Gold (20 page)

There was no answer. Jack watched as Sophie tilted her head. Her expression was inscrutable.

“What is it?” Jack said.

“Are you sometimes not sure, Dad?”

“Me? No, I’m always sure.”

“You always sound sure.”

“Aye. Because I am.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

Sophie closed her eyes. “Nothing.” She swallowed again. The color was gone from her face.

“Are you feeling sick?”

“No.”

Jack felt her forehead. “You are a wee bit hot.”

“I’m fine.”

He held her hand and sat with her, there on the kitchen floor. Sophie leaned her head on his shoulder and kept her eyes closed.

Jack didn’t feel sad; this was what sometimes surprised him. He
loved hanging out with Sophie, even with all this going on. When she’d first been diagnosed, he’d never imagined that happiness would be possible again. The correct response to having a critically ill child seemed to be a kind of stoical calm, or an endless, heavy solemnity that could bring flying birds to ground and suck the brightness out of sunlight. Jack had felt that for the first year or so, but eventually you grew out of it.

You could only be sad if you let yourself join the dots, if you allowed the scatter of moments in their totality to have some kind of a downward trend that you might be dumb enough to extrapolate. If you just sat on the kitchen floor like this, enjoying the feeling of your bare feet on these checkered tiles warmed by this bright April sun, and you breathed in the ashy, medicated smell of your kid, then it was okay.

Being a rider helped. The only way you could bear the training, and certainly the only way you could endure the pain of the sprint, was to take life one fraction of a second at a time. You carried that attitude with you across the finish line and through the dressing room and out into ordinary life with your kit still wet in your kit bag. One moment of pain was never unbearable unless you allowed it to have some kind of a relationship with the moments on either side of it. Atoms of time could be trained to operate quite effectively in strictly partitioned cubicles on the open-plan floor of the day.

Jack let Sophie fall asleep leaning against him. He smiled. You could practically hear the lightsabers humming in the girl’s dreams.

Kate came in from the next room and looked down at the pair of them fondly. Jack thought she looked more tired than usual. He knew she found it harder than he did, to let the day wash over her. She was tired and sick of their daughter being sick and tired, was what it was. Jack tended to trust the chemo, but he knew Kate was always asking herself whether there might be some version of cutting her own heart out and offering it to the gods on a sharpened stick that she had somehow missed in her determination to do everything she could for Sophie.
She stayed up late every night reading up on plasma or leukocytes, she got up early to bake a special kind of bread with wild grains and low gluten, and she missed training to organize days out for morale, like yesterday’s trip to the Death Star.

“You two…” Kate said.

The sound brought Sophie upright. Confused, she looked up at Jack with eyes that struck him as eerily blank, like a fish’s after the life had been knocked from it.

Jack’s breath caught in his chest. Fear, which he’d been holding at bay, had only needed one look to show him how negotiable his defenses were.

When he looked again, Sophie was back inside her eyes.

He shivered. “Would it help if I put on the special cheering-up music?”

Sophie widened her eyes in horror. “Nooooo…”

Jack jumped up, connected his iPod to the stereo in the kitchen, and selected the massed pipe bands of the Scottish Highlands playing a marching tune originally composed to be lethal to the English at a range of up to five miles, even in conditions of wind, rain, and mist. Kate hurried out of the room. Jack cranked up the volume.

Tins moved on the shelves. The windows rattled and buzzed. Jack imagined the neighbors cringing. The houses shared a party wall, which Jack liked to think of as Hadrian’s.

He lifted Sophie to her feet and shouted over the noise of the stereo, “Christ, Soph! Get a load of those pipes and tell me you don’t feel better already!”

She stuck her fingers in her ears. “It’s not helping!”

“What’s that you say, big girl? I can’t hear you above the sound of four hundred kilted Scotsmen telling leukemia where to stick it!”

She tried her hardest to scowl but it came out as a grin instead.

“That’s my girl!”

The two of them listened to the pipe bands for a minute, and Sophie
even managed half a reel around the kitchen floor with him. Jack was happy, and given that there was a fixed quantity of happiness in the universe, then he could only assume that in an equal and opposite kitchen somewhere on Earth, the father of another sick girl was listening to Mozart’s
Requiem
and not dancing.

When Sophie needed to get her breath back, Jack took a Mars bar from the fridge, broke it in two, and offered half to her.

“Get that down you. All the vital food groups: toffee, chocolate, and the mysterious beige matrix that we must assume to be vitamins.”

He lifted her onto a kitchen chair and watched her chewing. The pipe bands finished up on the stereo.

“Dad, can I ask you something?”

“Sure thing, big girl. What is it?”

She sighed, her expression implying that Jack might not be the brightest light in the room.

“Is Mum okay?”

“Yeah. Of course. Why?”

Sophie dropped her eyes and flushed. She laid one hand on top of the other on the tabletop, then removed the bottom hand and put it on top. She repeated this, faster and faster, zoning in.

“What is it?” he said.

She stopped abruptly. “Is she training hard enough?”

“Absolutely.”

“Did she miss training yesterday for me?”

“No. She had a rest day in her schedule. Me and Zoe too.”

“Honestly?”

Jack crossed his heart. “Honestly.”

“I want Mum to win gold in London.”

“So do I.”

“It’s her turn, Dad.”

He shrugged. “There aren’t turns in sport. They do it by whoever’s quickest.”

She looked steadily at him. “What if she isn’t quickest, and it’s because of me?”

He stroked her cheek. “Oh Sophie. I’m sure if you asked Mum, she’d say there were some things more important than winning.”

She held his eyes for a second longer. She blinked.

Straightaway, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. She turned away. Jack turned her back to face him and she sat there passively, shoulders hunched.

Jack hesitated. Of course you could turn a child so that she physically faced you. This was something you could do when you were six foot tall and superhuman. The trick was in knowing what to say.

“Maybe you should talk to Mum about it,” he said gently.

Sophie shrugged simply. “I can’t talk to her like I can talk to you.”

“Why not?”

She sighed. “I just can’t.”

Jack felt a constriction in his chest—an ache—whether for himself or his daughter or his wife he didn’t know. He’d never asked himself such a question. If he’d thought about it at all, he’d always felt that Kate was closer to Sophie. Nevertheless he’d sometimes felt guilty for his unshakable state of happiness, while Sophie was going through so much. He’d often worried that it had to be a certain detachment that permitted him to feel good, from moment to moment. Kate suffered more. She was the one who agonized about nutrition and nursing, she was the one who dropped everything when Sophie took turns for the worse, and she was the one who set her alarm three times a night to go and check in on their daughter. And yet here he was, apparently closer to her.

He dropped his eyes and stared miserably at the backs of his hands.

“I was the first person who held you, did you know that?” he said quietly. “When you were nine hours old. I didn’t know how to do it. They showed me how to scrub my hands and put on the latex gloves, and they showed me how to put my hands through the holes in the incubator. Then they stopped giving me the instructions. So there I was,
with my hands sticking through the glove holes and your little body lying on the blue plastic pad and all the wee tubes and whatnot coming out of you, and I said, ‘What do I do now?’ And they said, ‘Just hold her.’ And I was so scared I was going to drop you. I didn’t know how to do something as simple as hold you, Sophie. Sometimes I still don’t.”

“It’s okay,” said Sophie. “I don’t mind.”

They hugged for a while, and then Jack carried her up to her room for a rest.

Kate came into the kitchen when he was back down there, making more tea.

She laughed. “Real tea, in a pot? Okay, what have you done?”

He jumped at the sound of her voice and spun round. “What?”

“You’re the tea-bag-in-a-mug guy. You only make me proper posh tea when you’re sorry for something.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Once when you forgot our anniversary and once when your dad got pissed and tried to kiss me.”

He frowned. “I never realized.”

She kissed him. “See? I can read you like a book.”

“Which book?”

“One of those early readers with a list of new words we learned at the back.”

“And which new words did we learn?”

“Gorgeous, handsome, bloody, idiot.” She counted them off on her fingers.

He put his arms around her. “Sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“For being so bloody gorgeously idiotically handsome.”

“This is what my pot of tea is for?”

“Yeah. Don’t drink it all at once.”

She twisted in his arms to look up at him. “Really, though. Is something wrong?”

“If I make you a pot of tea, it has to mean there’s something on my mind? This is your contention?”

“Indeed.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Well, I’m sorry for that. But honestly, nothing’s wrong.”

“Truly?”

He hugged her tighter. “Truly.”

After a while Kate switched on the radio, and they looked out through the kitchen window and drank their teas while The The played “Uncertain Smile.”

“Remember this?” said Jack.

“Oh God, I do.”

“After my crash? Driving up the motorway? When you still thought I was an egotist?”

“I still think you’re an egotist
now
.”

He looked at her to see if she was being serious, but she was looking out the window and he couldn’t tell. He followed her gaze. Propped against the little shed in the small, sunny back yard, Sophie’s bicycle was rusting.

When Kate went upstairs, she found Sophie vomiting into the upstairs toilet. She was puking undramatically, with the resignation of a girl doing something less pleasant than cleaning her teeth but less arduous than homework.

Kate rushed to her. “You poor thing,” she said, stroking Sophie’s cheek and feeling the hot dryness of her skin. “Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m fine,” said Sophie, wiping her mouth.

“Have you been feeling poorly?”

Sophie shook her head.

“It was just really sudden?”

“Yeah.”

Kate ran a flannel under the bathroom tap and cleaned her up.

“Feel better now?”

Sophie smiled up at her. “Much better.”

Kate held her tight, and sighed. She must have fed her something wrong, which was bad of her because Sophie could eat so many things. This is what the dietician told her. Sophie had allergies and intolerances, of course, which was normal with leukemia and diminished immune function. The dietician told Kate that she just had to be imaginative.
Don’t obsess on what’s prohibited
, he insisted.
Think of the millions of things in nature. See it this way: your daughter can eat almost anything.

And he was right, thought Kate, so long as it wasn’t food. She rinsed the flannel and wrung it out. Sophie was wheat-intolerant and she couldn’t do shellfish. She could eat fresh fruit and sparingly cooked vegetables and she liked those things about as much as other kids did. Also, she had no resistance to germs. Everything got boiled or peeled. Theoretically she could eat fish. The dietician had told Kate:
Fish is nature’s superfood, Mum. It’s nutrition with fins. It’s lunch with a face on the front. Your daughter will live till she’s ninety on fish.

Sophie hated fish, though. She made outraged faces and spat it out. Because as well as having leukemia, she was eight. There were multiple protocols to treat leukemia, but the only known cure for being eight was being nine. In the meantime, no fish. Or yeast. Or soy. Or ground nuts. Or nuts from trees. Or citrus fruit. Sometimes Kate opened the fridge and just stared. Why, she didn’t know. In case they’d invented a more edible kind of food, perhaps, and she’d cleverly bought it without remembering. She could sometimes stand there for a whole minute, gazing into the bright white light as if a cure might be hidden between the baby sweet corn and the carefully scrubbed new potatoes.