by Dani Atkins
‘The woman I was at twenty-eight would have happily spent the rest of her life as Ryan’s wife, but the woman I am now . . . well, I’m different. And you seem to be forgetting something else . . . I’m seeing someone.’
‘Oh yes. Your landlord. Your faux boyfriend. I almost forgot about him.’
I swallowed guiltily; making sure the lie would come out smoothly. ‘He is not a faux anything. Mitch and I are very close.’ I always blush when I lie, it’s what would make me absolutely terrible at poker, yet strangely this time I managed to control it.
‘I understand why you’ve invented this relationship. Ryan might believe in it, but I don’t.’
‘It’s not for you to believe or disbelieve. In fact it’s none of your business, Chloe.’
‘Whatever you say,’ she replied, turning to look out of the side window, preventing me from reading her face. ‘But I just can’t see you with a man like that. A woman like you could have anyone she wants. What could a man like Mitch possibly give you?’
‘Sunflowers,’ I whispered, feeling the warmth of something I’d only just begun to realise flood through me.
Two sets of traffic lights and one roundabout later, I spoke again, knowing if we were going to get through the afternoon, we couldn’t be sniping at each other. ‘There were some nice bits in your letter too,’ I admitted.
Chloe said nothing, but her face turned back from the side window.
‘The things you said about me and my mum . . . I liked that.’ Chloe nodded slowly. ‘And saying how you felt that Hope was lucky to have me . . . well, that meant a lot.’
Chloe’s smile was slow and knowing.
‘But it still doesn’t mean that Ryan and I would ever have got back together if—’
‘—if I’d died?’ Two women who’d both stared death in the face weren’t afraid of using the words.
‘Yeah. Even if you’d croaked it, we still wouldn’t have ended up married.’
I took one hand off the wheel and gently shoved her upper arm. ‘So don’t do it.’
She turned towards me and then unexpectedly shoved me back, as if we were two children roughhousing in a playground, instead of two grown-up, perfectly sensible women.
‘Not planning on it. Not anytime soon, anyway.’
‘Good,’ I declared, looking up to see the rows of colourful bunting strung across the entrance to the school car park. ‘Because I’ve kind of got used to having you around.’
‘Ditto,’ said Chloe.
I turned off the car engine and we shared a single look that I knew I would remember for the rest of my life.
I hauled the collapsed wheelchair out of the boot of my car and stared at it helplessly for a moment, as though if I did that for long enough the thing would somehow miraculously assemble itself. Keeping one hand on the roof of the car for support, Chloe walked up to stand beside me.
Without a word she bent down and began locking clips into place, snapping on the footrests and fastening the seat with the speed and slick proficiency of a military expert assembling an assault rifle. Her hands flew over the chair, and when she was done, she looked up with a small expression of triumph. ‘I used to volunteer in a hospital, remember?’ Gathering the folds of her skirt in one hand, she lowered herself onto the chair. ‘Besides, after you’ve done battle with a buggy, any mother worth her salt could put up a wheelchair with her eyes closed.’ It was a tiny unthinking reminder of something I would never know.
I gripped hold of the wheelchair’s handles and began to steer us towards the school, past the rows of parked cars, whose chrome work glinted dazzlingly in the July sunshine.
‘Ryan’s here,’ Chloe observed quietly as we walked past a familiar vehicle. She drew in her lower lip and bit down on it nervously. At least it gave her face some much-needed colour.
‘You could always tell him I abducted you,’ I joked. She smiled weakly, but I could see she was genuinely worried.
I took one hand off the wheelchair to squeeze her shoulder reassuringly. ‘He’ll just be pleased to see you. Although not as much as I imagine Hope will be.’ Chloe’s smile told me I’d found exactly the right thing to say.
‘There’s a pathway down the side of the building,’ she advised as we reached the edge of the playground. ‘It’ll bring us out at the back of the field, so hopefully we can sneak in without drawing too much attention.’
The event must already have begun, for over the top of the building I could hear the vague strains of a woman’s voice amplified by a microphone.
‘That’ll be the Head’s speech,’ Chloe said as we disappeared out of the afternoon sunshine and down a narrow track shadowed by trees. ‘She gives the same one each year before the races begin; how it’s not about winning, but about taking part.’
‘Admirable,’ I said, trying not to picture the shelf full of sporting trophies and shields my mother had once proudly displayed. Every school has one. The annoying kid who wins every single race, seemingly without trying that hard. That had been me, once, a very long time ago. Had Hope inherited my highly competitive streak? Was she the result of my nature or Chloe’s nurture, or an intriguing combination of us both?
Luckily, July had been hot and dry and the ground beneath the wheels of the chair was baked biscuit hard, with fissurelike cracks running through the solid earth. I was glad of that, for tipping Chloe out of the chair before we even reached the field would have been an extremely unfortunate way for the afternoon to begin. We emerged unexpectedly from beneath the canopy of trees, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust from the sepia of the dappled pathway to the verdant technicolour of the playing field.
On a small raised dais some distance away, the head teacher was giving her speech to an audience of parents sitting on rows of slightly-too-small-to-be-comfortable wooden chairs. At the edge of the field, too far away to make out individual faces, the children sat in rows, arms firmly folded over tiny chests, legs neatly crossed.
‘Let’s stay here until she’s finished,’ whispered Chloe, as I drew us to a stop beneath the overhanging branches of a tree.
There was no reason for anyone to know we were there. Our arrival had been silent, muffled by the thick springy turf beneath us, and yet less than a minute later a head in the second row of chairs slowly turned around. A fluttering, like a trapped butterfly, flickered unexpectedly at the base of my throat.
Ryan swivelled all the way around in his seat and I watched the kaleidoscope of emotions cross his handsome face. Shock came first; then a frowning disapproval, which was quickly pushed aside by something that was so familiar, it had the power to transport me back in time.
He began to smile, slowly at first, and then more broadly. I watched it creep upwards, not confined to lips and cheeks, but travelling all the way to his deep blue eyes. This was how we had begun. How it had all started, with a smile across a sea of heads. His eyes focused in my direction. I was transported back to that industry event, back to the moment when I’d glanced over my shoulder to check who he was smiling at . . . only to discover it had been me.
It’s impossible not to return a smile as broad as that, and my features were already mirroring his in the July sunshine when I noticed the angle of his head and the direction of his gaze. The smile was coming straight towards me, but this time it wasn’t for me. The sun was suddenly too warm, the day too sticky, the memories too painful. I took a single step back into the shadows, as Chloe claimed something else that had once been mine.
Ryan got to his feet, stepping over legs and bags and other obstacles, while never once breaking eye contact with Chloe. He reached the end of his row and a woman behind him glanced back, towards the spot where we stood. I recognised her as one of Chloe’s school-mum friends from Hope’s party. Her mouth dropped open prettily to form a huge O of amazement. She clutched at the arm of a woman sitting beside her, who turned and gave a small gasp. By the time Ryan was free of the rows of chairs, both women were on their feet. The first one was crying, a
nd the second one didn’t look too far behind her.
Like a Mexican Wave gone wrong, more and more heads began to turn our way. An increasing number of parents had got to their feet. The headteacher, unable to ignore the fact that she’d clearly lost her audience’s attention, stumbled over her words, and lifted a hand to her eyes, using it as a visor to see who’d interrupted the smooth running of the afternoon’s proceedings.
‘Just sneak in at the back, huh?’ I said, bending down and whispering into Chloe’s ear.
The Head had finally made out the identity of the late arrival, and any hopes we’d had of making a low-key entrance were now a thing of the past. ‘Mrs Turner,’ she exclaimed, perhaps unaware that her microphone was still turned on.
‘That’s torn it,’ I said, which was the last thing I think Chloe would have been able to hear because someone – I believe it was the woman who’d first spotted us – began to clap. The rhythm of her applause was slow and measured. A solo performance, until another pair of hands joined in, and then another, and another. The sound rose like a cresting wave.
My voice was husky when I spoke. ‘Do they do this every time you turn up in the school playground?’
‘Every damn time,’ replied Chloe, tears streaming down her cheeks.
I missed the moment when Ryan swept Chloe into his arms, for I was distracted by an unfolding commotion happening on the far side of the field. I heard an adult’s voice, raised in agitation, calling out an instruction. Whoever it was aimed at must have been taking very little notice, for the adult voice was growing louder and angrier. That’s when I realised that it wasn’t an instruction, but a name that was being called out. ‘Hope’. Nineteen six-year-olds were still sitting crossed-legged on the grass, doing exactly what they’d been told to do, but number twenty had leapt to her feet on hearing the head teacher say her mother’s name, and was heading across the field with the speed of a miniature twister.
She wove through the legs of adults and when they saw who she was, they stood back to clear a pathway. There were very few dry eyes among the parents – including the fathers – as Hope leapt into her mother’s arms with such force that, without Ryan’s steadying hand, the wheelchair would surely have toppled over.
Mother and daughter rocked silently backwards and forwards in an unbreakable embrace. I watched them for a moment, until it hurt too much to do so. I turned my face to Ryan’s, and the sympathy in his eyes when he looked at me was almost my undoing. He knew me. He still knew me, and right at that moment I couldn’t decide if that was a blessing or a curse.
Around us, as the applause finally began to peter away, our arrival continued to sabotage the afternoon. One by one Hope’s classmates also got to their feet and scattered to join their parents. Children were running everywhere, and parents were scooping them into their arms and hugging them close, even though they’d probably only seen them hours earlier.
I glanced over towards the dais and saw the Head being approached by several members of her teaching staff, who looked at a loss as to how to restore order.
‘Now look what we’ve done,’ I said to Chloe, who’d finally lifted her face from Hope’s neck.
There was a sudden ear-splitting squeal as the head teacher once again picked up her microphone. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, children,’ she began, and then stopped, looking around the school field at the unique and poignant reminder of the fragility of life, and the bond between a child and its parents. Whatever it was she’d had been intending to say was suddenly abandoned as her face transformed into a smile. ‘Just for this year, I propose we break with our normal tradition and allow the children to sit beside their mums and dads for the rest of the afternoon. Please listen out for when your class’s races will begin.’
She looked down at the teachers clustered around the dais and they all shrugged their shoulders, but not one of them could hide the fact that what had just happened on the field had affected them all.
Chloe
The good thing about having brain surgery, if there can be said to be anything good about it, is that you can do just about anything and no one is going to get really mad at you. When the teachers had clawed back some kind of order to the proceedings, and the older classes were beginning their races, Ryan’s face took on a more serious expression.
‘So whose crazy idea was this prison-break plan?’
‘Maddie’s,’ I lied smoothly, giving Maddie a huge pantomime wink which I made sure Ryan saw.
‘It was more of a road trip than a prison-break,’ Maddie mused, playing along.
‘Yes,’ I agreed, giving her a co-conspirator’s smile. ‘More of a Thelma and Louise sort of thing.’
‘That didn’t end so well, if you remember correctly,’ Ryan said dryly.
‘All I can promise is that I’ll try not to blow up a tanker on the drive back,’ Maddie said with a sweet smile and a totally straight face.
Ryan’s lips twitched, and for just a moment I wished that Maddie wasn’t quite so funny, or so beautiful, or so . . . so here. I pushed the thought back down but it had left a bitter taste on my tongue.
A little while later, when the teachers called for Hope’s class to go to the track for their races, she was reluctant to leave my lap.
‘Come on, Pumpkin. You know how much you love to run.’
Hope shook her head so violently that her plaits slapped me lightly across the cheek.
‘Would you like me to walk you over there?’ offered Maddie, holding out her long-fingered pale hand. I could sense the indecision running through my little girl’s small body.
‘Maddie could probably give you a few tips on running,’ Ryan added cajolingly. ‘She used to be a bit of a superstar on the running track.’
Maddie looked up, and I saw the surprise register on her face. ‘I’m surprised you remembered that.’
His eyes were on hers and there was a softness in them that suddenly worried me. ‘I’ve not forgotten anything.’ He paused and suddenly seemed to snap out of whatever mood had descended upon him. ‘Besides, your mother used to constantly brag about it.’
Hope was suddenly looking at Maddie with renewed curiosity. ‘Were you good at races, Maddie?’
‘I won a few,’ she said, with something which I now suspected was false modesty. ‘I’ll tell you how I did it on the walk over.’
Hope slithered off my lap, and despite the heat of the day there was a cold and empty spot inside and outside of me as I watched her walk off with her hand firmly grasped in her mother’s.
Hope won her race, came second in the egg-and-spoon, and third in the three-legged, probably because she was about a foot taller than the girl she’d been harnessed to. I was beginning to feel tired, and was actually looking forward to the idea of returning to the comparative calm of the hospital ward. But there would be no leaving until what some parents regarded as the most important event of the afternoon had taken place.
For the final time that day the head teacher picked up her microphone to make an announcement. ‘Gentlemen, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you what’s coming next. Will all those taking part please make their way to the start line.’
I saw Maddie looking around her in bemusement, in much the same way I had done three years earlier at my very first sports day. Men all around us were getting to their feet. Some were slipping out of their jackets and pulling off ties. Others were kicking off their smart shoes and replacing them with the trainers they’d brought in preparation for this moment. A couple of dads emerged from the school building wearing shorts and vests. I shook my head, still unable to grasp how competitively they all took this.
‘What is all this?’ asked Maddie.
‘The Fathers’ Race,’ supplied Ryan, also getting to his feet. He’d taken his own jacket off earlier in the afternoon, but was now unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt and rolling up the sleeves. I saw Maddie watching him with a fascinated expression on her face.
‘You’re racing?’
He nodd
ed. Hope, who was sitting on the ground beside my wheelchair, looked up adoringly at her father. ‘Daddy tries very hard, but he never wins,’ she said with brutal honesty.
I smirked and shared a special look with Ryan.
‘That’s because taking part is more important than winning,’ Ryan said, ruffling his daughter’s hair before bending down to drop a kiss on my lips. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘Break a leg,’ I said, laughing at the comical expression my words brought to his face. ‘Only don’t really do that, because we’ve only got one wheelchair.’
Maddie waited until he’d gone before turning to me, clearly bewildered by what was going on. ‘They take it that seriously? It’s not all done for laughs?’
‘Far from it. I think some of the dads even train for a few weeks before the big day.’
Maddie shook her head, and I could hardly blame her for being surprised. Watching the collection of men at various levels of fitness thunder down the length of the field each year had always looked like a heart attack waiting to happen, as far as I could see.
‘If you think this is bad, you should see the women in the mothers’ race. Those two over there,’ I said, subtly directing her attention towards two individuals who were already removing their high-heeled summer sandals and replacing them with high-performance running shoes. ‘Between them they’ve won this race for the last ten years. No one else gets close.’
‘What about you?’ asked Maddie, idly plucking up random blades of grass from her position on the floor beside Hope as we spoke.
‘I bring up the rear each year,’ I told her with a laugh.
‘Mummy’s really good,’ said Hope with touching, if misplaced, loyalty.
It felt strange to have three of us cheering Ryan on as the pack of around forty runners powered down the field as if it were a steeplechase. The race went much as expected. There were a few who fell; a few more who wisely dropped out without completing the course; and a handful who took it way too seriously. Luckily Ryan didn’t fall into any of those categories.