by Steve Howell
Mimi didn’t answer; the lingering, expectant look was enough.
“Shit!” I said. “I’ve just remembered, she’s going to New York this week. I’m supposed to be having Danny. I can’t remember what we arranged.”
“Liam, for God’s sake.”
“I’ll text her. Let’s get back to the hotel.”
***
The pub car park opened onto a narrow lane leading downhill to Caerleon. It was country dark, the kind of darkness that unsettles city people. Even the light from nearby cottages and farms was blocked by the trees and hedgerows.
Mimi drove cautiously, having difficulty judging the width of the car against encroaching branches that looked soft and benign in the headlights but periodically slapped the windscreen like Triffids attacking us.
“What did you make of Terry then?” she said.
“God knows,” I said. “I’m not sure what to make of any of it.”
I looked across at Mimi, who was leaning into the steering wheel focusing on the waves of foliage. I thought it was about time I said out loud the words that had been on my mind – and almost certainly hers – all day.
“At first I assumed Meg dumped Will because she was disgusted he was a drugs cheat – she ditched him on principle, but now I’m wondering…”
“I know,” Mimi said, glancing across at me. “You mean, was it on principle or was it only for the sake of appearances?”
The car veered a few inches nearer the hedgerow, catching a branch. Mimi corrected her steering and looked into the mirror. Her face was lit up by the reflection of alternating blue and yellow rays. In my wing mirror, I could see a white car, so close we could have been towing it. Mimi put her foot on the brake a little too heavily and the car behind shunted us forward, our heads jerking like dolls with loose necks. We were going so slowly now it took only a few metres for the car to roll to a halt.
“Shit – what now?” Mimi said, as we sat completely still watching in the wing-mirrors a uniformed policeman walking towards us. Mimi lowered the window.
“You seem to be having difficulty, Miss,” he said.
Mimi was rigid, as upright as you could be in a low-slung soft-top. “Not really.”
“We observed you driving erratically.”
“Your headlights didn’t help,” Mimi said.
This wasn’t going well, but I didn’t think I could help.
“I require you to provide me with a breath test, Miss.” He sounded like a robot with a Welsh accent.
“You’re kidding me, right? I’ve had a shandy and a mineral water.”
I put a hand on Mimi’s arm, hoping it would have a calming effect. But the officer continued to be annoying.
“We saw you leaving the pub and suspect you have been drinking,” he said, like he’d memorised the police manual.
Mimi turned to me with a ‘can-you-believe-this’ look.
“Best get on with it,” I said softly.
She climbed out and followed the officer back to his car. I decided to stretch my legs, though I nearly changed my mind half-way through negotiating the branches, brambles and nettles along the passenger side of car.
I hovered in the gap between the two cars, but not – I thought - provocatively close to the police. I was wrong. The passenger door of the police car was thrown open and a second man jumped out. He wasn’t wearing a uniform. In the glow of car lights, his ginger hair stood out. Only the collar of his check shirt was showing over a black jacket. I felt like saying, “Hello again,” but managed to stop myself.
“Any problem, Sir?” he said. There’s something about the way police officers say ‘Sir’ in these situations that sounds anything but respectful.
I held a hand up. Another oddity: do we do that instinctively or are we imitating the movies? “Just getting some air,” I said.
The officer – I presumed he wasn’t just someone along for the ride – walked towards me so that we were now both in the space between the cars. We were closer than I like to be with anyone, unless we’re on intimate terms. I could smell alcohol on his breath. He was my height but about ten years younger, and his jacket was having trouble containing a well-conditioned upper body. I wouldn’t try kicking sand in his face.
“You’re not local are you?” he said. I assumed that question was rhetorical; that they must have checked the number plate, unless that was only in the movies too. “What are you doing down here?”
I couldn’t see how this was any of his business, but I still felt surprisingly calm considering what a bad day I was having.
“We’ve been having a drink with an old friend of mine,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows. “That isn’t what I asked. You didn’t come all this way just to have a drink with an old friend did you? So what brings you to Newport?”
My calmness didn’t last long. “Since when do people have to explain their movements to the police?” I said.
He smirked. “Don’t get clever, bud. Since I decided to ask – that’s when. Since I thought you might be connected to the little crime wave we’ve been having around here.”
He looked hard at me – standing even closer now – but I was struggling to think of an explanation for visiting Newport that didn’t involve mentioning Megan.
“I’m an athletics coach,” I said, hoping it might impress him. “I think some of your colleagues will know of me. Megan Tomos is one of my athletes.”
“And where are you staying?” he said.
I felt my pulse quicken and was tempted to argue again, but Mimi was walking towards us looking relieved, a grin forming.
“All clear, not surprisingly,” she said, brushing past the plain clothes man.
“The Priory,” I told him. “You know, in…”
“I know it,” he replied, distracted now by Mimi who’d reached the driver’s door of the soft-top. He was looking her up and down like she was wrapped around a pole. “Now you drive carefully Miss,” he said.
***
The hotel looked even more monastic by the time we got back. There was lighting near the reception desk and behind the bar, but the stone arches leading to the restaurant were hard to make out in the gloom. I was half expecting Richard III to pop out of the shadows with a speech about treachery. But the only person around was a barman washing glasses.
“Fancy a drink?” I said, feeling I wasn’t ready to sit alone in a hotel room contemplating how my coaching career was sliding down the pan.
Mimi put her arms round my waist and buried her head in my shoulder. I wasn’t expecting this. Her hair was nestling around my mouth, making it hard to say anything. But I had no idea what to say anyway. I felt a slight wetness through my shirt. She was crying. The sobs were so gentle I hadn’t noticed them at first. I was conscious of the barman checking us out with sideways glances. After a few moments, Mimi pulled her head back and looked up at me with watery brown eyes.
“Oh, Liam, what a fucking mess!” she said slowly, a quiver in her voice. “And those coppers… Bastards. What was the point of that?”
I felt awkward. I hadn’t held a woman for months, possibly years – I’d lost track – and I certainly wasn’t expecting this from Mimi. She was usually so brisk and business-like. I hadn’t seen much beyond the hard, PR-savvy London girl before.
I edged back slightly, enough to leave a space between us while her hands could still rest on my waist.
“Let’s forget the drink, Liam. I’m wiped out. We can discuss things in the morning.”
I was disappointed and I’m not sure if it was just the prospect of being alone – I have a bit of a phobia about hotels after staying in too many over the years – but I also found myself surprised that I didn’t want this moment with Mimi to end. I’d forgotten how nice being close to a woman could be.
“Okay,” I said, running my fingers through her hair, with no real clue what I was doing.
She took both my hands firmly in hers and kissed me on the cheek, and we walked silently back outs
ide to the path that led to the bedrooms.
My door arrived before Mimi’s, and I started to unlock it, fumbling with the old fashioned key. Mimi stood there watching, enjoying my difficulty, and I wasn’t sure if she was waiting for me to invite her in. But, as the door finally flew open, she laughed and turned away, giving me a wave as she walked on to the next room.
I watched her – she had no trouble unlocking the door. It was done with a single flick of her wrist, and she turned back, holding the key up with a cheeky grin, her eyes sparkling under the lights along the path. We nodded and smiled and went into our rooms.
8
A Word To The Wise
“You’re a fucking asshole.”
This wasn’t a good start to the day. It was just after seven, and Kelli was on the phone, responding to a text I’d sent the night before. And it was definitely ‘asshole’, the American way. Even after living here for fifteen years, she always sounded more Brooklyn than Brit when she was ‘pissed’ at me.
“Liam, you’re the most unreliable son of a bitch on the planet. Jesus! I need to be at Gatwick by eleven and I was depending on you meeting Danny at Victoria. He was all set to take the train – he was looking forward to it.”
When we first met at Middlesex, Kelli was a sublime runner. Her long black legs could carry her through a 400m with such elegance that everyone – definitely every male – was mesmerised, whether she won or not. It was a time when my own athletics career was having a second wind. I was running well and learning to coach, and she found my obsession with the sport charming. If I was late, tied up at an event, it was okay because I was this absent-minded Londoner of her dreams, a Hugh Grant-like character, who’d swept her off her feet. It didn’t last.
Danny’s birth brought us both down to earth. It was not long after she’d finished her MBA, when she was starting to race up the ladder at the bank. She bore the brunt of it: beaten-up by a difficult pregnancy and long labour, then sleep deprivation and trying to breast feed the hungry beast while pursuing a career. My charm was in tatters.
The breaking point came in 2006, the year of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. I was 34 and desperate to make one final effort to be selected for a major championship, thinking I had a chance because England has a separate Commonwealth team – so no Welsh or Scottish rivals to worry about.
Right through the winter and spring I trained twice a day – weights, circuits, hills, track – driving myself mad with lactic and exhaustion. But I still didn’t make the team and I’d missed Danny’s second birthday to run in the trials. And Kelli had had enough: a few weeks later, I came home to an empty flat and a terse note.
So I had form, and there didn’t seem much point now in mentioning the Olympic trials or my troubles with Megan. She must have seen the newspapers and already decided they were no excuse.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m in Newport and, well, I just completely forgot.”
“Hell, Liam! When are you going to think of anyone but yourself?”
I knew this was an argument I was never going to win. We’d been taking lumps out of each other for years.
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Don’t worry, the child-minder’s on standby. I had a hunch this would happen. But that’s not the point – Danny wants to see you, not a goddam child-minder.”
I could hear Danny in the background saying something about Megan.
“Can I speak to him?” I said.
She sighed. “No, not now. We’ve got to go. You can see him Sunday. And don’t forget this time.”
***
Even before the call from Kelli, I had decided I needed a run to clear my head. As I jogged across the hotel car park, cajoling stiff and weary limbs, the air was so thick I seemed to have to inhale twice as much as normal just to keep going. There had been no rain for weeks, and the air was dry and still.
The receptionist had pointed me in the direction of a footpath just beyond the hotel gardens that, she said, would take me past the remains of a Roman barracks. It sounded like inflated tourism talk, but as I pounded along the path, there it was, neatly laid out like a stone maze stretching out across an area the size of a football pitch. On any other day I might have stopped for a closer look, but I had more pressing things on my mind.
It had been a bad night: I hadn’t had any trouble getting to sleep. Mimi’s kiss had left me with a warm glow, but when I woke, barely three hours later, it was too warm and the only glow was an irritating light on the DVD.
The thing really nagging at me was Terry’s dig about Marion Jones. I’d handled it calmly at the time, but the more I dwelt on his words, the angrier and darker my mood became. I was boiling at his smugness. What did he really know about Megan and how hard she’d worked for the success that was coming her way? The idea that she could have taken a short cut – and deceived me – didn’t square with my experience of her. I couldn’t think of a single thing, until now, that made me suspicious, even with hindsight. But, equally, I couldn’t escape the reality that Marion Jones had lied shamelessly for years before she was eventually cornered into confessing the truth. I couldn’t escape the image of her in handcuffs, humiliated, her duplicity laid bare after she’d been caught – after she confessed she’d been a fraud all along.
Through much of the night, I’d been turning the Jones saga over and over in my mind, trying to piece together what had happened and when. I remembered the Sydney Olympics in 2000. I was there, called-up to help out with coaching the British team. And I’d seen Jones at close quarters warming-up for the 100m final. Watching her, I was enthralled. She seemed such a natural athlete, so powerful yet graceful. Her sparkling eyes and gummy smile charmed everyone. It didn’t occur to me for a second that she might be chemically enhanced. Why would she need to be? She won that final so comfortably that one commentator said, “This is the Olympics – you’re not supposed to win by that much”.
But then the news broke about C J Hunter. A shot putter failing a drugs test was no longer a great surprise, but he was Jones’s husband – and her coach. Rumours about them spread through Sydney like a forest fire in a drought.
The two of them gave a press conference. Both were tearful. I watched Jones weeping on a big screen in the athletes’ village. Hunter blamed the failed test on a nutritional supplement and Jones said she supported him. But Hunter eventually admitted using steroids, and Jones disowned and divorced him – to save herself – still insisting she was clean.
A few years later, she hooked up with Tim Montgomery, another sprinter – the men’s world record holder – but investigations, allegations and rumours continued to swirl around both of them. For a coach, it was soul destroying. At the time, it felt like everyone in the world of athletics was working under a thick and putrid cloud of suspicion that wouldn’t go away.
But Jones persisted with her fraud. By Athens, she was a declining force on the track, and she knew she would have to pay back millions in prize money and sponsorship deals if her cheating was exposed. She threatened to sue her accusers. She even started legal action against one of them. Then it all imploded. Montgomery admitted using steroids. He was banned and stripped of his world record. He started pushing heroin to pay-off debts. Apparently, he roped Jones into laundering the money. And, seven years after Sydney, she was caught depositing a dodgy cheque into her own account and confessed everything. That picture of her in handcuffs going to jail was in my head now.
I had followed the path and run across a railway bridge and past a neat, modern housing estate. Ahead was a lush flat meadow dotted with poppies, glistening in the early sun. But still, I couldn’t shake off the darkness. I felt empty and disheartened. Surely this wasn’t happening again? Was history repeating itself, but with me right in the middle of it? Okay, Meg hadn’t married Will, but they were lovers, or partners, and he was a proven drugs cheat. Did Terry have a point?
My running slowed to barely a brisk walk. The path had reached a river that wound around Caerl
eon, its wide muddy basin filling with a tide coming in. I stopped and watched the water surging upstream, its power carrying everything with it.
I checked the time. It was eight o’clock. I was probably no more than a mile from the hotel, but I had no enthusiasm for going any further. I turned and forced myself into a running stride again, trying to suppress the doubts and dark thoughts. It seemed a long way back to the hotel.
***
Mimi was sitting by glass doors that opened onto the garden when I arrived for breakfast. The sun was catching the side of her face, creating a glow around her profile. Seeing her gave me a boyish pulse of excitement. I couldn’t help grinning foolishly.
“So here we are in Newport,” I said, inanely, sitting down.
“Wonderful,” she replied.
After ordering coffee and helping myself to cereal, I told her about my run and the Roman barracks and the lovely meadow and the river changing direction, as if we were on a romantic weekend break. I was trying to be cheery, but she seemed subdued and preoccupied.
Finally, she said, “Well, Liam – what’s the plan? Because I have no idea where we frigging go from here?”
The truth was, I had no plan either – beyond trying again to make contact with Megan – and a vague idea I wanted to see the gym Terry had told us about.
“The official itinerary says Megan is supposed to be working on her start with me today,” I said, still trying to keep it light.
Mimi threw her head back dismissively. Levity wasn’t working.
“I’d like to see this gym, the one Terry mentioned in Newport; Grange Road,” I continued.
Mimi looked disdainful. “What, just walk in?” she said, leaning forward, her voice almost a whisper, “and say ‘Gimme the steroids?’ Hey, why don’t you just ask them if they supply Megan? Are you kidding? What’s that going to achieve?”
Her anger took me back. “I’ve no idea,” I said. “I suppose it’s just curiosity, and the fact I don’t want to spend the whole day waiting by a phone for her to ring.”
“It’s too risky. Megan’s coach going to a gym that sells steroids. How’s that going to look?”