Molly
Molly dropped to the snow inside the tent canopy and out of the worst of the wind. She could feel the cold snow beneath her legs and scooched closer to the three camping stoves positioned in the centre of the canopy area.
‘Why are there three stoves?’ Molly shot a questioning glance at Erica. She ground her teeth together and wished she’d asked Harry and Frankie if she could eat with them.
Why had Molly agreed to come on this trip? Why had Erica even asked? A slow fury rolled through Molly’s veins.
‘Rachel went to bed so I invited Noah to eat with us. It was the least I could do after being the cause of Rachel’s injury.’
‘Whatever.’ Molly shrugged, shuffling in to a space beside Erica. At least with Noah in the mix Erica would have to keep her bonding attempts to herself.
‘Got it,’ Noah panted, pulling down his neck warmer and brandishing a silver pouch of food. ‘It’s frozen solid,’ he added, sitting down at the edge of the canopy and banging the solid pouch against his knee with a clonk. ‘Could be a while before we eat.’ Noah crossed his legs and smiled at Molly, causing two dimples to appear in the centres of his cheeks, and adding to his pretty-boy image.
Molly forced her lips into a brief smile before scooping a handful of snow into the bowl of her stove. Her stomach growled at the prospect of food, even freeze-dried food specifically engineered for Arctic travel and laced with extra calories caused Molly’s mouth to water.
An awkward silence fell over the trio. Molly watched the snow in her pan turn first to icy mush, then water.
Erica touched the small of her back and tilted her head up. ‘How far did we travel today do you think?’ she trilled. There was an unnatural bounce to her voice as if she was trying too hard. A gust of wind rustled the fabric of the canopy and Molly thought she heard a peal of laughter from the other group carry in with it.
‘Forty kilometres,’ Noah replied. He plucked out his bag from the pot of hot water and gave it a shake before dropping it back in.
Erica frowned. ‘Oh. It seemed like more.’
‘The trip is about two hundred and sixty,’ he added. ‘Which is almost the width of the English Channel at its widest point.’
‘The width of the English channel?’ Erica gave a teasing smile. ‘Are you a geography teacher?’
Noah gave a sheepish smirk and shook his head. ‘I used to be on a pub quiz team. My category was geography. I know a lot of pointless trivia about distances, like the width of the UK at its widest points from the western coast of Wales to the eastern coast of England is four hundred and thirty seven kilometres, and the highest point above sea level in England is Scafell Pike in the Lake District. That kind of thing.’
Molly stared at Noah for a moment too long. He’d taken his hat off and his blond hair was squished at odd angles. He had dark smudges under his deep blue eyes and a scattering of dark blond stubble across his face. He was tall – the same height as Molly – and had broad shoulders underneath the snow jacket, but there was something in the guarded way he held himself that made him seem strong and vulnerable all in the same breath. Maybe her pretty-boy assessment of Noah on the first night was off. Either way, she knew next to nothing about him, apart from the obvious of course: his girlfriend was a first-class bitch.
‘Oh. I didn’t realize people took pub quizzes so seriously,’ Erica said. ‘I thought you just got together with mates and had a laugh.’
‘That’s how it started out, but you’d be surprised how seriously people can take it. The prize money can run into the hundreds of pounds. There’s even a pub quiz national league table.’
‘Why aren’t you on the team any more?’ Erica grinned. ‘Did you get a question wrong and get booted off?’
There was a sudden silence. Noah dropped his gaze to the pot and prodded his bag again, the smile dying on his face. ‘Something like that,’ he said a moment later. ‘Do you think these are ready?’
Oh dear, pretty boy lost his place on the quiz team. Boo hoo, Molly thought before realizing she sounded as bad as Rachel.
‘Probably.’ Molly smiled at Noah, plucking out her own bag as her stomach growled again.
‘What did you go for?’ Erica asked Molly. ‘I’ve gone for a stew of some sort.’
‘Curry,’ Molly muttered. ‘I’m not sure it’ll taste much different to the stew to be honest, but it’s hot and I’m hungry so –’ She shrugged, pulling off her hat and rubbing her hand over her curls. The cold was instant but she needed a break from the wool that had been itching her head for the best part of twelve hours.
She looked up and caught Noah’s eyes on her. ‘Have I got hat hair or something?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘No … I mean, yes actually,’ he said with a slight smirk, ‘but I didn’t mean to stare. It’s just I feel like we’ve met before.’
‘Which school did you go to? Birkdale?’
He nodded, his eyes lighting up. ‘Yes.’
‘Thought as much. We definitely haven’t met. I went to my local comprehensive.’
‘Molly’s a runner,’ Erica added as she ripped the top off her dinner packet. A puff of grey smoke poured from the gap. Erica leaned forward and gave a hopeful sniff. ‘You used to compete in loads of competitions, didn’t you, Molly? Maybe it was at an athletics thing. Did you do any running, Noah?’
‘Just football. Were you any good?’ he asked Molly.
She shrugged and forked in a mouthful of food. The heat of the sauce and the tang of the curry fired her taste buds. The meat was chewy, like the meat they’d eaten at Huskyleir. It wasn’t going to be gaining a Michelin star any time soon, but it was edible, more than edible it was tasty.
Erica beamed at Noah then Molly. ‘Molly was amazing. She ran eight hundred metres for England.’
Molly could no longer feel the cold on her cheeks. Her mouth burned from the spices but the flavour and taste had gone. Damn it, Erica, shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
‘Wow,’ Noah said. ‘You must be seriously fast. Why did you stop?’
Another silence. She felt their eyes boring into her and the fury – a bubbling lava – building under her skin. ‘I got an injury and didn’t qualify for Rio.’ It sounded so matter-of-fact, so void of the gaping wound opening inside her.
‘I thought –’ Erica started.
Molly jerked her head up and glared at Erica. Don’t you dare.
Erica closed her mouth. The only sound was the rustle of their pouches and the wind buffeting against the canopy as they finished their dinner in silence.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Molly mumbled the moment she’d swallowed the last mouthful of food. She tied the empty pouch of food into a rubbish bag before packing it away with her stove.
‘Goodnight,’ Noah said.
Molly didn’t bother to reply as she clambered over Erica and into the tent.
Molly pulled off her boots and zipped the opening to closed. She was still less than a metre away from Erica and Noah. She could hear every word they were saying. She could smell the herbs from Erica’s stew and hear the clink of metal as they emptied the water from their stoves and packed them away, but widening the gap between them made her feel better.
Despite the temperature sinking down to somewhere below zero, Molly’s skin itched with the heat of her anger. She wasn’t the least bit cold but she shuffled her body into the sleeping bag, adding another layer between herself and the comment Erica had been about to make.
‘I thought –’ Erica’s questioning tone prodded Molly’s thoughts.
Thought what? Thought she’d messed up. She had. Big time. She didn’t need Erica to remind her of how she’d let everyone down. She’d let Billy down. Competing in the Olympics was his dream as much as it was hers, and now she couldn’t even tell him she was sorry. Sorry for everything.
***
The scratch of the zip opening startled Molly’s thoughts. She closed her eyes and tried to level her breathing as Erica shuffled into the tent with her torch bouncing on the walls.
‘Mol?’
So much for feigning sleep. ‘What?’ Molly kept her back to Erica, her eyes staring at the red fabric of the tent. The last of the daylight had faded fast and only black showed through from the outside.
‘Why did you really stop running?’ Erica asked.
‘I just did, OK?’ Molly snapped. ‘Just because you’re Little Miss Perfect and your life is so flipping perfect, it doesn’t give you the right to start trying to meddle in mine.’ Molly’s heartbeat thundered in her chest. Her breath snagged in her throat as she tried to regain control of the rage she’d allowed to escape.
‘Perfect?’ The word left Erica’s mouth in a squeak.
Molly shimmied further into the sleeping bag, pulling her knees up so they strained against the cushioned fabric, and allowing enough length for her head to disappear inside. She didn’t want to talk about running, or anything else for that matter. She just wanted to sleep.
Molly closed her eyes and sighed, surprised Erica hadn’t bothered with a comeback, not that Molly would’ve listened. Not even Erica could argue with how flipping perfect her life was.
The click of Erica’s torch carried in the silence.
Molly pulled a long breath into her lungs and held it for a moment. The air was cold inside her. The heat of her anger seeped out with her exhale and she felt the fog of sleep close in.
‘Little Miss Perfect.’
Molly’s eyes shot open in the dark. Billy’s voice sing-songed in her head again, ‘Little Miss Perfect.’
The stirring of a memory drifted to the front of her mind. When had Billy called her that?
She pictured his face – the sheen of sweat glowing on his forehead. The faded red T-shirt he’d been wearing had dark patches under the arms. Beyond Billy’s face, rich green grass spread up the hillside and sloped down to a low wall made of misshaped grey stones, and a field of grazing sheep. A dense woodland covered one side of the steep peak.
They’d been on one of their regular runs out into the peaks towards Hollow Meadows.
Why couldn’t she remember that run?
Had Billy thrown the comment back at her, urging her to catch up? No. The tone of his voice was wrong. It hadn’t been said with playful encouragement; it had been a snipe.
Memories were a strange thing. Molly could pull out a memory of sitting around the kitchen table at Christmas, pulling crackers with Billy and their mum. She could remember every minute detail of the day she’d tripped over at school and been laughed at by forty of her peers. She could picture the cloudless blue sky on the day of Billy’s funeral and the stuffy smell of oiled leather in the black limo they’d ridden in.
How many memories did she have filed away, waiting for a scent to catch in her nose or a word, a stray thought, something to unlock the memory and set it free? Thousands she guessed, but this run with Billy, it was there, and it wasn’t. Like the lingering sense of having dreamt something but not remembering what.
‘Little Miss Perfect.’
Then, just like that the memory snapped free.
Billy hadn’t been ahead of her. This wasn’t one of their early runs when he’d spent most of his time in his bedroom studying for GCSEs and A levels. This was later. Much later. Billy had been visiting from London. He hadn’t been ahead of her, coaxing her onwards, he’d been lagging behind and it was Molly who’d been doing the coaxing.
‘Maybe if you hadn’t drunk so much last night, you wouldn’t be struggling so much now,’ she’d quipped midway between a joke and jibe, and enjoying the feel of her heart pounding in her chest and the clear spring air.
‘Yeah well, I needed to let off some steam. We can’t all be Little Miss Perfect. God, Molly, all you do is run. Don’t you get bored of being the goody two-shoes all the sodding time? Don’t you want to get a personality at any point in your life?’
The comment had stung. It wasn’t the words. He’d said far worse to her growing up. It was the tone – nasty – as if he actually believed it, actually thought that about her. She’d tried to mask the hurt from her face as she’d taken in the bloated look of his face and the skinny arms that swung loose in the sleeves of his T-shirt. She’d tried to remember the last time she’d seen his eyes without the red veins and bloodshot rims.
A moment later Billy had reached the turning in the path half a metre behind her and stopped dead. He’d dropped his hands to his knees and thrown up a gush of liquid that still carried the sickly smell of almonds and alcohol.
A shiver ran down Molly’s spine as the memory unravelled in her mind. His entire visit from London that spring weekend had been fraught. He’d arrived late on the Friday night and had missed the dinner Joyce had cooked for him – lasagne, Billy’s favourite. Molly had been fuming with him right up until the moment he’d bounced through the front door. Then he’d grinned a big cheesy grin and the anger had dissolved.
He’d strode straight into the living room and opened up the sideboard, reaching for the old Monopoly board they’d had since for ever. The long-forgotten bottle of amaretto had come out with it. Molly and Billy had squabbled like old times over who would be the race car. Billy won the squabble of course. He always did.
Everything had been as it should’ve been, as it had always been, until Billy polished off the last of the golden liquid and landed on Molly’s Mayfair hotel, and couldn’t pay. Suddenly the atmosphere in the room had changed. Instead of laughing and calling it quits like they usually did, Billy had snatched up a pile of five-hundred notes from the bank and thrown them in Molly’s face. ‘There.’
‘Maybe it’s time we went to bed,’ Joyce had said in her soft, careful tone.
‘God, you two are such party poopers. It was only a joke. When did you all get so BOR-ING?’ His voice sounded too loud in their small living room. ‘I’m heading to the pub.’ And with that he’d stumbled out the front door, allowing it to slam shut behind him.
‘His studies are really stressful right now,’ Joyce had said in the silence, as if she needed to explain it to Molly.
‘I know. He’s just letting his hair down. I get it,’ she’d replied with the sting of tears in her eyes.
Had she got it? Molly wondered, shifting her legs in the sleeping bag. Whispers of other memories threatened Molly’s thoughts. She pushed them back and twisted around to face Erica.
Molly blinked. The night was pitch-black and it took her a moment to decide if Erica’s eyes were still closed. They weren’t.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered into the darkness. She held her breath and listened to the steady in and out of Erica’s breath. Erica hadn’t heard.
What was the point anyway? Molly wasn’t even sure what she was sorry for.
‘He was my brother too.’
Molly had refused to hear it the other night, refused to see that Erica missed Billy too.
So why did you have to let him down? Hurt squeezed Molly’s heart. Maybe she was being too hard on Erica, but it was Erica’s fault Molly was here, just as it was Erica’s fault Billy wasn’t. Was Molly supposed to forget that and move on? Because she couldn’t. Ever.
Molly pressed playback and stuffed the earphones into her ears. A familiar weight lay on her chest as the slow beat of the music filled her ears. Exhaustion pulled at her thoughts. Her breathing levelled and Molly felt herself fall into a deep sleep.