1      You approach the blocks slowly, flexing your fingers, pointing your toes, like a gymnast preparing to leap. You wait for the others to bend first. You take your time.      This is your race.      The late sun glints off the track, still baking the long day golden-dry. You shake your feet, loosening them up, and back into the blocks gingerly, like an expensive car. Curling into position, flicking each foot into place, you splay your fingers along the line.      The wind smells of sweat. You ignore glimpses of shoulders, glistening scalps. The noise of the crowd is a dull thudding in the back of your head. You listen to the even swell of your breath, drawing it up into the recesses of your head—empty, now, of everything but long white lines and the horizon.      You wait, poised to spring at the first hint of the gun. Neck arched, squinting towards the fixed spot of the finish, you hear the crack. It meets the air, lifts you from the blocks, unfolds your body. It propels you forward, launching you along your narrow tunnel of track.      The sound of the gun, fired again, is a cold slap at your heels.      You pull up short, hopping. Reeling around, you face a shaking head, several taut backs. The other runners are a rippling wave—scowling, tense, interrupted, angry.      You approach the blocks slowly.        2      I’d never had any problems in that area before. Really.      I still don’t understand how one day you can wake up, roll over, climb on top and prepare to launch the troops as usual, if you know what I mean, and have them—well, have them break ranks a bit too soon.      If it had been a one-off, then I wouldn’t mind so much. I could say I was tired, or that I’d been working too hard recently. Stressed out, you know. Drank a bit too much the night before. Not concentrating properly.      But it kept happening. It was like being a lad again, except this time I wasn’t getting better with practice.      The wife was no help. It’s your age, she said. Get yourself to the doctor if you’re so worried about it, she said. Doesn’t bother me, she said.      Funnily enough, if I did go to the doctor, which I’m not going to, I could tell him exactly when it started. The beginning of the end, as they say.      It was the day we heard that Linford Christie had got himself thrown out of the Olympics. Sunday, the twenty-eighth of July, 1996. Even in my state, I could feel sorry for him, poor bastard. He was the headline news – day of shame and all.      Turned out to be our worst performance since 1952.        3      He senses that this may be the moment.      They’ve been back from the pub for what feels like hours. At first there was a crowd of them, but everyone else seems to have paired up and disappeared. He can hear Martin and what’s-her-name, the tarty one, laughing in the kitchen. They’re supposed to be heating up what’s left of the ratatouille.      He hopes they don’t come back.      The girl sitting next to him is called Julie. She’s not as bold as the others. Quiet and gentle, more his type.      The only light in the shabby living room is the flickering television. It illuminates their feet resting on the squat coffee table, an open magazine, two empty mugs pocked with dribbles of brown, her narrow pale face.      He wonders what she looks like in daylight.      She seems so self-contained, he thinks. Compact and sweet. All that pretty fair hair drifting around her face, curling onto her cheek.      He marks time with his feet.      She’s sitting right next to him, but seems a long way away, watching the television with a placid concentration. He notices that she occasionally chews the dark pink underside of her lower lip. The sight of it makes his legs throb.      His hand finds the back of his neck. An idle scratch. A pause, stalling for time. Then a casual stretch across the back of the sofa.      He slides his arm down the bumpy, brown velvet slope and holds his breath.      Her shoulder is more steep than he’d imagined. His wrist brushes the dent of her bra strap and lolls between the soft mounds of skin rising on either side. His hand flaps a little before dropping. There doesn’t seem to be a natural resting place. It hangs off the cliff of her shoulder like a boulder waiting to tumble.      She twists her torso away, ducking out of his loose embrace without taking her eyes off the screen.      “Not now,” she says. “It’s the hundred metres.”