Not breaking stride, Brooke glanced down at her watch, thinking it would take her another twenty minutes to make her way back across the park and be home in time to shower, change, and meet Vanessa Greenbaum for their 9 a.m. breakfast meeting at the Ritz–Carlton. Tap, tap, tap. The sound of her battered running shoes hitting the road was almost hypnotic. She veered off the main pathway down a slope and under a tunnel. As she came out the other side, she could hear heavy footsteps echoed from the tunnel’s bricks. Dammit! she thought angrily, they’ve found me.
‘Hey, Brooke! Brooke! Over here!’
Still running, she looked over her shoulder and saw a man, not with a camera, as she had expected, but with a small DVD recorder. He was one of the new breed, a videographer. A few weeks ago, Tess Garrett had given her a set of ‘press–fighting’ rules to learn. She remembered reading the point headed ‘paparazzi’, which said something like: ‘When confronted by a photographer, stop and let them take one quick photograph.’
Brooke was amazed. ‘Why should I make things easier for them?’ she had asked with distaste. ‘They make my life hell!’
‘They’re going to take the picture anyway,’ Tess had replied. ‘It’s better you’re smiling.’
So how was she supposed to deal with this? thought Brooke. What should she do when someone was taping her?
Unsure of the protocol, she picked up pace. Surely she could out
run a man carrying a big camera, she reasoned. She pumped her knees as she crested the slope then made for the flat road, one of the tarmac arteries that ran through the park, but as she jumped the path, her foot hit a loose rock on the path. She skittered sideways, holding her hands out to break her fall. Her wrists jerked back painfully and her knees stung as they scraped along the gravel. Her ankle felt as if it was on fire.
The cameraman had caught up with her and simply stood filming her as she lay on the ground panting for breath. ‘Please. Leave me alone,’ she pleaded between gasps. ‘I’ve hurt myself.’
She looked around desperately and saw a yellow cab was coming around the bend towards her. With one big effort, Brooke lifted herself up and waved her arms. The cab stopped with a screech. Barely upright, she hobbled to the vehicle like a wounded foal. The cameraman was still following her, moving on his haunches, keeping low to focus on the blood running from Brooke’s grazed knee. Desperate to escape, Brooke yanked open the cab door and, a split second later, heard a thud and a crash of splintering plastic. She turned to see the man crumple to the floor clutching his head.
‘Oh shit,’ she cried. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
The man hurriedly picked up his camera, rubbing his head with one hand and pointing the lens back towards her. ‘Fucking bitch!’ he shouted. ‘You fucking whore!’
Brooke stood there motionless, her mouth opening and closing uselessly.
‘Hey, get in!’ shouted the cab driver. Without thinking, Brooke did as she was told, sinking into the faux leather seat of the cab, her body shaking. She glanced behind and saw the videographer still pointing his camera at her as the cab zoomed away.
‘He deserved that, Miss Asgill,’ said the cab driver. ‘Those people, they make me sick to my stomach.’
She looked up. It still surprised her to be recognized by complete strangers.
‘So where you wanna go? The hospital? I think you better get that looked at.’
Her entire leg was throbbing now.
‘Hospital? Yes. I think … no, hold on.’
She stopped herself, suddenly visualizing the aggravation of turning up at ER. She quickly unzipped the money belt around her waist and pulled out a slim mobile phone. She always took a cell phone on a run, along with her house keys, twenty dollars, and a mace spray. This was New York, after all. She scrolled through her contacts book, stopping at Dr Powell, the Asgills’ family practitioner on the Upper East Side. She was just about to call, when she noticed the name next to it: ‘Matthew Palmer’. For a second she sat staring at his number on the LCD display. She wasn’t sure why she had transferred the number from his business card into her phone, but then maybe everything happened for a reason. Right now she needed an ER doctor without the aggro of hospital. She clicked to his number and pressed ‘call’.
*
Matt’s apartment was in a modern block on West Eighty–Ninth Street, a short walk from Riverside Park. The lobby was bland and a little run–down, its main feature a long row of mailboxes. It reminded Brooke of an old suburban library she had visited with David as part of a National Literary Awareness event. Well, until she slipped a little on the tiles and jarred her foot, letting out a gasp of pain. Then she couldn’t think of anything much.
‘Come on,’ said Matt simply, offering her his arm to lean on. Dressed in jeans and a ragged T–shirt, he looked rough and tired, but his arm still felt solid in her grasp.
They rode the elevator in silence. Was he annoyed at being disturbed or did he simply not have anything to say? Whatever, Brooke couldn’t concentrate on anything except the pain in her foot which was now searing all the way up her leg. The slightest pressure made her feel as though her entire foot had been locked in a vice.
He led her into the apartment, an open–plan space painted in a soft dark green, with two sofas, a table by the window and a long bookcase along one wall stuffed with books and magazines and random objects – a baseball, a pen pot, and a boomerang. Amazing the details your mind picked up when it was trying not to concentrate on something else, thought Brooke, as Matt semi–carried her to one of the sofas and gently eased off her running shoes. She tried hard not to yell.
‘Just cut it off,’ she said with a forced laugh.
‘It’s only a sprain,’ he said, flatly peeling off her sock and examining her ankle.
‘Only!’ she said. ‘I’m in agony.’
‘Brooke, a twisted ankle is not agony,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Not when you’ve seen what I’ve seen in ER today.’
‘I guess not,’ she said softly, feeling a little guilty. That must be why he looked so drawn. She could only imagine what he’d had to deal with in the last few hours.