Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (84 page)

Tom watched as the warm-up period ended. He saw Kate’s latent strength and Zoe’s perfect flow and Jack’s incandescent energy. They
were looking over at him now, excitedly, waiting for his signal that would end the warm-up and start the action.

He held the starting whistle between his lips. When he gave the signal, these people’s lives would change in ways they couldn’t yet know. It would be harder for them than they realized, because outside those exalted two minutes of each race, they were condemned to be ordinary people burdened with minds and bodies and human sentimental attachments that were never designed to accelerate to such velocities. They would go through agonies of decompression, like divers returning too quickly from the deep. They would have this one certain, strange, and mercurial quality, these unknowable people with their eyes hidden behind visors: at exactly the moment they crossed the finish line, they would become human beings just like anyone else.

Tom hesitated. He held the whistle ready, but he didn’t have the heart to blow it.

And then Kate swooped down from the high side of the track and brought her bike to a stop beside him. She took off her helmet and beamed at him, and Tom felt his heart melt. He frowned back at her sparkling blue eyes and her cheeks pink from the warm-up.

“What?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

She gave him the middle finger. “Can we bloody race yet, or what?” she said.

He laughed. All her hesitation and her awkwardness were gone. She was a different girl on the bike. This was what you did on the track, for better or worse—you raced yourself. And for a while at least, you could win.

“Race?” said Tom. “Ah, so that’s what you’re here for.”

He blew the whistle and called the riders in to him.

Now Tom picked his head up off the desk and looked at the email again.

You will need to have a word with Zoe and Kate ahead of the IOC announcement.

There was no sense whinging about it. It was on him, and he wasn’t going to shirk it. If you were honest, you called these heartbreaks in to you the moment you blew that whistle.

Zoe woke on the dark sheets of her own bed in the first wash of the pale April light. It was always like this. The slightest hint of dawn snapped her eyes open and sent adrenaline surging through her limbs. Immobility was impossible. You couldn’t train your body up to this pitch and also require it to lie still, however nice that would be.

Beside her was the junior doctor who’d checked her over in A&E the night before. Seeing that no bones were broken, and since his shift finished at eight, he’d offered her a lift home and she’d offered him a euphemism. Coffee was probably the one she’d used—she didn’t recall.

In sleep he’d taken up a position along the far edge of her bed, lying on his side, incurved like a closing parenthesis. She stroked his cheek and he didn’t respond—he was in deep sleep. Zoe ran light fingers over the soft skin of his shoulder. His stillness moved her.

There was a language of sleeping together and most men shouted it. Even good lovers became strident in sleep: fidgeting, sprawling, holding on to you. As if you needed to be held. As if it was against all odds that you had managed, for thirty-two years, not to fatally injure yourself by tumbling out of your own bed due to the absence of a relative stranger to anchor you.

Zoe stroked his cheek again. His eyes opened. They were pale green, and something stirred in her. He looked at her blankly for a moment, then closed his eyes again without waking. They worked the juniors a hundred hours a week, she’d heard.

Asleep, he looked really young. Zoe liked the tidy, self-contained way he slept. She hadn’t wanted the sex as much as she wanted to share
this space with another human being, forty-six floors up in the clouds. Sex was cheap money that you could print on demand and use to buy a reprieve from loneliness till morning.

Afterwards the man had collapsed, exhausted. He’d said this nice thing that had made her smile: “In my professional opinion there is quite literally nothing wrong with you, Zoe.”

“I might want a second opinion.”

“I might want some sleep.”

She’d laughed, and they’d lain together quietly in the dark. She’d felt his heart beating, and he’d felt hers. The rate of it had made him anxious to the extent that he’d taken hold of her wrist to measure her pulse.

“I don’t mean to worry you, but…”

She’d ruffled his hair. “My pulse is thirty-nine. I know. It’s okay, I’m not dying. I’m superhuman.”

He’d smiled sleepily. “What are your special powers?”

“Oh, you know, I just like to keep myself fit.”

He didn’t know who she was, and she hadn’t told him. It was easier to be herself that way. She’d kissed him, and he’d fallen asleep with the lightest touch on her wrist. She’d lain there listening to his breathing. She hadn’t moved her wrist from beneath his hand. Her whole life was filled with people who knew who she was, and who gave her training schedules, and who took her pulse day in and day out. They measured her maximum heart rate, her lactate threshold heart rate, her heart rate at optimal power output. It had felt good to lie quietly in her own private darkness beside this man who seemed to care, however slightly, what her heart was doing when it was resting.

In the feeble dawn light Zoe pulled the duvet up around the doctor’s shoulders and left him alone to sleep.

In the living area she put the news channel on mute while she did two hundred abdominal crunches, eighty side planks, and sixty seated oblique twists with a medicine ball. She stretched, then showered with
her grazed arm held high to protect the surgical dressing. She toweled her hair and made espresso. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows, she sipped it as the sun rose over the wide human sprawl of Manchester. The bright light connected with the postexercise glow in her chest and she felt weightless and uncomplicated. For the first time since moving into this high tower, she felt okay about it.

She smiled to herself and bounced on the balls of her feet.

These were the moments of happiness; you had to take them. You had to notice the minutes of stillness where memory was clement and the surface of your life was the mirror of an unruffled sea. You could almost believe you had raced so hard that you had outrun the past. The sensation was indistinguishable from that of being forgiven.

Spires reached, glass burned, painted gasometers gleamed in the new light.

Zoe stretched up on her toes, steadying herself with one hand against the glass. Slowly, she sank back down to her heels as her face became still again. The act of realizing she was happy had been enough to set the moment’s foundations crumbling. Sooner or later, the junior doctor would have to take the elevator down to the street and emerge, in yesterday’s clothes, to be confronted with a twenty-foot-high billboard image of her face. Once he knew who she was, the process of disintegration would begin the way it always did.

She made another espresso, her hands shaking slightly, and went to look in on him sleeping. He’d shrugged off the duvet again and his slender back glowed in the rising sunlight. She remembered the curve of it in darkness, the sense of complicity she had felt with him.

She sat on the bed with her back against the headboard and her knees drawn in to her chest, waiting for him to wake up. She fidgeted, weighing whether to stay or to go for a run. If she did, she wondered if he’d still be here when she returned. She pressed a button and a screen rose silently out of the foot of the bed. She put it on to the morning show, with the sound off and the closed captioning on. Pirates had taken
a freighter off the Somalian coast. Arsenal had lost quite badly. A planet had been discovered in a nearby solar system, at approximately the right distance from its sun to theoretically support life. The newscaster imparted these things without presuming to order them hierarchically.

The text message alert on her phone went off, startling her and bringing the man awake. He sat up in bed and blinked at her. When his eyes adjusted, he smiled.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“I’m not.”

He reached up and touched her hip. She hesitated. The morning hadn’t stolen his looks.

She looked down at her phone. The text was from Tom, asking her to put aside an hour at the end of afternoon training.

“Everything okay?” said the man.

“Fine. Just the office.”

“What time do you go in?”

“Oh… you know. I’m working from home today.”

“Want me to leave you in peace?”

Zoe smiled. “No.”

They lay on the duvet and their bodies were lit by the mute TV as the captions flashed.
There has been more protest in Pakistan’s troubled North Waziristan tribal region, say officials
as he kissed her body and
sixteen civilians were reported buried alive in the rubble of a building destroyed by an unmanned drone
and she rolled him onto his back and knelt over him and
dignitaries began arriving for the official opening of the London Olympic Velodrome
and she closed her eyes and bit down on a moan and opened her eyes and there she was, suddenly face-to-face with herself.

Through eight years of time she stared out of the TV screen from the top step of the podium in Athens, in the infamous clip where she looked miserable. The TV showed her stepping down from the podium
and journalists shoving microphones in her face, asking her how she felt.

Zoe blinked. She remembered exactly how she’d felt. With all the adrenaline crashing out of her blood, unconsoled by the gold medal that hung around her neck, she’d lost her nerve like a terrified child who had suddenly found herself in a grown-up’s body and wished the nightmare would end.

Oh I feel very happy,
said the closed captioning, in yellow, to indicate that the words had come from her.

You don’t look happy,
said disembodied green text on the screen.

Honestly,
said the yellow text beneath her speaking face,
no one is as happy as me.

The TV showed the soft line of her mouth in the moment when she had understood that victory changed nothing. That had been after the sprint final. The next day she’d won gold again, in the individual pursuit, and that had felt no different. Gold came out of the ground, and she had felt the weight of it dragging her back down there.

Zoe realized that she had frozen in the middle of sex. She became aware of him pushing up into her, nudging her back into motion. She couldn’t respond.

“Is everything okay?” he said.

“Yes, everything’s fine.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“God, nothing terrible’s happened, has it?”

His eyes followed hers to the screen. Blue text: the sports presenter’s voice superimposed on the archive footage of her podium moment:
There she is, Little Miss Sunshine.
The shot cut to the two presenters laughing on the newsroom sofa. The confirmation in white text: [
LAUGHTER
].

The picture cut back to the archive footage of her, pale, mumbling the national anthem.

Blue text:
And now of course she’s in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Red text:
Some pretty racy details doing the rounds on Facebook, and now these further revelations in this morning’s paper.

Blue text:
Apparently she’s been described as “sexually aggressive.”

Red text:
Now there’s a surprise!

[
LAUGHTER
]

Now they were showing the front page of Britain’s biggest daily. Her face stared out of the page, beneath the Olympic rings.

XXX-RATED, was the headline. It was the thirtieth Olympiad.

Beneath her she felt the man’s body shift.

“Oh my God,” he said softly. “It’s you.”

“Yeah,” Zoe said quietly.

She moved off him and sat with her chin on her knees, watching the pictures.

“I didn’t recognize you,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’m smaller in real life.”

Red text:
Thirty-two years old. Scandal aside—and we should stress that this latest story is only allegations—is thirty-two too old for a realistic Olympic prospect?

Blue text:
Well, thirty-two is old for any professional athlete, Doug, and even if Zoe is still selected for London after this, there’s no doubt it will be her last Olympics.

Beside her on the duvet, the man touched her hand. “You should have said something. You should have—”

“What?” she said. “What should I have done?”

“You should have told me who you were.”

She flashed irritation at him. “You didn’t tell me who you were.”

He spread his hands in despair. “I was wearing a name badge.”

“Oh please,” said Zoe. “I was wearing my fucking face. Excuse me for not
actually
having green lips and hair.”

He looked at her, and his face softened. “You’re beautiful. You’re not at all like they make you out to be.”

She gave a quick, bitter laugh. “What—the ice queen? The frozen-hearted destroyer of rivals?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just need a moment to get my head around this.”

On the TV the red text said,
Have you been able to speak to her?

Blue text:
No, her agent tells us she isn’t available for interview today.

He stared at her. “You told me you worked in an office.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that when people find out who I am,
this
happens.” She waved her hand at the TV.

The doctor flushed. “What, you think I’m going to run to the papers now?”

She looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “If you do, then at least tell them I’m an alright person, okay? Tell them… I don’t know. Tell them I offered you breakfast.”

The TV cut to an image of the high street of a provincial town in the rain. Bunched under bright umbrellas, charity collectors outnumbered shoppers.

Is consumer confidence returning to the high street?
said white text.