by Beth Moran
‘What about my friend Tate? I could invite him along to see this fantastic, incredible pool. But then, Tate is disabled, and he can’t get in the water without a hoist. So, all he’d be able to do is see it. I’m not sure quite how fun it would be for him to sit at the side and wave at his two sisters and two brothers splashing around in the intelligent thermostatically controlled water. What do you think?’
‘Um.’ There was a brief silence as he fumbled for a reply. ‘We do have a wheelchair accessible café area.’
‘If he wanted to go to a café, he’d pick a nice one, like the Cup and Saucer in Brooksby, which is also accessible and isn’t a bus ride away. Incidentally, the café owner’s wife, Gill, also uses a wheelchair so can’t use your amazing new pool facilities. Would you like me to invite her to the grand opening? Will she be very well looked after as she watches from the café area?’
‘Um.’
I breathed out a loooong sigh. ‘Look, I know it’s not your fault personally. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but surely, as the Head of Leisure Services, you could have done something? Maybe, before splashing out on a smartphone-controlled LED lighting and music system, gone for a pool that more people can actually get into? I’m not sure I feel comfortable endorsing a facility that is so non-inclusive.’
A gulp came down the phone line. ‘The signage has already been ordered,’ he stammered. ‘We can’t possibly change the name now.’
‘I wonder if the newspapers would be more receptive to my opinion?’ I pondered. ‘Come to think of it, a national journalist has been in touch recently, wanting to do a “where is she now?” story. Moira Vanderbeek. Perhaps you know her?’
‘Um, I don’t think…’
‘Funny that, because you’re friends on Facebook.’
‘Well…’
‘I’m guessing not friends enough that she’d ditch a story like this to protect your smart little swimming pool.’
Antonio Galanos took a couple of deep breaths. He hadn’t risen through the ranks of the Nottinghamshire County Council and made it to Head of Leisure Services for nothing!
‘Look, I’m aware that the lack of a hoist was an oversight. But these things cost money and there isn’t any left. What I can do is invite you to meet with our team and discuss a hoist budget for the longer term.’
‘That doesn’t really help Tate and Gill now though, does it?’
‘I appreciate that, Ms Piper, but really, I’m not sure what you want me to do.’
‘Well, I’m very glad you’ve asked.’
Fifteen minutes later, I had a guarantee (to be confirmed in an email by five o’clock that evening) that the council would give their full backing to the PoolPal campaign. I wanted banners, flyers, marketing, encouragement to every team entering the triathlon to consider raising money, all profits made from their wheelchair-accessible café area on the opening weekend and a generous donation to the JustGiving page from Antonio Galanos as a demonstration of his personal commitment.
That was for starters.
But the price was not cheap.
Amelia Piper was opening the swimming centre. This included giving a speech and presenting the triathlon trophy, along with a gazillion photos and meet and greets with local sports clubs. That I had been prepared for. The point at which I had to squinch my eyes shut and think very hard about Tate was when Antonio asked me to do an interview with Moira Vanderbeek. I would have said no, but I’d just threatened him with the same thing. Plus, I was pretending to be a badass.
It was my turn to gulp. I did remember to hang up the phone first.
I sat back, made a congratulatory cup of tea and shook my head in wonder that the woman who’d coolly negotiated such a fantastic agreement with the council moments earlier was actually me. If I carried on at this rate, forget pretending, I’d be a badass for real.
And when I thought about it, in a secret spot in my own mind, I was maybe starting to like myself a little bit. Enough to know that liking myself, feeling proud of who I was becoming, was okay.
At seven o’clock that evening, Nathan met us at the Brooksby Leisure Centre door. I eyed his trainers and tracksuit with a questioning eyebrow.
‘I’ve got a change of clothes in my car.’
Speaking of cars… yep – there it was. Skulking in its usual corner. I wasn’t surprised. At some point in the past twenty-eight hours, my head had clicked two connecting thoughts together like Lego bricks: mysterious fancy car, often found loitering in the leisure centre or outside my house, plus a scout scouting out my son. The car was stalking Joey. Full on stalking might seem extreme to those who haven’t lived inside the world of ultra-competitive sport, but I knew different. If a big-time agent wanted a new client, they would be thinking about sponsorship, endorsements, celebrity appeal. They would be asking who this athlete was – did they have a stable family life, were there any unsavoury secrets that could pose a problem in the future, were they susceptible to taking performance-enhancing drugs – or party-enhancing drugs? Were they constantly getting into trouble with authority?
If it was a big agent, and they were doing their research, they would surely have connected Joey Piper to Amelia Piper.
Joey was thirteen. Even if he joined the Gladiators and looked set to make it to the national squad, I’d be insisting on no agent for a long while yet. If ever. And come the Easter bank holiday, my cover was blown anyway. All I had to do was stall this scout until then.
For now, getting a decent look at him would suffice. From the inside of the leisure centre, which is where I presumed he was, given that the car was empty.
‘Right. Let’s do this!’ Joey grinned, pumped that his mum, the ex-world champion swimmer, was seeing him train at last.
‘Yes,’ I said. Or tried to say. It came out more like a dying chipmunk’s final breath.
‘We’ll see you in there,’ Nathan said. ‘Your mum might need to take her time.’
Joey frowned, reluctant to go in without me.
‘Don’t worry, I promise I won’t let her run off. She’s coming in even if I have to carry her.’
I flapped my hand, anxiety sign language for ‘what he said’, and Joey nodded once before jogging inside.
‘Amy – you need to breathe,’ Nathan said.
‘The smell, though,’ I whispered, using as little breath as possible.
A woman pushed open the door to leave, releasing another blast of warm, wet, chloriney air that churned up a tornado of nausea and dizziness, while sweat popped out from every pore on my body. My hand groped blindly behind me for the entrance railings, as the all too familiar panic clamped down on my chest.
Don’t fall, Amy.
‘Of course you’re going to fall,’ my anxiety screeched. ‘You can’t breathe. Your heart is exploding. You’re about to collapse and smack your head on the concrete and a whole crowd of people will gather round to watch you bleed.’
If I could only reach the railings, grip onto something. Anything…
And then my flailing fingers brushed something solid. And warm. And soft and strong all at the same time, and whatever it was wrapped itself around my hand and held on tight.
And, hallelujah, I was thinking. And breathing. And my heart was decelerating to a pace where I could distinguish the individual beats again. Because I knew that hand. I was learning to trust it, almost as much as I liked it.
‘I’m not dying,’ I croaked.
‘Nope,’ Nathan agreed.
‘Just feel like crap.’
‘I sort of picked up on that.’
And then it hit me.
This feeling – which to be fair, was overpoweringly horrendous to the point that it genuinely did seem as though I was dying – was it. There was nothing terrible inside the leisure centre. The monster I feared was this. Was here. Inside me. I was panicking because I was afraid of a panic attack. Afraid that the panic would make me collapse, or throw up, or act hysterical, or not do something I needed to do, like show up and act n
ormal. A fear that was justified, considering in the past it had made me do all those things.
But it was the fear that made me do it. Not the place, or the people, or the chemical smell or the echoey tiles or the squeak of a swim cap.
And I couldn’t feel any more afraid than I had thirty seconds ago.
And I was not going to let a feeling stop me from keeping a promise to my son.
I slowly straightened upright, lifted my head so that I could see more than my shoes. Wiped the perspiration-snot-tear combo off my face with a tissue and adjusted my woolly hat.
‘Let’s go,’ I declared, face set like flint.
‘Lead the way,’ Nathan grinned.
I looked back down at my feet, doing their best not to let the team down but not quite ready to be leading this stage of the Programme just yet.
‘Could you lead the way?’ I asked. ‘I’ll follow.’
Nathan’s eyes did that kind, crinkly thing again and he gently tugged me forwards a couple of steps. ‘Let’s do it together. That way I can catch you if you pass out.’
‘Good plan.’
And it was. I shuffled along, gripping my anchor, keeping my breaths as shallow as possible as we made it up the stairs to the viewing area, which overlooked the pool below. I lowered myself into a plastic chair and finally unclenched my hand from around Nathan’s.
‘You can open your eyes now,’ he said.
I did. His were still crinkling away. ‘You look inappropriately pleased to be witnessing someone suffering a panic attack.’
‘That would be inappropriate. But I’m witnessing someone overcoming a panic attack, and seeing that has made my day.’
Oof – it seemed my poor, frazzled heart had just about enough energy left to do a weak flop in response.
‘Do you want a coffee or anything?’
‘I’ve water in my bag.’
‘Right, I’d better get down there.’
‘Thank you,’ I called, as he reached the stairwell, managing to squeeze the words through the giant blob of tears balled up in my throat.
He spun around and paused there for a moment. ‘Well done.’
Two little words, but he spoke them as if one of his squad had won the gold. Like he was proud of me. I tucked those words inside my heart and used the warm glow to power me around to look down onto the vision of my past a few metres below.
My past. My son’s future. He was even more astonishing than I’d imagined. I wondered if me being there helped. Scrap that. I knew how much it helped. The number of times he glanced up at the viewing area told me that. Mesmerised, I barely blinked the whole time, so desperate was I to not miss a second of it.
Different swimsuits and shorts, a lot less bellowing and bullying from the coach, but not much else had changed. It was all so familiar, yet it felt as though a lifetime of avoidance and denial, secrets and cover-ups, had built an impenetrable wall between my present world and this one. I watched, and wept, and let the adrenaline gallop through my system, but, most important of all, I stayed.
It was incredible. Me, here at last. Watching my boy. I pushed aside the weight of regret, and shame and anger and hurt, and grasped hold of what consolation I could at the certainty that this was a new day, I was here now, and I would be here from now on. I had made it.
Twenty minutes before the end of the training session, a man wearing a dark brown baseball cap pushed through a door below and hurried over to one of the poolside benches where a few of the parents were watching their kids below me. He sat down, one arm placed on each knee, head twisting from side to side until he spotted Joey, powering along the far lane.
He didn’t look like a scout. Scouts wore tracksuits and trainers, not jeans, thick sweaters and heavy boots. And the agents who didn’t go for sportswear dressed in suits.
Who was this man?
I clattered down the stairs in a mix of anger and terror, wheeling along the corridor to the door leading to the pool. As my brain finally caught up with my agitated body, it produced this thought: What are you going to do when you open the door, Amy? Accuse him of stalking in front of everyone? What if he knows who you are? What if the one time you turn up at Joey’s training you cause a scene and embarrass him?
Jerking to a stop, I crashed into the door, sending it flying open as I stood there behind it. Every pair of eyes belonging to everybody on the bench swivelled to look at me. In the split second before the door swung shut again, my own eyes locked onto two of them. Which was precisely enough time to realise who they did in fact belong to.
‘Sean Mansfield,’ I exclaimed. ‘I should have known.’
I stood there, my nose an inch from the closed door, my whole being in suspended animation. Before I slipped completely into an insensible stupor, the door creaked open and Nathan appeared.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Were you trying to brave it poolside? If you wait ten minutes, I’ll give you a hand.’
‘No. Thank you. I’m going to sit out here and wait for the other parents to leave.’
Behind what I hoped was my cool exterior, I began plotting gruesome murder.
‘Amy, are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes.’ I rotated myself around and jerked down the corridor towards the reception desk. I had approximately fifteen minutes to get a grip and decide how the hell I was going to handle this without upsetting Joey or breaking the law.
Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds later, my plan consisted of don’t upset Joey and don’t break the law.
Every gracious thought I had been trying to summon up in order to allow that man to meet my son had evaporated in a cloud of steam tooting out my ears.
I waited on a plastic chair while the other parents and the lifeguard strolled past. Some of the faster club members began to filter out of the changing room door on the other side of the reception desk. Was Sean going to hide in there until the leisure centre staff locked everything up? Did he really think that—
Apparently not.
Sean Mansfield scurried into the centre foyer and straight past me, head down, cap pulled low, as if I wasn’t even there.
‘Take one step out through those doors and you will never meet your son.’
Well, that did the trick. He froze for a few seconds, then swung slowly around as I sucked in a long, careful breath, trying to calm my heart from its frenzied scrabbling.
I dug deep for the few remaining scraps of courage that would help me meet his gaze, head up, jaw set, shoulders squared.
‘Amy.’
‘You’ve been stalking Joey. For weeks.’
He pulled up the side of his mouth. The familiarity of his ‘I’m sorry but, hey, I’m charming, so you can’t help but forgive me’ expression was like being punched in the stomach with a thousand memories. ‘I’m not sure it’s technically stalking if it’s your own child.’
‘I’m not sure he’s technically your child if you abandon him before he was born and wait thirteen years before bothering to try and contact him.’
‘I thought about him. And you. Every single day.’
‘No. You didn’t.’
‘I regretted what happened—’
‘What you chose to do.’
‘…from the moment I left. I realised that however tough being a father would be, it couldn’t be as hard as knowing my child was growing up without me.’
I laughed, then. At least, it started out as a laugh and twisted into a sort of enraged snarl.
‘You thought about your child every day? I thought about him every second. Loved him and cared for him. Found a way to provide for him after you left us with nothing. I was there, with him, doing whatever it took to be a mother and a father to my son. That you could even suggest that sparing him the odd thought is somehow harder than putting in everything I had, than making everything I did be for him, just confirms that you have no idea what it is to be a parent, that you have no right to call him your child. If your biggest conc
ern was that he didn’t know you, rather than whether he had a roof over his head, or food to eat, let alone was happy or safe or healthy, then you are no father.’
I vaguely registered a collective gasp from the parents and children gathered, enthralled, in the foyer.
‘I did worry about that,’ Sean mumbled, his eyes pleading. ‘But I didn’t know where you were. I was young, and broke.’
I wasn’t the only one who let out a loud snort.
‘I knew I’d messed up, badly. And I kept thinking that I needed to sort myself out, get a decent job, some money saved, show you I’d grown up, that I deserved to be allowed back into his life…’
‘Back in?’
‘I was young, Amy. I was an idiot. I’ve told you that in the emails, apologised. But, like I said, I’m here now to put it right.’
‘Why now? You’ve been running a successful business for six years.’
‘I don’t know… by the time I felt ready, it seemed like too much time had passed. And then, well, like you said, I have a business to run. I always thought that soon I’d do it, in a few months, once we’d negotiated that contract, completed the next project, and before I knew it, years had passed. And honestly? I felt terrified. I knew if you’d told him the truth about me, he’d probably hate me. I hate myself for what I did.’
‘So, it was easier to do nothing. It’s a good job utter terror and self-hatred didn’t stop me from being there for him.’
Sean took a couple of steps closer. ‘I can’t excuse it. But please give me a chance. I’m here now.’
‘Yes, you are. And how long exactly have you been here, sneaking around and scaring people, Sean? Are you sure your business is coping without you?’
‘I’ve been here since the end of August. And I’ll stay for as long as it takes.’
‘Oh, please. For as long as what takes? For you to stop feeling guilty?’
‘This isn’t about me.’
‘Yeah, right,’ one of the dads behind me retorted.