The Way Back

by Dominique Kyle

  Jo ran out and hugged me as soon as she possibly could. “That was phenomenal, Eve!” She congratulated, her voice hoarse. “I really thought I was going to lose my voice from screaming at you!” Then she wrinkled her nose and backed off. “Actually you’re right, you don’t smell so sweet…”

  On the Podium, I gave Horrocks a big hug as he lifted the cup up above his head. “Well done!” I shouted above the cheering. “I’m really glad it’s you!”

  He gave me a wry sideways smile. “I know you far too well by now,” he said. “You’re just ecstatic that your car has won aren’t you?”

  I bit my lip. “Well, maybe a bit!” I admitted. “Well, maybe a lot. But on top of that, I’m still glad it’s you in my car not someone else,” I assured him.

  He grinned. “Lift your own cup a bit higher, Eve. I don’t think anyone expected that outcome. Runner up, right from the back. That’s some achievement!”

  Toon, the World Cup holding Dutchman, here in third place, nodded sideways at me.

  “We’ve seen this Podium before,” I remembered. Except that time I’d been on the top shelf.

  Various people were approaching now that the photographs were over.

  “How’s my favourite little tank?” I greeted Harry, Horrocks’ young Downs Syndrome son.

  Harry grabbed his dad’s legs and stared seriously up at me through his pebble glasses. “Little tank,” he repeated obediently.

  His dad looked meaningfully at me.

  “Oops,” I agreed and made a zipping motion over my lips.

  Harry copied me. “Oops,” he agreed.

  Steve, the sports journalist and commentator for the race shoved recording equipment in front of me. “So, Number Seven Six Eight, Eve McGinty, you’ve just done a good job of reminding us all why you were holding the Gold roof last year, and leaving us to wonder who’d be standing in that central position if you’d managed to get yourself anywhere at all on the grid… That was a stunning performance…”

  I looked across the scrubby ground past Steve’s shoulder. Nish was standing there. He smiled lopsidedly at me and raised a thumb. I smiled back and reciprocated with both thumbs, and then he let out a slight sigh and crumpled to the ground.

  “Oh, blast it!” I exclaimed, abandoning the interview without explanation, and striding over. “Someone get the paramedics to the poor sod…”

  I knelt on the ground beside him. He was still breathing, but he looked terrible.

  “Is that Nish?” Jo sounded amazed. “I’d never have recognised him. What’s happened to him?”

  The St. John’s lot were running over but I knew we needed a proper ambulance pronto, and told them as much straight away.

  “He looks like he’s been sleeping under the Manchester Arches with the tramps for a month…” Jo observed disapprovingly. I looked back at him through her eyes. Dirty, bruised, blood spattered, and with a week’s growth of stubble. Yeah, not pretty.

  I looked around me. “Help me get him into the recovery position, Paul, will you? He’s liable to throw up. No, the other side, this side’s got broken ribs…”

  A shadow fell over us. The soldier that had driven us both here.

  “Thank God you’re still here,” I greeted him, looking up. “He needs to go to hospital now…”

  The soldier got onto his phone.

  Jo and Paul were staring at the uniformed soldier and then they glanced at each other.

  “Maybe Quinn wasn’t joking after all?” Jo said to her dad.

  They got me home late that night. I walked into my tiny flat and found Quinn sitting on the settee, waiting for me. He looked up and smiled and held out his arms.

  “No, Quinn, not till I’ve showered,” I said firmly. “I never want to see this set of clothes again in my life!”

  In bed that night he held me tightly. “I thought you were going to die,” he told me. “And I suddenly felt like half my soul was going to get ripped out…”

  I searched his face. He looked worn and miserable.

  “Yeah, I felt like that when I thought you’d died,” I agreed.

  He looked surprised. “When was that, Ginty? When I was in that fridge?”

  “Nah,” I grinned. “I was completely gutted you were still alive that time! When you were away on that bike trip in Germany with the guys from work? Remember? Siân arrived at my door and burst into tears all over me without being able to speak for a bit, and all I could think was that you must have died in some horrific bike crash in Germany. It turned out that she’d just found out that your mum had cancer, but just for a moment I felt completely sick and wondered what I’d do without you…”

  His green eyes look intently into my own. “What? Even though I was behaving like a complete shit to you at the time?”

  “Yeah,” I sighed. “Dumb isn’t it? It felt like my heart was about to get torn out!” My arms tightened around him in response to the intensity of the memory. It seemed such a long time ago now. So much had happened since then. Looking back on the girl I was then felt like looking at a child. I tried to shake off the sudden melancholy that swept over me. “But hey – we’re both still here…” I dismissed robustly.

  “Yeah, we are,” he agreed. He hesitated, as though he was going to say something. His eyes intensified and searched mine for what seemed an endless moment. I raise my eyebrows enquiringly and my heart speeded up suddenly for no reason.

  His expression and tone suddenly changed. “Yep, here we are,” he agreed flippantly. “Same as ever. Alive, and ready to start kicking the shit out of each other again. Nothing changes does it?”

  I flopped back against the pillow feeling disappointed by his response. We’d been talking deep for once, and he always had to deflect everything with a joke.

  “I’m sorry, Ginty,” he said apologetically, as though was responding to the content of my thoughts. I glanced swiftly at him. “But I’m going to have to go back home tomorrow,” he continued. So no, he didn’t have a clue after all. “Do you mind?” He added. Like I had a choice!

  “No,” I said abruptly, turning my back on him. “I’ve got to go back into work tomorrow anyway.”

  Although it seemed forever since I was last in the factory, incredibly, I worked out that I’d only actually been absent for one work day, so hopefully, I’d have barely been missed. I just had to cross my fingers that Heskett had squared it with Alan and I wasn’t heading in for an almighty bollocking.

  When I walked in on the dot of nine o’clock, I was a bit surprised at the reaction. All the men straightened up or turned round and stared at me.

  “What?” I said defensively.

  “Everyone at the factory was texted to come into work early for a meeting,” Sam said.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, biting my lip. “I’ve lost my phone so I wouldn’t have got that.”

  “No, you idiot,” Ben set me straight. “Sam means we were called into a meeting about you and Nish.”

  Alan came out of his office and looked taken aback when he saw me. “How are you?” He asked with concern writ large across his face.

  “Nowt wrong with me,” I dismissed with a shrug.

  “How’s Nish?” Zak asked.

  “Bloody awful!” I reported with feeling.

  “What actually happened?” Duncan raised his eyebrows.

  I hesitated, and glanced at Alan. “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say just yet…”

  The door opened and Mizo stuck his head in. He must have caught sight of me through the glass door. He raised both thumbs. “Fantastic effort, Eve! Saw the footage. Runner up from the back! Bloomin’ amazin’!”

  “Is it on YouTube already?” I marvelled.

  “You bet it is! At least six different versions.”

  He suddenly clocked the blankly slack jawed expression on the faces of the rest of the men in the room. “I’ll send you all a link, shall I? Her performance in that race deserves to go viral!” Then he finally realised what their now dagger-like looks were commun
icating. “Oh, yeah, sorry Eve,” he added self-consciously. “How’s Nish doing?”

  I tried not to get the giggles. “Not so great Mizo, to be honest…”

  “Yeah, hmm, bugger,” Mizo murmured and retreated quick.

  Alan looked across at me. “I don’t think the management expected you in today. I’ll ring up and tell them. They’ll be wanting to speak to you.”

  “Are you ok?” Claire Williams asked with worry in her eyes.

  “Absolutely fine,” I assured her. “But I need to know what you’ve told everyone here and what the party line is going to be with the media.”

  “Yes, you do,” she agreed and I saw some of the anxious tension drain out of her.

  I’d asked to be kept out of all the media coverage. My pitch was that I was just an intern and barely relevant to the story. I kept away from the canteen too. If I left the mechanics den for even a moment, necks were craning to see me.

  That night on the national TV news coverage, there was a brief statement from Claire saying they were glad to announce that their development driver Nish Gilbraith had been liberated alive from a tense armed siege, but was still in a ‘serious condition’ in hospital. No mention of me. And a grave looking Deputy Chief Constable of the Wiltshire Constabulary, stood on the steps of some pillared building somewhere, and announced the fact that the three armed terrorists involved had activated their suicide belts and were consequently dead.

  I texted Sappho. How is he?

  She didn’t answer.

  Just before I went to bed my phone buzzed. I snatched it up, but it was Quinn. How RU? I was a bit disappointed that it was only him, not Sappho with news about Nish, or Nish himself, but on second thoughts, it was thoughtful of Quinn to realise that I might be feeling lonely just before bed.

  Wish you were here xx, I answered.

  Me too xx, came back.

  Just after I switched the light out and lay there feeling weirdly anxious about going to sleep, another text came in. My phone lit up. Quinn again.

  If U hav a nitemare feel free 2 wake me up 4 a chat xx.

  Thanx x. That was so kind of him.

  I did have a number of horrible dreams that night and reached out in the night for him, only to find that he wasn’t there. But I didn’t ring him.

  People kept asking me how Nish was doing and they didn’t seem to believe me when I told them that I had no more idea than they had. Alan kept me immensely busy. We were in the lead-up to the Singapore Grand Prix, and there was no time for slacking. Mizo insisted I came round to his house on both the Saturday and the Sunday to watch the full live programmes. It was on the Saturday, in a gap between Qualifying Round Two and Qually Three that they featured an interview with Nish. He was clean shaven, well-groomed and smartly dressed, but he still looked distinctly battered and drained. Claire sat beside him. Absolutely loads of journalists were in front of him.

  “So tell us what happened?”

  Nish was skilled with the media, I’d already noticed that. He could turn on the charm like a tap. “Well, to start out with I can’t remember much, as they kept me tied up and drugged unconscious for the first four days – until Eve turned up that is…”

  “Who is Eve?”

  “Eve McGinty. She’s an intern at Williams.” He glanced sideways at Claire who nodded confirmation. “Sounds like within a few minutes of marching in, she’d made three violent men armed with AK47’s, meekly untie me and stop giving me any more drugs. She told me that since the SAS didn’t seem to be getting their arse in gear, she thought she ought to step in instead!”

  “So how come she knew where you were?”

  “She recognised the car of one of the men and followed it.”

  “Why didn’t she call the police?”

  “She told me the police had already been sniffy about the fact she could exactly describe the car but not the man she’d seen, so when she saw the car again and realised they’d changed the number plate she figured the police wouldn’t take a blind bit of notice of her. When she ended up with an assault rifle pointed at her head, she said she gathered that she’d definitely got the right guy, but that now the wrong guy had got her! First I knew of it, I woke up in the back of a van listening to Eve and one of our captors having an intense discussion about how to milk a goat. I thought I was having some sort of weird hallucination, but unfortunately I wasn’t! Eve says she’s so going to try and milk a goat when she next sees one, but I figure the goat may have something to say about that!”

  Everyone in the room laughed.

  “How did you both survive?” Someone called from the back row.

  “Eve worked out that the youngest one was the weakest link and advised we work on him, and she soon had him eating out of her hand. She got him hiring another cottage and going shopping because she figured that someone out there might have the common sense to be watching out for credit cards they’d already used. She sounded a bit hacked off that MI5 was taking so long to track us down when it had only taken her three days to find me! I was quite irritated by her helping him pick a really isolated place to hole up in, but she explained to me later that she’d been looking for somewhere that the army could surround easily and where there could be no innocent bystanders as collateral damage… which I guess worked out just as she planned, except that I don’t think insurance cover for holiday cottages includes the risk of suicide bombers, so I feel a bit sorry for the owners…”

  He gave a brief description of the siege, and again I noted that there was no mention of the army shooting the older brother, just the implication that they’d blown themselves up.

  Then they gave him a hard time about what it was all about.

  “I’m sorry, but I really can’t tell you!” He protested. “Up until last week I really had no idea I had any relatives in Pakistan… We’ve never had any contact with them and they’ve never wanted anything to do with us. I know nothing about this supposed Uncle. But yes, I guess I’ll have to look into it now and have some chats with my mother…”

  Afterwards, Mizo looked at me sideways. “Phew, that sounded pretty scary and intense,” he observed.

  I nodded but added nothing. I was angry that Nish was obviously out of hospital now and still hadn’t contacted me. It hurt.

  Dad rang me. Crap, I hadn’t even thought of him! Poor Dad. He’d got to hear it for the first time via the media.

  “I’m sorry Dad! Because we got out of it ok, I never thought to ring you… Yes, I’m sorry, really I am. But honestly I’m ok, not a scratch on me – really!”

  Jo rang me. She sighed. “You can’t keep out of trouble can you?”

  Then – “Oh yeah, and I’ve a bone to pick with you! You never poured that jug away, did you, you bitch! You abandoned it on the table and neither Dad nor I noticed it, and it only tipped over on the first sharp bend out of the stadium! So now we have the sweet smell of your lovely urine keeping on coming back to haunt us!”

  “Oh God, Jo – I’m so sorry!” Oops! I tried to keep my giggles in check. Best to at least try to sound mortified…

  “Are you doing World of Shale?” She changed subjects abruptly.

  “No,” I sighed. “Let Horrocks have it.”

  “I wish Pete had seen your last race,” Jo said wistfully. “I asked him to come, but he wouldn’t.”

  That hurt too.

  Alan kept my nose to the grindstone. He had me down with Mizo getting to grips with the 500 different settings that can be used during a race. He had me going over with him every tiny detail of both of the Williams drivers’ last few races. Mechanical, tactical, computer settings, number crunching, tyre tactics, use of radio during the race, what we chose to tell the drivers about or not, what we were allowed to tell them or not.

  I bumped into Heskett in the corridor. “Shouldn’t I have rotated departments by now?” I asked him.

  “Alan seems strangely reluctant to let go of you,” Heskett said with a slight smile. “So I figured we’d leave you there a bit l
onger and wait and see…”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Ok.”

  “You sound a bit reluctant?”

  “It’s just that I thought I was coming here to get into the design side of things…” I explained.

  “We’ll see…” Heskett said cagily. When I remained silent he added, “Thing is, we’d have to fast track you through a relevant degree, which I’m not saying that we won’t. But it’s going to be a long road for you, Eve, if you want to get into the engineering design. Just remember that everything you learn with Alan about the practical and race engineering side of the business will still be invaluable to you if at some later stage you end up on the design side.”

  Yes, he was right. I’d be foolish to miss out on this amazing opportunity to get to grips with the nitty gritty hands-on aspects.

  It was another week, just before the Malaysian Grand Prix at the very end of September, before I spotted Nish walking into the canteen with his sports work-out gear on. He was looking great. Not a bruise to be seen. His hands looked ok now, apart from the raw looking scars around his wrists that I saw people glancing surreptitiously at, and he was moving easily as though his feet and ribs were no longer hurting him. Everywhere he went people were smiling and asking him how he was, and he responded with his usual easy public charm. Finally, he worked his way over to me with his tray and sat down.

  “Hi, Nish,” I greeted him coolly. “You’re better then? Where have you been all this time?”

  “Home,” he informed me, looking surprised that I didn’t know.

  “How’d that go?” I asked, glancing sideways at him.

  He averted his gaze and fluttered his hand briefly in the ‘dicey’ gesture. Yeah, I could imagine his mother being a mite prickly about it all.

  “How about a run tonight?” He suggested in normal tones. He responded to my thundercloud expression with a blankly querying look.