Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (80 page)

“Go on, take the piss. If you had these cheekbones you’d be living up there yourself.”

“I’m not like you. I don’t need the affirmation.”

“God!” said Zoe. “If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be one of those chubby yet strangely judgmental columnists.”

“If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be working through your esteem issues in porn films, getting banged by men with calf tattoos.”

Zoe threw back her head and laughed the bright, carefree laugh she only used when a joke frightened her, but when she looked back at Kate her face was composed.

She said, “Yeah, but we’re racers, so let’s race.”

Kate didn’t see how she could say no. She’d overstepped, and now she had to give something.

“Okay,” she said. “If you really need to.”

“Ooooh!” said Zoe, twisting her toes with excitement and flapping her hands at her sides like a chick attempting flight.

Kate felt the tension released and she could only laugh—Zoe really did love to race. The stuff they couldn’t talk about was more unbearable by the day. At least they could duel it out on the bikes. It was more dangerous than fighting but safer than conversation.

“Let’s go,” Kate said.

“You know the way, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just give me your apartment key, will you?”

“Why?”

“Well I’m going to get there before you, aren’t I? I can go up and put the kettle on, have a nice cup of tea waiting for you.”

“Save it for the bike.”

The two women clipped into their pedals and rode out into the cold black drizzle, streaks of red trailing from their taillights. By tacit agreement they took it easy for the first couple of minutes, keeping each other close as they wove through the slow traffic rolling into the city center. Then, as they rode past City of Manchester Stadium, they looked across at each other, nodded, and picked up the pace. Theirs was the easy, loping style of riders who made no distinction between their skeletal systems and the bones of their bikes. They dug in and accelerated to race speed.

They had a clear run for a mile now, west along Ashton New Road into the city center, and although it was only one lane in each direction, there was a wide band of chevrons between the lanes. They raced along that median strip, side by side, one rider now dropping back to slipstream the other before accelerating into the lead. Twice they had to swerve into the margin of their lane to dodge oncoming motorbikes filtering in the other direction along the central strip. Zoe clipped a wing mirror, a horn blared out, and she screamed with excitement.

Zoe was happiest when she was street racing. It was dirty and it was fast and everything you could see wanted to kill you. The car drivers were either dozy and inattentive or alert and seething, and either affliction might make them suddenly swerve out and hit you. The white chevrons you rolled on were slick in the rain and slippery with spilled diesel and strewn with broken windscreen glass that could shred your tire and spill you into the path of traffic. If you fell you could only roll like a gymnast and hope you hit the curb before you hit a car. The rain got in your eyes and made the approaching headlights a blur of speed and glare, and in the midst of this chaos you were racing another human being at the top of her game, so your heart rate was on the rivet and the adrenaline blitzed your senses.

They went quicker. Zoe grinned into the wind. This was pure racing because there was no prize and no glory and no one knew who you were. There was no recognition and no fame. You could ride to a place beyond yourself. This was what she loved. When she raced like this, she couldn’t think about her life. You were intent on not making the tiniest error. You could ride so fast that the speed fed on itself and your wheels began to roar in the dark and your heart was going so hard that you thought one more beat per minute might kill you, and then suddenly you heard a motorbike and you looked round and you saw the white headlight behind you, and somehow you went even faster. Lights flashed past like laser bolts. You leaned and you wove and you accelerated. Street racing was the only part of her life where Zoe felt in control. It was the only time she could ride past a twenty-foot-high floodlit billboard of her own face and notice only the helpful illumination it gave to the road surface.

Kate and Zoe jockeyed for position on the narrowing central strip, first one pulling ahead, then the other. They were perfectly matched. After nearly a full mile, with lungs bursting, neither could open up a gap on the other. The central strip was getting too skinny for them to come alongside each other in safety, and twice they bumped shoulders and had to hold their line hard not to careen off into the cars.

Two hundred meters ahead, a set of traffic lights marked the T-junction where their route went left onto Great Ancoats Street. The lights were green.

Kate looked up the roadway and judged the point at which the lights could show amber and she would still carry on rather than braking. Without signposting it in her body language, she suddenly kicked hard and opened up five bike lengths on Zoe. This was a power play in a street race: you dug extra deep for a few seconds, way beyond your aerobic limit, knowing that if you gapped your rival, then there was a chance the traffic lights would catch them after letting you through. The risk was that the lights might not change, in which case your rival could cruise past you as you drowned in your own oxygen debt.

Kate risked it, grimacing as the pain in her body began to spike. She badly wanted to win. To beat Zoe now, even in a play race like this, would be to lodge a negative association in Zoe’s mind the next time they lined up together on a serious start line. She kicked harder. At this intensity a single second seemed unendurable, and twenty unimaginable. By an effort of will, she called the image of Sophie into her mind. This was how she coped with suffering. She thought,
If I win this race, Sophie will get better.
There was no logic to it, but her mind above one hundred and sixty beats per minute of heart rate had no use for logic. As she powered on through the dark, she visualized Sophie ahead of her, and the image pulled her forward.

Zoe knew the traffic-light trap by heart and she’d been expecting Kate to jump ahead. She steeled herself and powered up her pedal stroke, refusing to let her rival open up more of a gap. She looked at the roadway, and now she was judging the point beyond which an amber light would not stop her. Her muscles were in agony, but she didn’t acknowledge pain. Her tires slipped and skidded from the lateral force as she cranked the bike forward so hard that the frame gave out cracking noises.

Kate was operating at her limit. Just as the pain in her muscles and her lungs reached an unendurable pitch, the lights went amber. She was still fifteen meters short of the point on the roadway that she had marked as the absolute point of no return. She had a flash of relief: she could brake now. She risked a quick look behind her to check that Zoe was thinking the same. But Zoe was going for it. Eyes glazed, she was rocking from side to side in a trance of effort; Kate didn’t think she’d even noticed her looking back.

Kate hesitated. Was she being too cautious? She was only five meters short of her judgment point now, and the light was still amber, and there was a pretty good chance she could carve through the left turn while the light had only just turned red. She flicked a glance right, across the face of the junction to where the traffic waited in the last second of its own red light. It was a dual carriageway. There was a black Volvo and a
blue BMW at the front. There was a courier motorbike filtering up the outside. Kate watched the cars tinted orange in the overhead lights of the junction. They looked okay. Neither of them stood out as obvious psycho wheels. Odds were that they wouldn’t go dragsters off the amber light.

Kate stamped down hard for two pedal strokes, then hesitated again. She thought about Sophie. Suddenly the zone into which she was traveling seemed as starkly demarcated as the painted stop line on the carriageway suggested. She was the mother of a young child. Was she seriously assessing the risks involved in riding out at full speed onto a T-junction that was about to be overrun with traffic? She pictured Sophie’s face, and her daughter’s eyes connected so forcefully with her tendons and forearm musculature that without even thinking about it, she was braking so hard that her wheels almost locked.

When the lights went amber, Zoe noticed Kate’s hesitation and upped her pace instinctively. She was thirty meters short of her own decision point, but she wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking about Adam. Here, at her physical limit, she felt her dead brother watching her with the same curious, unabashed gaze that Sophie had shown her earlier that day. Here was this ripple in time again, widening from their shared point of origin, keeping pace with her however fast she tried to outride it.

As Kate slowed, Zoe swerved and whipped past her. She flashed across the hard white stop line and ran the red light at twenty-five miles per hour, leaning hard into the perpendicular left turn with her wheels squeaking on the wet tarmac, at the very limit of adhesion.

The driver of the blue BMW told the investigating officer that he hadn’t had anywhere to go. He was three-quarters of the way across
the intersection and accelerating through maybe fifteen miles per hour when Zoe appeared in his lane, a wheel-length ahead of his bumper. He’d had less than one second to react. To his left there’d been the black Volvo; to his right, the motorbike courier. He’d managed to get a touch on the brakes but he’d still clipped Zoe’s back wheel. He’d felt something go under his tires and he was pretty shaken up because he’d thought it had to be her.

“I don’t know what to say,” he told the investigating officer.

The officer had an incident form on his clipboard and a ballpoint pen on a string. “You could say she turned into your braking distance,” he said. “That way it’ll be clear for your insurance.”

Measuring up the scene, and judging from the marks on the road surface and the detritus of shattered registration plates and indicator light housings, the investigating officer was inclined to endorse the male motorist’s account. The female pedal cyclist had come off her machine and rolled across the carriageway, probably passing fractionally ahead of or fractionally behind the motorcycle before coming to rest against an illuminated bollard on the central traffic separation island. She’d been fortunate to walk away with cuts and bruises.

Her pedal cycle—this is how he described it on the road traffic incident form—her pedal cycle had come off worse. He lifted the wreck of it into the back of his patrol car, its frame snapped and the rims twisted. It had gone under the wheels of at least three vehicles. The cyclist was sitting upright now, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket and shivering in the back of the on-scene ambulance while her friend comforted her.

When he set out the facts of the incident on the form on his clipboard, and came to the final box headed
SUMMARY,
he didn’t reckon it was any more complicated than this: that the injured party had continued into the path of oncoming vehicles, while the friend had applied the brakes. This was just how the world was. There were two kinds of people when a light turned red. One kind accelerated, the other kind
braked. It was Eve and Adam, Abel and Cain. There wasn’t any use doing your head in about it. Not on his pay grade, anyway.

His pen hovered for a few seconds above the box headed
OTHER COMMENTS,
but no words came. The officer clicked the button that retracted the pen point, shrugged, and winced as cold rain dripped from his uniform cap between his neck and his hi-vis jacket. He wondered what the hell it was in this woman’s life that meant she couldn’t just brake like everyone else.

Rain streamed down the rear window as the paramedic made Zoe comfortable sitting upright on a stretcher. The stretcher had an information panel indicating that it was rated for patients weighing up to 400 kilos or 880 pounds.

“It’s the weight of an adult female buffalo,” the paramedic said, inviting the conversation away from the fact that the casualty had willfully ridden into the path of moving traffic.

Kate smiled and looked to Zoe to respond, but Zoe turned away and frowned at the rain.

Kate filled the silence. “Do you get many buffalo?”

“We get ladies who just really like donuts. We actually have a crane to get them on the stretcher. We call it the Krispy Kreme Express.”

Kate laughed, but Zoe was still zoned out. Kate held on to both of her hands as the paramedic used tweezers to pick grit out of a deep graze on her forearm. Kate wasn’t expecting Zoe to flinch, and she didn’t. If you were very attentive, you could feel the slightest twitch of Zoe’s fingers each time the tweezers connected.

“Would you look at me?” Kate said softly.

Zoe looked out the rear window.

“Look at me!”

Zoe turned to her, exasperated. The paramedic paused in his work until she was still. When he resumed, the morsels of grit he removed from her arm made little clicking sounds as they fell into a surgical steel dish. The ambulance moved at the speed of the traffic, its sirens off. Twin overhead tubes secreted a bright sickly light.

Kate said, “Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to win.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“No. Well. Clearly.”

Zoe screwed up her face in irritation. “Oh, what are you? My mother?”

“I’ve known you longer than she did.”

Zoe was looking out the window again. “Yeah, but if I’d gone under that car, it would’ve made things simpler for you.”

Kate reached up and turned Zoe’s face back to hers.

“Look at me. If you’d gone under that car, I’d have died too.”

The paramedic paused again and the small percussions of falling grit stopped.