Over the Line

by Steve Howell

  “Evening, Jim, or Liam, or whatever the fuck your name is. Out for a nice stroll are we?”

  Before I could tell him to fuck off, the first blow landed – a fist or was it a knee, driven into my stomach. I gasped and gulped for air. I tried to double up, to protect myself, but the man behind still had me locked upright. I flexed my abdomen. More blows came in. I lost count of how many, of where they landed, or any sense of time.

  But I do remember falling face first onto the gravel and a voice saying, “Get the message: keep your fucking nose out!” And then: “D’you get it? Get it? Geeeet it?”, as boots thudded into my ribs. And then the sound of heavy feet running away; and the vomiting – I remember the vomiting – and its acrid taste in my mouth, my rib-cage on fire with pain.

  I’m not sure how long I lay there or how I managed to get back to the hotel. I have no memory of it. But I do have a dream-like recollection of standing outside Mimi’s door and of not having any strength to knock on it.

  11

  Mixed Signals

  Going for breakfast seemed like a good idea compared to twisting and turning in bed like a contortionist. I’d spent the night constantly changing the arrangement of my limbs, hoping to find a position that wasn’t painful. Success was never more than temporary. Periodically, I’d give up and walk around, killing time examining my wounds in the mirror, plucking gravel from my skin, and checking my wee for blood.

  “Have you seen this?” Mimi said, announcing her arrival by sending a glossy magazine flying like a Frisbee and landing it on my poached eggs.

  “Nice shot,” I said, grumpily, peeling it away from the runny yoke. The cover was of a man with an unnaturally contoured six pack. “What about it?”

  Mimi snatched the magazine back, shaking a blob of yoke into my tea. She flicked through the pages and thrust a double-page spread at me with a photograph of Megan draped across a bed in a minimalist nightie and some text headed ‘Pillow Talk – with Megan Tomos’.

  I still wasn’t quite sure what Mimi was so angry about. Meg had done several photo shoots she might in later years regret, and Mimi was the architect of most of them.

  Mimi sensed my confusion. “Read it.”

  I took the magazine from her, wincing as a pain shot from my ribcage to my neck. I felt like someone in jackboots had been using me as a trampoline. Most of the damage was concealed under the loosest fitting T-shirt I could find, but I was still acclimatising to a very limited range of pain-free movement. Even moving food from plate to mouth was a challenge.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Mimi said.

  I sighed and winced again. She touched the one visible mark – an emerging bruise in the centre of my forehead that was beginning to make me look like a brainy creature from outer space.

  “God, Liam, where did you get that?”

  Bad as the pain was, and much as I enjoy female sympathy, I was finding it difficult to admit I’d been so easily outgunned by two punks. I wanted to say, “You should see the other guy,” but I knew they had probably walked away without a mark – and the usual pleasure of my lame jokes was far outweighed by the effort and discomfort each word would cause.

  “Two punks jumped me,” I said, finding four syllables about as much as I could bear.

  “What?” she said. “Where? When?”

  “Walking back. To the hotel. Last night.”

  “Oh my God, darling. Why on earth…?”

  “No idea, really. Except one of them said, something about, keeping my nose out.”

  Mimi had sat down. Her mouth was hanging open like it knew it was its turn, but was waiting for her brain to give it instructions.

  “Fuck. What are we getting into here?” she said finally.

  I had spent most of the night asking myself the same thing and only managed to come up with more questions.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to avoid dark footpaths from now on.”

  “Let me look,” Mimi said, not waiting for permission, reaching to pull my T-shirt up.

  “Not here,” I said, patting her away, conscious the other people having breakfast were glancing in our direction between every mouthful. “Let’s have some breakfast and talk later.”

  Mimi nodded slowly with a lingering worried look. She took a piece of toast from the basket on the table and started to butter it absently, her eyes still on my forehead.

  I picked up the magazine. It was one of those lads-mags that had long sunk from tasteless to semi-pornographic, but the photograph wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was the headline that gave me a foretaste of what was coming: ‘Meg begs for quieter life’.

  The preamble was a teaser for the boys: pin-up girl, hot favourite for gold in Rio, sends male pulses racing every time she peels off her track suit. But then it went into question and answer mode. The first few were predictable. How does it feel to be the poster girl? What do you do to relax? Who is your role model? What’s been the best moment in your career, and what’s been the worst?

  But when they asked how she copes with success, the answers started to have an edge. Meg moaned about people, ‘thinking they know you just because they’ve read something in a magazine’ and ‘jumping to conclusions about stuff they know nothing about.’ She said she’s ‘coping’ by ‘trying to see more of old friends’.

  I looked up at Mimi who was watching me read. “You weren’t in the loop on this?” I said.

  “Are you kidding?” she said, sounding exasperated I’d even asked. “I normally write the frigging answers myself, but this one was sent straight to Meg by one of my staff. And it gets worse.” Mimi was pointing at the questions on the second page.

  Did you always want to be an athlete?

  I sort of fell into it. It’s just what I was good at. But I think I’ve been too obsessed with it. I’ve put winning before everything else.

  Winning at any price?

  Almost any, yes. You get so caught up in the whole thing, you think nothing else matters, and you don’t let anything get in the way of success.

  Is that the trait you most deplore in yourself?

  Yes

  But if you weren’t an athlete, what would you want to be doing?

  Something worthwhile. I want to give something back. You know, help kids in trouble, who’ve lost their way. I don’t know yet.

  I laid the magazine down in front of me and read some of the answers over again. I put phrases together – too obsessed, putting winning before everything else, not letting anything get in the way of success. And the ‘giving something back’? It would have sounded so worthy, if I hadn’t read about Marion Jones reinventing herself as a crusader for young people facing ‘tough choices’.

  I couldn’t reconcile this interview with the Megan I thought I knew. But what did I know? I’d just taken a beating from thugs who must have some connection with all this – who were obviously linked to a gym that Megan also had some connection with, if only via Will. That was a fact – and a very painful one. I looked across at Mimi. “What do you make of it?”

  “Fuck knows,” Mimi said. “I’m frigging livid she did it behind my back – and it’s panicked Jackie. She rang me at seven, furious. She read it to me and said she’d had a call from a sponsor asking if it had something to do with the police inquiry. What could she say?” Mimi shook her head. “I thought I’d better shoot out to get a copy. And the more I read it, the more it sounds like she’s admitting something. Sooner or later, other journalists are going to spot it and start speculating, and that’s all we need.”

  I tried nodding, but my throbbing forehead reacted badly. I touched the bruise, and Mimi put her hand over mine, like she was blessing me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, not really wanting the moment to end but feeling so nauseous I thought my breakfast might reappear.

  We made our way to Mimi’s room, her arm around me, my steps tentative. The day was cooler but I was glad it was still T-shirt weather. I didn’t fancy trying t
o manoeuvre myself into more than one layer.

  “Take your top off,” Mimi said once the door was closed.

  I wanted to say, “Are you serious?” but she got the general idea from my expression.

  “Really, take it off.”

  She helped pull it over my head, saying, “Oh my God,” at least three times as the bruises and cuts across my torso came into view. I looked at myself in the mirror, and it wasn’t pretty. Some of the bruises to my stomach and chest were starting to turn black. The skin across my ribs was raw and swollen. I had taken such a pounding that hardly any part of my upper body was unscathed.

  “Oh Liam, this is awful,” she said, running her fingers tips lightly across my chest. “We really didn’t sign up for this.”

  It was indeed awful. I had never been in a proper fight, never mind taken such a beating. But Mimi’s touch was helping, making my skin tingle with each gentle circling movement of her fingers. She was studying every lesion, her face only inches from my skin. I was looking down at the top of her head. Without thinking, I started stroking her hair with my left hand, and after a few moments, she began kissing my chest with moist open lips, moving slightly higher with each one until she reached my neck and then the dimple in my chin. Our lips met, and we kissed in silence for a very long time, tongues reaching deep into each other’s mouths, hungry and feral. I sensed she could feel how aroused I was. I was embarrassed and surprised by my lust. It had been a long time.

  I think we would have made love then and there if I hadn’t been so bruised and battered, but it was hopeless. Each time I tried to hold her more closely, stabs of pain would ricochet through me like electric shocks. Kissing and caressing were one thing, but I needed a body in much better working order to go any further.

  Mimi sensed my grimaces and pulled back. We looked at each other, neither of us knowing quite what to say. I didn’t want to be presumptuous and say we’d have to come back to this another time. Mimi looked awkward and flushed.

  “Thank you,” I said, stupidly. “I mean that was…”

  “Yes, it was,” she said with – much to my relief – a broad smile forming and her dark brown eyes starting to moisten. We kissed again as if to confirm that, even after a pause for reflection, this was how we wanted to be with each other.

  When we stopped, she looked back at my chest. “Liam, you’ve got to get this checked-out. Who knows what’s going on under there – you could be bleeding internally, anything.”

  “I’m not pissing blood,” I said, but Mimi frowned and I was touched by her insistence.

  “I will go… I will, later… if I’m still struggling.”

  We stood there in silence again for what seemed a very long time, beaming at each other like a pair of school kids with a crush. This was bizarre. Since splitting with Kelli when Danny was little, I’d hardly spent any time intimately with anyone. Okay, there’d been a few one night stands. Athletics is one of the few sports where men and women compete at the same events and socialise together. Musical beds is fairly common. But these moments with Mimi were pathetically schmaltzy, and yet I was enjoying every lingering second.

  ***

  I could hardly see Megan on the footbridge when I arrived. She was near the middle, only the top of her head visible in a crowd waving pens and notebooks at her. The most noticeable figure, towering above all of them, was male and standing over Meg like a security guard. I assumed it was Will and felt irritation welling up as I shuffled gingerly towards them, trying to avoid my arms brushing the bruises on my torso.

  The bridge arched across the river Usk, dangling from a crane-like structure that was taller than any building in the city. Underneath, the river basin was filling fast again with the rising tide, the water now only a few feet below the paths on each bank.

  Will nodded to me warily as I approached and broke away from the group to walk in my direction. Terry’s description of him as a beast was an understatement. He looked about six foot six, and his red track suit was swollen with enough horsepower to pull a lorry.

  “She won’t be long, pal. Fans, eh?” he said, with a lilting Welsh accent that was far more pronounced than Megan’s. He ran a hand through his long blond hair, pushing it away from his angular face to show more clearly his sky-blue eyes. He was looking earnestly at me like a boy meeting his girlfriend’s father for the first time.

  I was practically speechless at the sight of him, all the anger surfacing in such a surge it took me by surprise.

  “Good,” I said, looking at my watch.

  “I’m Will by the way.”

  “No kidding,” I replied.

  “You guessed then.”

  “I didn’t think you were coming with us.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “What happened to your forehead?”

  “It met a hard object. I bumped into two of your mates from the gym – or they bumped into me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  We stood in silence for a minute or more. Will was standing sideways on to me, looking back at Megan, trying to catch her eye to hurry her up. Finally, she peeled herself away. So much for hating celebrity, I thought.

  “Hi Li. You’ve met Will then,” she said, sliding her hand into his and looking up at him with eyes that seemed alarmingly besotted.

  “Yes. Shall we go?” I said.

  Megan managed to take her eyes off Will for long enough to notice my face. “Who gave you that?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later. Let’s go.”

  Megan seemed reluctant to let go of Will’s hand and gave him a nod as if wanting him to say something.

  “I used to play rugby over there,” he said, gesturing with his free hand towards a sports stadium just visible between the flats on one side of the river. “Rodney Parade. Some big matches, big crowds, but I blew it. Made a stupid mistake…”

  “Yes, I know all about it,” I said. “I read the papers.”

  “I wasn’t using ‘roids to cheat, Liam. I was injured.”

  “Yes, okay. I’ve heard the story.”

  “And I’ve taken my punishment.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking down at their hands, still clasped together. “But now you’re dragging Meg down with you.”

  “That’s not fair, Liam,” Megan jumped in.

  “It’s not?” I said. “What kind of friend would embroil you in this mess just before Rio?”

  “It’s not his fault.”

  I looked at her expecting more, but she simply tugged Will’s arm to get him to lower his head for a parting kiss and turned to lead me in the direction of some flats near the rugby ground.

  12

  The Shrine

  Megan took a deep breath and blew it out forcefully, like she was on a start line, adrenalin pumping. We were standing at the outer door of a small block of flats overlooking the river. The buzzer went to release the door, and Megan pushed it open.

  As we climbed the stairs to the first floor, she whispered, “I told you didn’t I, I haven’t seen him since Matt… you know. I’ve really no idea how…” But she stopped when she noticed the door of the flat was already open a few inches. The ruddy face of a man of around fifty was peering through the gap. On seeing Megan, he threw the door wide open and stepped forward with arms outstretched.

  The two embraced as if I wasn’t there. Nothing was said. Megan was slightly taller. The man – I assumed he was Matt’s father – buried his face in her shoulder. Then he stood back and inspected her like a proud parent.

  “It’s fantastic to see you, Meg,” he said. “Really fantastic. Mind you, I see your face everywhere. But it’s not the same as the real thing.”

  Megan was smiling radiantly. I don’t think I’d ever seen such a broad grin on her face. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever be introduced.

  “Oh, this is Liam by the way – my coach.”

  I stepped forward and shook Mr Davies’ hand.

  “Graem
e,” he said. “Come in, we can’t stand here all day.”

  We followed a dark, narrow hallway into a small living room with French doors opening onto a balcony overlooking the river. A breeze was catching the net curtains hanging either side of the opening, sending them swirling against a metallic garden table and chair on the balcony.

  Graeme pointed towards an armchair – I think he’d seen I was struggling – and I eased myself into it. It was so comfortable I felt light-headed with relief.

  On a day like this, with the sun flooding through the French doors, the flat was bright and seemed more spacious than it really was. The lavender walls were freshly decorated. The beech flooring was polished and pristine. But it was small – two armchairs, a small chest of drawers and a coffee table filled the space. In winter, I imagined it would be cramped and dark, a desolate place for Graeme to be cooped-up with his memories. But maybe I was making false assumptions? Maybe he liked being alone and welcomed the separation from his wife? Maybe he was a party animal, only using this place as a bolt-hole, and he was actually out and about every night? But, looking around the room, somehow I didn’t think so.

  There were photographs everywhere: on one wall, an overly-posed professional portrait of Matt; on another, school photos; on the drawers, multiple holiday snaps in a single big frame.

  Without any apparent qualms, Megan was browsing yet more photographs packed onto the mantelpiece. She seemed completely at home, not hesitating to pick out frames from the back to see the pictures properly. It was like someone had flicked a switch, and she was in a different mode, from another time.“

  “Grae!” she exclaimed more than once, holding pictures up and waving them towards the doorway to the kitchen where he was making tea – a noisy kettle coming to the boil very slowly – and Graeme would peer into the living room, smiling and sometimes saying when and where a photograph was taken.

  “Grae, look at this… Oh my God – when was this?” she said, holding one of several small children showing-off for the camera at a birthday party.