Hail on the campsite

Text 1: Ten Past Two, by Gwen Haverford

An original short story extract.

The first stone hit the tent at ten past two in the morning, and Kit thought somebody had thrown it. It struck the flysheet just above her head with a sharp, flat crack, like a finger flicked against a drum, and she lay very still in her sleeping bag and waited for the laughter of whoever had done it.

There was no laughter. There was another crack, and another, and then a hundred at once, and then the whole tent was roaring.

Hail. She had never heard hail like it. It came down on the nylon in a solid, drumming fury that filled her head and shook the poles and made the torch hanging from the roof jerk and swing, so that their shadows lurched across the walls like drunks. Her brother sat bolt upright, his hair standing in a crest. He said something. She saw his mouth make the shape of it and did not hear a word.

Outside, the field lit up white. For one second Kit could see everything through the thin green walls: the shadow of the car, the next tent along, the hedge, all printed on the nylon like an X-ray. Then darkness, and a long, splitting boom that seemed to come up out of the ground beneath her.

The tent began to sag. Water was gathering in the roof above their feet, a fat bulge that grew heavier with every second, pressing down, and on the side where the wind was strongest one of the pegs gave up with a soft popping sound. The wall folded in against her shoulder, cold and wet, like a hand pushing her.

“Car!” her brother shouted, right into her ear, and this time she heard him.

They went out into it barefoot. The hail stung like gravel thrown hard. It bounced on the grass knee-high and lay there, white and glittering, so that the field looked like a field in winter, a field in another country. Kit ran with her sleeping bag clutched to her chest and her brother’s hand clamped round her wrist, and the cold came up through the soles of her feet, and she was laughing, she realised, laughing so hard she could barely breathe.

In the car they sat dripping, the hail hammering on the roof like an audience that would not stop applauding, and watched their tent lie down slowly in the middle of the field, like a tired animal, and give up.

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