Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (72 page)

WHAT WOULD YOU SACRIFICE FOR THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE?

KATE AND ZOE
met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling—a sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair.

Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.

Kate is the more naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a tendency to slow her down. Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie dreams of the Death Star and of battling alongside the Rebels as evil white blood cells ravage her personal galaxy—she is fighting a recurrence of the leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago. Sophie doesn’t want to stand in the way of her mum’s Olympic dreams, but each day the dark forces of the universe seem to be massing against her.

Devoted and self-sacrificing Kate knows her daughter is fragile, but at the height of her last frenzied months of training, might she be blind to the most terrible prognosis?

Intense, aloof Zoe has always hovered on the periphery of real human companionship, and her compulsive need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship with Kate—and her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond they have shared for more than a decade?

Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track,
Gold
is a triumph of superbly paced, heart-in-throat storytelling. With great humanity and glorious prose, Chris Cleave examines the values that lie at the heart of our most intimate relationships, and the choices we make when lives are at stake and everything is on the line.

© LOU ABERCROMBIE

CHRIS CLEAVE
is the author of
Incendiary
and the #1
New York Times
bestseller
Little Bee
. He lives with his wife and three children in Kingston-upon-Thames, England.

Visit
www.chriscleave.com

or follow him on Twitter
@chriscleave

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

SimonandSchuster.com

• THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

JACKET DESIGN AND ILLUSTR ATION BY ROBERTO DE VICQ DE CUMPTICH

COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

Also by Chris Cleave

Little Bee

Incendiary

Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris Cleave

Originally published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2012

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Lyrics from “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles” by The Proclaimers are reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holders: (Reid/Reid) Warner/Chappell Publishing Ltd.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com
.

Designed by Ruth Lee-Mui

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleave, Chris.
Gold: a novel / Chris Cleave.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PR6103.L43G65 2012
823'.92—dc23
2011043699

ISBN 978-1-4516-7272-5
ISBN 978-1-4516-7685-3 (ebook)

For Cecily

Just on the other side of an unpainted metal door, five thousand men, women, and children were chanting her name. Zoe Castle didn’t like it as much as she’d thought she would. She was twenty-four years old and she sat where her coach told her to sit, beside him, on a thin white bench with the blue protective film still on it.

“Don’t touch the door,” he said. “It’s alarmed.”

It was just the two of them in the tiny subterranean changing room. The walls were freshly plastered, and little hardened curds of the stuff lay on the cement floor where they’d fallen from the trowel. Zoe kicked at one. It came detached, skittered away, and dinged against the metal door.

“What?” said her coach.

Zoe shrugged. “Nothing.”

When she’d visualized success—when she’d dared to imagine making it this far—the floors and the walls of every building in Athens had been Platonic surfaces, hewn from an Olympian material that glowed with inner light. The air had not smelled of drying cement. There hadn’t been this white plastic document wallet on the floor, containing the manufacturer’s installation guide for the air-conditioning unit that stood, partially connected, in the corner of the room.

Her coach saw her expression and grinned. “
You’re
ready. That’s the main thing.”

She tried to smile back. The smile came out like a newborn foal: its legs buckled immediately.

Overhead, the public stamped its feet in time. The start was overdue. Air horns blared. The room shook; it was so loud that her back teeth buzzed in her jaw. The noise of the crowd was liquidizing her guts. She thought about leaving the velodrome by the back door, taking a taxi to the airport, and flying home on the first available jet. She wondered if she would be the first Olympian ever to do that simple, understandable thing: to quietly slope off from Olympus. There must be something she could do with herself, in civilian life. Magazines loved her. She looked good in clothes. She was beautiful, with her glossy black hair cropped short and her wide green eyes set in the pale, haunted face of an early European saint. There was the slightest touch of cruelty in the line of her lips, a hint of steel in the set of her face that caused the eye to linger. Maybe she should do something with that. She could give interviews, laughing backstage after the show when the journalist asked did she know she looked quite a lot like that British girl who ran off from the Olympics—what was her name again?
Ha!
she would say.
I get that question all the time! And by the way, whatever did become of that girl?

Her coach’s breathing was slow and even.

“Well
you
seem okay,” said Zoe.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Just another day at the office, right?”

“Correct,” said Tom. “We’re just clocking in to do our job. I mean, what do you want—a medal?”

When he saw how she looked at him, he raised his hands in supplication. “Sorry. Old coaching joke.”

Zoe scowled. She was pissed off with Tom. It wasn’t helping her at all, his insouciance—his pretense that this wasn’t a huge deal. He was usually a much better coach than this, but the nerves were getting to him just when she most needed him to be strong. Maybe she should change coaches, as soon as she got back to England. She thought about telling him now, just to wipe that faux-wise smile off his face.

The worst part was that she was shivering uncontrollably, despite the unconditioned heat. It was humiliating, and she couldn’t make it stop. She was already suited and warmed up. She’d given a urine sample and eight cc’s of blood that must have been mostly adrenaline. She’d recorded a short, nervy piece to camera for her sponsors, signed the official race entry forms, and pinned her race number to the back of her skinsuit. Then she’d removed it and pinned it back on again, the right way up. There was nothing left to occupy these terrible minutes of waiting.