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Chapter Forty-Two

Darien

S ummer break is my signal to finally breathe for a few weeks.

Miguel and Diana head back to Dubai, where they’re bound to be entrenched in wedding planning for the break. Henri is here for a week before he goes home to Perth to spend time with his family. As for me, I stay behind in Rio to pay my dues.

Shantal makes it clear she’s not even entertaining the notion of returning to London for the second half of the season. She puts me through absolute hell in sims over the next week to restore my arm strength. Her and Celina’s combined might is actually pretty terrifying, but it starts to work its magic in the days before the factory shutdown is lifted. Shantal doesn’t once let me believe that things can go downhill. She’s determined – sometimes more than I am.

And it’s a shock to me when the night before we leave Rio for the season restart race at Spa, Belgium, she asks me for the biggest favour.

‘I think we should go karting,’ insists Shantal after a particularly heinous round of practice on the sim. She sits down in the simulator beside mine and perches her elbows on the steering, her chin atop her hands.

‘Karting?’

‘You’ve had too much edge this past week. This past season,’ she says, her eyes skating over me in concern. ‘You know as well as I do what that does to an athlete. I want you to remember what was fun about this sport.’

‘I mean … it was always a fight for the win,’ I try, but Shantal holds out a hand.

‘But you had fun fighting for the win, didn’t you? As a child, do you remember that? When we were able to enjoy things, no strings attached? No sponsors?’ Her voice is gentle, and in it, I hear the personal sentiment. I think about her time in football, the way she laughed and manoeuvred the ball with such little effort, second nature, when we played way back at the beginning of the year. That smile on her face, the love of the sport so plain to see.

‘There’s a little track,’ I finally say. ‘Out near Jardim Botanico.’

Shantal smiles, and I see her feet bounce in anticipation. ‘I’m so ready.’

It’s almost eleven at night when we drive out to the track, just outside the gardens, where the grass is greener than anything you’ll ever see in your life, and the stars a brighter silver. I park the car, and we get out. A cloud of humidity still hangs in the air, layered with a slight chill. I’m glad I’ve got pyjama pants and a T-shirt, plus a sweatshirt in the car just in case.

The small track has long been abandoned. Its narrow turns and simple straights are overgrown with vines and brush that I can make out in the flickering floodlights. But for me, my mom still cheers from the grass. My dad and my uncle still run beside my kart as they give it a push-off, and I drive it down the straight for the first time.

‘Maybe you will be on a track much bigger than this someday,’ Pai would say, ‘but remember where you truly became a racer. On our streets, and here.’

I make my way to the starting line, picking my way through the unruly weeds. I find the faded white dashes before I crouch and sit down on the cracked asphalt. I run my hands over the crevices and gashes of the very place where my passion became determination. I can forget that Pai ever left us when I am here. He still runs alongside my kart and gives my helmet that happy tap after I’ve done a good lap. Everything I need is right here, where I can be young and free of worry – no career, no races, no team; just a couple of people who loved the way the wind ran through our hair when the top of the car was down.

‘You remember this place?’ Shantal asks quietly.

I extend a hand her way, and she takes it, sitting down next to me. I hold her close, and her head falls to my shoulder. ‘First track I raced on, ever.’

She’s silent as we take it all in, the simplicity of it. The track doesn’t have stands. There’s no room for a crowd. A small shed sits off to one side, where we used to store the karts.

‘We don’t have to drive,’ she whispers with a squeeze of my shoulder. ‘It’s okay.’

I take a deep breath. I close my eyes and listen to the sputtering of my kart’s power unit as it goes round and round: the sound of a kid from the city finding his grip.

‘I think we do.’ I turn to her with a small smile. ‘Let’s get the karts.’

We unload our go-karts from the back of the pickup I brought from the Ring. Shantal is racing my number sixty-seven, and my kart bears Pai’s old number, forty-two. They’re old pieces of machinery, but functional nonetheless. I’ve been keeping them in my garage in Santa Teresa, and I’ve only brought mine out on a couple of rare occasions.

I drive his car, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to drive this kart, to drive with his number. It’s always been something I fundamentally associate with him . Something that belongs to him, not me. Never me.

I kneel down next to the kart, and Shantal joins me, glancing up at me, pressing a hand to the number plate on its small chassis. ‘What do you feel, Dar?’

With a fisted hand to my mouth, I exhale, hoping it will stop the way my bottom lip starts to quiver. ‘I’ve been looking for my dad all my life.’

I close my eyes in thought, and images of a parade of brightly coloured feathered costumes and floats flash before me. A grove of palm trees, my bare feet in the grass, a family dancing together, street football in the winding paths of the streets, the canary-coloured tram weaving around our little town.

‘I’ve always been under this pressure to keep racing. Shanni, if I stopped, I let him go. If I lose him for ever, I’d just …’

‘Maybe,’ she starts, her eyes glistening as they meet mine, ‘it’s time to stop living within shadows. Maybe it’s time to step out from those shadows and choose ourselves.’ She takes both my hands in hers and nods at the kart. ‘You are more than deserving of this, Darien. Everything you’ve done, everything you are … it’s what your father always dreamed of. I know it is.’

I let Shantal wrap me in a gentle hug and bring us to our feet. Her careful embrace slips from around my body as she heads towards my old kart.

‘Teach me how to drive,’ she says, pulling herself into the seat of the vehicle.

‘You gotta hold the steering like this. Give it gas, brake slightly before the turn. Not in, but before, and let the kart carry into the curve. Never use both gas and brakes at the same time …’

Shantal grins, gesturing towards kart number forty-two. ‘I got this. Are you not going to give it a shot?’

It’s time .

It takes more strength than my entire recovery ever did for me to get into that driver’s seat. The buckle is still adjusted to fit Pai – he was way taller than me, way stockier, so I have to pull the straps shorter. I click on the belt, and my hands curl around the steering, my feet at the pedals.

‘Go, go, go!’ Pai laughs from somewhere in the distance.

I floor it, and the start is a little choppy, but the kart still glides easily along the main straight, even after all these years. It picks up speed, and there beside me is my dad, beaming and running, clapping his hands, calling to my mom to take a video with the chunky handheld camcorder as I head into the first turn of the small track.

They say you can hear a heart when it breaks, but I realize today that it’s the same for one that’s being put back together. As I drive with Shantal, calling out directions, teaching her everything my father taught me, the engines growl loudly, and my heart mends itself.

There on the old racetrack, this time without my parents and my uncle, I start to find my grip once more.