Page 12 of Sad Girl Hours

Chapter Twelve

Saffron

Another half an hour later and I’m tempted to ask again, but I remember Nell’s resolute expression and daren’t broach the topic a second time. Instead, I get my phone out to film some more clips. “We are now entering our second hour in the maze.”

“If you don’t hear from us again, assume we’ve been eaten by the minotaur,” Nell adds off camera.

“I don’t think we’re going to be eaten by a mythical creature from an ancient Greek story—”

“You never know.”

“That is true, you don’t. Actually –” I slide the camera up between the rows of maize towards the slowly darkening sky – “speaking of what you don’t know, the ancient Greeks had some really interesting ideas about astronomy.

They observed that there were two kinds of stars – fixed stars and wandering stars.

What they called fixed stars are the stars that we can see in the sky today.

What they called wandering stars – which were stars that moved around in the night sky, separate from the others that only moved together slowly round the earth – were what we now know are planets, each with their own orbit.

“They also believed that there were two layers in what they thought was the ‘sphere of the universe’. An inner terrestrial level that went up to the orbit of the moon and was full of things like air, water and fire, and an outer celestial one where all the stars were and that was full of ‘heaven’.”

“That’s so cool,” Nell says. “I’d quite like to reach the inner terrestrial level of this maze if at all possible.”

“We could always…”

“NO. Not yet,” she replies, while I laugh and explain the envelope debacle to the future audience. “Not until we see the minotaur.”

“I think we’ve been here before,” I say (just to Nell) fifteen minutes later as we walk round a circle cut out of the maize and have to come back the way we came. Again.

Nell sighs. “I think you’re correct. Right or left?”

“I think right. We went left last time.”

Somehow, though, we come to what looks like an identical circle in the maize.

“No…” Nell storms round it in disbelief. “HOW ARE WE BACK HERE AGAIN? We literally went in the opposite direction.” She comes over to me and twists her head round to look at my watch. “We’ve been in here for an hour and a half.”

“We have.”

“That’s as long as most movies. We could have watched and been delighted by almost the entirety of any of the excellent Paddington movies in the time it’s taken us to get approximately nowhere in this godforsaken maze.”

“Are you having a nice autumnal time?” I ask, teasing her a little and expecting her to vehemently protest.

“I am actually,” she says instead, her face now an unexpected vision of Zen. “Though I would rather not have been carrying a bagful of apples on my shoulder for nearly two hours.”

“I could carry yours if they’re heavy?” I offer, despite my shoulder also being a bit sore, but she just glares at me.

“It’s a perfect crisp autumn day, and we’re going to complete this damn maze if it kills us. Which I’m starting to think it might.”

We hit another dead end. Nell tilts her head to the sky and shouts, “SUNNY? I’M SORRY FOR EVERYTHING I SAID. We need our maze guardian, pleeeease .”

I half expect their little face to poke through the maize and say, ‘Yes?’ but nothing happens. “Nice try.”

Somewhere in the distance, we hear noises of jubilance erupt into the air. “Someone must have found the middle,” I say.

Nell looks like she either wants to commit a homicide or cry. (Or both.) “Why do they sound so far away?” she says pathetically. “Are we just bad at mazes? It sounded like there were children in that group. How have infants bested us? We’re meant to be strong, smart, capable women.”

“We are strong, smart, capable women,” I insist. “We just may also be women that need to have a teensy little peek at a map.”

You can tell things are getting dire because she actually hesitates.

“No,” she says, though she doesn’t sound completely sure. “We can do it. One last try.”

“I really admire your determination,” I say, partly joking, partly not. “It’s one of my favourite things about you. You’re very tenacious.”

“Like a badger.”

“Sure.”

“Well, thank you,” she says. “It’s always nice when someone appreciates— Oh, for the LOVE OF GOD.”

Yet again, we’re being stared down by a dense wall of golden maize, swaying slightly from side to side, the wind having picked up a little.

I raise my eyebrows. “Envelope time?”

Nell’s sigh this time could rival the wind rustling through the maize. “I just don’t understand how it can be so hard to go on a little walk and find a stupid way out of some plants. And—”

Part two of her rant is interrupted by plump drops of rain beginning to plummet from the heavens. I watch as Nell stands there, completely still, a droplet landing directly on the bridge of her nose, sliding down it to plop off the bottom.

“Envelope time,” she agrees.

Thank God for that. I unseal the envelope and pull out the paper, dark circles already scattering themselves across the page.

“OK, so we must be…” I consider the last coloured square we found a couple of turns back and match it to the one on the map.

“About here,” I say, pointing to our location to show Nell.

“So, we’re actually really close to an exit point, or we’re about halfway to the centre. ”

Nell scans the map carefully, tracing different routes with her finger. “All right.” She seems to think hard about something, rain still falling down on us. “This way.” She nods with her head in one direction.

We walk forward for a few turns until we get to another split. Nell stops. “So. If we go left, we’ll be about five turns away from the exit. If we go right, we’ll be heading towards the centre.”

I briefly check the map. “Correct.”

“So…” Nell just looks at me and I realise she wants me to make the decision.

“Oh.” I think about it.

It’s raining. We still have to walk to the bus stop and get back to town, probably soaking wet.

But.

We’re already soaking wet. It’s not actually that cold: the warmth of summer seems to be stretching on into October more and more in recent years. And Nell really wants to finish this maze.

“Right,” I say. “Let’s go right.”

Nell’s eyes widen in surprise, before softening into a smile. “Right it is.” She holds out her hand.

I take it and squeal with laughter as she starts running, dragging me behind her, twisting and turning through the maze.

The sky has fully cracked open into grey now, rain starting to soak through my clothes.

It feels like the only dry part of my body is the palm of my right hand, tightly clasped inside Nell’s as we run, laughing, through the maze (and past a couple of bemused families who had the forethought to bring umbrellas).

“How’s your heart?” I yell to Nell as we keep thundering.

“Still there,” she calls back to me with a grin. “Having the time of its goddamn life. Oh shit.”

We’re at a dead end. Nell drops my hand to look at the map properly. “Ah, I see where we went wrong. We’re nearly there, though. Take two?”

Without thinking, I grab her hand again and lead us back off in the right direction, picking up the pace with each new twist, with each slam of our feet down into the damp earth, until finally…

“We did it!” Nell lurches forward and collapses down on to the pile of hay bales surrounding the big red flag poking out. The smell of damp farm our reward for completing two hours of meandering around the same few hundred square metres.

I lower myself down on to the hay too, looking up above us at the millions of droplets descending from noir candyfloss clouds as I try to steady my breathing. “We did it.”

We sit/lie there, listening to the rain patter down around us and our breaths trying to get back to normal. After a little while, Nell props herself up.

“So. Was it worth it? Is the centre of the maze everything you dreamed it would be?”

I lean up too. “And more,” I say. “I mean, there’s hay, there’s a big red flag – what more could you ask for as a reward for your efforts?”

“Truly nothing. This is all the reward I need. And whatever our prize is for completing it is, of course.”

“But we opened the envelope.”

“Did we?” Nell says. “Or did the envelope just disintegrate in all the rain?”

I go to throw her a disapproving look, but when I face her, sitting there, grinning cheekily at me, her normally straight dark hair starting to curl and sticking to her flushed cheeks, I find I just can’t do it. She deserves a stupid prize, even if I don’t want to lie to Sunny.

“Did I say we opened it?” I say, frowning. “Sorry, I meant that it appears to be open. But I’m sure once we tell Sunny what happened, they’ll understand.”

Nell’s face opens up into a surprised smile yet again, and I feel warm on the inside, despite the worsening conditions on the outside. I like surprising her, I realise. I might try to do it more often.

We find our way out of the maze with ease (using the map that we have never seen before and definitely didn’t take out and then put back into the envelope) and find Sunny reading in a little wooden booth by the field that’s acting as a car park.

“Oh, hi, guys! I thought everyone had gone home because of the rain!”

We just stand there, dripping and looking up at them.

“But obviously not!” They put their book down and come over to the window. “So, how did we find it? Did you have oodles of maze fun?”

“Oh yes,” Nell says. “Oodles.”

“Excellent! And did we manage to complete it without checking the map?”

I slap the two envelopes down on the counter, one clearly intact, one … less so. “We sure did!” I say cheerily.

Sunny just stares down at them for a good few moments. I can tell they’re not convinced, but they clearly decide that it’s not worth fighting about. “Amazing! Congratulations! Now, as a prize for triumphing over the maze, you get to pick an item out of our magnificent prize bucket!”

They produce what is, in fact, just a regular bucket filled with small objects wrapped in orange paper, and hold it out to us.

“You can do the honours,” I say to Nell, who thrusts her hand into the bucket with glee.

“All right, I pick … this one!” She pulls out a long, thin parcel.

“Excellent choice! Have a wonderful day, guys. We hope to welcome you back again soon!” Sunny beams a goodbye at us as we head off.

“I think once was perhaps enough,” Nell says. “I think I’ve reached my maze capacity for at least a year.”

“Definitely. Maybe in a year, though, we can come back and see if we can beat our time on their new one, try to win you another prize. Speaking of which, what is it?”

Nell examines the parcel, turning it over in her hands. “Well, it’s very small and cylindrical. It’s almost like…”

She pulls it out of the wrapper and stops in her tracks. “A pencil. A pencil with footballs printed on it.”

I can’t help it. I let out an almost hysterical hoot of laughter. We spent two hours in a labyrinth, we’re soaked to the bone, and our reward for our efforts is a pencil clearly designed for an eight-year-old child.

“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Nell says, but she’s clearly battling against mirth herself. “This is exactly what I was hoping for.”

“We could find a football-loving child to gift it to,” I say, still laughing. “I’m sure they’d be very grateful.”

“Um, absolutely not. I will be keeping and treasuring this forever. We earned it fair and square.”

I’m about to comment when Nell does it anyway.

“Well, maybe not fair ,” she admits. “But definitely square. We earned it square.”

“Come on,” I say, swapping my apple bag to my other arm so I can loop my right arm through hers as we walk down the hill towards the bus stop again. “Let’s go home and show the others.”