Chapter Nine

The bus stopped where the tar met the village road, the way it always had. She stepped down onto the dirt.

The ground had give in it. She had been running on rubber for seven years.

She walked up through the village with the kit bag on her shoulder. Children she didn’t know chased a ball across the road in front of her. The provision store still leaned. On its wall there was a poster gone almost white in the sun — a girl mid-stride, lane three, and under her some letters that had mostly given up. She looked at it for about a second.

The turn to her mother’s house came up on the left.

She walked past it.

The federation had taken rooms at the school for the camp. She dropped the bag on a cot and went to look at the track before the light went, because that was what you did with a new training ground, and this was a training ground now.

The track was perfect.

Lanes raked. The rail mended. The finish post carried paint that couldn’t have been a season old. Nobody ran here anymore — she could hear the kids playing football in the lower field — but somebody was keeping it anyway.

Across the lanes, at the equipment shed, an old man was winding a hose.

Cheta. Older.

He saw her. She saw him.

Neither of them crossed.

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In the mornings she ran the ridge. She took the old routes — the climbs in their old order, water at the bend where water had always been taken. It was the program. It had always been the program.

The grass at the old line was cut. She noticed it at speed and was past it, and ran the rest of the spine hard.

On the way down she passed the mango tree. It was still there. It was just a tree.

Evenings she ran the track alone, after the football had gone home. Her spikes left a clean line of prints down lane four in the raked dirt.

By morning the lanes were always smooth again.