by Beth Moran
Oh, no. This was horrible.
‘He was the one who told me where he lived!’
She stopped plucking at her hair and turned to face me, hands on hips. ‘Well, that confirms it then, doesn’t it? Oh, come off it, don’t look so shocked. What else was he supposed to do?’
‘He should have asked me to leave. Why didn’t he? I would have left, if he felt that uncomfortable. I thought it was nothing really, not a big deal, we’d laugh about it and move on. Nathan can’t leave the Larks because of me. I’ll talk to him, tell him I’m leaving. Then he can come back.’ I shook my head, confused. ‘Why didn’t he ask me to leave?’
‘What, apart from being head over heels in love with you? I’d guess not wanting to send you back into your house for the next ten years, back to a hopeless, friendless and below-optimum-fitness existence. Hoping you’ll bring us a victory today. You being the celebrity face and driving force behind hashtag PoolPalforPiper. Not wanting to cause tension between you with Joey’s trials coming up and Joey being so excited about you and his dad getting back together. Is that enough for starters?’
‘What? What? Selena, stop. What? What are you talking about? Nathan is not in love with me!’
She shrugged. ‘Well, probably not. But it takes more than a passing fancy or simple animal attraction to turn Nathan’s head and surmount his insanely strict code of conduct. Believe me. And if he thought you were worth giving up the Larks for, what would you call it?’
‘But… if he liked me, then where has he been for the past two months?’
More to the point, I thought, but would never say out loud to Selena, ever, why did he disappear straight after I accidentally leaned in a bit close while barely dressed and in an enclosed space?
‘Ooh, training your son, turning up at A&E to find you all cosied up with your ex, who tells him to jog on? Giving you space to decide who you are and who or what you want? Allowing you to decide if you want Nathan, even when you don’t need him? Doing the decent thing and bowing out so you have a chance to get back with the father of your child? Using all this as an excuse because he’s massively shy and even more scared after his last girlfriend? You know, the whole him forgetting to meet her for a run, her getting attacked and him not getting over it so she dumped him, and married his oldest friend?’
Before my head had a chance to explode with all this information, let alone start sifting through to decide which, if any of it, was true, Bronwyn burst through the changing room door.
‘There you are! Flippin’ ’eck, you two, the next leg is about to start. Stop preening and get on out there!’ She gave me a concerned second look, before disappearing out the door again.
‘Come on, then.’ Selena held the door open for me. ‘You never know, there might be another miracle which means we end up being not last.’
But in the end, no miracle was required. Unless you call months of hard work, the best coach in the country (and by that I mean our earlier coach, not last-minute stand-in Koach), the strength of a team who have cheered, encouraged and badgered each other on, and – as Bronwyn predicted – grit, guts and good old-fashioned girl power a miracle.
We ran our great, big, beautiful hearts out.
Even Audrey, who gave so much, she half-collapsed in the impossible heat three-quarters of the way round, then tipped a bucket of water over her head, grabbed her mum’s hand and kept on going.
Even Mel, whose knees finally gave out with three-hundred metres to go, crawling until Dani and Bronwyn ran back to brace their arms either side of her, the crowd going wild as they hobbled on.
Even me, who’d done my best to get a grip on the turbulent thoughts running rampage in my brain and reclaim the single-minded focus that had won me the world championships. That is, until I remembered that this was a fun run, a team event, and one I wanted to actually enjoy, so I ditched the focus and just, well, enjoyed it.
By some unspoken decision, passed along via the power of our unbreakable team bond, each Lark paused a hundred metres from the finish line, smack in the middle of the new athletics field and waited for the rest. I found out later that Nathan and Marjory had been first and second out of the whole race, and yet they were the first ones to stand and wait while the athletics team, the cyclists, the footballers and three out of the four members of the council team ran, walked and limped past.
Like a game of very badly played sardines, as each one of us reached the others, we stopped and huddled, arms around each other, adrenaline pumping with passion.
‘Who cares if we lose the triathlon?’ Isobel yelled, as we watched Audrey and Selena slowly overtake Mel, Dani and Bronwyn, going even slower. ‘We’ve won at what really matters!’
‘Well, yes, but let’s try not to come last at the triathlon as well. We can have both,’ Marjory said, frowning.
‘Come on the Larks!’ someone shouted from the crowd, and they were swiftly joined by a dozen other voices. ‘Come on the Larks!’
The final member of the council team shuffled up behind Mel, amid the hollering crowd. She took a deep breath and shrugged off Dani and Bronwyn’s arms from around her waist. ‘Thanks, girls. Much appreciated, but I’ve got this.’
To everyone’s amazement, she began jogging, face scrunched up in agony, tears streaming down her face, her howled curses thankfully masked by the noise of the crowd.
‘Well, come on then,’ Marjory yelled at Dani and Bronwyn, who were stood there with their mouths hanging open, ‘let’s not be last!’
And as Mel and the others caught up, we linked arms, ten Larks and their trainer, and spread out so far across the track, the council runner couldn’t have got past if he’d tried.
There were fifty sweet, short metres to the finish line. We were only going to go and not be last!
‘Amelia, how does it feel to be scraping fifth place in your first competition for fourteen years? Are you embarrassed to perform so badly in front of your son and newly reconciled love of your life?’
At the end of the line (in an attempt to stay as far away from Nathan as possible, at least until the race was over and I’d had a chance to weigh up what Selena had told me), I was so near the edge of the track that Moira Vanderbeek’s microphone wobbled perilously close to me. As I turned, I could see the freckles on her cheeks, the sharp gleam in her eye.
‘Do you blame the weight gain, or your mental breakdown for such a disastrous comeback?’
It was stupid, and weak, and if I’d not been so careless with my focus it wouldn’t have happened, but as the words slammed into me like a wrecking ball, all I could see was the greedy faces of the spectators surrounding her, ready to feed like coyotes on carrion.
I must have stopped running and dropped arms with Mystery Woman One next to me (Karen? Or maybe Carol?) because I found myself frozen, stricken silent, Moira Vanderbeek’s microphone six inches from my nose.
‘Amelia? Don’t you have anything to say?’
I had no idea if I had anything to say or not. My anxiety, on the other hand, had plenty. None of it printable in a national newspaper. So did the crowd. As my pulse began to accelerate, I could feel more than hear the ripple of morbid anticipation.
And here it was, like one of those old friends you might not have seen for years, but as soon as you do, it’s as if you were never apart. Only this time, an enemy: the reeling head, the convulsing heart, the churning wave of nausea as my lungs wheezed like a pair of rusty bellows.
I bent over, hands braced on my thighs, and closed my eyes. The world kept spinning, forcing me to my knees, hands on the ground to stop from flying off into the ozone layer. I was enveloped by panic. Drowning in fear. Surely I would pass out any second.
Then, as if from the end of a long tunnel, a distorted voice found its way into my consciousness.
‘Ames! Get up! For the Larks! Come on! You can do it!’
Then louder, more voices, like a drumbeat: ‘You can do it! You can do it! You can do it!’
I held on to that chant
, I dug down and I remembered to count my breaths, to feel the ground beneath my feet – or, in this case, the grass beneath my palms and knees.
An arm went around my waist, the other lifting me up as fingers gripped my hand. ‘I’ve got you, we can do this,’ spoken into my ear.
‘No.’ I shook my head, clearing some of the fog as I did it. ‘No!’
‘Yes, Amy. We can do this.’
‘No!’ I pulled my hand from his, tottered to my feet. ‘I can do it.’
I found Nathan’s eyes. Held them for as long as it took me to send the ‘GO!’ message from my brain to my body and took off towards the finish, past the last man a millisecond before he crossed the line, Nathan two seconds ahead of me.
But I didn’t stop there, swerving around the jubilant mob of Larks, I sprinted on a lap of victory, past Joey and Sean, around Moira Vanderbeek, to the small stage put up at the far end of the field, where the winners were going to be presented with their prize.
‘You wanted an exclusive interview, Ms Vanderbeek, I believe?’ I panted, clambering up onto the stage as a circle of spectators formed in front. ‘Well, here it is. And where’s Antonio? Antonio? Can this microphone be turned on please? This is my speech. I’m doing it now.’
With skinned knees, hair all over the place, my only make-up smears of mud, sweat and tears, in shorts that put the hips in hippo, it was time.
‘Is it on? Hello? One two, one two. Right. So. Yes, I’ve put on some weight. What of it? I just swam, cycled 10K and ran five. I’m proud of my body and more than satisfied with what it can do. And yes, I had a mental breakdown. I’ve been battling with anxiety, panic disorder and agoraphobia for many years. And for most of that time it’s been beating me hands down. But its primary weapons were shame and isolation. I am not ashamed of being ill any more. The only thing I’m ashamed of is how ashamed I was. One in five young people suffer with some form of mental illness. I could blame it on my circumstances, the ridiculous pressure I was under thanks to journalists like you, having no balance in my life, no time to have fun or relax, my parents publicly disowning me on the back of a devastating mistake – at eighteen years old! But I won’t, because that’s irrelevant. If none of those things had happened and I had still been ill, that would not be my fault either. And I still wouldn’t be ashamed. I am not weak. I am not a coward. I am not pathetic. I am not broken. I am not a shirker. I am no less of a person than you. Or any less amazing.
‘Today I’m here, and I’m doing well. But that doesn’t mean all those people who aren’t here, who are watching this on YouTube later because they couldn’t quite get out of bed and face the world today, are any less worthwhile, valuable, precious human beings than I am. They, to me, are champions, because they face what most of you will never have to, they push on through it every single day.
‘And – I’m not finished, please wait and clap at the end – if you saw what happened today and consider it disastrous, or anything to be embarrassed about, you’re even more stupid than I thought. Not to mention a really quite unpleasant person.
‘Oh, and I had good reason to think you’re stupid, by the way, so let me correct a few mistakes you made. Sean Mansfield, the father of my child, is not the love of my life, or, as your article so nicely put it, the person who gave me a reason to get dressed in the morning. We are not, have not and will never be resuming any form of romantic relationship. He’s here in the UK to spend time with his son. I suggest you work a bit harder to get your facts straight before you lose the last shred of your professional credibility.’
I paused, took a deep breath, scanned the crowd, quickly searching to find Joey. He grinned at me, and gave a double thumbs up, an act so cheesy and uncool for a teenage boy, I knew I was doing okay and he wasn’t crushed by the public announcement that Sean and I were not happening. That gave me the rush of courage to say what popped out next:
‘If you’d bothered to do your research, you’d have realised that I’ve actually been spending time with somebody else, lately.’
Oh, crap, I couldn’t spot him. Bloody hell, Amelia, if you’re going to do this, you might as well do it with him listening.
A sky-blue and white cluster in one corner gave out a long, raucous whoop. And there he was, head and shoulders above the rest of them. Face in robot mode, shoulders braced as if prepared for the worst.
‘Someone who showed me that I was just fine as I was, and at the same time inspired and encouraged me to be the best that I could be. Who didn’t see a washed-up national disgrace, but a person who had got a bit lost and who needed a friend. As do we all. Even you, Moira. He’s one of the kindest, sweetest, loveliest people I know. And also happens to be staggeringly gorgeous. Anyway, Nathan, now seems as good a time as any to say that I don’t need you.’
There was a collective gasp of dismay from the onlookers. All of them except Nathan, who remained motionless.
‘But I would love to spend more time with you. In a mutual, dating, possible girlfriending type of way. If you would like to maybe go out with me sometime.’
The gasp morphed into an oooh.
I peered at Nathan. Had he even heard me? It appeared to no longer matter, as the Larks were now herding and jostling him through the crowd towards the front of the stage. And it looked very much like he was resisting.
To deepen my jitters, he forcibly removed Bronwyn and Dani’s arms and held out his hands like you would if fending off a wild animal, creating a circle of space around him. As everyone watched, and several hundred phones filmed, he completely changed direction, the crowd parting to let him move off to the side as if making for home, a hot shower and a cold beer, to help forget this whole debacle ever happened.
Except, once out of the crush, he didn’t head that way at all. Instead, he jogged towards the steps onto the stage. Something the Larks hadn’t considered when thrusting him towards the centre.
‘Hi,’ he said, bounding up to join me.
‘Hi.’
I held my breath for what seemed like far too long, waiting for him to say something. Was he waiting for me? I’d just asked him out in front of what would probably be millions of people once the videos went viral. Was he trying to find a way to gently let me down, in which case why not wait and do it later on, in private, except of course those interfering Larks hadn’t let him do that, so now he was trying to find a nice way to reject me in front of everyone.
I cursed myself for listening to Selena. This was going to be worse than the article. Worse than the Search for Amelia. Worse than my parents on breakfast television. Worse, because that had been about leaving the past behind, and this was about my future. One that with Nathan might have been lovely. And now I had probably messed up our friendship, too—
Nathan’s eyes crinkled.
I couldn’t keep the smile from bursting out across my face.
The crowd, sensing something had happened, gave a cheer.
Nathan flashed his eyes in their direction and then stepped forwards, wrapped his gorgeous arms around me and, without anyone having to push him from behind, pressed his lips against mine.
As kisses go, it was delicious. Warm and soft and full of tender promise and sweet longing.
‘Well done, Coach,’ I gasped, finally breaking away. ‘That was probably the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done. I think that graduates you from the Stop Being an Emotional Robot Programme.’
He laughed, grabbing onto my hand and pulling me back up against him. ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve thought more about that than anything else for months.’
And then, he kissed me all over again.
Until, remembering suddenly, I pushed him away and leant back towards the microphone.
‘Oh! And the winners of the first Amelia Piper Family Fun Fit triathlon are… the Greasby Athletics Club! I think there’s a trophy somewhere… Antonio?’
But, of course, there were a whole lot more winners that day. I, for one, was most definitely no longer a loser.
The truth I realised that day, on the most important race of my life? I never had been.
Programme Complete
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the consistently fantastic team Boldwood – especially Sarah Ritherdon, for her unfailing encouragement, wise insights and invaluable edits. Thanks also to my wonderful agent, Kiran Kataria, for her input and support throughout. Jade Craddock also added some much needed finishing touches.
A special mention to Shelly Joddrell, for sharing her experiences in the world of competitive swimming – I hope you can overlook the bits I made up.
As always, to everyone who has read my books, taken the time to write a review or got in touch to say they enjoyed it – it really does make it all worthwhile (plus it is a great incentive to keep me from messing about on the internet!).
My incredible mother-in-law, Phyllis Moran, decided to join a running club in her 60s, and went from being exercise-novice to long-distance runner in no time at all. Her story has inspired many people, as well as this book. We are so proud of you, Phyllis!
And for all those I love who face the battle against anxiety with courage and strength that most of us will never see – this book is for you.
For Ciara, Joseph and Dominic – may you always hold on to the truth that being a winner is about who you are, not what you do.
And for George, I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather run alongside in this wild race called life.
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