* * *
Joey hadn’t come home by dusk. The clocks had moved back an hour that morning, and it was dark enough by five-thirty for me to stop pacing up and down the living room, shrug on my trainers and head out.
The leisure centre was open for a public swim, and it was easy to spot the extra-fast blur of boy streaking through the water on the far side. I leaned my forehead against the glass in weak relief. Perhaps I knew my son better than Cee-Cee thought. Or, at least, I knew the one place I’d have headed at thirteen under similar circumstances. Any circumstances.
I also knew me finding the guts and gumption to wrestle my way inside and interrupt him wouldn’t help. I found a bench to huddle on, pulled the old woolly hat I’d dug out from the back of my chest of drawers down further over my forehead and prepared to sit it out. The pool closed at seven, so I knew I wouldn’t freeze to death.
The cars dotted around the car park gradually disappeared as a group of older men carrying squash rackets, then gym users and most of the swimmers trickled out. One car stayed in the far corner. The shadow behind the wheel was clearly waiting for someone. Probably their kids using the pool, or maybe a staff member. From the lights clicking off around the building, it appeared the centre was shutting down for the night.
Seven came and went. A family of three children and their dad left on foot, hair dripping. Seven-thirty. Hands and feet numb with cold, I prowled up and down. The car was still here, so someone else mustn’t have left yet. I wondered again about trying to go inside. Changed my mind. Changed it back again. And then, an agonising length of time later, Joey appeared at the main entrance, together with a young guy wearing the centre uniform. I shrank back into the shadows while the guy locked up, unsure what to do next but sure that it didn’t include approaching Joey while he was with someone else.
Heart thumping, I waited while the staff member wheeled a bike out of the communal rack and cycled off. Joey adjusted his rucksack and turned to where I had so cleverly concealed myself beside a metal tool shed.
‘Are you walking back?’ he asked, voice subdued.
‘Yeah.’
‘Sorry I called you a bitch.’ Not screwed-up, or selfish.
‘Thank you. I’m sorry I’ve handled everything so badly. I’m sorry that I allowed my issues to make me act selfishly.’
He nodded, once, in acknowledgement, and turned for home, hands in his pockets, eyes straight ahead, mouth set.
I felt so angry with Sean Mansfield I could have swum to America and strangled him.
Most of all, of course, I just felt angry at myself.
And with all that anger, it was only the next day, when we got another text alert about the creepy black car creeping about near school that I remembered the car at the leisure centre car park. Waiting for, it turned out, nobody.
I shook off a prickle of unease. There were a dozen, perfectly plausible explanations for someone to be sat in the dark in a village leisure centre car park for over an hour. Like, maybe a man was waiting for his secret lover. Or had been kicked out of the house when his wife discovered the secret lover, and he didn’t know where else to go. Maybe he had a nasty wife and a gang of uncontrollable children and he pretended to go swimming every week even though he couldn’t actually swim, just to get a couple of hours’ peace and quiet, finding sitting alone in a cold car park preferable to being in his own house.
Maybe.
Maybe I would start meeting Joey from training more often.
21
Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Fifty-Eight
I had never been so aware of my feet as during these past few weeks. So many things I had forgotten, tiny things, everyday nothings to the millions of people who open their front door, stride out and go somewhere without thinking twice about it every single day.
Shoes, for starters. I hadn’t worn anything sturdier than slipper socks for two years until that first evening under the stars. The flip-flops, trainers and work pumps felt like long-lost friends as I dusted them off, tested them out, tried to get used to them again.
I stepped in a puddle early one morning, up to my ankle in freezing water. Oh the thrill of squelching along, toes tingling, sock sopping, mud-spattered trainer well and truly out of retirement.
And the ache! From where overgrown nails pressed against the edge of my trainer, through soles, arches and heel, right up into the ankle. My throbbing, attention-demanding, hard days’ graft, worn-out muscles and tired bones gloriously ached.
I soaked them in long, hot baths, tears plopping onto the bubbles. The clamour from the physical feelings were continuing to wake up deeper – soul-deep – feelings kept carefully dormant for years. They stirred and stretched: thick, black grief rose alongside disappointment. Curiosity brought with it joy.Joy.Hope’s sister. The antidote to despair. It seemed these feelings were a package deal: fear and loss, wonder and anticipation. There were so many of them, the only way to make room for them all was to let some out: to cry and wail, laugh and sing.
I stored them up on my morning runs, my occasional night-time walks, and once Joey left for school each morning, I would let the feelings come, embrace the agony and the exhilaration as they swirled and ripped right through my heart and soul. To feel was to be alive.
I was living once more. Not a measly portion of me, a skin-deep, just-about-enough-to-survive part of me. Every blood vessel, tendon and cell hummed with life.
And, oh, I would feel it all.
* * *
