A Run in the Park Read online

  So if I had to pick a book for these days we live in it would be Hard Times, and that’s maybe because I volunteer at the weekend helping with a food bank, set up in our church hall. Every time I hear about people having their claims turned down and others stumbling as a last resort into payday loans, it makes me think of that prison grille in Doughty Street, think of the prison in which debt and desperation confine you.

  And if anyone was able to look inside my head, they might see that in its most secret parts I sometimes think of myself as a kind of Sissy Jupe, throwing off the Gradgrinds of this world, happy to dwell in the world of the imagination but able too to lend my hand to what is practical and right. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m reluctant to go online, be judged by how I look when I know that the totality of who I am consists of so much more.

  Maurice tells me he has a daughter, and after telling him about mine in Australia, I asked him where she lived, and it seems she’s only a few streets away. ‘But she might as well be in Australia,’ he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear him. He didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask. I think his breathing’s getting better and there’s less sideways movement in his running, but he’s never going to find it easy. But fair play to him and fair play to all of us for giving it a go, and Pauline’s really encouraging, always telling us we’re doing great and taking turns to run with each of us. She’s very insistent that we must do our third independent run of the week.

  Running on your own is probably the hardest part of the programme – when it’s something you’ve never done before, it’s easy to feel a little self-conscious, particularly in leggings that make you think you’re out in public in your knickers – so, taking up Pauline’s suggestion, a small group of us who live quite close have decided to join up. There’s me, Maurice, Brian, Maureen and a Polish woman called Zofia who has her own cleaning business. Following Pauline’s advice, we’ve all invested in high-viz tops so we’re a luminous little phalanx running the city’s streets. And we’re only one of many, and sometimes when we encounter what I think of as proper runners, they acknowledge us as if we too have been granted admittance to their exclusive club. On these runs we replace Pauline with Laura on an app, who starts by congratulating us on having the willpower to reach Week Two and having overcome the first hurdle and then proceeds to tell us when to run and when to walk.

  I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure our run eventually takes us past Maurice’s daughter’s house because he turns his head towards it and scrutinises it intently as he shuffles by. It’s not an attractive house and there is an air of neglect, from the untidy pocket of front garden to the dingy-looking net curtains screening the windows. I’ve no time to ponder these things because Laura is telling us we have only one ninety-second run left, exhorting us to keep a nice steady pace and assuring us that we can do it. When we finish she congratulates us again and tells us it wasn’t easy. I am already fond of Laura, even though I only ever get to hear her voice, but she’s encouraging, personal, and she sounds like someone who doesn’t judge you, only wants what’s best for you.

  My daughter Zara has told me that she’s pregnant in our latest Skype and I can see in her face that she’s frightened because she had such a hard time giving birth to Patrick and because she lost her first in early pregnancy. See it in her face, but I can’t talk about it or reach out my arms to her, so instead we do that jolly congratulations thing, try to fill the spaces, hush our fears with meaningless small talk. There is a television or radio playing somewhere in the background and while we chat Zara sometimes turns her gaze away from the camera to briefly look elsewhere. I say her hair is nice and she tells me that she hasn’t done anything to it, then describes how well Patrick is getting on in nursery school.

  And I want to cry but can’t until her face finally disappears into the darkness. Because I know that I too am a disembodied voice offering encouragement, reassuring someone far away that she’s doing well, that she can do it, and I want to tell her that I too know what it is to be frightened, so I can share her fears. Then, when her face finally fades from the screen, I am filled with a sense of unspeakable distance, reminded of all the burgeoning absences in my life. In the sudden silence I talk to my only child, tell her everything that I couldn’t say.

  Brendan and Angela

  Brendan

  It was Angela’s idea that we signed up to the Couch to 5K. She says we want to look our very best on our wedding day – a day she’s been planning for a year like a military campaign. Part of me has started to think I’m actually in a kind of war – a war against wedding planners, a war with family over who should or should not be invited, a war with venues, photographers and bridesmaids. I’m just about ready to wave a white flag, except there’s no provision for that in Angela’s spreadsheets and battle plans. She’s resolutely ‘Onwards to victory’ and doesn’t always believe in taking prisoners. But I’m enjoying the running, so it’s turned out to be one of her better ideas. In this third week we’re edging up to three minutes of running followed by three minutes of walking. And I feel good after the sessions, self-righteously good but also physically good. Pauline always keeps it light and makes sure we have a bit of a laugh, but I’m glad I packed in smoking some years ago because my lungs need all the free flow of air that I can muster. I’ve discovered too that I like the rhythm of running, and because I interact with people all day in my job as a nurse, it gives me private time, time to think. And even though Pauline encourages us to talk, I like to stride out a little and just occupy my own space.

  Angela

  Yes, I do want the day to be perfect and, despite what Brendan thinks, that won’t just happen, so I’m leaving nothing to chance. Right down to this running. This running that I hate because I don’t like anything that hurts and all that ‘no pain, no gain’ sounds like the stupidest type of thinking. And although he doesn’t know it, we’re also going to take some dance lessons so that when we have our first married dance, we don’t look like the Strictly equivalent of two left feet. Despite Brendan’s occasional lack of enthusiasm, there’s nothing wrong with wanting things to be perfect, aiming to start off the rest of your life together in the best way possible. And I know he does too underneath it all, because I could never be with anyone willing to accept second best. But this week we’ve had words because he’s started to run ahead and I think we should stay together, like a team, like a partnership. And sometimes he’s run with Ciara, the young woman who wants to be a firefighter, and for all I know maybe he’s fantasising about her rescuing him from a burning building, slinging him over her shoulders and making their way down the ladder to some permanent shared safety.

  Brendan

  Angela runs a little bit slowly for me and I want to encourage her, but it’s not as if we’re on a tandem or that we have to go through life joined at the hip. And I want to get better at running, to push myself a little. Otherwise what’s the point? Angela doesn’t like running because she’s never really had to do anything that gives her grief, and because she’s from a wealthy family who make so much money from property in this city, from wheeling and dealing, that they’ve always had someone else do the things they don’t want to dirty their hands with. So they pay to have their wealth protected by accountants and lawyers, their house secured by experts, their garden tended – even the dogs get walked by someone else – and if the word on the street is correct – and the street is where I’m from – they haven’t always been averse to employing muscle when encountering some recalcitrant problem.

  Angela and me are a bit of an Across the Barricades love story, except in this case what separates us isn’t the old cliché of religion, because let’s face it, only the cave-dwellers in this city bother very much about that any more. No, the gulf that separates us is money – I didn’t say class because in my eyes my family from a terrace house has as much, if not more, class than hers, despite the money that drips from them. And I know that her father Aidan has constantly thrown cold water on our relati
onship, sown every possible seed of doubt and hoped his daughter’s infatuation with someone from the wrong side of the tracks and who works as a nurse for the National Health Service would eventually fizzle out. It must have really broken his heart when Angela told him we’re getting married. And fair play to her: for all her cosseted upbringing she doesn’t bend easily, and doesn’t ever get bullied, not even by her father. So she’s been loyal to me and that’s something I value and I think we can make a go of this if we’re allowed to.

  Just like we can make a go of this running if we stick at it. And it’s a chance to try and clear my head from some of the sadness I see in my job, try to think about the future I’m running towards. And the truth is I’ve been having doubts recently. Doubts about the type of life I’m planning to sign up to. And I don’t like the way my family felt uncomfortable when they went to a get-to-know-you meet-up with hers after we announced our engagement, right from the moment when they received a printed invitation in the post. Like they were being summoned to the big house, to bloody Buckingham Palace. So much so that my mother insisted they arrive in a taxi rather than their twelve-year-old rust bucket of a car. Angela and her mother – and her mother is someone I’ve always liked – did their best to welcome them and make them feel at home. But hard to feel at home amidst the champagne and where their own house could probably have fitted inside the kitchen. And my father means no harm but he keeps saying I’ve done well for myself, as if I’ve been given a meal ticket for life.

  But money’s nothing to do with why I love Angela. Love isn’t something you can ever begin to explain, so forgive me if I don’t try. Just let me just say I love it when she smiles with her eyes, the way she’s kind to my mother and how when she grills up cheese on toast she thinks she’s demonstrated the epitome of culinary skill. I met her, slightly ironically, after the Gay Pride march in the city centre – my sister Catriona is gay and I’d gone on the march to support her. Afterwards in a bar Angela assumed I was too, until during a convoluted, cross-purposes conversation she discovered I wasn’t. That was the start and somehow two years later we’re going to get married.

  When I’m running, a space seems to clear in my head and I’m able to think. Ciara doesn’t want to talk either so we just stride out in contented silence. But into that silence flow some of the doubts that I spoke of. And they begin with the wedding itself and a growing realisation that Aidan intends to use it to show off his status to the world, to throw so much money at it that it becomes a glossy-magazine supplement in itself. He’s talking of arriving with Angela in a helicopter, about hiring some big-name chart-topping musician, massive firework displays and for all I know, gold-painted doves flying out of the priest’s cassock. And none of this is what I want, and sooner rather than later I’m going to have to tell Angela, try to put the brakes on before this juggernaut hurtles unstoppably over the edge into disaster for both of us.

  But maybe the wedding’s only the tip of the iceberg because my doubts are about more than this. And if we let him control the first day of our future life together, shape it in the way he wants with money, then what’s to stop him trying to shape everything that comes after? How can we ever be independent of his vision for us, but will Angela ever be willing to live our life together without all the stuff to which she’s become accustomed?

  Angela

  I’m not going to admit it to Brendan, because it was my idea in the first place, but I don’t like running. I like to think I’ve kept myself in decent shape and use the gym at home, but there is something different about this. It’s a bit – I’m not sure what the word is – maybe ‘raw’ comes close, and it’s a complete mystery to me how anyone runs a marathon. And I’m competitive, need to be good at the things I do, so it’s a bit of an unwelcome surprise and a disappointment that so far I’ve found it difficult and we’re only on Week Three. I thought it would come naturally, that everything would just flow – I mean, how hard can it be to run? – but I know now that if I’m going to complete the programme, I’m going to have to make a real effort. And I don’t want Brendan ever to think I’m a spoilt little rich girl, so there’s no way I’m giving up on this. God bless her, but Pauline’s a bit too jolly-hockey-sticks for my liking, and when I ask Brendan what he talks to Ciara about, he says ‘nothing’, that they don’t talk, but when I see them up ahead it looks to me like their bodies mirror each other’s rhythm. So maybe that’s a way of silent talking.

  I don’t know how or when the wedding grew into something stressful. It just gradually evolved into something that there isn’t a spreadsheet big enough in the world to contain. Sometimes I think it’s what I want and sometimes think it isn’t, and Brendan just seems to go along with whatever’s on the table as long as he doesn’t have to get involved, and that means all the burden of decision-making rests on me. And that’s starting to take some of the pleasure out of it. So perhaps this running on his own carries more meaning than he’s willing to admit.

  Brendan

  I do the warm-down walk with Angela but feel I’d have liked to run for longer and further. Pauline tells us we’ve done well, that she can see by looking at us that we’re stayers, that we aren’t going to drop out when the nights get colder and our warm homes beg us not to leave them. She tells us too that she’s sure we have what she calls the stickability necessary to complete the nine weeks. Then, when the session is over, Angela and I go our separate ways. I’m working night shifts so there’ll just be time to take a shower and grab a bite to eat before I’m due on the wards.

  After the running my body feels lighter even though sometimes my brain feels as if it’s got more thoughts crowding in on it, but my work needs me to be clear-headed so I always pause a minute or so before going in and try to get my focus sharp. The nature of the work always demands your full attention and the problems of the people you encounter soon relegate your own preoccupations to the realm of the trivial.

  As always when I come on duty, I call in the side ward where Judith has been moved. She hasn’t long left. She’s being transferred to a hospice soon. It hurts me to see her, a woman still young withered away like an autumn leaf, but it’s a hurt I never reveal to her, and she’s someone still with all her inner life seemingly unaltered. So she’s resolute, always able to find something to laugh about. When I enter she opens her eyes and asks me how my running went and after I tell her I ran like the wind, she says, ‘More like Forrest Gump.’ I fix her sheets and even though I want to take her hand I don’t but just busy about the room. As I’m about to leave she says she’s getting married and I’m invited. I think it’s the morphine talking and, when I glance back at her, her eyes close as she falls into sleep.

  In the morning, after my shift is over and the city is only beginning to stir into life, I run on my own. It’s my private time and I don’t tell Angela about it. Try to let only music fill my head.

  Yana

  I’ve always tried to run. Even during the war as it came creeping ever closer, and in the camp in Lebanon, running down the tented alleyways and out to the edges of our confinement. When I was young my family told me that they disapproved, that it wasn’t seemly for their daughter to be in constant motion as if she was fleeing from some bad thing they had done to her. But after so many bad things have happened for real, they have come to accept it. And perhaps they think that, in times of troubles such as ours, being able to run is no bad thing, that it has its uses.

  Running under the sharpest of suns, even running through the first snows to smother the camp, my course tracked by the frozen prints left in my wake. Running despite the children who at first laughed at me, then occasionally tried to follow, as if I knew where there was some secret store of food, some better place that existed just beyond the fixed parameters of their world. I’ve never tried to explain it to anyone, but I know that it is in motion that I feel safest and most happy. That it’s when my body feels as if it belongs to me and not someone else’s expectation of who I should be. And when everything e
lse has been taken from us – our home and livelihood, my oldest brother – this sensation that flows through me remains mine alone. In every stride is always the unspoken hope that I am moving to some better place for my family to follow. So it’s as if I’m running ahead, scouting out our future days, searching for where we can be together, safely sleep through the night without starting awake at the slightest sound. Not anticipate the terror of the bombs falling before they’ve been launched. Not scurrying through the ruins looking for friends and family, not sitting in candlelit basements waiting for the help that never comes. Sometimes too I secretly think that if I run far and fast enough it will bring me to Masud who gave himself to the resistance, even though I know he is dead, his body scattered to the wind so there was nothing left to bury.

  The soles of my trainers grew so thin it felt as if I was running in bare feet and when traversing the baked and rutted pathways my feet kicked up little spurts of red-coloured dust. Now I have new trainers. Now we are safe. But safe in a place that I didn’t really know existed and which every day tells me that it isn’t my home. Here with my father and mother and my little brother Issam who each night asks when we shall return and will Masud be waiting for us. We will try to make our new life in this place but never give up the hope of going back when the scars of war have healed, when things are rebuilt. And we’re here as part of what is called the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme, given a charity for which we are grateful, but it was war that made us vulnerable, not as a result of any actions of ours. And we have come from having a small restaurant and bakery business, of having the respect of our neighbours and society as a whole, to a new world based on this charity. But also to a world where there is sometimes resentment.