Purgatory Is a Place Too

by Dominique Kyle

  He made an angry, frustrated, despairing groan in his throat. “That’s what I mean about me being so fucking stupid! I was so fucking insecure, I was just certain you were going to go off with Quinn, probably on camera in front of the eyes of the nation in the middle of that wretched documentary, and I felt so humiliated at the imagined thought of it, I figured I’d just get it over and done with and be the one to do the dumping! And then you were so devastated, I felt terrible. I suddenly began to realise I might have got it all wrong, and even Quinn seemed to hate me for it. And my family were just beside themselves and then poor Kes went and tried to kill himself, and I was just the bad guy all round the country. And then when you made those approaches, I just felt so ashamed. I thought, I can’t mess her around. I can’t put her through all that grief and public humiliation and then just take up with her again like nothing’s happened, that would be more abusive than anything – at least that was my reasoning at the time. But I realise now that that was my chance, and that you’re surprisingly forgiving and you’d have let go of it. I mean, you’re really kind to Siân now, even after all she’s done to you, and I really admire you for that. And three years on you’re still not with Quinn, so I get it now, that you’re just friends – sort of friends anyway.” He stumbled to a halt.

  I said nothing.

  “And then you went off with Tyler and you said it was just casual sex for something to do, and I felt so fucking jealous. And I could have skinned myself alive because at the moment you went off with Tyler I realised that I was mad about you!” He paused, as though he was waiting for me to interject with something, but I didn’t. “And then you fell in love with him and I knew then that I’d lost you for good…”

  There was a long heavy silence. “I’m sorry Eve, I know I didn’t treat you right. I just took you for granted in the beginning and didn’t make you feel special enough, and I didn’t tell you I loved you, perhaps because I didn’t properly realise my own feelings at the time. And now it’s too late isn’t it..?”

  There was a desperate question in his voice, like he was hoping I might just throw myself in his arms after all.

  “Yes,” I said as gently as I could. “Yes, I’m sorry Pete, I’ve moved on now. I had to as a matter of self-defence. I wouldn’t have gone off with Tyler if I’d still been with you. But Tyler was a darling and was absolutely lovely to me, so I’ve no regrets about having done it, apart from the terrible way it ended. But what it does mean is that the chapter with you got thoroughly closed and I can’t open it again. I can’t go back to before…”

  He sobbed painfully. I knew how it felt. Once it had been me sobbing and begging him to get back with me, and him being kind as he refused me, trying to give me a hug to make me feel better, which of course it didn’t. So I didn’t want to insult him by reaching across and touching him.

  “Please give me a hug, Eve. I won’t take it the wrong way, but please just give me a hug, Eve,” he begged.

  I worked my way over to him in my sleeping bag and put my arms around him. Poor Pete. I felt so sorry for him. I understood, I really did. But there was nothing I could do about it. It was all of his own making. And of course it was precisely that fact that was making it so agonising for him. He wouldn’t get any sympathy from his family because they were so bloody angry with him.

  He wiped at his eyes. “I’m twenty eight, in a job that’s going nowhere, still living at home with my parents!” He summed up bitterly. “So, I’ve won the World Championship a couple of times in a format that hardly anyone has ever even heard of! Big deal! Dad and Mum were married and with a baby and a house by my age! Dad already had a degree in engineering. They were earning good money. And Dad won every bloody title going over and over again!”

  I hugged him tight.

  “And now Dad’s coming back to take even that one title off me. Like he can’t bear me to have it! I don’t understand why he’s doing this to me!”

  “I don’t think he’s doing it to be mean to you,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t. I think he just can’t resist having another go, and testing the mettle of the pair of us.”

  He said nothing.

  “So let’s agree one thing shall we, right now?” I said firmly. “We are not going to let him have it. Let’s agree right now that we don’t mind which of the two of us gets it, as long it’s not him. If one of us sees the other one is ahead and has a chance of winning, and it means we have to sacrifice our own chances to see him off, then we’ll do that? Yes? We’ll drive co-operatively at all times, and only if it’s just us two left on the last bend with no sign of him, then we’ll go for each other. Agreed?”

  “Ok,” he said, rather hoarsely. “Agreed.” He sounded calmer, like having arranged a strategy with me made him feel less alone.

  “So are we ok then?” I asked, wiping the tears from his cheeks with my hands.

  He nodded. “But can I ask you just one thing?”

  “What?”

  “Please can you stop flinching when I touch you?”

  “I wasn’t aware that I did.”

  He sighed. “Sometimes I just feel so sorry for you when I see you standing upright there, so stiff and alone. I guess no-one’s even touched you since Tyler died? And I know that if I laid my hand on your back it would be rigid with tension, and you’ve got no-one to massage it for you. And then sometimes I reach out to just touch you, and you flinch away, and it makes me feel so awful.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll try not to. Maybe it won’t happen now we’ve had this talk?”

  “If you ever need any oxytocin before a race,” he offered, “just sidle up to me and I’ll rub your back or your neck for you…”

  I laughed, and I could feel him relaxing at last. “Ok,” I offered, “you can give me a hug as we go to sleep now if you like.” And I turned my back on him and allowed him to curl up behind me with his arms around me. “We’re not going to let your Dad win,” I promised him as we settled down. “But we mustn’t let him suspect anything. No driving co-operatively until the Final itself, before then we drive competitively and head into each other if we need to and then on the day of the Final we slap it on him and do whatever we need to do to win!”

  He gave a sort of laugh and his arms tightened around me and as his breathing slipped into exhausted sleep pattern, I hoped this would be the end of all the trauma between us.

  This time it was my turn to enter the room, pump the air and exclaim, “Result!”

  “What?” Jo demanded.

  “I’ve just had a phonecall telling me I’m going to have to be away the exact weekend of the next tarmac World Qualifier!”

  Zanna sighed audibly. One of her favourite phrases was change the record will you? I guess we did endlessly talk Stocks.

  Jo frowned. “What really? Or are you just going to pretend you are?”

  “No really,” I said, throwing myself down beside her on the settee, meaning Zanna had to udge up a bit. “ITV has asked me and Quinn to do another short series for them, and for some reason Damian said we had to start straight away. ‘Or the season will be over’ was what he said.”

  “What season? What series? You never said anything about this!” Jo sounded offended.

  I shrugged it off. “It’s literally just come up,” I lied.

  “So what are they asking you to do?” Jo asked.

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know exactly. That’s part the set-up, I believe. He asked me if I’d got a passport, took down the number of it, then told me to turn up at Manchester airport for ten am next Saturday… Paul can’t argue with that, can he?”

  Jo looked a bit shell shocked. “I hope this isn’t going to interfere with any of the other important dates though!”

  I frowned. “Well if it does, I’m just going to tell them where to shove their series…” I said.

  “And they’ve really not told you where you’re going?” Zanna pulled a face at me like she didn’t believe me.

 
I shook my head. “When I asked him what to pack he said something warm for the day and something pretty for the evening and ‘all the other kit would be provided’.”

  “What kit?”

  “He wouldn’t say…”

  “Well I’m looking forward to being a fly on the wall when you tell Entwistle you’re disappearing off into the sunset at such short notice,” Jo said dryly.

  I’d negotiated with Damian that they’d pay us the equivalent of our week’s wages so we could both offer our employers to take unpaid leave if they cut up stiff. He agreed so easily to it I wondered if I should have negotiated more. He promised me the journalism team would get in contact with me soon. Until they did I decided that I was going to leave the whole issue alone because if I made any breakthrough it would be better if I had it all recorded. And they’d know best how to go about that.

  “How’d your Dad take the news?” I asked at work after a weekend of racing, trailing Cody around, and gaining points.

  “He looked a bit gobsmacked,” Jo reported.

  “Good!” I celebrated. “Another curve ball for him to digest!”

  The following Saturday morning found me and Quinn travelling to Manchester airport together on the train. A guy with a camera joined us in front of the departure boards.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” I asked Quinn.

  It turned out to be Innsbruck.

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Austria,” Quinn said.

  Another guy with a camera joined us on the plane. It had taken them a while to get all their equipment through security despite apparently having given advance notice. Passengers looked curiously at us as one guy trained a camera on us as the plane turned onto the run-way to take off. They’d instructed us just to act natural. They told us they’d film it, but probably wouldn’t use any of it, but claimed it would get us into the swing of just ignoring the cameras.

  “Do you want to hold my hand, Ginty?” Quinn asked.

  “Why? Are you scared?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

  (When the series screened, months later, the Satterthwaites pissed themselves over this. His face when you said that! Sue thought it was hilarious.)

  “No, I thought you might be, since you’ve never been on a plane before,” he explained with an attempt at dignity.

  “Nothing to be scared of,” I explained back. “Bloody big engine. I wonder what a plane engine looks like? I’ve never thought before! I’d love to see one close up…” I pressed my nose to the window and watched delightedly as everything rushed past then got smaller and smaller and we got above the clouds. It was awesome actually being able to see the cotton wool tops of the clouds. “I’m trying to compute what the formulae and equations would be relevant for getting a plane off the ground, but I think I don’t know enough and will have to read up when I get home.” I flopped back in my seat and stared ahead of me for a bit.

  “What’s going on in that head of yours?” Quinn asked me curiously.

  “I’m designing a piece of engine,” I reported, glancing sideways at him. “What’s going on in yours?”

  “I’m designing a song,” he said with a slight smile. “Do you want to hear it?”

  “No, I think I can live without that,” I said dryly. “Do you want me to draw my bit of engine for you?”

  He laughed. “No I think I can survive without seeing it.”

  A short pause later. “When did you start thinking in formulae?” He asked idly.

  I shrugged. “A while now. They’re really interesting, but I don’t much remember doing them at school, at least, not in a way that applied to anything…”

  He pulled a face.

  “It’s only like you thinking in terms of musical notation,” I pointed out. “When I look at a sheet of music it’s just gobbledygook, but when you look at it, it’s a song. Same with equations and formulae and me.”

  “I s’pose when you put it like that…”

  When we got to the other end I got really excited. I pressed my nose to the window. “Look Quinn, real mountains with snow on!”

  “Well they’re not going to be pretend ones are they?” He teased me.

  “They look just like all the pictures,” I said awed. “Proper mountains!”

  “You are such a lokel yokel,” he derided. “Have you never seen mountains before?”

  “Actually,” I said, sitting back a bit. “No I don’t think I have. Where have you seen them?”

  “Well we went to that Welsh Outdoor Centre with school remember?” He said.

  I shook my head. “No, I didn’t go, we couldn’t afford it and I was too embarrassed to allow Dad to apply for one of the grants for me…”

  “Oh, yeah, it was remarkably trouble free as I remember,” he recollected. “Which probably means you weren’t on it…”

  I gave him a perfunctory slap on the arm for that one.

  “And then I did that bike trip through Germany remember? We went into Austria towards the end of it. Huge mountains!”

  “You never told me anything about it,” I said.

  He pulled a face. “Well the second I got back they dumped the news on me that Mum had cancer, so no-one much felt like listening to any of it…”

  I reached out and squeezed his hand and watched the ground rushing up to meet us. “I wonder what we’re going to do?” I speculated.

  “Well that’s pretty obvious,” Quinn said. “They’ll be taking us skiing.”

  A train ride and a bus ride and a night in a hotel, then a kitting out session and then our first lesson.

  “We’ll be separating you out during the day,” they explained, “and you’ll come together in the evening for some lively apres-ski. And at the end of the five days you’ll challenge each other to a task each, and we’ll see who turns out to be the better skier.”

  I couldn’t possibly see how that would be at all interesting to an audience. But it would be edited down to half an hour – so all they had to do was keep in every mildly funny thing we said and every stupid prat fall, and that would fill it. Clearly, the idea was for us to make idiots of ourselves. So I was determined to not give them that satisfaction.

  My instructor took me up onto the beginners’ slope on some terrifying thing called a T-bar that two of you had to balance your bum on at once while it dragged you along. He tried to hold onto me at the top where we were meant to get off, but we both ended up tripping over as these mental extensions on my feet went off in their own directions. I skidded off at high speed across the slope, scattering families and small kids, left, right and centre, shouting, “Sorry! Sorry!” Which they probably didn’t understand because they were all speaking German. The only thing I could think to do was to crouch down and lean forward. When finally I came to a halt and straightened up, I was the only one left standing. Even the instructor was on his backside. It looked like a massacre.

  “Oops, sorry!” I said.

  “I think she’s going to be able to ski,” the instructor said drily to the cameraman.

  That night both Quinn and I were complaining about thigh burn, but we were expected now to whoop it up for the entertainment of the masses. They sent us down to an establishment called the Golden Eagle where the night life was young and raucous and loud and there was a rock band on. Quinn raised his eyebrows at me, this was his sort of night out. It turned out they’d primed the band of course, so all too soon he was dragged up on stage to sing and everyone was screaming along to it. We got back late.

  “I don’t know if I can keep this up for five days,” he said hoarsely.

  I laughed. “You can’t ruin your reputation with all the teenage audience by begging for an early night.”

  When I got back into my room I sorted through all my dresses again. I knew what was expected of me – what they were paying for. I’d brought all those flirty mini skirted outfits with me. Even the smoky blue one that Tyler had fallen in love with me in. I’d been ruthless with myself. Nothing was off limits.
I knew I was expected to show plenty of leg.

  I couldn’t understand why skiing was considered so difficult. You just pointed at where you wanted to go, and leaned like on a motorbike. Quinn however was still moaning every night. On the Wednesday my instructor asked me what challenge we should take up with Quinn. I frowned and looked across at where some young people were doing some slalom training, whipping in and out of bendy poles on a steep slope, first one way and then the other.

  “I could do that,” I said.

  He looked a bit incredulous. “You think?”

  I nodded. “I reckon anyone who can ride a motorbike and drive a Stock car could do that.”

  “You think?” He said again. “Well off you go then!”

  I made my way up to the top of the course and whipped in and out down it, skidding to a halt beside him at the bottom.

  He stared at me. “Ok, we are definitely challenging Quinn to that! Are you sure you’ve never skied in your life before?”

  (When watching it at home, Paul said to me, ‘the minute I saw that expression on your face when you pointed at the poles and said you could do it, that you were going to be right. That’s the expression you had on your face when you told us you would be good at racing, and then again when you told me you could design a new car.’)

  On Thursday we lined up at the top of the slope.

  “What’s your team called?” Quinn’s instructor asked.

  My man grinned. “The Bullet Train! How about yours?”

  The other guy looked a bit uncertain. “The Camel Train?” He proffered. “The Snow Plough?”

  My instructor and I looked at each other and smiled.

  As Quinn landed ignominiously at my feet at the bottom of the course in a huge tumbling cloud of flailing arms and legs and snow, I grinned at him and poked at him with my ski pole.

  “Come on Quinn, get up, it’s the best of three you know!”