Gold (24 page)

For a moment he saw her eyes alight on him as they ranged across the ranks of patients.

“I mean there’s an amazing connection, don’t you think?”

The words sounded really stupid, even to him.

“Connection?” she said.

The nurses were distributing trays of tepid food prepared in huge stainless steel kitchens—prepared not with carelessness or even incompetence, but with a kind of indifference to any quality of comfort or sustenance that might be contained within it. A tray of it landed on the wheeled table that bridged his bed, smelling of neutralized masala under its shiny dome with its lifting hole into which a finger could be inserted. Jack was suddenly aware of the dangerous ordinariness of it all—the speed with which their uniqueness had been diluted. The ward—the world—had absorbed them.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she was saying. “It’s like your mouth is going
mwah mwah mwah
.”

His desperation overflowed. “I love you, Zoe.”

She stopped. “Oh…”

“What?”

She ran her hands over her scalp and exhaled deeply. “Wow…”

Jack’s heart was hammering in his ears.

“Look,” she said. “This is a bit quick for me, I mean I only came here in the first place because Kate was into you, and now—”

Jack gripped her hand.
“What?”

She stopped and looked at him. “Oh. I thought you got that, no? Kate was obviously going to come here, so I thought I should be here when she did. What? Don’t look at me like that. She came, and you made your choice.”

Jack dropped her hand and tried to sit up. “Kate was into me, so you…”

“Look. She’s going to be my biggest threat on the track, for sure, so I thought—”

He stared at her.

“What?” she said again. “I’m just saying that’s why I came in the first place. I stayed because I like you, so don’t get all stressed. But
love
is… you know. No offense, but it’s a bit sudden for me. I really like you, but love…”

Jack rubbed his eyes. “You’re here to psych Kate out?”

She shook her head. “Is the morphine making you slow? I
came
to psych her out. I stayed because of you.”

He ran his hands through his hair. “When were you going to tell me?”

She laughed nervously. “Oh. I just thought you got it.”

“No, of course I didn’t
get it
. That’s not how my head works, Zoe. That’s not how anyone’s head works.”

She struggled to keep her smile. “I’m sorry. I think about racing too much, probably. I mean if that’s—”

He struggled to keep his voice to a whisper that wouldn’t carry to the neighboring beds. “That’s fucked up, is what it is!”

She strained to keep her voice low. “What’s fucked up is saying you love someone when you don’t even know them. I do what I want, okay?”

“Oh, very good. So how long do you want to stay with me? Just till you’re sure Kate isn’t coming back?”

She looked sadly at the floor. “Don’t be a dick, Jack.”

They watched each other in silence. Slowly, Jack let his weight sink back down to the pillows.

She took his hand, and he let her hold it without reciprocating her pressure.

“I like you,” she said. “More than I thought I would. I really want to believe I could be with you.”

He sighed. “I like you too.”

“I liked meeting your parents. You know? Seeing where you come from.”

He looked sharply at her. “You met them?”

“When they came to visit. You don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “Did Dad try to chat you up?”

“He was furious with me for making you crash. He grabbed my arms and shook me.”

Jack groaned.

She smiled. “It was fine. I mean once he felt my muscle tone, he was already looking for the first convenient moment to stop.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I liked him,” Zoe said. “I liked both of them. They’re a unit.”

“Mum repeats everything Dad says, you mean.”

She squeezed his hand. “You’ll end up marrying someone like that.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You’ll marry some saintly woman who tidies up your mess.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to end up like my parents.”

“Everyone says that.”

“Don’t you?”

She stared at the ground. “Mine are gone. Dad didn’t stick around, and Mum killed herself when I was twelve. I was fostered.”

She looked up and saw him watching her. “So? It happens. So what?”

He held his hands up. “No, nothing.”

“No, go on, what?”

He said, “That’s pretty intense, is all.”

She stared at him. “Intense…?”

He spread his hands. “Yeah, I mean—”

She laughed, and he saw the bitter flash in her eyes again. “You just told me you loved me. Sorry for being
intense
.”

She scraped her chair back and stood. He reached for her wrist but she pulled her hand away.

“You’re going?”

A tear escaped and she brushed it away. “I can’t stay.”

Jack watched her go, and each step she took down the ward left an ache he knew he would have to fill with morphine.

When visiting hours began the next day, Jack watched the doors at the end of the ward. Each day he waited, but she never came back to the hospital.

A fortnight later, when he was still high on painkillers, the doctors released him to a program of intensive physiotherapy. Jack sat in an NHS wheelchair in the hospital’s main lobby and took out his phone to call his parents to pick him up. He paused, watching a game show playing on the TV on its high bracket above the reception desk.

He changed his mind and dialed another number. She picked up, out of breath. “Yeah?” She sounded as if she’d been running.

“It’s me,” he said.

A long pause. “I deleted your number.”

“I’d have done the same.”

“Yeah.”

“I hurt you.”

“It’s fine. Look, I’m running, so—”

“Kate, please. I want to explain. I was concussed. I didn’t remember you till after.”

“You remembered Zoe.”

“Not at first. And then she didn’t let me forget.”

Another long pause. In the background, he heard the sound of traffic. She said, “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Just recently I was the quickest rider in the galaxy, and now I’m in a wheelchair with… I’m checking my pockets here… nine pounds forty and a four-millimeter Allen key and three paracetamol. My leg needs another operation. I’ve got vertebral fissures. The doctor reckons it’s fifty-fifty whether I’ll race again.”

“Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I could beat odds like that with an egg whisk.”

She laughed. “Did the doctors say they could do anything about your ego?”

“No, I’m afraid it’s gone secondary. It’s completely inoperable.”

“You’re completely impossible.”

He smiled. “Are you okay?”

She sighed. “I spent a week hating myself, then a week hating Zoe, then a week hating you. I was just getting round to me again.”

“Sounds like I phoned just in time.”

“Stop it. Are you seeing her?”

“No.”

“Did anything happen between you?”

“Nothing good.”

“So now you’re phoning me?”

“Well, you are the only English girl I know who hasn’t tried to kill me.”

She laughed again. “What makes you think I won’t?”

“I made a mistake. I got taken in, and I’m sorry. That’s all I rang to say. And good luck, and be a little bit careful of Zoe. She’s alright, but she’ll do stuff to win that isn’t healthy.”

She paused. “Thanks.”

“Great. Well. I’ll see you around, okay? I guess I’ll see you on the track.”

“Yeah. Get better, okay? And thanks. Thanks for calling.”

She hung up, and Jack sat in the wheelchair in the hospital reception lobby. He gripped the chromed handrims of the wheels, applied some torque, and wondered how it would feel to race one of these things. Not too bad, probably. You’d want to get one of those fancy chairs, with the aero position and the caster wheels way forward like a Formula 1 car. Then you could really tear it up. He held the image too long, and the morphine high was crumbling. He stared at his phone, thinking of Kate’s voice, and a hollow sadness crept into his chest. His broken leg throbbed, elevated on the front rigging of the chair.

For the first time in his life, he felt breakable. He sank down into the cracked vinyl upholstery of the wheelchair, and his eyes half focused on the TV. Two contestants, equipped with buzzers, were guessing the price of retail items. He watched and tried to learn, in case his injuries were going to make him a civilian.

His phone rang.

“Look,” Kate said. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the hospital. Just psyching myself up to call my folks to collect me.”

A slight pause. “Don’t move,” she said.

She walked into the lobby a little under two hours later, still in her running kit.

“I’m an idiot for coming,” she said, smiling shyly. “I stopped twice on the M6. I nearly turned around.”

“You look amazing,” Jack said.

She shrugged. “You look like shit.”

They didn’t talk much. They listened to Radio 2 on the motorway north in the old VW Golf she’d borrowed from a work friend. As they passed Preston the sun came out, and The The came on the radio playing “Uncertain Smile,” and Jack reached across to put his hand on her knee. She picked it up without drama and carefully gave it back to him, keeping her eyes on the road. He liked the way she drove, too close to
the wheel with her hands bunched up at the top of it, frowning through the windscreen as if she were navigating something more complicated than a flat straight strip of tarmac with neat lane demarcations, populated by evenly spaced production cars traveling at velocities that closely approximated their own.

It was only later that he found out she’d had a problem with her contacts and didn’t want him to see her in her glasses.

At the time he said, “You drive like an old lady.”

Again, that slightest of pauses. “An old lady wouldn’t let you in her car.”

When they stopped for coffee at a service station, she had to take the wheelchair out of the back for him and set it up. He wheeled himself to the disabled toilet and parallel-parked next to the high porcelain bowl, reversing himself into position and then ankling his trousers and hoisting himself across. He pissed sitting down, gripping the big chrome safety rails for balance and trying not to think of all the bed-sore arses that had sat where his now rested. When he wheeled himself back out to the car park, the wheelchair picked up dog shit and smeared it on his right hand. Back at the car he sat there wiping it off on a tissue she gave him, while she explained how she wasn’t promising anything. It was a long speech. He got the impression she’d been practicing it in the middle lane of the motorway, all the way down south.

Her flat was one small room looking out over the brown water of Morecambe Bay, with a bed that folded down. Since he was the one with spinal injuries, he slept on the bed while she lay on an air mattress on the floor. During the day she went out to her job at the gym while he did his physio exercises and read her cycling magazines. She didn’t have a TV. In the evenings she trained on her road bike and came back late. He cooked pasta for her, reaching up from the wheelchair to use the sink and the cooker.

Twice a week she drove him to his physio appointment in Manchester, and every morning she supported his head and neck while he lay on
the floor and did his abdominal exercises. When for the first time he was able to stand up from the wheelchair and balance unassisted, she was there to see him do it, and she was there to hold his hands and help him down into the chair when the pain in his back got too much.

That time was full of flashes of progress followed by setbacks. In the second month he walked from her flat to the corner shop and back, then lay in bed for two days and nights with back spasms. On the second night of that she came into the bed, and although she still wouldn’t kiss him, she slept with her arm around him and her face pressed into his neck. The next morning, though, nothing was said and they started the day as normal, each one careful to avert their eyes while the other dressed.

A happiness was growing between them. It felt normal when, on the first day he could walk that far, he walked to the gym where she worked. It felt natural that she kissed him in the car on the way home. They shared the bed, and the air mattress was propped up against the wall. On the first day it seemed too dramatic, or too definitive, to pull the stopper out of it. The next day Kate was out till late, and Jack idled in the house, eyeing it, but a unilateral deflation seemed presumptuous. On the third day, while Jack was out walking around the block, Kate got as far as putting her hand on the stopper. It was already too good to be true, this thing that was happening between her and Jack. She didn’t want to jinx it. By the end of the week they had both stopped seeing the mattress. Besides, its top edge was useful for draping training kit on after it came out of the wash. It stood against the wall for a month, slowly leaking, sagging as their bond became firmer, until it lolled so badly that it no longer made a useful clotheshorse. Then Kate dealt with it matter-of-factly, its talismanic qualities forgotten. She laid it on the floor, pulled out the stopper, and rolled it to expel the vestigial air. The room that she and Jack now shared so easily was suffused with the uncertain breath that she had blown into the mattress on the first night he arrived.