Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (99 page)

He drained his coffee and signaled for another. The radio was on in the café, playing Gold FM. Like the DJ said, they were number one with the solid gold hits of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Phil Collins came on, doing “In the Air Tonight.”

The waiter arrived with the coffee.

Tom smiled at him. “Brings back memories, eh?”

The waiter looked blank. “What does?”

“Phil Collins.”

“Who is Phil Collins?”

Tom pointed at the speakers. “Him.”

“Oh yes,” said the waiter. “Very good music. Very nice.”

He nodded with pantomime enthusiasm and took Tom’s empty cup away.

Tom wobbled his denture and a light sadness settled over him, like snow on a barbecue in winter. Away from the track, young people had begun to humor him. When they treated him like a relic it made him think of future rooms where he would be encouraged to sit on wipe-clean vinyl recliners alongside others of his generation. He saw himself insisting that he’d once competed in an Olympic Games, while
uniformed carers politely agreed with him.
I missed out by one-tenth of a second
, he’d tell them.
One bloody tenth.

That’s lovely, Thomas, now eat up your soup or you won’t be in top shape for the next Olympics, will you?

When he’d thought about old people’s homes, he’d always imagined a soundtrack of Bing Crosby and the wartime greats. Now he realized that by the time it was his turn to be geriatric, the nostalgia music would be MC Hammer and Sade and Phil Collins. He imagined himself in a group of half a dozen tracksuited octogenarians doing seated light aerobics to Madonna’s “Vogue,” and he understood immediately that he would need to kill himself in pretty much the same month he retired from coaching. He would give himself maybe a week to get his papers in order, then find a sensible way of doing it. There was bound to be something involving pills—something relatively undramatic. He’d write a quick note and then do it in a way that made the least possible mess for others to clear up.

He worried about whom he should write the note to. An email to the police seemed overly self-pitying; it was surely an exaggeration to pretend there was no one else who needed to know. On the other hand, a suicide note would be a shitty way to get back in touch with his family. Matthew was best off not hearing from him again. This too was undeniable. He’d wanted his son to succeed where he’d failed and so he’d bullied him too hard in training. The kid had snapped one day and taken a bike lock to him, and that was the end of Tom’s front teeth. A week later, his wife had left and Matthew had gone with her, and that had been that.

Sometimes Tom thought about it—had a flash of Matty’s face for a moment, like now—but then his mind recoiled from the pain of it. It was okay, really. Each year the sharp edges of it grew softer.

In the empty café, Tom listened to Phil Collins and tried to analyze the lyrics the way he would if the artist were one of his athletes. Something was coming in the air tonight. Phil could feel it coming, so
obviously it was something big. The guy had been waiting for this moment all his life, so whatever it was, it wasn’t as if they came along every half hour.

These haunting chords; this echoing drum; this insistence that some cataclysm was imminent. Tom frowned as he thought about how he would advise Phil. He sat in the café and pushed his denture about with his tongue and stirred his coffee anticlockwise, languidly. His professional conclusion, finally, was that Phil Collins was just a fucker for never saying what the something was—this something that he alone had detected coming, like some balding airborne early warning system with drumsticks and a reverb unit.

This was how Tom’s mind rebounded from thinking about his son. Always, it skimmed the surface of the pain, then skipped off and attached itself to the nearest harmless distraction.

He looked at Zoe’s photo in the newspaper. He knew there was grief in her past, as deep as his. He had no other explanation for the desperate way she behaved or for the strong connection he felt with her. It wasn’t love—he was too old for that—but it was a kind of unbearable affection. It wasn’t even that she made him wish he were thirty years younger. Life did that all on its own.

He growled at himself. It was frustrating. When all you knew was heart rates and lactic thresholds, it was as if life gave you big emotions but only these cheap little instruments to gauge them with. Phil Collins’s lyrics held meaning the way a pocket mirror held the moon, and yet these insufficient things were all he had: these old pop songs in empty cafés, these gold medals his athletes had won, these small redemptions refunded by an idiosyncratic history that disqualified whole decades but counted every second in tenths.

Time had never behaved itself around him. It played like a scratched record, now repeating an endless phrase, now skipping whole verses so that things happened too late or too soon.

He could still feel the fierce pressure of Zoe’s hands on his, in the delivery room. It was his fault that she hadn’t carried the baby to term. It still haunted him that he hadn’t been able to persuade her to stop training. All he’d managed was to slow her down slightly. She’d dealt with the pregnancy the way she would deal with an injury—keeping her training ticking over whilst accommodating the temporary restrictions on performance. Even when she was twenty-six weeks pregnant, he hadn’t been able to get her to think of the baby as something that was actually going to happen. He’d talked to her about it at the velodrome one afternoon. He’d actually stepped out in front of her on the track so that she had to stop, and he’d held her handlebars while she struggled against him.

“Please,” he’d said.

“Please what?”

“Please stop. You’ll hurt the baby.”

Her chest was heaving and the sweat was pouring off her. “Don’t be so melodramatic. I’m not pushing it. I just need to keep my basic fitness level up, and then as soon as it’s out, I can get back to race fitness for Athens.”

“Except that as soon as it’s
out
, Zoe, it’ll be a human being and you’ll be its full-time bloody mother.”

She nodded and waited, as if further explanation was required.

“Well?” he said. “Are you telling me the father’s going to care for it? I got the impression he isn’t involved.”

She threw her head back and laughed. “You got that impression?”

He put up a hand. “Look, it’s none of my business who the father is, but you should consider asking him to help, at least. Babies are hard work. It’s relentless. They need feeding and changing and carrying, day and night.”

“So I’ll do those things. We’ll work out how many hours it takes and I’ll fit it in.”

“It’s not like it’s a list of tasks I can schedule round training for you.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a life. You’re supposed to give a shit.”

She looked past him, down the track. “Of course I give a shit.”

“Then get off the bike, Zoe. You’re twenty-three years old. All this will still be here for you when you’re ready to come back to the sport. But right now, you need to get off the bike.”

She stared at him. “It’s Jack’s baby, Tom. I’ll get off the bike when Jack does.”

He was so surprised that he let go his grip on her handlebars, and she was so angry that she stamped down hard on the pedals and built up her speed way past any kind of safe limit. Each time she flashed past him he begged her to slow down, but she only rode harder. Finally he just slumped in a seat and watched her ride.

After twenty laps Zoe slowed to a stop, racked her bike, and warmed down slowly on the fixed machines in the center of the velodrome. Tom took her a clean towel and an isotonic drink at ambient temperature.

“You okay?” he said.

She looked up at him. Her face was pale and there were black rings around her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. I’m just an old bastard who never got it right myself. I reckon you can do better than I did, is all.”

He arranged the towel across her back and squeezed her shoulders and used a corner of the towel to dab the sweat away from her face. She stopped pedaling then. She closed her eyes and leaned her head into his chest. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he left them hanging helplessly by his sides. They stood there for a minute while the decelerating flywheel of the stationary bike made a mournful, descending note in the echoing space of the velodrome.

“I’m so tired, Tom,” she whispered.

“You’ll feel better,” he said.

“Will I?” she said. “Do you?”

He thought about it and then, because he was her coach, he said, “Yeah.”

She smiled up at him. “Liar.”

When it happened it was sudden. She got up from the exercise bike, took two steps towards the dressing room, and collapsed with a shout. He ran to her and she gripped his hands. When he realized what was happening, his legs almost buckled. He had just enough presence of mind to get her to change out of her British Cycling kit and into her civilian clothes. Whatever was going to happen now, he knew it would be easier for her without all the attention. When the ambulance came, he got in it with her and she held on to his hands again, her eyes rolling. When the paramedic took his clipboard and asked him for the details of the patient, he gave them his mother’s maiden name.

She was still gripping his hands forty minutes later, when the paramedics wheeled her into the delivery room. They peeled off her clothes and laced a hospital gown around her, and Tom was careful not to look while they did it. The medics gave her injections to stop the contractions, but they didn’t work. An hour after they’d arrived, the midwife told them that nothing was going to stop the baby coming.

“Are you the partner?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “I’m just a friend. I’ll wait outside, okay?”

Zoe gripped his hands. “Don’t leave me alone. Please.”

“I’ll just be outside.”

She looked up at him, pleading. “Please.”

Tom closed his eyes and opened them. “Okay.”

The midwife looked levelly at Zoe. “Just to confirm, are you happy for this gentleman to be present at the delivery?”

Zoe’s face convulsed with the pain of a contraction. When it was gone, she looked up at the midwife. “I don’t have anyone else.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

They gave her pethidine, and gas and air, and after that the contractions seemed to bother her less. He held her hand and dropped to his knees to whisper encouragement in her ear. Thirty-five years before, they hadn’t let him into the delivery room, but he told Zoe what he’d
told his own wife just before they’d wheeled her away from him. He said what he’d said to all of his athletes, for decades:
“Breathe.”

Zoe was disconnected with the shock and the opiates and the gas. She squeezed his hand and groaned.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.” He knew this was what you were supposed to say when it wasn’t.

She rolled her head to look at him, and her eyes were frantic.

“Tom,” she said. “When they let me out of here, let’s go straight back and finish the training session, okay?”

“Just breathe, alright? There’ll be plenty of time for all that.”

She shook her head and writhed with pain. “I have to get back.”

Sweat beaded on her face and her hand gripped his so hard that her nails drew blood. The midwife told her to push.

Tom was making sure to keep his eyes on her face, and Zoe had her eyes squeezed tight, and the doctors took something away but neither of them noticed, and no one explained anything to them.

Fifteen minutes later Zoe delivered the placenta, and both of them thought it was the baby.

“It’s coming,” Zoe groaned. “Oh God, it’s coming.”

Tom felt an arc of tension rise in her body, and as it subsided, he heard the heavy, flaccid weight of something coming out of her. He looked, expecting to see a newborn. Instead he saw a steak-sized parcel of gore in the midwife’s hands. It was wrapped in a translucent and gelatinous jacket, like a clear dumpling. The umbilical cord trailed from it. He forced himself to look again, following the cord to the place that must be the belly button, and trying to make sense of what he saw. He stared at the placenta for the longest time, thinking it to be the convexity of the belly, and searched at its extremities for the places where tiny arms and scrawny legs and an outraged little face should be. Not finding them, he felt a rising panic and a clawing shame that something had gone terribly and obscenely wrong. There was a hot metallic stink of blood, and the midwife was flustered and
uncommunicative. Her attention was turned to what was happening now on the other side of the delivery room, where doctors and nurses were crowding around something on a table that was blocked from his sight by their bodies.

Zoe was flat on her back, exhausted.

“Is it okay?” she whispered.

Tom squeezed her hand and tried not to vomit.

“Yeah,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

An orderly reached down with a latex-gloved hand and grasped the thing that had just come out of Zoe. Tom watched as the hand lifted the yielding mass into a large stainless steel dish, covered it with a plain green cloth, and placed it without ceremony on the middle shelf of the stainless steel trolley beside the bed.
Of course,
he thought.
These people saw such things from time to time. It was natural that they were unsentimental.

So that’s it,
he thought.
The thing wasn’t viable.

He couldn’t block out the image of its terrible malformation. He was only grateful that they weren’t going to make Zoe look at it.

He knelt by her ear. “Look, sweetheart,” he said. “I have to be straight with you here. It was beautiful, but it was stillborn.”

She looked at him then, and he saw the relief in her eyes.

A few minutes later the doctors wheeled over the thing they’d been working on. It was a clear acrylic box, besieged by monitoring machines and perforated by cables. Inside was a tiny premature newborn, much smaller than the hideous thing that the orderly had placed in the dish and taken away. This newborn was almost completely obscured by ventilating pipes, feeding tubes, protective headgear, and plastic sheeting. Tom wondered why they were showing Zoe some other woman’s baby. Maybe it was a psychological thing. Maybe if you’d just given birth to something monstrous, there was research that showed you needed to see a normal child immediately.