Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (86 page)

“No,” she said irritably. “I mean properly.”

Tom sighed. “Love?” he said. “Yeah. Shit. I mean, long time ago.”

“What does it feel like?”

“You’re asking the wrong bloke. Like I say, it was in another life.”

Zoe was still watching Kate and Jack. She said, “I just feel kind of flat inside, mostly. Kind of dead. And other times I get super angry.”

“Does it scare you?”

She thought about it. “Yeah.”

Tom nodded acquiescence, like a doctor inclined to agree with his own diagnosis.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. But I mean, surely that counts as an issue.”

“I’m just being honest about how I feel.”

“You’re just being nineteen, Zoe. It gets easier.”

She made the hand signal of a mouth flapping away.

Tom smiled. “No. Seriously. As your coach it’s my solemn duty to inform you that you haven’t seen everything yet.”

“Whereas, what? You have?”

“Time moves on, is all I’m saying. You’ll find someone you care about.”

She gave him a hard look. “I’m not scared of being alone. Are you?”

“Oh my God, are you crazy? I’m shit scared of being alone.”

They sat there for a couple of minutes, watching Kate and Jack. They didn’t talk. Finally, Zoe passed Tom her fruit salad tray and he took a grape.

He said, “Thanks.”

She said, “Don’t get used to it.”

Tom laughed, Zoe didn’t.

“I want to race Jack,” she said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No. He pisses me off. Let me try to beat him.”

He looked at her skeptically and she looked back, forcing her face to be blank. She held his eyes and a certain sadness took shape between them. It made Zoe ache and she didn’t know what the feeling was. Her own fragility, maybe. Her sudden doubt that she was stronger than
days, that she could be the fixed object that time would curl around like smoke in a wind tunnel.

Tom said, “I’m more of a bike coach than a matchmaker. I mean, if you fancy Jack you’d probably be better off just going down there and talking with him.”

Unexpectedly, Zoe blushed. “I don’t
fancy
him.”

“Then let it go.”

She tossed her head dismissively. “Fuck letting go.”

Tom regarded her carefully.

“What?”
she said.

He weighed two invisible masses in his cupped palms. “You’re going to end up on a podium or in a body bag. I’m trying to work out which.”

Zoe snorted. “Like you care.”

“I’m paid to care, okay? This is my job. I strongly believe that with the right coach, you could be an incredible champion.”

“I don’t need a coach. I just need to race.”

“Then I’ll make you a deal, okay? If I let you race Jack, you let me coach you for a month. If you still think you don’t need me at the end of that month, then I’ll release you back into the wild. Maybe put some kind of tracking device on you, make it easier for the police to find your corpse.”

She grinned. “Okay.”

Tom patted her on the shoulder. “Good girl. Now look, how do you want to race Jack? You’ve got no chance if we make it a sprint race, have you?”

She looked down to where Jack was still laughing with Kate at the side of the track. He was big for a rider, six feet of muscle, and he had no body fat at all, just long bones with quads and glutes and abdominals deployed on the framework like an anatomical diagram. Zoe looked him up and down, and there was no lack of power.

“Distance?” she said.

“I can’t disagree. Make him work a few laps and he might fade. Ever raced pursuit?”

Zoe nodded. Individual pursuit was the simplest kind of racing. The two riders started at opposite sides of the track and rode anticlockwise, chasing each other down. You went hard from the start, and whoever caught the other rider was the winner. If no one made the catch, the winner would be whoever finished the distance first.

“Okay then,” said Tom. “Fourteen laps?”

“Fine.”

They walked down the steps to the track, and Tom called the riders in and shouted out the rules of engagement. Zoe kept her eyes locked on Jack, and he watched her back with amusement. His eyes did something to her. She fumbled her helmet straps before finally getting the buckle to snap closed. She hid behind her mirrored visor and whispered, “Come on, come on.” She controlled her breathing.

She closed her eyes tight and let all the buried fury come to the surface. Here was the deep rage she felt at herself. It started to rise in her, quicker and quicker, until she knew that if she didn’t get on a bike immediately and turn it into forward motion, a scream was going to come out of her that would get her taken away from the group.

“Let’s go,” she said with her eyes closed. “Come on, come on, let’s go…”

She let herself be ushered to the start line. Someone wheeled out her bike. Her body was shaking itself apart with adrenaline. She was alone on her start line. All the other riders on the program wanted Jack to win. They were clustered round his start, on the opposite side of the track. Zoe was fine with that. But there was no one to hold her bike up for the start. Tom called for volunteers, but no one would. In the end Tom came over and held her bike up himself.

He took her arm, but she shook him off.

“Come on, Zoe,” he said quietly. “Let’s set a realistic expectation for you here. Just try not to let him catch you inside ten laps. If you hold him off till the last four laps, you and I will call that a win, okay?”

She managed to say, “O-k-k-kay.”

Tom shouted out to get ready for the countdown, and the girls were excited at the other side of the track and they were shouting, “Go on, Jack!” “Kick her arse, Jack!,” all thighs and glowing faces. Zoe looked across the center of the velodrome and Jack was looking back at her, smirking.

She snapped her gaze away. Tom yelled out the countdown.

Ten seconds to go. Zoe stared at the black line on the track ahead of her front wheel. The thin black strip that brought you back to yourself. She breathed hard, getting the oxygen into her blood. Focusing. She looked along the curved black line that bent gravity around the locus of her fury and called in all her demons and bound them together into one infinitely hot point of energy in the center of her. She shook with the force of it. She held it on the very edge of control as the countdown reached its end. The absolute anger of her energy would kill her if she had to hold it for more than a few more seconds. She fought to keep it contained. The speed struggled hysterically to be born. For the three last impossible seconds she restrained it, focused between the race and the real world, under starter’s orders. Her lips moved: she was praying for the whistle to go.

She felt the shriek of it down her spinal column. The sound connected directly with the life that she’d focused into one vengeful incandescent point. The whistle released that life into motion. She was stamping down on the pedals before her brain had heard the gun. She only became conscious twenty yards down the track. The first and last properly formed thought arrived:
Oh, look at this, I’m racing.

The technique returned to her. All the training she’d coded into her body began to take control. Round the first steep curve, she eased down onto the saddle. She took her hands off the wide part of the bars, braced her elbows, and settled into her aero position. Her brain churned out random chatter. It said
fuck fuck fuck I am going to lose.
It said
shoes, I need a new pair of shoes.
It said
her name is Rio and she dances on the sand
. By this time her heart was doing 140 beats per minute and
her digestion had shut down to save energy. Anger was transfigured into muscle burn. Muscle burn became speed. Her brain said
indium, tin, antimony, tellurium.
Her brain said
I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe
. When she got to the second steep curve she was on her line and getting into her rhythm, and her heart was already at 150, and her mind had gone numb and the edges of her vision were starting to blur. This was her body shutting down the blood flow to nonessential systems. Her brain gave one last chatter and faded into silence.
Great Burnham Wood. Eject! Eject!
Her heart rate hit 170. Involuntary whines escaped from her body. By six laps in, her heart rate was 190. She couldn’t think or even recall her name, and she was almost blind. Then something surprising happened.

A very slow peace came over her. Every bitter joule of rage had been converted into speed. She was empty. There was no pain. The air whistled past her ears. She listened intently. That silent music was all there was. It was the sound of the universe showing her mercy. Finally, she was no one.

These were the moments.

But then it started to go wrong. Slowly, as a whisper at first and then an undeniable roar, she heard Jack’s wheels behind her, and the ragged sound of his breathing. With eight laps to go, he was catching her. She was working at her maximum and so was he. Jack was just quicker. There wasn’t anything to be done about it.

Being chased down by another human being is a very intimate thing. She’d never been caught before. She heard each gasp of Jack’s lungs. She heard the catch in his breathing each time he reached the top of his pedal stroke. She heard the hiss of the airflow around him change its pitch as he dropped even tighter in to the frame of his bike. Her vision was down to a single bright green tunnel in a haze of black, as if she were riding with a tinted headlight. Behind the racing edge of the darkness there was only her breathing and Jack’s, getting closer. Somewhere out there, other human beings were chanting Jack’s name. The darkness filled with hallucinations. She saw the tall trunks of beech trees flashing
past her. She saw green dappled shade and a tarmac road curving leftwards ahead. She heard a child’s giggling over the noise of the airstream, and she stamped down harder, hoping that her heart would burst and she wouldn’t have to hear it anymore.

And then Jack said something to her. He didn’t have to shout, because he was so close now. He said, “Sorry, Zoe.”

He was sorry. She knew it was the only kind of apology that meant something. With both of them at 200 heartbeats per minute, with the peace of exhaustion coming over her, she understood the effort it took him to say that. She realized what it must have cost him.

She could have simply accepted it. She could have eased up on the pedals, spun her legs out for a few slow laps, and let go. She wanted to. But some dumb anger, encoded by years and automated in her limbs, kept her pushing to the point of blacking out. She gave it everything. She was losing consciousness. Her steering bucked and twitched.

There was a bang.

At first she didn’t know if she’d crashed or if it was Jack.

Her vision started to brighten. Colors returned. She was still upright and riding.

Later, when Tom explained to her what had happened, he said he’d never seen anyone hit the inside rails so hard. Apparently Jack had clipped her back wheel. The duty medics took one look and put him unconscious with an injection, right there on the track. They strapped him into a body brace to move him.

Afterwards there was an inquiry and they asked Zoe why she hadn’t stopped riding. She told them she must have been in shock. Really, she didn’t want anyone to see her face. She wanted to keep her helmet on, because its visor hid her eyes, and she needed to ride herself back together. If she could have kept on riding flat out, forever, then she would have. Instead she put in twenty slow laps and tried not to look at Jack lying unconscious. When they finally moved him, she dropped down to the center of the velodrome to warm down on the stationary trainers they had there.

She was aiming to get her heart rate down from 160 to 80 in ten-beats-per-minute increments, spending two minutes on each step. She was down to 140 and a few of the other girls were coming by and giving her looks. She shrugged back. Because it wasn’t as if she’d done anything except ride hard. And then Kate came over, tearful and shaking.

“Sorry, Zoe, but you could have killed him.”

She was down to 130 beats per minute.

“I held my line, that’s all I did.”

“No, you cut right up across him. He swerved not to hit you. He didn’t have a chance.”

“I wasn’t trying to hit him. I was just trying not to lose.”

Kate stared at her. Then she sobbed—a single, sharp sob.

“Shit! It’s just a fucking bike race, Zoe.”

Zoe couldn’t hold her eyes. The sharp edge of misery forced itself back into her. It prized apart the calm that the race had given her. She fought against it, but the confusion was back. She looked down and shook her head slowly. “I know. I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Kate looked at her for a long time, then came close and touched her on the arm.

“Maybe you should talk to someone. You know? To a doctor.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there someone who can take you?”

“Yeah. I mean of course. Sure.”

Kate squeezed her arm. “Who?”

She looked down at her heart rate monitor.

“Loads of people.”

“There’s no one, is there?”

Don’t admit it
. That was the first thing Zoe thought.
Don’t show her any more weakness. You’re going to be racing this girl for years. Don’t give her an inch. Make up a family. Make up a partner. Make up a Pekinese, but don’t tell her you’re alone.

She said, “Look, you’re a nicer person than me. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Please,” Kate said. “I’m just saying we could go together to see someone, if you like. I mean, we’re always going to be racing each other, aren’t we? So I’d like it if we were friends.”

Thirteen years later, in her apartment on the forty-sixth floor, Zoe tried to hold her hands steady as she made her third double espresso.

You should talk to someone.
That’s what everyone said if they cared about you.

Happy people believed in someone. That was the difference between her and Kate, right there. Expecting company, people like Kate walked with a careful space beside them. Even in their worst moments they could imagine the possibility of someone. A magic someone who could glue them back together with words. That someone would need to be a good listener, and they would need to understand you very well, and you would need not to have killed them when you were ten.