“But I’m on the opposite side of this hedge from you,” I say. “And anyway, can you remember which direction you came in, and which right is right?”
“No worries,” Forrest says. “Okay, let’s try this. Follow my voice to the right and we’ll meet at the next intersection, okay?”
“Okay,” I say. For as long as it takes us to get out of the maze, we are in it together and he’s right, I just have to deal with it. Imean if I thought running away from cocktails was embarrassing, staying lost in a maze just to not hang out with Forrest would make me look really crazy.
“If we just go right along here, then at the end of this length of hedge there should be a...”
“Hedge,” I say, looking at another identical wall of leaves. “We’ve reached a dead end.”
“Huh,” Forrest says. “I guess I must have got turned around when I heard your voice,” he says. “Not a problem. Let’s turn around and walk back the way we came, and that will be the right way to go, okay?”
“If you say so,” I say, without much confidence. I will admit it is nice to hear him walking on the other side of this hedge.
“Hmm,” Forrest says. I can hear him frowning, then, “Oh shit, I can turn right now. How about you?”
“I can only go left,” I say, looking down a shadowy corridor.
“Damn.”
“I guess we have to break up to go forward,” I say. I’m surprised by the pulse of anxiety this gives me.
“Okay, how about this?” Forrest says. “I’ll go my way, you’ll go yours, but we keep shouting each other’s names so we can hear where the other is, and then hopefully we’ll find a way to meet up.”
“Okay,” I say. My voice sounds annoyingly timid. It’s infuriating that I’m glad that he isn’t going to just leave me.
“Ava,” Forrest says as if he’s read my catastrophizing mind, “it’s okay, you know. We are only like at maximum thirty feet from civilisation. Nothing that bad can happen.”
“I know that! God, I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”
“Yep, I’m getting the totally fine vibes loud and clear,” he says. “Right, well, if we lose each other and never see each other again, I have found your company barely tolerable.”
“Back at you,” I say.
So, we start to walk. I can hear my name receding into the distance as I keep calling his, our voices dancing around each other in the cooling air. At one point his call is so far away that I think we must have lost each other completely, and then Forrest’s voice starts to get a little louder, and little louder still, bit by bit.
Within about ten minutes I’m at the end of this row and make a right turn and... there he is at the other end of the narrow path.
“Forrest!” I shout happily, before I remember the whole nemesis thing.
“Ava!” He waves, delighted, and before I know it I am running towards him and he is running towards me.
I am here to tell you that neither one of us thought about how this headlong full-gallop reunion would end, because traditionally it’s not with a formal distance and a polite handshake, it’s with a big hug at the very least. I guess the prospect of a big hug scares him at least as much as it does me as he starts to slow down to a jog. By the time we are about to meet we are both basically strolling, him with his hands in his pockets, me looking around the hedges like I have never seen one before.
“Well, that worked,” he says, pleased with himself.
“At least now, we won’t die alone,” I say.
Then a stupendous rustling comes from one of the hedges. Forrest and I turn to look at it as it trembles andgrowls. And then swears very creatively.
“There aren’t any bears in the UK, right?” Forrest asks me.
“There shouldn’t be,” I say, as the hedge swears. “But then again, there shouldn’t be peacocks either.”
“Good Christ, I will have the gardener fired!” LadyB splutters as she falls out of the hedge and onto the grass, before leaping to her feet and smiling at Forrest and me in turn with the poise of a woman who just made a graceful entrance through a set of French doors.
“There are supposed to be thin areas in each hedge in case of emergencies,” she explains. “You know, in case someone has a heart attack in here and the paramedics need to get to them stat. I could have sworn one was around here...” She looks around at the identical hedges for some kind of defining characteristic.
“Hang on a sec.” She walks past us and sticks her arm easily into the hedge. “My mistake! Hodgkins’s job is safe after all. Now”—she looks us up and down and gives me a knowing smile, although I’m not sure what it is she thinks she knows—“sorry to say your adventure is over. Follow me please. We’d best take the usual way out to preserve your lovely dress, Ava.”
