Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Gemma Akintola

She had never been more mortified in her life. Forget the pant pissing in the middle of the year 1 playground, the falling flat on her face during her secondary school's calamitous production of Fame, more pant pissing at her first freshers week party, attributable to an adverse combination of intoxication and not knowing where the hell anything was. Being marched off the English Institute of Sport track by a seething officiator in front of at least 300 spectators topped it all and the spectacle created by Ellie, Georgie, Josh and the rest of her family hadn't helped in the slightest. They had all come running down, following Gemma and the officiator into the corridor, Ellie heading the crowd, dreadlocks swinging manically.

"What the hell is going on?" She had asked, grabbing the man's shoulder as Georgie spluttered over Josh Young's presence.

"Josh? What the fuck are you doing here?" She said, scowling.

"What does it look like I'm doing, Caines?" He snarled back at her. "I'm here to call bullshit." And then he turned on the officiator who was still attempting to jostle Gemma down the corridor. "Because she was about to win, you can't just stop the race like that! That can't be normal procedure! It's not normal fucking procedure, I know it's not!"

"This young man here is right." Gemma's dad added more calmly, ever the diplomat. "Gemma here was in first place. It must be against the rules to just bring the race to a standstill like that-"

"Are you a relative?" The officiator interrupted, swinging Gemma round with him and leaning on one of the doors, pulling at the handle with his spare hand. "Because, I think you should be here for this conversation too."

"What about me?" Gemma's mum barked. "I am her mother."

"Well, you too then ma'am. Everybody else outside." The officiator commanded in spite of the expostulations of Josh, Ellie, Georgie and all of Gemma's brothers. He then proceeded to bustle Gemma and her parents into his frowzy office, slamming the door behind him and gesturing to the chairs that sat facing a tumbledown desk. "Sit." He ordered flatly, Gemma taking the middle seat. She didn't know what to do with her body, bouncing her legs up and down, rubbing her hands together. What was going on? What had she done? Why hadn't they just let her cross that finish line? It had been so, so, so close. It felt as if she'd been sat in front of the TV watching the lottery, only to be one number short of the jackpot, the disappointment being scolded by the sceptic inside, the "this is a miracle!" having its head shaken at by the "too good to be true.".

"Gemma Akintola, correct?" The officiator said, once he had everyone's attention. Gemma nodded, her mum reaching across and squeezing her hand which had began to tremble, like they had regressed back to her first day at primary school in which she had refused to let go.

"What is this all about?" Her dad growled, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the desk; the officiator appeared most aggrieved by this, leaning back in his seat and watching them blandly. "Like the lad out there said, you can't just-"

"Look, I'm sorry that we had to halt the race like that." He interrupted. "But your daughter's urine sample was displaced. The technicians tried to get the organisers to hold off whilst they put it through but organisers assured them it wouldn't turn up anything, that it was all just procedure, really, and to start the race. It wouldn't be fair, however, to let the race continue in light of the discovery the technicians ended up making." His expression was grave, like a doctor about to give a negative prognosis. "Miss.Akintola, your sample tested positive for anabolic steroids."

Like the puck in a funfair high striker, minutes before, being as close to that finish line as she was, Gemma had hit the top. Of course, she had to come back down. And there it was.

The crash.

"I didn't..." She stammered, her mother promptly letting go of her hand. "I would never-"

"Really?" The officiator interjected again. "Because one of our employees has just made contact with your coach and she informed us that this has happened before."

"That?" Gemma spluttered so severely, it appeared as if she had just taken a big gulp of a drink which had then gone down the wrong way. The thing with Cleo? They were going to bring that up? Now? "That was ages ago!" She turned to her mum whose face was what she would use to explain the meaning of the word fury to a bunch of non-English speakers. "Mum, listen to me, I can explain-"

"Your coach said that this incident happened less than 2 years ago. That is hardly what I would call ages." The officiator snapped. "It is people like you, young lady, that make a mockery of all the hard work that goes into a sport like this." He paused before speaking again, more authoritatively this time. "I think a ban is in order. Effective immediately."

"Wait a minute? Are we sure this couldn't just be some kind of misunderstanding? Can't you take another sample?" Gemma's dad said, as Gemma began to sob. It was humiliating, she thought, a 20 year old woman sat there weeping between her parents, and in that moment, she fucking hated herself for it but how could she not? She had listened to her dream implode. Shatter. Get torn up into thousands of futile pieces, like paper put through a shredder, leaving it impossible to patch back up. Like a 1000 piece jigsaw she had spent all that time working on, dived onto by some snotty little kid, all the pieces conglomerating and the picture on the front of the box displaced.

"We can't take another sample." The officiator replied. "Now she knows it's given her an opportunity to-" He cleared his throat, "-rid herself of the drugs. There has been no misunderstanding. The levels were far too high for it to be some kind of accident and to me, it's very clear what's happened here. Your daughter somehow moved her sample so that we wouldn't find it, knowing we'd let the race go on anyway and probably thinking that nothing would happen."

"That's not what happened!" Gemma yelled, rubbing at her nose and eyes so that she didn't resemble a toddler having a middle-of-the-supermarket tantrum; that would certainly prevent anything she was about to say from having the desired effect. Springing out of the chair and then kicking it aside, she addressed mostly the officiator, but also her parents. "The sample was misplaced?" She repeated hoarsely. "Is your bullshit radar really that badly fucked up that you can't see how much of a set-up this all is?"

"A set-up that you are clearly not the victim of." The officiator barked, Gemma slamming her hands down on his desk and continuing her tirade only centimetres from his face.

"Somebody is clearly trying to sabotage me!" She yelled, before walking backwards and shaking her head despairingly. "Can't you see that? Can't you all see that? Somebody doped me! Or they put the drugs in my sample or..." Her head whipped round from her mum to her dad but their faces did not crumple in sympathy as she had expected them too. Their disappointment, her mother's outrage, was unyielding. But so was her denial. And so, Gemma stormed out of the office, past her bewildered brothers, Josh, Ellie and Georgie, down the corridor and then to the locker room, where one by one she struck each of the locker doors. It was as she reached her own one that the handwritten note fell onto the floor.

I hate to say I called it, I really do.

The note teased.

But I know a dirty cheat when I see one.

I mean, it's not like I didn't have a hand in it.

I suppose I just wanted you to be able to tell me, sweet.

How does it feel to lose your purpose?

Screwing the note up in the palm of her hand, Gemma could feel them again, though this time they were not really there: the cockroaches, with their skinny, little legs, tap dancing over the spot where the same person who had wrote the note had frazzled her skin like bacon.