The park is swathed in mist and the cold air stings my nostrils. Wythall Park is the best part of a mile from home and from the moment I set off to walk there – as soon as Ian has left for work – my chest has been tightening and my stomach clenching with nerves.
In the murk the brightest thing I can see is my trainers. These are the one thing I have had to buy. I hid them in the cupboard upstairs because I’m still not really sure I’m doing this. Otherwise I’m wearing old black leggings which I hope won’t keep falling down, a T-shirt and navy sweatshirt. The blue-and-white trainers seem to glow at each end of my feet. They make me look as if I’m some sort of sporty person who knows what she’s about and so I feel a fraud wearing them.
‘There’s a track round the park – about a mile,’ Hayley told me. ‘We could do that to begin with?’
Before I have even got across the car park to get right into the park, I see a figure appear through the mist in tight black sports leggings with a bright blue contour stripe down the sides and a similarly blue top, jogging with a beautiful fluent stride. Hayley’s ponytail swings back and forth and she runs out of the park to meet me like some gorgeous Serengeti gazelle. In comparison I immediately feel like a clapped-out old goat.
‘Hi!’ Hayley waves, her face glowing with health. She has evidently already done at least one lap of the park. ‘Well done – you got here.’
‘Well, if I couldn’t even manage that I wouldn’t have much hope, would I?’ I say, feeling faintly patronized. ‘Have you seen Pat?’
‘Here she is!’
A small silver car pulls into the misty car park, Pat waving from the driver’s seat.
‘Oh!’ Hayley says. ‘Look who’s with her!’
Getting out of the other side of the car, we see Sunita.
‘Look who I found,’ Pat says, grinning. As ever she is neatly dressed in navy and white.
‘The Creak and Groan running team,’ Sunita pronounces with her usual self-mocking face. ‘Well – not you, Hayley, of course. I thought, Well, come on, Sunita – why don’t you give it a go?’
She is wearing a cherry-red top and loose navy tracksuit trousers and her hair is fastened back, covering her ears.
‘Oh, am I glad to see you,’ I say. ‘I thought I was going to have to run with these two fit ones on my own.’ I eye Pat’s athletic-looking figure.
‘I told my husband,’ Sunita says, in her emphatic way, ‘and he said, “You should give it a try, it’s good for you. It will make your heart stronger.” ’ She tilts her head melodramatically. ‘That’s if I don’t have a heart attack.’
‘What did Fred say?’ I ask Pat.
Pat looks sheepish. ‘I didn’t really tell him.’
‘I haven’t told Ian either.’ We both laugh. ‘Mad, isn’t it?’
‘Shall we begin with a few stretches?’ Hayley suggests. I can see she’s starting to feel cold.
‘I don’t think I can do it.’ I’m suddenly full of panic. ‘I don’t know why I said I’d do this. I’ve hardly done any of this sort of thing since I was at school.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Pat says with sudden firmness. ‘Come on – you come with me, Jo. Hayley, you go with Sunita.’ I find my arm being taken by Pat. ‘All it is, is putting one foot in front of the other. You can do it. We’ll start by walking fast, OK?’
‘That will probably finish me off,’ Sunita says, so gloomily that we all laugh.
The path hugs the edge of the park, a wide, flat, grassy space with a few scattered trees. No big hills, anyway, I think, as Pat and I start off in front, walking faster and faster, in fact needing to just to keep warm. I feel the pull on my thighs, the strangeness of being aware of my body. Pat matches my pace. I feel comfortable with her. Since the day she confided in me about her baby, we have not talked about anything like that. We’ve met for a coffee a few times, kept it light. But we know these deep things about each other and there’s a quiet understanding. Behind us, Hayley is making encouraging noises to Sunita.
‘Now, we’ll take this up to a jog – just for a while,’ Pat says. She must have been a good mother, I think. She is gentle, positive.
And we are running. Not fast, in fact very slowly, like lumbering little bears – but we’ve begun.
‘You’re running, Sunita!’ Hayley cries, like a cheerleader.
‘I know,’ Sunita grumbles. ‘And I can feel my bottom – it is wobbling like a jellyfish.’
Pat and I look at each other and laugh and we can hear Hayley giggling. ‘You mean a jelly?’
‘Jellyfish, jelly – it’s all the same,’ Sunita mumbles. ‘Very wobbly.’
My grin is almost as unfamiliar as the air stinging in my nostrils, the sudden awareness of how much the ground pulls you down, the effort needed to drive myself forward. It feels all right for a few minutes and then my lungs start to pull, my chest seizing up. But I’m doing it . . . I’m running. The guilt comes again, the bitter waves which wash through me: here I am, alive – if running isn’t a testimony to feeling alive what is? – feeling really alive, for the first time since . . . While he lies in the dark, cold earth . . . My chest tightens unbearably as the rush of emotion takes over again and I need to stop. I’m about to gasp that I can’t carry on, when I am saved by Sunita.
‘Oh! I am stopping now,’ she groans wheezily. ‘Let me walk – my heart is pounding!’
I stop immediately, panting, bending to rest my hands on my thighs. With a huge effort I manage to get a grip on my emotions and just breathe. Not now – I don’t want to do this again. Not here . . .
‘You OK?’ Hayley asks as Sunita and Pat walk on ahead.
‘Yep.’ I straighten up and ram my face into a smile. ‘Just needed to get my breath back.’
A few minutes later Sunita, suddenly full of enthusiasm, turns and calls to us, ‘Right, let’s run again!’ And I find that once I have got my breath back, I’m bouncy in these new trainers and keen to go too. I feel suddenly as if I’m overcoming something, reclaiming myself.
‘We’re training,’ I hear Sunita say with definite proudness and I find myself smiling.
I’m doing it. I’m talking to Paul in my head as I jog along with Hayley. I’m doing it, love – for you and for that boy. I feel now that I can hardly distinguish the two. It feels as if the boy is Paul.
We walk a bit, jog a bit and so on and it doesn’t feel all that long until we are back where we started.
‘Well –’ Pat beams at us both – ‘that didn’t go too badly for a first try, did it?’
‘But six miles,’ I groan.
‘We shall pretend we are in a film,’ Sunita announces. ‘You know, like . . . Oh, I can’t think . . .’
‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner?’ Pat says, grimacing.
‘Chariots of Fire?’ I suggest.
‘No, no,’ Sunita says. ‘Something with a bit of glamour . . .’
‘The ladies of Hollywood run round their park,’ Hayley says.
‘Hollywood? Bollywood?’ I say. ‘Maybe we should have our own song? The Creak and Groan song.’
‘Hollywood-Bollywood.’ And Sunita rises up on her toes, humming and singing something none of us can understand but which is obviously from Indian cinema. And the next thing is she’s whirling round, doing arm movements and making exaggerated faces, one minute thunderous and sulky, the next smiling as if at the love of her life. Sunita, tubby and dressed in the baggiest of clothes, is not a bad mover. Her hands, as I watch, are beautiful and expressive.
‘Sunita – you’re great at dancing!’ Hayley cries. All of us are laughing in amazement and Hayley goes and dances beside her, trying to imitate the moves.
‘You like dancing?’ Sunita stops. Hayley looks suddenly embarrassed. ‘Yes – well, sort of. I used to dance at school.’
‘We need our own songs,’ Sunita says. She seems really enthusiastic, amused by the idea. ‘Our own Hollywood-Bollywood. I will think of a song – or we can make them up.’
‘Oh, I’m no good at that sort of thing,’ Pat says.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Sunita insists. ‘You say that about everything. What about thinking positive, eh? I’m no good at running but I’m doing it, aren’t I? And,’ she adds, ‘I’m going on a diet. No more Granny with her bottom stuck in the chair. Next year I will be sixty and if I don’t do something I will just go on eating cake and getting bigger and bigger and . . . one day I will not be able to get into the shower!’
As she says it her eyes protrude with horror at the thought and she looks so funny that we all end up laughing.
I realize, surprised, that Sunita is only a couple of years older than I am and younger than Pat. She seems to think of herself as an old woman – or that’s how it has looked up until today. I find myself feeling inspired. Pat looks pretty lit up as well.
‘Good for you,’ I say, as we walk back across the car park. And with a lightening feeling, I think, we’re going to do this.
‘So we went for our first run round the park this morning,’ I say.
Dorrie looks at me over her teacup. As ever, she’s in her chair by the fire and somehow she seems even smaller. I see her every day, often more than once, but for some reason I notice this today.
‘You went running round the park?’
‘Yes – four of us. I’ve met some nice women here.’
Dorrie replaces her cup on the saucer. ‘I don’t know why everyone has to rush about so much these days. If you want to give money to charity, what good’s running round the park? Why don’t you just give them the money? You’ll wear yourself out.’
‘I think it’s just . . .’ Again, I can’t really explain properly. It’s wanting to do something, be involved somehow, but Dorrie, though active, has never been one for expending unnecessary energy. She comes from an age when people literally worked themselves to an early death, never mind going for runs around the block.
‘Why that, anyway?’ she says. ‘I mean, there’re all these charities these days – so many . . .’
‘I s’pose . . .’ It’s hard to explain. I don’t feel like telling her about the boy, the picture. It all sounds a bit mad. I think about what Pat said, about things getting under your skin. ‘It’s a bit like . . . You know what Bogey says in that film, Casablanca? “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” It’s just how it goes – some things just get to you.’
Dorrie nods, slowly, as if this makes some sort of odd sense.
‘So,’ I say, ‘they’re coming about the stairlift on Wednesday?’
Dorrie nods, stiffly. ‘If you say so.’
My heart buckles. I know Dorrie doesn’t want to admit how difficult she’s finding things, that even getting up to bed at night is a tortured ordeal.
‘It’ll make everything easier,’ I say gently. ‘You’ll soon get used to it and you’ll be glad you’ve got it, Dorrie – I’m sure you will. It’ll mean . . .’ I try to find a tactful way of saying it. ‘You can stay here, in your own bed for as long as . . .’
Dorrie nods but she’s staring ahead of her, a blank look on her face as if she doesn’t want to talk about it.
‘I was thinking,’ she says. ‘Of how no one remembers now – about how things were.’
‘That’s because most of us aren’t old enough to,’ I point out.
‘Things were . . . Everything was so dirty. And food – there’s so much food now. People went without for days sometimes . . .’
I feel a prickle of unease. Dorrie does not seem herself this morning. She seems frail and wandery.
‘You lived through amazing times,’ I say. ‘And Dorrie –’ I lean towards her – ‘I’ve so enjoyed reading about your memories. I’m sure Ian would love to see them – and Cynthia. I read the bit you wrote about how you met Tom, Ian’s dad. It’s lovely – what you said and everything.’
‘Tom.’ Dorrie seems to come back to herself. ‘My Tom. Yes, Tom Stefani was my husband. Husband for four years – that was all. He was a good man, Tom was, ’til they did that to him . . .’ Again she trails off, sinking into her own world.
There are all sorts of things I want to ask her, but I feel shy. Dorrie has never been one for dwelling on things or talking about herself. I have read nearly all of her pages of writing now. What started off quite fluently, written when she was younger, has become more and more scrappy – odd things she must have jotted down, the handwriting different, shakier. There are also big gaps in what Dorrie chose to write about. Among the descriptions of her childhood, she often says she is about to write about something – her mother, for example – and then she doesn’t, or at least if she ever has, it is not there among the pages that she gave me.
The trip to the zoo with Aunt Beattie is there, though next to nothing about school. Nor about what she did when she left school, except that eventually, at some point in her twenties she met Tom Stefani in a pub, where she must have been working. It’s not quite true that I have read absolutely all of it. Lately I’ve found myself resisting going on with it, somehow worried that I might find something I don’t want to read. I’m still wondering what it is that Dorrie is trying to tell me by giving me the pages.
‘Til they did that to him. What does that mean? Yet in a way I am not sure I want to know.
‘Are you a bit tired today, Dorrie?’
She fixes on me again, seeming to shake herself. ‘Ar, bab, sorry. I didn’t sleep very well last night. Feel a bit anyhow today.’
‘Well, let’s get you a bit of dinner and then you can have a nap, eh?’ I say.
At home I take out Dorrie’s sheaf of papers again and turn to the pages near the end.