Gold (35 page)

The two weeks in Beijing were a blur. Sophie was in and out of hospital. It was complicated. The doctors thought it was a lung infection. Then they thought she had a problem with her kidneys. She was running a temperature. The IOC gave them an interpreter. The interpreter had learned the vocab for twenty-eight sports, but she didn’t know all the medical terms, so it was hard for Kate to judge how serious Sophie’s condition was. Doctors talked at them and their sentences went on forever. Afterwards the interpreter would touch Kate’s arm. She would make a sad face, and her translations were short. “Doctor says your child quite sick.” The doctors watched the interpreter while she translated. Kate couldn’t translate their expressions.

She and Jack took turns to train at the Olympic velodrome while the other went with Sophie to the hospital. When they weren’t training, they sat with Sophie in their hotel room. Kate hardly slept. She woke up and went training. Or she woke up and cried. She woke up feeling too weak to ride and went to the velodrome and watched Zoe getting stronger.

They did more tests. The interpreter accompanied both of them to the hospital. They sat in a small room and waited for the doctor. There were no windows. There was a round table with white plastic veneer and coffee rings. There was a clean white plastic vase with pale flowers. There were bright halogen spots. There was a painting in a plastic frame, of one white horse, running. The carpet was gray and there were gray stacking plastic chairs. They sat for half an hour, and the interpreter translated their silence perfectly. Sophie slept in Kate’s arms, in
her black Star Wars pajamas. There were footsteps in the corridor outside. Each time footsteps approached, they all turned towards the door. Each time the footsteps passed by, they looked back at the floor. The air conditioning rattled. There was a fourth chair in the room. It was empty, for the doctor when he came.

The walls seemed to warp and shift. The hands of the clock seemed to surge forward in a sudden gust, then stand for long periods becalmed. The room was adrift in time. The interpreter wrung her hands.

When the door opened, Kate jumped.

The doctor unbuttoned his white coat. He sat down. He put one hand on his knee. He checked his notes and looked up. He talked to them for a long time. Then he stopped talking and looked at the interpreter. She had brought a dictionary. She flicked through the pages. Then she looked up at Kate.

She said, “Your daughter has leukemia.”

“She has what?”

The interpreter checked the translation again, marking the word with her finger and showing it to Kate. “Lew-kee-mee-ya,” she said. “You are unhappy as one in ten thousand people. Now you must start angry medicine right away.”

Nearly four years later, at the kitchen table, Kate began counting the day’s pills into the silver cup for her daughter. Already she could feel the adrenaline sharpening her gestures and scattering her thoughts in anticipation of racing Zoe the next day. She counted out the sixteen pills like old friends, knowing that by the time they were gone, only one sleepless night would remain between her and the race that might be her last.

In the afternoon Tom wheeled his girls’ race bikes up from the storeroom and installed them on stands in the center of the velodrome.
Half-a-dozen riders from a youth squad were training on the track, and their coach’s instructions rang through the otherwise empty building. Tom let the action revolve around him at a distance while he focused on his preparations.

He spun the wheels on both bikes, looking for trueness and alignment. He checked that the mechanic had installed the right gear for each rider. He made sure the tires were new and checked the air pressures. All of this was the mechanic’s job tomorrow morning, but Tom didn’t want to leave it that late to discover that some vital part was defective.

When his checks were done, he stood between the two bikes, one hand loosely closed around a handlebar of each. In the way the machines were set up, you could feel something of the riders. Zoe’s bike was bigger, with two more inches of height in the frame and three extra inches of reach. She rode with a bigger gear and used the long levers of her legs to power the pedal stroke around. Kate’s ride was more compact, with a lighter gear that she spun till her legs were a blur, making up for her relative lack of power with a phenomenal work rate. Kate’s machine was painted simple white, with a passport-sized image of Sophie’s face smiling up from the top tube under the clear lacquer of the finish. The bars were wrapped with a light pink bar tape that was springy and warm to the touch. Zoe’s bike was unpainted, so that the functional lay-up of the dark carbon fiber was visible under the matte varnish. Her bars had a black rubberized grip on the drops. On each side of the seat tube, visible from whichever side her opponent lined up beside her on the start line, was written
UNDEFEATED
in large gold letters in an Old English typeface. While Kate’s bike was designed to make her feel at home in the cockpit, Zoe’s was calculated to intimidate.

There was an intimacy just in touching these machines whose frames fitted each rider as precisely as her own bones, these frames that had carried their riders, the two people he cared most about, to limits of pain equal to, and occasionally beyond, their emotional breaking point. Tom gripped the handlebars and grappled with the feeling of knowing
that after tomorrow, one of these bikes would never be raced again. By one p.m. the next day he would be wheeling one of these machines back down to the British Cycling gear room, while the loser took her ride home with her as a souvenir, to sit in the hallway for a few months and then finally, when the pain and the shock had sufficiently receded, to be auctioned off to benefit a charity of her choice.

When he allowed himself to visualize the aftermath, the physical act of wheeling the winner’s bike back down to the room where dreams were held in trust, he knew it would be better if Zoe won. It wasn’t that he would prefer her to win: he’d never allowed himself to confuse the closeness he felt to her with a wish that she should prevail over his other athlete. It just seemed true to him, as the coach of both women, that if he extended his remit beyond simple results on the track and into the domain of their general welfare, then it would be better for Zoe to beat Kate tomorrow. Kate had reasons to carry on living if she lost.

It was shitty, though. If anyone deserved a go at the Olympics it was Kate. Back in Beijing, when Sophie was first diagnosed, there’d been six days to go before the cycling events. He’d caught up with them an hour after the doctor gave them the news, when they didn’t know if Sophie was going to die or not. He’d been briefed by the doctors, and because it wasn’t his own kid, he’d had just enough detachment to ask some follow-up questions. He knew more than Jack and Kate did.

He’d had to fight his way into the hotel through a press of reporters. Somehow, the media had worked out that there was a story. The opening ceremony was under way, and Jack and Kate weren’t there, and the reporters had done their asking around. Britain’s two best medal hopes, and some kind of medical emergency. That’s all they knew, and Tom wasn’t giving them anything else. He’d barged his way through the pack in the hotel lobby, stonewalled their questions, and got the general manager to take him upstairs in the service lift.

When the manager let him into the room, Kate and Jack were kneeling by Sophie’s bed. Her eyes were motionless behind her eyelids. Kate’s
phone was going off and so was Jack’s. The TV in the room was on quietly, showing the opening ceremony. There were fireworks, and showering silver stars from the roof of the stadium. All the teams were draped in their flags, smiling and waving as they lapped the track.

He made them both sit down on the end of the bed and he took away their phones. They sat there like children, looking up at him.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve been talking to the doctors, so let me break this down for you.”

He pointed at Sophie. “Fact one. Ninety-one out of a hundred kids in her condition recover, so this is a very positive situation we’re managing here. Fact two, you do not want to get her involved with the treatment protocols in this country, because none of us will understand what the hell is going on and you won’t be able to make the right decisions for her. Therefore, fact three, one of you has to fly home with her in the morning. This is what I gather from talking with the doctors here, and I’ve also been advised by a consultant in Manchester who’s ready to organize Sophie’s admission.”

Kate couldn’t look at him. She leaned over and buried her face in Sophie’s neck.

Tom said, “Unless you think there’s another way to do this? We could assign someone to fly home with Sophie, but you’re not going to let her go home without one of you, are you? Not to start chemo. If I thought there was any way we could still have both of you medaling at these Games, then that’s what we’d be doing. But one of you competing is the best we’re going to get out of this situation.”

Jack put an arm around Kate. He said, “We’ll both fly back.”

She squeezed his knee. “Yeah. We’ll both go.”

Tom knelt on the floor. He looked from one of them to the other. He said, “No.”

There was silence.

Tom said, “I don’t blame you for not seeing it straight, but this is all about winning outcomes. You can get Sophie better. And you can win
gold. If one of you stays, you can achieve both of those things as a family. That’s how you have to look at this.”

Jack said, “No, Tommo. No.”

“Dave will tell you the same, Jack. Call him if you like.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Of course we’ve talked. We both reckon one of you needs to win now, for the three of you. You simply don’t train as hard as you guys have trained to come away with nothing.”

Kate looked at Jack. Both of them were stroking Sophie’s hair and face, as if they might make her better with their hands.

Kate said to Jack, “Is he right?”

Jack held his head and grunted, as if containing an explosion in a limited space.

“And I’m sorry,” Tom said, “but you need to think about the money side of this too. At least one of you has to keep your sponsor happy. The next couple of years are going to be hard, and the last thing you need is to drop both of your incomes.”

Kate turned to Tom, and he watched her forcing herself to breathe. “Okay,” she said at last. “Who stays, and who goes home?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? I think you two have to choose.”

Jack groaned again, and the sound was so desperate that Tom found his own hands twisting. He wondered if Kate was getting her head around the situation more quickly because she was stronger than her husband, or whether it was easier for her because it wasn’t her biological daughter who lay on the bed between them—dying, for all any of them knew. Maybe there was a deeper level of pain in the blood. Certainly when he’d told Zoe, she’d taken the news like a direct hit from a bus. She was only out there now, at the opening ceremony, because Tom had made her attend. They couldn’t risk the media making a link between her and Sophie.

Kate looked at him. “How would you decide, if it was just about the results?”

“On purely sports performance grounds?”

“Yes.”

Tom hung his head for a long time. He massaged the back of his neck.

“You know I hate this, right?”

“Yes.”

He looked straight at her. “Jack’s a surefire bet for gold, I reckon. And you’re in the form of your life. If this was about results, I’d ask Zoe to take Sophie home.”

He watched her face carefully as the shock came into it. She drew closer to Sophie and held her, instinctively. “No,” she whispered.

He pushed a little harder. “Let’s send Jack home with Sophie, then, and let you race. It’s your turn.”

She shook her head and stroked Sophie’s hair. “I can’t leave her,” she said.

She swallowed. She knew it was the end.

Jack put his hand on Kate’s shoulder. “But it is your turn,” he said.

She looked down at Sophie and ran her fingers over her pale cheek and neatened up the collar of her daughter’s dress where it had become folded inwards.

“I just can’t leave her,” she said simply.

Tom stood up and took a step away, to give them a little space. “Then I’m sorry, Kate. You’d better pack your things.”

Kate said, “Fine.”

He could tell she was concentrating on not crying. The next few days were going to be all about helping her to break the hours down into achievable goals: not crying, not screaming, not fainting. If she could perform these feats to Olympic level, there was a possibility that she would get through the week.

Jack put his head in his hands. Now that the decision was made, no one knew what to say.

The BBC sports anchor was on the television in the hotel room,
looking serious. He was standing in the downstairs lobby, talking to camera. They cut to footage of Jack winning gold in Athens and Kate on her doorstep accepting his marriage proposal on live TV, with Sophie in her arms and the flag draped around them. They cut back to the sportscaster, who had one hand on his earpiece and one hand holding the mic. “All we know at this time is that this looks like a grave, grave situation.”

Sophie woke up crying. She said, “I feel
bad
.”