“She messed up.”
“Yes.”
“What should we do?”
“Nothing. She made a mistake. We’ve all done that. The important thing is that she doesn’t give up. We want her to wake up tomorrow and shoot for another perfect day.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Not easy.”
Julianne asks if I want a cup of tea. Normally, I’d jump at the chance to spend twenty minutes in her company, surrounded by the familiar.
“I have to get back.”
“To London?”
“Oxford.”
I can’t tell her about Natasha McBain. She’ll know soon enough. Then she’ll put two and two together and realize that I’m helping the police again and look at me the way she always does, like my personal star is shining a little less brightly than before.
She kisses my left cheek and her lips brush against mine as she moves to my right cheek.
“Thank you for bringing her home.”
Charlie unlatches the window upstairs and pushes it outwards, leaning half her body through the opening.
“There’s a story on the TV about that guy.”
“What guy?”
“The one you talked to in Oxford—Augie Shaw.”
“What about him?”
“He tried to hang himself.”
I have this counting game.
I start counting backwards from a hundred and tell myself that Tash will come back before I get to zero. When I get to the end, I start again. I always slow down when I get to single figures, listening between each number in case I hear footsteps or voices.
It’s just the wind.
She’s not coming back.
Early morning, it’s dark inside and outside. Dark enough for the trees to look like a monstrous wave moving towards me.
When the sun rises pale and cold, I stand on the bench and look at the brightening sky. A train passes. Without it, I might be on another planet. I might be dead. I might be the only person left in the world.
I have no more paper to write upon. I have used up the last page. When George hosed me down, the book was under my pillow. The pages were wet and now they are buckling and curling as they dry. My pencil is just a stub, so I guess it doesn’t matter about the paper. From now on I’ll have to write in my head. Compose my lists. Gather my thoughts. File and forget.
People say that my generation lacks imagination and that we have a short attention span. We’re also super-sized and lazy and have no decent music. This is criticism from a Boomer generation that loves telling stories about the 1960s—the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—but who swapped their protest placards for property portfolios and pension funds. My parents are like that: small people with small lives.
When I reached the England Indoor Age Championships and had to go to Birmingham to run, my mother didn’t come to watch me. She said running wasn’t very ladylike and suggested that I had a mutant gene that didn’t come from her side of the family. She also joked about checking my adoption papers or said that she must have shagged Seb Coe instead of my father.
She was always talking Dad down like that. “I didn’t marry you for your looks,” she’d say, “but where are the brains you were supposed to bring to the family?”
After I came second at the nationals for my age group my parents gave me a brand-new Raleigh bike. I was sick of running by then, but I liked my new bike. I rode everywhere, for mile after mile.
My grandmother died that month. When I got the news I rode my bike to Abingdon Station and waited for one of the express trains to come roaring through so I could swear and scream at how wrong the world was to take my gran. That’s what I want to do now. I want to scream at the top of my lungs, but this time I want the world to hear me.
18
Homeopaths say that water can retain a memory; why not walls? They can be scrubbed, graffitied, painted and plastered yet somewhere beneath the layers, the memories remain.
The guard ahead of me has pale blond hair that is combed across his forehead like he’s going to primary school. Occasionally, he glances over his shoulder, making sure I’m still following.
“One of my colleagues found him,” he says, as we stop outside a cell. “He opened the viewing hatch and saw him hanging there. Raised the alarm.”
The cell door opens. I’m expected to look. The guard is still talking. “My colleague wrapped his arms around the prisoner’s waist, supporting him until someone could cut him down.”
The guard points to the far wall. “The belt was looped around that heating pipe. He must have stood on the bench.”
The room has no windows, bare walls and a concrete floor.
“They took him to the Radcliffe, unconscious but breathing. Could be brain damaged. Oxygen deprivation. I heard one of them paramedics talking.”