ALICE Ch 221

“What is it, Faye?” Glynda asks calmly. She’s still seated at her place at the table in the meeting room at the paddock. Everyone’s leaving, but Faye hasn’t moved. The meeting’s over and it’s a pretty afternoon in Austria.

“How are you?”

Glynda looks up from her laptop, gazing over her glasses at her daughter.

“You sound like a bloody protestant. What do you want?”

“I want to know how you are.”

“I’m busy. How’re you?”

“Dunno. How’s a girl s’posed to be when she hasn’t spoke to her Mum in twenty years?”

Glynda’s eye twitches and she slaps the laptop shut. “Why’d you have to wait to be in your twenties to be a teenager?”

“Spent my teenage years as a political prisoner, didn’t I?”

“We are not re-litigating this in the year of our Lord,” Glynda begins, but Faye cuts her off loudly.

“Missed my Debs, didn’t I?”

“You had to be grounded! You were too young to be looking at that stuff!” Glynda’s raising her voice.

Faye bristles. “If you want that stuff to be a mystery, maybe don’t leave your back massager out all the time,” she retorts, making finger quotes.

“Out,” Glynda says, pointing at the door.

“I won’t go. I want to talk to you.”

“I’m fine.”

“Fine? Look at the state of you!”

FF1

Grueling strategy sessions and more time than usual spent on making sure that Alice is up to speed on changes with the car—these things are all expected.

Cosette has come around trying to make sure there’s no medical reason that Alice can’t do another big Diorgasm shoot soon. She knows better than to think she’s getting laid, and Alice doesn’t miss that.

The standings are all anyone can talk about. Formula One is so accustomed to having one lead team and everyone else trailing with zero suspense for second and third. The interesting storylines were all about fourth and fifth place. Now, everyone’s jockeying for second and third. Maybe even first if Max doesn’t keep his shit together.

Alice tries to avoid that and stay focused on the race ahead. That’s not easy to do when there hasn’t been a single word spoken about the car’s reliability. These are conversations that need to happen, but they aren’t. It feels like people are afraid to talk about it, like they’re afraid to say the word Covid even though everyone’s got it. They always say “Something’s going around,” or “I felt off.” For the car, they say “We don’t want to count on an edge in the straights,”

It's upsetting. Alice sits in the sun out in the paddock milieu, squeezing a stress ball in one hand and sipping Gatorade with the other. She smiles and waves to people, but no one bothers her. All eyes are on the qualifier.

A stranger approaches holding a phone. Alice braces herself for a selfie, but instead, the stranger offers it. She’s wearing an F1 lanyard.

“It’s for you,” she says.

“Who is it?”

“Dry cleaning,” the woman says uncomfortably.

Alice frowns. Dry cleaning? She owns exactly one nice outfit, and that’s because Glynda makes her wear it to the super fancy promotional stuff. She hates it. Hopefully, the dry cleaners have ruined it, except she didn’t know that she had anything at the cleaners. Puzzled, she takes the phone and the girl steps back.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon, Alice. Do you recognize my voice?”

It takes her a moment, but she does. It’s the vaguely Tom Hiddleston-esque sinister quality that gives it away.

“Christian,” she says, heart sinking.

“Alice, I’d like to buy you lunch.”

In F1, gossip and speculation spread like wildfire. Christian Horner is being polite. The exaggerated spy movie message delivery is absolutely justified. Red Bull wants to talk to Alice Wilde. There’s only one thing they can possibly want to talk about. Alice licks her lips.

Have lunch with Christian Horner?

Or say no?