Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (81 page)

Zoe said, “I don’t see why. You have things to live for. You have everything.”

“Not everything.”

Zoe exhaled irritably. “Christ, Kate. It’s a lump of yellow metal on a shiny red string.”

“Easy to say when you’ve won it.”

“You think?”

“You know what?” said Kate. “I don’t even care. So long as we both get to that final in London, and we’re both on that podium, I don’t care which of us wins it.”

“No, nor do I,” said Zoe. “So long as it’s me.”

Kate smiled and shook her head. “Honestly, Zo, what are we going to do with you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Really, though? I’m worried. You seem a little bit out of control.”

“The road was wet, Kate. Crashes happen and we bleed. The girls who couldn’t handle the damage dropped out of this game years ago.”

Kate sighed. “I’m not talking about crashes. I’m talking about real damage.”

Zoe looked away, and Kate squeezed her hands. “We don’t always have to be psyching each other out, do we? We can call a truce. We can talk about what’s bothering you.”

“Nothing’s
bothering me.
” Zoe took her hands out of Kate’s to put air quotes around the phrase.

Kate hesitated, then took Zoe’s hands again. “It’s Adam, isn’t it?”

Zoe looked at her sharply. “No.”

“It is though, isn’t it? I know you. When you get like this, it’s because you’re thinking about him.”

Zoe looked at her steadily. “I’m thinking about boys and shopping.” The paramedic resumed his work in silence and the ambulance rolled on through the slow, rain-soaked traffic.

Kate didn’t know how to handle her friend when she was like this. If you closed your eyes you could believe you were talking to a drunk at a bus stop—one of those puffy-eyed women who were alternately morose and acerbic, squinting through their own cigarette smoke while their fingers spun a thread of imagined oppressions from the air and knitted them into a shroud. But when Zoe went on a downer like this, she did it from behind those clear green eyes in that perfect face with its unblemished skin and its Olympian glow of health. The incongruity shocked you, like being punched in the face by a Care Bear.

“Want to come home with me after the hospital?” Kate said. “Have a bite to eat with us?”

“I’m not hungry,” Zoe said, as if that was an answer to a question Kate had asked.

Kate had to remind herself that Zoe wasn’t always like this, and that
she was always sorry afterwards. She cared enough to try to explain, at least, and that was how Kate had first learned about Adam. Years ago, well before Athens, Zoe had got into one of her moods and done something so viciously personal that Kate had actually lost a race at the National Championships because of it. In the weeks that followed Zoe had been incandescent with remorse. That was how it had seemed to Kate—that her friend had actually flickered with a pale and anxious light that sought to expel the shadows cast by her behavior. She’d invited Kate to lunch—begged her to come—and they’d met up at one of the best restaurants in town, the Lincoln. Kate couldn’t have afforded the place, and she doubted Zoe really could either.

In the busy dining room clad in Carrara marble, a low-slung hipster with a three-day beard and a linen suit was playing Debussy in shoes but no socks. Zoe inhabited the room naturally, un-made-up in jeans and a loose gray tank top but still attracting covert glances. Kate ducked down behind the menu and failed to find one single item on it that didn’t seem expressly conceived to worsen her power-to-weight ratio on a bicycle.

She was furious with herself for accepting this invitation to a reconciliation that was looking more and more like a bid to humiliate her.

She looked up in misery and saw Zoe watching her back with a panicked look.

“Shit,” said Zoe, “this isn’t helping at all, is it?”

“Oh no, this is great,” said Kate. “It’s really nice.”

Zoe held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “I can fix this.”

She stood, crossed to the pianist, and sat down lightly beside him at the piano stool. The
Préludes
faltered for a moment as she whispered something in his ear, then they picked up again with a hint of
allegrezza.
Kate saw the pianist’s grin as Zoe came back to the table.

“There,” she said.

“What did you say to him?”

Zoe flicked a hand dismissively and blew a strand of hair off her face. “I said I’d give him my number if he made you laugh.”

Kate felt a surge of anger. “It’s not funny.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I treated you like shit, Kate, and I don’t know how to make it right.”

As Kate looked into Zoe’s eyes, trying to work out if she was being sincere, the pianist segued seamlessly into Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again,” with sober classical phrasing and a completely straight face.

Kate couldn’t help smiling.

“I don’t know where my head goes,” Zoe said. “I want to win so badly, I forget that you’re
you
. That we’re friends.”

Kate felt her anger dissolve in the bubbles of the mineral water and the impressionistic flourishes with which the pianist was retrofitting Britney’s chef d’oeuvre.

“Well,” she said. “Just don’t forget again. Write it on your fucking hand or something.”

Zoe bit her lip. “I know I have a problem with relationships. I told you… I tell
everyone
that I’m an only child, but actually I had a brother and I lost him when I was ten, so… you know. Boring old story. People get too close, I push them away. I’m sorry.”

“God, no, I’m sorry. Oh Zoe, you should have said something.”

Zoe looked up. Her eyes were brimming, but the pianist lurched into Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” grandioso, and she laughed instead.

“It’s not something you say, is it? You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“In Manchester?”

“Or any other planet.”

“Doesn’t Tom know?”

Zoe frowned. “It’s not a performance issue.”

“Still, I think it’s the sort of thing you should tell him.”

“I think… it’s the sort of thing you should tell your best friend.”

Zoe waited for Kate’s reaction. Before Kate could think what to say, a waiter arrived and placed plates before them, covered with silver cloches. He whisked away the cloches, gave a half bow, and glided away.
On each of their plates were 150 grams of plain steam-cooked wild rice, 60 grams of chopped raisins, 100 grams of canned tuna in brine, and a 30-gram, carob-coated ProteinPlus PowerBar in its blue-and-yellow wrapper.

Kate blinked, incredulous.

Zoe grinned. “I asked Tom what was on your eat sheet for today. I knew the menu would freak the piss out of you.”

Kate stared at Zoe, while the pianist threw in a quick intermezzo of baroque variations on the theme from
Knight Rider
.

“What?” said Zoe.

Kate studied her for a moment longer, then smiled and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Bon appétit,” which was easier than trying to find the words to explain that just sometimes—in the rare moments when she wasn’t causing quite serious mental discomfort—being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace.

This was what Kate was thinking about as the two of them rode the ambulance to the accident and emergency unit.

“Are you okay though, Zo?” she said. “Really, I mean?”

Zoe looked at the ragged mess of her forearm, then back at Kate.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’ll mend.”

When the girls left the flat, Tom was tired. He retrieved his denture from the toilet, scrubbed it down with bleach, rinsed it, and reinserted it. He stuck the front door shut with duct tape and put the chain on it. He sat down in front of the simulated log fire and took two Nurofen and an inch of red wine for his joints.

He came awake to the sound of his own sobbing. He was disoriented. He made it to the kitchen on his stiff knees and boiled the kettle for tea.

He breathed. It was okay. It was okay. Here were the blue-and-white
ceramic kitchen tiles. Here was the old work surface with all its rings and scratches that you could run your fingertips across. It was okay. You had to stop thinking of these dreams as proof of damnation. They were just your bloody neurons crackling and fizzing, like jaded ladies fabricating gossip.

On balance he was not guilty. He’d made a fair job of his life, that’s how you had to look at it. After his own Olympics he could have stayed in Oz and had people buy him drinks for a few years, but he hadn’t done that. He’d made a good decision, flown out here to try a new life as a coach. He’d started a family too, and it hadn’t worked out, but he’d had this idea that if he could help other kids, it would make up for the mess he’d made with his own.

He couldn’t even remember much about his boy now. Maybe it was a good sign. At some point all the okay stuff you did had to start canceling out the bad things, even the memories.

He’d got into coaching with the juniors, and when BMX came along in the eighties he’d had a lot of success. BMX was Wacky Races—all those kids with their full-face helmets and their legs hammering like tiny steam pistons. He let the races take care of themselves and he worked with the kids between competitions to find out where they were coming from, so he could help them be mentally stronger. A kid’s psyche was a hundred times more powerful than an adult’s. If you could work out which kids were racing away from their past and which were racing towards their future, then you unlocked a lot of power.

When it came to race day, his kids were always on their game and they won every bloody trophy in sight. He loved those furious little shrimps who only came up to his waist. He especially adored the angry kids. You helped them to win enough times, and bit by bit their grin on the podium was a little bit less
fuck you
, and a little bit more
hey, I’m secretly enjoying this.
Maybe he was still waiting for that moment to arrive with Zoe, but he was patient and he knew he’d live to see the day she smiled an uncomplicated smile.

He’d done an okay job with his life. If you put it all on the scales—your own attempt at parenthood on the one side, and all the kids you’d helped on the other—then who could say where the bastard thing would balance? You just did your best with every hour—that’s all you could do.

He poured the boiling water and stirred up a tea. Squinting at the clock on the cooker, he made out that it was just before nine p.m. He was no fool. He was going to give his dream half an hour to vacate the building before he risked sleep again. He sipped the tea and leaned against the kitchen counter. His knees hurt, but he didn’t dare sit down in case he couldn’t get up. He didn’t need the girls to have to rescue him again.

Still, wasn’t it a hell of a thing that they’d looked after him?

He’d always believed that the most important thing was the results. He’d imagined that the thing that would make him happiest would be seeing his athletes improve. After years of getting kids to the top of BMX, he’d been promoted to run the Elite Prospects Programme for British Cycling. The idea was to take the seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-olds with the best record on the track at national level, and see which of them had the stuff to go international. It was death or glory for those kids, and they ran the program out of the best venue they had, which was the National Cycling Centre at Manchester Velodrome. It was the big time for Tom. He got to pick the athletes he wanted to work with. Most often he picked girls. They tended to think harder about what they were doing than the guys ever did, and that suited Tom’s coaching style, which was more confidant than drill sergeant.

He’d picked his girls, and then he’d picked the best of the girls, and finally he’d dropped everyone else for Zoe and Kate, because he couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do with his life than to get those two to the top. He’d given his best years to them, and all he’d ever wanted was to see them achieve. But the truth was, Zoe’s four Olympic golds and all of Kate’s near misses didn’t mean half as much to him, now, as the fact that his two girls still believed in him even when all the evidence pointed to their coach’s being a decrepit old wreck.

Tom chucked the last of his tea in the sink and went back to lie down on his bed.

He felt good for once, he really did. Maybe the deal was that life had to break your body down before you could see it. Maybe there wasn’t any other racket in town except this one that brought you to your nadir and challenged you to build yourself back up from it, then showed you that what you’d done at least meant something to someone.

Tom laughed with his head on the pillow. He felt drowsy again, and he closed his eyes. He could almost see the rest of his life, and it looked pretty simple now. He’d get both his girls to the Olympics, he’d watch the best one win, and then he’d retire and take his knees back to Oz, maybe even buy the old house if it still stood. He’d drink red wine on the veranda and be at peace with all that had happened. You weren’t a finished man till you could look at your memories and be… not unmoved, but unafraid of them.

Kate squeezed Zoe’s knee. “I should get home,” she said. “Jack and Sophie will be wondering where I am.”

Zoe smiled. “Cool. Thanks for staying with me.”

“Will you be okay?”

Zoe looked at the slim, good-looking doctor who was carefully taping a sterile dressing over the graze on her arm.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”

In a sports administration unit on a high floor of a modernist office building, six middle-ranking officials were gathered around a
midcentury burr walnut boardroom table. They were finalizing a small change to the rules governing the running of Olympic track cycling. It was nearly midnight, and they wanted to get it done and go home to their families. Tomorrow they would be reviewing modern pentathlon. There were half-empty cups of cold black coffee and half-empty cans of warm Diet Coke on the table. Subordinates were dispatched to vending machines. Clauses were redrafted. In the long corridor outside, the cleaners were vacuuming the carpets.