Joe

I have a bag from the off-licence balancing on my handlebars as I ride through the woods to Rabbit’s. A few cans of cider, that’s all. Ash has a half bottle of vodka in his pocket and a bag with a big bottle of Coke in it resting on his handlebars. He has some weed as well.

It’s overcast and windy tonight, though it isn’t really cold. Feels like it should rain at any moment, but it hasn’t so far. The woods smell earthy and damp. And I feel kind of weird and scared riding through them.

We cycle past the part of the woods where we found the car last week. It’s gone. Taken away by the police, I s’pose. You wouldn’t know that anything had happened there now, except that the tree which had been knocked into the other trees has been chopped down. There are still some tyre tracks, but they’re not fresh any more and they blend in with all the others. You’d only notice them if you knew what you were looking for.

We don’t say anything to each other for a while after we’ve gone past the spot where the car was. I don’t know about Ash, but I’m thinking about what’s happened in the last week and feeling paranoid, like we’re still gonna get found out by someone. Even though I know in my head that I’m being stupid. Because the facts are:

1. No one saw me and Ash pick the bag up.

2. There’s nothing left to link us to the bag except a gun that’s buried in the woods. Finding the gun would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

3. Whoever it is that the bag belongs to has it back now. They’re not gonna take it to the police and complain that there’s a couple of hundred quid missing.

4. We dropped the bag off before we told them where it would be. So there’s no way that they can know who we are – they won’t have seen us.

But, you know, even as I think about all the reasons why we’re not gonna get found out, I can find little loopholes in them, like:

1. We think no one saw us pick up the bag, but we don’t know for sure. Anyone could have seen us last Friday. We were both half cut. Who knows who else was in the woods that night?

2. It’s possible someone could find the buried gun, even if it’s unlikely. And if they handed it in to the police – like we should have done with the bag – the police might link it to us. I mean, they have forensics. All they would need to do is find one fibre of clothing and they could link it to Ash or Rabbit.

3. We don’t know for sure who took the bag after we left it on the common. For all we know, someone walking their dog picked it up and took it to the police. And if they did, the police could get my fingerprints and Ash’s and all sorts off the bag, couldn’t they?

4. We went back to make sure the bag had been taken from the common, and we could have been seen then.

I know I’m being paranoid, but I can’t help it. I wish I could be more like Ash and just treat everything like it’s a joke. But I can’t.