“There are lady council workers in my bedroom”

IT’S 6am and my husband tiptoes around our room in a Kerry B&B, careful not to wake me.

We were in bed last night, at 10pm, lights out. I’d envisaged something, anything more diverting than lying in bed with my eyes smack wide open at 10 but my husband said, “triathlon starts at seven tomorrow”.

He explained what a half-iron-man triathlon involved and after this, even I couldn’t argue a case for turning the lights back on.

He tiptoes and whispers, tiptoes and whispers, before finally congregating with other sporty fellows in the corridor.

I’m sleeping the sleep of the dead when I hear my name being called urgently. I pitch forward into an upright position and see two council workers standing at the bottom of my bed, looking back at me. They’re wearing fluorescent bibs and gesticulating wildly at my feet.

I’m slack-jawed. “There are lady council workers in my bedroom,” I think.

I think I hear the council workers say the word “husband” and “triathlon” in the same sentence.

I’m having trouble surfacing. “Yes,” I say, “I know, my husband’s doing the triathlon, he’s there now I think.”

I’m certain I hear the word “runners”, twice.

“Yes,” I say, “there are lots of runners doing it”.

The thought that they may not be lady council workers at all is floating past, just out of reach, but when I hear the words, “we’re race marshals, your husband is at the start line, he can’t find his runners, he sent us here to find them”.

My unfocused haze of sleep turns into focused panic. I’m galvanised. We start to turn the bedroom upside down.

“He’s in an awful panic,” they say, pulling my underwear out of a suitcase and onto the floor. I tip my husband’s suitcase out, “really?” I say, in an awful panic. “He’s running around like a headless chicken. He’s looked everywhere,” they say. “Christ,” I say, running around like a headless chicken and looking everywhere.

It crosses my mind that those things that make my husband his own worst enemy, like trailing bedlam and panic, have a funny way of trailing me and making him mine.

“They’re not here,” I say, “the only other place they could be is the car”. We bound across car park puddles to search the car. We find shameful filth, a Visa card I’ve reported as stolen, but no runners. At this stage we all know it’s hopeless and stare at each other blankly in the rain.

One of the marshals is tall. I glance at her feet. They’re big. She’s wearing pink and silver runners with a cherry whoosh.

“What size are your feet?” I ask.

“Eight/eight a half,” she says.

“My husband’s nine,” I say. I watch the penny drop; she backs away and jumps into her car.

“I’ll give them to him, don’t worry,” she shouts, reversing.

“What about your feet?” I call, but they’ve gone.

I run to the B&B, grab the door handle and turn it. I’m confused by its resistance and turn it again; the bewilderment intensifies until I remember my keys are inside my room.

It dawns on me that I’m wearing a bra and pair of my husband’s boxers, which are gaping around the crotch. I shiver in biblical rain at sunrise, clutching my husband’s boxers. I think, this is a fresh round of bedlam and panic but it still has my husband written all over it.

I sit in the car until after 21 minutes, I notice a light turn on to the right of the locked door. I knock and explain my predicament briefly through the window to a flushing toilet. A guest in a dressing gown opens the door.

Eyes to floor, I scuttle past.

At lunchtime I wait at the triathlon finishing line under an umbrella. I’m looking forward to seeing my husband cross the finishing line in pink and silver with a cherry whoosh. Size eight-and-a-half might well have pinched, I think.

I see my husband approach the tape in a jubilant canter.

I look at his feet for a flash of pink and silver but he is wearing his own runners; size nine.

“Where did you find them?” I ask later. We’re in the car and I’m driving home.

“Oh, in a mate’s boot,” he says.

“There are no words,” I think.

“But you’ve no idea what an awful panic it was at the start line,” he says, yawning. “I was running around like a headless chicken,” and falls asleep.