Stories - 2013 - Hiding

We are walking along the path in the park and I suddenly turn right to walk between the two bushy rows of lavender. He doesn’t follow me, because he just has to be different, doesn’t he. I walk to the end and he walk s to his end. I look his way, but he isn’t coming and he isn’t looking either. There is a tall rose bush in front of me and I duck down. Maybe he won’t see me. Maybe he’ll wonder where I’ve gone. I want him to look my way and to see him worrying, surprised I’m not there anymore. He doesn’t look worried. But he starts walking my way. I keep looking at him through the branches and flowers. When he is close and he can see me crouching in my black office suit, his face opens into a big smile and he laughs. 

“Are you hiding?”

“Yes, how did you know I was here?”

“I saw you.”

“You could see me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to call you Pedro from now on.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes I will.”

... I am small. Six maybe.

My mother and I are in the house of some friends. She is talking grown-up things with them in the living-room, and I am bored. So I go and hide. Their flat is like ours, a dark corridor with a built-in cupboard by the bathroom door. They use theirs to store dirty laundry and rags for washing the floors, as far as I can tell by the dank smell.  I sit there in there and carefully close the doors from inside. My dark purple dress would look like any other rags, but I have to hide my hands and face. I pick up some dirty clothes in the dark and put some over my arms, and one over my head and face.

And then I sit there, waiting, listening to the noises in the dark and smelling the clothes. The smell is that of wet cloth drying in a closed, airless space.

At length my mother’s voice emerges from the living room, saying goodbye and calling out to me. She calls, but I don’t answer. They all start looking for me. They go in the other rooms, I hear the doors opening, their voices calling me, and asking each other where else to look. 

That is infinitely pleasing to me. They actually want me, and they are feeling it, now I am not there. And I can hear it all while they don’t know I’m there. 

I hear someone switching the light-switch by the bathroom door, and the door to my cupboard opens. I hold my breath and keep very still, my heart pumping extra hard. A few long, silent moments. The doors close. I take a deep breath and shift a leg - it has gone numb. They didn’t see me. I’m good at this!

“Did you look in the cupboard? She must be hiding somewhere.”

“Yes, she’s not there”.

I smile in the smelly darkness.

The light switch again. The doors open, I stop breathing again. The doors stay open for a while, but I can’t see who it is, the dirty cloth is on my face. I can’t hold my breath for that long, so I start exhaling slowly and carefully, trying not to move at all. I take small, invisible, shallow breaths. My heart is thumping again with the excitement. Who’s going to win this time?

Me. The doors close again, disappointed.

My mother’s voice rings again in the corridor. She is saying goodbye, she has to go. She has given up. But I don’t hear despair in her voice.  She isn’t crying either. I’m disappointed now.

After she has gone, I stay there for a while longer, and then I emerge. There is no more fun if they are not looking for me. If I am not the thing they care about most.