Finding Gobi - Dion Leonard

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me. All day I’d fought hard against the urge to worry, but as one thing went wrong after another, I ended up getting nervous. It wasn’t logical, and it didn’t make sense. I’d reminded myself again and again that I had allowed plenty of time to get from Beijing to the race start, and I figured that even if I’d missed my train, I could have found a way to put things right. And I knew, deep down, that any aches I’d picked up from the previous couple of days would soon shake themselves out once I started running.

      Even so, by the time I arrived at the hotel near the race headquarters, I was more anxious than I’d ever been before any race I’d ever run. The source of my nerves wasn’t the journey, and it wasn’t the knowledge of the physical challenges that lay ahead of me. It was something far, far deeper than that.

      It was the worry that this might be my last race ever and the fear that maybe I was never going to win a race—winning had been the only thing that motivated me to run competitively in the first place.

      Tuesday, 3 January, 1984. The day after my ninth birthday. That was when I first understood how quickly life can change. The day had been a great one, soaked in beautiful Australian summer sunshine. In the morning I’d ridden my bike over some jumps I’d put together while Mum and Dad read the papers and my three-year-old sister played out in the yard near Nan’s downstairs flat at the far end of the house. I’d finally managed to perfect my somersault on the trampoline, and after lunch Dad and I went out with our cricket bats and a few old balls. He was just recovering from a chest infection, and it was the first time in ages that he’d joined me for a bit of sport outside. He taught me how to hold the bat in just the right way to hit a ball so hard and high that it sailed way out over the scrubby grass and beyond the far boundary of our property.

      When I finally came inside in the late afternoon, I found the house to be full of the smells of Mum’s cooking. She steamed her chocolate pudding for hours and made Bolognese so rich that I would hold my head over the pot and inhale the aroma for as long as I could before the heat got to be too much.

      It was a perfect day.

      Like any nine-year-old, I denied I was tired when it came time to go to bed, but soon enough I was drifting off to sleep, vaguely aware of Mum leaving for her Tuesday night aerobics class while Dad watched cricket on TV with the sound turned down low.

      “Dion!”

      I didn’t want to wake up. It was dark and my head was still half-stuck in its curious dream world.

      “Dion!” I heard Dad’s voice again. There was no other noise in the house, no TV, and no sound of Mum anywhere.

      I didn’t know why he’d be calling me like this, and I let myself drift back to sleep.

      I couldn’t tell you how much longer Dad went on calling my name, but at some point I knew I had to get up and go and see what he wanted.

      He was lying on his bed, under a sheet. He didn’t look at me when I came in, and I didn’t want to go too far into the room. His breathing sounded all wrong, as if he was having to use all the strength he possessed to drag even the smallest lungful of air in. Something told me he was really sick.

      “Go and get your grandmother straightaway, Dion.”

      I ran downstairs and knocked on Nan’s front door.

      “Nan, you’ve got to come,” I said. “Dad needs you. Something’s wrong.”

      She came right out, and I followed her back upstairs. I remember thinking that because she used to be a nurse, Dad would be okay. Whenever my little sister, Christie, or I was hurt, Nan would always make us laugh as she tended to our wounds, telling us stories from when she worked in a war repatriation hospital as a head nurse in charge of the others. She was a tough woman, a fighter who I believed held within her hands the power to make any illness or pain disappear.

      As soon as she saw Dad, she left to call an ambulance. I stayed with him while she made the call, but as soon as she came back, she told me to leave the room.

      Christie was asleep in the next room. I stood and watched her, listening to my dad’s breathing grow worse and Nan talk in a voice I’d never heard her use. “Garry,” she said, a little louder than normal. “The ambulance is coming. You’re having an asthma attack. Keep calm, Garry. Stay with me.”

      Christie woke up from the noise and started crying. “Dad doesn’t feel well, Christie,” I said, trying to sound strong like Nan. “But people are coming to help.”

      I raced across the hallway to open the door as soon as I heard the ambulance pull up outside. I watched as the paramedics carried a stretcher and breathing apparatus up the set of stairs. And I looked on in silence as Mum rushed into the house a few minutes later. I listened to the sound of Mum’s sobbing coming from the bedroom, not understanding what it meant. When they wheeled Dad out a while later, I didn’t want to look at him. He was still struggling to breathe, and his head was shaking. I could hear the noise of one of the wheels under the stretcher as it squeaked along.

      I followed everyone outside, where the streetlights and headlights and blinking hazard lights all made the night look out of time. As the medics were loading Dad into the back of the ambulance, he told Mum he loved her. I stood by Nan’s side, the grass cold against my bare feet. “Things will be okay,” said Nan. I didn’t know who she was speaking to.

      Christie, Nan, and I stayed back while Mum went off with Dad in the ambulance. I don’t know how long we were alone, or even what we did. But I remember that it was around midnight when the front door finally opened. Mum came in with a doctor beside her. Neither of them had to say anything at all. Nan and I both knew what had happened. Soon Mum, Nan, and I were crying. Not long after, the phone started ringing. Nan answered, her voice low, the calls never lasting more than a few minutes. When the doorbell rang and the first neighbours arrived and hugged Mum tight, I disappeared to my room.

      On the day of the funeral, I watched as Dad’s coffin was wheeled toward the hearse. I broke free from Mum’s hand on my shoulder and ran out to stop it. I draped as much of myself as I could around the timber box, but it was no use. My arms couldn’t reach all the way around. When my sobbing got so hard that it hurt my chest, someone peeled me away.

      Soon after Dad’s death, Mum moved downstairs, where Nan took care of her and Christie and me. It was as if Mum became a child again, and in doing so she couldn’t be a mum to us anymore.

      I may have been just a nine-year-old kid, but any fool could have spotted the signs. The day I walked in on her in her bedroom, tears barely dry on her cheeks, confirmed the fact that she wasn’t coping.

      That was a few weeks after Dad’s death. It took a few months for me to find out that her troubles were not just caused by grief. She and I were in the kitchen one evening. She was cleaning—a new obsession that had started recently—and I was sitting at the table reading.

      “Dion,” she said, “Garry wasn’t your dad.”

      I don’t remember crying or running off to hide. I don’t remember shouting or screaming or asking my mum to explain further. I have no memory of what I said next. I have no recall of how I felt. A blank void exists where so many memories should be. I can only imagine how painful that news must have been for me to wipe all trace of it from my mind.

      But what I know for sure is that the wound that had been inflicted on me by my dad’s—Garry’s—death became so deep that it changed everything about me.

      Even today my mum will cry when she and I talk about Garry’s death. She’ll say it took only a twenty-minute ambulance ride for everything in our lives to change. She’s right, but she’s also wrong: it might have taken minutes for life to be thrown into chaos, but it took only four words for my grieving heart to be ripped completely apart.

      I held tight to my secret. Within a year or two of finding out the truth about myself, I was ashamed of my past: not only was I the kid without a dad at home, but I was the only one

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