Me: It’s funny how our female relatives show love by cooking.
Kubicka: My mum doesn’t. Food is fuel and love is a tiny bit of time carved out of her busy day to criticise my life choices.
Me: That’s rough. But I’ll raise you, food is fuel and love is giving up everything and every moment in life to criticise me.
Kubicka: I recognise Tony.
Me: I knew you were smart.
Chapter 24
Colin
‘Can you see the top of the Tourmalet? You’re 300 m from the finish line. Andreu is behind you – with fresh legs. You’ve been pushing 400 watts for minutes. Tell me what happens. What do you see?’
I saw the same thing every time I closed my eyes these days: Leesa in a pretty dress, giving me a wry smile over that little dent in her chin. But for the benefit of Vickers, the psychologist on the other end of this video call, I cleared my throat and answered, ‘I don’t see anything except the finish. I don’t feel anything. I just get over the line – ahead of Andreu.’
Oops, I knew that last part wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
‘That’s good,’ he said so gently I wanted to punch him from several countries away. ‘Just remember what the other cyclists do is up to them. You just visualise yourself. It’s okay to feel something too, just know that you’re stronger than the pain and the effort and you can get over that line.’
A grunt of assent was all I could muster.
‘All right, Colin. I’ll see you in Strasbourg. Until then: rest. Tony asked me to remind you, since he’s not there to look after you himself.’
‘I’m resting,’ I insisted. ‘It’s a fucking idyll.’ Turning my phone, I showed Vickers the rolling Italian hillside and the actual babbling brook providing a clichéd soundtrack outside my nonno’s place. When I turned it back to face me, the image of my face was framed in the cosy rustic view of the old stone house with ancient wooden beams.
It didn’t change the fact that the place I most wanted to be right now was somewhere in Poland. I’d looked it up and plotted a route: 12 hours and lots of highway tolls and construction sites. If she was in the north, that was another 500 km. It was a big place.
‘Do you… need to talk about anything else?’
‘Nah, mate,’ I said, leaning back in the old wicker chair and propping an arm behind my head. I wasn’t about to tell him that Dad’s concern for my rest was actually a passive-aggressive comment about Mum via the team psychologist and I definitely wasn’t going to talk about the tearing, burning, cut-up sensation that came over me every time I remembered Leesa was heading back to the States after the Tour.
They were not helpful visualisations, when I got caught up imagining her taking my face in her hands before a stage, telling me I could win it and that she’d be there at the end. It wasn’t her job to sort out my messed-up head, but I recognised the spiral I was sinking into.
I just didn’t want to pull myself out, if it meant I had to stop thinking about her.
I sat down with Nonno after the call with the psych, but I was rusty with the Tressette cards and the weird local version of the game he’d taught me when I was younger – as rusty as I was at speaking Italian. He wasn’t very mobile and I was supposed to be resting, which was so wholesome it made me want to text Leesa again.
If Mum had had her way, we’d have lived somewhere around here during the season, but Dad had settled us in France, near the Pyrenees – another of the many things they must have disagreed about. As if it wasn’t clear enough: Gallaghers rode bikes, we didn’t manage healthy relationships.
Even though I considered myself close to Mum, even that relationship functioned – if it could be called functioning – because we went running together in the off-season. Of the two of them, Dad was more touchy-feely, but at least Mum was interested in more than my performance.
All of which was why I was caught out that evening at aperitivo on the porch with Mum – well, Mum had an aperitivo and mine was soda water with lime – when she asked, ‘Colin, are you going to talk to me?’
I sat up in surprise, dropping my feet down from where I’d propped them on another chair and shooting her a wary glance. Mum was tall and thin and strong and her resilience was something I hoped I’d inherited.
She didn’t usually want to ‘talk’.
‘About what?’ I asked doubtfully.
‘You’ve been so quiet all week.’ Her measured look made the tips of my ears heat. ‘Is it the problems between your father and me? I know we probably didn’t handle it well and it’s you and Lori I most feel for—’
‘I’m not upset about that,’ I said, resisting a frustrated sigh. ‘I mean, it’s shit, but I can see how you both might be happier in the long run.’
‘Do you know how Lori’s taking it? She doesn’t… speak to me much.’ There was a world of regret in her tone that I didn’t really want to address right now. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to admit that Ihadspoken to Lori last week. We’d just mumbled some mutual commiserations about how our parents seemed to have regressed into children giving each other the silent treatment, but that was more than I would have expected from my sister. She’d gone soft, since falling for Seb.
‘Lori deals with this stuff how she always does: with stubbornness. She’s stubbornly making a healthy relationship, despite our inspirational family history.’
