Gold (21 page)

She was sure she hadn’t fed Sophie anything on the banned list, and yet here was this vomit. She sat on the edge of the bath and phoned the
dietician, while Sophie sat with her back against the warm radiator and played with her
Millennium Falcon
.

Kate had to go through the hospital switchboard and ask to speak to the food doctor. There was an assumption on the pediatric unit that the technical vocabulary would bamboozle you. If you asked for the dietician they would say, “Do you mean the food doctor?” and you would have to say, “Yes please,” and that would be another ten seconds of your life that you’d never get back. The nutritionist was the food doctor, the hematologist was the blood doctor. The first time they had met Sophie’s pediatrician, he’d bounded up to them and said, “Hi! I’m the baby doctor!” After a while, you learned to play up to your role in the pantomime. The script was that you were not very clued up, but the doctors were patient and kind with you, and all of the children were brave.

After some paging, the food doctor came on the phone.

“And how are we today, Mum?”

“Sophie’s been sick. We haven’t even done breakfast yet, and I wondered if you had any ideas to settle her stomach.”

“Well, Mum,” the dietician said, “what you have to understand about leukemia is that it is a condition affecting the blood, and because blood is such an important part of the little one’s body, it will affect all her systems, so you have to be prepared for food tolerances to change…”

Kate zoned out and let her eyes defocus on the bathroom tiles. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting the dietician to say.
Try Marmite
, perhaps, or
Custard always goes down well
. Instead she was getting this lecture, apparently aimed at parents with head injuries, and yet there was still a certain comfort in it. Sometimes, even with Jack in the house, she felt alone. It could feel as if you were only orbiting the planet that normal families lived on. Hospital voices on the phone reassured you, like the babble of mission control. They made you feel that at least you were orbiting something substantial and not simply drifting in space.

She heard Jack’s steps coming up the stairs. He stood in the bathroom doorway, watching her for an explanation. She mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, pointed at Sophie and the toilet.

Jack clapped his hand to his forehead.

Kate mouthed,
What?

“I fed her a Mars bar. Just a half. I thought it’d be okay.”

Kate was too relieved to be angry. She put the dietician on speakerphone. Jack listened for a moment, then grinned and mimed words coming out of his arse, swirling in eddies, and dispersing in the air of the room with an odor that was disagreeable to him. Sophie and Kate giggled, which stopped the dietician in midflow.

“Is everything alright, Mum?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, everything’s fine. Look, something’s come up, I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back.”

She clicked the phone off and stared at Jack. “You twat,” she said simply.

Jack aped the dietician’s voice. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Mum, you’re thinking in a much too narrow way. Consider all the very many foodstuffs that exist on this big wide planet of ours. Have you tried tractor grease and tiger milk? Have you tried cuttlefish roes and wolfsbane? No? Then kindly do so at once, before phoning up to bother me with news that your daughter has puked up a Mars bar.”

That made Kate laugh, and Sophie too. Jack knelt and gathered them into him, and they hugged on the bathroom floor in the little house, and it seemed true to all of them that a moment like this was worth the unceasing work of ignoring the little things that might spoil it.

Before training that day, at the velodrome, Jack’s coach gave him the news about the Olympic rule change. Jack listened without changing his expression. Then he nodded and said, “Fine.” He strapped on his
aerodynamic helmet, clipped into his pedals, and trained so hard he almost blacked out on the track.

He warmed down from the bike session, then hit the basement gym. There was an energy in him, a fury. He got rid of some of it with abdominal work, then he began clean-lifting an eighty-kilo barbell, just snatching it up and slamming it straight above his head. Some of the guys from British Cycling were warming down in the gym. They were all national-level athletes themselves, and they stared at Jack as if he was a freak.

The mood he was in, he could have lifted more. He tried to wear himself out but he couldn’t. He felt muscle fibers ripping and forced himself to stop before he ruined something. There was still so much furious energy. He showered and stood with a towel cinched around his waist, looking at himself in the mirror above the basin in the locker room. He caught his own eye, held it for a second, then somehow walked away before he punched the mirror.

It was two in the afternoon. He jogged home to pick up Kate and Sophie and drive them back to the velodrome for Kate’s training session. All the way home he rehearsed how to give Kate the news about the rule change. He slowed to a walk as he got closer to home. The walk got slower, became a dawdle. When he finally turned his key in the door, Kate was standing in the hallway, impatient. Her annoyance turned to concern when she saw his face.

“What is it?” she said.

Jack’s courage left him. He forced his face to become calm. He said, “Nothing. I’m sorry I’m late.”

Kate had packed a bag with all Sophie’s bits in it as well as her own, so all Jack had to do was drive. His legs ached from the track work, his shoulders hurt from the weights, and his fingers would hardly grip the wheel. Ideally he’d be horizontal at this moment, in recovery, with his legs slightly elevated and an ice pack on his deltoids. At the elite level it wasn’t the training that set you apart—all the guys trained themselves to
the edge of destruction. Victory lay in how well you managed the recovery phase.

“Don’t kick the back of my seat, please.”

The kicking stopped. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Sophie was hunched in her car seat with her arms crossed tight. She looked out at the traffic, her eyes huge under her baseball cap.

“So why were you late?” Kate said.

Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry, okay? Dave wouldn’t let me go.”

“He’s your coach, Jack, not your boss.”

“Don’t nag me, please.”

“Then don’t be late, please. This is shit for me.”

“Twenty minutes late. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Don’t be petty. You’re not a petty person.”

She shot him a look that said,
No, but you’re an arsehole
.

He drove through traffic that was sluggish and getting slower. He thought about recovery. You were meant to have time to yourself, to settle your thoughts while your body replenished the energy and fluids you’d lost in training, and set about new protein synthesis. You weren’t supposed to be on the go, twenty-four hours a day, juggling sport and this illness.

The truth was, with their final Olympics only four months away, he and Kate were getting tireder each day. And now here was this rule change, and suddenly the pressure on them was doubled. It was another heavy blow to take. Last year the IOC had announced that the individual pursuit had been axed from the Olympics. It had been hard for all of them, to have one less chance to medal, but it had been hardest of all for Kate since the pursuit was her best event. She’d taken the news uncomplainingly, rebuilt her body into a new configuration to focus everything on the sprint—and now this. He tried to find the words to give the news to her, but he could hardly think about it coherently himself.

In the passenger seat beside him, Kate snapped her fingers
impatiently. Zoe would have been warming up for half an hour already. Kate probably imagined that this was her biggest problem at this moment in time. She exhaled loudly.

“Can I help you?” he said.

She pointed at a gap in the traffic that had just closed ahead of them. “You could have got through there.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

Jack hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and looked away. She was putting this crawling traffic on him, as if it was somehow his fault that everyone in Manchester had picked this exact moment to jump in their vehicles and go to buy geraniums, or deliver photocopier toner, or whatever people did with their time when they didn’t have an Olympics to prepare for.

Sophie started drumming her feet against the back of his seat again; Kate clicked her fingers. Jack thought,
Of course this is my main job, ferrying these women around
. He realized the thought lacked dignity, but it was hard not to feel resentment. His competition wasn’t as close as Kate’s, but still. There was only one male sprint place for London in play, and only so many joules of energy in his body. His rivals would be chilling out right now, recovering. They’d been clever enough to choose wives without sports careers and kids without cancer.

Jack cursed himself for thinking it. He nosed through the slow-moving traffic and tried to grip the wheel. He carefully changed lanes to put a high-sided van between their car and one of the billboards of Zoe.

Kate said, “This lane’s even slower.”

“So I made a mistake.”

She looked at him sharply. “Are you okay? You’re being shitty.”

“
I’m
being shitty?”

“Yeah.”

He kept his eyes straight ahead. “I’m being fine.”

“Training go alright?”

“Yeah, I ripped it up.”

“You’re not smiling.”

“I’m knackered, Catherine. Okay?”

“Catherine?”

He raised his arms. “Sorry.”

She sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

“I’m knackered, Kate, truth be told.”

“What, even your little face muscles?”

She made a mischievous face and jabbed his cheeks, insistently, until she raised a smile.

“That’s better,” she said, and straightaway it was.

Jack’s mood evaporated. He clicked on the hazard warning lights, brought the slow-moving car to a stop in the right-hand lane, and leaned across to kiss her. They kissed while the outraged traffic blared and diverted around them. Motorists made the sign of mental incapacity, stabbing their fingers at their temples to indicate the locus of the deficiency. It made Sophie anxious.

“Come on!”
she whispered.
“Move!”

Jack felt for her, but he wasn’t in a hurry. Now that his irritation was gone, there was the post-training high, a cozy analgesic cocoon within which it was hard to prioritize the needs of the impatient world over his own. Reluctantly he pulled back from the kiss. In moments like this an old anxiety struck him with fresh shock: he couldn’t understand why she had chosen him, and why she had stuck with him through everything that had happened, and why she continued to stick with him. Sometimes he felt like a clawed animal who’d been given a rose to hold. He knew just enough to know it was beautiful, but not enough to know how to look after it.

Kate was welling up, and Jack wiped away her tears with his thumbs. Behind them, Sophie was freaking out. Outside, the car horns had massed into an imbroglio of indignation. Their fellow motorists were
beginning to make the other sign, of the extended middle finger, with its implication that there was some rectum or some vagina into which something—possibly the finger being displayed, or possibly some other item for which the displayed finger was a proxy, signifier, or understudy—might usefully be inserted in such a way that it would expedite the plaintiff’s journey to whichever furniture superstore or cross-platform marketing meeting constituted their immediate destination. This soon after lifting heavy barbells, Jack found that it was hard to take people or their hand signals particularly seriously.

“You’d better drive,” Kate said. So he did.

“Finally!”
said Sophie, in such a prissy voice that it made all three of them laugh.

The traffic seemed to ease up a little.

Trying to keep his voice casual, Jack said, “That text from Tom, this morning—did it say what he wants to talk to you about?”

Kate shook her head. “Just to put aside some time after training. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Jack kept his eyes straight ahead.

When Dave had given him the news that morning, his first thought had been how he was going to secure his own place in London. He’d thought about how he could train harder. He didn’t care if he had to train the world to spin the other way on its axis. That place in London was going to be his.

Turning, now, into the car park of the velodrome, Jack realized how typical it was of him not to have thought about what the news meant for Kate until afterwards, in the locker room. When his head was in the game, the existence of others—even the ones he loved—could easily not occur to him for hours on end. People just flickered in and out of his awareness, like figures in a dark room where some unbidden hand turned the light switch on and off at times not of his choosing. As soon as he remembered them, he wanted to do the right thing. That was all you could say in his defense, he supposed.