The track narrowed, and we entered a flat forest section that lasted a few miles. I was in second, a few feet behind a Chinese guy I’d not seen before. Every once in a while he’d miss a marker—a pink paper square about the size of a CD case attached to a thin metal spike in the ground. They were hard to miss, and in the forest sections there was one of them every ten or twenty feet.
“Hey!” I’d shout on the couple of occasions that he took a wrong turn and headed off into the forest. I’d wait for him to track back, then fall in again behind him. I guess I could have let him keep going or shouted my warning and then carried on running, but multi-stage runners have a certain way of doing things. If we’re going to beat someone, we want it to be because we’re faster and stronger, not because we’ve tricked them or refused to help when we could. After all, pushing our bodies as hard as we do, everyone makes mistakes from time to time. You never know when you’re going to need someone to help you out.
The forest fell away as the path started its climb into the mountains. I kept up the six-minute-mile pace, concentrating on keeping my stride short and my feet quick. My body remembered the hours I’d spent with my coach standing beside the treadmill, beating out the rapid cadence to which he wanted me to run. His shouts of “one-two-three-one-two-three” were like torture at first, but after a few sessions of spending a whole hour running like that, three minutes on then one minute off, my legs finally got the message. If I wanted to run fast and not feel the crippling pain anymore, I had no choice but to learn how to run this way.
I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and forced myself to look down for a fraction of a second. It was the dog again. It wasn’t interested in my gaiters this time but, instead, seemed happy just to trot along beside me.
Weird, I thought. What’s it doing here?
I pressed on and attacked the incline. Zeng, the Chinese guy who was leading, is an accomplished ultra-runner and had pulled away from me a little. I couldn’t hear anyone behind me. It was just me and the dog, side by side, tearing into the switchbacks. The path was interrupted by a man-made culvert. It was only three feet wide, and I didn’t think anything of it, leaping over the fast-flowing water without breaking stride.
I could tell the dog had stayed behind. It started barking, then making a strange whimpering sound. I didn’t turn back to look. I never do. Instead, I kept my head in the race and pushed on. As far as I knew, the dog belonged to someone back near the camp. The little thing had had a pretty good workout for the day, conned some runners out of some high-calorie food, and now it was time to head home.
I was fifteen when I told my mum I was leaving the dingy basement and moving in with a friend. She barely said anything. It seemed to me she didn’t care. I guess since I’d already been staying with friends whenever I could—and the fact that when I was around, Mum and I fought endlessly, trading insults like boxers at a weigh-in—it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise. In fact, it was probably a relief.
I moved in with a guy named Deon. “Dion and Deon?” said the woman who ran the hostel when Deon introduced me. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No,” said Deon. “Straight up.”
She snorted and turned away mumbling. “I’ve heard it all now.”
Deon was a year older than me, had left school already, and was an apprentice bricklayer. He’d had his own troubles at home.
Even though we were both finally free from the struggles at home, neither of us was too excited about life in the hostel. The walls were paper-thin, and everyone else living there was older and freaked us out. The hostel was filled with homeless people, travellers, and drunks. Food was always going missing from the communal areas, and barely a night went by without the whole hostel waking up to the sound of a fight breaking out.
While I was still at school, I also took a part-time job pumping petrol at the servo. It brought a little bit of money in but not enough, and I had to rely on Deon to help with the shortfall each week.
I only just managed to keep up with my schoolwork, but none of my teachers showed any sign of caring about where I was living or how I was coping with life away from home. In fact, I don’t think any of them knew about my new living arrangements, and I wanted to keep it that way. I was embarrassed to go back to the hostel and tried to hide the truth from my classmates with their perfect, loving family homes.
Deon was the kind of guy who could charm the birds from the trees. We’d sneak into the pub on a Friday or Saturday night, have a few beers, and try to chat up some girls. I’d let Deon do the talking, much like I’d let him do the dancing. Aussie blokes from towns like mine didn’t dance in those days, and it was almost inevitable that when he finally came off the dance floor, Deon would take a mouthful of abuse and a few thrown punches. He’d just laugh them off.
One Sunday afternoon as we lay on our bunks wasting time, we heard shouting in the corridor outside. Someone was calling Deon’s name, saying he was going to kill him for sleeping with his girlfriend.
The two of us froze. I stared at Deon, who looked for the first time ever genuinely scared for his life. We both tried to act tough when we were in the hostel, but we were just kids—who at that moment were terrified we were about to get our heads kicked in. Luckily the blokes didn’t know which room we were in, and they kept moving up and down the corridor until they eventually left. That was enough of a shock to get us to move out of the hostel as soon as possible.
The Grand Hotel was a step up from the hostel, but it wasn’t much of a hotel. It was just a pub with a few rented rooms at the top. Instead of addicts, drunks, and homeless blokes, the Grand was home to guys who worked on the railroad or in the local meatpacking plant. One was an ex-pro pool player who had once beaten the national champion but had drunk all his talent away. Another was a traveller who had run out of money and simply decided to make Warwick his home. I liked listening to him talk. “Any place can be all right,” he’d say, “as long as you accept what’s wrong with it.”
I felt much happier at the Grand than I did at the hostel. I liked being in the company of the kind of people who had chosen their lot and were happy with it, even if it meant not having the perfect wife, the perfect house, and the perfect family. I felt free living among them, and for the first time in years, it seemed to me that all the things my mum had said that made me feel worthless and unwanted, an unlovable screw-up and a disappointment, might not necessarily be true. Maybe I could learn to get by after all.
The barking and whimpering continued until I was twenty feet past the culvert. Then there was silence. I had a moment of hoping the dog hadn’t fallen into the water, but before I could think about it much more, there was a familiar flash of brown beside me. The dog was back by my side again.