“
Her face lit up in welcome as she saw me, and taking prompt, if cowardly, action in the face of emergency I smiled, waved and ducked out through a side door.
As I hurried around the side of the building into a handy patch of deep shadow (Briar being a persistent sort of girl), I tripped over someone’s legs stretched across the path. I lurched forward, and a big hand grasped me firmly by the jersey and heaved me back upright.
‘Thank you,’ I said breathlessly.
‘Helen?’ Briar called, and I shrank back into the shadows beside the owner of the legs.
‘Avoiding someone?’ he asked.
‘Shh!’ I hissed, and he was obediently quiet. There was a short silence, happily unbroken by approaching footsteps, and I sighed with relief.
‘Not very sociable, are you?’
‘You can hardly talk,’ I pointed out.
‘True,’ he said.
‘Who are you hiding from?’
‘Everyone,’ he said morosely.
‘Fair enough. I’ll leave you to it.’
‘Better give it a minute,’ he advised. ‘She might still be lying in wait.’
That was a good point, and I leant back against the brick wall beside him. ‘You don’t have to talk to me,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
There was another silence, but it felt friendly rather than uncomfortable. There’s nothing like lurking together in the shadows for giving you a sense of comradeship. I looked sideways at the stranger and discovered that he was about twice as big as any normal person. He was at least a foot taller than me, and built like a tank. But he had a nice voice, so with any luck he was a gentle giant rather than the sort who would tear you limb from limb as soon as look at you.
‘So,’ asked the giant, ‘why are you hiding from this girl?’
‘She’s the most boring person on the surface of the planet,’ I said.
‘That’s a big call. There’s some serious competition for that spot.’
‘I may be exaggerating. But she’d definitely make the top fifty. Why did you come to a party to skulk around a corner?’
‘I was dragged,’ he said. ‘Kicking and screaming.’ He turned his head to look at me, smiling.
‘Ah,’ I said wisely. ‘That’d be how you got the black eye.’ Even in the near-darkness it was a beauty – tight and shiny and purple. There was also a row of butterfly tapes holding together a split through his right eyebrow, and it occurred to me suddenly that chatting in dark corners to large unsociable strangers with black eyes probably wasn’t all that clever.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I collided with a big hairy Tongan knee.’
‘That was careless.’
‘It was, wasn’t it?’
I pushed myself off the wall to stand straight. ‘I’ll leave you in peace. Nice to meet you.’
‘You too,’ he said, and held out a hand. ‘I’m Mark.’
I took it and we shook solemnly. ‘Helen.’
‘What do you do when you’re not hiding from the most boring girl on the planet?’ he asked.
‘I’m a vet,’ I said. ‘What about you?’
‘I play rugby.’
‘Oh!’ That was a nice, legitimate reason for running into a Tongan knee – I had assumed it was the type of injury sustained during a pub fight.
”
”