Gold (40 page)

He needed Kate. He needed to hold her hand. If this was the final fall, and they didn’t fall together, they’d fall apart.

He tried to keep busy. He plugged in his earphones and stuck on The Proclaimers. He put on “500 Miles” because it was Sophie’s favorite. When it got to the chorus, he took out one of the earbuds and placed it in her ear. The rhythm of the song drifted in and out of phase with the beeping of Sophie’s heartbeat. Her expression didn’t change.

He leaned down to whisper that Kate was on her way, that Sophie should fight and hang on.

They were letting him hold Sophie’s hand now, and for a while it had seemed like a good sign—an indication that she was out of danger. Now Jack began to think that the nurses were passing him a message that he was reluctant to understand.

At first they’d made him wait outside, where he’d gestured to Sophie through the wired safety-glass panel in the door. Sophie didn’t know what was happening to her and Jack had done his best, but these were difficult hand signals to make:
You’re fine, you’re absolutely fine, all these doctors and nurses rushing around you are basically overreacting, but it would be rude to contradict them now that they’ve made such an effort.
It was a tricky message to pitch, through thick glass. You had to allow for refraction.

Sophie had smiled before she fell asleep. That smile, framed in wired glass, was framed inside Jack’s head now. Doctors and nurses had ebbed and flowed, and he had found it impossible to isolate one individual from the green-gowned tide and ask,
Is my daughter dying or just sleeping?
At this extremity, finally, there was shame. He was ashamed that his daughter had become so ill without his realizing it.

Now, whatever was happening to Sophie seemed not to be improving
or worsening. The monitoring machines were constant. Jack was fearful of breaking the spell or of calling any more of time’s attention to Sophie’s particular case. He sat very still. Inside this room now, with the monitors on, time was a diamond cut by Sophie’s breathing and polished by her pulse. As long as these sounds persisted, it was crystalline.

Kate was careful not to look at Zoe as they lined up side by side at the start. Zoe had drawn the inside line for the first race, so Kate had her to her left. She didn’t let herself think about the drama of Zoe’s arrival or of what might be wrong. She held on to the sound of Jack’s voice on the phone, telling her that he loved her. She let the words ring in her head until they were the only sound she heard, until all her disappointments were silenced. She looked straight ahead down the track, adjusted her grip on the bars, and made her mind go quiet.

“One minute to go,” said the starter.

Her senses were keyed up. She swung her steering left and right, testing the adhesion of her tire rubber as the torsional force squeaked it against the varnish of the track. As she turned the bars, the friction of her skinsuit irritated the fresh tattoo on her shoulder blade, sending a flash of anger through her. She tensed and relaxed her muscle groups in turn, transmuting the anger into potential. She noticed the tiniest details: the ultrafine mesh on the backs of her gloves; the sandalwood notes in the perfume of the woman in the blazer who was holding her bike up by the back edge of its saddle.

As the starter counted down the seconds from ten, she let herself look across at Zoe for the first time. Zoe was staring straight ahead. Kate felt the expansion of Zoe’s lungs and the tensing of her muscles as if they were her own. In the last few seconds before the start, she let her body fall in with the rhythms of her rival’s.

When the starter’s whistle blew, Zoe eased away from the line and Kate followed her at a distance of six feet, ready to close the gap
quickly if Zoe pulled away. Zoe kept the speed to a crawl, craning her head back, watching for any twitch Kate might make to indicate that she was about to accelerate. Around the first curve they both hung low in the trough, and when the straight opened up again, Zoe steered right and made for the high side of the track. Kate followed her up and they held their line there, accelerating to keep adhesion around the second curve, then maintaining the speed into the home straight. When they crossed the line at the end of the first of the three laps, they were gradually picking up the pace, and Kate was still tucked into Zoe’s slipstream.

Halfway round the second lap they were still cruising on the high side of the track, with Kate following and watching for any sign that Zoe was going to break. As they reached the apex of the curve that would take them back into the home straight, Zoe angled her head and set herself to dive down the banking to the well of the track. Kate reacted instantly to follow her, and she was fully committed before she realized that it had been a trick. Zoe kept her height, and as Kate dropped down to the black line with her muscles screaming as she snapped them instantly to full power, Zoe dropped in behind her and tucked into her slipstream just as the bell went for the final lap.

Kate understood the consequences immediately. Now that she’d lost the advantage, the only thing to do was to ride hard for the finish. There were no tactics left: they were both down in the well of the track, winding up to top speed around the shortest line, and Zoe was tucked into her wind shadow. If she couldn’t put down some extraordinary power now, Zoe would simply hang there until the last hundred meters and then accelerate out of her slipstream to slingshot past her for the win.

Now that there was nothing to think about, Kate was very calm. She wound herself up to the absolute limit of her power and used the image of Sophie to turn off the messages of agony exploding from her legs and her lungs. As they came into the last curve, sparks were detonating in her retinas from the effort. She flashed out of the curve into the
last straight, sensing the disruption in the airflow and hearing the roar of the wheels as Zoe came out of her shadow and pulled alongside her. For fifty feet they were side by side. Kate pulled every atom of herself inside out and slowly, inchwise, Zoe’s attack began to falter. From being alongside she dropped to an inch back, a wheel-length back, and with a cold, silent flicker of wonder in her heart, Kate realized she was going to win. She crossed the line a bike-length ahead of Zoe and began to wind the pace down, easing her pressure on the cranks and letting the bike pedal her around two laps as the speed slowly came off. As she slowed, she looked across and saw how Zoe rode in defeat, with her shoulders slumped and her head down.

Zoe looked across at her, gasping. “I’ll get the next one,” she said.

Kate shook her head, too breathless to speak, but inside her a small, careful hope was forming.

Sophie came awake with a groan, and Jack’s heart leapt. Her voice was muffled by the mask, and he had to lean in to hear what she was saying.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Yes.”

“When you die, it’s just the same except you get a glowing line around you.”

“I know, darling. I’ve seen the films.”

“They’re not just films though. The Force is real.”

Jack looked into her eyes and saw the fear in them. He swallowed. “Yes, darling. It’s real.”

Slowly, Sophie smiled. “Truly?” Her voice was a clockwork doll winding down.

Jack said, “Truly.”

She closed her eyes. “I’ve never felt like this.”

“Yes you have. You’ve been through much worse.”

“How do you know?”

“My job is to remember for you.”

“How do you know you’re remembering right?”

“I know. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll understand. Everything is much clearer to us.”

“Am I going to die, Dad?”

“No, you’re not.”

“Would you tell me if I was?”

“Yes.”

“But would you?”

Jack found the power not to hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “I’d tell you.”

They fell back into silence. The air smelled of urine and bleach. They searched each other’s faces for doubt.

It was a relief when Sophie closed her eyes again, a respite from the grueling work of projecting confidence. Only later came the shock as Jack realized what the closing of eyes might mean now. His mind was slow to adjust to the situation. It was still reacting to ordinary things according to their ordinary context. It saw his child’s eyes closing and it thought
rest
. It didn’t think
rest of your life.

A few minutes later Sophie’s eyes came open again. She looked around her in confusion.

“Why isn’t Mum here?”

Jack squeezed her hand. “She is here, darling. She’s been with us all the time you’ve been asleep. She’s just gone out of the room for a few minutes.”

Sophie looked relieved. Her head sank back into the pillows.

“Dad, it’s so quiet in here.”

“Yes.”

A long pause. “Why aren’t there more doctors?”

“Why do you want more doctors?”

“So they can do more stuff. Make me better.”

“They are making you better. They found you had an infection. They’ve put you on antibiotics.”

“What if they’re not here because there’s nothing else they can do?”

“They’re doing exactly what they should. Right now the best thing to do is to wait and rest.”

“Then why are we here and not at home?”

“We’re just in here as a precaution.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the doctors told me.”

“Would the doctors tell you if I was dying?”

“Yes they would.”

“How do you know they would?”

“I just told you! Grown-ups know things. It’s like we have the special glasses and we can see the whole thing in three-D.”

Sophie opened her mouth to deny this, but then Jack saw the quickest flash of cunning in her eyes. The look vanished and Sophie’s face became childish again and simple.

“When do I get the special glasses, Dad?”

“When you’re twenty-one, Soph.”

“That’s ages.”

“Yeah.”

She waited for exactly six beeps of heartbeat and then her smile blinked off.

“I think the doctors don’t tell you everything.”

“Why would they not tell me everything?”

“Because you might cry.”

She was watching Jack’s face for a reaction and Jack was careful not to show her one. He hugged her instead. “There’s nothing to cry about. You’re going to be fine.”

Later, when she drifted away from consciousness again, Kate called
and Jack jumped up. The ringtone clashed with the rhythm of Sophie’s heart rate and breathing. It shattered the crystal of time that had formed in the room. The fragments scattered, displaced by this new kind of time that arrived in old-fashioned rings, sampled from the bell of a vintage Bakelite receiver and encoded into the software of Jack’s phone.

About to answer, he closed his eyes and listened to the dissonance. Heart, lungs, phone. The ringing went on and on, seeming to increase in volume and discord until there was nothing he could do but step outside the room to take the call out of earshot of the monitoring machines.

“Jack?” said Kate.

Her voice was beautiful in the sudden silence.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”

He could hear her elation even through the bad connection here in the heart of the hospital, with her voice modulated by the rhythmic ticking of some urgent pulse in the phone mast.

“I won the first race,” she said. “I’m stronger than her today. I think I can beat her.”

“I knew you could do it.”

“I knew it too. We’re on again in five minutes. If I win this next one, that’s it. I’ve got to go now, okay? I’m not meant to have the phone, but Tom forgot to take it back off me. Don’t call it, okay, ’cause it’ll ring in my kit bag.”

He smiled. There was a lightness in his chest as his body responded to her voice, dumbly, as if nothing else was going on. The crystalline time of Sophie’s room was gone now, but here was a new kind of time that shone on them both, that radiated from the warm glow of their voices on the axis of the connection. They could live here, just for a moment, and be happy. These were the moments you lived in, after all, these rococo twists of time. You could make them last forever, or until you told the truth.

He glanced back through the wired safety glass. Sophie seemed completely peaceful. The heart rate monitor still said eighty-eight. The
breathing monitor was still on twenty-two. Who was to say that she wouldn’t simply open her eyes again, and smile, and everything would be okay?

He forced back the urge to blurt out the truth, to tell his wife to come quickly.

“Good luck,” he said. “Go ahead and win it.”

After she clicked off the call, he went back into the room and sat by Sophie’s bed. He closed his eyes and imagined Kate, untroubled by anything except the race ahead. He smiled because he had given her something rarer than gold: an hour outside time.