If it turned out the absent father of my child had been wrongly imprisoned, or in a coma for the past decade, I might have felt a twinge of sympathy. But according to articles in online business magazines, and various conference speaker biographies, the managing director of Mansfield Recruitment, head office Denver, Colorado, needed sympathy from no one. I clicked on his website, teeth grinding at the staged image of him dunking a basketball (no boring sitting behind a desk for Sean Mansfield!). Ugh. Sean hated anything to do with sport. Apart from me, that was. For a while, anyway.
No mention of a wife or children. Mostly, it seemed he played golf, posed on aeroplane steps and made money. A lot of money. Sean Mansfield had recruited the heck out of Colorado. No surprises there. He was an expert at persuading people to ditch one career for, well, empty promises, broken commitments and a truckload of disappointment, in my experience.
And now, for some reason, he had turned his persuasive powers in the direction of my son.
Message deleted.
* * *
After meeting Sean on the bus, I started seeing him almost every day. Fitting a secret romance in between training and my parents’ cashing-in-on-the-celebrity campaign wasn’t easy. But the drama of sneaking off, defying authority and making my own decisions was part of the adventure.
The craving for normal – too young, too inexperienced to know that normal was an illusion – had burst out from behind my fierce ambition. I was sick of the weight of expectation. The relentless pressure to follow orders. Sean tapped into my deepest doubts about whether Cee-Cee and the other coaches, my parents, my sponsors, squad, even saw me as a person any more.
‘You’re a means to an end,’ he told me, as we lazed on the grass in the university park. ‘When was the last time they asked what you want, how you feel? Gold medals and hard cash. That’s what they care about. They don’t know the real you. If you never swam another stroke, you’d still be the most amazing person I’ve ever met. I love these shoulders.’ He bent then, tucking the neck of my T-shirt back to kiss my bare skin. ‘Your back, your incredible legs. Arms. Chest.’
I pushed him away, giggling, as after kissing each body part he made a pretence of going for my chest.
‘But, to me, you’re so much more than that. They want you for what you can do. I love you for who you are.’
Every ounce of air whooshed out of my lungs. I goggled at him, speechless.
He laughed. ‘Well, you must know I love you. Why else am I here, not studying for my exams, like everyone else?’ He gently pressed his nose to mine. ‘You’ve messed everything up, Amelia Piper,’ he breathed. ‘I’m utterly under your spell. So you’d better love me back, or I’m in serious trouble.’
Oh yes, I loved him back. I loved the way he looked at me. How he casually took my hand whenever we were together, stroking it with his thumb. I loved that he always asked me what I wanted to do, and listened to my answers with a funny, furrowed brow. I loved the afternoons spent doing nothing, lying on a blanket watching the clouds drift by, dreaming, dozing in each other’s arms. I loved that he never, not once, pressured me to do anything I didn’t want to. Which, of course, made me want to do things I’d never have considered otherwise. Once exams were over, we swapped a picnic blanket for his bed. A girl prone to fierce obsession, my allegiance had changed. I no longer lived and breathed for the water. I lived, breathed, hoped, dreamed, dressed, lied and schemed for Sean Mansfield. And the more my lap times suffered, the more Cee-Cee sought to compensate with diet plans, gym workouts, video analysis, motivational lectures and the threat of actually losing, the further she drove me into his undemanding, understanding arms.
As the Athens Olympics drew closer, Amelia Piper, swimming hope of the nation, began to pull away.
15
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Thirty
I bought myself a new pair of trainers. I figured that stopping looking like a loser would help me to stop feeling like a loser, and as a result, stop me acting like one too.
Except I’d bought them online, of course, and they were slightly too big. The following Saturday, I stuck on an extra pair of socks and wore them anyway. The only trouble was, after three kilometres (mostly running, some walking, NO stopping!), I had what felt like blisters the size of beach balls beneath each ankle bone. I managed a hobbling sort of canter, wincing with every galumphing step as I decided to ignore the screaming agony and continue on for at least another K, but the combination of unsteady footing, pain-spawned sweat stinging my eyes and a particularly dark stretch of trees meant that my too-big trainer caught in a rabbit hole, sending me ricocheting head over bouncing-behind down a muddy slope and into the ditch at the bottom.
Oh, crap.
I half rolled, half scrabbled to a sitting position. Not an elegant sight, I’d imagine. I used my hoodie sleeve to wipe some of the mud from my face before gingerly bottom-squelching out of the ditch, which thankfully contained only an oozy dribble of actual water, and hoicked myself onto a rock and took a moment to steady my shaken nerves, forcing a wobbly smile in an attempt to laugh it off.
I was wondering whether to take my trainers off, and negotiate my way home in sopping socks, when I heard footsteps crunching on the path above me.
No. Don’t be following me again. Don’t have seen me tumbling down the slope like a bouncy ball, squealing like a piglet…
‘All right down there?’ a woman’s voice asked. ‘That looked a right tumble!’
Okay. This was somewhat better. I swivelled on the rock to see two women peering at me from a few metres away. My heart accelerated at their pale T-shirts, what looked like the silhouette of a bird, wings outstretched, on the front. I’m no ornithologist, but I was guessing that was a lark. Scanning around, I couldn’t see anyone else, however, so perhaps the incident could be contained.
One of the women asked, ‘Do you need any help?’ Judging by her precise accent, it was the other, who had what appeared in the dusk to be orange-squash-coloured hair, who’d spoken first.
‘Um, I think I’m okay,’ I said and made to stand up. Only to quickly plop back down on the rock again.
Yowch.
I tried again, this time carefully putting all my weight on my right foot, seeing as my left ankle appeared to be at the least sprained, and, judging by the bolts of lightning now shooting up my leg, quite possibly smashed into smithereens.
‘I’m fine. Honestly,’ I gasped, clearly not fine. ‘I don’t want to hold you up.’ Or attract further attention, like a big, strong male lark to toss me over his shoulder and carry me back to the path.