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‘Boring. When are we going to read the book?’ He had finished his tea in record time and licked the plate clean.
‘When we’ve washed up. We have to go and wash up in that barn over there, do you see it? I’ll need you to help me carry everything and dry up, so you’ll have to be very grown up and sensible. I’m not sure whether you might be too little to be able to do something like that.’
He looked at her sideways, eyes narrowing.
‘Do you know what, Mam?’ he said ‘I think maybe I might actually be too little. I think I should go and play Goat Gunge with Oliver instead.’
He wasn’t stupid, this son of hers.
* * *
She finished the washing up, wiping dry the last couple of teaspoons. Harry had “helped” for about five minutes and then she’d sent him back to the tent to put away the pans. Even from the barn, where the washing up sink was, she’d been able to hear the loud clatter as he dropped the pans back into the box. Well, at least they were put away. One more sticker on his reward chart for being helpful, one step closer to his goal of Florida. She crossed the campsite after him, carrying her box of clean plates. As she passed Oliver Sutherland’s campervan, she could hear arguing from within.
‘I don’t want to. It doesn’t taste nice!’ she heard Oliver yell.
‘Can’t you try it?’ his dad said.
‘No. No, no, no. I want proper food, like Mummy’s. Not this stupid camping food!’
It could have been Harry talking. She allowed herself a smile of recognition. Perhaps Oliver wasn’t such an angel after all.
She opened the tent flap to find Harry sitting cross-legged next to the pan box, staring in bemusement at the shiny new phone James had given him, worth about five times more than hers.
‘Mam, my phone doesn’t work,’ he said.
She tried not to smile. She’d wondered how long it would take for him to realise.
‘What, the phone Daddy gave you? That phone? How sad. We’re in the middle of nowhere, so you won’t be able to get a signal. Never mind.’ She ruffled the hair on top of his head in a manner she hoped was consoling.
She’d known even when she booked the campsite from the reviews on the CampTastic website that mobile phone signals in the Elderthwaite valley were next to useless and the site didn’t provide free Wi-Fi, so she hadn’t turned a hair when James had given Harry the phone a couple of weeks earlier and told him to contact him every day when he was away to “make sure he was having a nice time”. She knew this was James’s way of checking up on her via Harry, but Harry wouldn’t be contacting anybody from Elder Fell Farm.
‘I promised I’d talk to him every day. He’s going to be cross with me.’
‘Then I’ll explain. Don’t worry. The games you’ve downloaded will still work, but you can’t use it for anything that needs a signal. Now, it’s time for a shower and then we’ll put our pyjamas on and have a hot chocolate and a nice long story.’
It was already nearly eight o’clock, and if it wasn’t for the sheep poo, she would have let him wait until tomorrow morning for a shower, but she couldn’t let him go to bed still smelling, especially as she was sharing the tent with him. She’d made him change his clothes and wash his hands and face, but she could still smell it; it must be in his hair. There was no way she was going to let that hair touch his pillow before he’d washed it.
‘Can you manage a shower on your own? I’ll come and show you how to work it.’
It was always a dilemma when she was on her own with Harry — take him into the ladies with her or send him into the gents on his own? — but when they got there she realised that, unlike the toilets, the washing facilities here were undifferentiated as to gender, with two shower rooms in one part of the outbuilding which might once have been stables.
She opened the door to the first shower room, gingerly. It was old and heavy and creaked on its hinges. The shower had seen better days. Though it was clean enough, the head was so old and inefficient it proved difficult to get enough water to come out of it for Harry to get a wash. The grey shower tray didn’t match the green tiles, the floor was painted concrete, and the paint was wearing away from years of mopping. The hooks for towels were broken and there was only a plastic patio chair to put clothes on. Cobwebs full of dead flies occupied the corners high above the reach of the cleaners and the single bulb wasn’t enough to banish the shadows in the corners. It looked old and unloved.
‘Will you be okay on your own?’ Amy wondered if, when she had to come for a shower, she would be okay on her own with all those spiders around.
‘Yeah!’ he declared as he wriggled out of his clothes.
‘Make sure you bolt the door in case anyone else comes in to use the showers.’
‘I will.’
She left him to it, giving him a bottle of shower gel and shampoo, more in hope than expectation that he would use it. She could hear him singing a song about ‘Mummy’s butt’ to the tune of Baby Shark halfway across the campsite as she went back to the tent, but at least that meant he was happy.
She put the kettle on the little stove, moving it carefully outside the tent first, and made hot chocolate as she watched for Harry coming back from the showers. He wasn’t usually a big fan of hygiene, but today he was obviously enjoying the hot water and the singing, and eventually he appeared, hair wet and tousled, pyjamas on inside out and trailing his sopping wet towel through all the muddy patches on the campsite. She was very glad there was a washing machine in the barn; she was going to be using it every day at this rate.
The sun was behind the mountains now and the campsite in shadow though the tops of the fells were lit like candles in the last of the sun’s rays.
‘Come on, let’s settle down and read our book!’ Amy reluctantly shut out the views with the cool evening air. Inside the sleeping area it was cosy; there was soft light from the camping lantern and a string of fairy lights. Their beds looked comfy, covered with special blankets she’d made for the camping trip from some old clothes and deconstructed charity shop jumpers, in cheerful shades of red, yellow and orange. Crafting was her true passion; she could spend hours creating new textiles from old. It had been her one escape through the miserable years of the divorce and her mother’s death, taking something worn and broken and turning it into something new.
