Gold (29 page)

“Not on our first date. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not that kind of a girl.”

Zoe laughed, but halfway through the laugh she started crying.

“Zoe? What is it?”

She sniffed. She bit her knuckles and whispered, “I’m fucking
pregnant
, Kate.” Her face was crumpling so hard, the word came out in a squeak.

“What?”

“I’m pregnant. No one knows.”

“No one?”

Zoe shook her head.

“Oh. Wow. I mean… right.”

“It’s okay. I mean, it’s nothing. I have to get rid of it, right?”

Kate blinked. “Oh
God
, I mean…”

Zoe swallowed. Her voice was broken. “I know. But I have to. Don’t I? I mean, I’m doing Athens. I’m not doing… you know…
baby
.”

Kate was silent.

“Kate?”

Zoe watched her face distorting, and it made no sense. It took her the longest time to work out that Kate was trying not to cry. She felt a surge of anger. What was Kate doing crying, when Zoe was the one whose life was in bits?

“What’s your problem?” she said. “I’ve got no
choice
, okay?”

“Zoe, please…”

“No choice at all. So don’t guilt-trip me.”

She watched Kate’s red eyes rise up to meet hers.

“Is it Jack’s?” Kate said quietly.

Zoe didn’t feel the impact until a few seconds afterwards. She hadn’t thought about whose child she might be carrying, only about how
quickly she could stop carrying it. When the question came, the shock was so total that she couldn’t make her face deny that it was possible.

Kate watched her, her face heavy with sadness.

“I knew something had happened,” she said finally. “He was so quiet in the training camp…”

Zoe got up, left the room, and went for a long walk alone around the streets of Stuttgart. She realized as she walked that there wasn’t any different way to do the maths. She hadn’t slept with anyone since she’d slept with Jack, and not in the month before him either. That meant two things: that the baby was his and that sleeping with him had meant something to her, at least enough to break the pattern of her behavior. Something had been growing in her emotions as well as in her womb, and she would somehow have to find the strength to get rid of both.

On the plane back to London, she was a wreck. She hadn’t slept. She covered her head with a fleece and hugged her knees in a window seat, three rows behind Kate and Jack. Half an hour into the flight she stood and walked up the aisle to them. She wanted to say sorry. More than that, she was desperate to talk. Tom was furious with her, and with Kate and Jack closed against her too, there was no one to speak with about the agonizing choice she was trying to make. She reached their row. Sensing her looming, expecting her to be a member of the cabin crew, they looked up with the half smiles of people about to politely turn down the offer of coffee or tea. When she saw the shock come into their faces, followed by Jack’s embarrassment and Kate’s miserable confusion, she mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and hurried back to her seat.

There were photographers waiting at Heathrow. She walked through customs into a galaxy of flashes. Money had changed hands. Someone at the clinic had leaked the news. A reporter shouted at her. He was from Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper. From somewhere behind the crowd barrier he yelled, “Zoe! Zoe! Are you going to keep the baby, or are you going to the Olympics?”

Once it was put like that, in public, it wasn’t her choice to make
anymore. A hundred bright flashes caught the bone-white realization on her face.

After they’d eaten and Sophie was in bed, Kate put the dishes in to soak. On the windowsill above the sink was the drilled metal container holding the washing-up brushes, and next to it was the silver trophy cup into which Jack had counted Sophie’s sixteen pills that morning. It was empty now.

“It’s only the Olympics,” Kate said. “I could just ditch it, you know. Spend more time with Sophie.”

She saw a pale and cautious fear flare in Jack’s eyes.

“Stop that talk,” he said. “You’ll fight Zoe for the place, and you’ll win it, and you’ll go and race in London. You were neck and neck on the track today.”

Kate stared out the window. “I worry about fighting her. I think she’s getting more unstable. I think she’s losing it.”

“Don’t make it about her. Think about how Sophie would feel if you quit. Think about how you’d feel.”

“What about you? How would you feel?”

“If you quit?”

“Yes.”

She watched the strain of it tightening his face.

“I’d quit too,” he said.

She nodded, believing he meant it but not believing he would.

She ran the cold tap and rinsed the suds off the baking dish. Maybe this was how it ended, after all, at thirty-two years of age. Not in defeat or glory on the track, but here, with a new load of their training kit in the laundry basket upstairs, and these three plain white plates with their pasta-bake encrustations soaking in the sink. Detergent breaking down the stubborn grease.

“Maybe I need some time to think,” she said.

“Oh Christ,” said Jack, holding his head. “Since when was this about thinking?”

And he was right—it was terrible to hear herself saying such things. On the cork wall behind them were Sophie’s drawings, from baby to eight years old. The smiling suns and the spaceships. Their daughter’s footprints in yellow poster paint, making the petals of a sunflower. Kate remembered how she had held Sophie’s skinny ankle to stamp each foot in its hour. With her other arm she had held Sophie up; this was before she could stand on her own. The strong stem and the broad leaves Kate had drawn herself, with a green wax crayon, while Jack was on the plane to Athens.

“Just think about it,” Jack was saying. “What would you do, if you gave up?”

She waved a dismissive hand, then winced as the movement stretched her tattoo.

“There are other ways to make a living, right? I mean unless all those commuters are faking it, there are other jobs.”

Jack stroked her cheek. “Not once you’ve heard the crowd.”

She pushed his hand away, gently. In truth, the baying of the crowd had often frightened her. It set your adrenaline pumping, yes, but there was a particular silence at the heart of it. The crowd got thirty minutes for its lunch break. The crowd smoked outside its office building in the rain, stubbing out its cigarettes and disposing of the smoldering ends by inserting them through the metal grille of a wall-mounted disposal unit according to a directive contained in an email that had been circulated. The crowd was Jack, if his dad hadn’t pushed him out of his comfort zone. The crowd was her, if her own father hadn’t taken her to a bike race when she was six. It was the thinnest of separations, and the crowd noise carried easily across the space and haunted her.

She shivered. It was dark outside, and here were these dishes in the sink and the laundry in the basket and the orange blush of streetlamps revealing the rooflines. From their neighbors’ windows, that warm and
self-assured glow. That underlying flicker of TV. And in the sink, this scud of soap bubbles, thinner each time she looked.

Tom had always warned them about this:
One day, sooner than you think, your sporting life will be over.

This soft sound of soap bubbles popping in the bowl.

This despair in her husband’s voice as he said to her, “Think about what’s good for you, for once. You don’t owe anyone else one more thing.”

She turned and watched him. “Even so, I think I’d rather look after Sophie than fight against Zoe.”

“It’s not an either/or. Oh Kate, is this about your confidence? I
know
you can beat Zoe. The only thing stopping you is the fear you might lose.”

She heard the sharpness come into her voice. “I’m scared I might win. Winning is all she has. I’m nervous what she might do to herself if we leave her with nothing. I’m terrified of what she might do to
us
.”

She saw from his eyes that he felt it too, that he’d been struggling to formulate it until now. He didn’t think past the immediate, this was the thing with Jack. The sheer simplicity of him was the reason they’d ended up with a life of such complexity. It wasn’t his fault that she could deal with the complications and he couldn’t. People had their natural habitats, after all, demarcated not in ecologies but in ages. He’d been perfectly adapted to being nineteen, and she was better at being thirty-two.

She kissed him, carefully, on the cheek, and both of them circled around this thing that she had finally said out loud. They reached for ways to ring it around with more words, to make it safe.

Jack said, “She can’t hurt us anymore, Kate. That was nearly ten years ago. We’re older and wiser now.”

“So’s she.”

“But what can she actually do to us, if we trust each other and we don’t let her get between us?”

The question hung there between them.

Kate looked out the window at the dark back yards and the dark
terraced houses darkening further under the sudden hammer of rain. She could have had so many other lives.

When she was six, Dad had taken her to her first bike race. It was something they could do together, out of the house. Dad had seen the race advertised in the local paper; it could just as easily have been tiddlywinks or judo.

Mum and Dad had argued at breakfast, that day. Kate was eating fried eggs. She didn’t think about the argument too much. Mum had been grumpy for weeks; her new job made her miserable. She sold door-to-door, working for a company selling fabrics by the yard. Sometimes she went on road trips, and once or twice a month she had to stay the night away from home.

At breakfast on the day of the race, Mum snatched her plate before Kate had finished. She crashed it down by the sink. There were rings under her eyes. Dad said, “We’ll be back late, okay? I’ll take Kate out for a pub lunch after the race.” He smiled and squeezed Kate’s hand. She was thinking of plowman’s lunch, with the thick brown bread and the butter in a little gold wrapper. With cheese and chutney and pickled onions, strange and translucent, that you could prize the layers off one by one. Dad would have a pint of mild and she’d get a Diet Coke.

Mum said to Dad, “Why do you always get to be the fun one?” And Dad said, “That’s rich.” That was when they argued. Kate put her fingers in her ears. Sometimes, at night, she dreamed about finding money. Hundreds of pounds that she would dig up in the garden and rush inside and give to Mum, so she wouldn’t have to work all the time.

Dad drove them to the race in the Rover 3500. The old car was beautiful. It was the dark, rich yellow of egg yolk. It was creaky and it rattled. But it was lovely and big and solid. It was your own world inside there, completely safe and unbreakable. Dad said she could sit in the front, for a treat. Mum was saying something. Dad closed the car door on the end of her sentence. “What time are you planning on being—” Clunk. And
then silence, because the doors were so big and heavy. And the smell of the vinyl seats. Also the smell of Dad. He did up her seat belt. He wore an aftershave called Joop! with an exclamation mark, as if you were meant to shout it. Sometimes, when she was all alone, she did. Without really knowing why.

Joop!

Dad pulled out onto the road and she watched through the side window as Mum’s lips moved. “What’s Mum saying?” “I don’t know.” “Shouldn’t we go back and find out?” Dad sighed and squeezed her hand. He switched on the radio. The
Challenger
space shuttle had exploded the day before. It had broken apart after launch. They were still talking about it. It was such a shock. One moment it was white and intact, like a milk tooth, a bright white shape in the clean blue atmosphere. And then the blue sky was full of the tiny pieces of white. Each color was full of the other. Kate was sad because one of the astronauts was someone’s mum. They’d said, “
Challenger
go at throttle up,” and then everything had disintegrated, the radio said. But Kate didn’t want to hear. She hummed a tune with her fingers in her ears.

In the middle of the Rover’s steering wheel there was a big, silver hexagonal bolt that held the steering wheel on. It was an instrument just like the others, always telling you that you were exactly eighteen inches away from death. People got killed by those bolts. The police arrived at accidents and they found dads with perfect hexagonal wounds right between the eyes but no expression of surprise on their faces. They’d been aware of the risk. It had stared them in the face for years.

When they arrived at the race, Dad got her bike out of the boot. He held her hand and carried her bike to the start. There were forty or fifty kids there, and she was scared. Lots of the other girls were bigger than she was. Some of them had fast bikes, with drop handlebars and thin tires. Hers just had Scooby-Doo stickers. She hid behind Dad’s legs till it was time for the race to start.

It was a grass track, with the course marked out by wooden stakes
with thin orange rope strung between them. Kate was much faster than nearly all the others. She was so far ahead, she thought she’d done something wrong. She waited for someone to shout at her. Only one other girl was as quick as she was. They rode side by side for a while. Kate looked across and smiled, but the other girl didn’t. Kate could have gone faster, but it felt mean to leave the other girl alone, so she stayed with her. When they got back round to the start line at the end of the first lap, Dad was smiling. He gave two thumbs up. The other girl’s dad was there too. He was shouting, “Come on, come
on
! You can beat her!” The other girl tried to go faster. Her face was getting red. Kate slowed down a bit, so that the other girl could too. They got around to the start line again. Dad cheered. The other girl’s dad shouted, “Come
on
! You’re quicker than this!” He was angry. Kate was scared for the other girl. On the last lap she slowed down even more, but the girl was getting tired. She clipped a stake with her handlebars and rolled across the grass.