Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (114 page)

“You’re a pretty nice person,” Zoe said finally.

“If your ankles get any worse, honey, then you’d better start being nice too.”

She smiled at him then, a full smile that lifted him to a place he hadn’t been in weeks.

Slowly her mouth sank back into a soft and serious line. “You’re good to me,” she said quietly.

“You’re the story of my bloody life,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be good to you?”

The barman gave two strikes on the big brass bell and said, “Time, ladies and gentlemen, please.”

Tom growled.

“What?” said Zoe.

“Time,” he said. “Never liked that stuff.”

Jack sat next to Kate, high up in the stands, watching Sophie train alone on the track. They didn’t talk, only listened to the rumble of her wheels on the boards and the beeps from the lap timer. They liked to wait up here, out of Sophie’s line of sight, letting her get on with it. They liked to listen to Zoe’s excitable shouts as she coached their daughter.

Sometimes, as Sophie carved around the high banking and dropped snugly back down to the racing line, they felt their own hands twitching on phantom handlebars and the muscles in their legs aching to fire. Their heart rates climbed and they were there on the track with her, roaring round those polished maple curves, pushing the biomechanics to that perfect edge where everything clicked and their minds became still.

When it carried them away like that, they had to close their eyes and slow their breathing and remember that their time was gone. It persisted
only in the immutable stillness of Jack’s gold from Athens, buried in the ground with his father, and in the daily motion of Kate’s gold from London, swinging in its rightful place on the end of the light cord in the understairs toilet of their home.

After all the years of speed, the greatest challenge of all was to make themselves sit still, up here in the dark of the stands. This was what you learned, after all the racing was over: that the hardest laps were the ones you did after the crowd had gone home.

“Kid looks good, doesn’t she?” Jack said after a while.

Kate watched Sophie grinning as she swooped into another curve. “Yeah, she looks really quick.”

“Think she’ll go gold one day?”

Kate was about to warn him against hoping for too much, but she closed her mouth. Who was she to say what the probabilities were? Sophie had come back from leukemia. She had fired the Death Star’s destructor beam into the limitless constellations of space and hit exactly the right target. She had beaten those kinds of odds.

They watched their daughter. Dark locks protruded from under her crash hat. When she took the helmet off, she liked to wear her hair in side buns, and she had a tendency to accessorize with a belt and a blaster. Strangers who saw the Argalls now were more likely to diagnose a fashion disaster than a medical one.

Sophie had bulked up as quickly as they had. With remission from leukemia had come respite from some of the allergies and intolerances. With her off the chemo and them off their training diets, the family had become partners in second breakfasts and midnight feasts. Sophie’s cheeks were filling out. Jack’s jeans were three inches bigger at the waist. They had eaten themselves back to normal, or as normal as any family could be whose daughter was currently circling the national velodrome in a custom-made Princess Leia Lycra outfit under the supervision of an Olympic quadruple gold medalist at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning while her school friends were all at a sleepover.

Jack squeezed Kate’s knee. “Youth Nationals this summer. Think we should let her compete?”

Kate thought about it. “What does Zoe say?”

“She told me Sophie was going to beat the other girls so badly they’d need counseling.”

Kate laughed. “She doesn’t change.”

He felt the anxiety catch in his chest. “But I don’t know. Is it safe for Sophie to push herself so hard, physically?”

“She says she feels great.”

“But that’s what she told us when she was practically dying. I mean, how do we know what to believe?”

Kate hugged Jack around the waist and nestled her head into his shoulder.

“We’ll see the truth on the track,” she said quietly.

They both looked down at the action. Far below them, with fits of echoing giggles and rivers of foul language, Zoe was psyching their daughter up to race pace. In the fading years behind them, the vast crowds shouted their names. Far above them all, and falling through the skylights high in the vaulted roof of the velodrome, the brave April light was golden.

Cycling is hard. The training is brutal and relentless, the racing desperate and dangerous. Researching this novel, I spent some time on a bike, seeing how far I could push myself and trying to record how it felt. I am a willing but poor cyclist, and with every turn of the pedals I am more in awe of the champions. There are barriers of physical and emotional pain which they can push through and I cannot. They are extremely brave people, and I feel it is important to record some of their real achievements here.

At the Athens Olympics in this novel, Zoe Castle won gold in the women’s sprint and individual pursuit, while Jack Argall won gold in the men’s sprint. In reality, gold in the women’s sprint was won by Lori-Ann Muenzer of Canada, gold in the women’s individual pursuit by Sarah Ulmer of New Zealand, and gold in the men’s sprint by Ryan Bayley of Australia.

At the Beijing Olympics in this novel, Zoe Castle won gold in the women’s sprint and individual pursuit. In reality, Rebecca Romero of Great Britain won gold in the women’s individual pursuit, while Victoria Pendleton of Great Britain won gold in the women’s sprint.

May their victories be remembered and their characters celebrated, forever.

At the time of writing, the London Olympics of 2012 are still a year away. Good luck to all the athletes.

Caring for sick children is the Olympics of parenting. While researching this story, I was allowed to shadow Dr. Philip Ancliff, a consultant hematologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London, where gravely ill children are brought from all over the world. I was present in the room while Dr. Ancliff, a brilliant and compassionate man, broke the news of some very serious diagnoses to the parents of some very sick children.

Nothing prepared me for the emotional impact of witnessing parents’ reactions at times like these. And nothing has ever filled me with more hope and anticipation than to see how those parents, together with the amazing team at Great Ormond Street, subsequently cared for their dangerously unwell children. Parents and staff alike seemed to step up into a state of focused grace in which all worldly concerns were cast off until all that remained was love. As a researcher, it was like being embedded with angels.

I am sometimes depressed or discouraged by the behavior of institutions and individuals in this world, including myself, and I have frequently struggled to find something that is unequivocally good—something I can look up to without fear of being let down or disillusioned. For me, Great Ormond Street Hospital is that thing. It embodies not only a pure spirit of mission and selflessness on the part of the staff, but also the astonishing progress made by doctors and scientists. Only four decades ago, a diagnosis of childhood leukemia was a death sentence in nine cases out of ten. Today, through advances in medical research, the odds have been reversed and nine out of ten children will enter remission.

There is, of course, far more work to be done. If you have a spare moment, then I would urge you please to visit the website of the Great Ormond Street Hospital charity, where you can find out about children with conditions like Sophie’s, and learn about the extraordinary things that can now be done for them. If you are moved to donate, then I believe you will be effecting one of the most efficient conversions of money into love available anywhere on our planet.

http://www.gosh.org

Thank you.

Chris Cleave

London

2012

This novel evolved through six drafts and Jennifer Joel read all of them. Her insightful critiques and unfaltering support meant everything to me. Thank you, Jenn.

Peter Straus is a brilliant man who always has my back, and I’d be nowhere without his wisdom and strength.

Sarah Knight is a generous and inspiring editor whose contribution to this book has been immense.

My grateful admiration to everyone at S&S, especially Jonathan Karp. And Big Bee, for going way beyond the call of duty.

Jackie Seow is the art director for my books and Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich is the designer. I think they do a beautiful job. If you first picked up this book because it looked good, I owe them one.

My very grateful thanks also to Jessica Abell, Simon Appleby, Tina Arnold, Leena Balme, Aileen Boyle, Michael Croy, Maite Cuadros, Stephen Edwards, Clay Ezell, Charlotte Gill, Katie Haines, Laurence Laluyaux, Molly Lindley, Job Lisman, Nicola Makoway, Maya Mavjee, Zoë Nelson, Gunn Reinertsen Næss, Jorge Oakim, Marina Penalva, Liz Perl, Carolyn Reidy, Richard Rhorer, David Rosenthal, Marysue Rucci, Wendy Sheanin, Louise Sherwin-Stark, Eleanor Simpson, Mathilde Sommeregger, Henrikki Timgren, Francine Toon, Synnøve Helene Tresselt, Alexis Welby, and Kelly Welsh.

Thank you to my cycling friends for getting me up to speed: Matt Rowley, Matt Hinds, Jake Morris, Neil McFarland, Ian Laurie, Jonny Moore, and Alex Cleave.

A very special thank-you to Danielle Ryan for the incredible support she has given to my family.

And thank you, as ever, to my family and friends.

Chris Cleave
was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. He studied experimental psychology at Balliol College, Oxford. His debut novel,
Incendiary
, won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was short-listed for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and is now a feature film. His second novel,
Little Bee,
is an international bestseller with over 2 million copies in print. He lives in London with his wife and three children. Chris Cleave enjoys dialogue with his readers and invites all comers to introduce themselves on Twitter; he can be found at
www.twitter.com/chriscleave
or on his website at
chriscleave.com
.

Zoe, Kate, and Jack met when they were nineteen and recruited to compete for the elite British Cycling team. In this sport, time is their greatest rival—a fraction of a second could mean the difference between going home with the win, and just going home.

Fast-forward thirteen years and Zoe—a two-time Olympic Gold medalist—has enjoyed the most success in her career out of the three, but at the cost of nearly every personal relationship in her life. Kate has sacrificed two Olympic games to raise her daughter, Sophie—an eight-year-old with leukemia who escapes her illness with dreams of the Death Star and of battling alongside Han Solo. And Jack has fought valiantly to balance his career with being an attentive father to Sophie and a committed husband to Kate. As the three athletes start training for the London Summer Games, Sophie’s condition worsens and the stakes rise: both women will be tested to their physical and emotional limits. They must ask themselves the question:
What would you sacrifice for the people you love, if it meant giving up the thing that was most important to you in the world?

Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track,
Gold
is a pulse-pounding examination of the choices we make when lives are at stake and when victory is on the line.

1. Discuss the opening scene of
Gold
where Kate and baby Sophie are watching Zoe win the gold at the 2004 Olympics. What did you learn about Kate’s personality as a wife, mother, and athlete in this one scene? How does this scene set the stage for the rest of the novel?

2. According to Sophie, “You could play boys’ games like
Star Wars
that had fighting and spaceships and made you look tough, even if you weren’t tough enough to ride a bike.” Consider Sophie’s obsession with
Star Wars
. What attracts her to these movies? What does she have to prove by playing “tough” boys’ games?

3. Consider Tom’s first impressions of his two star athletes: “Bit by bit, race by race, year by year, a girl like Zoe would stay afloat in the sport while Kate slowly sank under the weight of real life. Tom had seen it a hundred times.” How well does Tom predict their career successes and failures? In what ways does he underestimate Kate?

4. When Tom watches his group of teen recruits, he notices “Kate’s latent strength, and Zoe’s perfect flow, and Jack’s incandescent energy.” Compare Kate, Zoe, and Jack’s athletic strengths to their personalities. How do Kate’s strength, Zoe’s flow, and Jack’s energy help them face everyday life off the track?

5. Compare how Zoe and Kate handle the costs and benefits of being Olympic athletes. How does the press treat each of them? How do Zoe and Kate handle the media attention? What could they learn from the other about fame?