Chapter 17

I lasted three weeks.

Three weeks after Derek had told me to put up or shut up, I collapsed by the side of the pool after time trials. I woke up in the sickbay, still in my swimsuit, under a blanket. I tried to sit up. That was a mistake.

“Better out than in,” said the school nurse, putting the reeking bucket back on the floor next to the bed. My throat burned. She twisted the cap off a bottle of water and handed it to me. “Rinse your mouth out with this and lie down whilst I call your folks.”

I lay back and stared at the ceiling as I tried to remember what had happened. It was weekly trials, and halfway through the final lap my arms had started to turn to jelly. But then I’d thought of Nao – her almond eyes, the way she tucked her bottom lip under her front teeth as she leaned in to kiss me, the sound of her happy sigh as she snuggled into the crook of my arm – and remembered my promise to myself. I pushed through the fatigue and managed to keep going, even finding an extra burst of speed. I’d hit the wall with enough force to make my palms sting, and as I heaved in great gasping breaths of air our head coach leaned over the block in surprise.

“One point oh eight seconds off your PB, Jimmy. I don’t know where you pulled that from, but I hope you’re laying in a supply.”

I nodded as I turned to duck under the ropes. I remembered climbing out of the pool, a weird electric shiver running down my neck, then waking up in the sick bay. One point oh eight... My eyes opened wide, as I realised that, if I could make an improvement like that in three weeks, I could be within sight of a nationals qualifying time within six months. If I could repeat it.

The nurse came back over from her desk.

“Your father is going to pick you up in about forty-five minutes. How are you feeling?”

I shrugged.

“Well, your blood pressure is at the low end of fine, but you’re a competitive swimmer so that just tells me you have a good cardio-vascular system. You don’t have a temperature – if anything you’re running slightly cool. Your coach said you were swimming particularly hard today, and you didn’t bring too much up when you were sick earlier, so I’m guessing it’s probably just your blood sugar levels.”

“I kind of skipped lunch,” I admitted. It wasn’t the first lunch I’d missed since Nao had gone, to spend watching film with one of the phys-ed teachers to see how I could improve my technique. It was easier to avoid everyone, avoid the lunchtimes that reminded me of her.

“Well, there you go. And from the looks of you, you’ve got an admirably fast metabolism. Your friends brought your bag over, so you can put some proper clothes on. And in future, if you’re going to run at full throttle, make sure that you have some fuel in the tank first.”

“So, are you going to calm down a little now?”

My dad broke the silence we’d shared since he’d collected me from school. I looked at him.

“I get it,” he continued. “You miss her. She’d become a big part of your life. But you can’t kill yourself over her.”

I looked over at him. He glanced at me.

“In the pool I mean. Poor choice of words, sorry,” he said.

I didn’t answer. I turned and looked out the window at the dirty slush the winter snows had dissolved into. He spoke again.

“You know, your mother and I broke up once. I don’t even remember what it was over. We’d been together almost two years. We had some argument, and both of us were too stubborn to apologise. It just escalated until we both decided we obviously couldn’t be together because the other obviously didn’t care enough.”

I turned back to my father. I’d never heard this story before. He looked at me before looking back at the road. He sighed.

“I was useless for months, in everything but my coursework. I think I was a more diligent student then than I’d ever been before. I did every reading I was assigned, diligently rewrote my lecture notes into indexed revision sheets, spent hours at the library following up on the references for the references the professors had used in class. Basically, anything I could do to fill the gaping hole in my life that had opened up. I even stopped eating in the refectory so I wouldn’t run into your mother or have to answer questions from our mutual friends.”