After biology, Georgia and us dump our files and books at Wimborne, change into our sports kit, and head to Upper Ock.
Upper Ock is a giant sports field on the grounds, but it’s so far away from the main buildings (you have to walk through the rose garden to get there) it feels like somewhere else altogether. Every day after school for hours the two of us run round the 400-meter track, which is painted white on the grass.
Georgia does this because she is tipped to run for Great Britain in the 2012 Olympics. I do it because running is the antidote.
I align my body with the start line and fill myself with breath.
Georgia executes all sorts of warm-up drills, because her coach says you can’t train properly without doing them. She has tried to persuade me to do them with her.
Georgia does not understand that I am not training.
She lives in the future—hears “running” and “gold medals” in the same sentence, pictures herself jogging victory laps around stadiums and ascending podiums, probably to her favorite music. This is her goal, and she is running toward it.
My goal is much less heroic and exists purely in the present. In fact, I’m not sure it even counts as a goal. I am not trying to achieve a personal best; I am trying to outrun my friend.
Being less fit would actually make it easier.
When I started running with Georgia a few months back, my pulse would roar in my temples; hotness would rise to my hairline; the cold air would coat my lungs with a bloody metallic tang. The physical discomfort alone made it pretty much impossible to focus on any lists. But the better I get at running, the less quickly I achieve my goal, because now it takes much longer to get to the level of physical pain needed to reach distraction. At first I set myself three laps an evening, and that would be enough to switch my head off.
As I became tolerant, I upped it to six, nine, fifteen . . .
Eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four . . .
Now I’m on forty-two, which is approximately ten miles. Georgia tells me I will injure myself. She does not understand that I do not care.
One, two, three—my body tenses, I push up from my back foot and hurl myself into forward momentum along the track.
My friend whispers: TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.
Not now, I say.
She says: TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.
I focus hard on my lane, studying the blades of grass that stand coated in stiff white paint, making me think of a hundred thousand mini plaster-of-paris casts.
A hundred thousand? That can’t be right. It must be more than that. Each painted line is probably 10 centimeters thick and definitely 400 meters (40,000 centimeters) long. There are eight lanes requiring a total of nine painted lines to make the track. So all I need to do is count the number of blades of grass in a 10-by-1-centimeter area of one of the lanes and multiply it by 40,000 and then multiply that by 9, and then I’ll know how many mini plaster casts there really are—
TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD.
Her voice is insisting, wheedling, difficult to unhear. It will only be deafened by a high-intensity pain in my body, so I up the pace. The cows in the neighboring field chomp disinterestedly on grass and gaze over the fence. The concept of running laps must be bizarre to a cow, mustn’t it? Cows! That’s another one, that’s easier than grass, how many cows are there in the field? One, two, three, four—must run faster, go, go, go!—five, six, seven, eight—
TCNDUCTOSCLSKEAYJLPRD!!!
She shrieked that one—She’s a banshee; She’s a spoiled child demanding the whole of me, tugging at my shorts as I try to run past her, and . . . oh! I’m going to give in again.
She isn’t going to be distracted by grass or cows.
Fine, fine, I say, and start to go through the letters with her. She’s leading the routine, shuffling letters efficiently into red and green like piles of cards, saying when things are okay, chastising when they are not and sending me to the scarlet kingdom. We’re on U—
Did I appear noticeably UPSET in biology after reading the passage out loud? Did anyone notice and guess our secret?
—when I try to trick her.
In the part of my brain closest to her, I appear to be happily going through the motions of letters C, T, and O, but closer to my forehead, in the space I am sometimes able to keep her out of, I make the decision to keep going faster every thirty seconds. It’s a subtle increase, so slight She won’t notice it, hopefully, until it’s too late. I keep my breath even and press on for the next few laps.
As I pass her, Georgia calls out, “You’re flying round!”
My friend realizes she’s being gradually muted and lets out a shout of anguish.
But it’s too late for her.
She’ll pay me back later, but this is my time now. “I know!” I grin. I steel my gaze ahead and accelerate. Some sort of toxicity is seeping into the muscles in my legs. We learned—in biology—that this is lactic acid, which builds up during anaerobic respiration when you can’t get enough oxygen to the body parts that need it. It’s perceived to be a bad thing, but I use it like rocket fuel.
The remaining letters rush out my ears, shimmying down underneath my vest top and shorts, landing in my socks before tumbling out and unraveling in ribbons behind my shoes. I imagine—and I know this is bad—my friend out of my head and onto the track in front of me, and me running her down like a car. The force of something else that can, when you think about it, really only be me, clasps my rib cage and begins squeezing the bones inward—I’ll run out of air soon, well good, do your worst and—
The rush. The rush of this open field where I can see for miles: the other fields beyond the fence that turn into unkempt meadows, and the woods that get smaller and smaller, the winding toy gardens taken from the grounds of a princess’s dollhouse. The rush of knowing that whoever owns this field will never know it like I do, which means that in the world after time, where money doesn’t matter and no one cares for territorial battles, it will all belong to me.
Georgia appears by my side, challenging me to a lap race. I don’t know why I agree. I always lose. I suppose it’s because I know she needs the rush of beating someone like I need the rush of escaping the letters. We’re matching each other’s speed for the first 200 meters, and I anticipate the moment where she will overtake me like she always does. It doesn’t seem to come. At 300 meters I realize I’m a couple of strides ahead of her, and then there’s nothing but me against the wind, each footfall sending me bounding forward on higher and higher springs, carrying me across the finish line, swiftly followed by Georgia a few seconds later.
She is doubled over, her hands on her knees, her badly dyed blond hair, which is now ginger, swinging like vines against the tips of the green and white blades of grass. “I couldn’t keep up with you!” she puffs.
“I’m sorry,” I say instinctively.
“What on earth do you have to be sorry for?” She laughs, patting me on the back.
They should bury me here, the place where I run until my heart beats apart from all other noises, isolated like a drum removed from a score of hateful music I never wanted to play.