“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “We give up.”
“No we don’t.” Probably if Rosaline had been going to get hypercompetitive over anything, it should have been the television competition she was on. Not a spontaneous game of I Spy in the dark. But her honour was at stake here. “I can totally get this. Tortoiseshell butterfly. Thistles. Tyre tracks. Somebody’s thumb.”
Harry put a gentle hand on her arm. “Seriously, mate. You get one more guess and we’re cutting you off.”
“Toad. Tawny owl. Tannenbaum.”
“Um,” said Anvita. “It’s tractor.”
There was no way, Rosaline was certain, she had missed a large piece of agricultural machinery. “What fucking tractor? There’s no fucking tractor.”
“Well, there was when I said it. It was across the field.”
“There was not.”
“There so was.”
“Show me.”
Harry got as far as “Uh, guys,” but Rosaline and Anvita had already started backtracking.
“There.” Anvita pointed triumphantly at a vague shape in the distance. “Tractor.”
Rosaline squinted through the darkness. “I think that’s someone’s car.”
“Isn’t it a combine harvester?” asked Harry.
“Or two bales of hay quite close to each other.”
“It’s a tractor,” insisted Anvita. “Come on. I’ll prove it to you.”
Swept up in the drama of the moment, they scrambled over a gate and began running towards the ambiguous machine, which was turning out to be much farther away than they thought it was.
Harry cupped his hands to his mouth, calling after them: “That’s someone’s field. You can’t just run into someone’s field. That’s like a farmer’s house.”
“It’s fine,” Anvita called back. “People must do this all the ti—”
The next thing Rosaline knew she was sprinting alone across the furrows. And it took her a moment to remember that she wasn’t going to win anything by leaving Anvita in a heap on the ground. She jogged to a halt.
“Ow,” said Anvita. “Ow.”
Harry was also bearing down on them. “I’m not saying I told you so. But I am saying I could if I wanted to.”
Kneeling, Rosaline checked Anvita for signs of obvious breakage. “Are you okay?”
“My ankle hurts and I’ve scraped my knee. And I’m going to have to film in this top tomorrow and it’s covered in poo. How am I going to bake a cake worthy of Marie Antoinette covered in poo?”
“It’s not poo, it’s mud.”
“Oh, well, that’s fine then.”
“I’m pretty sure”—Rosaline dredged up her first-aid training from, ironically enough, her Duke of Edinburgh award—“it’s just . . . hurt. It’s not broken or fractured, and it’s probably not even sprained.”
“People are going to think it’s poo. My nan’s going to watch this and she’s going to say, Anvita, I watched you on the television and I was very proud until I saw you were covered in poo.”
Hooking an arm under Anvita’s shoulders, Rosaline helped her to her feet. “You do realise you could have genuinely injured yourself. A slightly dirty top is very much the least of your problems. Now come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”
“Fuck no,” cried Anvita. “I’ve been wounded in pursuit of this fucking tractor. I’m showing you the tractor.”
Harry put his hands up. “How about we believe you that it’s a tractor, and we admit we lost the game of I Spy, and we all go home.”
“No. My integrity has been maligned and I’m showing you this tractor.”
“I don’t need to see the tractor.” In some ways, it would have been easy for Rosaline to stop Anvita pressing on with the great tractor quest, but it would have involved letting her fall flat on her face again. So she grudgingly shuffled along beside her. “I’m sorry. You won. I’m a loser. Suck it, me.”
After about twice as long as any of them had expected it would take, they arrived in front of a large machine that none of them could identify.
“Is it a harrow, maybe?” asked Rosaline. “Or a tiller?”
Anvita nodded. “I think it’s probably a tiller. Tiller begins with ‘t.’”
“You can’t retroactively change your I Spy word to match what the thing you spied turned out to be.”
“I’m injured and covered in poo. I can do what I like.”
“And I’m supporting you and letting you get poo all over me, so no you can’t.”
“It’s mud,” said Harry. “It’s just mud. Stick it in to soak for a bit, leave it to dry overnight. You’ll be fine.”
They contemplated the tiller, tractor, or, at Harry’s suggestion, muck spreader a while longer.
“All right,” Anvita concluded. “We can go now. Um, which way is it?”
Harry glanced around vaguely. “You’re the one what did orienteering in the guides. You tell us.”
“Yes, but when I did orienteering I had a compass, a map, and, most importantly, three other girls who knew what they were doing.”
“All right.” Harry’s gaze settled on Rosaline. “It’s down to you, Duke of Edinburgh.”
This couldn’t be that difficult. Fields were square. You had a one in four chance of getting it right. “That way,” said Rosaline decisively.
And off they went.
Two fields in, the road had yet to emerge, and Rosaline was beginning to remember that she’d spent most of her Duke of Edinburgh sneaking off to make out with Lauren.
“Hey, Rosaline,” began Anvita.
“Look. If we pick a direction and keep walking, we’ll find some people eventually. And then we’ll just tell them we’re idiots on a baking show and—”
“It’s not that.” Anvita’s tone was unusually careful. “It’s more . . . you see that thing over there, with the four legs and the horns. Is that a bull?”
“Maybe,” suggested Harry, “it’s a tractor.”
Anvita poked him. “Not the time. If that’s a bull, we’re dead.”
“Nah, it’s all right. I saw this on a programme once. What you do is, you run towards it, shouting, and that scares it away.”
It was hard to see through the heavy darkness that had crept in with the night, but there was definitely something out there. It was a moving blob with a faint aura of horned malice, and Rosaline was sure it was staring at them.
“No,” she said quickly. “Don’t do that. Because if you’re wrong, you’re going to get gored by a bull.”
“I think,” Anvita put in, “you’re supposed to grab it by the ring through its nose.”
Harry snorted. “While it’s running at you? How’s that meant to work?”
“I think it’s like judo and you sort of . . . use its own momentum against it.”
“How about”—this was Rosaline, whose fear of imminent trampling was not being alleviated by the conversation—“we walk slowly away and don’t do anything to provoke it.”