Gold (37 page)

He tried to get back on the pace.
Pedal pedal pedal. Breathe breathe breathe.

But the image came back to him, more distinct now. Sophie’s hand in his, her face a mask of stillness.

His coach was making more frantic gestures from trackside. He was shouting,
“Step it up! Step it up!”
At the end of the third lap, Jack was twenty meters behind. He wound it up as hard as he could, and his coach was shouting,
“Let’s go, Jack, that’s it!”

The picture came back.

He couldn’t block it out anymore. All the force poured out of him, as if someone had pulled plugs from drain holes in the soles of his feet. The Frenchman beat him by forty-five meters. Jack was only just coming out of the curve onto the home straight when he saw him cross the line with his hands in the air.

The crowd was very quiet. There was a stillness in the velodrome. The humidity was overwhelming. Sweat poured off Jack in hot sheets. He slowed to a halt over two laps and grabbed the trackside rail to lean on. His chest was heaving. He was too exhausted to even get off the bike. The medic raced over with his bag. His coach ran up and put an arm around his shoulders.

“The fuck just happened there, Jack? Are you okay? The fuck was that all about?”

The pain was burning all through him. It was agony—he realized he was actually groaning. The medic was asking him could he tell him the name of the prime minister? He had a stethoscope on Jack’s chest. Dave was in his face asking was he alright? He sat there with his body shaking and he let the physio cool him down with a sponge, like you’d do with a racehorse.

His mind kept lurching between the moment and that terrible room where he’d sat holding Sophie’s motionless hand. He was so frightened
and confused he could have screamed. This was how a bull in a bullfight felt, bleeding from all the lances. He wanted to destroy things. He wanted to die right there, by the side of the track. He wanted the world to be burned to ashes and all of the people to be gone and nature to start again without him.

The camera on the zip wire zoomed right up to his face, and he stood up and started yelling at it, and trying to punch it away with his fists. He stared it right in the lens, to show that he wasn’t broken. He was trying to stare two billion people down. Dave grabbed him round the shoulders and turned him away.

“Leave it, Cassius Clay. Let’s get you out of here.”

“But the next race…”

His coach shook his head. “We’re going to concede, old friend. You’re cooked.”

And that was the end of his Beijing Olympics. As they walked towards the dressing room, his legs buckled and he started to cry.

There was a man with a Steadicam, walking backwards, capturing every moment. Jack looked up and saw him and said the only thing he could think of to say, right into the camera.

He said, “I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m so sorry.”

In the calm of the kitchen now, he hugged Kate tightly.

“Just keep your head in the race tomorrow,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Sophie’s getting better, and you’re in the form of your life. All you need to do now is ride.”

Kate kissed him on the tip of his nose. “Sport’s so much simpler than life, isn’t it?”

“That’s why it’s so much more popular.”

The morning of the race was cloudless and chilly. For the first time since moving to the tower, Zoe did her warm-up on the roof deck, five hundred feet above the rush-hour traffic, in the direct lightspeed blast of the sunrise, with the
Blade Runner
theme in her earphones. Sometimes life was okay. It was impossible not to be lifted by the elevation.

She had a spinning bike up on the roof, pushed up against the railings on the east side, and she took the cover off it now and clipped into the pedals, warming up as the sun climbed higher. As her heart rate rose steadily and smoothly up into the 130s, a simple happiness trembled in her: at the atomizing brightness of the light, at the barely contained potential in her muscles, at the undertones of approaching summer in the cold clean breeze blowing in off the Pennines. As her heart rate hit 150, she felt as if she could unclip from the pedals, climb over these rails quite unfussily, and just fly. It didn’t feel as if she weighed nearly enough to get hurt.

The feeling freaked her out. She dialed the resistance down, spun the lactate out of her legs, and came to a halt. Then she burst into tears, quite unexpectedly.

She calmed herself, unclipped from the spinning bike, and went down off the roof into the cool marble staircase of the tower. She let herself back into the apartment.

In the living area, she watched herself on TV. She was all over the morning news. A psychologist in a lime-green skirt suit and gold book chain necklace was agreeing with the presenter that it would be better if Kate went to the Olympics.

The presenter said, “A lot of our viewers will be asking whether it’s acceptable for someone to represent Great Britain when she’s being written about for all the wrong reasons.”

The psychologist said, “That’s exactly the point. Girls are inspired by these Games—
my
daughters are inspired by these Games—and they look to someone like Zoe for an example of how to be a successful female.”

Zoe flicked the TV to mute and felt herself balancing on the edge of control.

After coffee and 300 grams of steamed long-grain rice with dried fruits, she stood under the shower and let herself imagine that she’d chosen another life. She imagined being Sophie’s mother—feeding her carefully, carrying her around like eggshells, giving her all those pills in the right order, doing everything she saw Kate do.

Her tattoo stung on one arm, the graze from her crash stung on the other, and she tried to hold them both outside the jet of the shower. She couldn’t wash herself, only revolve futilely. She tried to get her head back into the uncluttered space where she needed to be to beat Kate.

It was frustrating that her mind was doing this to her, today of all days. There were days when she didn’t think about Sophie at all. Then suddenly, like this morning on the spinning bike, out of nowhere, she would cry for a few minutes. Most nights she had dreams where she
had lost something nameless and was frantically searching for it. At first she’d imagined it was gold she was looking for, but after she won gold in Athens, and again in Beijing, the dreams carried on. And sometimes too she had dreams where she was racing and something horrible was chasing her and would catch her if she ever slowed down. But then again, everyone had those dreams.

She got out of the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and went back to look at the TV while she dried her hair. They were showing yesterday’s back page now, with the photograph of her and Kate in the tattoo parlor. Zoe stared at the inset photo of Sophie. She still found it impossible to link the child Sophie was now with the tiny thing in the incubator that everyone had insisted was hers. When she saw Sophie—at the track yesterday, for example, grinning in the basket of the butcher’s bike—she found her appealingly mad in the manner of all children, and sobering in the manner of all the undifferentiated sick, but still, nothing really moved inside her. She felt more for Kate: she knew Kate had suffered and was suffering, and it touched her.

Now, though, as she looked at the inset picture, it was undeniable that Sophie resembled her. There was much more of Jack in there, but by forcing herself to look, she could see a very slight ghost of her face in Sophie’s. It disturbed her, watching this evidence of herself surfacing through the features of a man she had put behind her. And she
had
put him behind her. This was the one thing she had done that she was proud of.

In the sink in the kitchen area she ran cooling water across the hot rawness of her new tattoo.

What would her life be, if she hadn’t given Sophie up? Would Jack have left Kate for her? Would the three of them be together now?

She allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to have Jack in her bed, softly breathing, in place of the howling emptiness of the wind blowing in from the hills and swaying the tower in the gusts. An old anguish surged through her and she ground her nails into the raw tattoo, forcing a cry of pain.

On the TV, the psychologist was explaining that someone called Zoe Castle had all the classic markers of someone in denial. She counted off the telltale behaviors on fingers ringed with diamonds and tipped with cherry-red lacquer: the promiscuity, the insatiable need to win, the lack of contrition.

They cut to the back page of the newspaper again. The picture caption said, “Sophie: Mum’s gold would mean so much to me.”

Zoe tried to remember the state she’d been in when she left Sophie behind at the hospital. Those days were clouded in her memory. When she thought back to them, there was just the obfuscating haze of the analgesic drugs and the certainty of tears if she tried any harder to access what had happened.

For the first time, she wondered whether Kate might be not someone who had shouldered a burden that she couldn’t carry, but someone who had arrived when Zoe was at her most vulnerable and taken something from her.

She bit her lip and tried to think clearly. What if Tom was in on it too? What if Tom had liked Kate best all along? What if everything he had done was to manipulate Zoe and get Kate what she wanted? What if it wasn’t in Zoe’s interests at all to race against Kate today, and this was just one more of Tom’s confections?

She pushed the thought away. It was wrongheaded, she knew it was. Tom was a good man and she knew how he felt about her. She liked him back.

On the TV, the psychologist was counting off paranoia, delusional thinking, and pathological self-obsession on her fingers. There was so much wrong with this woman called Zoe Castle that the psychologist had to start counting on the fingers of her other hand.

Zoe closed her eyes, trying to block out everything but the calm visualization of the race she would ride against Kate in less than four hours’ time. The image of Sophie’s face came to her instead. Something she had been fighting for years stirred inside her. It was a small ache at first,
something barely differentiable from the rising crackle of emotion that wouldn’t let her think straight this morning. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and clenched her fists so tight her nails bit into her palms, and slowly the ache grew into a hurt, and then a wound, and then a furious agony that she could no longer hold inside.

Sophie was her daughter, and she had let her be taken away. Whenever the thought had started to surface, she had pushed it back under, into the cold depths where light rarely reached, but she had always known that this had to be part of why she felt the way she did, why she had spent all these years racing from one championship to another, bedding this man and that. Was this why nothing came close to touching the raw and inconsolable place inside her?

Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.

She’d thought she’d done the right thing. She’d believed it was best, given that she had no feeling for the child, to give her to someone who did. Now, though, all she could think was that in giving up Sophie, she had given up life. She let the grief surface and howled.

Later, when her tears had stopped, she felt cold and calm and clear. She went back up onto the roof. The sun was still bright but the breeze was freshening, and darker rain clouds were rolling in off the hills. By leaning on the rail and screwing up her eyes, Zoe could make out the street where the Argalls lived—the terrace of roofs that they must be eating breakfast beneath even now.

She felt the ache again, somewhere in between love and despair. The need inside her was frantic. She needed to see Sophie. She tried to get her head clear to race, but for the first time in her life, she didn’t know if she wanted to win.

Mum’s gold would mean so much to me.

She shook her head violently, trying to get the thought to leave. She spat over the railing, and watched the white fleck spiraling down
through the rising vortices to lose itself in the bright white tones of masonry.

She could barely remember how she had reached this height, but she could see now that it was a very, very long way down.