Stop Being a Loser Programme
Day Eighty-Four
That Thursday, I took another step forward in the Programme. Sean had picked Joey up from school and taken him to a local pub restaurant that offered a ‘create-your-own rotisserie experience’. I thought there were probably better experiences than thirty combinations of cheap chicken and sides, but it was a darn sight better than the non-existent places I’d taken Joey in the past few years, so I couldn’t really comment.
I could, however, use my angst at the father-and-son meal to propel myself into the Brooksby Leisure Centre and firmly plant myself on a bench,poolside,ready for training. And I only needed to hold Nathan’s hand for the actual stepping through the door into the pool area. After all, there couldn’t be anything worse in here than Sean, and I’d already handled that challenge. Once I was in, I strolled on up to that old bench as if I sat there three times a week alongside all the other normal parents. Lisa, Ben’s mum, came and plopped herself down next to me a few minutes later.
‘Hey, Amy,’ she exclaimed. ‘Great to see you! You’re looking well.’
By which we both knew she meant:you’re looking OUT OF YOUR HOUSE!
It was none of her business, but she’d definitely have heard about last week’s spectacle. There was no point fudging the issue.
‘I’m here to spy on Joey’s dad.’
Lisa nodded. ‘I guessed as much. For what it’s worth, the odd time I’ve stayed for training, he’s done nothing weird.’
‘You don’t usually stay?’
‘Nah. Only when I haven’t got the twins with me. And I don’t really watch. It’s just an excuse to sit down and do nothing for an hour. It’s not like Ben cares whether I’m here or not.’
‘I thought all the parents stayed.’
Lisa rolled her eyes as a gaggle of mums pushed through the doors and started tottering towards us on heels that would have been a health and safety risk on a dance floor, let alone the side of a swimming pool. ‘Only this lot. And they aren’t here to watch their kids.’
I followed the tilt of her head to the other side of the pool, where Nathan was laughing with the lifeguard.
‘Or the lifeguard,’ she added.
Between the revelation that my guilt at not attending training had been for nothing, and the sight of five women so blatantly offering themselves up to the man I had been trying to keep in the mental friend zone, I was rather flummoxed.
‘I know,’ Lisa tutted. ‘It’s pathetic. As if he’d be interested in such a blatant attack of bored, middle-aged-crisis mums.’
I managed a vague, sort of snorty squeak in reply.
‘Not that there’s anything wrong with being middle-aged, or a mum, of course. I personally consider my forties to be my finest decade.’ She wrinkled her nose in thought. ‘I think it’s the desperation that’s so grim. Like, their radars lock onto every fit and attractive single male in the village, irrespective of what he’s like as a person, or whether they have anything in common.’ She put on a high-pitched robot voice. ‘Must make man fancy me. Prove still able to get man and therefore not worthless as woman.’
I might have considered that a bitchy statement, had I not personally been wincing at the pouting and preening, flicking hair and prominently displayed body parts. David Attenborough would have had a field day in here. No wonder the swimming pool glass was steaming up.
Nathan, to his credit, didn’t even give them a second glance.
He did, however, give me a questioning look, responding to my tentative thumbs up with a grin and a nod, as if he’d known all along that I’d be fine.
After that, Sean slithered in and took a seat beside me on the bench, and by the time I could see something other than a raging-red cloud, Joey was in the water, and, despite my own possible, not-quite-middle-aged-grim-desperation, I couldn’t possibly look anywhere else.
‘He’s incredible,’ Sean said, as Joey powered past us for the dozenth time, glancing at me after a few seconds when I failed to reply (I still wasn’t quite ready to agree with Sean on anything, and I could hardly disagree with that comment). ‘It’s uncanny. As soon as he hits the water, it’s like watching the male version of you.’
‘You never saw me in the water,’ I replied, in a tone that made it clear I wasn’t falling for any of Sean’s lines this time around. ‘You hated me swimming.’
‘I didn’t hate you swimming,’ he said, softly. ‘I hated how it made you feel. How the pressure was affecting you. Swimming wasn’t the problem. The supposed hopes of the nation being strapped to your shoulders? That I had a problem with.’
We watched Joey in silence for a while. I’d been doing a reasonable job at making this evening be about him, pushing the avalanche of memories to one side by focusing on the here and now. Getting myself here was a huge deal, and I really didn’t need Sean Mansfield tossing reminders at me like snowballs.
‘Do you regret it?’ he murmured, shifting a couple of inches closer to me on the bench, making him now at least eight inches too close. ‘Walking away from it all? I mean, looking at Joey, I guess you can’t wish it had been any different.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ I got up and went to stand beside a woman in a skintight purple dress cut so ingeniously that she was actually showing more flesh than the girls in the pool. Next to her, I felt like even more of a washed-up frump than usual, which only made me more annoyed with Sean than I had been already. Ugh. This was going to be a long however-long-he-was-going-to-be-here-for.
What annoyed me the most? How when he leant towards me and lowered his voice, it still had the power to trigger a faint echo of the way those eyes, that gentle smile, had made me feel fourteen years ago. I was a woman careening down a mountain in a bobsleigh after years trapped in the ice palace at the top. Every sensation, every person, every new (and old) experience was overwhelming. I couldn’t trust it. I couldn’t trust myself yet to handle, well, anything much at all beyond a run in the woods with some kind women and a chance to sit and watch my son swim.
