Gold (43 page)

He put a call through to Jack and got his voicemail. He was about to leave a message when the technician called over that the image was ready to view. Tom stood, walked the five steps to the screen, and made himself look.

Ten thousand times per second the camera had taken the narrowest cross section of the finish line, giving ten thousand microscopically thin vertical lines. The software had arranged the lines side by side, from left to right, in the order in which they had been taken. Tom squinted at the screen. You had to remind yourself that what you were seeing was the opposite of a normal photo, where space was frozen in time. This was an image created for use by professionals of the fractured second. It showed time frozen in space and it lent the strangest distortions to the bodies of the two athletes he knew so well. The quality of relative stillness translated well from space into time, and so their arms and their faces were faithfully reproduced, but their legs, which had been spinning so fast, were thinned at the top of the pedal stroke where they had been traveling faster than the bike, and thickened on the back stroke. The wheels of the bikes were neat circles, but the spokes described eerie parabolas from the hubs to the rims.

It spooked Tom to see his girls smeared across time like this. This was how he had lost out on a medal in ’68. Back then they had used real film, continuously exposed as it was dragged across a thin vertical slit. The old machine had stamped lines on the image at intervals of one-tenth of a second. That was what he had lost by: one-tenth of a second, one-eighth of an inch of time. That was the thinnest they could dice it,
back in the day, and anything closer was called a tie. In those days they still left a fraction of a second for the idea that what God had joined together, no man should split apart.

He looked at Zoe’s face, perfectly at peace as she crossed the line, and he was proud of her. It seemed to him that whatever happened on the line, she had won the race of her life. It was a symptom of this fallen age that the three race officials were asking the technician to superimpose a vertical red line that intersected the leading edge of Kate’s front wheel and making him zoom in and pointing excitedly at the tiniest sliver of pale light between the fine red line and the foremost extremity of Zoe’s front wheel.

“Shit,” Tom said quietly.

The senior race official turned to him. “Is there a problem?”

Tom opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. It was useless to explain that for most of his life there had been no technology in the world that could have separated his two girls today. It was impossible to express his outrage that they had atomized the second to the point where Zoe could lose by a thousandth of it.

“There’s no problem,” he said finally.

“I’m sorry,” said the senior official. “Do you want me to tell them?”

Tom shook his head. “No, it’s on me.”

The walk back down the steps to the track was long, with his knees protesting every movement. Zoe and Kate stood at the foot of the stairs, watching as he approached. He worked to keep his face neutral, and when he reached them, he took Kate’s hand in his right and Zoe’s in his left.

“Kate won,” he said. “By one-thousandth of a second.”

He held their hands tightly for a moment, then released them. They turned to each other and stood in silence while the information began its slow metamorphosis into understanding.

He said, “You can look at the photo if you like.”

Zoe didn’t take her eyes from Kate’s. “No, it’s okay. Well done.”

Tears welled in Kate’s eyes. She shook her head and put her hands to her mouth. “Let’s race again.”

Zoe shrugged, helpless.

Kate turned to Tom. “Can we do it again? Just the last race.”

“You know we can’t.”

“I’m sorry, Zoe,” said Kate. “I’m so sorry.”

Zoe didn’t react. It worried Tom, the way she stood there with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes unfocused.

He put a hand on her arm. “Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s talk.”

She shouldered him away. “There’s nothing to talk about, is there? That’s why they paint a finish line on the track, so you know when it’s over.”

He sighed and dropped his head. He had to find the strength to be her coach now, to provide the simple minute-by-minute instructions she would need to get through the next hour and the shitty days that would follow.

“Go and get a shower. Then get dressed and come and see me in my office. Okay?”

She sniffed and looked down at the raw Olympic tattoo on her forearm. “Okay,” she said finally. She turned to Kate and tilted her head slightly. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

Kate took her hands. “Zoe…”

They hugged hard, almost painfully, until Zoe broke it off and turned to walk to the dressing rooms. Tom watched her go, then he flipped down a seat for himself and indicated to Kate to take the one beside him.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

She looked at the ground. “Like shit.”

“That’s about right, I’d say. You’re a good girl, Kate, but she didn’t let you win. She only let you race.”

“I shouldn’t have got up again. I shouldn’t have let her bring me back in.”

“So why did you get up?”

Her face crumpled and her voice came out in a thin, strangled whisper. “Because I’ve tried so hard, Tom. I wanted to win. I wanted to go to the Olympics.”

“And now you will. Unless you break three legs or someone pops up from nowhere in the next three months who’s anything like as quick as you, then you’ll be going to London. Think about that for a moment, will you?”

Kate held her head. “I’m trying. But when I get there, I’m just going to be thinking,
Zoe should be here, not me.
”

He put an arm around her. “Zoe is where Zoe is. If she hadn’t let you back in after that crash, she’d have lost more than the race, and I think she knows it.”

“I still feel like crap.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll handle it, Kate. It’s about time you caught a break.”

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the maintenance crew buffing the track.

Tom took a deep lungful of air and exhaled it slowly. “Kate?” he said carefully.

She looked at him warily, sensing the change of register. “Yes?”

“You should call Jack.” He watched her eyes widening and he raised his hands. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, but he’s had to take Sophie along to the hospital.”

She jumped to her feet and the seat flipped up with a crash. Her nostrils flared. “What? When was this?”

The truth was that it had been in another life, ninety minutes ago, when what happened on the track had still seemed vital. He tried to meet her gaze, but his eyes only made it to her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think you should go to the hospital.”

She was silent for a second, taking it in, then he watched as she sprinted away from him across the warm-up area and up the stairs to the main entrance.

He stood, folding his seat up quietly, and began the long walk down to his office.

Vader said, “I am your father.”

Sophie screamed, “No!”

She woke up sobbing and confused. Dad was holding one hand and Mum was holding the other. There were tears in Mum’s eyes. She was wearing her race kit with a raincoat pulled over the top.

“It’s okay, darling,” Mum said. “Everything’s okay.”

There was a burning place near her heart, and she put her hand to the familiar place where the Hickman line exited her chest. It was gone. In its place was a raw wound that hurt very badly when she touched it.

“I’m hit!” she said. Her voice was muffled and there was a mask obstructing her mouth. She struggled and tried to sit up, but Dad pushed her back down to the pillows.

“You’re not hit, baby. It’s the anaesthetic. You’re going to feel a bit confused for a little while.”

Sophie blinked up at him. She looked around. There was a bank of instruments with wires trailing towards her body. She followed the wires to the points where they ducked under the edge of a sheet. The sheet covered her. She looked underneath and saw her own familiar body there, dressed in a hospital gown with a happy blue dinosaur on it.

Something was wrong. Dad’s big strong hand was painfully tight on her small one. Mum’s was too hot; there was sweat running down her arm. And the Hickman line was gone. This wasn’t normal. She didn’t belong here. This was the dream, she realized. She closed her eyes and tried urgently to wake up. There was a battle raging on the forest moon of Endor, and they needed her. This was no time to sleep.

“Sophie,” said Dad. “Stay with us, okay?”

She opened her eyes again, irritably. “You’re not even real,” she said.

Dad grinned. “That’s my girl.”

She struggled weakly and tried to rip off the thing that was covering her mouth. Mum’s hand closed around her wrist and stopped her.

“It’s suffocating me!”

“Darling, that’s your oxygen mask. It’s helping you breathe.”

Sophie struggled for a moment, then collapsed back into her pillows. She lay for a while, catching her breath, then she opened her eyes wide.

“Am I late for school?” she said.

Dad looked at Mum, and Mum looked at Dad, and they both smirked.

“What?”
she said crossly.

Mum leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.

“You are a bit late for school, Sophie. You’re about two months late, but I’m sure you’ll catch up very quickly. Fingers crossed, the doctors think you might actually be getting better.”

Sophie scowled. “I’m not going in thicky maths with Barney,” she said.

Mum and Dad laughed, which was really annoying because everything she said now they seemed to think was hilarious.

She was so angry that she used the Force on them, which you were only meant to do in a battle and never with people in your family, but she was so enraged that she couldn’t stop herself. She raised her right hand, which was plumbed in all its veins with catheters that were taped down to the wrist, and she pointed her thumb and first finger at Mum and Dad. She narrowed the gap between her digits and made the special frown with her eyes that caused the Force to flow from her fingers.

Her parents looked across at each other again and widened their eyes in fright. Sophie nodded with satisfaction: they weren’t so cocky, now that the tables were turned. First Dad and then Mum put their hands to their throats and made small choking sounds, struggling for air.

When she decided she’d made her point, Sophie released them.
Mum and Dad collapsed down into their seats, gasping, and when they’d got their breath back, they held her hands while the monitoring machines showed her pulse slowly returning to normal.

“Do you want some good news?” said Mum. “I think I’m going to the Olympics.”

Mum was watching her, waiting for a response. Sophie had been half listening, and because it seemed important to Mum, she made an effort. She ran the words over in her mind, trying to get the sense of them, but she was exhausted. The words made no sense. There were just these ten pink toes poking out of the end of her sheets. This shiny blue linoleum floor that made you want to roller-skate. The bright, clean smell of the hospital, like electric washing-up liquid. It was beautiful and it made her happy but all of it was suddenly too much, and the darkness lurched again and swallowed her up and dragged her back down into sleep.

Tom waited for Zoe in his office underneath the track. She was taking forever in the shower, and he didn’t blame her. There were two decades of racing to be washed away.

He got through to Jack, who told him that Sophie was very weak in postop. He tried to put it outside his mind for now, to break it out of the problem space and concentrate on the needs of his athlete.

“My athlete,” he said aloud, feeling the sound of it in the dead air of his little room.

Unless she wanted to carry on in the sport at some more terrestrial level—and he couldn’t really see her showing up to race at the Nationals anymore, or the Northwest Seniors’ Track Meet—then maybe she was no one’s athlete now. What should you say to a woman like Zoe, now that no one was paying you to say it? As her coach he’d always known what to tell her. It had been easy to help when it had mattered how high she should keep her pedaling cadence or how many grams of
protein she should be eating a week before race day. Now that real life was the game, it would be easy for her to lose it. She would be helpless in a world where victory was rarely complete and defeat was often negotiable.

He didn’t know what to tell her. He couldn’t protect her the way he’d done when she was nineteen. He’d put her up in his flat in the week she spent at the hospital, after Jack’s crash. He’d cooked for her, he’d talked cycling with her, and then when she’d decided she couldn’t be with Jack, he’d hosted her for another week and tried to keep her head together. He’d looked after her the best he could, and there’d been a bond between them since then.