Hide and Seek

NICHOLAS ROYLE

It was a way to pass the time and keep the kids happy. Kids. When I was a kid myself I didn’t like the word. I didn’t like being referred to as one of ‘the kids’. It seemed unrespectful, dismissive. I preferred to be one of ‘the children’. When my own kids were born, I consequently referred to them always as ‘the children’, never ‘the kids’. In fact, to qualify that, it was when the first one was born that I stuck religiously to that rule, which lasted until just after the second one came along. The second and final one, I might add. Nothing I’ve ever done in my life drains the energy quite like having kids. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t unhave them. My life has been enriched - immeasurably. Practically anyone who’s had kids will tell you the same. Apart from the abusers, the loveless, the miserable. So no, I wouldn’t go back, but nor would I have any more. I’m shattered as it is; plus, how could I love another one as much as I adore the two I’ve got? Mind you, I thought that after the birth of the first one.

Harry, our firstborn, is a handful, as naughty as he is adorable. Good as an angel one minute, absolute horror the next. Would I have him any other way? The standard answer is no. I wouldn’t want him any different. The standard answer sucks, however. Doesn’t take a genius to work that one out. Sure I’d have him different. I’d have him good all the time. It would make life easier, that’s all. However, he’s lovable the way he is and if making him any less naughty made him any less lovable, then, no, I wouldn’t have him any different.

He’s funny. He makes faces and strikes poses I wouldn’t have thought a four-year-old capable of. He’s a mimic in the making. I love him like - well, there is no like. I love him more than anything or anyone I’ve ever loved. Before his sister came long. Now I love her the same way I love him. I’m nuts about her. If our relationship is less developed, less complex than the relationship I have with Harry, that’s only because he’s got two years’ head start. Our dialogue is less sophisticated, but we still talk. In fact she’s talking more and more all the time. For months, while other two-year-olds were chattering away, Sophie remained silent. She’d point and she’d cry, but she didn’t have much vocab. Then it started to come in a rush. Now she knows words I didn’t know she knew. Every day she surprises me with another one. The longest sentence she can speak gets longer every day. She’s also the most beautiful little girl you’ve ever seen (takes after her mum - my wife - Sally), but then they all say that.

Sometimes when I’m out with the two of them somewhere I forget that while Harry’s walking beside me and holding my hand, Sophie’s sitting on my shoulders, and I briefly slip into a dizzying panic. Where is she? Where have Heft her? Will I ever see her again? Sure you will, she’s on your shoulders, you dummy. It’s like forgetting you’re wearing your glasses. Don’t tell me you’ve never done that: searched for your glasses for a good quarter of an hour, only to realise eventually they’re stuck on the front of your head.

But those moments, those moments when I forget she’s there and I don’t know where she is, they remind me of when Harry was little. I mean really little, three months or so. When having a baby was still a novelty, when you turned round and saw him lying in his Moses basket and gave a little start because you’d forgotten, you’d forgotten you’d got a kid - or a child.

I had this fear that one day I’d look in the Moses basket and he wouldn’t be there. Not that he could climb or roll out of it, he couldn’t, but that he just wouldn’t be there. That somehow I would have reverted to that pre-parental state. Gone backwards at speed. One minute I had a child, the next minute I didn’t. It didn’t make any sense, of course, hut a lot of stuff goes through your head in those early months that doesn’t make any sense.

I was looking after both the kids. Sally was working late, attending a meeting. Harry kept going on about Agnes, one of his little friends. He wanted her to come round. Or to go round to hers. We couldn’t do that, I explained, because Agnes’s parents had invited us round to theirs the other day. You have to be invited, I explained to him. You can’t invite yourself.

Agnes’s parents were our closest friends and they lived just two streets away. To stop Harry going on about it, I called them to invite I hem over. It turned out Agnes’s mum, Siobhan, was at the same meeting Sally was at. They worked in the same field. So Agnes’s dad, William, was looking after Agnes on his own. Looks like the tables have been turned, he joked. Our wives are out at work and we’re left holding the babies.

Then he explained he was trying to finish some work of his own and needed to make the most of Siobhan’s being out at the meeting. He was going to try to get Agnes into bed early. Instead, I offered to look after Agnes while he got on with his work. I’ll bring her back after an hour or so, I said. Are you sure? He asked. No problem, I said. She’s a very easy child.

William dropped Agnes round and she ran into the house, all excited at spending time with Harry and Sophie. William called after her, hoping for a goodbye kiss or hug before he went back home, but she was gone. I saw his crestfallen face, knew how he felt, but knew also that he’d be feeling relieved to have offloaded Agnes for a bit, so he’d be able to get some work done, or just have a break. I locked the door after him: my kids knew about not leaving the house unattended, and no doubt Agnes did too, but it didn’t pay to be careless. So there I was now with three of them to keep happy at least until Sally got home. No problem, I’d said to William. No problem, I thought to myself. I loved Agnes almost like my own. Almost. There’s always that almost. The love you have for your own kids is different. It’s instinctive, fiercely protective. With someone else’s kids it’s less visceral, more of an affectionate responsibility.

Let’s play hide and seek, I suggested. Yes! they all shouted, jumping up and down. Hide and seek. Hide and seek. i

Who wants to hide first? I asked. Me! they chorused.

When Harry first started playing hide and seek, when he was two and a half, perhaps, or three, he’d tell you where he was going to hide. I’m going to hide under the bed, he’d say, and you’d try to explain why that wasn’t really going to work. Later he would just close his eyes, believing that if he closed his eyes, not only could he not see you, but you couldn’t see him either. Eventually he got the hang of it and became quite proficient at the game. He got so that you genuinely couldn’t find him for two or three minutes. It was pretty much the only time, apart from when he was asleep, that you could get him to keep still and quiet for more than ten seconds. For this reason we encouraged the playing of hide and seek.

Sophie was still only learning, like Harry had been at her age. And Agnes - well, I was about to find out how good Agnes was at hide and seek.

Who’s going to hide first? I asked, as if I didn’t know. All three shouted ‘Me!’ and put their hands up, but I knew from experience that if it wasn’t Harry, then it wasn’t going to work. He’d go into a sulk, wouldn’t play properly and everything would start to fall apart. OK, Harry first, I said, raising my arms and my voice to forestall protest. The rest of us count to ten.

Twenty, he shouted as he bounded up the stairs.

I counted loudly enough to drown out his retreat and the girls joined in. Sophie was jumping up and down with excitement. She had just learned how to jump and liked to do it as much as possible whenever there was a situation that seemed to call for it. Twenty, we concluded at the tops of our voices. Coming ready or not. Dead silence from the rest of the house. That’s my boy.

Shall we look in the kitchen first, I suggested, in case he managed to sneak past us while we had our eyes shut?

The girls both nodded and I led the way into the kitchen, which smelled of onions and fried minced lamb. Still steaming on the hob was the big pan of chilli I’d made earlier for Sally and me to enjoy in front of the TV when the kids were in bed. The fridge door was a collage of art postcards, Bob the Builder yoghurt magnets and photo booth pictures of me and Sally with the kids. Over in the corner, a stereo was playing Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun album for about the twenty-third time that day.

No sign of him here, I said. Shall we look in the dining room?

The knocked-through dining room and lounge looked like it usually did when both kids had been home for more than half an hour. Like a cyclone had ripped through the boxes, crates and cupboards filled with toys. A riot of Thomas the Tank Engine, Buzz Lightyear and Woody, Teletubbies and Barbie. Scott Tracey and Lady Penelope masks. Bob the Builder construction vehicles. Britains models and Matchbox Super-fast cars (handed down from father to son). Teddy bears, rag dolls and dozens of assorted soft toys. Full marks to the kids for having out-Chapmanned the Chapman Brothers, who would have been proud of the maelstrom of miscegenation and mutilation.

No sign of him here either, I said, checking under the coffee table and behind the settee. Shall we look upstairs?

Yes!

Upstairs we looked in Sophie’s room. We’d recently taken the side off her cot. As a result she could get out of bed and wander in the night, which was marginally preferable to one of us having to go to her if she started crying. Let her come to us instead.

Harry wasn’t in Sophie’s room.

Sophie and Agnes had already checked out the bathroom. Next was Harry’s room. Harry had recently become keen on colouring in and cutting out and sticking down. His masterpieces covered every available inch of wall space. On the floor was a little pile of jagged scraps of paper from his most recent session with the kiddie-proof scissors. I quickly looked under his bed, but could only see his plastic Ikea toy crate-on-castors that I knew was full of dressing-up gear, Batman costumes, old scarves and so on. He wasn’t in the walk-in cupboard or the walnut wardrobe.

By now the girls were shouting his name, enjoying the fact that we couldn’t find him. We had a quick but thorough look in my and Sally’s bedroom, but he wasn’t in there either, so he had to be upstairs again. The top floor held my office, another bathroom and the spare bedroom. As soon as we’d looked in all three I began seriously to wonder where he might be. It occurred to me that, although I couldn’t imagine how he might have done it, there was the tiniest of possibilities that he could have slipped past us while we were in his room and nipped downstairs. So I ran downstairs and rechecked every possible hiding place. It didn’t take long; I knew where they all were by now. I made my way back upstairs like a cop with a search warrant, clearing rooms as I went, mentally chalking a cross on the door, one stroke on the way in, another as Heft. Back at the top of the house, I finally admitted to myself that I was anxious.

Harry was good at hide and seek, but not this good. How was it possible, in a house I knew so well, for him to vanish so completely? I forced myself to be calm and to stick to a methodological approach. He couldn’t have left the house - the front and back doors were locked, as were the windows. The door to the cellar was kept bolted. The door leading to the crawlspace that was all that was left of the loft after its conversion was not locked, but it was inaccessible behind the ratty old settee in my office and neither of our children had ever shown the slightest interest in it. I looked down at Sophie and Agnes. Their eyes were wide with excitement. Sophie was jumping up and down, shouting Harry’s name.

Follow me, I said, something having made me think of triple-checking his favourite hiding place. In Harry’s bedroom I got down on all fours and pulled out the plastic toy crate from under his bed. There he was, in the far corner, still as a statue, scarcely breathing. His eyes met mine and he started to smile.

He crawled out and I hugged him so tightly he protested that it hurt.

I’d lost my appetite for hide and seek, but naturally the kids hadn’t and Sophie was insisting on hiding next. I knew if I stopped the game there’d be trouble, so we counted to twenty while she toddled off. It took us less than another twenty seconds to find her, a tell-tale giggling lump under the duvet in my and Sally’s bed.

In fairness, I now had to let Agnes go off and hide despite overwhelming tiredness on my part and a growing desire to head back downstairs, open a beer and listen to the news on the radio while allowing the kids to veg out in front of Cartoon Network. I couldn’t expect either William or Sally for another fifteen minutes.

. . . eighteen, nineteen, twenty!

The first place Harry looked was under his own bed. I think we might have heard if she’d hidden in here, I suggested, but in fact we hadn’t heard anything at all. She’d managed to slip out and hide without leaving us any clues.

Let’s look in Mummy and Daddy’s room, Harry urged.

Sophie instantly copied what he’d said in her more condensed delivery, in which all the words ran together and could only be decoded by remembering what had been said before.

Agnes wasn’t in Mummy and Daddy’s room. The three of us climbed the stairs again to the top floor. Spare bedroom, bathroom, my office - all clear. Back down to the first floor. Bathroom, Sophie’s room - both empty. We trooped downstairs, Harry running on ahead, wanting to be the one to find Agnes. There was no sign of her in the lounge, dining room or kitchen. Back in the hall, I noticed her shoes at the bottom of the stairs. She’d taken them off just after coming into the house.

I checked the locks on the doors and windows, then we ran back up to the first floor. I looked under each of the beds, behind all the curtains, in every cupboard. I added my voice to those of Harry and Sophie. I shouted that her Dad was due to collect her and he’d want to get straight back. It was time to come out. She’d won. (No, I won! Harry protested.) Come on, come on out, Agnes!

I ran up to the top floor without waiting for Harry and Sophie. I shoved the settee in the office out of the way and yanked open the door to the crawlspace, shining a light inside. Fishing tackle, rolled-up film posters, Christmas decorations, stacks of used padded envelopes, suitcases full of old clothes I couldn’t bear to throw away - but no little girl, no Agnes. I looked under my desk, behind the oversize books on the bottom shelves of the bookcases, in the corner between the radio and the radiator. Running back out of my office I collided with Sophie on her way in. She fell over and started crying, but I ran on, into the spare bedroom. I ripped the sheets off the bed, hauled the TV away from the wall. In the adjoining bathroom I tore aside the shower curtain.

As I took the stairs three at a time back down to the next floor I could hear that both children were crying now. In our bedroom I emptied the laundry basket, fought my way through the dresses in Sally’s wardrobe. I made myself stop and stare into the room’s reflection in the full-length mirror in case that revealed any hidden detail I had somehow otherwise missed. I ran into Sophie’s room and climbed up onto a chair to open the door to the linen cupboard.

I had checked everywhere, every possible hiding place, and she wasn’t to be found. She’d gone.

The door bell rang. Sophie’s room was just at the top of the stairs, so I could see right down to the front door. Through the frosted glass I could see that it wasn’t Sally. Anyway, she would have used her keys. It was William.

* * * *

Nicholas Royle is the author of four novels - Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart and The Director’s Cut - in addition to more than a hundred short stories, which have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines. He has also edited eleven anthologies. He lives in west London with his wife and two children. Currently he is working on a new novel, Straight to Video, and a non-fiction project. After a six-year stint as a writer and editor at Time Out, he finally gave up the day job in the autumn of 2001 to write full-time. ‘When my son was only a few weeks old, I used to have this fear that I would look down into the Moses basket or into the car seat and find that they were empty. The best horror story I can think of that plays on parental anxieties of this kind is Alex Hamilton’s “The Baby-sitters”, which appeared in his excellent 1966 collection Beam of Malice. The same Alex Hamilton compiles the annual fast-sellers chart for The Guardian’s books pages, which makes equally disturbing reading.’