Free Flight by Isabel Ashdown Page A

‘Lisa,’ she said, and her hand quietly reached for Rob’s, their fingers lacing in the narrow gap between their bodies. Wren didn’t know how to feel about this, having never seen Rob with a girlfriend before. There was something unsettling about seeing those two hands intertwined, when the owners seemed little more than strangers.
    ‘ Rob ?’ Laura asked, nodding her head at Lisa. You dirty beggar , her face said. ‘Anything you want to tell us?’
    Rob flushed a deep shade of pink, and Wren realised he was avoiding eye contact with her, addressing Laura and Lisa, but managing to blank her out altogether. ‘Um, so – this is Lisa. She’s – well, she’s kind of – coming with us to Stonehenge.’ His eyes met Laura’s, mutely begging her to be nice.
    ‘Really?’ Laura said, and Wren could sense her assessing Lisa’s attire, her clean hair and fresh skin. ‘Have you been to Stonehenge before, Lisa?’
    Lisa tugged at Rob’s hand. ‘No. But I’m really looking forward to it – it should be fun.’
    ‘Fun. Yup. Should be fun.’ Laura stuck an unlit cigarette in the corner of her mouth and wrestled herself back into her rucksack. She passed the trolley handle to Rob. ‘You can take this now you’re here. It’s a bloody liability – the wheels keep jamming and it weighs a ton. It’ll give you a chance to show Lisa your man-muscles.’
    After the first leg of their trip, they were lucky enough to get picked up by a minibus driver who was heading for Salisbury. Once she had settled in to the journey, it turned out Lisa was a chatterbox, filling every silence with stories of her work behind the counter in the student union bar, grasping Rob’s thigh every time she laughed or told a joke. Laura sat up front, making faces over the headrest and chatting to the driver, who eventually took pity on them and went out of his way to drop them close to Stonehenge, where they could walk the last stretch to the festival site. They took it in turns to wheel and drag the cumbersome tent trolley, although Rob wouldn’t let Lisa anywhere near it, instead taking her turns for her. The road was lined with slow-moving camper vans and flag-draped rusting buses, while hundreds of dusty ramblers took the same route on foot, entering what appeared to be an entire village dedicated to the celebration of midsummer. In the distance, the strangely unimposing stones stood to one side of the road, against a landscape of tents and tepees to the other. In the queue to the site, one woman reclined on the truck bed of an old Austin van, her long skirt pulled high as she sunned her legs in the bright Salisbury light. A dehydrated-looking greyhound lay panting at her feet. From her horizontal position she was reading poetry aloud, accepting the applause from the stationary vehiclesto either side. It was uncomfortable to be there alongside Lisa: she looked like an overprivileged child in her pastel outfit and scrubbed skin, gaping in alarm at the noisy hordes of unwashed explorers who hung from their van windows smoking roll-ups and laughing with fellow travellers.
    ‘Hashish?’ This was the first word uttered to Lisa as they passed into the tent field, spoken by a loose-eyed stranger, topless and nut-brown. His ribcage corseted his body in deep grooves as he lunged towards Lisa, flapping a sinewy arm after her. ‘Hey, angel? Brownies?’
    A huge dog squatted to crap in the middle of the path, fixing his blood-strained eyes on Lisa as she approached. She shrieked. Laura and Wren, walking behind, clapped their hands over their mouths to control their laughter and Rob looked back and scowled. ‘You’re like a pair of bloody kids.’ He sighed, trying hard to deflect their idiocy. ‘So, where do you want to camp?’ When Laura shrugged and smirked in reply, Rob looked furious and he stomped ahead with a startled Lisa trailing from his hand like a pretty flutter of streamers. ‘We’re off to find the toilets,’ he called back to