Prologue
University of York, 5 December 2005
Running was a bad idea.
I can see that now. There was no need to run. It’s a game of Sardines, not the Olympic 100m. Plus, they haven’t even started looking for me yet. I can still hear them all outside the maze, shouting to fifty in unison. It sounds like a weirdly raucous episode of Sesame Street.
I could’ve taken my time, strolled about leisurely in search of the perfect hiding place, but no: drunk logic told me that fifty seconds was no time at all and that the best option would be to peg it into the campus maze at top speed until I was safely camouflaged. Now, as I slow down to a stumble in the darkness, I can feel six snakebite blacks, four sambuca shots and that doner calzone I split with Harv all roiling ominously in my stomach.
I stop for a second to catch my breath, which immediately explodes back out of me. I put a hand to the wall to steady myself, remembering too late that the wall is not actually a wall, but a hedge. I fall through it with the slapstick dexterity of a young Buster Keaton, miraculously avoiding being blinded or castrated by a million scratchy branches. I try to get up, fail miserably, and then decide that this is probably as good a hiding spot as any.
The leaves settle around me. The counting has stopped now, and I can feel the maze bristle and creak as a dozen drunken bodies stagger into it, yelling, ‘We’re coming to ge-et you!’
I sit there in silence, trying to work some moisture into my parched mouth and listening to my heart galloping in my chest. I reach up to wipe my forehead, and my hand comes back covered in foundation and fake blood – souvenirs from tonight’s stellar theatrical performance.
The play went about as well as any first-year uni play could be expected to, which is to say we probably won’t be nominated for any Olivier awards, but no one fluffed their lines or vomited nervously on the audience. It was in the bar afterwards, though, where everything really kicked into gear: everyone gabbling at a hundred miles an hour about what we all want to write or direct or act in next. Maybe it was the adrenalin – or more likely the sambuca – but the world suddenly seemed alive with possibility, like I could actually see the future spooling out endlessly ahead of me, beckoning me in. Mad, really, to think that I can do anything I want with it.
It’s funny, though. As weird and brilliant as tonight has been, I always thought it would be me and Alice’s night. The night we finally got it together after a whole term of awkwardly not quite managing to. It’s my fault, really: I’ve never been very good at ‘making the move’ (in fact, just the phrase ‘making the move’ makes me want to cringe so hard that my retinas detach). If I get even the slightest suspicion that a girl might be interested in me, my brain tends to immediately draw up a laundry list of reasons why she actually definitely isn’t.
But with Alice, that list has been getting harder and harder to compile. Over the past ten weeks – ten weeks of private jokes and late-night chats and shared microwave meals – she’s made it pretty clear that she likes me. And I like her too, I guess. She’s funny and pretty and we get on really well, and I suppose I always thought that tonight – the night of the play, the last night before the Christmas holidays – there’d be enough booze and drama and emotion to give us the push we needed.
But then that Daphne girl showed up backstage and sort of knocked everything off track.
It sounds stupid when people say they just ‘clicked’ with somebody, but I can’t think of another word for it. How else do you explain an hour of silly, funny, effortless conversation with a total stranger? Or that weird, tingly electricity in my chest every time I made her laugh?
So, maybe it won’t happen for me and Alice tonight after all. Or maybe it will.
It definitely feels like something will happen tonight.
There’s a flurry of whispers from somewhere nearby – two people bumping into each other in the darkness, forming a momentary alliance in their search for me. And then there’s that whooping seal bark of a laugh that immediately identifies one of them as Harv.
I shuffle further back into the hedge, but somehow I’m sure he won’t clock me. Call it intuition, or a sixth sense, or just being a bit drunk and horny, but I know that either Daphne or Alice will find me before anyone else does.
When we spilled out of the bar after Marek shouted, ‘Let’s play Sardines!’ I looked around to see both of them smirking at me. ‘I think Ben should hide,’ Alice said, and Daphne nodded her agreement: ‘Yep. Ben seems like a natural hider.’ I filed that statement away for further examination when I was less pissed, and then tore straight off into the maze.
Right now, just the idea of sitting here, hidden, with either one of them seems outrageously – ridiculously – exciting.
In fact, as I try to keep perfectly still, my heart going like the absolute clappers, I can’t decide who I’d rather found me first.
Chapter One
London, 24 December 2020
‘So … are you coming, or not?’
‘I mean, obviously I can come. If you want me to?’
Daphne breathes out heavily, but still resolutely refuses to make eye contact. ‘Do you want to come?’ she asks her reflection in the mirror.
I loiter by the bare Christmas tree, picking at stray needles. ‘Well, if you reckon I should, then maybe. I guess.’
She snaps the brush back into her mascara bottle with impressive force. ‘Ben, seriously. I’m starting to feel like Jeremy Paxman here. Can you just give me a yes or no?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Will they be expecting me? I came last year.’
‘Yes, and what a great success that was,’ she says to the ceiling, and there’s a pause where we both remember what a great success that was.
‘Listen …’ she says, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘It’s Christmas Eve drinks at my boss’s. I don’t even particularly want to go, so there’s no reason why I should drag you along too.’
‘Well, like I say, I’m happy to come if you want me to.’ She ignores this completely, so I add: ‘But you clearly fucking don’t.’
Finally she spins round to look at me. ‘I want you to come if you’re going to actually talk to people and try to have a good time. I don’t want you to come if you’re going to stand in the corner like a grumpy arsehole. OK?’
She snatches up her bag and walks out into the hallway.
Daff is of the opinion that fights are A Good Thing in a relationship. A Healthy Thing. Or at least she used to be of that opinion, back when our fights weren’t really fights, but silly little flare-ups over nothing. I’d get sulky at her for taking too long to get ready, or she’d shout at me for farting or imperfectly folding a bedsheet. And then after a volley of yells, we’d break off, hugging and giggling at the idea that we’d caught ourselves bickering like a sad old couple.
But at some point during the last couple of years, something changed. That fun phoney-war play-fighting turned into this awful tight-lipped trench combat; each of us working doggedly to gain an inch of ground over the other, occasionally lobbing a passive-aggressive grenade into no man’s land.
How did we get here? I wonder. From calmly discussing our evening plans to bitter, seething resentment in – what was it – a minute and a half? That’s got to be some kind of spontaneous marital-spat world record. Because the truth is, everything seems to lead to a fight nowadays. Every nod or murmur or question feels loaded and potentially explosive, like it has to be patted down carefully for hidden meaning. I’m pretty sure this is my fault – in fact, I know it is. It’s all tangled up with everything that’s happened over the past couple of years, and my general sense of self-worth dribbling slowly down the plughole. I can see the problems clear as day, I just can’t figure out how to fix them. Maybe they can’t be fixed.