Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (85 page)

Zoe stood.

“I don’t have much in the cupboard that normal humans eat. I mean… I can offer you rice, or dried fruit? Or rice
and
dried fruit, if you’re going for a PB today.”

“PB?”

“Personal best. Like when you’re training and you really smash it up and you clock your quickest lap. You want to be fueled up for it.”

“We don’t really have PBs in A&E.”

She raised an eyebrow. “So how do you motivate?”

“Mostly we just resuscitate.”

She pulled on her bathrobe and went to the kitchen area to make two more coffees while he looked for his clothes. The hissing of the espresso machine was the only sound in the apartment, as it pumped steam into the silence but failed to entirely fill it.

When he was dressed he came up to the counter in the kitchen area and she leaned across and took his hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It would really be okay if you stayed for breakfast.”

He was helpless in his confusion. Zoe squeezed his hand. “It’ll blow over by tomorrow. And anyway, I’m B-list. It’s not like they’ll start stalking you. Actually I’d really like to see you again.”

“Yeah, but this is… I mean, God. I don’t know if I’m up for all this.”

As he said
this
, he looked away from her to the window and swept the Manchester cityscape with his hands. The gesture seemed to link their situation with a billion tons of masonry, and Zoe felt the sudden concrete drag of it.

“But I
like
you,” she said. “Can’t you ignore what they’re saying about me? It’s jealousy, that’s all it is—they hate me because I’m successful and they’re just little people who’ve never done anything with their lives. And they sit on their arses and criticize the way I’m living, and it’s like they’re stealing my life from me. The more they criticize, the less I can have a normal relationship, and the less I can have a normal relationship, the more they criticize. I can’t win, and now if you’re standing here and telling me you care about what the papers will say, then that does my head in because I’m a winner, okay? I’m a winner and I can’t fucking win.”

She realized she was failing to keep the desperation out of her voice, to hold back the rising anger as she squeezed his hand tighter.

She let go of it, cast her eyes down to the kitchen counter, and took a long, shaky breath to calm herself.

“Sorry,” she said.

He looked at her for a long time with his pale green eyes, then touched her shoulder.

“Look,” he said softly. “Can I write down a number for you?”

He took a pen from his pocket and she passed him the copy of
Marie Claire
, flipping it onto its back so he wouldn’t see her face on the front.

“Here,” she said. “You can write on this.”

He clicked the point of the pen out and began to write a name and phone number across the face of the face of a rival brand of bottled mineral water. Zoe couldn’t help laughing.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. You’ve got really crappy handwriting.”

He grinned. “Typical doctor, huh?”

“Mmm.”

Relief flooded her. It had been an awkward morning, but at least he was leaving his number. Mostly, the guys she liked didn’t do that. She watched the strong, soft movements of his hand where it held the pen, and let herself begin to believe in the possibility of seeing him again.

He clicked the button that retracted the tip, replaced the pen in his pocket, and spun the magazine around so that the phone number was the right way up for her.

She smiled. He smiled.

“This is the number of a very good friend of mine from med school,” he said gently. “She’s actually a clinical psychologist but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. She’s just a very good person to talk with about anything that’s on your mind. I can’t imagine what you’re going through with all this media intrusion, but it can’t be very easy to deal with.”

Zoe felt an icy clutch in her chest, and forced herself to keep smiling. She smiled as if this was not utterly terrible, and not unbearably embarrassing, but instead exactly what she had been expecting and hoping for him to do at this exact moment in the long and troubled history of her romantic life: to write her a referral.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll call her.”

She smiled as he put on his jacket, grinned as he kissed her neatly on the cheek, and beamed as he prodded questioningly at the minimalist
opening mechanism of the apartment’s high-gloss olive-lacquered sliding front door.

“It’s open,” Zoe said.

The man turned and smiled back at her for a moment.

“I’ll be rooting for you, okay?”

“Yeah,” she said brightly. “Great.”

The door slid open and then back between them on air-damped runners with a hydraulic closing system that made only the tiniest sound, hardly louder than her soft exhalation of breath as the smile could finally be abandoned to make room for the neutral expression her features fell into.

In frustration she slammed her free hand down on the kitchen counter and winced as the movement tore at the wound under the sterile dressing.

She walked over to the windows, leaned forward, and looked down over the city for a long time.

At nine in the morning, with the sun glittering on the wet streets far below, her agent phoned.

“You alright?” her agent said.

“Yeah. No worries. You’re calling about the story?”

“Yes. You saw the TV? We need to wrap our arms around this situation. If we let them rebrand you like this, your sponsors will walk.”

“It’ll blow over.”

“Do you want to take that risk? I think you have to give the newspapers something bright and shiny to distract them. And I mean before they go to press. Otherwise this could run another day, don’t you think?”

“What do you want me to give them?”

“Any positive photo op would work. You need to be smiling. And showing a bit of skin.”

“Oh, please.”

“I don’t make the rules, okay? I make fifteen percent by imploring you to follow them.”

Zoe pulled her dressing gown tighter. On the TV, the closed captions were trailing a daytime staple.
Jules Hudson and the team are in Worcestershire to meet Meg Cox and her teenage daughter Melissa. Melissa may be blind but that is not stopping her from achieving her dreams. With a great talent for music, she hopes the team can uncover enough items of value in their beautiful home to purchase a 12-string guitar.

Zoe shivered. “Okay. I’ll do what I have to.”

Her agent’s relief came through the line. “I’m sorry. We both know you’re better than this but it’s the news cycle, you know? I mean—”

“Stop talking now. This photo op. What do I need to do?”

“We need to create a positive event. Something to generate sympathy.”

“Like what?”

“Could you visit some charity or something?”

“What sort of charity?”

“I don’t know… something with kids?”

“You know how I feel about kids.”

“Okay. Sport, maybe?”

Zoe closed her eyes. “I do enough sport.”

Her agent took this in for a beat. “Well, can you rustle up a particular friend? Is there like a BFF angle we could work, a feature piece, something to make you look more human?”

“Well, there’s Kate.”

“I’m not talking about a photo on the bike. We need you doing something interesting.”

“And bike racing isn’t?”

“Darling,” her agent said. “What humans are interested in is human interest.”

“Fine, so Kate and I will do something human.”

“You’d better. Or tomorrow’s papers will eat you. And remember to smile in the photos, okay? You have a really lovely smile.”

Zoe was silent, thinking about Kate. Every now and then a moment
came—like the aftermath of the previous day’s crash—when she realized how close they’d become. It had meant everything to Zoe to have one person in her life, amidst the black rain and the blue flashing lights, who was picking her up off the road surface not because it was her job but because she wanted to. Later, in the back of the ambulance, they’d talked the way she imagined sisters might. It had scared her. Her reluctance to open up, her sharpness—it was a bid to put back some distance. She needed Kate but she didn’t trust herself. She’d been more naturally equipped to deal with the relationship when all Kate had been was her rival—someone to destroy on the track and demoralize off it.

“What’s wrong?” said her agent.

“Nothing,” Zoe said. “I was just remembering when none of this was about news cycles.”

“What, you still think it’s about bicycles? You can’t get all sentim—”

Zoe clicked off the call and closed her eyes.

The first day she met Kate, on the first morning of the Elite Prospects Programme when they were both nineteen, she’d only beaten her by psyching her out. She and Kate were the two quickest girls on the program by far, and Tom had set them up for a head-to-head sprint over three laps.

They’d sized each other up. Zoe’s heart had been fluttering. She couldn’t think straight from the adrenaline. She sat on her bike next to Kate, on the start line. Tom held Kate’s bike up and Jack held Zoe’s. Zoe’s skin glistened. She’d ridden three races in a row.

Kate said, “Are you okay to ride? Don’t you want to rest first?”

Zoe shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m warmed up. It’s you should be careful. How long have you been out of competition?”

“Six months.”

“Don’t break anything.”

Zoe had meant it to be psychologically unsettling, but Kate seemed to take it at face value.

“Thanks,” she said.

Zoe began working up a hypothesis that Kate was maybe not all that bright.

Tom counted down. “Five… four… three… two…”

Zoe looked down at Kate’s pedals. She made her eyes go wide.

Kate said, “What is it?”

Zoe said nothing.

Tom said, “One…”

Kate looked down. She was confused.

Tom blew his whistle for the start.

By the time Kate looked up, Zoe was already ten yards down the track. It was an impossible lead to reel in over three laps, but Kate almost did it. On the line, Zoe only beat her by a wheel.

Kate said, “Fuck!”

They rode two warm-down laps. They were gasping. They got off the bikes and collapsed. Kate drew up her knees and Zoe knelt beside her.

“Are you okay?”

Kate stared at Zoe. Her eyes were bloodshot. She said, “I’ll beat you next time.”

Zoe shook her head in some kind of admiration. “You’re fucking bionic,” she said.

Kate smiled. Jack came over, and when Zoe saw his hand on Kate’s shoulder, and the way she looked up at him, a knife turned in her chest and she stalked away.

By the last day of the program she was sitting apart from everyone whenever she wasn’t racing. She ate lunch high in the dark stands above the banking at the south end of the velodrome. She watched Kate and Jack putting each other’s numbers into their phones far below on the bright floodlit track. They’d been starry-eyed for three days.

She had a tray of fruit salad and she speared green grapes with a plastic fork as though each one of them had spited her. Tom climbed the
stands to reach her. He held on to the handrail and pulled himself up with painful steps.

He said, “You don’t think she’s his type, do you?”

“I don’t think. I ride.”

Tom laughed. “Still pissed off at me for the receptionist trick?”

She looked up at him, crunched an apple slice, and said nothing.

“You okay?” he said.

She turned back to monitoring Kate and Jack. “If I keep winning, yeah.”

“And if you don’t?”

She shrugged. “Not an option.” She screwed up her eyes to see them better.

“I like you, Zoe. I’m pleased you came on this program. I can help you work through your issues, if you like.”

“I don’t have ‘issues.’”

“It’s just that you don’t seem very happy.”

“Like you are?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Because?”

“Because I’m the bloody coach.”

She drummed her fingers on the seat back in front of her.

After a while he said, “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

Tom waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”

He stood to go.

As he was turning, she said, “What happened?”

“To what?”

“To your knees. To you.”

Tom smiled. “I’d just as soon not talk about it.”

Zoe smirked. She mimicked his tone. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”

“Shit, Zoe, I’m only doing my job.”

She looked away and smiled.

Tom said, “Ah, I get it. You have to win
everything
. Even conversations.”

Zoe massaged the back of her neck. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

Tom sat down again and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m a pretty fair coach. I’ve helped a lot of riders.”

She shrugged, but she didn’t shrug his hand away. He squeezed her shoulder quickly and took his hand back himself.

Zoe stared down at the track. Kate and Jack were laughing, the arc lights full on them. Jack threw back his head and guffawed, and Kate stretched to punch him jokily on the shoulder, and light flashed on her hair and light sparkled in his eyes and both of them glowed with fucking light as if they were hollow and illuminated from the inside by searchlights of one billion candlepower blazing through air-blown clouds of gold and silver glitter that filled their body cavities in the places where ordinary people had livers and lungs and intestines.

Zoe scowled. “How come they like each other, just like that?” she said, snapping her fingers.

“Ah, it’s chemistry, isn’t it? You see it all the time as a coach. There’s nothing on this earth more ready to fall in love with itself than youth at high velocity.”

Zoe opened her mouth to say something, then reconsidered.

“No, go on,” Tom said.

“Okay,” said Zoe. “You ever fall in love?”

He laughed. “Only twenty or thirty times a day. Doesn’t count at my age. Apply the voltage and the frog still kicks, but it’s dead as a disco on a Tuesday morning.”