Gold (23 page)

He lifted Sophie carefully out of the basket and sat down with her by the track. The excitement had left her shattered. Jack pulled the fleece blanket back around her and held her on his lap.

He watched Kate and Zoe sparring. Kate got her real bike up to speed for a few laps and then Tom had the two of them do power intervals—ten seconds at full exertion followed by a minute to bring the heart rate back down. Jack kept his arms around Sophie as he watched. Every time the two riders flashed past, Sophie whispered, “Come on, Mum, you’re so much quicker!”

Watching the two women, Jack wasn’t sure. It had never been easy to choose between them.

In the hospital, after the crash, Zoe had held his hand. He’d woken up from anesthesia and seen her looking down at him with an expression more like sarcasm than sympathy.

“You took your sweet time,” she said.

“To…?”

“To be conscious. I got so bored.”

Jack glanced around. It seemed from the many beds with their green sheets and modesty curtains that they were on a hospital ward, or in some kind of budget hotel concept that probably shouldn’t catch on. The girl was saying she was sorry for some crash.

Jack said, “What crash?”

Concussion had set him back a couple of days. He half recognized
Zoe, though. Remembered her name, even, but not where he knew her from. He found himself smiling at her. It seemed safest. He remembered having had an argument with her once. Either recently or long ago. Maybe he’d been very drunk. Maybe he still was—maybe that was the problem. He wondered why she was holding his hand.

“Sorry, are we… going out or something?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Would you like us to? You’re very attractive.”

“God,” she said. “You’re ridiculous.”

She didn’t stop smiling though, and they began talking. She told him how they’d fought at the velodrome, and yes, he remembered it now. He remembered her hitting him, in a rage. He must have pushed all her buttons.

She seemed different now. All of the hardness he remembered, it melted away as she talked. She was beautiful. She struck him as kind of sad, or maybe angry, or maybe she was just talking about fetching tea and a biscuit—he was finding it hard to follow her words. Her voice was slipping in and out of phase like the rainbow of sounds at the end of “Bold as Love.” And all the while here was a white thing in a green sling angling up and away from him. After the longest time he realized that the white thing was his own leg, in plaster, suspended from the ceiling on a chain. This was a weird place to put it. He could see his toes sticking out from the plaster cast, and by making the right movements in his brain, he could make the toes wiggle. It was hard though—it made him cross-eyed with concentration, like bringing a plane in to land. Just wiggling his own toes. He laughed, interrupting whatever she was saying.

“What?” she said, irritated.

“My
leg
!” he said, incredulous. “The fuck is it doing up there?”

She began explaining the crash to him again, but he cut her off.

“Just feel under my blanket,” he said. “See if this leg’s still attached to me, at least.”

“Under your blanket?” She smirked. “You’ll be lucky.”

He grinned back. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”

“Are you always like this?”

The question confused him. The morphine was wearing off. He lost his train of thought and noticed his broken leg all over again. This time, it hurt.

He looked up and saw Zoe more clearly now. Pale, intense, head shaved like a penitent.

“Tell me about you,” he said. It was something you were meant to say, and he said it to give himself some time.

Her green eyes stared off into space. “Ah, you don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

Her eyes snapped back down to his and he saw a flash of anger, but it quickly dissolved into uncertainty. “Yeah?”

He felt sorry for bringing that expression to her face. She couldn’t work out if he was playing with her.

He squeezed her hand. “Really.”

Something in her eyes closed itself off, and she laughed. “Forget it.”

When she laughed it unsettled him. Her eyes did something different from her face.

A nurse came and gave him more morphine.

“I love you, nurse,” he told her. “You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

When the nurse had gone, Zoe shook her head. “The fuck is wrong with you?”

The question confused him. Then he noticed his leg again. “I think it’s this,” he said. “Oh my God, I think I might have broken it.”

Hours went by. His parents came and went in a blur of morphine and concussion.

When he woke it was daylight again and Zoe was still holding his hand and Kate was there in the ward, staring at them without words. As soon as Jack saw her face, he remembered her. She was the girl he’d talked with at the track, the one he couldn’t keep away from. He’d loved
the way she laughed and shrugged off defeat, the way she turned every negative positive. She was gentle good energy, and it made you feel simpler and stronger being around her.

She looked devastated when she saw his hand in Zoe’s.

He tried to sit up but his ribs were cracked, and he fell back to the pillow in pain.

“I’m sorry…” he said.

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I didn’t realize you two were… I…”

“Oh, it’s not… I mean…”

He stumbled on his words as Kate’s lip began to tremble.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just so tired. I think I’ll just…”

“No, please, it’s just that…”

Jack took his hand away from Zoe’s, but Kate was already turning to go. They watched her back disappearing down the ward.

“Fuck,” Jack said, raising his head and slamming it back down on the pillow.

Kate’s trainers squeaked on the floor as they covered the length of the ward. The heavy doors swung closed behind her at the end of the room.

Zoe said, “Want me to fetch her back? Your choice.”

They watched the swing doors returning to stillness in diminishing oscillations. When they were motionless, Jack found it quite possible to believe that the scene had not just happened.

He sighed. “Nah.”

He reached over to touch Zoe’s hands again, but she took them back into her lap. Which was understandable but also a bit overdramatic, he felt.

“Okay, I’m a bad person,” he said simply.

“No. It’s fine. I mean, she’s cute.”

“Is she? I mean…”

“Don’t shit me, okay? You’ve been flirting with her for three days.”

“Well, you know, that’s what I’m like. There’s less to me than the bike I rode in on.”

“Is that meant to make me feel better?”

Jack was suddenly tired of apologizing. There was a throbbing pain in his leg and ribs, now that the morphine was wearing off again.

“I don’t care how it makes you feel,” he said.

She blinked. “Thanks for the information.”

“My pleasure.”

They were silent for a minute, then Zoe sniffed and leaned back in her chair. “I know she’s more your type anyway.”

He smiled. “Really? What’s my type then?”

She shrugged. “Pretty happy. Pretty normal. Pretty pretty.”

“As opposed to…?”

Zoe managed a half smile. “I’m ugly on the inside. I’ll mess your head up.”

“Aye, I’ve used that line myself.
I’m a bad boy, I’ll break your heart.
It’s a good one, really sexy.”

“You think I’m joking.”

“You won’t do it to me,” Jack said. “I mean look at me. I’m indestructible.”

Zoe smiled and shook her head. “No one’s indestructible.”

“Try me,” he said.

He stretched out and took her hand and pulled her down towards him. She resisted at first, then she let him pull her close. She wasn’t smiling now. With their lips almost touching she said, “No one’s indestructible, Jack.”

The movement of her lips brushed them against his. This was their first kiss, this thing that started out as a warning, and as their lips touched he thought about Kate. He didn’t like that. He couldn’t understand why the flash of her face came, or why it bothered him. Nothing had happened between them in the three days of the program, which wasn’t his usual style. They’d flirted but she’d held herself back, and if
he’d thought about it at all, he’d imagined that would make her easy to forget. It nagged at him that he was thinking about her now, at exactly the moment when his body was insisting he shouldn’t. Kissing Zoe was good, and it made him think of Kate, which was inexplicable, like getting ready to leave the house and putting on your jacket and shoes and opening the front door and instead of seeing the street, seeing your own hallway looking back at you.

Zoe stayed with him all day and then all that week. There were kisses and whispered conversations, and all of it was good, and slowly the sense of unease subsided and he stopped thinking about Kate when Zoe touched him. He grew used to her lips, and he liked listening to her, and he followed the morphine down into a graceful state just above pain and just below happiness. The ward was starting to fill up. Now that it was getting busy, the nurses began to enforce visiting hours. Zoe had to leave between six p.m. and nine a.m., but the first minute the nurses let her back in, there she would be, pushing the swing doors open. She sat by his bedside for hours. She would slide her hand under the sheets to place it against his heart. He would let his own hand wander from her arm, to her knee, to her thigh. On the second day she suddenly took it and slipped it quickly under her waistband. She cupped it there for a few seconds while the other patients ogled
Countdown
, blaring out from the TV. While the rest of the ward watched contestants trying to configure six numbers to produce a randomly chosen total, Jack felt the warmth of her sex. It was a juxtaposition he found easy to confuse with the sensation of falling suddenly and delightedly in love.

They dared each other on. He loved how Zoe didn’t give a shit—didn’t really care if they were caught. He loved how she slipped her hand further down under the sheets and cupped his balls and whispered in his ear, “When we get out of here you’re not safe.” He was nineteen and drowning in morphine and he didn’t see the harm in it. This was a game they played: while the ward bustled with patients and their visitors, she would cover her lap with a blanket as if she was cold, and he
would slip his arm underneath and she would read him sports articles from the
Daily Mail
in the most matter-of-fact voice she could muster. “‘Whenever football lovers gather to reflect on the beauty of their game they will talk of the night Manchester United gave Juventus a two-goal start before calmly proceeding to place a shroud over Turin. This will rank forever among the most magnificent comebacks in the annals of the European game.’” A visitor on the ward would only have noticed the very slight cracking of her voice on “calmly proceeding,” and the sudden flush of blood in her cheeks. Afterwards she would lean back languorously in her chair and read the horoscopes in a dreamy voice.

“Taurus,” she said. “You will meet a tall dark stranger. And somehow or other she swears to God she will find a way to give you a blow job without anyone on this ward noticing.”

“It doesn’t really say that.”

“You’re right, it’s the
Daily Mail
.” She peered again at the newsprint. “The actual phrase they use is ‘lewd sex act.’”

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.

“That’s why you’re still happy,” she said casually.

The next day
Antiques Roadshow
came on the TV. It was popular in the ward, and all the eyes were off them. She quietly drew the curtain most of the way round the bed and ducked down under his blankets, and Jack closed his eyes and felt certain that a bond was forming between them that would by some process—the mechanisms of which were yet to be established in his mind but in which his faith grew even as an old lady got to the head of the queue clutching a painting by a local watercolor artist and Zoe brought him to the point of no return—would by some process lead to some shared happiness that would occur between them for some unspecified period—a lifetime, for example—and in locations still to be determined—a rented studio flat, perhaps, with bikes hanging in the hallway, and then a bigger flat, and then maybe a small house with a kids’ room. Lazy with pleasure, afterwards as the TV drifted into the news, this was how Zoe seemed to him: like a
future unhurriedly condensing from the white-hot gases of youth, like a star not in a rush to be formed.

He began to feel that he loved her.

This is what he said to her on the fifth day, and he knew straightaway that it was a mistake. He told her in the gray light of a tedious afternoon in that ward that was no longer an empty stage on which they shone alone but which was increasingly crowded with the needy and the sick, who brought with them their own visitors with their corpulence and their flatulence and their rustle of carrier bags full of paperbacks and fudge.

“Sorry?” Zoe said, distractedly.