Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (78 page)

“So anyway,” the agent was saying. “She sleeps with this guy, and apparently he wakes up and realizes who she is, and he goes and plasters it all over the internet. Where, right at this moment, the salacious details are being read by every single person on Earth with the exception of the Chinese, because Facebook is blocked there, and you, because you are a reactionary old man with no interest in fun stuff. You want me to read you the filth he’s posted?”

“Not really.”

“I’m going to read it to you,” she said, as if he’d never spoken.

Tom heard her out, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with the information.

“I’m Zoe’s coach on the track,” he said finally. “Who she takes to bed is her own bloody business.”

“Agreed,” said the agent, “but this is just to keep you in the loop, and to suggest that—”

Tom growled. What did a loop have to do with it? Why couldn’t people just say,
I wanted to give you the information
?

“Is everything alright?” said the agent.

“Christ, that’s a huge philosophical question.”

“You made a sort of… noise.”

“Yeah, actually I growled at you. It’s an Aussie thing. And I guess it worked, because you stopped talking.”

“Look, I’m just trying to help, okay?”

“What you’re trying to do, darling, is protect your fifteen percent.”

“She’s the face of
Perrier,
Tom. It’s worth protecting.”

“Look. If fizzy water wants a face, that’s fizzy water’s problem. My job is to help Zoe win gold in the sprint in the London Olympics in August.”

“Yes, and what
I’m
saying is that we’re on the same side here. Surely it can’t help her focus, to be all over Facebook like this.”

“I won’t disagree, but what do you want me to do? Shut down Facebook? I’ll check with my broker, but I’m pretty sure I don’t own it.”

“Could you just have a talk with Zoe? She respects you.”

Tom smiled, and his voice softened. “Flattery will get you everywhere, honey, but don’t kid yourself. I’ve been trying to calm Zoe down since she was nineteen. If I had my way I’d keep her asleep whenever she wasn’t training or racing. I’d pop one of those little tranquilizer darts into her with a blowpipe, like they do with tigers in the wild. But what can I do? I’m a coach. All they give us is a whistle and a stopwatch.”

The agent murmured sympathetically. “Well I hope you can do something, because this will be all over the papers tomorrow and these things have a habit of spiraling. You should at least encourage her not to give them any more ammunition.”

Tom sighed. “I’ll pull her in and see what I can do. That’s all I can say.”

“Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you can make me the face of something.”

The agent laughed. Through the phone, it sounded like a goose honking with its head jammed in a half-empty Lyle’s Golden Syrup can. “And what would you be the face of?”

“I don’t know. Nurofen? I use a lot of that.”

“I think they’d be looking to cast someone young and pain-free.”

“That’s ironic.”

“Ah, but that’s show business.”

Tom clicked off the call. He thought it over for a minute, then texted Zoe to be at his flat in an hour. If he was going to assert some authority over her, it had better be on his patch. Rule number one of tiger training: make sure the beast knows it’s coming into your territory.

Zoe texted back straightaway:
OK boss
.

Good girl—she knew what it was about. She’d show up, he’d tell her off, then he’d make them both a cup of Earl Grey and send her on her way.

He felt a lurch of worry for Zoe. He had tried so hard to get it right with her. He’d been a terrible dad himself, but Zoe and Kate sometimes felt like his second chance. He cared more than he probably should, on his salary, for these two women he’d trained since they were nineteen.

He let himself daydream about what he’d do to the guy who’d smeared Zoe all over the internet. They were pretty good, these vengeance fantasies. With functioning knees, you could kick all kinds of shit out of a fellow. This was one of the many advantages that wishful thinking held over reality.

Still, he did care about Zoe. She was hard to read, and maybe that’s why he liked her so much. For all he knew, she really believed in the good-looking losers she fell for. He often tried to talk about it with her but she always made a joke of it, as if arriving for her early-morning training session with her heart in tiny pieces was an everyday evil to be endured, like losing an earring, or not finding a seat on the bus. She was defensive, and sometimes that came out as sarcasm. And she was right—what would he know about a young woman searching for love? But if Tom had to pin it down, he’d say she was more vulnerable than reckless.

He added more hot water to his bath. The trouble was, he saw stuff in men that Zoe could never see. He knew what the awful bastards were like.

“Present company excepted,” he said aloud.

Steam rose. He couldn’t blame Zoe for being desperate. The odds against her finding love rose every day. She was only getting more notorious, and men were only getting worse. The planet was filling up with good-looking young worldlings built entirely of opposites, canceling themselves out and—speaking as a bloke—leaving nothing you’d honestly want to go for a drink with. This new species of guys paired city shoes with backwoods beards. They played in bands but they worked in
offices. They hated the rich but they bought lottery tickets, they laughed at comedies about the shittiness of lives that were based quite pointedly on their own, and worst of all they were so endlessly bloody gossipy. Every single thing they did, from unboxing a phone through to sleeping with his athlete, they had this compulsion to stick it online and see what everyone else thought. Their lives were a howling vacuum that sucked in attention. He didn’t see how Zoe could ever find love with this new breed of men with cyclonic souls that sucked like Dysons and never needed their bag changed in order to keep on and on sucking.

Tom swore at himself and put the thought away. The agent was right: he was an old man. Also, he was probably thinking about Zoe too much.

He wasn’t supposed to have a favorite, and the truth was that he didn’t. Kate was the more naturally gifted rider, Zoe leveled the score with pure determination, and Tom liked them equally.

He checked his watch—forty minutes to go till Zoe arrived. His watch was a Casio, it was splash-proof, and it did exactly one thing, which was to tell the bloody time. This was another point of difference between him and guys these days. They all wore James Bond watches with separate chronometer dials, resistant to a depth of one thousand meters. What the hell did they think was going to happen to them? That they would be thrown clear from the high street stores where they worked and sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, from which they would swim clear only owing to their ability to time events to the split second? Those guys wouldn’t know a fraction of a second if it jumped up and denied them an Olympic medal. They had no concept of what could be won and lost in one. Time was wasted on this new breed of man who could spend a whole night with a woman and then upload it in less than a minute.

He sighed. He knew he wasn’t being fair. Whatever was wrong with Zoe, it was about more than this latest man. Away from the track, her judgment was shitty. Take this new apartment of hers. One lucky break with that endorsement gig—those Perrier ads, because of her
looks—and she’d gone and got herself mortgaged up higher than a career in track cycling could ever pay down. As her coach, he should literally talk her back down to earth. Get her out of that apartment and back to ground level, back to where athletes hunted gold for the glory of it. It made him sick, to be honest, the way the agent had turned Zoe’s head. But he knew how it went: you lost all human perspective, living alone. You didn’t have anyone to say,
Mate, you’re being a dick about this.

He worked on getting his knees to bend, as a prelude to standing in the bath and toweling dry. He massaged his knee joints again to ease the ligaments, swearing rhythmically under his breath. Finally, in pure frustration, he banged his fists on the backs of the knee hinges. The pain flared and his knees flatly refused to comply. They mocked him, dumb and inarticulate.

The bathwater had cooled. He raised one stiff, straight leg and reached for the hot tap again with his big toe. The toe scraped up the chain of the bath plug, each tiny chrome-plated link marking off one-thirtieth of a second against his waterlogged skin. He managed to spin the hot tap but there was no more hot water. He realized he was getting cold. His knees were adopting their coffin configuration. He told them, “Don’t get used to it, you work-shy little bastards. I’m having you cremated.”

The longer he was stuck here, the worse the situation got. About a heartbeat ago, at the age of twenty-two, he had been the Australian national champion in pursuit cycling and the Australian number two in the sprint. And then, so recently that he could still hear “God Save the Queen” ringing in his ears, he’d won two Commonwealth silvers. He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was, surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn’t care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.

He tried to push himself out of the bath by placing his palms flat on the rim and heaving his wiry body up to a point at which he might be
able to maneuver a buttock onto the edge, raise his legs over, and fall in a reasonably controlled fashion onto the blue bath mat, catch his breath, and drag himself across the floor to pull himself upright on the rungs of the heated electric towel rail. Sweet bollocks, he thought. This is actually my best-case scenario right now, to fall out of this bath and land on the floor of this modernist bathroom in this two-bedroom flat with its double-glazed units and its Juliet balcony giving onto the partially obscured canal view in this regeneration project of a residential block, twelve thousand miles from where I was born.

The cold gripped him now, and he didn’t have the strength in his arms to lift himself out of the tub. He thought for a long time about what to do, but a plan wouldn’t come. The problem now wasn’t that he was one-tenth of a second short of the podium. It was that he couldn’t get out of the bath. He fought back tears of frustration. He hadn’t wept since 1968, and he wasn’t about to give the twenty-first century the satisfaction.

When Sophie was a Jedi knight was the only time she didn’t feel exhausted. She lay on her stomach on her bed on her home planet, wearing Skywalker’s black robes. She had his lightsaber at the ready, and she was reviewing footage of herself on her iPad. On the screen she was explaining the lay of the land to C-3PO, a protocol droid.

“Well,” she was saying, “if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s furthest from.”

Sophie’s lips moved as she watched herself speak the words on the screen. Through the wall of her bedroom, she could hear Dad singing in the bath. Through the window she heard children laughing and calling to each other as they rode their bikes in the street. By scrunching the
earphones into her ears, she muffled the noise. It was a distracting phenomenon, that Earth sounds could be heard way out here on Tatooine. It had to be some kind of spatio-temporal effect caused by the gravitation of the planet’s twin suns. As a Jedi, she tried to tune it out. Time and space were training wheels on a bike—you were pretty limited until you could ride without them.

The walls of her room were lined with Star Wars posters. The lamp shade hanging from the ceiling was the Death Star under construction. On the floor beside her bed was her most precious thing, a perfect model of Han Solo’s ship, the
Millennium Falcon
. It was two feet long and open to reveal the interior. There were the twin Girodyne SRB42 sublight engines, the Isu-Sim SSP05 hyperdrive generator, and the Novaldex stasis-type shield generator. Something she worried about was that the ship didn’t have a toilet. There were Corellian Engineering Corporation AG-2G quad lasers, both dorsally and ventrally mounted, there was a complex network of underfloor smuggling compartments, but there was nowhere to go for a wee. Even when time and space meant nothing to you, a trip across the universe was a long time to hold it in.

From the street outside, the noise of the kids shouting was getting louder. Singing in the shower next door, Dad was misremembering “Over the Rainbow.”

Sophie decided to review all the footage again, to see what could be learned. She watched the whole of
A New Hope
and
The Empire Strikes Back
on super-fast-forward, slowing down whenever she got to a scene with the
Millennium Falcon
in it. Still nothing about any loo.

She’d been feeling pretty sick already, and the super-fast-forward made it worse. Her stomach cramped and her saliva ducts produced a sweet, metallic water. She ignored it and switched to
Return of the Jedi.
There wasn’t much of the
Falcon
in this footage, and pretty soon she was back to the scene in
The Empire Strikes Back
where Skywalker finally confronts Vader.

She slowed it down, watching herself getting zapped by the powers that radiated from the Emperor’s fingers.

“Feel the power of the dark side.” This is what the Emperor was saying.

All she really felt was sick.

“Luke,” said Vader. “I am your father.”

In the bathroom, Dad was singing, “Lemon drops, in some kind of lullaby with chimney pots.”

Her concentration wavered. It was getting hard to block out her life on Earth. Outside her window, the children were screaming and giggling. She kept the earphones in and stood on her bed to see what was happening. Through the window she saw Zoe arriving on a bike. The kids in the street had fallen in line. They were riding behind her down the street. Zoe was laughing and playing up to it, weaving along the road, leading them all in looping patterns.