Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (77 page)

The extra pressure helped her push through the pain threshold in training. You had to keep yourself desperate—as wild as you’d been when you’d had nothing. You had to double up your stake each time, or watch as someone more frightened than you were rode you off their wheel.

It amused her that this place she’d bought to scare herself was trying so hard to be soothing. The walls were painted in Farrow & Ball. They had the quality of neither reflecting nor absorbing. The shade was called Archive. The tall plate-glass windows responded to the external light level, sparing one’s pupils the stress of it all.

On a low ironwood coffee table beside the sofa there was the new copy of
Marie Claire
with Zoe’s face on the cover, smiling. She flipped
through it. She was
fiercely determined
. She was
ruthless and unstoppable
. She was
driven by her demons
. This is what they wrote.

None of it felt like her. She closed her eyes and tried with her breathing to calm the panic that was spreading from her stomach. There was no traffic noise, no sound of the neighbors’ TV, nothing. This high above the world’s surface, the thing the estate agent had marketed as privacy felt quite a lot like solitude. This high above the city she’d climbed out of, the silence seemed irrevocable.

She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. Maybe that she could leave her problems forty-six floors below, on Earth.

She tried to focus on her breathing. She wished Tom were here. He would know what to say to help her work through how she was feeling. Since she’d met him, at nineteen, she’d trusted him to get her through the difficult days. The trouble was that the difficult days weren’t the race days anymore. Competing in an Olympics didn’t scare her now. The thought of stepping up into the full roar of the crowd, in London, seemed simple and natural and good. It was ordinary days now that frightened her—the endless Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons of real life, the days you had to steer through without the benefit of handlebars. Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions—like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere—when all she’d ever trained it to do was pump blood.

She shuddered, and picked up her phone to call Tom. She pulled up his number and paused. She knew he would ask her to formulate the problem for him, and she tried to think what to say this time. Probably she should lead with a question about her diet, or her Pilates regimen, and then let Tom work out what was really wrong. This was often what she did now, when she called him. She was a champion, after all, and it was humiliating just to say out loud,
Please, I’m not coping.
She hesitated, gazing out into the gray mist that cloaked the city.

An Italian olive tree ascended silently past the window, spinning slowly as it rose.

Jack turned into the Argalls’ home street and slowed down to walking pace as he edged the car over the potholes. He looked in the rearview mirror to check he wasn’t shaking Sophie around too badly. The rain had eased, and half a dozen children wrangled their bikes lazily down the long, straight ribbon of road between the banks of identical red brick Victorian terraced houses, each with its single step and low wall separating a painted front door from the pavement. The children stopped their bikes to blow bubble gum and watch the Argalls pull up outside their house.

Jack opened his door, stepped up and out into the last of the rain, and frowned.

“Don’t you kids ever go inside?”

The tallest child was a girl of eight in pink leggings, white trainers, and a green parka with the hood up. She inched her bike forward from the others, gripped the brake levers, and tilted her head to one side. She wrinkled her nose and looked at Jack as if he was slightly retarded.

“There’s nowt on telly, is there?” she said. “Just shite.”

He frowned.

“What?” said the girl. “I only said
shite
. Is that not a word in fuckin’ Lapland or wherever you come from, Mr. Argall?”

She leaned over and spat on the road. A long strand of drool failed to detach, and she sucked it back like spaghetti between the gap in her front teeth, looking amiably at Jack all the while.

“I come from Scotland,” said Jack. “You’d know it if it came on TV. Bagpipes? Kilts? Heroin?”

“Whatevs,” said the girl. “Is your Sophie alright?”

“Ask her yourself, Ruby. She does talk.”

Kate had got out of the car and was leaning back in to undo Sophie’s straps. The girl footed her bike up to her.

“Mam left a cake for you, Mrs. A. On your step.”

Kate looked up and there they were, one Tupperware box and one metal biscuit tin on the front step of their house.

“Two cakes,” she said. “That’s so kind.”

“Nah, the tin is from Kelly’s mam. It’s biscuits but I wouldn’t eat them if I was you because Kelly’s mam’s dirty.”

“Ruby, honey, that’s not nice,” Kate said.

Jack gave her a look over Ruby’s head that said “Yeah, but…” and she tried to keep a straight face.

“Let’s have you out of there, Sophie,” she said, cradling her daughter’s head as she lifted her out of the car.

Sophie looked over Kate’s shoulder at the other girl. She blinked against the drizzle.

“Alright, Soph?” said Ruby.

“
Amazing
,” said Sophie, “we actually went to the Death Star and we actually met Darth Vader and it was really him because otherwise
why would I have these memories
?”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “When are you coming back to school?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Soon, Ruby,” Kate said. “When she’s better.”

“You’ve missed two months now,” Ruby said. “Miss any more and you’ll have to go in thicky maths with Barney and he’ll show you his willy.”

Sophie shrugged nonchalantly. “Already seen it.”

Ruby smiled, then she reached up quickly and took Sophie’s hand. She looked into her eyes for a second and tilted her head forward, as if she was trying to direct forces from inside herself, through her arm, into Sophie’s body. Then she let go of her hand, popped her bubble gum, and pedaled away to join the other children riding circles in the street.

Sophie let Mum carry her inside. The house smelled of toast and
bike oil. Her parents’ road bikes hung on hooks in the hallway. Mum set her down on her feet and she kicked her way through the chaos of shoes, unpaired gloves, and discarded coats on the hallway floor to get to the toilet under the stairs.

Sophie bolted herself into the toilet and collapsed on the floor in the dark. She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. That half a minute of talking with Ruby had wiped her out. It was good, though. Mum had seen it, Dad had seen it. That counted for an hour when they wouldn’t worry. After that she knew she would start to see the lines creeping back into their faces, and hear the sharp edge coming back into their voices, and notice the little sideways glances they shot at her while they pretended they weren’t looking. They would start to have arguments with each other, about stupid things like training hours and long-grain rice, and they wouldn’t even know why they were doing it. She would know, though. It meant that they were scared for her all over again, and she would have to do one of the things that made them forget it for another hour.

If you were in the car, you could kick the back of the seat. That made them annoyed, which was the opposite of scared. If you were in the house, you had more choices. You could answer back or be lippy, which made you seem less ill. You could do a drawing. You could hurry up the stairs and make a lot of noise so they noticed you doing it, even if you had to lie down on your bed afterwards for ten minutes. You could make it look like you’d eaten all your toast, even if you had to post it down your T-shirt and flush it in the toilet later. You could play boys’ games like Star Wars that had fighting and spaceships and made you look tough, even if you weren’t tough enough to ride a bike.

Night was more difficult. At night when you had nightmares, and when Mum or Dad came running, you could tell them it was about a wolf or a robber—the stuff that healthy kids had nightmares about—and not Death, that made you so scared you could never even make your voice come out to call for Mum and Dad. When you got Death,
you just had to keep quiet. Other nights, you could pretend to be asleep when Mum came in to check on you at ten p.m., one a.m., and four a.m. If you set your iPod alarm for five minutes before hers, you could make it seem as though you slept soundly, even if you were really reading Star Wars comics half the night.

There were a hundred things you could do to make Mum and Dad not worry. You could polish your own shoes and clean your teeth and get dressed nicely, even though you were so tired all you wanted to do was lie down and close your eyes. You could talk about the future—they liked it when you talked about the future, so long as it was close. If you said “Tomorrow can I go to the shops with you?” it made them happy, because it meant you were being optimistic. Dr. Hewitt called it
positive engagement
and it was a sign that you weren’t suffering from the thing everyone was most scared of, which was
failure to thrive.
So if you said “Can I go to the shops tomorrow?” they would say “Great!” But if you said “Next year can we go to France for our holidays?” then they would get a hollow look in their eyes, and give each other those sideways glances, and say something like “Let’s just take it a day at a time, shall we?”

If you wanted them to not worry, there were also a hundred things you could not do. You could not cough, you could not be sick, and you could never say you were tired or sad. If you actually were sick there were ways to hide it, and if you actually were sad there were ways too.

There were so many ways to make Mum and Dad not worry, it was easy to think of a thing for every single hour. The only hard bit was that all of it made you very tired, which was one of the main things you had to never be. That was why you had to rest like this sometimes, in the toilet, in the dark.

Now that she’d rested, Sophie reached up and pulled the light cord. The wooden handle had come off the end and got lost, and Mum had tied on one of her Commonwealth gold medals in its place. It swung in the light of the bare bulb, flashing as it spun.

Music started up from the kitchen. Sophie smiled. Dad was in a good mood. The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing “Never Understand.”

Dad’s music was shit.

Through the toilet door she could hear Dad singing along. It sounded like anyone’s dad singing words. Sophie loved the moments when Mum and Dad were happy. If you concentrated and arranged them in your memory then you could collect them, like old copper coins, or crystals.

Sophie pulled herself upright on the hand basin, sat on the toilet seat, and peed. This time her urine was a bright lime green. She was glad Mum and Dad couldn’t see it, because it would freak them out. She flushed the toilet and washed her hands carefully in the little basin with the cake of soap that had been formed by pressing together the tailings of the last two. She dried her hands on her jeans. Through the door she heard her parents laughing in the hallway. Mum was telling Dad to shut up with his singing.

Sophie stood on the toilet seat to look into the mirror above the hand basin. She had to check how she was doing, every day. She did it in here, so no one could see. She took off her Star Wars baseball cap and examined her scalp. She had one lock of hair left now, hanging down over her forehead on the left side. In the mirror there were dark circles under her eyes. That was just the effect of the harsh overhead bulb. Her face seemed thinner, though. She put her hands to her cheeks, ran her fingers over the cheekbones, and felt the sharp edges of them. She was scared for a moment, but then she realized it wasn’t the leukemia. This was just what it did to you, the microgravity of the Death Star. It made you waste away. This was probably what all the Stormtroopers looked like, under their helmets.

She put her baseball cap back on and checked herself in the mirror. She rubbed her cheeks to put color in them. She planned what she would do now: go into the kitchen, look healthy for about a minute, tell Dad his music was rubbish, then go upstairs to her room and lie
down. No, she would say “Your music’s
shite
,” the way Ruby would say it. And Dad would grin, and drop to his knees and play-fight with her, and Mum would laugh when she saw them, and that would be one more hour when Mum and Dad wouldn’t worry.

“Shite,”
said Sophie quietly, practicing the word.

Tom Voss still remembered how it had felt for him, back in Mexico in ’68, to miss out on Olympic bronze by one-tenth of one second. He could feel the anguish of it even now, in his chest, raw and unavenged. Forty-four years later he still noticed the sharp passage of every tenth part of every second. The inflections of time were the teeth of a saw, bisecting him. This was not how other people experienced time. They noticed its teeth indistinctly in a blur of motion and were amazed to wake up one day and find themselves cut in half by it, like the assistants of a negligent magician. But Tom knew how the cut was made.

He took a call from Zoe’s agent while he was soaking in the bath, persuading his knees to unlock.

“She’s been sleeping around again,” the agent said. “It’s all over Facebook.”

“Facebook?” said Tom.

“It’s a social networking site, Thomas. People use it to exchange information with friends. A
friend
is someone who—”

“Ha ha,” Tom said. “I know what Facebook is. Zoe’s got a lot of likes on it, right?”

“Ninety thousand, last time I looked.”

He held the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he massaged his knees. His inflamed ligaments weren’t responding to the application of ibuprofen rub. In truth he knew they would only respond to his applying several decades of top-level coaching insight to his own life. It was maybe time to admit that a sixty-six-year-old man shouldn’t be
doing clean and jerk with a heavy barbell. But hey. There were accountants who bolloxed up their own taxes. There were doctors who smoked Marlboro Reds. Why should he be the first old man to listen to himself? He was a sports coach; he wasn’t some kind of bloody pioneer.