Gold (14 page)

The boys were terrible. There were slaps and falls and swearing echoing through the velodrome. The girls started laughing and stood up from their stretching to watch the boys. On the far side of the track the boys were losing it. It was falling into chaos.

Jack grinned at the girls. “Now, ladies, if I could have your kind attention, I have a terrible admission. My name really is Jack Argall, but Thomas Voss didn’t ask me to do this. I’m just one of you. I have no idea where Thomas Voss is, to tell the truth. So I would just like to take this opportunity to inform you girls that I am the reigning Scottish National Champion on a push bike, that these are my real biceps, that I am currently single, that all of you are extremely beautiful and stretchy, and that at this exact moment I’m the only male athlete in the building who isn’t looking like an arse and doing the backwards Bavarian slap dance. I thank you.”

He bowed. From the waist. With a flourish.

There was silence from everyone. Kate started laughing, and Jack winked at her. It turned into a coughing fit, and Jack touched her on the elbow. He said, “I’m sorry, are you okay?” Kate nodded at him, tears streaming.

The boys came back to the start line. They were seeing the funny side. They swore at Jack, and he put up high fives. Everyone was laughing now, or nearly everyone. Zoe stepped up to Jack. She was as tall as him. She looked him in the eyes. Her face was an inch from his, and she was shaking. The laughter stopped.

Zoe said, “Who. The fuck. Are you?”

Jack spread his hands wide. “Aw, come on! I was just playing!”

“Get a good look at us, did you? How was it?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, very pretty…”

Zoe punched him in the gut. She put her full weight behind it. It caught him unawares, and he staggered and bent double.

“Now,” she said. “Look at me differently.”

Jack got his balance back. He smiled. He held up a placatory hand. “Please…”

Zoe slapped him across the face, and the sound echoed around the velodrome. Tom felt it. He physically felt the sting and felt the breath catch in his chest.

Jack was rubbing his face.

“Remember that feeling,” Zoe said quietly.

All the kids stared at her in the half darkness. Her eyes were wild. Her face was white. The echoes took too long to die away.

“The fuck are you all looking at?” Zoe shouted. “Is this not serious for you? This isn’t Girl Guides. This isn’t something I do on Saturdays so my mother can have the house free to tidy.”

As they stood in shocked silence, Tom took his phone and made a quick call to the velodrome’s control room. The floodlights powered up from orange to white. The shadows shrank, the velodrome filled with light, and the prospects stood caught in it and blinking.

Tom walked calmly down to the track, taking some weight off his knees on the handrail. He looked them all in the eye.

“Okay, guys,” he said. “My fault entirely, I reckon. Jack, you’re a dick. Are you injured?”

Jack rubbed his face. “No.”

Tom said, “Zoe, you’re a menace. Are you sorry?”

She looked straight at Jack and shook her head.

“Well, can I rephrase? Zoe, if we all agree that Jack’s behavior was out of order and we were wrong to laugh, will you agree to take out your aggression on the track?”

She shrugged. She made a face that could be read both ways. Tom was old enough to take that, while it was on the table.

“Well okay then.” He held up his hands. “Look, I’m Tom Voss. I’m not proud of what happened just now. I play the receptionist trick every year. I’m a decent coach but I only get three days to sort out which of you might cut it internationally, so I go undercover and learn the psychology. I think I’ve learned all I need. Now, let’s ride, shall we?”

The prospects smiled. They couldn’t help it. Their bodies changed. From standing stiff, they loosened. Their knees bent slightly, their fingers flexed. Balance shifted from heels to balls of feet. Calves tightened and breath quickened.

Tom grinned back at them. “Christ, you lot are like bloody wolves! Never let it be said you bastards aren’t keen.”

He issued bikes. They were pretty basic. The frames were heavy steel with dents. He let them fine-tune the bikes to size and had each of them write their name on their machine, in marker pen on masking tape stuck to the top tube. He watched them peel off the last rider’s name.

He told them to strip down to their race kits and warm up for half an hour. He had them do slow laps, each of them watching the others, circling like ships in a whirlpool.

Tom observed as they orbited him. He analyzed their form and after a dozen laps he already knew which three of them would make it to the highest level. Under these shadowless arc lights he saw that Zoe, Kate, and Jack would graduate to the big events. They would be the ones to race one-on-one around the banked wooden curves of the world’s velodromes—these gladiators’ arenas, encircled by the roaring crowd, where human speed and human loneliness were contained so that they might be witnessed. They would become the most powerful athletes on earth, propelling their silent machines to speeds where the air started to scream.

In the velodrome their sprints would last for less than two minutes, but the making of those minutes had begun before his eyes. They would come up in the sport together, have these angry confrontations together, love and loathe and make up together, and peak together in their late
twenties and early thirties. They would match each other breath for burning breath, pedal stroke for pedal stroke at the speed of a swooping bird, and win or lose by millimeters. The tiniest error—the lightest touch of wheel on wheel—and bones and bikes would shatter. They would wear no protective armor, only aerodynamic suits that showed off every lean and sculpted muscle. They would wear mirrored visors, hiding their eyes. They would become unknowable. Their minds as they raced would transcend. They would be aware of the swirling vortices of the rival’s slipstream; of the precise burn in every particular fibrous strand of each muscle group; of the constantly fluctuating parameters of heat, humidity, and surface texture that determined the limits of tire adhesion on each square centimeter of the track. They would be aware of the hope they were chasing and of the failure that stalked them, they would be aware of their future and their past, and they would be aware of every pixel of the moment, from the knots in the boards of the track all the way up to the plaits of the little girl in a blue checked dress, in row thirty-eight, catching her breath as she realized she wanted to be just like them. The jurisdiction of the psyche in their races would remain unmapped by literature or science. More would be known about the minds of hunting sharks.

The best Tom could do for these kids was to coach them to Olympian level, where they rode to destroy each other, once every four years and for less than two minutes each time, on the greatest of the world’s stages. They would ride for the thousands roaring in the stands and the three billion watching at home. The winners would receive their own childhood dreams of glory, smelted into a disk and presented back to them on a ribbon. The medal itself would be sixty millimeters across, three millimeters thick, made of silver and gilded with six grams of pure gold. Tom remembered when the gold medal used to be solid—but these days, what was?

Tom watched as the warm-up period ended. He saw Kate’s latent strength and Zoe’s perfect flow and Jack’s incandescent energy. They
were looking over at him now, excitedly, waiting for his signal that would end the warm-up and start the action.

He held the starting whistle between his lips. When he gave the signal, these people’s lives would change in ways they couldn’t yet know. It would be harder for them than they realized, because outside those exalted two minutes of each race, they were condemned to be ordinary people burdened with minds and bodies and human sentimental attachments that were never designed to accelerate to such velocities. They would go through agonies of decompression, like divers returning too quickly from the deep. They would have this one certain, strange, and mercurial quality, these unknowable people with their eyes hidden behind visors: at exactly the moment they crossed the finish line, they would become human beings just like anyone else.

Tom hesitated. He held the whistle ready, but he didn’t have the heart to blow it.

And then Kate swooped down from the high side of the track and brought her bike to a stop beside him. She took off her helmet and beamed at him, and Tom felt his heart melt. He frowned back at her sparkling blue eyes and her cheeks pink from the warm-up.

“What?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

She gave him the middle finger. “Can we bloody race yet, or what?” she said.

He laughed. All her hesitation and her awkwardness were gone. She was a different girl on the bike. This was what you did on the track, for better or worse—you raced yourself. And for a while at least, you could win.

“Race?” said Tom. “Ah, so that’s what you’re here for.”

He blew the whistle and called the riders in to him.

Now Tom picked his head up off the desk and looked at the email again.

You will need to have a word with Zoe and Kate ahead of the IOC announcement.

There was no sense whinging about it. It was on him, and he wasn’t going to shirk it. If you were honest, you called these heartbreaks in to you the moment you blew that whistle.

Zoe woke on the dark sheets of her own bed in the first wash of the pale April light. It was always like this. The slightest hint of dawn snapped her eyes open and sent adrenaline surging through her limbs. Immobility was impossible. You couldn’t train your body up to this pitch and also require it to lie still, however nice that would be.

Beside her was the junior doctor who’d checked her over in A&E the night before. Seeing that no bones were broken, and since his shift finished at eight, he’d offered her a lift home and she’d offered him a euphemism. Coffee was probably the one she’d used—she didn’t recall.

In sleep he’d taken up a position along the far edge of her bed, lying on his side, incurved like a closing parenthesis. She stroked his cheek and he didn’t respond—he was in deep sleep. Zoe ran light fingers over the soft skin of his shoulder. His stillness moved her.

There was a language of sleeping together and most men shouted it. Even good lovers became strident in sleep: fidgeting, sprawling, holding on to you. As if you needed to be held. As if it was against all odds that you had managed, for thirty-two years, not to fatally injure yourself by tumbling out of your own bed due to the absence of a relative stranger to anchor you.

Zoe stroked his cheek again. His eyes opened. They were pale green, and something stirred in her. He looked at her blankly for a moment, then closed his eyes again without waking. They worked the juniors a hundred hours a week, she’d heard.

Asleep, he looked really young. Zoe liked the tidy, self-contained way he slept. She hadn’t wanted the sex as much as she wanted to share
this space with another human being, forty-six floors up in the clouds. Sex was cheap money that you could print on demand and use to buy a reprieve from loneliness till morning.

Afterwards the man had collapsed, exhausted. He’d said this nice thing that had made her smile: “In my professional opinion there is quite literally nothing wrong with you, Zoe.”

“I might want a second opinion.”

“I might want some sleep.”

She’d laughed, and they’d lain together quietly in the dark. She’d felt his heart beating, and he’d felt hers. The rate of it had made him anxious to the extent that he’d taken hold of her wrist to measure her pulse.

“I don’t mean to worry you, but…”

She’d ruffled his hair. “My pulse is thirty-nine. I know. It’s okay, I’m not dying. I’m superhuman.”

He’d smiled sleepily. “What are your special powers?”

“Oh, you know, I just like to keep myself fit.”

He didn’t know who she was, and she hadn’t told him. It was easier to be herself that way. She’d kissed him, and he’d fallen asleep with the lightest touch on her wrist. She’d lain there listening to his breathing. She hadn’t moved her wrist from beneath his hand. Her whole life was filled with people who knew who she was, and who gave her training schedules, and who took her pulse day in and day out. They measured her maximum heart rate, her lactate threshold heart rate, her heart rate at optimal power output. It had felt good to lie quietly in her own private darkness beside this man who seemed to care, however slightly, what her heart was doing when it was resting.

In the feeble dawn light Zoe pulled the duvet up around the doctor’s shoulders and left him alone to sleep.

In the living area she put the news channel on mute while she did two hundred abdominal crunches, eighty side planks, and sixty seated oblique twists with a medicine ball. She stretched, then showered with
her grazed arm held high to protect the surgical dressing. She toweled her hair and made espresso. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows, she sipped it as the sun rose over the wide human sprawl of Manchester. The bright light connected with the postexercise glow in her chest and she felt weightless and uncomplicated. For the first time since moving into this high tower, she felt okay about it.