All About Us Page 6

  A couple of the group have no idea what Sardines is, so Marek’s explaining it to them: ‘Someone goes to hide, right, and then we all look for them. When you find the hider, you hide with them, and it goes on like that until everyone’s hiding and there’s only one person left looking.’

  ‘So who’s hiding first?’ someone else asks, as we arrive at the entrance to the maze. I look round to see Daphne and Alice both grinning at me.

  ‘I think Ben should,’ Alice says.

  ‘Yep.’ Daphne nods. ‘Ben seems like a natural hider.’

  I feel the sudden urge to just drop onto the damp grass and adopt the foetal position until this dream or nightmare or vision or whatever the fuck it is is over. But something propels me forwards, and before I know it, I’m bolting into the maze while they all start counting to fifty behind me.

  I’m nowhere near as drunk as I was first time round, but still, I have absolutely no clue where I’m running to, or where I originally hid. I’m just sprinting mindlessly, turning corners whenever I feel like it, my footsteps keeping time with my heartbeat, the sweat cold and clammy on my temples.

  The counting has stopped now, and I can hear them all bundling raucously into the maze after me. I slow down to a standstill, clutching the throbbing stitch in my stomach, and claw my way into the nearest hedge. I flop down painfully among the prickly branches, and try to picture Alice climbing in beside me.

  But what happens if she does? We kiss? And then what?

  Do I stay here, in this new reality? For how long? For the rest of my life?

  I try to decide whether I would actually – genuinely – want that. Whether it would be better for everyone, Daphne included. But I can’t. The concept is just too massive to properly process. My head throbs with confusion and doubt, and I realise the only thing to do is let fate take control, exactly as I did last time.

  I hear Harv’s whooping laugh float around the corner as he bumps into somebody in the darkness. I remember this happening first time round too, and wonder idly if I’ve somehow ended up in the exact same hiding spot as before. Just as they did originally, the two pairs of trainers bounce right past without stopping.

  And then, almost immediately, I hear another crackle of feet on twigs. I crane my neck to see someone else rounding the opposite corner and beginning to emerge through the leaves. I squint to try and make them out …

  And as I do so, something even stronger than déjà vu slaps me hard across the face. A sense memory so vivid it makes my head spin.

  All these years I’ve been telling myself the story of what happened in this maze. And I realise now I’ve been telling it wrong.

  It was Alice who got to me first.

  I see her now through the gaps in the hedge, creeping past just as she did back then, scouring the branches for any movement. The precise thought I had at the time flashes suddenly into my brain: I could make a sound now. I could let her know where I am.

  But I found that I didn’t want to make a sound. I didn’t want her to find me.

  Alice squints right through the branches, and for a second I’m certain she’s looking straight at me. But then she draws back, turns and keeps walking.

  I breathe out shakily, because it’s all coming back now and I know exactly what will happen next. I’m not sure how I could have forgotten it – the booze, I guess, or just the gradual erosion of the intervening years – but the memory is now crystal clear in my mind.

  Right on cue, Daphne appears, peering gingerly into the hedge opposite. And without thinking, I do exactly what I did fifteen years ago: I reach up to bend one of the branches above me until it snaps cleanly in two.

  She jumps at the sharp sound and turns in my direction, a smile playing on her lips.

  It wasn’t random chance at all.

  I wanted her to find me. I made her find me.

  She gets nearer and nearer until she’s standing right over me, grinning down through the leaves.

  ‘So,’ she whispers. ‘Not a great hitman, not a great hider.’

  I just about manage to croak a laugh.

  ‘Is there any room in there?’

  I lift the biggest branch and she climbs under it and sits down opposite me, cross-legged. Our knees are already overlapping, but then she has to lean forward to readjust her position, which brings our faces so close they are practically touching.

  ‘Oops,’ she whispers. ‘This is a bit, erm …’

  She lets the sentence hang there, unfinished, as we look into each other’s eyes. My heart is thumping so hard that I’m sure she must be able to hear it. But I can’t help it. My head is suddenly filled with the memory of this moment, fifteen years ago: our first kiss. How right it felt, as I leaned forward and touched her lips to mine. The way she smelled, the way she felt, the way she tasted.

  She tucks a stray curl back behind her ear and smiles at me. And God, I want to kiss her again.

  She tilts her head slightly, and without thinking, I reach up and touch her face, very gently. She smiles again, and the tip of her nose brushes my cheek as her lips find mine. And as we kiss, everything around me seems to fizzle and dissolve, until there’s only the two of us left.

  Chapter Eleven

  I’m not sure how long we stay like that, lost in that kiss.

  I must have kissed Daphne a million times over the past fifteen years, but I can’t remember any of them feeling this perfect. It’s like my whole body is being lit up from inside. I don’t want it to ever end.

  But then, suddenly, it does.

  There’s a sharp crackle of leaves, the branches are pulled back, and there’s Alice, staring straight down at us.

  Daff pulls away, and the look on Alice’s face brings me right back to earth with a jolt. It’s exactly as I remember it: the initial flinch of confusion that melts instantly into a kind of embarrassed disappointment. She sucks in her bottom lip, glances down at the grass and mutters: ‘Sorry.’

  Daff shoots me an ugh-this-is-awkward grimace, but I have no idea what to say or do. The moment is so insane and unreal it feels like it’s happening to someone else.

  Thankfully, I don’t have to do anything. Marek and a couple of others materialise out of nowhere, right behind Alice, giggling like idiots. They barge into our hiding place, and suddenly there are enough bodies in the hedge to muffle the awkwardness.

  I’m doing everything in my power to avoid eye contact with Alice – which is not difficult, really, since the space is now so crowded that my face is pressed directly into Marek’s armpit. And even though I feel sick with guilt about Alice finding me and Daff together, I’m still thrumming with the exhilaration of that kiss. I can’t help it. It’s all coming back to me now: the way I felt at this moment, fifteen years ago. The ballooning sense of excitement in my stomach. The tingly feeling that this might be the start of something really good. The absolute certainty that there was no way in hell I could wait the whole Christmas holidays before I saw Daphne again.

  Finally, after what seems like centuries, the last person finds us and the game comes to an end. We all scramble out of the hedge, and start traipsing back out of the maze. I lag behind, right at the back of the pack, trying to figure out what I’ll say to Alice when I get out.

  But it turns out I don’t need to worry. By the time I step out of the maze, Marek is already leading the charge back towards the bar for last orders. Everyone is staggering drunkenly after him, and I can’t see Alice anywhere. I linger by the maze’s entrance and watch the bodies disappear into the night, terrified that Daphne might have disappeared with them …

  Then, suddenly, she’s right beside me in the darkness.

  ‘Not sure I’m up for another drink,’ she says.

  ‘No, me neither.’

  ‘So …’ I feel her hand brush gently against mine. ‘I guess this is goodnight, then …’

  The first time around, it was. We were still surrounded by people, so we just exchanged a brief, awkward ‘See you later’, and then I headed of
f for one last beer, before stumbling back to my room to lie wide awake in bed, reliving the memory of that kiss.

  But this time, I don’t want the night to end. I still can’t make head or tail of what is happening, but I know for absolute certain that I don’t want Daphne to leave.

  ‘Do you want to …’ I begin. But I can’t think of a way to add ‘come back to mine’ without sounding like a massive sleazebag.

  Daff must pick up on this dilemma, because she tilts her head at me playfully. ‘Not-Naked Ben, are you asking me back to your room?’

  I laugh. ‘Well, yeah. But for entirely innocent reasons, I promise.’

  She still looks dubious – which is fair enough, really. I don’t know how to communicate that I am actually telling the truth. As amazing and electrifying as that kiss was, the idea of us going any further honestly hasn’t crossed my mind. I just want more time with her – with this Daphne. This happy, funny, carefree girl who is so different from the woman I live with in 2020. I want to get to know her all over again.

  ‘A cup of tea,’ I say. ‘That’s all, I swear. If you fancy it?’

  She sizes me up with her big brown eyes. And then that amazing smile spreads across her face. ‘OK, yeah. I could murder a cup of tea, actually.’

  We wind our way slowly back to my hall of residence. And with every step, I can feel the excitement rising in my chest. Daff loops her arm through mine and shoots me a grin that makes me think she’s feeling the exact same thing.

  But then we get to the entrance, and I come face to face with a bulky locked door, and a numbered entry panel beside it.

  ‘Oh. Shit.’

  My heart sinks right into the pit of my stomach.

  ‘What?’ Daphne asks.

  For the hell of it, I punch in 1-2-3-4. No joy. We could be here a while.

  ‘How drunk are you?’ Daff laughs. ‘Can you really not remember your own door code?’

  ‘No, hang on, don’t worry … It’ll come to me …’

  But obviously it won’t. I’m about to pull my phone out and see if Harv is still awake when I hear someone shout ‘WAHEY!’ at a deafening volume behind me.

  I turn around to see Geordie Claire standing there, grinning drunkenly, with her massive rugby player boyfriend next to her. Both of them smell strongly of tequila and chilli sauce.

  ‘Hey, Ben!’ Claire slurs, dragging me into a wobbly hug. ‘So, we both really enjoyed your play. Really, really, really. It was very, erm … original.’

  ‘Yeah, top work, mate,’ says her boyfriend, whose name escapes me. ‘You were … great.’

  ‘He was, wasn’t he?’ Daff nods, somehow managing to keep a straight face. ‘He’s a natural hitman.’

  Claire punches in the entrance code, and we all troop up the stairs together. We say goodnight to the two of them at the end of the corridor, and as we do, I find my voice dropping automatically to a whisper. It’s not even half eleven – still early for a freshers’ dorm on the last night of term – but I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that Alice’s room is right next door to mine. I have no idea whether she went on to the bar with the others, or whether she’s in there right now, just one paper-thin wall away from us.

  By some miracle, my room key is in the pocket of the jeans I was wearing when I woke up, so I let Daff in before heading into the kitchen to make the tea. I flick the kettle on and stare at it hard, willing it to boil faster. I don’t know how long we’ll have together tonight – I have no idea if I’ll find myself back in 2020 at any moment – so I want to make the most of every second here.

  Once the kettle’s boiled, I dart straight back to my room with the two steaming mugs to find Daff kneeling on my bed, peering closely at the bookshelf next to it. I spent hours arranging that bookshelf in preparation for precisely this moment: a hot girl peering closely at it. It was chock full of wilfully obscure, borderline unreadable paperbacks, all designed to make me look much deeper and more intellectual than I actually was.

  I feel a little shiver of exasperation at my try-hard teenage self as I hand Daff her cup of tea.

  ‘Here you go,’ I say. ‘Milk, one sugar.’

  She wrinkles her brow. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I, er … Lucky guess.’

  ‘Very lucky. So, you’re doing English, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Me too.’ She takes a sip from her mug. ‘Mmm, good tea.’ And then, with a little smile, she adds: ‘You know, I’ve actually seen you in lectures.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ I’d definitely never seen her before this evening.

  ‘Yeah. You and Marek,’ she says. ‘You always seem to be the last ones to arrive. The lecturer starts talking, then the door slams and everyone looks round, and you two come swanning in in your long flappy coats, looking like you’ve just got out of bed.’

  I can’t help laughing at the memory of it. ‘Oh God. We don’t mean to always be late,’ I start. ‘We just—’

  She interrupts me with a grin. ‘I reckon you both like the attention.’

  She’s right, of course. We loved it. God, we were a pair of knobs.

  It’s so weird, thinking back to what I was like at this point. So full of ill-founded confidence, so desperate to appear cool and interesting at all times. For this whole first term, I saw Marek as a bit of an aspirational figure, I guess. Like Alice, he was clever and funny and sarcastic, and he seemed to have stepped straight out of Withnail & I, chain-smoking roll-ups in his moth-eaten pea coat. I’d bought one in the exact same style – I can actually see it now, through the gap in my wardrobe.

  By second term, though – once I’d met Daphne – the Marek effect started to wear off. I began to realise that Daff and Harv were much more fun to hang out with. Mainly because when I was with them, I didn’t have to try so hard to be someone I wasn’t.

  Daff shifts round to face me and sits cross-legged on the bed. She’s slipped her shoes off already, and she tucks her stripy-socked feet underneath her. Her curly hair is starting to wriggle free from her ponytail, and as she reaches up to retie it, she pushes her shoulders back and tilts her head, and for a moment, she looks so beautiful I can barely think straight.

  This is just … mad. I mean: this is Daphne. I’ve known her fifteen years. Why the hell am I so nervous?

  I plonk down opposite her, nearly spilling half my tea.

  ‘So, you’ve already got me figured out, then, have you?’ I say.

  ‘Yup.’ She grins. ‘Always late. Reads highly pretentious books. Bad at hiding in mazes. Good at making tea. That about sums you up, I reckon.’

  ‘Oh, great. Thanks a lot.’

  ‘No worries.’ She stretches her leg out and pokes me gently in the thigh with her big toe. It’s a gesture that’s so familiar – so relaxed and comfortable – that I’m suddenly seized by the idea that she knows. That this isn’t 2005 Daphne: it’s 2020 Daphne, and she’s inexplicably jumped back through time, too.

  But as soon as that idea forms, it dissolves. Because the truth is: she was always like this. Right from the start. I remember it even on our first date. I made her laugh at one point, and she reached across and squeezed my hand. She was so intimate; like we’d known each other our whole lives.

  She cranes her neck round to look out of the window, but she doesn’t move her leg away. She just leaves it there, with her foot still resting lightly on my thigh. She can’t possibly know the effect this is having on me – or at least I hope she doesn’t. It’s like a cement mixer has just been switched on in my stomach. All I can think about is leaning forward and taking her in my arms again.

  ‘You got so lucky with your view,’ she murmurs, staring out of my grubby second-floor window. ‘You can see the lake and the ducks and everything. My room looks out onto the bloody staff car park.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s not lucky,’ I say, remembering the racket the ducks used to make. ‘Listen to this lot.’ I lean past her, catching a scent of her perfume as I do, and crack the window open. The sound
of hooting and quacking comes floating in, along with a blast of bitingly cold wind. ‘They’re like this all night,’ I say. ‘Honestly, I barely sleep in here.’

  She laughs, her brown eyes twinkling. ‘So that’s why you’re always late for lectures. The ducks.’

  ‘Exactly. Blame the ducks.’

  She glances out of the window again. ‘They’re probably hungry …’

  She jumps up and bolts out of the door. When she comes back in a few seconds later, she’s swinging a half-empty bag of sliced bread. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that reads: MAREK’S – DO NOT TOUCH. For a self-styled anarcho-communist, Marek always had surprisingly conservative views on food-sharing.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten,’ Daff says, ‘how pissed off will Marek be if we nick two slices of his bread?’

  ‘I’m going to say eleven,’ I tell her. ‘But let’s do it anyway.’

  She drops back down on the bed and hands me a slice. We both poke our heads out of the window into the freezing night air. And as we lean out, shivering, we’re pressed right up against each other, arm to arm, so close that her loose curls are spilling onto my shoulder. We start dropping the bread.

  ‘This is not doing anything for the noise levels,’ I say over the excited honking.

  Daff laughs, and nudges her shoulder into mine. ‘Yeah. Plus it’s absolutely freezing.’ She dusts her hands off and watches as the crumbs rain down. ‘Come on, let’s go back in.’

  We retreat inside and shut the window again. She recrosses her legs, and wraps both hands tightly around her tea mug to warm them up.

  ‘It’s crazy how quickly this first term has gone,’ she says. ‘Before we know it, uni will be over.’ She shakes her head at the idea. ‘We’ll be twenty-one. We’ll be actual adults.’

  ‘We are technically actual adults now, you know,’ I say.

  She gives me a perfectly deadpan look. ‘Ben, we’ve just spent the last hour playing hide-and-seek in a hedge.’

  I laugh. ‘Good point.’

  She takes another sip of tea, and shuffles backwards on the bed until she’s leaning up against the headboard. She stretches her legs out again, and without thinking, I lift her foot back into its previous position on my thigh. If she finds this at all weird or forward, she doesn’t show it. She just smiles at me and says: ‘It’s crazy to think about, though, isn’t it? Once uni’s over, we’ll have no one telling us what to do any more. We’ll actually have to decide what to do with every day of our lives.’