It had been, frankly, a rather wretched Friday. It started badly when Mr Jameson, the chief librarian, trapped me (again) in Maritime History (M to R) and practically wrestled me to the floor. When I told him for the umpteenth time that my interests lay in a different direction, he rather breezily replied that he was 'up for soixante neuf if that's what you mean'. Eventually I fought him off with a leather bound copy of 'A History of Nelson (Vol 2)'. Then, over lunch I had to listen to Maureen who spent an hour cataloguing (as only a qualified librarian can) every sex game that she and Mark, her current squeeze, had played over the last month. When she came to the incident involving the pool cue, the feathers and whipped cream I had to excuse myself and seek sanctuary in the Ladies. Finally, to cap it all, in the afternoon I received an email from my mother saying that she was planning to come and visit next week and could I ring her back that evening.
So it was little surprise that as I climbed off the bus and crawled along the High Street that night, I had little on my mind but a hot bath, a cold drink and an evening devoted to The Shopping Channel. If I had been more attentive I would have noticed the rather beguiling blonde girl, in the surplus Army teeshirt and combat pants, leaning against the wall of the bank. I would have certainly remembered having exchanged smiles with her a few days earlier as I queued at the check-out of Kwiksave clutching my bargain bottle of vodka and sad-looking stack of ready-cooked meals (portions for one). She had looked at me as if to say: 'You look a likely lass.' In fact, it had been so long since I'd had a date that I was not so much likely as a racing certainty.
Anyway, as I passed the bank doorway, the blonde suddenly grabbed my wrists and another, bigger, more formidable woman helped her bundle me down an alley. It was all done with such little fuss that, if performed in the library, it would have barely caused Mr Montague, our most regular patron, to stir from his afternoon nap. My God, I thought, this is Okehampton, not Moscow.
In the alley the two women bound my wrists tightly and force-marched me out of the town and towards deepest Dartmoor. I didn't mind the knotted wrists so much – with Clara that used to be a rather ordinary Friday night – but I was wearing sandals and my feet were soon bruised and blistered.
After about an hour we stopped and they untied me so that I could catch my breath and have a drink. I slipped off my sandals and spread out my toes.
'What's this all about?' I asked them pleadingly.
The bigger one, a rather ugly woman, probably in her late twenties, just stared back and spat at the ground.
'Don't mind Vixen,' said the other, prettier one. 'She don't talk much.' She passed me a bottle of water and I took a long swig. 'They call me Pussy Willow. We've had our eye on you for a while. We're taking you back to camp.'
'Why? What can you want with me?' I began to rack my brain: had I paid my final year's subscription to the Girl Guides? I had left under a bit of a cloud after that incident with Veronica Hardcastle. Perhaps these were the Provisional wing, exacting retribution. I felt so exhausted I began to cry.
Vixen laughed. 'You goin' to be our sex slave,' she hissed in a thick Liverpool accent.
'Really?' I said and began to perk up immediately. I slipped my sandals back on, helped Pussy Willow (such a delightful name) to her feet and held out my wrists for tying. 'Well, hadn't we better be getting on? The others will be wondering where we are.'
We reached camp just as the sun was disappearing into the hilltops. There were another three girls waiting for us. One appeared to be the leader. She looked a little like that girl in Lost: you know, the cute, olive-skinned one, but she had a patch over one eye and about a dozen tattoos that appeared to have been self-inflicted. The others called her Nell.
She undid my blouse and my braless boobs tipped out. 'Nice tits,' she said, squeezing them like oranges. 'You done well, girls. Have some beetle stew.'
'Lovely,' said Vixen. 'Has it got flies in it? I likes flies.'
Amongst this band of outlaws, the girls fulfilled all the roles required of such adventures. Vixen, Pussy assured me, was hard on the outside but a real sweetie when you got to know her. But do I want to get to know her, I thought to myself. Pussy Willow herself was the ditzy girl whom everyone else loved and wanted to help. There were two other girls. Grunt was German, Polish or possibly from Newcastle. She certainly gabbled in a foreign language, so that whenever she said something, the rest of us were required to look knowingly as if it had been of profound importance, whilst hoping that we would later discover that she did, in fact, speak English after all. The final member of the band was a Baroness who had fallen on hard times (something to do with a Stock Market crash). She was called Lady Shaver.
