Chapter 9

      “You okay?” Al touches the back of my hand. “You didn’t come to breakfast.”

      “I couldn’t find my tablets.”

      We’re sitting on the back seat of the rusty, ramshackle bus that will take us to the base of the mountain so we can trek up to the retreat. It’s a lot more rickety than the bus that took us from Kathmandu to Pokhara but, according to Leanne, this journey will only take half an hour rather than a six-hour slog. I made it on the bus first and took a seat by the window, folding up my waterproof jacket to cover the springs poking through the ripped leather seat. Al, Leanne and a sunglasses-wearing Daisy filed on several minutes later. Al immediately tucked herself in next to me.

      “Not your malaria tablets?”

      “No, the anti-anxiety ones. I looked everywhere. I’m sure I packed them.”

      “They’ll be in a side pocket, or something. Don’t worry, I’ll help you look once we get to Skanky Yaka, or whatever it’s called.”

      “Cheers, Al.”

      We lapse into hungover silence. We didn’t carry on drinking for long last night. When we returned to the patio, Leanne had already gone to bed, and, with no sign of the hotel manager, we only had Daisy’s half bottle of wine to drink between the three of us. By the time I dragged myself into the room I was sharing with Leanne, she was snoring softly.

      I glance across the bus. Leanne’s laughing uproariously at something Daisy’s just said. She looks remarkably fresh-faced in her My Little Pony T-shirt and skinny jeans, while Daisy looks like she dragged herself out of bed and crawled into her clothes. She notices me staring and presses a hand to the side of her head.

      “You as hungover as me?” she asks.

      I nod. “I feel like hell.”

      Satisfied with the response, she sits back in her seat and whispers something to Leanne, who glances at me and laughs.

      I close my eyes to try and conjour up the memory of Daisy stamping on the gecko, but the images in my mind are blurred by my hangover and lack of sleep. If she couldn’t focus on me without her contact lenses in, and I was sitting across from her on the bench, how could she even have seen it? I’m misremembering what happened. I have to be. There’s no way she deliberately stamped on a living creature, not after the accusations her mum levelled at her when her sister died.

      Al snorts with laugher beside me, and I open my eyes.

      “I don’t suppose you got a photo of that gecko, did you?” she says. “I just remembered I was supposed to get my camera, but I was so obsessed with finding more booze I completely forgot about it.”

      “No.” I shake my head. “No, I didn’t.”

      “No worries.” She shrugs. “I’m sure we’ll see loads more.”

      Thankfully, we arrive at the Maoist station within minutes. Their desk is on a platform at the end of the rickety bridge that connects the café at the base of the mountain with the start of the trail. None of us are shocked to see them there – you’re warned about the “tourist tax” in all good guidebooks – but the guns they clutch to their sides take us all by surprise. Shankar, our trek guide, nods for us to approach. I try to read his expression. While many Nepalese people support the Maoists, others are fearful of them. But Shankar’s eyes give away nothing of his thoughts.

      Daisy approaches the desk first, her shoulders back, chin high. She runs a hand through her hair and smiles at the man behind the desk as she hands him her passport, trek visa and 150 rupees, but he doesn’t acknowledge her. His expression doesn’t change as he flips through the passport and then slides the money to the man at his left, who slips the notes into a money belt around his waist. Daisy reaches for her passport then jumps as the man slaps his hand on top of it.

      “I tell you when to take,” says the man behind the desk. He stares at her for an unbearably long time then lowers his eyes to her visa on the desk in front of him. He flips the passport open again and compares the name on the visa with the name on the passport, then looks back up at Daisy.

      “Why you here?”

      “Um …” She clears her throat. “Just to trek up to the summit.”

      Leanne has told us what to say. She seems to think the Maoists will charge us extra if they think we’re going to be staying in a Western establishment rather than one of the Nepalese-owned hostels.

      “You sure about that?” He continues to stare at her.

      “Of course. I’m dying to see the view from the top. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

      He pushes Daisy’s possessions across the desk towards her then dismisses her with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t speak to Al, Leanne or me, and our documents are processed wordlessly. When we’ve been checked, the two armed men standing either side of the gate take a step back to let us enter the trail.

      Daisy grabs my arm the second we’re all through. “Wow.” She pushes her sunglasses onto the top of her head. She has bags under her eyes, and dozens of red blood vessels streak the white around her eyeballs. “That was mental.”

      She releases me and links her arm through Shankar’s before striding off up the path. If she notices him flinching at the unwanted physical contact, she doesn’t let on.

      The muscles in my thighs burn from weaving my way from left to right and back again as I climb the three thousand steps up the Annapurna mountain. I was expecting actual steps – I think we all were – but these aren’t evenly sized concrete blocks; they’re slabs of rock, dug into the side of the mountain, so uneven and wonky you have to look where you’re placing your feet. They’re the rustic, higgledy-piggledy winding steps of a fairytale. Or a nightmare. With the exception of Al, we all go to a gym back home in London, but running 5K in thirty-three minutes on a treadmill prepares you for this in the same way that jumping in puddles prepares you to swim the English Channel.

      It’s 2 p.m. and Shankar is leading the way, leaping from stone to stone, as enthusiastic and energised as he was when we started our trek five hours ago. Daisy and Leanne follow in his steps, both breathing heavily, both swearing whenever they look up and see how many more steps there are to go until we reach the end of the trail. Green mountains striped with brown paddy fields and capped with snowy peaks wrap around us, hiding us from the rest of the world. I have never been anywhere so breathtakingly beautiful or so back-breakingly harsh. We passed donkeys earlier, roped together, stumbling up the steps with huge saddle bags strapped to their backs, their knees buckling, their hooves slipping under the weight of their heavy loads. One of the donkeys was carrying a fridge, strapped on top of its saddle bag like it was the most normal thing in the world. Watching the poor animals climb and stumble, heads down, eyes sad, was more than I could bear. I wanted to set them free and tell their handler that he was cruel for forcing them to live such a miserable life, but I bit my tongue.

      Al trails behind me, her face puce, her enormous backpack waving from side to side with each step she takes, the belt undone around her waist, her hands on her hips. Every dozen or so steps she stops, takes a puff of her asthma inhaler and continues on again. If I were Al, I’d ask to slow down or take more breaks, but she’s ox-like in her determination to get to the retreat before nightfall and hasn’t complained once. I hear the puff-puff of her inhaler and stop walking. That’s twice in the last five minutes.

      “You okay?”

      She shrugs off her backpack then bends forward and grips her knees with her hands. She sucks at the mountain air like a fish on a hook.

      I put a hand on her shoulder. “Stand upright if you can. Leaning over like that squashes your lungs.” My brother Henry had asthma as a child, so her