Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (109 page)

Zoe knew that she should feel exultant. Instead her legs felt suddenly heavy, as if an unseen hand had dialed up the resistance on the stationary bike.

The antibiotics dripping into her arm should save Sophie, this was what Dr. Hewitt said. Jack wanted to believe it. She was still pale and drifting in and out of sleep. Jack held her hand and squeezed it from time to time, a submarine sending a sonar pulse, checking for the return pressure.

“Alright?” he whispered.

“Alright,” said Sophie. Her voice was still tiny inside the capsule of her oxygen mask.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I sound like Vader with this mask.”

She squeezed his hand, and Jack felt better.

Dr. Hewitt pulled up a stacking chair and sat down at the bedside, facing Sophie and Jack.

“I’ve got good news and more news for you, Sophie. Can you listen carefully for a minute?”

Sophie nodded, a small movement against the green pillow with the name of the hospital printed in purple ink on the selvage of its case.

“Well, the good news is that we’ve run your bloods and they’re really, really good. I’m delighted, and you should be too. I know this might seem odd to you when you’re feeling so poorly, but your counts of bad cells are way down and if I had to take a bet on it, I’d say it looks as if the chemo is working.”

Sophie whispered, “So why am I like this?”

“The immediate issue is that the chemo has made your body very weak. There’s an infection in your Hickman line, and that’s what’s been making you poorly. Ideally we’d have spotted it earlier.”

Jack groaned. “I’m so sorry, Sophie.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. Often the symptoms are indistinguishable from the general fatigue. This is the problem. The infection can sit around the axis of the line for ages, and then for whatever reason it accelerates. We’re going to take the line out and clean up a bit. Because the line’s been in for a while, there’s been quite a bit of tissue formation around the insertion point, so we’ll need to put you under for a few minutes while we whip it out. Okay with you, Sophie?”

Sophie hesitated, her eyes wide and worried above the mask.

“It’s not a big deal,” Dr. Hewitt said. “First we’ll clean your skin with a special wipe to kill any nasty germs that may be lurking there. Then we’ll just make some little incisions, with a very small knife. You’ll be under anaesthetic, which means you’ll just be dreaming.”

Sophie stared at Dr. Hewitt. “What will I be dreaming about?”

The doctor looked at Jack.

“Star Wars,” Jack said quickly. “I promise.”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

Dr. Hewitt said, “We’ll draw the Hickman line out slowly, and once it’s clear of the vein, we’ll flush an antibiotic through the line as we withdraw it, which will treat the site of the infection. Then you’ll need a couple of little stitches, and we’ll put a dressing over that.”

Sophie’s hand was trembling. Jack wished Dr. Hewitt would stop.
He squeezed her hand again and she looked up at him, stared for a few seconds without any expression, and then, suddenly, she smiled the widest, most perfect smile. Jack beamed back. There was no choice in it: his body just responded. It was the strangest feeling to have your courage given back to you by your own child.

“After the Hickman line is out, we’ll take you down to radiology and the nurse will take an X-ray picture of your chest, to make sure that we haven’t left anything inside. Then we’ll bring you back up here and give you the once-over.”

Sophie grinned at Jack again, and he made a face. She giggled. The moment had a certain persistence. The April light from the windows seemed to Jack like the clearest light ever to fall. The rhythms of the monitoring equipment were better than any of the music on his iPod. The tiny pulse that went
whum-whum-whum
in his ears.
Beep, beep, beep. Pulse, pulse, pulse. And AH would walk five HUNdred miles.
Sophie laughing. Him laughing back at her.

Dr. Hewitt had said that the chemo was working. It dawned on Jack, only now, that this really was what he had said.

“After the operation, Sophie, you’re going to feel very poorly, I’m afraid. Your chest will feel a bit burny and you might have a headache and feel tired and sick. You might even
be
sick, but that’s perfectly normal and you mustn’t worry about it. It just means the antibiotics are doing their job.”

Sophie crossed her eyes at Jack. “Bleurgh!” she whispered. “Sick!”

That set them both off, faces hot with laughter. Dr. Hewitt talked louder, struggling to assert himself.

“Sorry, Jack. Sorry, Sophie. Are you listening?”

They were gone. They had the giggles.

Dr. Hewitt smiled and shook his head. “You two are really something else, you know?”

“Sorry,” Jack said. “It’s just been a really hard time.”

He looked up at Sophie then, and he had never felt so tired or so
happy. The machines bleeped. The afternoon light poured through the windows. The light was made in the core of the sun, thousands of years before Sophie fell sick. It had reached this point at the same moment that she was getting better. It seemed to Jack like first light.

When a suitable time had gone by, Dr. Hewitt said, “Right then, Sophie. Shall we wheel you through to theater?”

Sophie shrugged. “Whatever, Trevor.” Her insouciance was a mist in the breathing mask.

Jack walked with Dr. Hewitt behind Sophie’s bed as two porters pushed it along the corridors.

Dr. Hewitt leaned in to him and said in a low voice, “There are certain risks involved in the procedure. Fingers crossed she’ll be fine, but she’s weaker than we’d like. I just want you to be aware.”

Jack’s stomach twisted. “What does that mean? How big are the risks?”

“Obviously we do everything we can to mitigate. We use the lightest anaesthesia, and we have a crash team standing by.”

Jack nodded. His hands twisted together as they walked the long corridors under the superstitious eyes of hospital visitors. Jack knew what they were feeling. A child like this—bald, frail, and breathing through a mask—made the corridors quieten and onlookers draw back. Sophie cleared minds that had been filled with thoughts of mortgage payments, and unpleasant duties, and difficult conversations overdue. After she had passed they would reconvene, in groups of two or three, and confide to strangers that the moment had marked them.
It makes you think, doesn’t it? It puts it all in perspective.
These are the things they would say.

In the operating theater a smiling nurse handed Jack a surgical gown with a stylized dinosaur printed on it. She helped Jack to lift Sophie down from the bed and into a wheelchair, and she showed them to a little cubicle with a nylon curtain where Sophie was to change.

“I can do it myself,” Sophie said, when Jack tried to help her.

Sitting in the wheelchair, she took off her Star Wars T-shirt. She put
on the surgical gown and Jack did up the laces at the side. He tried not to think about them unlacing the gown and exposing her skinny chest with the Hickman line growing out of it.

On the cubicle wall there was a sticker from a sticker book. Someone had tried to remove it but they’d only managed to tear the edges. It was blue-and-red Spiderman fighting black Spiderman. Sophie stared, transfixed.

“Am I going to be okay, Dad?”

Jack knelt down and turned his daughter to look into his eyes.

“Of course. Look at me? Of course you are.”

“Really?”

He smiled. “You’re going to be fine. I promise.”

This is what he said.

They let Jack hold her hand while she went under the anaesthetic. The anaesthetist pushed home the plunger on the syringe and told Sophie to count to ten.

Sophie stared up at Jack with defiance in her eyes. “I’m going to count to a hundred,” she said.

Jack stroked her face. “Start with one, Sophie.”

“One…” said Sophie, and fell soundlessly asleep.

An X-wing chased a TIE fighter through the infinite darkness of space.

With the match tied at one race each and his girls lining up on the start for the decider, Tom climbed the stairs and sat in the seat high up in the stands where he’d eaten grapes with Zoe thirteen years before. Up here
it was easier to resist the temptation to coach her, to give her the nod of his head and the cyclonic motion of his hands that meant she should simply go hard straight off the start line. If she threw the playbook out the window, went to one hundred percent power right off the whistle, and opened up a gap on Kate, he knew Kate wouldn’t have any answer. Kate’s legs were shot, but Tom knew Zoe. She would still be thinking tactics. In the last race she’d used her head, conserved her power, and resisted the temptation to blow Kate away completely. She’d kept her powder dry and won by the tiniest margin she dared. She’d won elegantly. The way Tom saw it, the danger was that she would try to win that way again. Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward.

He watched Kate on the start line as she checked and rechecked her pedals. He put himself into her mind. She would be thinking of ways to slow the race down, and since Zoe had the inside line this time, it wasn’t going to be easy. If he could whisper in Kate’s ear, he would tell her to go like a rocket off the whistle. That way if Zoe had decided to go to full power too, then Kate wouldn’t have let a gap open up and she could tuck into Zoe’s slipstream, but if Zoe had decided to start slow, then Kate could drop down in front of her, slow down, and use the lead position to dictate the speed of the race.

He swore at himself then, and he had to smile. This was what it had come to, after forty years of high-level coaching: his best tactical advice to his two best riders would be to ride their bicycles as fast as they were able.

It was unbearable though, watching his girls lining up to hurt each other like this. In less than a minute the starter would step forward, and then, three minutes after that, all of their lives would be changed. There was an intimate distance at which Kate and Zoe had held each other for more than a decade, now calling it friendship and now calling it rivalry
but always keeping each other less than a finished sentence, less than a ragged breath, less than a wheel-length away. This final race was the knife that would cut that link between them and send them falling into their separate lives.

If he was honest with himself, the reason he had come up here to sit on his own in the stands was not that he was afraid of giving in to the temptation to coach Zoe to win. It was because he was finding it harder and harder to resist the impulse to go down to the start line and beg the two of them not to race at all. You’re thirty-two, he wanted to tell them, so why not give it up without killing each other first? Sooner or later you’ll both need to climb down from the Olympic heights and learn to walk quietly in the valleys with whatever remains of your strength.

He hated himself for the part he’d played in bringing this final confrontation forward. He’d done it to protect them from the media, but now he wished he’d played it differently. He raised his hands helplessly, wishing he knew how to make the signal that would make them look across at each other on the start line and understand all this for themselves. A cyclonic motion, perhaps, but in the anticlockwise direction, meaning,
Please, when the whistle goes, forget everything I ever told you.

As the starter counted the seconds down from ten and the start line tension came into the bodies of his two athletes, his arms slowly dropped to his sides. He was the best coach he knew. He had nothing else in his life, and his focus was perfect and absolute. He knew everything there was to know about making human beings go quicker, but nothing at all about how to make them stop.

He fell back down into his seat as the whistle blew. It didn’t surprise him at all that Zoe and Kate both did exactly what they should have done, going hard off the line. Because Kate had anticipated her quick start, Zoe failed to open up a gap on her, and by the time they came out of the first bend, Kate was tucked into her wake. With the pace high, Zoe was doing all the work, and with each meter they raced, she was conceding the energy she’d conserved in the first two races. She swerved
across the track from the well up to the high side and back, trying to expose Kate to some air resistance. Kate responded well, matching every twist of direction that Zoe made.

As they entered the second lap, Tom watched with his heart hammering. His riders were at full speed now, swerving and ducking at thirty-five miles per hour with Kate’s front wheel six inches from Zoe’s back wheel as Zoe tried desperately to shake her off. Another lap of this and Zoe’s legs would be blown, leaving Kate to pick her moment to pop out of her slipstream and ride past her. If Zoe couldn’t drop Kate from her wind shadow very soon, then she would have to slow the race down to the speed at which the slipstream wasn’t an advantage.

Even before it happened, Tom saw the risk. He rose to his feet again and his hands went up to his mouth. He watched Zoe signaling, by the relaxation of her shoulders and the slight lifting of her head, that she was slowing down. Either Kate didn’t see it or she decided Zoe was faking, because Kate didn’t slow or turn. At close to full speed, at the high side of the track, her front wheel made contact with Zoe’s back wheel. Zoe’s bike twitched and sent her into a high-speed judder, but she managed to control it. Kate was less fortunate. Her steering twisted and sent her over with her feet still locked into the pedals. She skidded along the smooth boards on her side, her bike still attached to her. She came to a stop in the well of the track, screaming with shock and distress. In less than a second, everything was over.