know. Probably. There are a lot of people there from different professions, and—”
“We’re going back down.” Daisy holds up her hands. “We’re not gambling with Al’s health. Come on.” She gives Leanne a small shove. “Let’s go.”
“No!” Leanne twists sharply to one side and, for one heart-stopping second, I think she’s going to hit Daisy. “You can go back down if you want, but I’m—”
“Could everyone please stop talking about me as if I’m dead, or something!” Al steps out from beside me and holds up her hands. “I am here, you know. Seriously, I appreciate the concern, guys, but no one is going to miss out on the holiday of a lifetime just because I’m a twenty-a-day lard arse with crap lungs and a heavy load.” She pats the roll of flesh that overhangs the waistband of her black combat shorts.
Daisy shakes her head firmly. “Nice speech, but no one loves a dead hero.”
“Fuck off, Dais!” Al laughs then looks at Shankar. “How much further have we got to go? Like, how many more hours?”
He shrugs. “Thirty minutes, maybe forty?”
“All right, then.” Al reaches down for her backpack but Shankar grabs it first. There’s a stand-off as they each hold a strap and lock eyes, urging the other to back down. Normally, there’s no way Al would ever let a man do something she’s capable of doing herself.
“Miss. I carry. You breathe.” There’s a quiet tenacity to the way Shankar speaks, and although Al shakes her head, I can see her resolve waver. Her high colour has paled but she’s still breathing shallowly.
“I’ll take yours,” she says, reaching for the smaller rucksack on the guide’s back. “We can swap, but only until I’ve got my breath back. Five minutes, ten minutes tops.”
Forty-five minutes later, Shankar shrugs off Al’s backpack, flipping it onto the ground as though it’s a pillow, and points to the building down a small track to our left. “We are here.”
Rising out of the white blanket of cloud that surrounds us are three separate houses, linked by fenced walkways, their three-tiered roofs silhouetted against the landscape like Chinese temples. The window frames are painted in shades of red, ochre and turquoise, and stone steps lead up to an enormous wooden door on the front of the main house. A high wall runs around the perimeter of the grounds, a large wooden gate closing the retreat off from the world. Prayer flags flutter in the wind and the sound of laughter drifts across the breeze.
“Wow.” I unbuckle my own backpack, twist my body sideways so the pack drops to the ground, lean back and groan with pleasure and relief as I press my shoulder blades together.
Daisy skips towards Leanne, grips her arm and presses her cheek against the top of her shoulder. “Oh, my God, it’s even more gorgeous than it looked on the website.”
Leanne grins at the compliment, drops her backpack and wraps an arm around Daisy. “Told you! And you all thought I was going to bring you to some kind of shack.”
“Actually,” says Al, climbing the last few steps, “I thought we’d be sitting in a paddy field, meditating for twelve hours a day before being force-fed mungbean sandwiches.”
“The paddy fields are back down the mountain,” Leanne says, pointing. “Off you go!”
“There’s the river!” Daisy lets go of Leanne and points excitedly into the distance. I strain to see through the trees then spot something blue and shimmery. “Is that the waterfall I can hear?”
“Probably.” Leanne reaches for her backpack and hauls it back onto her shoulders. “Come on, they’re expecting us.”
Daisy squeals and hurries after her as she makes her way down the track. I wait for Al to catch up. She slips Shankar’s rucksack off her shoulders and hands it to him. He slips it on effortlessly.
“Thank you.” She holds out her right hand. “I couldn’t have made it up here without your help.”
Shankar shakes her hand while simultaneously touching his left hand against his right forearm as a sign of respect. “No problem, miss.”
“For you.” Al reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hundred rupee note. “Please.” She presses it into his hand.
He accepts the money with a smile and tucks it into the little leather wallet attached to his belt, then turns to go back down the mountain.
“You’ll come in?” I say. “The least we can do is offer you a sandwich and a cup of chai. I’m sure the owners won’t mind.”
The smile slips from his face. “No, thank you.”
“Please, you can’t walk all the way back down again without a break. It wouldn’t be right.”
His gaze flicks to the left, to the retreat at the end of the track. “No.” An emotion I can’t read flickers across his face, and then it’s gone.
“But …” The words fall away as Shankar turns on his heel and, without another word, starts back down the mountain.
“Emma, Al, come on!” the girls shout from below us.
A tall man with shoulder-length black hair, wearing cut-off camouflage trousers and a grey long-sleeved T-shirt, is standing beside them, holding the gate open.
“Hi,” the man shouts, raising a hand in greeting. “I’m Isaac.”
Present Day
Sheila sent me home, no questions asked. She heard me throwing up in the ladies’ loo and immediately diagnosed me as suffering from an upset tummy. She didn’t even give me the opportunity to object.
“I saw you nibbling the corner of that sandwich and I knew something was wrong. It’s not like you not to have an appetite. Get yourself home, Jane. We don’t want to risk you passing it on to everyone else. We’re short-staffed as it is.”
I think she would have driven me home herself if I hadn’t pointed out that I had my bicycle with me. No point driving me home when I only live a five-minute cycle away and it’s all downhill.
That was two hours ago. I’ve spent the last thirty minutes sitting in front of my laptop. I thought it would be harder to find Al. I thought that, after five years, she’d be impossible to track down, but, unlike me, she hasn’t changed her name. She’s even got a Facebook profile. Alexandra Gideon. There were only three listed and two of them live in the States. Her cover image is of Brighton seafront and the profile picture’s a rainbow, and that’s it, that’s all the information I’ve got to go on, but I know it’s her. She always said she wanted to leave London and move to Brighton.
It’s been four years since we last spoke. We kept in touch for the first few months after we got back from Nepal, talking on the phone every day, trying to make sense of what had happened, but then Al sold her story to the press and everything changed. I couldn’t understand why she’d done
