Hold Me Close

roots (the aussie ones)

They tell you what will happen after you have won but it is pathetic preparation. 

There is an awkward amount of waiting, and filled with camera flashes that don't allow me to let my boredom rise to the capturable surface.

Messi wins again, which must be getting old for him, and we have to pose together. They don't explicitly ask me to, but I bend my knees slightly for his sake.

My parents and Jaimie hang around for our own photos, which are separated just like their old custody arrangement until someone urges us, with alarming insistence, to squeeze in one of the entire family. In my head, I grumble at the photographer that not all families need two parents, but he just wants a valuable picture to sell to tomorrow's newspaper so it really isn't worth protesting.

There is no time for chatter with anyone else because I speed off to the airport with Jaimie, promising my father that I will visit and my mother that I will answer her phone call when it comes. The cameras follow us, some of them our own. Olivia looks as though she's the winner, because her grin has not stopped growing since they first got a glimpse of my dress.

Security is rushed and the planes' engines are screaming at us to hurry up. Jaimie is heading back to Mexico, and I play a match in Glasgow tomorrow.

I need to go to Amsterdam, I need to arrange a time for Mum to come to Barcelona, I need to work out the best way of carrying the Ballon d'Or box, and why is Olivia coming with me to my match?

I also need to fetch Oli when I get back from Amsterdam, or tell Alexia to get him. Or maybe not, because she is preoccupied with her own pet troubles and I don't want to add to that. So Mapi?

And I need to reply to all the messages I'm getting, because I don't want people to think that I'm–

"Would you like something to drink?"

I look up at the air steward with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips. He has bags under his eyes but his smile is radiant enough to distract from that. I flick my gaze to Olivia, who is comfortably asleep in her seat, her iPad flat on her lap with a lengthy email draft slowly fading on the screen.

He clears his throat to indicate that his patience has waned.

"No thanks," I say, alarmed at how strangled my voice sounds. "Do you know how long we have until we land?"

"An hour."

I notice his accent, and how it sounds as though he is hitching a flight home. "What time is it?" However foggy my brain feels, I figure out the timezone the Spanish team is in relatively quickly. "European time," I clarify.

She's in Zürich.

I wonder if she is sleeping.

"Wait, no. Just – do you think my girlfriend will be awake?" I get a strange look and then he tells me to text her and find out, but one look at my keyboard sends my head into a swirling tornado and I have to close my eyes to fend off the pain piercing through my temples.

Next thing I know, someone is gently shaking me awake and I am being coaxed down the steps and onto the tarmac of the airfield.

━━━━━━━

Being the Ballon d'Or has its perks, but according to Keira Walsh, no more Spanish lessons isn't one of them. I don't know how she found this out, but she has been on my back about it ever since I returned from Amsterdam a few days ago, and she is actually quite upset.