There's No Place Like Home, page 1
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
JANE LOVERING
CONTENTS
This Week’s TV - Channel Listings Magazine
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
More from Jane Lovering
About the Author
About Boldwood Books
This book is dedicated to Lin Chadwick (Hawkins) 1960–2022. We grew up one road apart and used to joke about being one another’s ‘oldest’ friends. She was a great supporter of my writing and books and had the best laugh of anyone I’ve ever known. We didn’t see one another much latterly, but when we did it was as though we’d never been apart. She is much missed.
This Week’s TV – Channel Listings Magazine
Tonight: UK Wildlife Channel 9.30pm
New Series Hunting the Hidden
Four teams of members of the public, each with a Celebrity Tracker, searching for mysterious giant cats around the UK. Each team is living wild in the surrounding countryside and filming themselves as they search for evidence, which will be evaluated by experts back in the studio.
With £50,000 prize money for scientific proof, and £250,000 for a captured animal to be won, expect competitive sightings and mistaken identities galore!
1
The rain dripped through the tent roof and plopped disconsolately onto the nylon beneath. We were all already so wet that nobody paid it any attention, but we shifted occasionally to keep out of the rapidly forming puddle in the middle of the groundsheet. At last, the girl who’d complained really loudly during the five-mile walk across the moors and whose make-up was beginning to come off in patches, leaving her with uneven eyebrows, said, ‘I thought it would be like Love Island.’
She sounded on the verge of tears. The man sitting next to her patted her arm briefly. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ he said, ‘I didn’t really read the description either. I’d envisaged sitting in a comfortable hide somewhere. With coffee.’
I looked around at the assorted collection of soggy humanity in the tent with me. We were three women and two men; all of us wearing almost all the clothes we possessed under the provided ‘waterproofs’, which weren’t, huge boots covered in mud and expressions ranging from the ‘mildly cheated’ to ‘about to sue’.
‘I wish this so-called celebrity would show up.’ Another man. He’d turned off his body-cam and microphone, I noticed. We were supposed to keep them on 24/7, unless asleep or going to the toilet, although there was very little to choose between this tent and lavatorial activities, when I looked at it. Damp trousers either way. ‘Then maybe we could get something to eat.’
‘I hope we get Bear Grylls.’ Odd-eyebrow girl produced a mirror and began repairing her face. Her accent was so sharply upper-class that she could have used it to cut her way out of the tent. ‘It would be the only thing that could make this worthwhile.’
‘That and the quarter of a mill we win.’ This was ‘Coffee in a Hide’ Man.
‘Should…’ I began cautiously, and everyone turned to look at me, rain-soaked hair flicking so that the inside of the tent pattered with more water. ‘Should we introduce ourselves? If we’re going to be stuck together in tents for the next few weeks on these moors, we should at least know the names of our fellow captives.’ I smiled, trying for a weak joke to lighten the atmosphere. ‘I’m Izzy, short for Isabel. I’m from York and I saw the ad for the new reality show and wrote in. I didn’t really care what happened from there on.’
I looked expectantly at the man to my left, the one who’d turned his comms off. He gave me a slightly dirty look as though I’d put him on an unexpected spot, but unless he wanted to be known as Camera-Off Man for the next month, he didn’t have much of a choice. ‘My name’s McKinley,’ he muttered. ‘From Glasgow.’ He didn’t tell us what he’d expected from the chirpy ad, but he did look as though fame and fortune were not his primary goal.
Eyebrow-woman was called Kanga, although I very much doubted that was her real name. We already knew about the Love Island expectations, and a very great deal more about life in a big house in Notting Hill with a million handbags and large disposable income than we could ever want to know. On my other side, a quiet and very young-looking girl who’d said nearly nothing so far introduced herself as Ruth. ‘I just wrote in asking if they had anything I could be on,’ she said sadly. ‘I didn’t really think it through, did I?’
This left the remaining man. He’d been talkative during our hike, and had put himself in charge of the map-reading which had got us here to these ready-pitched tents on this wind-flapped stretch of the North York Moors. He seemed capable and practical, and his face, under his Sherpa-style hat, was weather-beaten and brown. He looked slightly older than the rest of us. ‘I’m Sebastian,’ he said. ‘I’m a farmer from Sussex and, as I said, I didn’t quite realise what this was going to involve.’ He glanced around the group. ‘I think we’re all wondering what has hit us, aren’t we?’
We all went quiet again. I remembered the email that had come as a reply to my request for information on the show.
Hi Izzy!
We’re starting out filming a new game slash reality show next autumn – adventure and exploration and the chance to win a massive cash prize! If you’d be interested, please get in contact, sending your name, age, a little bit about yourself and a head and shoulders picture to ABCAdventures@gmail.com
Dax Williams
Yes, they’d actually written ‘game slash reality’ instead of punctuating it. That should have tipped me off to the type of thing I was dealing with. But then, I was desperate.
I looked around again. From their expressions, backs hunched against the wet fabric of the tent, the others were also recalling that they’d been promised adventure and exploration and that, on the evidence so far, those particular elements had been oversold to us. The likely trench-foot, dysentery and the opportunity to be knifed to death by one of our fellow participants had, by the looks of it, been undersold to an almost criminal degree.
‘I don’t suppose…’ Ruth said cautiously, ‘that there’s any chance that we could just go back and say we’ve changed our minds?’
Another silence, into which the rain plopped and the outside of the tent shivered as a breeze ran past on its way to somewhere more salubrious.
‘We signed something, I think,’ I said, when nobody else had anything to contribute. ‘To say we accepted their conditions?’
At this point, everyone started to talk at once.
‘…didn’t know it was going to be like this!’
‘…will be fine once the rain stops and we settle down.’
‘The money will come in useful, I mean, at least they’re paying us to be here…’
‘Bear Grylls better turn up soon, they wouldn’t let me bring my make-up case and I’ve only got a spoonful of cover-up left! I’ve got a lovely place in Notting Hill and I wouldn’t have come, only my agent told me this would be the quickest way into a presenting job!’
McKinley from Glasgow, I noticed, didn’t say anything. He’d got his knees under his chin in an attempt to keep his boots out of the rapidly increasing puddle in the centre of the tent, and he looked disgruntled to the point that his gruntle might be waving farewell forever.
I smiled at him. ‘Nothing to add?’ I asked.
He turned a look on me that was so sour I could feel my tongue dry out. ‘You’re the cheerleader then, are you?’ he said. ‘There’s always one Pollyanna. Going to tell us it’s not as bad as it could be?’
‘Izzy’s only being pleasant.’ This was Sebastian, who’d taken off his Sherpa hat now to reveal blond hair standing in points. ‘She’s right, we’re going to have to exist together and rely on one another to get through this. There’s no point in being rude for the sake of it.’
McKinley averted his gaze. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ But he wasn’t looking at me and he didn’t sound as though he really meant it.
My heart had dropped. Yes, actually, I had been about to point out that at least we had tents and we’d be heading to our permanent camp site tomorrow, where we’d been promised food and a proper toilet; it might be raining but at least it wasn’t snow or frost and we were being paid to be here, to say nothing of the putative prize money if we managed to find evidence of some kind of what Dax had called ‘an anomalous creature’. Quite frankly, it could have been worse, and I didn’t think that made me a twinkly starshine girl, just realistic.
At that moment, there was the sound of a vehicle outside and we all leaped to our feet and started trying to look like a bunch of reality TV contestants rather than wet, cold and tired campers.
Kanga consulted her mirror again, then snapped it away. ‘Do you really think we’ll get Bear Grylls?’ I asked her, as we filed our way out through the tent flap.
‘How many trackers who are celebrities are there?’ She pulled down the zip at the front of her jacket. At a guess, she was used to doing this to flash her cleavage; all she was showing was a down-filled gilet, but the thought was there.
Outside the tent there was still a lot of rain. The sky was leaden an d didn’t seem filled with the promise of sunny frolics, and beyond the camp was a Jeep. In the Jeep was Dax, who was the man behind the show. He leapt out, all legs and expensive waterproofs. With him were a cameraman, who’d been briefly introduced to us back in Leeds as Callum, and a sound man who seemed to go by Steve. I was beginning to realise why the introductions had been brief, presumably Dax hadn’t wanted them to let any details slip in case we ran away en masse.
‘Oh, good, you’re all here!’ he trilled. I wasn’t sure whether he’d expected us to have walked off or hidden from him, but given the conditions, it would have been a fair assumption. ‘Any questions so far?’
Ruth put her hand up, cautiously. ‘Um. Dax, is… well… is this it?’
‘It?’ Dax looked baffled inside his enormously fluffy down-filled hood, from which his face protruded past the tightly fastened toggle. He was wearing big, round-framed glasses, so the effect was that of being addressed by an owl in an anorak. ‘Well, yes. The premise of the show, as I think we’ve gone over, is that you’re all out here looking for evidence of anomalous creatures, big cats, that sort of thing.’ He looked around our spartan site once more. ‘You have to carry all your things, you see. Move from place’ – he indicated with his hands, as though we were all unfamiliar with the concept of motion – ‘to place. D’you see? Carrying your things? Whilst tracking?’
Another grim silence resulted. Whilst the premise of the show hadn’t exactly indicated five-star hotel rooms and spa treatments, the element of deprivation conjured by the tent, the rain and the gear hadn’t, I was fairly sure, been covered in sufficient detail. The five of us huddled closer together. Darkness was beginning to crayon its way around the edges of the moor, and the early November wind was sharp. We were wet, cold, hungry and tired and I hoped that Dax wasn’t readying a pep talk because we were likely to rush him and steal the keys to the Jeep.
Callum shouldered his camera nervously. He was young, and looked as though this might be his first real job that didn’t involve burgers.
‘Anyway. I’ve brought you your tracker,’ Dax carried on, a little uncertainly. ‘Everyone, I’d like you to meet Bo “Junior” Acassi!’
Another man peeled himself out of the Jeep. He was enormously tall, wearing only a T-shirt which showed off tattoos a little darker than his skin, and army trousers tucked into calf-high laced-up boots. His head was shaved to a shiny baldness and he looked as though he’d have been more at home gunning down insurgents with an AK-47 than camping out in the moors of North Yorkshire.
‘Hi,’ we all chorused. Except McKinley, who was still silent.
‘Junior is a very well-known tracker in the US,’ Dax was talking quickly, ‘where he hosts a show tracking Bigfoot for one of the cable channels.’
I wondered if he was talking fast to try to distract us from thinking about what made a celebrity. I had certainly never watched any ‘cable channel Bigfoot programmes’ and, from the expressions on my fellow captives’ faces, neither had they.
Junior raised a hand in greeting. I watched Kanga stare at his muscles. They were improbably large; he looked as though someone had taken an ordinary man and inflated him with a bike pump in strategic areas. ‘Hi,’ he said, his voice so deep as to be practically infrasound. ‘I’m looking forward to tracking this here big cat of yours.’
‘Yes, well, we don’t actually know that there’s a big cat,’ Dax, looking flustered, went on, still speaking fast. ‘That’s the point of the show, you see. We’ve got groups all over the country trying to find proof; there’s a group on Bodmin Moor, looking for the Beast of Bodmin, and one up in the Highlands of Scotland, and another in Cannock Chase – all places where out of place animals have been sighted recently. The show revolves around you all finding that evidence.’ He sounded as though he’d been pitching that idea in the same combination of words for so long that he was parroting it without really thinking about what it meant.
For us, out here in on the moors, it evidently meant wet, mud and misery. We shuffled about in a discontented way like a herd of cows seeing the vet on the horizon, but nobody actually said, ‘Who’s going to watch a bunch of people getting rained on and arguing and not finding anything?’ Compared to some of the game shows currently on TV, this was practically genius-level viewing.
‘Plus, there’s the whole social element.’ Dax loosened a toggle and reached a hand inside his enormously insulated coat to push hair back under the hood. ‘This is why we’ve asked you to keep your cameras and microphones on at all times. People will be fascinated watching a group of such disparate people trying to cooperate and establish their positions within the group. I’m seeing it as a sort of Big Brother meets Love Island.’ He did the ‘choppy thing’ with his hands again. ‘With elements of Survival of the Fittest. You see,’ he finished, now sounding slightly desperate.
Steve coughed and adjusted the boom mic.
‘With enormous overtones of Lord of the Flies.’ This was McKinley, speaking for practically the first time without being spoken to first. His gruntle was still not in evidence.
‘Yes, well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?’ Dax said, waspishly. ‘And, Mac, turn your camera back on for the love of god, we can all see that your live feed isn’t enabled.’
Looking as though he would happily club Dax to death with a tent peg, Mac grumpily groped about inside his jacket and the little light showing he was recording blinked on his shoulder.
‘Right, I’ll leave you all to get to know one another then.’ Dax began shuffling towards the Jeep, without turning his back on us. Perhaps he assumed that Mac really would attempt murder if he didn’t keep an eye on him. ‘And then tomorrow you can start out over the moors. We’re setting up the camp site now and we’ll send the coordinates tomorrow morning, unless, of course, Junior picks up the track of an animal in the meantime.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Sebastian’s head came up. ‘What do we eat tonight then?’
Dax’s retreat got faster. ‘Er. I think there may be basic supplies in your packs?’
We all looked towards the rucksacks we’d been given. They lay in a damp pile outside the tent and were not giving off ‘four-course dinner’ vibes. By the time we all looked up again, Dax, Callum and Steve were speeding away in the Jeep, only visible because the lights were bouncing their way across the moor. It was almost completely dark, and raining again.
‘Well, that’s a bit of a bugger,’ Sebastian said. ‘I was at least hoping that they’d send us in someone to cook.’
Everyone chimed in here with their own expectations and it became evident that we’d all been fed different stories about what the living environment would be whilst we were tracking the, probably mythical, animals. Kanga had been told there would be ‘accommodation provided’, from which she had deduced that there would be guest houses, hot showers and comfortable beds. Ruth and Sebastian thought that ‘all needs catered for’ meant that we’d be bussed to a nearby town when filming finished, to hotels. Mac, once again, didn’t say anything and I had to admit that I hadn’t really thought about it. Someone had mentioned paying us £100 per day whilst we were out here and then they’d dangled the prize money, and I would have agreed to sleep in a cave wrapped in leaves for a chance at that.
‘We’d better eat,’ rumbled Junior. ‘Gonna be a long day tomorrow.’
Nobody asked how he knew this. I think we’d had all our ability to question anything squashed under the insistent rain and the amount of mud that clung to our boots and doubled our bodyweight.
Happy campers we were not.
After a few moments wrangling the baggage, Sebastian, who seemed to have become our de facto leader, in his own head if nowhere else, wrenched out a small primus stove and some packets of what looked horribly like dehydrated animal feed. He sent Kanga and Ruth to fetch some water from the stream we could hear rushing its ominous way past the campsite, whilst he and Junior assembled the food and Mac and I were designated In Charge of The Primus and told to light the stove and get it going somewhere out of the wind. ‘But not inside the tent,’ Sebastian said sternly. ‘People can die from carbon monoxide inhalation that way.’
