He could hear them talking on the other side. And when he bent closer, cheek to hedge’s leaf, he could just about make out their shapes. Elsa, had taken control of proceedings; Arthur contradicting everything she said. “Well go that way if you want,” she declared, “but I’m going this direction.” The debate was over but the children didn’t move. Rintoul squatted, his ear to their level. “What if – ” Arthur began. His sister shushed him. She was muttering to herself. Arthur snorted. Leaning over as far as he was able, Rintoul could see his son’s feet beneath the fringe of yew. He wondered if his arm was long enough to reach through it. I could grab his ankle, give them a fright, he thought. He shifted his weight and started winding his hand through the pranging twigs. No sooner was it inside, however, then Elsa overcame her doubts. As they burst from the nest of their hesitation, he heard them chirp “let’s go!”
Rintoul withdrew his arm. He stood, knees stiff, thighs aching. He’d long since found the middle of the maze, but was going to let Elsa and Arthur think they’d beaten him to it. His plan was to hide out within a couple of strides, and, as the children approached, make a dash for its centre. It would look like they’d just pipped him to the post. When the wait was longer than expected, however, he’d retraced his steps. The children had been easy to find. They were the only family playing in the maze. Having listened in, it was clear that everything was fine. Elsa and Arthur were comfortably absorbed in the labyrinth’s secure conundrum. He made his way back towards its end.
In the last false alley before the centre there was a low, stone bench. Rintoul sat, the cold of it tightening his posture. Gradually he began to slouch. The hedge was too far back to be comfortably leant on. His gut bulged. Undoing the buttons of his jacket, he wrapped, then held it, tight around him. Beyond the tops of the box cut walls, he could see little more than bewhited sky, the nerve ending crowns of the palace garden’s trees spasming towards its mute occlusion. It was the last day of the Toussaint holidays.
Rintoul settled into waiting. Surely now they wouldn’t take too long. He yawned, shivered, and closed his eyes. His mind wandered. In other circumstances, he asked himself, would I have made a better big or little brother?
*
When he woke, it was already dark. He sat bolt upright and rubbed his eyes. “I dozed off,” he said aloud, as though his wife were there beside him. Numb to the marrow, a band of pressure from the bench’s lip cut across his hamstrings. He stood and stamped his feet, needle pricks sinking to his heels. His back was tender from his slumping; his neck from how his head had lolled. There was a patch of dribble on his lapel. Rintoul blinked heavily. A photo-negative world, ground black, block print of hedge walls brilliant, hid behind his lids. He dispersed its contrasts with a knuckle. Opening his eyes again, the evening glowered.
Showing no urgency, he called his children’s names. He buttoned up his coat, stamped his feet again and clapped his hands. On the end of each action, quiet returned, weighted with a reticence suggesting something wrong. Rintoul checked his watch. How long was I out? Knowing the hour told him nothing. He hadn’t known the time when he’d first sat down.
He set off without considering which direction he was going, the instinct to clamour for Elsa and Arthur replaced with the belief that a brisk walk would bring him across their path. He reached into his pocket to check his phone. It wasn’t there.
Doubling back to the cul-de-sac from which he’d just emerged, he checked the gravel around the bench’s base assuming his phone had slipped from his pocket. It wasn’t there either. He kicked at the hedge’s lower branches half-heartedly, then folded to make sure it hadn’t gone beyond the cover of their edging. When he straightened up, his head was swimming. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had it. In the car? When they’d been having lunch? Had he not been idly scrolling on it whilst waiting for the kids to find him? He thought back to the moments before he’d drifted off. All he could remember were the tops of the trees, and their ink-line outgrowth faltering on the sky’s impassive page. There had been crows cawing. A shut-eyed inhale of the air had been bracing, distilled through winter’s immanence, solitude and nothing. He’d been content.
A thought occurred or re-emerged. At some point of his wait, Rintoul had decided that if he saw the children round the corner, if they suddenly appeared, he wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t greet them, stand, call or chase them. He wouldn’t go along with their race. Instead, he’d thought, he would stay as still as a statue and let them approach. Even as they came to him and put their little hands on him, he wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t so much as blink. He would hold his pose as their worry grew. Hold it through their confusion, as they cottoned to his game, and with their exasperation deepening the longer it went on. He would hold it while they slapped his face and yanked his limbs; until frustration circled back around to ripple with concern. And then he would snap out of it. Make them jump into the bargain. That’ll be a laugh, he’d said to himself. That’s what I’ll do.
Rintoul moved away from the bench. Around him, despite the crunch of his shoe, the air was inert. Nothing moved in his immediate world, abandoning him to a replete differential. He heard the blood pumping in his veins, the inch-work stretch of creaking tendon, the abrasion of skin at his groin and underarm. His heart was pounding. Why is nobody calling my name? Where are the footsteps coming running? Will someone answer if I start to shout? “Elsa! Arthur!” He began to worry. How long was I out? he asked himself again.
Cursing himself for drifting off, Rintoul stopped. “This is getting ridiculous.” With his toe, he marked out a semi-circle in the dust. He felt the points of sharp pebbles through his soles. “Call that A,” he murmured, adding a glyph. He was going to have to explain this to Veronika. Too much time had passed for the story of his getting lost not to be the dominant memory of the day. The tour of the Imperial Palace, the picnic lunch he’d prepared, his patience, good humour, the fast food he’d been planning to surprise them with on the way home, all of it would be glossed in the children’s retelling by this moment of confusion and the minutes he was gone. If he wasn’t careful, his getting turned around would define their entire holiday. He could picture his wife’s expression as Elsa and Arthur, laughing, described it to her, hiding her contempt for him behind the smile of a captive listener. “Don’t,” she would later cut him off, if he tried to give his side of the story.
Rintoul took a breath. There were crows again cawing in the far and leaf-wept trees. Dusk seeped through the prowling shadows. It was as though the world only deigned to move when Rintoul wasn’t watching. No sooner did his eyes begin to search, then the flint air held its breath on him and closed him in the hollow of its jaws. He called his children’s names again, the notes of his imploring damped by the hedge walls, cloud’s mute, the night itself. A fleck of black-feathered thing took off, escaping the corner of his eye. Nothing moved again. “El-sa!” He felt her syllables fill his mouth, resound within his chest. “Ar-thur!” It felt good to shout. It made the children seem lost instead of him.
“If you ever get lost, don’t go wandering about” hadn’t that always been their advice? It had been his mother’s advice to him. He could see her scared eyes welling as she held his shoulders and insisted. “Don’t go wandering off like that. You scared the life out of me.” Hadn’t he taught his children the same? Had he repeated it the way it’d been drilled into him? “The ones who stay put will always be found.”
Rintoul set off in the direction he thought would take him to the middle of the maze. He could picture the dry fountain at its centre, but, as he hadn’t been paying attention when he’d first got there, finding it in the twilight was much more difficult. In any other circumstances, it might have been a pleasure. He was confronting the puzzle on its own terms, the silence of its supposition promised as reward. Silence. Not the crotchety quiet of city nights, where even in the stillest hours, pipes groaned or the upstairs neighbour paced, and empty rolling stock on the dormant metro lines rumbled a vibration all the way up through the building. He looked around. With every breath he was further embalmed within a distance. The evening had entered him and, taking it up, he became a younger man.
Rintoul shut his eyes, and exhaled through his nose. He breathed in and out, deep and slowly, three times. When he opened them again, they had adjusted. His surrounds were an abstraction in shades of blue, dissected by paths of moonlight pale. There was no moon shining in the sky. I could stop looking. With this thought, the pathways of the maze opened out. They extended new dimensions; wider, grand and concentric routes, clear to him alone and glowing. I could not go back.
The walls of the labyrinth diminished before him, and from where he stood, Rintoul watched as thick trunks bursts from the cracking ground. Branchless and protruding, blunt as bones, their sprouting formed in avenues. All I would need to do is follow. In the distance, Rintoul could make out the lands that taking the path would lead him to. He didn’t move. His heart was flickering in his chest, flickering like his mother’s eyes as their tears began to well. Somebody whispered, “the children will be frightened.”
In a blink he was back in the square cut maze, its alleys stubby and its corners blind. The splay of forking ways looked like fat fingers spreading. Yew fronds quivered. Rintoul saw unknown hands paw his children’s hair. Fear cupped in the burrows of the hedges. He took off running.
At a junction he went left; at another, left again. His foot slipped out from under him. Grit winced, and he skidded, almost to the floor. He called his children’s names. One more turn and he was back to where he’d toed a mark into the stones. Now, when he shouted, his voice had changed. There were no longer pleasures to the sound he made.
He doubled back. Turned right. Turned left. A junction; dithered. Veronika’s voice was in his head: “be a man, make up your mind.” Was it a memory or something he imagined she’d said? That she would say? That he deserved to hear? “If you knew what you actually wanted in life, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.” The echoing voices were getting mixed up. “If you’re lost, stay put.” “You’re no different from your father.” In other circumstances, would I have protected my brother? Would I have been the one who trailed or would I have led? “You’ve never known how to take care of anybody but yourself.” Perhaps, after all, I’m not cut out to be a dad.
There was no way now he could hide what had happened. The children were lost. He was lost. He would have to admit that he’d fallen asleep. Been asleep while the predator made off with his kids; asleep while they had wandered into traffic; asleep while they had drowned in the octagon lake, its brackish waters creeping at the corners of their mouths. He had slept as they had disappeared into the woods. He had slept, breathing softly in an empty dream, while for countless years they had staggered through the maze, starving, thin and frozen, in a half-world hush, only to find him and, unable to wake him, sit at his feet until time wore them to dust.
It had crossed his mind to abandon them.
Red pulp images of butchery flashed and left him. Nightmares, easy to identify as such, he was quick to dismiss. More banal fears were weighing in his guts. A view of a bedroom from the open door, the bed made and for years untouched. The sun-faded fur of plush toys. Framed photographs which multiplied though the children pictured never aged. His wife turning away from him; sat with her back to him, arrayed in light; sat with her back to him in tears at the table; stood at a railing, looking away.
He saw grey mornings stretch to the same dull horizon, where a breaking white and heatless dawn was the empty hope they might return. Every day believing that they might come back. Her back. Every afternoon stood by a window, on a threshold, desperate for a sign. Taking to prayer. Being left and left again. Distant figures waiting. Distant figures watching. Solitary figures who refused his attention, who refused to turn and look at him.
Alone, seeing their spirits shimmer, a mirage on the shoreline of a far withdrawn sea; theirs a place that no matter for how long he walked, he would never reach. He saw himself hollowing in the attempt. He knew what it was that people disappeared.
Turning a corner, he found himself at the ornamental bench, and no sooner was he out of the cul-de-sac, saw Elsa and Arthur sitting on the fountain.
Rintoul called out to them. They didn’t look up. Elsa’s eyes were fixed on the sky, as though they were following a bird in flight. Her arms were at her sides. She was holding his phone in her lap. Arthur held his cheek in a cupped hand, elbow on his knee, expression beaten down, bored of waiting. As Rintoul approached, neither of them stirred.
“I’m so sorry, Elsa, Arthur. Are you OK?” he sank to his knees in front of them. “I’m so sorry. How long have you been waiting?” Rintoul clasped his children to him. They didn’t move. “You gave me such a fright,” he said. They didn’t react. Leaning back from them, he looked at his daughter, then his son. Their expressions were completely blank, eyes open but unseeing. “Arthur; Elsa?” Neither moved. Rintoul let his hands fall and grabbed their little arms. His thumb and fingers touched as he ringed his grip around them. He shook their limbs. No response. The moon emerged from somewhere, or seemed to. The light on his children’s faces changed. He had never seen them look so pale. He held the back of his hand to Elsa’s forehead. She was cold. “My Elsa,” he whispered.
Arthur was the same. His skin was duck egg blue, cheeks smooth. Rintoul gently patted them. He clasped the boy’s chin to turn his face towards him. “Arthur?” He didn’t blink. A tear ran down Rintoul’s fingernails. Putting his arms around them again, Rintoul embraced them. He held them as tightly as he could. “Elsa, Arthur, what’s wrong? I’m here. Please.” “Wake up, wake up,” he heard some voice. He looked over his shoulder. “Someone help me, please.”
Clamped tight to his father’s side, Arthur began to shake, his shoulder digging into Rintoul’s ribs. He let go of Elsa in a panic and grabbed his son by his upper arms. As he tried to hold the shaking boy, Rintoul saw his face was cracking. “Arthur?” Behind him, Elsa burst out with a laugh. “I couldn’t hold it anymore! I couldn’t hold it in!” Arthur wheezed. Elsa tousled her father’s hair. She doubled over. “You should’ve seen your face, dad. You should’ve seen it! I told you Artie, I told you!”
Their laughter sounded hollow, high-pitched and harsh. Rintoul slid to sitting, propped against the fountain. The ground left marks on his coat and trousers, claiming him for the bone-dust path. The children kept laughing. They flitted around, the sounds they were making more forced and insistent. Rintoul felt clammy, shaky and small. Arthur, copying his sister, swooped and mussed his hair. Elsa twirled about a circle. “We got him a treat! We got him a treat!” Arthur joined in, “we got you!”
Sitting with his face in his hands, Rintoul tried to control his breathing. The children realised something was wrong. Rintoul hadn’t make a sound. While Arthur hopped nervously from foot to foot, Elsa leant her head to one side, then the other. He knew that to make everything alright all he had to do was flash a smile, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He kept his hands over his eyes. “It was only a joke, dad,” Elsa said. Arthur was tugging at his sleeve. “We thought it would be funny to pretend that we were statues.” “I wanted to jump out on you, but Elsa said we shouldn’t.” “No, I didn’t!” “And it was her who took your phone!”
“You sacred the life out of me,” Rintoul said. He picked himself up, brushing the dust from his trouser leg, and went in the direction that he thought would take them out. Elsa and Arthur came up alongside him. Neither said a word. Elsa reached out to her father, and her little brother copied her. They left together, hand in hand.
*
Emerging from an underpass on the outskirts of the city, the sky had cleared. A ringed full moon glowed in the haze above the carriage way. Not a star could be seen. “Look dad,” Elsa said. Arthur was asleep in the back. Rintoul drove, quiet. He could feel his daughter’s eyes flash in his direction.
The roundabout followed the moon around, its shine cut by the knotting lanes of the complex junctions. Soon it’d sunk within the rows of lights that lined the upper highway. The night came in around them then, eerie with the city’s smoulder. Taking a slip road, the car thudded softly over broken painted lines.
“We didn’t mean to upset you, daddy. We just thought it would be fun.”
“I know that, sweetie,” he replied. “I know.”
