Authors: John M. Green
If you believe something is factually wrong in the book, it is more likely because I intentionally voted for pace or story over accuracy than because I garbled my research or advice but, if it
was inaccuracy, don’t blame the people above.
Thanks to Pam Holland for photos of New York trains and subways so I could get my imagery right after I misplaced my own. Raymond Teichman, Supervisory Archivist at
The Franklin D. Roosevelt
Presidential Library and Museum
helped by digging up the full context of Eleanor Roosevelt’s short quotation in the epigraph. Her article, “Women in Politics,” ran over three
issues of
Good Housekeeping
in 1940: Volume 110: January: pp.18-19, 150; March: pp.45, 68; April: pp.45, 201-203. The relevant part is:
This country is no matriarchy, nor are we in any danger of being governed by women. I repeat here what I have so often said in answer to the question: ‘Can a woman be President of
the United States?’ At present the answer is emphatically ‘No.’ It will be a long time before a woman will have any chance of nomination or election. As things stand today,
even if an emotional wave swept a woman into this office, her election would be valueless, as she could never hold her following long enough to put over her program. It is hard enough for a
man to do that, with all the traditional schooling men have had; for a woman, it would be impossible because of the age-old prejudice. In government, in business, and in the professions there
may be a day when women will be looked upon as persons. We are, however, far from that day as yet.
With the right woman, such as an Isabel Diaz, I hope that this day is now not far at all.
For other help with
Born to Run
, thanks to: Bill Thompson, my editor in New York. Authors Stephen King and John Grisham said good things about him for a reason. Luke Causby for the jacket
and internal book design. Graeme Jones for typesetting, Karen Young for production. Publicist, Trudy Johnston. The book’s distributor in Australia and NZ,
Simon & Schuster
,
especially Lou Johnson and Ed Petrie and their fabulous team and reps. And the bookseller who sold this book to you, or your friend who gave it to you.
I also shine a torch on
Pantera Press
. With our focus on discovering and nurturing previously unpublished writing talent,
Pantera Press
hopes to be “a great new home for
Australia’s
next
generation of best-loved authors.” In its second year, it is already delivering on that dream, with a small but growing stable of authors, books with rave
reviews and happy readers, including a best-seller, several books now in reprint, new editions, and one short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
Lastly, my family. My role-model wife, not least for the light bulb she flicked on for me when she tossed in her own business career to become a full-time professional sculptor. Visit her
website:
www.jennygreen.net
And our extraordinary two kids who have lived with this book and far, far more
.
If you enjoyed
Born to Run
, here is a taste of John M. Green’s first novel...
It’s available from all good booksellers…
T
HIS CITY DOESN’T grow on you, it grows in you. It snatches your breath. It scratches its scarlet nails down your back so you squirm for
more. Sydney is heaven without dying. But in eight minutes, for Sonya, it would become hell.
The bush track clung alongside the foreshore, a seductive stretch of dirt and rocks and water views. Professor Sonya Wheen pounded it daily so, even without checking her watch, she knew
she’d been running fifty minutes. But after last night, who cared about time?
Dribbles of sweat kept filling her smile lines. It had been their first sex in three weeks, true, but what did she expect after nine, no, ten years. As Sonya was convincing herself once again
that Michael wasn’t a lousy lover, the lace frond of a fern camouflaged a sandstone outcrop and she almost tripped. Regathering her balance and her pace, she reminded herself that in the long
spaces between the sex Michael was still, well, a gentleman; most at ease sniffing a vintage red or cradling a tumbler of good scotch—no ice, no water—and drawing back on one of his
antique smoking pipes. And considerate. The word “companion” didn’t endear itself to her, so she pushed it away.
She leapt, almost flew, over a tree root that caught her eye just in time but her shoulder swiped against a split branch of a eucalypt.
To her, Michael was a Mr Cool in a gallant, nineteenth-century kind of way, yet “cold fish” was the epithet more often whispered round their circle of friends; these days more a
semi-circle, and mostly hers. To them, Michael soaked himself in solitude. “Reserve” was a word conceived for him, or so a friend had said once in Sonya’s earshot. It was true he
rarely sought friendships and when on odd occasions they were offered, he seldom accepted them.
For him, familiarity bred contentment, albeit one focused on few people and fewer things. Mostly, Michael was a self-contained, tight-lipped man who brushed off the prevailing fondness for
approval or intimacy. Cool… yes. Detached at times… oh, yes. But for Sonya, also thoughtful… decent. Integrity and a quiet generosity gently shimmered from him, in soft
beats.
He stuck to his guns in most things, even in his business affairs. His work since she’d known him was as a stocks and bonds trader operating from home, a perfect cocoon for his
temperament. He’d chosen it well, she decided. Intellectual stimulation, the adrenaline of the markets, and no people. Plus, keeping yourself away from the daily hub-bub helped you filter out
the noise and maintain perspective, a lesson he said he had gleaned from his earlier days freelancing as a journalist.
He claimed it was a useful tool in trading on the markets as well as in everyday life but Sonya was never as convinced about the virtues of isolation. It did have its moments, like when she
powered her motor bike down after a day’s lecturing and she’d find him at their grey sliver of fence that overlooked the beach, ready for their ritual chat over a freshly-poured wine or
whisky. She never knew if it was his first drink since alcohol didn’t affect him as much her. Sonya was tall and slim so her vulnerability was a metabolism and fitness thing, nothing to do
with her being a blonde as a friend once joked. As she’d head through the house to join Michael at the back fence, she’d try to guess from the wafting aroma what he had cooking. As well
as a journalist, he’d also worked as a chef. What jobs hadn’t he done? She’d pass by the dining table, usually set for two, often with a spray of fresh tulips. Like last
night.
For Sonya tulips went with everything, even her job lecturing in business studies. It wasn’t just their cheeky cup shape or their splashes of vivid colour. It was also the history of the
manic speculation they’d fired up four centuries ago. Every year, she got a kick out of telling her students how Rembrandt earned less for his 1640s masterpiece, The Nightwatch, than the
hammer price a single Viceroy tulip bulb got knocked down for at auction.
There were other kindnesses: gifts, and especially conversations. But Michael kept that side of him to their private world; the modern fetish for public displays of affection, even warmth,
repelled him.
Where would she have been without him? Living comfortably on a university salary, for sure, but not in their beach house… well, hers actually… but that was another story. One she
had certainly rationalised but never quite worked out.
A barbed sapling brushed against her but she palmed it off, just as she’d done for years to the gibes and gossip. Like Michael she didn’t care for the sneering but, truth be told,
she yearned that he would occasionally display his emotions so others could see him as she did. Her late mother had always stereotyped him. That he was so reticent, so uptight, because he was
British. It wasn’t that, Sonya was sure, but there was something. An itch she couldn’t scratch.
Sonya knew she should speak to him about it, and she would.
Today.
Six minutes…
Heck, did she really care if he was reserved? Live for the moment! And with him, there were great moments. She brushed back some loose strands of hair, for a change blasé that the whole
world could see she had one ear with a lobe and one without. It was an oddity she normally covered up with longer hair, even though Michael claimed he found it endearing.
How often had she engaged in these same arguments with herself? She would definitely raise it all with him today. For sure. What better time, now that he’d agreed, finally, to a baby?
Thirty-five on her last birthday, she had certainly been hearing her body. Tick… tick…
The early morning sun slanted through the treetops, leaping from branch to branch like flames. She stopped at the viewing platform, drawing in the crisp sea-spray of the sou’-easterly and
watching the wind-shadow skip across the water. An augury perhaps.
Her thoughts lingered, imagining that the rhythmic swell of the water was Michael, his chest rising and falling just as it had been when she’d slipped out of their bed that morning.
Their relationship had always had its edges. Until last night, Michael’s stand-off against children, though always gracious, had been as hard as flint. Despite that, compared to the ditch
her first marriage had careened into, her decade with Michael was a yellow brick road. There were the unexpected things. Like last night: “Let’s go barging on a French canal,”
he’d said, “before our baby.” Before our baby, a phrase lightly tossed in like a vinaigrette, and without any fanfare despite her years of badgering.
Surprisingly, she’d almost not registered it; the mere mention of an overseas trip had thrown her completely off-guard. After they’d quit New York for Sydney nearly nine years ago
and despite their, or rather, his money, they’d only ever flown together within Australia. Never internationally. He, on the other hand. God! she thought, as she turned back onto the track,
Michael was such a frequent flyer the airport security people probably knew his shoe size. He must have a trillion international frequent flyer miles but, she reminded herself, she had never
enjoyed a single one.
His many, too many, business trips were fleeting, always rushed. Inevitably he returned dishevelled, as if he’d just been trekking for thirty days in Nepal rather than on a three-day flit
to Los Angeles or some other business capital. In the beginning, she’d stressed herself about these trips—what wife wouldn’t?—but time wore her down and tolerating them
simplified her life, despite her mother’s finger-wagging: one failed marriage was enough, she’d repeatedly warned.
Four minutes…
A child. Sonya hurtled off the end of the track and her shoes dug into the white sand, so fine and clean it squeaked as it stopped her short. She slipped off her sweatshirt and wrapped it round
her waist for her cool-down. Her red leotard top was crimson with sweat and her heartbeat was even outpacing her mind.
She’d come round the headland and this end of the beach was tapped in behind, sheltered from the south. Here the palms and eucalypts stood motionless. The barnacled boats moored in close
were rocking imperceptibly from the rising tide and there was scarcely a jangle from their glinting halyards. The sun continued to chin itself above the horizon and paint colour onto the eastern
cliffs, giving the final crescent of moon a razzle of gold.
She watched the water nudge against the beach, up and back. It hissed up the sand leaving a froth of lace for the seagulls to trample. As her breath slowed she watched the grey scavengers
fluffing up their wings and poking their beaks underneath, picking out lice for their breakfast appetisers. A fledgling with a pink-grey beak and legs and spotted wings scrabbled to the
water’s edge and dipped its head in and out several times, shaking it in between.
Apart from a drifting foam of cloud, it was a still winter’s morning. Sonya strode over the sand for her final stretch, certain this would be a good day… a good year.
But in three minutes, she’d discover how wrong she was.
At the far end of the beach, the familiarity, the odd ordinariness of their grey slatted fence sandwiched between much grander walls caused her to question Michael’s sudden new leaf and by
the time she reached the boardwalk, she was stamping the sand out of her soles as well as her scepticism.
Once again she questioned how she’d lasted so long with a man so guarded, so private. Obscurity and vagueness about his past hovered around Michael like a cloud of summer sand flies but
though it was irritating, years of practice had taught Sonya to swat it off as yet another tolerable eccentricity. No longer. Not from today. Today the itch would be scratched.
She recalled how weeks after she’d moved into his New York apartment on Central Park West, she’d knocked his passport from his desk and two strange dried flowers fluttered out of it
to the floor. They were shrivelled, brittle and brown though she guessed they’d once been white. Daisies perhaps. As she slid a page of the passport underneath the wilted blooms, carefully so
they wouldn’t disintegrate, she’d wondered if they were a memento. But of what? Or whom? She’d never asked. Flipping through the tattered passport that day, she saw some pages
were ripped. The corner with his birth-date was gone. Cut or torn, she couldn’t tell. But for the first time she saw his full name: Michael Will Hunt. His name was a sentence.
One minute…
She unlatched her gate smack on what she assumed was 7 am. Courtesy of Ralph their pitch-black Labrador, the time seemed obvious. Ralph was not normally a barker but what usually got him yapping
at this time was the racket from the builders a few doors up. Six days a week it was always the same. On the dot of seven the noise dam from the construction site legally sluiced open.
But wait. Apart from Ralph and the squawk of a seagull, and the hiss of the tide, there was no sound. No builders. Not yet. Sonya checked her watch: five before seven.