Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (101 page)

She shivered and pushed the image away. She couldn’t think of it happening like that. The only way she was going to wave good-bye to the sport was from the top of the podium in London. Tom must think she was going to beat Kate, or he wouldn’t have asked her to race. He knew she wasn’t built to survive a slow fade-out.

The only thing that kept her alive was winning, and without winning there was only blackness and despair. It had been like that since she could remember. She’d been born in a speeding ambulance after a very quick labor, and the first sound she’d heard was sirens. What could you do, when you were born under a blue flashing light instead of a star sign? You could only keep ahead of your destiny. You could only count calories, and do three hundred abdominal crunches every morning, and make your body your home.

At ten months she crawled faster than the other babies. When there were rusks and rattles to reach, she reached them first. At eleven months she toddled while the others only teetered. The old photos showed a blur of her in a tiny dress. At two she ran with her elbows sticking out, so no other kid could get past her.

Her mother found her secondhand machines to ride until she turned ten. Then, on the morning of her birthday, she raced downstairs and her first brand-new bike was waiting. It was wrapped in two kinds of paper, one a canary yellow, one red with stars. One roll hadn’t been long enough. The bike was pink with white tires, tinsel streamers on the handlebar ends, and a basket to put her doll in. She didn’t love her doll, not so blindly that she was going to give her a free ride, so she unscrewed the basket to save weight. She loosened the screws with the point of a carrot peeler, then teased them out with her fingernails. She snipped off the handlebar tinsel with her mother’s haircutting scissors. She knew boys rode their bikes quicker, and she reckoned maybe the difference was tinsel. She left it in plain sight on the kitchen floor, without
sweeping it up, and she knew she’d get in trouble for it later. But if later really cared, it should try turning up at places sooner. She called upstairs to her brother Adam and told him it was time to race.

Adam was seven and a half and much smaller than her. He rose up on his toes when their mother marked off their heights against the doorpost, but his mark still came a head below Zoe’s. They had the same hair, a glossy blue-black. Their mother cut it for them while they sat on a three-legged stool in the kitchen, kicking their legs and listening to the
Chart Show
on BBC Radio 1. Debbie Gibson and the Fine Young Cannibals. It didn’t matter if you were a son of hers or a daughter: the haircut their mother gave out was the one Luke Skywalker wore in the first
Star Wars
film, the one where he journeyed throughout the galaxy but didn’t meet anyone who took him aside and said,
Listen up, Luke, either grow it long and raffish or cut it properly and let’s see those nice cheekbones
. Zoe wanted to be a boy, and it upset her that Luke was so bad at it. Still, their mother wouldn’t cut her hair short, and Skywalker’s hair was what she had to settle for. Rather Luke than Leia.

They shared a bed in a small room under the eaves, and when their mother climbed the ladder to wake them each morning, they’d be tangled around one another, puffy-eyed from dreaming or wide awake and bickering about the details of a dream they’d shared. Their mother dressed them more or less the same, but she put butterfly-shaped hairclips in Zoe’s hair, which Zoe could sometimes persuade Adam to wear if she took responsibility for his wetting the bed. As well as the hair, Adam had the same jade green eyes and the same skill of not being in the room by the time you finished your sentence. They’d learned the trick of living fast and then accelerating away before they got in trouble for it. So of course she called for Adam when it was time to test her new bike from the top of Black Hill to the bottom. The handlebar tinsel was still on the kitchen floor, all mixed up with the jet-black clippings of the haircut their mother had given her for her birthday. She was supposed
to sweep them up, but there was no time. Jobs like that, when you were ten, they took about two hundred years.

They lived in a small farmhouse with its own field at the end of a long lane. Their father had left when Zoe was four, so their mother did everything. As well as Zoe and Adam, there were four dozen bantam hens and nine Jacob sheep. The Jacobs had four horns and devil eyes; they looked like Lucifer in a woolly sweater. There wasn’t much to do apart from look at the sheep, and there weren’t many cars in the lanes, so they rode their bikes wherever they liked. Black Hill was their local mountain. It was 212 feet high, which was the highest altitude to which a human being could ascend without supplementary oxygen. From the top of the hill you could see the curvature of the Earth, if you held your head upside down at a particular angle.

The day of her birthday was hot. It was the alivest part of summer, the part where you could actually see the plants growing, out of the corner of your eye, although they froze the moment you looked at them. The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it. They rode out along the lanes, singing “Back to Life” by Soul II Soul and taking their hands off the handlebars to clap out the rhythm. Swifts swung down to buzz them and flashed back up into the heights, screaming. When they reached the foot of Black Hill, they got off and pushed their bikes. The hill was so steep.

They shared a water bottle, one of the aluminium ones that the pro riders used in the old days. It was dented and scuffed, with just the vestiges of its original paint. Adam drank from it often and noisily, making sure Zoe noticed how pro it made him. It also made him have to stop and wee. She closed her eyes and listened and pretended that the sound of Adam’s urine was hers, scattering insects and seeping into the soil and releasing the dark scents of clay and cool flint. She supposed boys took this consolation for granted. However bad things got, you could always make ants flee and beetles race for higher ground.

At the top of Black Hill they stopped to catch breath. They tightened up their race helmets. It was 1989. It was before safety was invented. But Greg LeMond had just won the Tour de France in a futuristic streamlined hat—it had been on the television news—so she and Adam had made aerodynamic helmets out of chicken wire, paste, and newspaper. The newspaper was the
Daily Telegraph
, which their mother took. Under the paste of Zoe’s helmet you could see three-quarters of the photo of the man in Tiananmen Square, standing in front of the tanks. The tank man was famous for being slow. Four tanks bearing down on him, every nerve of his body screaming at him to run, and somehow he stood his ground. It was the only kind of race you could win without moving.

Adam and Zoe drew up beside the oak tree they always used as a start line, and they turned their bikes so they pointed downhill. The lane was seven feet wide, lined with beech trees that roofed it in. The light was green and soft. She took the left-hand side of the road and gave Adam the right. She was older, so she could push him around like that. She chose the left side because the road curved to the left all the way down the hill, so her side of the road was shorter. She had a shorter line and she had a new bike with straight wheels. She was going to beat Adam hollow. He just grinned at her. He never worked out why he always lost their races. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t mind. Adam just cared less than she did.

Their helmets were held on with string. You could see a fragment of a newspaper headline on the front of Adam’s. It said
JUBILATION AS.
He grinned in the green light, with gaps where his grown-up teeth were growing, and the smell of blooming plants in the lane, and
JUBILATION AS
. She wondered,
As what?
They counted down from five and then they stood on the pedals. She began to inch ahead of Adam. Soon they were pedaling like crazy. She could hear Adam struggling for breath and giggling at the same time. The harder he chased, the quicker she rode.

They went so fast that her eyes began to stream. She couldn’t see
much, but there wasn’t much you needed to see—just the high banks of the lane to steer between. The air roared over her ears, and she was shouting with the excitement of it, and so was Adam. You got up to this speed where the bike started humming beneath you, where the vibrations through the handlebars and the saddle drew you into a trance of concentration. You noticed everything. Every click of wing cases opening as ladybirds in the long grass verge took fright at your approach. Every concussion of tiny chips of stone, thrown up from the asphalt by your tires and striking the tensioned steel of the bike frame. Time had the quality of indecisiveness. Everything was unusually quick and unusually slow.

She whooped. Adam echoed her, somewhere behind. Around the curve a car came quickly up the hill, black and soundless against the roar of the rushing air, and impossibly close. She saw the face of the woman who was driving it. She saw the O that her mouth made. Her lipstick was neon pink, unnatural. Zoe was hugging the bank to her left and the driver was hugging the bank to her own left, and Zoe shot through the gap between the car and her side of the lane. She was surprised. She thought,
You don’t see many women wearing lipstick in these lanes
. Then she heard the bang, which was much louder than the end of the world, and she kept on pedaling.

She knew it wouldn’t be true unless she looked back. She was certain that if she could ride faster than the news, the news would never reach her. This was the hour in which she began to emerge distinctly from the main fluid of time. She and time were oil and vinegar shaken up and left to stand: they began to separate back into magic and water. She rode flat out for twenty-five miles, and when the police finally found her, it was dusk, and she was on the dual carriageway, wobbling with exhaustion while juggernauts swerved and blared their horns. She was delirious. She asked the policemen if she was in trouble for cutting the tinsel off the ends of her handlebars and leaving it on the kitchen floor. They put her in the back of the police car, and they took off her papier-mâché
helmet and laid it on the seat beside her. They took her to hospital and they gave her fluids, and later they gave her the news.

Her mother came to the hospital the next afternoon and drove her home, in silence. The tinsel and the hair were still on the kitchen floor. Her mother went to bed without a word getting said and stayed in her room for ten days, until her mind allowed her to answer the phone and consent to Adam’s being taken from the cold room and driven to the church to be cremated.

Cards and flowers arrived in the house. Zoe wasn’t as sure it was over as everyone else seemed to insist. Several times a day she climbed to the top of Black Hill and raced down again, as hard as she could. The deal was, if she could ride faster than she had ever ridden before—if she could ride faster than time—then she would look around and Adam would be there again, racing along behind her. She was sure she could bring him back. There were so many deals she had made as a child, after all, and about half had worked and half hadn’t. Once on Christmas Eve she’d slept in her sleeping bag on the floor, leaving her bed for Jesus to sleep in. In the morning she’d checked to see if the pillow had been slept on. It hadn’t. But another time she’d ridden past a fox that had been killed on the road, without a mark on him, and he was still warm and his eyes glittered with black fire, and she made a deal that if she carried him to the foot of a silver birch tree and put acorns close to his head for when he woke up, then he would come alive again. And when she went back the next day to look, he was gone, and that was proof.

If she could cheat time of a fox, she could try to rob it of her brother. She rode down Black Hill again and again, faster and faster, and each time she looked back and Adam wasn’t there, she thought,
Next time I’ll just go quicker. I’ll never lose a race.

She didn’t remember any one particular day when she stopped believing that winning would bring Adam back. She didn’t know when she stopped looking behind her when she raced, to see if he was on her wheel. She just gradually grew up, and time with its self-regarding eye
built a monument to itself out of her memories, raising it from the plains of her experience until it blocked her view of the past.

While Kate was still on the phone to Tom, Sophie came downstairs, hanging tight to the banisters and screwing up her eyes against the light.

“Tom,” Kate said, “I’ve got to go.”

“Sure. Will you do it?”

“Yeah. I’ll race her.”

“You can take a bit more time if you want. A week or two if you need to mentally prepare.”

She closed her eyes for a moment while she thought about it. “No,” she said. “I’m fine to race tomorrow.”

“Anything I can help you with? Anything you want to talk through with me?”

“No,” said Kate. “Just have my bike ready.”

“That’s my girl,” said Tom. “Midday tomorrow then, okay? Come at eleven and get warmed up.”

“Alright.”

Kate pocketed the phone and hugged Sophie. “You okay?”

Sophie was puffy from sleep. She broke out of the hug and looked at Kate as if trying to place her in the general taxonomy of species. “Excuse me,” she said in a cracked voice, “but what planet is this?”

“It’s breakfast time on Earth,” Kate said. “Rice Krispies or chopped banana?”

“Rice Krispies. Are you with the Empire or the Rebels?”

“Rebels. Juice or hot chocolate?”

“Juice. Where’s Dad?”

“Training.”

Sophie groaned and sat down at the kitchen table with her head in her hands.

“You feeling okay, darling?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

Sophie pulled her knees up to her chin and looked out the kitchen window without saying anything.

Kate felt a catch in her chest. She held Sophie close, noticing the slightness of her. It seemed that there was less and less of her each day. Kate closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of her daughter.