Page 17 of A Smart Girl's Guide to Second Chances
Miranda had made it very clear that if I wanted to stay at the firm, ATG was the client I needed to impress. If I had to work with Alex, then we needed to lay some ground rules. And given that in two days’ time we were going to be thrust together at a team awayday, I needed to speak to him this weekend.
Except I had no way of getting in touch with him. I had his work email, but this wasn’t exactly the kind of conversation I wanted to have on a professional platform. I’d rejected his Facebook request a million years ago, and I’d have bet he never checked his social media anyway. I knew he wouldn’t sign up for a LinkedIn account even at knifepoint, and I didn’t have his mobile number.
My online search had given me an idea. Parkrun took place at 8 am every Saturday at Albert Park Lake. If it was my Alex Lawson – who’d set a ridiculous pace for the last few weeks – then I’d be able to speak with him. And if he was a no-show or the Alex Lawson I’d internet-stalked was another person entirely, well, I’d been meaning to try the community timed fun run for years. I might well have woken up this morning and decided to give it a go anyway. It was a win-win.
I knocked back two Panadol, left Matt happily snoozing in bed and walked through South Melbourne. It was my favourite kind of Melbourne day – crisp and sunny after a summer storm. Surely there was no better smell on earth than steaming asphalt. I checked my watch: 7.45 am. I was early – so far it was mostly volunteers in bright orange vests milling around.
Thanks so much for having us. Hope you got some sleep last night!I messaged Stella.
Are you okay?she wrote back straightaway.
I felt a jolt of shame. Normally I’d have been the one staying back to help clean the house. I was seeing her in the afternoon with Lily; I resolved to give her a decent break.
And what had Matt thought? When we’d got home, I’d just managed to pull off my wet work clothes and roll into bed, wearing one of Matt’s old uni T-shirts, before passing out. It hadn’t been the striptease I knew he’d had in mind. I pulled my phone back out.
Sorry I got carried away last night. Breakfast at market after my run?
I tucked my phone back into its Lycra pocket and then pulled my hair up into a ponytail, which was a mess of natural curls after the deluge. I wondered if I should get my hair chemically straightened.
The lady in charge of the run, who had the energy of an executive assistant to someone very senior, began to issue instructions through a megaphone. We all – and there were now hundreds of us in activewear – began to shuffle from a wooden pavilion over to the start line.
And there he was. I rubbed my still-blurry eyes just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. No, it was definitely Alex, right up near the front of the pack. And in case I had any doubt, he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt featuring the University College crest in cracked yellow print.
The crowd began to move forwards. I’d been so focused on watching him that I’d missed the starting cue. A few moments too late I began to jog at a slow shuffle. I settled into a pace that was only mildly uncomfortable and watched him stride off. He bounded around the first curve of the lake and out of my line of sight – evidently the part of him that refused to be anything but the best at whatever he decided to do hadn’t changed.
He’d never known me as a runner. I’d discovered it in my mid-twenties, and it was now a key part of my ‘Stay in Control of My Nervous System Regime’.
I’d had my first run-in with anxiety in my teens, and by trial and error had learned how to keep it in its box. But when I’d started work, and stress became part of my daily life, I’d realised that I needed to up my game. If I was going to last in the corporate world, I needed a pressure valve, and vodka and cocaine were (observationally) less sustainable than cardio. I knew that I’d become a cliché – a woman with a corporate job who meditated often, jogged regularly and had a preferred yoga studio, but given that the combination had fewer side effects than Xanax, I’d never really cared.
With no Alex to fixate on, I soaked in the morning for a few moments – the sense of solidarity that came from doing the same thing at the same time as other people you didn’t know.
The lake’s black swans guarded the season’s cygnets. They all had metal rings around their necks with an engraved number, I guessed so that the park rangers could keep track of them. I glanced down at the tag on my wrist, replete with a barcode, so that Parkrun could record how long it took us to run in a circle. Normally I’d be tempted to analyse this, but today I was too hungover to follow that grim train of thought.
The sound of my feet and the ones around me rhythmically hitting the dusty towpath began to work its magic. Even though last night’s alcohol was oozing out of my pores, and my stomach felt like it was filled with battery acid, a rare sense of calm descended on me. This was why I ran – it was like Aerogard for anxiety.
I finished the run in a time I hoped no one would ever see on my Strava app. Then after a volunteer scanned my code (in a moment of wavering willpower I’d likely look up how badly I’d fared compared to other women my age) I went to collect my jumper and water bottle. And talk to Alex.
In my peripheral vision I could see that he was chatting with a group of serious runners (they were lean and wore singlets rather than T-shirts) on the other side of the pavilion. I knew they would be talking about something technical – brands of shoes, interval training, running watches – Alex had never done small talk but would happily chat about the few topics that interested him for hours.
As the crowd thinned out, he spotted me. I crossed the pavilion as he broke away from his conversation.
‘I googled you last night and saw that a person with your name had been doing this run,’ I said. ‘I thought you might be here today.’
‘And here I am,’ he said warily. Which was fair enough given I’d ambushed him. ‘Though I thought our working plan was to never darken each other’s doorsteps again.’
‘That was Plan A,’ I said. ‘But it turns out that this project is a pivotal career moment for me, which means not only can I not escape but I have to nail it.’
‘I’m sorry the heavy industrials thing didn’t work out for you,’ he said caustically. I ignored him.
‘This project is a five-week sprint. We’re both adults, we’re both professionals – of course we can work together,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t the one who said we couldn’t,’ he said.
‘So, I pulled together a few ground rules,’ I ploughed on, unlocking my phone. I’d drafted these in the middle of the night when I woke up in desperate need of all the water in the world.
‘Are they in a PowerPoint presentation?’ he asked drily. I ignored him again.
‘Number one: we won’t hide the fact that we... know each other. But we won’t flaunt it either. No in-jokes. No reminiscing, et cetera.’ I wished I had a slide deck to hide behind.
