Gold (3 page)

“Don’t even joke, okay? I feel guilty enough.”

Tom looked at her carefully. “Because of Kate?”

Zoe was surprised at the relief she felt when Tom said Kate’s name. Underneath all the last-minute details of her preparation—the tightening of shoe cleats, the polishing of visors—she hadn’t realized how much it had been eating her.

“She should be here,” she said. “It should be me and her in this final.”

Her coach squeezed her knee. “Good girl. But you didn’t force Kate to stay at home. She made her own choices.”

“Still…”

“I want you to say it, Zoe. I want to hear you say
Kate made her own choices.
”

Zoe stared at the floor for a long time. The roar of the crowd accelerated every torpid molecule of the air in the little unfinished room. The vibration of their stamping feet rose through the steel frame of the bench and shimmied the white plastic seat beneath her.

Slowly, she raised her eyes to her coach’s.

“Kate made her choices,” she said softly. “And so did I.”

Tom held her gaze.

“Good,” he said finally. “And now put it out of your mind. Okay? That there is life; this here is sport. You only need to think about the next ten minutes.”

She swallowed. “Alright.”

He laughed. “Well then, don’t look so terrified.”

“Listen to that noise. I
am
terrified.”

“Look, Zoe. You’ve done all the hard work. You’ve made it to the final. Your worst-case scenario here is to be the second-fastest rider on the entire planet. The very worst thing that could happen in the next ten minutes is that you win an Olympic silver medal.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re scared of getting silver?”

She thought about it, then nodded. “I’d rather fucking die.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

She took a long, deep breath, and the trembling in her body subsided.

When she looked back at Tom, he was smiling.

“What?” said Zoe.

“Young lady, I believe you’re finally ready for your first Olympic final. Now do us both a favor, and go up there and win it.”

“But the door…”

Tom grinned. “Was only ever in your mind.”

She stood up and pushed on the metal door with two fingers, tentatively. It swung open easily, on oiled hinges, and the roar of the crowd swelled louder. The door banged against its stop and rang with the deep note of a bell.

She stared at him, wide-eyed.

“What?” said Tom, shooing her away. “Go on. You’re really bloody late, as it happens.”

Zoe looked back at the open door and then at him.

“You’re actually pretty good,” she said.

“Get to my age, you’d better be.”

The tall, whitewashed stairwell leading up to the track was silvered with sunshine falling from the high skylights in the velodrome roof. On the wide white riser of the very last step, in blue stenciled letters that were nearly straight, the Olympic motto read
Citius, Altius, Fortius.

Zoe breathed a deep, slow lungful of the hot, roaring air. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. Everything that had passed was excused, gone, and forgotten. The crowd was screaming her name. She smiled, and breathed, and took the first step up into the light.

On a tiny TV in the cluttered living room of a two-bedroom terraced house, Kate Meadows watched her best friend emerge from the tunnel into the central arena of the velodrome. The crowd noise doubled, maxing out the TV’s speakers. Her heart surged. The baby’s bottle was balanced on the TV, and the howl of the crowd raised concentric waves in the milk. When Zoe lifted her arms to acknowledge the crowd’s support, the answering roar sent the bottle traveling across the top of the TV. It teetered on the edge, fell to the floor, and lay on its side, surrendering white formula from its translucent teat to the thirsty brown hessian of the carpet. Kate ignored it. She was transfixed by the image of Zoe.

Kate was twenty-four years old, and since the age of six, her dream had been to win gold in an Olympics. Her eighteen years of preparation had been perfect. She had reached the highest level in the sport. She had shared a coach with Zoe and trained with her and beaten her in the Nationals and the Worlds. And then, in the final year of preparation for Athens, baby Sophie had arrived.

This was an old TV and the picture quality was terrible, but it was quite clear to Kate that Zoe was now sitting on a twelve-thousand-dollar American prototype race bike with a matte black monocoque frame
made from high-modulus unidirectional carbon fiber, while she herself was sitting on a Klippan sofa from Ikea, with pigmented epoxy/polyester powder-coated steel legs and a removable, machine-washable cover in Almås red. Kate was well aware that there were victories to which such a seat could be ridden, but they were small and domesticated triumphs, measured in infants weaned and potty-training campaigns prosecuted to dryness. She ground her knuckles into her temples, making herself remember how in love she was with Sophie and with Jack, who was in Athens preparing for his own race the next day. She tried to exorcise all jealous thoughts from her head—kneading her temples till they hurt—but God forgive her, her heart still ached to win gold.

Under the coffee table Sophie picked over the fallen mess of breakfast and lunch, cooing happily as she brought cornflakes and nonspecific mush to her mouth. The doctor had said she was too poorly to travel to Athens, but now the child seemed effervescent with health. You had to remind yourself that babies didn’t do these things deliberately. They didn’t use the kitchen calendar to trace out the precise schedule of your dreams with their chubby little fingers and then plan their asthma and their allergies to clash with it.

It was sweltering in the living room. The open window admitted no cooling breeze, only the oppressive August heat reflecting off the pale concrete of their yard. Kate felt sweat running down the small of her back. From next door, through the shared wall, she heard the neighbor vacuuming. The Hoover groaned and thumped its bald plastic head against the skirting board, again and again, a lifer despairing of parole. Crackling bands of electrical interference scrolled down the TV picture, masking Zoe’s face as she lined up to start the race.

The two riders were under starter’s orders now. A neutral voice counted down from ten. Up at the start line, behind the barrier, Kate caught a glimpse of Tom Voss in the group of IOC officials and VIPs. At the sight of her coach, her pulse quickened to prepare her system for the intense activity that his arrival always signaled. Adrenaline flooded
her. When the countdown in the velodrome reached five, she watched Zoe’s hands tense on the handlebars. Her own hands tensed too, involuntarily, grabbing phantom bars in the stifling air of the living room. Her leg muscles twitched and her awareness sharpened, dilating every second. Kate hated the way her body still readied itself to race like this, hopelessly, the way a widow’s exhausted heart must still leap at a photo of her dead lover.

There was a commotion by her feet, and an excited squeal. She reached down to lift a small electric fan from the floor to the coffee table, out of the way of Sophie’s exploring fingers. Its breeze was a relief. On the TV, the starter’s countdown reached three. Kate watched Zoe lick her lips nervously.
Two
, said the starter.
One.
Sweat was beading on Kate’s forehead. She reached out and turned up the speed on the fan.

The picture contracted to a bright white dot in the center of the TV screen, then sparked out entirely. From next door the whine of the neighbor’s Hoover descended in pitch and faded through a long, diminishing sigh into silence. Through the wall she heard the neighbor say, “Shit.” Kate watched the blades of the fan relinquish their invisibility as they slowed to a stop. She looked at the fan dumbly, feeling the breeze on her face fade into stillness, wondering why a breeze would do such a thing at the exact same second the TV went on the blink. After a moment she understood that something had blown in the fuse box. As usual, it had taken half the street’s electricity down with it.

She felt a rare pulse of self-pity. Only these little things set her off. Missing the Olympics was too big and blunt to wound in anything but a dull and heavy sense. It was like being etherized and then smothered. But Jack’s plane tickets when they arrived had been sharp enough to cut. The packing of his send-ahead bag had left an ache, and a specific emptiness in the wardrobe that they shared. Now the electricity burning out had left her burned out too.

A second later she laughed at herself. After all, everything could be
fixed. She looked in the kitchen drawer until she found fuse wire, then took a torch into the understairs toilet, where the fuse box was. Sophie screamed when she left the room, so she picked her up and held her under one arm while she juggled the torch and the fuse wire in her other hand, standing on the toilet seat to reach the fuse box. Sophie wriggled and squawked and kept trying to grab the wires. After a minute of trying, Kate decided she cared about not electrocuting her daughter more than she cared about watching Zoe race.

She put Sophie back down on the living room floor. Immediately the baby brightened up and resumed her endless quest for dangerous objects to put in her mouth. Fifteen hundred miles away the first of the best-of-three sprint rounds was over by now, and Zoe had either won or lost. It felt weird not to know. Kate clicked the TV on and off, as if some restorative element in the wiring of the house—some electronic white blood cell—might have healed the damage. No picture came. Instead she watched herself, ten pounds heavier than her racing weight, still in her nightie at three in the afternoon, leaning out of the reflection in the blank black TV screen.

She sighed. She could fix the problems with her reflection. Some hard miles of training would put the leanness back into her face, and her blond hair wouldn’t always be scraped back into a tight bunch to keep it clear of Sophie’s sticky grip, and her blue eyes were only hidden behind her ugly glasses because she just hadn’t found the strength to get dressed and go to the shops for the cleaning fluid for her contacts. All this could be sorted.

Even so, as she watched herself on TV, she panicked that Jack couldn’t possibly still find her attractive. It didn’t do to dwell on thoughts like that, so she slumped back down on the sofa and phoned him. Behind his voice when he picked up was the roar of five thousand people.

“Did you see that?” he shouted. “She killed it! She won like she wasn’t even trying!”

“Zoe did?”

“Yeah! This place is unbelievable. Don’t tell me you weren’t watching?”

“I couldn’t.”

She heard him hesitate. “Come on, Kate, don’t be bitter. It’ll be you racing next time, in Beijing.”

“No, I mean I actually couldn’t watch. The power’s gone out.”

“Did you check the fuses?”

“Gosh, Ken, my Barbie brain did not entertain that option.”

“Sorry.”

Kate sighed. “No, it’s okay. I tried to fix the fuse but Sophie wouldn’t let me.” Straightaway, she realized how sulky that sounded.

“Our daughter is pretty strong for her age,” said Jack, “but I still reckon you should be able to kick her arse in a straight fight.”

She laughed. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just having a shitty time here.”

“I know. Thank you for looking after her. I miss you.”

Tears formed in her eyes. “Do you?”

“Oh my God,” he said, “are you kidding? If I had to choose between flying home to you and racing for gold here tomorrow, you know I’d be right back on that plane, don’t you?”

She sniffed, and wiped her eyes. “I’m not asking you to choose, idiot. I’m asking you to win.”

She heard his smile down the phone. “If I win, it’s only because I’m scared of what you’ll do to me if I don’t.”

“Come back home to me when you win gold, okay? Promise me you won’t stay out there with her.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. “You know you don’t even have to ask me that.”

“I know,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Through the phone connection, the noise of the crowd peaked again.

“The second race is starting,” Jack shouted over the roar. “I’ll call you back, okay?”

“You think she’ll win it?”

“Yeah, absolutely. She made round one look like a Sunday ride.”

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you,” she said. “More than ice cream after training.”

“I love you too,” he said. “More than winning.”

She smiled. It was a perfect moment, and then she heard herself ruin it by saying, “Call me when the race is over, okay?”

She cringed at herself for being so needy, for putting this extra demand on him. Love wasn’t supposed to require the constant reassurance. But then again, love wasn’t supposed to sit watching its own reflection in a dead TV while temptation rode a blazing path to glory.

Whatever Jack said back to her, the crowd drowned it out by chanting Zoe’s name.

She clicked the call off and let the phone fall softly to the washable, hard-wearing cushion covers. It wasn’t just that she’d stopped believing she would ever get to the Olympics. Now, if she was really honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure if she could win the kind of races you rode on kitchen chairs and sofas.