Ready or Not (45 page)

             
He turned and spotted a high wall at the far end of the path. If he’d been the one doing the hiding it would have been exactly the place he’d have chosen. He ran towards it, lifting his feet high in an attempt to elongate his tiny strides.

             
When he got behind the wall Daniel stopped and looked around. There was no one there. The grass behind the wall had been left to grow high and he stepped through it, the last of the melting snow wetting the bottom of his trouser legs. He ran to the end of the wall, checking that his sister was not crouching behind the bushes in the corner. She wasn’t there.

             
When Daniel turned to go back up to the path there was a lady standing by the wall. She was oddly dressed for the weather and had on a flowery, summer dress with a black padded jacket thrown haphazardly on top. Her hair was a tangled mess of knotted curls, tied loosely at the back in an elastic band. On her feet she wore brown sandals and white ankle socks.

             
Daniel stopped and stared at her.

             
‘Who are you looking for?’ the lady asked, smiling.

             
Despite her bizarre appearance and despite the fact that she looked very old to Daniel, the lady looked quite pretty when she smiled. Her cheeks became fatter and the roundness of them made her look more youthful. Her skin glowed warmly, pinched red by the cold. She had good teeth; very white teeth that were a little too big for her face.

             
‘Katy,’ Daniel told her.

             
The lady smiled again. Though her mouth smiled, her eyes didn’t. They were glazed, shiny; she stared at Daniel, but stared through him, as if looking at something beyond him. She looked as if she had sacrificed a lot of sleep to vivid dreams and a million worries.

             
‘Who’s Katy?’ she asked.

             
‘She’s my sister.’

             
The lady nodded knowingly. ‘Hide and seek?’ she said. ‘I used to love that too. I always used to hide though. Looking is the boring bit, don’t you think?’

             
Daniel nodded. He very rarely got to be the one doing the hiding; Kate always wanted to do it, and because she was older than him she always seemed to get her own way. If he argued with her she would not play at all and then he would be bored, left on his own while Kate sulked in a corner somewhere.

             
‘What’s your name?’ the lady asked, taking a step closer.

             
‘Daniel.’ He held his hands together in front of him and watched her with curiosity.

             
‘I had a boy like you once,’ she told him, looking straight through him. ‘He was a little bit taller than you, but he had blond hair just like yours.’

             
Daniel didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

             
‘Well, Daniel,’ the woman said, her voice changing and becoming brighter. She looked right at him now, as though her mind had just returned to her body. ‘Would you like to hide with me? How about we find a good hiding place and then your sister can come and look for you?’

             
Daniel thought about it. His mother had always told them not to talk to strangers, but those strangers always seemed to be men and this was a lady. Anyway, she had been really nice to him. She just wanted to join in with the game. His mother had also told him not to be rude to other people, and to share, so it seemed the right thing to do to let her play.

             
‘OK,’ he said.

             
For a moment the woman paused and her smile faded, as if she had suddenly doubted that she really wanted to play at all. She looked up at the sky and watched the dark clouds rolling overhead. Then she reached a hand out to Daniel, opening her palm for him to take.

             
When Daniel took her hand he noticed how cold her skin was. She wrapped his small fingers in hers and gave him a reassuring smile.

             
‘Come on then, Daniel,’ she said, his name sounding unfamiliar when spoken with her voice. ‘Let’s go and hide somewhere no one will find us.’