Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (100 page)

“What’s this?” he asked them.

The midwife ignored him and smiled at Zoe. “It’s your daughter, Mum.”

Zoe waved her away as politely as she could while the orderly dabbed at her thighs with baby wipes. She explained to the doctors, clearly and calmly, that it was okay—that it was kind of them, but that she didn’t need some other woman’s baby. She told them it wasn’t the end of the world for her that her child had been stillborn.

Tom watched their startled reactions.

“There’s only nine months to go till Athens,” Zoe explained. “I need to get back to training.”

The doctors had a whispered consultation, then hurried the baby away to the neonatal ICU.

Even when Tom grasped what had happened and talked Zoe through it, she didn’t seem to feel any connection with the thing in the incubator. The doctors told her it was breathing mostly on its own. They were pleased: at twenty-six weeks, it was the best possible news. They set up a bed for Zoe next to the incubator, and they showed her how to scrub her hands and push them through the airlocked vents in the side of the box. She was supposed to touch the baby. Instead she fell asleep, washed out with fatigue.

Tom called Jack and Kate to the hospital. They came straightaway and stood by the bedside, holding hands. They looked at the baby in its box. Kate sighed, and Jack held her tightly.

“She’s beautiful,” said Kate.

“Yeah,” said Jack.

“She’s got your little face.”

Jack said nothing, just looked at his daughter while tears ran down his cheeks.

Kate looked up at Tom. “She told you the baby’s Jack’s?”

He nodded.

She looked down at Jack’s hand in hers. “What do you think?”

Tom shrugged. “I don’t think. I’m just here to help.”

They all looked at Zoe sleeping, on her side, with her knees drawn up. Her black hair was plastered to her face with perspiration. There was blood on the sheet that they all tried not to notice.

Kate stroked Zoe’s face. Zoe didn’t stir.

Kate knelt by her bed. “Look what’s happened, Jack,” she said quietly.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Kate didn’t respond to him. “She looks so weak. Zoe? Zoe? Oh God, is she going to be okay?”

“She’ll be fine. Doctors say she’ll be flat out for a while, but you know Zoe. She’ll be breaking down the walls if they don’t let her home in a couple of days.”

He tried to make it light, but Kate wasn’t smiling.

“I should have just talked to her. It’s been months since we spoke. I can’t believe I just left her alone to deal with… all this.”

Tom touched her arm. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not like any of us knew how to cope.”

Kate didn’t take her eyes off Zoe. “I’ll make it up to her. She’s my friend. And now look at her… look at all this
blood
… and she didn’t have
anyone
.”

Tom nodded. “But look at the baby, won’t you? Don’t tell me she isn’t beautiful. None of this is something to be sorry about.”

They all looked in silence while the baby’s pulse beeped softly from the monitoring unit attached to the incubator.

Kate stood and turned to Jack. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to stay here with Zoe and… your daughter? Do you want me to leave?”

He shook his head.

Kate hugged him around the neck and pressed her face against his. “I should,” she whispered. “I thought I could handle it, but I’m not a part of this. I should go.”

She looked at him with perfect desperation and hurried out of the
room. She paused in the doorway, and Jack took a step towards her, but the despair came back into her eyes and she was gone.

Jack looked Tom in the eye and nodded sadly.

“Oh, mate,” said Tom.

They hugged, briefly. Jack turned back to the incubator. He placed both hands on top of it and looked down at the face of his daughter.

“Coffee?” said Tom, after a while.

“Thanks.”

Tom went out for twenty minutes. He found a vending machine, bought a chocolate bar, and ate it slowly to give Jack some time to get his head together. He bought two plastic coffees from another machine and held one in each hand as he reversed back through all the swing doors to the ICU. When he returned to the room, Zoe was still asleep and Jack had his hands inside the incubator, stroking the baby’s cheek very carefully with the tip of one finger.

He said, “Is she going to be okay, do you think?”

Tom put Jack’s coffee down on Zoe’s bedside table. “I don’t know. The doctors say she’s twenty-six weeks. I don’t even know how early that is.”

Jack nodded slowly, still looking down at the incubator. “You think I’m an arsehole, right?”

“You talking to me or the baby?”

“You.”

Tom sipped his coffee. “I don’t think you’re an arsehole. You fucked things up is all. That’s our primary role as fathers.”

Jack laughed sadly. “I did it sooner than most.”

“Well, I always said you were spectacularly quick.”

Jack stared down into the incubator. “Do you think she’s alright in there?”

“She’s probably looking up through the glass and asking the same thing about you. She looks snug as a bug.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Nah. I grabbed a Twix out in the corridor.”

Jack didn’t answer, and Tom realized he’d been talking to the baby.

“Jack,” he said. “Have you been seeing Zoe often?”

Jack shook his head. “I slept with her once. After Kate chucked me out. It was a rough patch.”

“Think you could live with Zoe? Raise the kid?”

Jack turned to watch her sleeping. “I’ll help her raise the kid,” he said finally.

“No happy families, then?”

Jack looked at him. “I don’t love her. She doesn’t love me either. I think it took us sleeping together before we could see that straight.”

Tom looked away.

“What?” said Jack.

“Mate, what is it with blokes your age? You’ve got psychological answers for everything. Look at Zoe. Look at her. She’s fragile as hell, and just about the only thing that makes any sense to her is going to Athens. And now she’s got a baby, and you’ve got away with it. Back in the day I’d have run you out into the bush and beaten the crap out of you till you took your bloody responsibilities.”

Jack looked him in the eye. “You’re not her dad,” he said quietly.

Tom stared back, blood pumping. He was so furious he could have punched him. Slowly, the pounding in his chest calmed down and he looked at the ground. His shoulders sagged.

“True,” he said.

Jack took a step back and ran his hands through his hair. “I care about Zoe, but what am I meant to do? Emotionally speaking, she comes up to here on me.” With the flat of his hand he indicated a planar surface two feet above his head. “I think I could look after a baby, but I don’t know how to look after her, and I don’t want to. I don’t love her, I love Kate.”

Tom looked down at Zoe. In sleep, the hardness was gone from her face. Her hands were tucked beneath her cheek and her nostrils flared softly with each breath. She looked very young.

Tom said, “I think I can look after her, but I don’t think she can look after the baby.”

Under the naked lights of the ICU room, Tom and Jack said nothing for a long time.

In the café, Tom finished his coffee. A measure of the thick sediment made it into his mouth, and he ground it between his molars, tasting its bitter blackness. Phil Collins was still singing that he could feel it coming in the air tonight.

Tom was pretty sure that if Phil could be bothered to express the problem a little more honestly, he’d be able to coach him how to break it down into its constituent parts and solve it. This was how it worked, with coaching. If you were honest about the challenge, there was always a way to break it down.

Zoe hadn’t wanted the baby; Jack hadn’t wanted Zoe. Once Tom had expressed it like that, the solution had seemed straightforward. He’d sent Jack, Kate, and Zoe off for a week to give everyone space to think about it, and he’d stayed in the hospital with the baby. Within a week Zoe was back in light training, and he was helping the nurses to change the baby’s tiny nappies and switch the cylinders on her feeding tube. He slept in the bed they’d put there for Zoe, and he ate the food from the vending machines. The nurses called him Grandad, and he found it easier not to correct them. He called Zoe every day and asked her to come in, and some days she did. He would sit with her while they both looked at the baby’s tiny hands swatting invisible flies in the incubator.

“Don’t you want to hold her?” Tom asked.

Zoe twisted her hands together. “I can’t feel anything for her.”

“You can’t, or you can’t let yourself?”

Zoe hadn’t taken her eyes away from the baby. “If she isn’t with me, it’ll be better for her.”

“But are you sure you want Jack to take her? How do you know you won’t feel different, a few months down the line?”

She pulled her knees up to her chin and stared at the baby.

“It’s not about how I feel, is it? It’s about how I am. I won’t be good for her, Tom.”

A few days in, on one of Zoe’s visits, Tom said, “At least give her a name.”

“Sophie,” she said, without hesitation.

“Oh. You’ve been thinking about it.”

“I’ve been thinking about her all the time. I haven’t been thinking about anything else.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know if I could give her a name. I didn’t know if I had the right.”

He hugged her. “You just give her as much as you can. That’s all any of us can do.”

The nurses wrote
Sophie
on the baby’s wristband and wall chart. An unspoken optimism took hold in the ICU, now that the girl was attached to the world by more than her feeding and breathing tubes. The medical staff seemed to move more lightly, and a brightness came into their tone. Tom liked the name. There was something soft and hopeful about it that befitted a child whose claim to life was still provisional.

When Jack next came to the hospital, Kate came with him. They took over from Tom, taking it in turns to sit with Sophie while the other one trained. Tom watched Jack becoming the besotted father and Kate falling in love with the baby too. He watched them for a month, with the same careful attention to positioning and body language that he gave to his riders on the track. Then, when he was sure it was going to work out, he helped them to arrange the legal papers. Jack had custody, Zoe had access rights, and the newspapers had a different story entirely. The papers would have destroyed Zoe for giving up her child, so Tom had her agent tell them that she’d had a stillbirth. It was the only cycling story the mainstream papers ran in the whole of the off-season. For a while
they called her
BRAVE ZOE,
or
TRAGIC ZOE,
and they printed photos of her leaving training in dark glasses.

Three months later, Sophie was strong enough to leave the hospital with Jack and Kate. They waited another month, then announced through the British Cycling press office that Kate had given birth to a daughter and wouldn’t be racing that season but still planned to be fit for Athens. She didn’t give any interviews, and Tom whispered into the ear of one or two reporters that this was out of respect for Zoe’s loss. Jack did a three-minute segment on the BBC breakfast show and a lighthearted, self-mocking piece about new fatherhood in the
Times
, which appeared under his name with a photo of him in his racing kit holding Sophie gingerly and was based on some vague notes he’d phoned in to the subeditors at the paper. Because it had all happened in the winter and Kate hadn’t been seen in public since the Worlds, no one asked questions. She was just one more promising female athlete who’d put family first; Jack was just one more handsome guy rendered likeable by an anecdote about poo going everywhere at nappy change time.

Tom had run the whole deception. He’d broken every problem down into its parts and solved it. And in the years that followed, whenever Zoe broke down into parts, he’d done his best to solve her too.

Phil Collins faded out. Tom pushed his coffee cup away and looked at the newspaper photo of Zoe and Kate. Every day now the newspapers would raise the temperature. He knew they wouldn’t all get through three months like this, before the Olympic qualifiers established which of the girls was going to race in London. Sooner or later, something would give. Zoe would do something stupid, or Kate would collapse under the pressure, or some hack would dig up the truth about Sophie. When you broke this problem down it had two parts: one, that the media was all over the rivalry between Zoe and Kate; and two, that they had a whole three months to make hay with it.

He put a fiver under his coffee cup, pulled himself upright, and made his decision. He couldn’t change the media, but there was a way of shortening time. He nodded at the waiter, hobbled out into the light, and phoned his girls one after the other.

It was still early when Zoe ended the call, put the phone down on the kitchen counter, and went to the window. It was a bright morning with cumulus clouds idling in the synapse between the skyline and the sky. She watched their shadows trailing at street level. The gaps between the shadows were surprisingly even. From up here you noticed patterns that seemed random when you lived on the ground. The clouds arranged themselves in the sky with the same instinct for separation as people in crowds. There were a lot of them up there, but you never saw them collide. There was no clumsiness in the way their ranked shadows marked a dappled time across the escapement of the city’s roofs.

She put a hand against the plate glass to balance herself and lifted her ankles in turn to stretch her quads. Tom had phoned to ask if she would agree to race Kate the next morning and to abide by the result. It would be better, he’d said, to get it over with than to tear themselves to pieces for three months while they waited for the formal qualifiers. She’d said yes without thinking, the way she always said yes to Tom.

Down in the city center, on Princess Street and all along Portland Street, she picked out the adverts with her face on them. If she lost against Kate tomorrow, there wouldn’t be another campaign. She’d be papered over with new ads. Here and there out in the suburbs, in this economy, a few orphaned posters might linger on the billboards. Green would be the last color to fade. Her flesh tones would go first, then the silver edges of the ice cubes in the glass she held. Finally only her eyes would be left, with the slash of green lipstick and the fringe of
green hair, tinted in postproduction. She would look out across the gray streets from the white of washed-out adverts.