The Ritual

dark roof of tree branches and heavy wet leaves they had camped below. The individual limbs and branches above merged into an inky ceiling. Tiny
segments of paler sky glimmered through the holes. Drizzle settled onto his face. A few heavy drops regularly smacked the earth about him. The water would always find a way down to them.
    ‘Ready chaps,’ Hutch said.
    The two figures inside the tents stirred. Dom groaned. Then stuck an arm out of the awning of his tent. The hand at the end held a metal dish. ‘And don’t skimp on the sausages. I
don’t care if they taste like scrotum.’
    Hutch grinned. ‘Well I had to thicken the sauce with something.’
    Luke didn’t have the strength to laugh. Phil turned his torch on inside the tent and looked about himself to find his own tin.
    ‘We’ll wash this down with some coffee after.’
    Luke’s mouth filled with saliva. Even with the milk powder that never fully dissolved and the sugar sachets they had swiped from the hostel in Kiruna, just the idea of it made him stupidly
happy.
    They ate quickly and noisily, almost weeping into their tins as they licked at the final dregs of liquid around the sides. None of the pans had been washed from the previous night and the dried
residue of yesterday’s meal could be felt against their tongues as they lapped like starving cats.
    ‘That might have just been the best food I have ever eaten,’ Hutch said, when they had all finished, his tone of voice lighter and warmer than it had been since midday.
    Luke thought of saying something about losing sight of the simple things that really mattered. But decided against it. He doubted anyone in that camp had any interest in what he had to say any
more. They all felt awkward around him now. He sensed it on the few occasions he had spoken since the fight, and intuited a tensing of their bodies when he came close to them as they made the
clearing and set up the tents. The majority of both tasks he had performed, but his efforts had gone unacknowledged. He was getting impatient again, at his exclusion, and it was turning to
irritation.
    He lit a cigarette. And pondered again on why he had been at the very edge of the group since they met in London six days ago. Six days? It seemed much longer. He looked into the packet and
squinted. Only eight filter cigarettes left and then he’d be into the emergency ration of roll-up tobacco, 12.5 grams of Drum. Being out of tobacco would make him truly psychotic; he’d
take cigarettes over food every time.
    He fidgeted. He sighed. If he were honest, something had happened to him in his late twenties that seemed to manoeuvre him away from other people, not just his friends, but from the normal
course of human affairs. He’d begin to catch people exchanging glances whenever he spoke up in group situations; or they would be half smiling when he entered the offices and warehouses he
worked in, but he never stayed for very long before he moved on to something else equally unsatisfactory. Invitations to join others lessened, then ceased before he was thirty-two. Only damaged and
insecure women seemed to find comfort in his company, though they had little interest in him besides his being a confirming presence. By thirty-four he was lonely. Lonely. Genuinely.
    Back in London and Stockholm, before the hike began, unless he was talking to Hutch alone, his every attempt to start a conversation in the group had been treated like an ill-thought-out
statement, or just ignored. No one even tried to pick up the threads he started. Most often there would be a silence and then the other three would fall back into whatever natural camaraderie they
had rediscovered. A bond he was only interrupting by speaking. At best, he had been humoured from the start of the trip.
    How he had become so estranged from his oldest friends puzzled him, and wounded him deeply. It could be down to something that happened to him in London after a few years in the city. He knew
how the city changed whoever you were before you lived in it. Or maybe he’d always suffered a fundamental disconnection with other people that had been latent in his youth. He didn’t
know, and was getting too tired to think about it now, and was sick of analysing it. Fuck it, what had he got to lose? ‘Dom. Look. This morning . . .’ He took a deep breath and
sighed.
    Inside his tent, Phil turned away, onto his side, his back to the open door. Hutch stayed preoccupied with boiling water for