Free Ibrahim & Reenie by David Llewellyn Page B

Everyone goes away, sooner or later. Stupid to invest even a tiny bit of trust in any one person. If she had learned one thing in her life, it was that you can only ever trust yourself. Never mind. She preferred it on her own, preferred the pace of it.
    It took all morning and much of the afternoon for her to cover just five miles, and in that time the landscape changed very little. Sometimes there were hills, real hills, and the effort of pushing the trolley up each incline exhausted her. At the top of these hills the countryside reached out in seas of recently ploughed earth, the black plastic hay bales like humpbacked whales coming up for air pungent with the scent of fresh manure.
    Soon she’d have to stop and rest, but more importantly find somewhere tucked away and private that she could use as a toilet. That was the one thing most people didn’t consider on a walk like this. They’d forget it’s not just food and clean clothes you need. Sooner or later you’ll have to answer nature’s call. Not a problem in the cities, where there were public toilets, with hot water and soap, but there was no such luxury between cities. There she had to find a bit of privacy, and even then it was a risky, clumsy kind of privacy; behind hedges or in abandoned coal sheds. Dignity is the first thing sacrificed on a long walk, but she didn’t mind so much. She wasn’t too proud to piss in the open, though she wondered how it might look to a passer-by.
    Eventually she found a place, a short distance from the main road, secluded and sheltered behind a small thatch of trees, in the corner of a vast and barren field. At the top of the field was a farmhouse, but even from some distance she could see it was in poor shape. The outer buildings had yawning black holes in their roofs, and she saw the barely visible hulk of a rusting red tractor, consumed by weeds, in what might once have been a farmyard.
    Did anyone live there? Could anyone live there? Perhaps, if the farmhouse was abandoned and derelict, she might find her way inside and use it as a shelter for the night. It might not be as comfortable as the house she’d left behind in Cardiff, but it would be better than the tent, and she was drawing up a plan to investigate further when a battered, ancient-looking van pulled up in the farmyard.
    The people who climbed out – two men and a woman – didn’t look much like farmers. The men had long hair, scruffy clothes. The woman wore her hair in straggly, dirty-blonde dreadlocks. Whoever these people were, they hadn’t noticed her, and so she carried on setting up her camp. She washed and changed her clothes, and ate a light meal of bread and cheese. She pissed behind a windbreaker that she had found, before setting off from Cardiff, in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The windbreaker had last seen daylight on a blustery Bournemouth weekend maybe thirty years ago, when it was used to save Reenie, Jonathan and their jam sarnies from the wind and sand.
    The afternoon and early evening passed quietly. She fed Solomon, read from a spine-creased Jean Plaidy novel she’d read at least half a dozen times before, and rose to the challenge of a crossword she’d been tackling for the last five days. When it became too dark for her to read, she put away the novel and the copy of Puzzler , and she and Solomon retired to the warmth of her tent.
    The first vans and cars began to arrive shortly after ten, and she heard music – if it could be called that – coming from the farmhouse. There was no discernible melody, just an electronic wail drifting on the night air, and beneath that a ground-shaking drum – pounding, insistent. When this music had been playing for quarter of an hour or more, Reenie crawled out from her tent, and saw in the distant farmyard flashing, multi-coloured lights and a shifting wall of silhouetted, dancing bodies.
    She unfolded one of her deckchairs and sat in that