by Steve Howell
“What the hell is it now?” she whispered.
Tom was shaking his head. “She’s done a runner,” he replied.
“What the fuck do you mean?” Mimi hissed. She didn’t have any patience with Tom at the best of times, and this wasn’t remotely one of those.
“I woke up, and she was on her way out the door.”
Mimi was right in his face now, her eyebrows saying ‘and?’
“She’s gone.”
Mimi turned towards me with a despairing look.
“Did she say where?” I asked.
Tom was shaking his head again. “The cow! She just told me to move out, that’s all.”
Mimi rolled her eyes and made no attempt at sympathy.
“I’m sorry, Tom… So you’ve split up?” I said, just to be sure what he meant. “And she’s gone back to London?”
Tom looked at me now like it was me who was being dull.
“No, Newport,” he said.
***
And so I took Mimi up on her offer of a lift. But our destination wasn’t London. After a ten-minute scramble to pack and check-out of the hotel, we found ourselves heading south on the M5 towards Wales, without much sense of what we were doing or why.
“If you’d asked me last week how I’d be spending today, it definitely wouldn’t be like this,” I said. I was having trouble recalling my original plan, but the general idea was to spend the day celebrating Megan booking her ticket – and mine – to Rio. It would probably have involved a walk-about on campus – I wasn’t averse to milking the plaudits after years of barely suppressed yawns from colleagues when I talked about athletics. These days, with Megan becoming so successful, I was mentioned in university marketing material and given one of the best seats at academic events I hadn’t previously known existed. Why not enjoy it? “I can’t believe they’re about to announce the team, and Megan’s gone AWOL,” I continued.
But Mimi was in no mood for chitchat and gave me a sideways, thanks-for-stating-the-obvious glance. We were somewhere near Worcester with the SatNav telling us it was sixty-six minutes to our destination.
Mimi was driving like someone was cardiac-arresting in the back seat; gripping the steering wheel so tightly I could see what was meant by a ‘white-knuckle ride’. Occasionally, she would use her left hand to pick her mobile up and juggle with it just above the dashboard, trying to read the flood of emails pinging into her inbox.
“Fuck this thing,” she said finally, tossing it into my lap. “Liam, can you have a look?”
I skimmed through the messages. It mostly seemed to be panicky emails from her staff, either about Megan or with queries about how to handle other needy clients.
“It looks like your office is getting a load of calls, and no one knows what to say,” I said.
“Phone them will you,” she said. “You know the number.”
I keyed it in from memory and, as it started ringing, the hands-free kicked in.
“Mimi, thank God you’ve called back,” a female voice said.
“What’s up Sarah?” Mimi said.
“What isn’t? We’ve had about twenty media calls about Megan, and then there’s all the usual Monday crap, you know – and Mimi, you haven’t forgotten we’ve got two book launches this week?”
“Shit! Yes, okay,” Mimi said. “Get the others on the line, and we’ll sort out who’s doing what,” Mimi said.
‘The others’ seemed to be about four new voices, all of them failing miserably to hide their excitement at the drama engulfing their most high-profile client. Mimi cut through the babble with scary efficiency, issuing instructions and allocating jobs like she was running a state of emergency. The media calls about Megan were all to be answered with a bland two-liner, news alerts were to be set up covering every Megan-related keyword imaginable, and Meg’s Twitter feed should pump out tweets as planned about how ‘thrilled’ she is about Rio.
As for the book launches, she told Jo or Joe – I wasn’t sure – to take care of everything and report to her later.
“Everyone okay with all that?” Mimi said finally to a chorus of “sure,” and “leave it to us”.
Mimi nodded in my direction and I tapped ‘End Call’. The SatNav lady told us to take the slip road for the M50.
“That was impressive,” I said, meaning it.
“Fuck off,” Mimi said.
“How many staff you got?” I asked.
“Just the six of us, and if Megan’s work goes down the pan, I’ll have to let half of them go.”
“Really?”
“Yes – really, Liam. I’ve recruited two people just to handle her sponsorship work. It’s been manic, something nearly every day, a photo-shoot, an event. And then there’s Twitter and Facebook. And the fans wanting stuff. And the media. I can’t do it all myself anymore.”
I had no idea. I’d never been to her office or asked how it all worked. Over the last eighteen months, the ‘business’ of Megan had grown into a slick commercial operation. But I’d mostly kept out of it, happy to start receiving generous expenses and concentrating on my three coaching sessions a week with Meg. I left the rest to Mimi and Jackie.
Jackie had come on the scene first, recommended by another athlete to help Megan negotiate terms with the first wave of sponsors. And Jackie brought Mimi in to handle the media and marketing, which I thought was over the top at first. But how naïve that seemed now with Megan having already banked more than a million pounds in endorsements and appearances, and with the experts saying her earnings would top two million annually if she wins gold in Rio.
I glanced across at Mimi, taking in her bold, angular profile and her eyes – dark chocolate irises on clear white – her thick, dark hair combed back into the nape of her neck, showing smooth copper skin. We’d had countless coffees together at an odd florist-cum-coffee-shop in Hendon, but our conversations were nearly always about Megan; wrestling over how to split her time between athlete and ‘brand’. But there were occasional exceptions. Once, she’d announced she was about to go to Cape Town on holiday and mentioned her parents lived there, and I said something lame about the weather and the wine. Another time she ranted about Megan being a magnet for dull men, which must have been around the time Tom had turned up on the scene, sniffing around like he could smell the money. I said, “You’re sounding jealous,” and Mimi flushed, and we both sat in embarrassed silence for a moment.
“I should have quizzed her. I really should have quizzed her!” Mimi said now, shaking her head. “All that, ‘I’ll sort it – it’s my problem’ crap. I just assumed Jackie had it covered. I thought they must have talked before the meeting, and Jackie was cool with everything, and we didn’t need to know the details. This is what you get for being frigging trusting.”
I looked at my phone to see if there was a message from Megan. I’d tried her mobile a few times but only to hear her chirpy voice telling me she couldn’t get to the phone and to leave a message. I eventually left one, stressing how worried we were and how much we wanted to help.
“Any news?” Mimi asked.
“Not a thing.”
“We need a plan. Where do you think she’s gone?”
“Not to her parents, for a start,” I said. “They’ve moved somewhere west. Cardigan, I think. And I don’t think she’ll want them involved anyway – her father isn’t well.”
“Yeah, she told me. Banned me from mentioning them in any PR.”
“So we need to find out where Will lives.”
A juggernaut was starting to move into the fast lane, intending to overtake another, even slower lorry and following the well-known trucking principle ‘manoeuvre and maybe signal’.
“Fuck you!” Mimi said, accelerating through the gap before the lorry could block our way. “I hate that! He had no idea I was even there.”
I smiled and took a few deep breaths. “So, back to the plan,” I said.
“She’d be stupid to go to Will’s, wherever that is,” Mimi said. “It’ll be
crawling with paparazzi.”
The road was clear now, the lorries left far behind. Yellow fields of grass and grain stretched to the horizon on either side. Ahead, the terrain seemed to rise endlessly under a big, clear sky towards what I assumed were the Brecon Beacons.
“I’ve got a hunch she’s at Celtic Manor,” I said, not knowing quite where the thought came from. But it suddenly seemed obvious. Jackie had struck a deal with Newport’s only big hotel. She could stay more or less any time she liked. All she had to do was show up a few times a year and look pretty next to the owner.
“Fuck, yes, that makes sense,” Mimi said. “She wouldn’t go to Will’s – she’s not that stupid. And I doubt anyone would think of Celtic Manor. We haven’t announced that yet.”
The SatNav was giving us only thirty minutes to our destination now. I pointed to the radio. “How do you turn this thing on?”
Mimi looked at her watch, knowing why I was asking. It was eleven and news of the Olympic team would be on the bulletins. She prodded and flicked the buttons and knobs until she found Five Live. A presenter was running through the main stories. The Olympic team was the third item:
“UK Athletics announced its team for Rio this morning amid confusion about the fitness of its strongest gold medal hope. Megan Tomos failed to appear at a press conference at the Olympic trials yesterday, her coach saying she was ‘under the weather’. There are unconfirmed reports she is linked to a police inquiry into a drug-related death in Newport two years ago. But the selectors say she was an automatic choice for the team as winner of the one hundred metre hurdles at the trials in Birmingham. They also selected her for the sprint relay squad.”
Mimi hit the mute button as the presenter started to talk about other selection issues. On any other day, I might have stopped her.
“Shit, it sounds awful when you hear it out loud like that,” Mimi said.
For a moment, I was too choked to speak.
6
The Disappearing Guest
As we pulled up under Celtic Manor’s oversized portico, men in red and gold plus-fours swarmed around the car like we were visiting royalty, opening both doors simultaneously, one of them grabbing Mimi’s keys before she could say ‘pin high’.
We handed over the car, waved them away and linked arms to show our determination to get through the revolving doors without any further fuss.
We found ourselves in a vast, glass-domed atrium with six white, curving balconies towering above us like an over-the-top wedding cake. I felt about as far out of my comfort zone as a child starting school, but Mimi was already striding confidently towards a long, oak reception counter in the far corner.
“I’ve got a lunch meeting with Megan Tomos at midday. Could you give her a buzz and say Mimi’s here?” she told a receptionist, as cool as anything.
If the young woman was ever trained in the dark arts of discretion, she was having an off day. Instead of pretending to check the system to see if there was such a person registered – which would have been the normal thing to do – she said, “Just a minute,” and went into a whispering huddle with a colleague. I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying but Megan was mentioned like they were on first name terms.
Turning back to us, the colleague – an older woman with a European accent I couldn’t place – said firmly, “Megan Tomos is not staying here at this time.”
This possibly wasn’t strictly a lie, but I didn’t see much point in getting into the nuances of what she meant by ‘staying’ or how precise she was being about time.
Mimi, on the other hand, seemed ready to tear them apart, which would have been entertaining but wasn’t likely to get us very far.
I decided to step in with, “That’s odd. We’re due to meet her here, but maybe she hasn’t checked-in yet. Could we leave her a note?”
The older receptionist wasn’t having that either.
“No, we can’t take a message, sir,” she said. “I’m sure if you have a meeting with Miss Tomos, she will either turn up or you will have some other means of contacting her. You arranged the meeting, yes?” The question was obviously rhetorical but I gave her a nod to confirm I realised this conversation wasn’t going anywhere.
Steering Mimi with me, I turned to head back across the atrium with the thought we might sit on one of the plush settees in one of the many bars to take stock.
“Tossers!” Mimi said, en route.
“Well, they were helpful in as good as confirming she’s here or she’s been here,” I said.
“Of course she has. That receptionist practically had a sign on her forehead. So what do we do? Hang here all day in the hope we bump into her ladyship?”
Hanging wasn’t quite the word: we had just landed our backsides on one of the settees and were sinking so fast I thought we would need a crane to get out.
“We may as well have something to eat – I’m starving,” I said, reaching with difficulty for a menu from the nearby coffee table.
The only other person in this space looked nearly as out of place as I felt. He was sitting in the next but one group of settees fiddling in turns with a smart phone and a small notepad. He wasn’t wearing either the casual clothes of a golfer or a business suit. Maybe I was stereotyping the guests of a five-star golf resort, but his zipper-jacket, stripy blue shirt and grey trousers didn’t look the part.
A waiter appeared and asked how he could “help us today”. I was tempted to say, “as opposed to when?” but that was just me feeling grumpy and there was no point taking it out on the waiter. A quick glance at the menu reminded us we ought to watch the pennies until our expenses payments from Megan were more secure. We ordered two coffees.
The zipper-jacket man was, meanwhile, being chatted up deferentially by a man wearing a black jacket, grey trousers and white shirt with a tie in the same colours as the plus-fours. He had to be hotel management. Zipper-jacket man nodded in our direction and the hotel manager sat down and leaned towards him so that he was speaking directly into his left ear from only inches away. With another nod from zipper-jacket man, the hotel manager stood up and walked over to us.
“I’m sorry, you can’t wait here,” he said in slightly exaggerated home-counties English.
There was no stopping Mimi this time. “You’re kidding me, right? You are kidding. What sort of hotel is this?”
The manager looked indignant. “We’re the sort that doesn’t allow journalists to ‘door-step’ its guests, whether they’re here or not – that’s the sort we are, Miss.”
Mimi was on her feet now, which was quite an achievement given her sunken starting point. “I’m not your Miss, and we’re not journalists, and we’re certainly not ‘door-stepping’ anyone,” she said.
“Who are you then?”
“That’s actually no concern of yours, but just for the record, we work for the athlete Megan Tomos and we’re waiting to meet her.”
The hotel man smirked – I assumed to show he wasn’t convinced, never mind impressed.
By this point, I had managed to push myself up into a standing position. For the second time in twenty-four hours, my dilemma was who had more to lose by making a scene? I doubted the hotel manager would get the men in plus-fours to drag us across the atrium, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk reading headlines saying, ‘Olympic coach thrown out of five-star hotel’.
“Okay. Look, I’m Megan’s coach,” I said. “My name’s Liam McCarthy.” The man was still smirking. “I don’t really care whether or not you believe me, but I’ll only leave here quietly if you give me your word you’ll tell Meg. I need to speak to her as soon as possible. Tell her to call me or find me at The Priory.”
“As you’ve been told, Miss Tomos isn’t…”
Mimi and I had started to make our way out of the hotel. “Yes… got it – she isn’t here,” I said over my shoulder. “But, if she does suddenly appear, you’ll tell her, won’t you?”
The manager was already walking back to zipper-jacket man
.
Mimi looked at me quizzically. “The Priory?”
“It’s the only other hotel I know in Newport,” I said. “It’ll have to do because I’m definitely not leaving Newport now – not until I know what this is all about.”
“But The Priory?” she said.
“No, not that Priory.”
“But, Liam, it’s an unfortunate choice in the circumstances, and something else for the tabloids to conjure with.”
We pushed through the revolving doors to find one of the plus-fours men looking smug and hovering next to the Mimi’s soft-top with the key in his hand. Mimi took it from him, jumped in the car and was accelerating past a convoy of buggies before my bum had hit the seat.
“Reckon that guy in the zipper-jacket was a copper?” she said.
“Yes, but maybe I watch too much TV,” I replied.
***
I’d stayed at the Priory a few years earlier on my only previous visit to Newport for a coaching course – long before I’d even heard of Megan. All I could recall about the hotel was that it was in a village with a Roman connection. Signs with a silhouette of a Legionnaire helped. Following them took us over an old stone bridge into the cosy, narrow streets of a village called Caerleon.
The Priory was as I remembered it, a rambling stone building that lived up to its name. It felt like the monks hadn’t long moved out. We booked two rooms for one night, still clinging to the hope this was just a 24-hour aberration.
“Unusual place,” Mimi said, as we went back out to a row of cottage-style rooms opening directly onto the gardens behind the hotel.
Mimi followed me into my room and slumped into one of the armchairs. I paced around a bit – checking out the bathroom and the toiletries and the sachets of tea – for want of anything else to do.
“I hope this doesn’t go on much longer – I’m running out of knickers,” Mimi said.