Helena’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘Tell me about her.’
And so I forgot about my own worries and settled down by the warmth of the campfire to do just that.
‘I never wanted to go on the camping trip.’ Helena was exhilarated and full of emotion after I had filled her with knowledge of her mother. ‘I pleaded with them not to make me go.’
I knew all this but I listened intently, fascinated to hear the story I knew so well from one of its main characters. It was like seeing my favourite book come alive on stage.
‘I’d wanted to go home that weekend. There was a boy …’ She laughed and looked at me. ‘Isn’t it always about a boy?’
I couldn’t relate but smiled all the same.
‘A new boy had moved into the house next door to us. Samuel James was his name, the most beautiful creature alive.’ Her eyes were bright, as though the fire’s sparks had leaped in and set her pupils alight. ‘I met him that summer and fell in love, and we had the most wonderful time together. Sinful.’ She raised her eyebrows and I smiled. ‘I’d been back at school for two months and I missed him dreadfully. I begged and pleaded with my parents to let me go home but to no avail. They were punishing me,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘I’d been caught cheating in my history exam in the same week I’d been caught smoking behind the gymnasium. Unacceptable, even by my standards.’ She looked around the group. ‘And so I was stuck going away with this lot as though separating me from my best friends would suddenly make me an angel. All the same, it turned out to be a punishment I don’t think I entirely deserved.’
‘Of course not,’ I empathised. ‘How did you get here?’
Helena sighed. ‘Marcus and I made arrangements early in the evening to meet up when everyone had gone to sleep. He was the only one who had a packet of cigarettes so the other two boys went with him and, well, Joan,’ Helena looked at her friend on the other side of the campfire with fondness, ‘she was afraid to stay in the tent by herself so she came too. We moved away from the camp so our teachers wouldn’t see the cigarettes alight or smell the smoke. We didn’t walk that far at all, just a few minutes or so, but we found ourselves here,’ she shrugged. ‘I can’t really explain it any other way.’
‘That must have been terrifying for you all.’
‘No more than it was for you.’ She looked at me. ‘And at least we had each other. I couldn’t imagine going through it all alone.’
She wanted me to talk but I wouldn’t. It wasn’t in my nature to open up. Not unless it was with Gregory.
‘You can’t even have been born when we went missing. How do you know so much?’
‘Let’s just say I was an inquisitive child.’
‘Inquisitive indeed.’ She studied me again and I looked away, finding her glare intrusive. ‘Do you know what has happened to everybody’s family here?’ She nodded at the rest of the group.
‘Yes.’ I looked around them all, seeing their parents’ faces in each of them. ‘I made it my life’s work to know. I followed up on all of you every year, wanting to see if anyone came home.’
‘Well, thank you for helping me feel one step closer to it now.’
A silence fell between us, Helena no doubt lost in her memories of home.
Eventually, she spoke again. ‘My grandmother was a proud woman, Sandy. She married my grandfather when she was eighteen years old and they had six children. Her younger sister, who they could never seem to marry off, embarked on a mysterious affair with a man she would never name and to everybody’s shock, gave birth to a baby boy,’ she chuckled. ‘That my grandfather’s face was written all over that child was not lost on my grandmother, nor were the shillings that disappeared from their savings just as the new clothes appeared on the child. Of course, those things are entirely coincidental,’ she said in a singsong voice, stretching her legs out in front of her. ‘There are a great many brown-haired, blue-eyed men in the country and the fact my grandfather had a fondness for drinking would explain the dents in their savings.’ Her eyes twinkled at me.
I looked at Helena in confusion. ‘I’m sorry, Helena, I’m not sure why you’re telling me this.’
She laughed. ‘That you have ended up here with us could be one of life’s great coincidences.’
I nodded.
‘But my grandmother didn’t believe in coincidences. And neither do I. You’re here for a reason, Sandy.’
Helena added another log to the dying fire and its weight sent a pile of adolescent ashes racing one another down the side of the burning tower. The flames were awakened from the embers and sleepily began to climb up the log, casting out heat to Helena and me.
I had been talking to her for hours, filling her in on all the details of her family life that I knew of. An unusual feeling had stirred within me as soon as I’d realised whose company I was keeping. It washed over me in waves, each wave relaxing me, making my eyes that little bit heavier, causing my mind to tick that little bit slower, and for the tension in my muscles to relax just a little bit more. It was just a little bit, mind you, but it was something.
All of my life people had told me that my questions were irrelevant, that my over-interest in cases of missing persons unnecessary, but right there in the woods every stupid, embarrassing, irrelevant and unnecessary question I had ever asked about Helena Dickens meant the world to her. I knew there had been a reason for my endless searches, my infinite interrogations of myself and of others. And the greatest thing of all was that there wasn’t just one reason for it all; sitting next to me by the campfire there were four others.
Oh, the relief. That’s what the feeling was. The first sense of relief my mind had felt since I was ten years old.
The sky was growing brighter; the tips of the trees that had been burned by the sun by day had been cooled by the night and now shaded the sky a cool blue. The birds that had been silent during the dark hours were now warming their vocal cords, like the idiosyncratic rendition of an orchestra tuning, pre-performance. Bernard, Derek, Marcus and Joan lay asleep in their sleeping bags, covered by blankets and looking how they should have the night of their school camping trip. I wondered, had they slept soundly through that night instead of venturing into the woods, would they have been back in their families’ arms all those years ago, or would the secret door to this world have welcomed them in regardless?
Was it an accident that we were all here? Did we stumble upon a blip in the earth’s creation, a black hole on the surface, or was this just a part of life that was unspoken throughout the centuries? Were we lost and unaccounted for, or was this where we truly belonged and our ‘normal’ lives the original error? Was this a place for those who felt like outsiders in life to belong, to finally feel relief? Despite my own relief, my questions kept flowing. The world around me had changed but some things remained constant.
‘Were you happy?’ I looked around at the others sleeping. ‘Was everybody happy?’
Helena smiled softly. ‘We’ve all asked the question of why, and there is no answer that we know of. Yes, we were happy. We were all very, very happy in our lives.’ She paused. ‘Sandy,’ she broke the silence again, watching me with that amused expression as if enjoying a private joke, ‘believe it or not we’re very happy here too. We’ve spent more years living here than anywhere else. The past is a distant but pleasurable