Gold (28 page)

Her leg brushed against something big and heavy. She kicked out in terror, ready to fight, but the thing floated to the surface. It was a section of a wooden boat. It hung beside her, black with age and waterlogged, sheathed in hard white barnacles on the underside. When she took a stroke away from it, it followed her, languidly, sucked along by the eddies her body made. She forced herself to be calm. She floated on her back, her limbs extended in a star, staring up at the blue-gray dome of the dawn. There, with her chill white body suspended in the ocean and tingling with the memory of Jack’s, she felt the terror of having no one. The feeling was wide and cold and savage as the sea.

In the tattoo parlor, Kate dropped her phone on the floor and it disintegrated, the battery shooting one way and the shattered plastic casing the other. The sound broke through into Zoe’s thoughts, and she looked up. Kate was staring at her.

“What is it?” she said.

Kate’s hands were shaking. “Tom’s on his way here. He’s got news.”

Mum had a white surgical dressing taped over her right shoulder blade. Sophie could see the corner of it above the neckline of her yellow T-shirt. She sat watching it from her seat in the back, while Dad drove them home. She tried to work out what it meant.

“Mum,” she said, “what’s that on your back?”

“It’s nothing, Sophie.”

“Did you crash?”

Dad said, “It’s
nothing
, okay?”

He used the voice that made you fold back into yourself, like an anemone in a rock pool when you touched it with your finger. Sophie shut her mouth.

Mum and Dad were talking in the low voice grown-ups used when they didn’t want you to hear. Grown-ups thought your ears were worse than theirs, but your ears were actually better. This is the order it went downwards in, for hearing: Jedi, bats, owls, foxes, dogs, mice, grown-ups.

“What were you
thinking
, anyway?” Dad was saying.

“Don’t be a shit. You think this isn’t bad enough?”

“I’m just saying, I mean… what was in your head?”

“I don’t
know
, okay? Do I always have to know?”

“What? Is that your question? If it involves skin that’s permanently attached to you? Might it be sensible to be
sure
?”

Mum said in a sad voice, “It’s my skin.”

Sophie’s stomach sank. It was cancer. This is what it was. It was skin cancer on her back. That was why the surgical dressing was there. Sophie knew all about cancer, and Mum had it of the skin, and she’d gone for an operation. That’s why she’d disappeared after training, because grown-ups always tried to be secret about cancer and things. But this is the order it went downwards in, for keeping secrets: Jedi, foxes, grownups. Mum had gone for an operation, and it had gone wrong, and now everything was bad.

Dad was saying, “But the
Olympics
… I mean, shouldn’t you have
got there
first?”

“We thought we
were
there, didn’t we? We’re number one and number two. No one else is even close. And now
this
happens. And if that isn’t bad enough now I’ve got this fucking…
thing
on my shoulder.”

Sophie watched in the rearview mirror and saw how her mum’s hands twisted around her seat belt. Dad looked across at Mum, then
reached out to touch her knee. She looked back across at him, and the sadness in her face softened slightly. Straightaway Sophie felt better too. It was like Mum’s knee was the okay button and Dad just pressed it.

“I know,” Dad said. “I’m sorry.”

“Mum?” said Sophie.

Her voice was so small that Mum didn’t hear it. She tried again, filling her lungs with a hissing wheeze and forcing the sound out through the tightness in her throat.

“Mum?”

Mum turned to look at her and she reached out her hand, between the two front seats, to touch her.

“It’s okay,” Sophie said. “It’s actually not as bad as you think.”

“I’m sure you’re right, darling.”

“Sometimes you’ll feel really sick but if you do all your chemo you actually will get better. You will.”

She looked at her firmly, nodding so Mum would see how sure she was. Confusion came into Mum’s face.

“Sorry?” she said.

“The thing on your back,” Sophie said. “The cancer.”

Mum looked at her for a long time, and there was a strange expression in her eyes that Sophie didn’t understand. She swallowed. She shouldn’t have said
cancer
. She was used to it, but the new people took a long time. At the hospital a lot of them couldn’t say the word, especially the grown-ups. The women said
I’ve got a tumor
, which made it sound small enough to catch hold of but not so small that it would slip through your fingers. The men said
I’m fighting the big C
, which was better for them because they could think of this massive C-shape from the alphabet posters attacking them, like a crab, and it was easier for them to imagine how they would fight something like that than some smaller, softer C, like a cell.

“It’s okay, Mum,” she said. “Dr. Hewitt says it actually makes you stronger if you use its real name.”

There were tears in Mum’s eyes. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. It isn’t cancer. It’s only a silly tattoo.”

Dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and they both got out and climbed into the back seat. They unstrapped her and hugged her tight, and the three of them sat there while the dusk gathered and the early evening traffic rolled by with the rain flaring in its headlights.

“Whatever happens,” said Dad, “it’s nothing next to how proud we are of you.”

“What?” said Sophie. “I didn’t do
anything
.”

This made Mum and Dad laugh for some reason. Why were they proud of her, when all she’d done was to get it completely wrong? A tattoo was really different from skin cancer. Really.

Sophie sighed, exasperated. As soon as she’d survived leukemia, she was going to have to survive these parents.

Zoe let herself into her apartment, dropped the key into the dish, and put a blue plastic carrier bag down on the enameled lava work surface in the kitchen area. She took a screw-top bottle of white wine out of the bag and stood looking at it. She hadn’t drunk alcohol since that rainy training ride with Kate, in the depths of the off-season, more than a decade ago. She didn’t have anything specifically made for putting wine in. She didn’t even know how much you were supposed to drink.

She chose one of the small, heavy white ceramic espresso cups and filled it. She brought the bottle and the cup over to the tall windows and looked down over the lights of the city. She sniffed the wine, screwed up her face, and drank it. She stood for ten minutes, gauging the effect. In a body that was tuned to know its heart rate to the nearest beat and to process the afferent messages running through every highly strung nerve bundle with arctic clarity, there was no warm glow, just an immediate
feeling of concussion and a sense of terror at the power of the chemistry. She poured again, and drank another cup.

When half the bottle was gone, she felt brave enough to think about what the rule change meant. If she wanted the Olympic place, she would have to fight Kate for it. She held the thought and turned it around. It was true that she was desperate for the place. Without it, she’d lose her sponsors, and she’d lose this apartment, and she’d lose a reason to keep her heart and lungs functioning. But to be sure of getting the place, she’d need to push her body harder than she’d ever pushed it before. There’d been nothing to choose between her and Kate at training today.

She drank another slug of wine and used the cold coffee cup to cool the raw Olympic tattoo on her forearm. Looking at those rings, she could hear the roar of the crowds in Athens and Beijing. She searched her heart and questioned whether she was capable of destroying Kate, just to hear that sound again. She closed her eyes, leaned her forehead against the cool plate glass, and wondered.

In the months after Gran Canaria—the spring and early summer of 2003—she did almost no competition at all. She saved herself for the Track World Championships in Stuttgart, at the end of July. She was clocking world-record times in training. She left Jack and Kate alone to rebuild their relationship, and she forced all her pain and confusion into energy on the bike.

She flew out early to Stuttgart. British Cycling set her up in the hotel that all the British Cycling squad would use when they came out. It was close to the velodrome, and for the whole month before the event, she trained on the track she would race on. She battled a virus that sucked her energy and spaced her out, but the game had never been bigger, and every atom of her body was focused. She hardly even noticed she was in Germany. The language was different but the track was the same.

Jack and Kate came out together, with one week to go. They were happy again, but not so solid yet that they could comfortably be around
Zoe. She smiled politely at them when they met in team meetings or passed each other at the breakfast buffet.

The 2003 Worlds were the biggest they’d ever been. There were teams from as far away as Brazil and China. All the races were broadcast live on Eurosport. Zoe was sick with nerves and excitement. More than once, she threw up in her hotel room. She was calm, though. Her preparation had been impeccable. It was all over the press: she was going to clean up. The media was in love with her. In the
Guardian
, a popular philosopher wrote a piece about her work ethic. In the
News of the World
, there were photos of her breasts in Lycra and speculation about whether she wore anything underneath. There was something for everyone.

The World Championships began in a blaze of camera flashes. In Stuttgart, on the last day of July and the first two days of August 2003, Jack got the most gold medals ever won by a British cyclist at the Worlds. Kate won two golds and a bronze. Zoe failed to even qualify for the finals in three of her events. She came second to Kate in the runoff race for the sprint bronze medal. She felt terrible in all her heats. Once she even threw up on the start line. They had to delay the starter’s whistle. A man mopped the track, then they drove off the water with industrial dryers. Zoe lined up again to start. The whistle went and a hot weakness flooded her body. The other girls rode away from her as if she wasn’t even pedaling. A clip of her, trackside, in tears of incomprehension, stamping repeatedly on her nine-thousand-pound state-of-the-art carbon fiber machine was soon all over the internet.

Tom arranged a taxi and took her straight from the track to a clinic. They were there for two hours. The doctors ran tests. Zoe waited. They ran more tests. She waited again, in a tiny white room with fashion magazines in German and air conditioning that rattled. A doctor came in, all smiles, and told her she was pregnant.

“It looks like you are right at the end of the first trimester,” he said. “Congratulations!”

Then, seeing her face, he said, “Sorry, is that not the good word? My English is not so good.”

Zoe made him repeat the test. She didn’t believe it was possible, not when she’d been training as hard as she had. He wasn’t a specialized sports doctor, so she told him about the physiological changes. The way your body saw how low your fat stores were. How it registered the unbelievable pain you went through every day. How it naturally assumed you were dying and made the necessary adjustments to your reproductive system. The doctor listened politely while she told him how her hormone levels had changed, how her estrogen had fallen and her testosterone had built. She told him that she hadn’t had a period for three years, that she hadn’t used contraception since 1999. The doctor said that maybe she should have. The doctors were direct like that, in Germany.

When she walked out of the consulting room and into the lobby of the clinic, Tom was waiting for her. She smiled weakly and told him it was just a stomach bug.

Back in her room in the team hotel, she vomited again. She drank iced water. Kate was still at the velodrome, doing press. Zoe watched her on Eurosport. She was radiant.

She switched off and stared at the wall for an hour. Then she went online, made an appointment at an abortion clinic in Manchester, and started to rough out a revised training schedule for Athens.

Kate knocked on her door. She’d had the decency to leave her medals in her kit bag, but there was no hiding her victory. Gold blazed out of her: through her skin, from her eyes. It glowed in the air around her.

Zoe said, “Happy now?”

“Don’t be like that. I thought you might need someone to talk to.”

“I’ve got Tom.”

Kate paused. “Great. Good. Well, look, I’ll leave you to it, okay?”

Zoe sighed. “Don’t go. It’s nice of you to come.”

Kate sat down on the bed with her. “So what’s wrong? Did the doctors say?”

Zoe gave a small, defeated laugh. “Just gastro. Look, when we get back to England, let’s… you know. Let’s do something. Like go and watch a film, or whatever.”