5

Doing A Runner

“So, Liam, what did you make of last night – the new, humble Meg?” Mimi asked me whilst tucking into a mound of steaming scrambled eggs on toast. I couldn’t help but admire her ability to multi-task and, for someone so petite, her remarkable appetite.

I stared at my plate of rubbery fried eggs and stuck-together bacon wondering why I kept doing this to my body. At my age, I needed to start thinking about muesli and fruit.

“Humble is good - I like humble,” I said.

“Yep, but there’s talking humble, and there’s being humble,” she said, lifting her head to check I appreciated the emphasis. “And I’m not sure which we were getting.”

I poked my fork into a shiny piece of egg white, shook the grease off it and decided not to put it in my mouth.

“There is that,” I said, “but talking humble might be a step in the right direction.”

Mimi didn’t reply. We seemed to have exhausted the ‘humble’ topic, and she obviously had more appetite for her eggs than I did for mine. I watched her polish them off, mulling over if I cared whether or not Megan had much humility as long as I could believe her.

“Right, Liam darling,” Mimi said, swallowing the last lump of egg and wiping her mouth with a napkin. “Much as I love it here, I need to get back to London. Are you catching the train or hitching a ride with me?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer that one because Tom had turned up at the table looking even more like a dog who’d been kicked than usual.

“What’s up?” I forced myself to say fairly cheerfully. “It’s Meg,” he mumbled, barely moving his lips as if struggling to keep a grip on himself. I frowned and reached across the table for his shirtsleeve, tugging gently to signal he needed to sit down. The restaurant was full of familiar faces – athletes, officials, supporters, and a table full of journalists I recognised from the press conference, sitting too close to earshot for comfort. Tom slumped into the empty seat next to Mimi.

“What the hell is it now?” she whispered.

Tom was shaking his head. “She’s done a runner,” he replied.

“What the fuck do you mean?” Mimi hissed. She didn’t have any patience with Tom at the best of times, and this wasn’t remotely one of those.

“I woke up, and she was on her way out the door.”

Mimi was right in his face now, her eyebrows saying ‘and?’

“She’s gone.”

Mimi turned towards me with a despairing look.

“Did she say where?” I asked.

Tom was shaking his head again. “The cow! She just told me to move out, that’s all.”

Mimi rolled her eyes and made no attempt at sympathy.

“I’m sorry, Tom… So you’ve split up?” I said, just to be sure what he meant. “And she’s gone back to London?”

Tom looked at me now like it was me who was being dull.

“No, Newport,” he said.

***

And so I took Mimi up on her offer of a lift. But our destination wasn’t London. After a ten-minute scramble to pack and check-out of the hotel, we found ourselves heading south on the M5 towards Wales, without much sense of what we were doing or why.

“If you’d asked me last week how I’d be spending today, it definitely wouldn’t be like this,” I said. I was having trouble recalling my original plan, but the general idea was to spend the day celebrating Megan booking her ticket – and mine – to Rio. It would probably have involved a walk-about on campus – I wasn’t averse to milking the plaudits after years of barely suppressed yawns from colleagues when I talked about athletics. These days, with Megan becoming so successful, I was mentioned in university marketing material and given one of the best seats at academic events I hadn’t previously known existed. Why not enjoy it? “I can’t believe they’re about to announce the team, and Megan’s gone AWOL,” I continued.

But Mimi was in no mood for chitchat and gave me a sideways, thanks-for-stating-the-obvious glance. We were somewhere near Worcester with the SatNav telling us it was sixty-six minutes to our destination.

Mimi was driving like someone was cardiac-arresting in the back seat; gripping the steering wheel so tightly I could see what was meant by a ‘white-knuckle ride’. Occasionally, she would use her left hand to pick her mobile up and juggle with it just above the dashboard, trying to read the flood of emails pinging into her inbox.

“Fuck this thing,” she said finally, tossing it into my lap. “Liam, can you have a look?”

I skimmed through the messages. It mostly seemed to be panicky emails from her staff, either about Megan or with queries about how to handle other needy clients.

“It looks like your office is getting a load of calls, and no one knows what to say,” I said.

“Phone them will you,” she said. “You know the number.”

I keyed it in from memory and, as it started ringing, the hands-free kicked in.

“Mimi, thank God you’ve called back,” a female voice said.

“What’s up Sarah?” Mimi said.

“What isn’t? We’ve had about twenty media calls about Megan, and then there’s all the usual Monday crap, you know – and Mimi, you haven’t forgotten we’ve got two book launches this week?”

“Shit! Yes, okay,” Mimi said. “Get the others on the line, and we’ll sort out who’s doing what,” Mimi said.

‘The others’ seemed to be about four new voices, all of them failing miserably to hide their excitement at the drama engulfing their most high-profile client. Mimi cut through the babble with scary efficiency, issuing instructions and allocating jobs like she was running a state of emergency. The media calls about Megan were all to be answered with a bland two-liner, news alerts were to be set up covering every Megan-related keyword imaginable, and Meg’s Twitter feed should pump out tweets as planned about how ‘thrilled’ she is about Rio.

As for the book launches, she told Jo or Joe – I wasn’t sure – to take care of everything and report to her later.

“Everyone okay with all that?” Mimi said finally to a chorus of “sure,” and “leave it to us”.

Mimi nodded in my direction and I tapped ‘End Call’. The SatNav lady told us to take the slip road for the M50.

“That was impressive,” I said, meaning it.

“Fuck off,” Mimi said.

“How many staff you got?” I asked.

“Just the six of us, and if Megan’s work goes down the pan, I’ll have to let half of them go.”

“Really?”

“Yes – really, Liam. I’ve recruited two people just to handle her sponsorship work. It’s been manic, something nearly every day, a photo-shoot, an event. And then there’s Twitter and Facebook. And the fans wanting stuff. And the media. I can’t do it all myself anymore.”

I had no idea. I’d never been to her office or asked how it all worked. Over the last eighteen months, the ‘business’ of Megan had grown into a slick commercial operation. But I’d mostly kept out of it, happy to start receiving generous expenses and concentrating on my three coaching sessions a week with Meg. I left the rest to Mimi and Jackie.

Jackie had come on the scene first, recommended by another athlete to help Megan negotiate terms with the first wave of sponsors. And Jackie brought Mimi in to handle the media and marketing, which I thought was over the top at first. But how naïve that seemed now with Megan having already banked more than a million pounds in endorsements and appearances, and with the experts saying her earnings would top two million annually if she wins gold in Rio.

I glanced across at Mimi, taking in her bold, angular profile and her eyes – dark chocolate irises on clear white – her thick, dark hair combed back into the nape of her neck, showing smooth copper skin. We’d had countless coffees together at an odd florist-cum-coffee-shop in Hendon, but our conversations were nearly always about Megan; wrestling over how to split her time between athlete and ‘brand’. But there were occasional exceptions. Once, she’d announced she was about to go to Cape Town on holiday and mentioned her parents lived there, and I said something lame about the weather and the wine. Another time she ranted about Megan being a magnet for dull men, which must have been around the time Tom had turned up on the scene, sniffing around like he could smell the money. I said, “You’re sounding jealous,” and Mimi flushed, and we both sat in embarrassed silence for a moment.

“I should have quizzed her. I really should have quizzed her!” Mimi said now, shaking her head. “All that, ‘I’ll sort it – it’s my problem’ crap. I just assumed Jackie had it covered. I thought they must have talked before the meeting, and Jackie was cool with everything, and we didn’t need to know the details. This is what you get for being frigging trusting.”

I looked at my phone to see if there was a message from Megan. I’d tried her mobile a few times but only to hear her chirpy voice telling me she couldn’t get to the phone and to leave a message. I eventually left one, stressing how worried we were and how much we wanted to help.

“Any news?” Mimi asked.

“Not a thing.”

“We need a plan. Where do you think she’s gone?”

“Not to her parents, for a start,” I said. “They’ve moved somewhere west. Cardigan, I think. And I don’t think she’ll want them involved anyway – her father isn’t well.”

“Yeah, she told me. Banned me from mentioning them in any PR.”

“So we need to find out where Will lives.”

A juggernaut was starting to move into the fast lane, intending to overtake another, even slower lorry and following the well-known trucking principle ‘manoeuvre and maybe signal’.

“Fuck you!” Mimi said, accelerating through the gap before the lorry could block our way. “I hate that! He had no idea I was even there.”

I smiled and took a few deep breaths. “So, back to the plan,” I said.

“She’d be stupid to go to Will’s, wherever that is,” Mimi said. “It’ll be crawling with paparazzi.”

The road was clear now, the lorries left far behind. Yellow fields of grass and grain stretched to the horizon on either side. Ahead, the terrain seemed to rise endlessly under a big, clear sky towards what I assumed were the Brecon Beacons.

“I’ve got a hunch she’s at Celtic Manor,” I said, not knowing quite where the thought came from. But it suddenly seemed obvious. Jackie had struck a deal with Newport’s only big hotel. She could stay more or less any time she liked. All she had to do was show up a few times a year and look pretty next to the owner.

“Fuck, yes, that makes sense,” Mimi said. “She wouldn’t go to Will’s – she’s not that stupid. And I doubt anyone would think of Celtic Manor. We haven’t announced that yet.”

The SatNav was giving us only thirty minutes to our destination now. I pointed to the radio. “How do you turn this thing on?”

Mimi looked at her watch, knowing why I was asking. It was eleven and news of the Olympic team would be on the bulletins. She prodded and flicked the buttons and knobs until she found Five Live. A presenter was running through the main stories. The Olympic team was the third item:

“UK Athletics announced its team for Rio this morning amid confusion about the fitness of its strongest gold medal hope. Megan Tomos failed to appear at a press conference at the Olympic trials yesterday, her coach saying she was ‘under the weather’. There are unconfirmed reports she is linked to a police inquiry into a drug-related death in Newport two years ago. But the selectors say she was an automatic choice for the team as winner of the one hundred metre hurdles at the trials in Birmingham. They also selected her for the sprint relay squad.”

Mimi hit the mute button as the presenter started to talk about other selection issues. On any other day, I might have stopped her.

“Shit, it sounds awful when you hear it out loud like that,” Mimi said.

For a moment, I was too choked to speak.