“She’ll love me. Mothers always do.” Tom began to pull some green leaves apart, running them under the tap.
Ollie put the kettle on and tried another tack. “She might love you too much.”
Tom grinned. “Maybe she’ll adopt me.”
Ollie made some tea, mulling over whether he could sneak a biscuit without being spotted. The green stuff was going in a bowl. It wasn’t looking good. He didn’t think his mother would have
adoption
on her mind when she saw Tom Collins. Her last lover had still owned his childhood teddy bear. Which was fine, but he’d brought it along when he’d come to stay one weekend. It was entirely possible
Tristan
had been channelling his inner Sebastian Flyte, in which case it was a vaguely amusing affectation, but the fact that he’d also spent the entire weekend chatting to his
mummy
on the phone made this seem rather unlikely to Ollie. And Ronnie had a bit of a thing for soldiers. She’d grown up with them, her godfather being Colonel of the Regiment of the Grenadier Guards…
“I’m not going to eat that, by the way. I thought I’d better let you know before you start adding the orange thing.”
“Pepper.”
“There you go. Dumb name. Sounds like a perky girl in a boarding school story by Enid Blyton.
I say,
Pepper, old thing, you awful swot; gosh, I shall jolly well not let you have any ginger beer
.”
“You ever thought about being a writer?” Tom split the pepper between two plates and added half of the green.
Ollie considered the concoction. “You do know that this is why everyone, every single person in the entire world, hates dieting. You totally know Day One is going to look like this.” He picked up his fork and began to carefully inspect each leaf. He’d once been brave and tried eating a healthy item, and halfway through had discovered something white and gelatinous on it. Rather like some of the pink offerings, in a way, when you thought about it.
“Eat.”
“I’m working up to it.” He took a sip of tea instead. “So what about this visit with your friends? Aren’t you going to meet up with them after all?”
Tom kept his head down, munching, and only shrugged and changed the subject by asking, “So, you reckon your old mum’s a bit of a Lady Chatterley then?”
Ollie spluttered out the hot liquid. “What?”
“That she might like a bit of the rough. Working class soldier types…”
Dear God. This is what happens when you allow reading to the masses.
“Mellors was an
officer
.”
Tom frowned deeply. “No, he wasn’t. He was rough and down and dirty. Like me. That’s the whole point of the damn book.”
“I think you’re confusing him with Sean Bean. Anyway, trust me, that’s not what I meant at all, and Mother knows a lot of soldiers already. And I don’t mean in the Biblical sense. Well, I suppose she might. I meant
Help for Heroes
. The charity for disabled soldiers? She’s a patron.”
Tom shrugged and changed the subject again by pointing to the window. “Eat up. Day’s getting away from us, and I want to do your assessment, so we’re ready to start first thing tomorrow.”
Assessment? Ollie hadn’t had one of those for a while. The last one had been on Shakespeare and the physics of sublunary transformation. He’d done rather well, if he remembered rightly.
This one consisted of putting on shorts, so that was a bit of a downer to start with.
§§§
“Look, all I meant was you might be more comfortable if you stayed somewhere in—”
“Right, see my sweater over there?”
Ollie could. He’d be a bit worried if he couldn’t, as it was only a little way away, across the smooth grass by an azalea bush. “She’ll think that we’re—”
“Right, when I say go, you’ll hear a beep from my phone. You run to the sweater and wait for the next beep before you run back. Okay?”
“And then she’ll…”—
beep
—“Hang on!” Ollie shot across to the sweater then bent, hands on his knees, panting. “Did I pass?”
Beep.
“Again?” He shot back to where Tom was watching his phone.
Beep.
“What the fuck?” He ran back to the sweater.
“This is the walking pace part,” Tom informed him dryly. “You haven’t even got to the running pace yet.”
Beep.
As he sprinted—apparently at walking pace—back to Tom, Ollie pictured the phone and its beep going somewhere dark. But then, in his fantasy, it continued to chirp, and he saw a whole scenario play out where a guy was having sex, possibly for the first time, because that would be very amusing, and there was this urgent tone coming from deep within his…
Beep.
Even he, unaccustomed to anything physical, could tell the gaps between the fuckingly annoying noises were getting smaller. His throat was tight, like the worst indigestion after the best binge possible on fudge. His lungs felt like he’d woken alongside a volcano on some doomed mission to find—
Beep.
“Fuck!”
“If you can speak you can run. Go faster or the next beep will catch you mid…”—
Beep
. “Yup. There you go.
Faster
!”
Beep.
“Pick up the fucking pace, Fitzroy!”
Beep
.
Ah, there you go.
The sadist was never far under the surface. Was there a PT instructor anywhere in the world who had a secret hobby of reading Oscar Wilde? One who did craft projects for fun? Enjoyed choosing chocolates from a selection box? No, they should all be fucking locked—
Beep.
“No!” Ollie stopped. He just stopped. It was
incredibly
liberating. He looked around, relieved not to find the huge rugby master about to wallop him, the sixth-form prefect screaming at him that he’d lost the house colours, the rowing cox—actually, the rowing cox had been chasing him for an entirely different reason, now that he came to think about. “I can’t do this. I told you I couldn’t, and I can’t.”
Tom came closer, stowing his phone, which had been the source of the torturous sounds. “You can speak.”
Ollie pushed off his knees and straightened. “Duh! I’ve been able to talk since I was nine months old. I think I said uh-huh. It sort of summoned everything up.”
“No, I meant, if you can still talk, you’re not trying hard enough. You’ve disrespected me, but more importantly you’ve disrespected yourself.”
Tom walked away.
He simply walked away.
Ollie stood and watched him go.
Well, that was easier than he’d thought it would be. He should have given up a bit earlier.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ollie particularly enjoyed the shortbread biscuit he treated himself to after such a demanding workout.
He’d read somewhere that you burned about a thousand calories a minute running. He needed to top back up, clearly.
And did you ever see fat marathon runners? He didn’t think so. Except for the ones with fridges on their backs, but they were probably from a home for people with special needs, out on day release. So, no fat runners. He had been running, ergo he couldn’t get fat on this delicious piece of shortbread. Everyone should have the benefit of the superb education he had and be able to debate hypothetical syllogism.
Tom was eating some more greens, and they weren’t speaking.
Ollie got that this was intended to reinforce the self-recrimination he was supposed to be feeling.
Yeah.
It was blissfully quiet, and his biscuit tasted particularly buttery and nice. He was contemplating enjoying a second one when he said conversationally, “When I first went to school I thought I wanted to do lots of sports. It seemed like fun. But when I joined the cricket team, the master who coached the under XIs used to shower with us, and then he inspected us to see if we’d washed thoroughly enough. He was never concerned about the ears though. Funny old thing that.”
Tom frowned. “Why didn’t you all bloody gang up and punch the fucker?”
“We were seven.”
Tom laid down his fork. “Fucking hell.”
“I thought cricket would be fun. There were always lovely scones for tea afterwards and some of the mothers came for the matches—the other mothers. The nice ones.”
Tom put his head in his hands, running his fingers through his dark hair. He’d look good in cricket white, Ollie reflected sadly.
“So, I’m sorry. I have bad memories. But I’m not seven anymore. Can I have another go?”
§§§
It was the start of something.
Besides some pulled muscles and sore feet.
Ollie experienced a rare sense of peace that night, and it wasn’t from succumbing to some miraculous, newly discovered love of fitness. It was hideous still. All of it. He felt good because he’d seen a glint of admiration in Tom’s eyes as he’d struggled on the rerun Bleep Test, and another, as he’d attempted a push-up. When he’d managed one crunch, there had been a small smile. Ollie frowned deeply. Were those glints and lip twitches worse than a motivational poster? This was troublesome. It had been a long time since he’d worried about what anyone else thought of him, or tried to change to be the person they wanted him to be.
Ollie turned his mind to all the things he still had to do to get the place ready for his mother’s visit. He’d bought the food, ordered the wine and the car. The flowers from Auckland were coming the next day. He’d contacted a company that provided staff and had arranged for half a dozen assorted cleaners and cooks and servers. He was probably forgetting something, but he thought she’d be able to survive the first evening, and then she could cater for herself, and he could bugger back off to Dunedin.
Oliver
didn’t live in Dunedin, of course. He’d settled in Nelson. He’d come to New Zealand a year ago, too, and was cohabiting with an artist in Golden Bay. The book wasn’t finished yet, so its ending was still to be decided—unless Ronnie Fitzroy actually planned out her novels. That was a bizarre thought. No, Ollie had the very distinct impression that Oliver was hovering, waiting for
him
to make a move first—a sophisticated game of cat and mouse, blink and I’ve got you, which
he
would inevitably lose. Or perhaps Oliver would this time. If he stayed in Dunedin in a tiny crib and carried on not writing his novel and not having a life, how could that be the end of Oliver’s latest, as yet untitled, escapade? He had tried to be helpful over the title and had suggested Zealand Zeitgeist, which was so horrible it had come to him whilst scraping bird crap off his gutters, and then Maori Milieu, because, as he’d told his mother, this would add a hint of ethnicity to the Oliver saga which up to this point had been noticeably lacking.
He woke with a headache and aching limbs, and realised he was coming down with something very serious. Which was just about perfect. He’d done enough fitness the previous night to last him for a very long time and clearly now needed to rest, read a good book, and keep up his intake of iron from the rather nice Pinot Noir he’d ordered for his mother. Excellent.
Tom was already up and in the kitchen when Ollie appeared wrapped in his very thickest sweater and with his glass of wine.
Tom looked first at the glass and then at the clock, which told Ollie it was ten o’clock. He must be
very
ill to be up this early.
“I hope that’s prune juice.”
Ollie gazed at the wine and tested it just to make sure. “I’m ill. I’m allowed.”
Tom plucked the glass from him and put a hand to his forehead, which was actually almost as good as the alcohol. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve got a splitting headache and possibly hemorrhagic fever.”
“You’re aching?”
Ollie nodded.
“Toxins.”
“You’ve poisoned me! That green stuff! I knew it!”
“Jesus. Sit down. Here. Eat.” Ollie had to admit that breakfast appeared more appealing than the poisonous salad had. Scrambled eggs and suspiciously healthy brown toast. He felt a little bit better and began on the eggs.
“Your body is losing all the poison—the toxins—you’ve built up from the carbohydrates, sugar, and processed foods you live on. That’s all. It’ll take a few days.”
“I’ll be dead in a few days.”
“Your mum’d be a bit gutted if she got here and found you’d pegged out.”
“Yeah. She would. I wonder if she’d fly Oliver home or have him buried here.”
“Maybe she’d turn him into a ghost for the next book.”
Ollie paled. “Don’t suggest it. Sometimes he does things first and I follow. I’ve never been able to work it out.”
“Save you from having to actually write your novel.”
“I prefer funny cat videos for that.”
“Right, you’ve got an hour to watch whatever you like while that settles, and then we’re going to have some fun.”
Ollie perked up. He could feel better if fun was in the offering. But it was a bit early for…He watched, disbelievingly, as Tom began to make some marks on a bit of paper. “What are you doing? What’s that?”
Tom glanced up. “A map.”
“No, I got that. I meant, why have you deliberately used the word
fun
in the very close proximity of a map? That’s like using celebrity and Josie Cunningham in the same sentence. Or saying, ‘Hey, that Haley Joel Osment, he’s aging well.’ I am
allergic
to maps.”
“So, I’ll see you outside in running kit in,” Tom checked his watch, “fifty minutes.”
“I don’t have shoes—to run in.”
“What size feet are you?”
Fuck
. Suspecting he was about to be offered a loan of a spare pair of shoes, Ollie tried to gauge what size Tom was—not the first time he’d wondered this, but the first time about his feet—to try and make sure such generosity was impossible. “Nine.”
Tom grinned. “Lucky you.”
§§§
It was very hard going, and they hadn’t even left the driveway yet. To be fair to Ollie, the property was well over a mile from the road, but still. Even he felt a little embarrassed to have to stop and take a break when they could still see the house. If he squinted, he could almost see Maru in his box, where he’d left his laptop on the window seat. Tom didn’t seem to mind him pausing and offered him some water, which he took gratefully.