door disturbed me.
I’d been in the disabled toilet for three hours.
I opened the door a penny’s width, just enough to reveal one sunken, feral eye to whomever knocked. One of the Cub leaders, Jenny, had been looking for me.
“Everything okay, mate? You don’t look very well. Why don’t you come out? We’re watching Chicken Run.”
Bastard. I’d forgotten the tradition. On the last night, all Cubs gathered in the main hall to watch a film on the projector.
“Oh, erm, I’ve been sick. I think I’ll just go back to the tent tonight.”
“Don’t be silly.” I’ve always been spineless. That’s all it took. We started walking to the hall. No mention of the murder.
The truth is, I had a soft spot for Jenny. She was kind. She listened to me patiently as I nervously stumbled through the simplest of sentences. She asked my opinions on things when no one else in the clan seemed particularly interested. She once overheard me calling one of my fellow Cubmates a “pussy-hole” under my breath during a particularly heated treasure hunt and turned a blind eye. She wasn’t like other Cub leaders. Maybe she was there on community service or something.
The idea of her knowingly leading me to the hall where a SWAT team was waiting to apprehend me welled my eyes as we walked. I pictured the hall doors swinging open, a line of men with machine guns peppering my pathetic body with bullets from close range. My flesh separating from bone as I scream “I trusted you!” to Jenny. Jenny just laughing, letting out a little snort as what’s left of me melts into the laminated flooring. I always found her snorts very charming.
The door opened. No sign of them. They’d allowed me the courtesy of one final film before my execution. A classy touch from the military.
We settled into our Cub “family” groups. I still felt a little cagey, but there was a feeling of hope within the hall. Maybe he hadn’t been found yet. Maybe it was the uplifting nature of the Chicken Run’s DVD menu title track. If I could just make it through tonight, my mum would be here in the morning.
Before the film started, another Cub leader stood up, a little boy there by his side with a bandage on his head. I’d recognise that stance anywhere. The jammy bastard had survived the attack. While somewhat glad to see him alive, I knew this meant it wasn’t over.
“Right, it’s a shame to end such a lovely weekend like this, but someone has gotten a little bit carried away earlier today, and we need to have a word with her. Alfie has given us a good description of the person, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of who it was. We’ll be speaking to you after the film.”
Her? Her. The thick little runt had only gone and misgendered me and taken my long flowing locks for those of a lady. I wanted to scream. Those letters, the prison, my horrible jailhouse boyfriend. I didn’t have to think about any of that anymore; there was no chance I was getting called in for questioning. Freedom was but a whisker away. I struggled to follow the plot of the film and, perhaps controversially, haven’t bothered revisiting it since.
As promised, the authorities did their rounds, singling out slim girls with brown shoulder-length hair. I watched on from a distance, getting quietly offended if they singled out any of the uglier girls. Children were folding under the questioning left, right and centre. A few were even reduced to tears. The fallout from this whole ordeal felt nuclear to some of the more sheltered within the “family.” I, however, remained composed, like a right-wing politician. Smiling and lying all the while. There was one girl I was nearly sure was going to admit to it just to get the ordeal over with.
I struggled to sleep that night. Partially out of guilt for the wrongfully accused, partially out of sheer, immovable joy. You could also hear patches of muffled sobbing from surrounding tents, which was both annoying and excessive. You can always rely on middle-class children to blow a situation way out of proportion. Anyway, I had done the unthinkable.
Mum arrived nice and early that morning, which was good of her. “Nice weekend, mate? Make any friends?” and so on and so forth. I gave her the usual spiel, chucked her my bag and said something backhanded about her parking as I climbed into the passenger side of the car. The drive home was quiet.
With the window wound down, I watched my hair dance in the breeze in the wing mirror. I smiled at myself all the way home, giddy with the thought of the lady I may one day grow up to be.