Soon after my visit to meet the King and Queen (said the old man), I returned home from school one day to be greeted by a most unusual sight: a customer standing in the toy shop talking to Poppa. I couldn’t remember the last time this had happened – the donkey and the dachshund were generally the only visitors the shop ever received – and it was only when the bell over the door realized I was standing there and sounded a half-hearted ring that the man turned round and clapped his hands together in delight.
‘And this must be your son,’ he said in a loud and extravagant voice.
‘This is him,’ replied Poppa quietly.
‘He’s not as tall as I expected him to be.’
‘Well, he is still quite young,’ said Poppa. ‘He hasn’t finished growing yet. In fact, he’s barely begun.’
‘Hmm, I expect so,’ said the man, marching forward and grabbing me by the hand before shaking it violently. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Quaker. Bartholomew Quaker. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?’
‘No, sir,’ I admitted.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Quaker, his forehead disappearing into a series of frowns. ‘That’s a great disappointment. And a considerable blow to my pride. But never mind. I’m the official selector of the village team for this year’s Olympic Games. You have heard of them, I imagine?’ he added, turning round to Poppa and laughing heartily as if he had made a tremendous joke.
‘No, sir,’ I said again, shrugging my shoulders.
‘You’ve never heard of the Olympic Games?’ asked Mr Quaker in astonishment, leaning forward now and removing his spectacles in order to get a better look at me. ‘You can’t be serious!’
‘We live a very quiet life here in the toy shop, Mr Quaker,’ I told him. ‘I’m afraid I don’t get to see much of the outside world. Although recently I visited the King and Queen and—’
‘But, my boy,’ said Mr Quaker, interrupting me, ‘the Olympics is the greatest sporting extravaganza the world has ever known. It exists to promote a sense of fellowship between nations and to celebrate extraordinary sporting achievement. Some athletes spend their whole lives training for the Games, and to win a medal is the pinnacle of their careers.’
‘Well, it sounds like great fun,’ I said, doing a little running up and down on the spot to keep my blood circulating. ‘I suppose you want me to take part in it, do you?’
‘But of course!’ said Mr Quaker, nodding his head. ‘The news of your success as a runner has travelled far and wide. And it shames me to say that the village hasn’t won a single medal since the days of the great Dmitri Capaldi. We’re hoping that perhaps you’ll be able to change all that for us. It’s a great weight of expectation on the shoulders of one so young, but from what I hear, yours are quite strong enough to support it. What do you think? You won’t disappoint us, will you?’
‘If Poppa says I can go,’ I replied, looking at my father for agreement, ‘then I’d love to.’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Poppa quietly, the pain of impending loss already appearing on his face. ‘They’re held so very far away. And there’s your schooling to think of. Wouldn’t you rather stay here with me? I know it’s not the most exciting life but—’
‘We’ll have him back before you even know he’s gone,’ said Mr Quaker, interrupting him, not wanting me to be discouraged. ‘But tell me,’ he added, turning back to me. ‘You’ve only started running quite recently, I’m told.’
‘That’s right,’ I said, nodding my head. ‘Yes, I couldn’t really run that fast before. My legs weren’t up to it. But since I turned eight … well, things changed quite a bit for me.’
‘My son doesn’t like to talk about the past,’ said Poppa, stepping out from behind the counter now and putting his arm around me protectively. ‘Suffice it to say that before we moved to the village, my son was a very different fellow altogether. But when he decided to become a boy – a good boy, I mean; the boy he’d always wanted to be – well, since then he’s realized that he has certain … gifts. The ability to run very fast being one of them.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, sir.’ Mr Quaker beamed. ‘In my job, you meet all sorts and I never judge. I never make a judgement, sir,’ he repeated as if he wanted to be very clear on this point. ‘Do you know, I once worked with a boy who’d spent the first five years of his life trapped inside a pane of glass? He had extraordinary skills on the pommel horse and the parallel bars but sadly finished last in the qualifying heats, so that was a great disappointment. He was absolutely shattered afterwards. And in the last Olympics but one, another boy who had been expected to win gold in the chariot racing left his sense of humour behind on the train to the finals and was completely unable to concentrate during the event. He never came back, of course. He’s still out there, trying to track it down, but he’ll never find it. And I dare say you heard about Edward Bunson, from the next village along?’
‘No, sir,’ I said, my eyes opening wide.
‘He was their great hope in the fencing competition,’ recalled Mr Quaker with a sigh. ‘But on the day of the event he got a terrible case of the shakes because he was so overwhelmed by the size of the crowd who had come to see him, and he couldn’t go on. Those fields remained unfenced for years afterwards. It was a tremendous shame.’
‘There are worse things in life than failing to win medals,’ said Poppa. ‘Youth is a prize in itself. Why, I’m an old man now and my legs don’t work as they should. I have arthritis in my back. I’m blind in one ear and deaf in one eye.’
‘You have that the wrong way round, Poppa,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘But I don’t,’ insisted Poppa. ‘I don’t, my boy! And that’s what makes it even worse.’
‘This is all terribly interesting,’ said Mr Quaker, glancing at his watch, ‘but I’m afraid I have a train to catch and can’t stand around all day making idle chit-chat. I hope I can go back and tell my committee that you’ve agreed to take part? We’d consider it a great honour.’
‘I really would like to,’ I told him, breaking into a wide smile.
‘But school,’ cried Poppa in despair. ‘Your education!’
‘Oh, you need have no worries on that score, sir,’ said Mr Quaker, tapping his stick on the ground three times in rapid succession in such a way that I stared at it, wondering whether he was about to perform a magic trick. ‘We make it a policy that for every one hundred minors on our team, we have a fully-qualified tutor on hand to give lessons. We take the education of our young athletes very seriously.’
‘And how many boys will be travelling to these Games?’ asked Poppa sceptically. ‘Will there be others of his own age there?’
‘Just your son,’ said Mr Quaker proudly. ‘Which means that we will have no need of a tutor and therefore save the expense, thus not wasting a penny of your hard-earned taxes, sir.’ He leaned forward and banged a fist on the counter top. ‘We are all winners in this scenario, sir, are we not?’
Poppa sighed and looked away, shaking his head in exhaustion. ‘You really want to go?’ he asked me a few moments later, staring at me as I performed a rousing set of calisthenics.
‘Yes, of course!’ I said.
‘And you promise you’ll come back?’
‘I came back last time, didn’t I?’
‘You promise?’ insisted Poppa.
‘I promise.’
‘Then, if it is your heart’s deepest desire, I won’t stand in your way. You must go.’
To everyone’s astonishment I became the first person to take gold in the 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres, 800 metres, 1,500 metres, 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres in the same Olympic Games. I even took a silver in the 400-metre hurdles, but was so disappointed by that relative failure that I chose never to refer to it again, until now, and it was quickly removed from my official biography. And I became the only Olympian ever to win the 4 x 400-metre relay solo, by passing myself the baton in a complicated manoeuvre that quickly passed into legend.
No one could run faster than me; that was the simple fact of it.
As soon as the Games were over I remembered my promise to Poppa and thought it was probably high time I returned home, but that was when the exciting offers started to come in.
In Japan, the Emperor requested to see the boy who had deprived Japan’s star athlete, Hachiro Tottori-Gifu, of so many medals at the recent Games, and I ran all the way across Europe, into Russia, down through Kazakhstan, across China and over to Tokyo to do a few circuits of the Imperial City for the Heavenly Ruler Above the Clouds. His own son, the Crown Prince, challenged me to a race, and although he was soundly beaten I was generous enough not to win by too large a margin. The Japanese, after all, were covering both my accommodation and all my expenses.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said afterwards to the cheering crowds. ‘Now I’d better go home because I made a promise.’
But instead I went to South America, where a group of freedom fighters invited me to take part in their twice yearly Lay-Down-Your-Arms Day, a celebration where all those on opposing sides of a particular political dispute came together for twenty-four hours and put on a sort of talent show. They made a point of inviting an international guest every year, and that year it was my turn. ‘You think you very fast, don’t you?’ asked a general, puffing on a cigar after he had seen me run through the forests in record time. ‘You think you big clever fellow.’ He seemed a little offended by me, even though he had been the one to invite me.
‘I do, sir, yes,’ I told him, trying one of the General’s cigars and promptly throwing up on my boots. ‘But now I’d really better go home because I made a promise.’
But on the way home I found myself in Italy, where the Pope challenged me to run around St Peter’s Square a thousand times in one afternoon. As the crowds gathered to watch and cheer me on, I found that I rather enjoyed the attention and didn’t want it to end.
‘Come into my private quarters,’ said the Pope afterwards, putting an arm around my shoulders. ‘Have a little tiramisu with me.’
‘No can do, Your Holiness,’ I told him, shaking my head. ‘I really have to get home. I made a promise.’
And on the way, I found myself in Spain, racing with the bulls in Pamplona, then running north to Barcelona for La Diada de Sant Jordi, where I manned every book- and flower-stall in the city by chasing between them every time a customer appeared, and the entire city came to a standstill as I sped through the streets.
Closer to home, I found myself a little tired for once and decided to rest for a few days in West Cork, stopping off to be one of the judges in the Skibbereen Maid of the Isles Competition, an annual festival where every Irish man, woman and child descended on the town for twenty-four hours to run races, sing rebel songs and talk about the recession. I was invited to address the people, but I said I’d much rather show them how fast I was, and at that point a young woman in the crowd threw a set of keys at the stage.
‘I think I might have left a tap running,’ she said, giving me an address in Donegal, some three hundred miles away. ‘Would you ever go up there and check it out for me, lad?’
‘You didn’t,’ I replied a few moments later, throwing the keys back at her, along with a heavy red woollen jacket, ‘but I thought you might need this coat later. It looks like rain on the horizon.’
‘You’re a credit to your mother and father,’ the woman shouted back, and the crowd cheered again.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘But I’ve no mother. Only a father. And I’d better be getting back to him quick smart. I made a promise.’
From there, I took a boat across to London, stopping for a couple of days at a literary festival, where I ran in and out of the authors’ readings at such a speed that the wind I generated turned the pages of their books for them, leaving both their hands free for drinking and finger-pointing. And try as I might, no matter how hard I tried to get back to the village, it seemed impossible. There was always another crowd that wanted to see me, always another invitation to accept. Another festival to attend. Another race to run. Thoughts of Poppa were never far from my mind, though, and I tried to forget my promise to go home, even as I knew that the years were passing, my schooldays were already far behind me, and my father could not be getting any younger.
It wasn’t until I had been sidetracked to St Petersburg and was running like a hamster in a giant wheel for the entertainment of the Tsar and his wife, the Empress of Russia, without ever taking a break or growing tired, that matters came to a head. A letter arrived for me, and I stopped running and stepped out of the hamster wheel. I read the words over and over, and felt the tears begin to spring from behind my eyes. I asked a young imperial bodyguard about the times of the trains from St Petersburg and was told that they were terribly slow, terribly rare and terribly cold.
‘But I have to get home,’ I said. ‘My father is dying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the young guard, shrugging his shoulders and looking genuinely regretful that he could not be more helpful. ‘But there are no trains.’
‘Then I’d better run,’ I told him. ‘And I promise that this time no one will get in my way.’
And that, at least, was a promise I kept.