All About Us - Tom Ellen

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conversation is over.

      ‘Sorry about that,’ Daphne murmurs to me, not looking in the least bit sorry. ‘I hope I didn’t upset your friend.’

      ‘He’s not really our friend,’ Harv whispers, leaning across. ‘He’s more a bell-end that happens to live on our corridor.’ Daphne laughs hard at this, and Harv stands up to address the whole table. ‘Right, I’m getting more shots. Who’s in?’

      ‘Fuck shots,’ says Marek, snapping his phone shut and assuming leadership once again. ‘Let’s play Sardines!’

      A dozen chairs scrape backwards noisily, and the cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Let’s do it!’ instantly drown out the Kaiser Chiefs’ riot predictions on the stereo.

      I can feel beads of sweat starting to prickle on my brow, so I excuse myself and barge through the last-orders throng at the bar, towards the bathroom.

      I slip into a cubicle and slump down on top of the toilet lid, my heart pounding in my chest. Playing Sardines in the campus maze was an end-of-term Drama Soc tradition, one that Marek had always insisted we should keep up tonight. But this evening’s game represents something way more significant than a bit of random boozy fun: it was the first time Daphne and I ever kissed.

      I take a deep breath and try again to make some sense of the situation. I’ve spent the past half-hour being reminded of how brilliantly Daff and I once got on; how right we once seemed for each other. But while I may not have a clue why this is all happening, one thing I do have is hindsight. And that means I now know exactly how we’ll end up. How far we’ll eventually drift from our hopeful, happy, seemingly perfect-for-one-another teenage selves.

      Fifteen years ago, it was just a random quirk of fate that Daphne found me first in the maze. And that quirk has gone on to define the rest of our lives. So maybe this time … will it be Alice who finds me first instead? The idea makes my heartbeat instantly double its speed. Will I get to see what my life would look like if she and I had got together tonight?

      There was always something between us, and over the years, it’s like fate has constantly found ways to bring us back together. There was Paris, then Marek’s wedding, and now this drink we’ve arranged back in 2020. Maybe this – tonight – is where it was all supposed to start? But instead, Daphne found me first during the game of Sardines, and all three of our lives were sent spiralling off in the wrong direction …

      I must be breathing pretty heavily as these thoughts ricochet around my head because the bloke in the next cubicle thumps the wall and shouts, ‘You all right in there, mate? Tactical chunder?’

      I unlock the door and splash some cold water on my face. As I walk out, still dripping and borderline hyperventilating, I bump straight into Alice on her way to the ladies’.

      ‘Bloody hell,’ she laughs. ‘You look like you’ve just done fifty lengths. You all right?’

      I nod.

      ‘Oh-kay.’ She tilts her head at me. ‘Hardly chatted to you all night, Benjamin. Impossible to tear you away from the sexy props girl … who clearly fancies you, by the way.’

      Telling me that random girls clearly fancied me was something Alice did quite a lot over this first term. I would estimate that ninety-eight per cent of the time it was utter bollocks, but still, it always made me feel pretty good. Probably because, even at nineteen, I realised that ‘so-and-so clearly fancies you’ can usually be translated as ‘I clearly fancy you’.

      ‘I’m not sure about that,’ I tell her.

      ‘Soooo modest.’ She rolls her eyes, mock dramatically, and gives me a coy smile. For a second, it’s like I’m right back at that wedding with her, feeling the words WHAT IF? burn themselves onto my brain.

      ‘What’s her name again, the props girl?’ Alice asks, fiddling with her fringe. ‘Daisy?’

      ‘Daphne.’

      ‘Daphne, right.’ Getting Daphne’s name wrong was something Alice did quite a lot from this night onwards. ‘Well, anyway, if you can tear yourself away from Daphne, maybe me and you can hang out a bit later?’ She grins and nudges my trainer with hers. ‘I feel like I’ve hardly seen you recently, what with having to rehearse all the time. And tomorrow it’s the holidays, so I won’t see you for, like, three weeks, you know?’

      I nod, dumbly. It’s odd to think now, but throughout this whole first term, Alice was probably the person I hung out with most. More than Harv, even. We were next-door neighbours in halls, and since we were both doing artsy degrees, with precious few contact hours, our daytimes would mostly be spent cooking sausage sandwiches in the shared kitchen and then retreating to the bar to play pool and talk bollocks. We were pretty much inseparable for those first ten weeks. And now – just like in Paris, just like at the wedding – I’m starting to remember why. She was funny and clever and I liked who I was when I was with her. And as the term wore on, I have to admit I enjoyed the heady sensation of knowing something might happen between us, but not knowing exactly when.

      ‘Hanging out later sounds great,’ I tell her. It briefly crosses my mind to suggest that we sack off Sardines altogether, and head straight back to the corridor, just the two of us. But before I can weigh this idea up properly, Alice says, ‘Cool, see you out there,’ and slips past me into the loos.

      When I step out of the bar, everyone is huddled up in coats and scarves, their breath billowing out in smoky speech bubbles. Harv slides an arm around my shoulder and starts gabbling about something or other, but I can’t concentrate on what he’s saying. Everything is zoning in and out of focus, feeling real and unreal at the same time.

      Alice comes out and loops her arm straight through mine. I’m not sure if Daphne sees this, because she’s at the front of the pack, chatting to someone else. Marek shouts, ‘Let’s go!’ and starts to lead our chattering, giggling group down the walkway and over the bridge behind the English blocks, where the campus maze looms out at us through the darkness.

      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

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