In the bedroom, calm was being restored. The children were awake. Having scared each other with stories about phantoms in the old-fashioned wardrobe behind the door, they could not be prevailed upon to return to their shared bed, until Dad promised to share it with them. In a gesture as magnanimous as it was practical, Sadie offered to trade places with Celine, and take her camp bed, as it was closest to the wardrobe, leaving the double bed for her friend. ‘For you and Angus,’ she murmured, ‘but only after lights out. Simon might blurt something inappropriate tomorrow. Inadvertently, of course. Angus shouldn’t be out there in the corridor by himself anyway. It’s too cold out there.’
They could hear Simon whistling tunelessly outside as he urinated loudly into the shrubbery. He was snoring even more loudly only minutes later when the cabin was dark and Angus tiptoed to Celine’s side with the aid of a flashlight.
‘Ow are you, ma jolie copine?’ He snuggled up to her. ‘Time for spoons.’ She edged her back into his protective embrace, and patted his hands as they cradled her, in which position the couple swiftly and gratefully fell asleep, Angus’s happiness gradually subsiding in the sanctity of a chaste communion.
Some time in the early hours of the morning, Angus awoke, aware of movement beside the bed. A shadow passed in front of the window before he heard a familiar ‘Heh-heh.’ He sat up and to see Simon, ridiculous in disordered hair and pyjamas decorated with some bird pattern, looking down on him.
‘What are you doing, Simon?’
’Heh-heh. Heh-heh. So that’s why you changed beds!’
‘I said, what are you doing?’ He saw that the birds were turkeys. How apt.
‘Counting tins. I gave Celine’s aunt a can of baked beans. There should be five left, but there are only four. Did you take one?’
‘Of course I didn’t. Why would I do that? Why would you bring six tins anyway?’
‘Scout motto: Be Prepared. Look: you’re waking the kids up.’
‘You woke me up. Go count your tins in the corridor.’
‘O.K, but I need to take the box out there.’ Before Angus could protest, Simon with some groping and panting had lifted the box over the beds. A stifled grunt at the door suggested painful contact with some obstacle, but Sadie did not wake, and Angus sighed.
He lay awake trying to Make Allowance, until he decided to go and remonstrate with Simon. The man was tactless, self-centred, boorish, clumsy, and self-satisfied. And now he counts tins in the dark! No wonder he wears turkey pyjamas.
He sat down heavily on the hideabed in the cold half-light, rehearsing in his mind what to say. Simon was crouched on the floor with his back to him, absorbed in re-packing the supplies he had scattered on the floor by the light of a plug-in night-light Suddenly there came a rattling of the door-handle, and an instant later, a beam of dazzling light shone directly in Angus’s face. The intruder snapped on the overhead light, and both young men saw Don Monaghan, his white hair upended, flashlight in hand, and a look of alarm in his wild eyes. He spoke first.
