Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (88 page)

She groaned. This was why people didn’t race bikes. This was why people didn’t train for seven hours a day. This was why people allowed themselves to drink alcohol and carry body fat and chill out with friends in the evenings, so that they wouldn’t have to cope like newborns with these unbearable feelings. Her heart was racing and her head was scrambled. She curled her hands into fists and squeezed her eyes tight with frustration.

The day’s bright sunshine had surrendered to afternoon cloud, and now the first spots of rain darkened the pavement and sent the other pedestrians hurrying. Here was that startling new-rain smell of youth and fresh water, cutting through the traffic fumes of the city. She watched the crowds scatter and wondered which was more frightening: that she was just like other people or that she wasn’t. If they all felt how she felt, then how did anyone survive? How did you endure all the ripping and tearing, the disintegration as whole layers of yourself attached themselves to the surfaces of others and came away completely from your core? If she let herself fall in love, there would very quickly be nothing left. A memory of her in the exhalations of these scattering crowds on the pavement.

She should go home. She had a training schedule that resumed at five the next morning. She had a job as a personal trainer at LA Fitness and a college course that would make her a physio in two years. She had friends. She had people who needed her.

Kate started walking again, towards the train station. She was conscious of piloting herself, unhappily aware of the portentousness of each footfall that took her away from Jack and back to her life. She felt too
small to have to think this big. She watched her trainers slowing again on the wet flagstones. She was very aware of the textures and the singularities beneath her feet. These were huge conversations for composite soles to be having with damp cigarette butts and the old hardened circles of chewing gum.

If she turned back and went to him now, she would be losing focus. She had planned to leave the velodrome at the end of the Elite Prospects Programme and take the train straight back home and then wait to see if the call-up came from British Cycling. It had been a good plan, and now this. Her mind was sunset and sunrise all at once—a brilliant, half-lit mess. It was simultaneously the most exciting moment of her life and extremely painful and distressing.

She was nineteen. She stopped dead in the street halfway to the train station, changed direction, and ran to the hospital to see Jack.

She arrived breathless in a wide corridor outside the intensive care unit. Both walls were lined with stackable brown plastic chairs. The nurses couldn’t give her any information and they told her to wait. She sat for an hour reading leaflets about death and its causes, and still there was no news. She was tired from the day of racing, so she lay across three of the chairs and covered herself with her coat.

She dreamed about Jack and when she woke she was wet between her legs and her chest was fluttering and it was dark outside. The hospital corridor was lit by overhead strip lights with dead flies trapped on the inside of their frosted acrylic housings. This was the first thing she saw, and the second was a middle-aged man’s face looking down at her. She sat up, blinking. The man’s face was Jack’s but half-dead. She put her hand to her mouth and choked back a scream.

A woman was standing beside the man, holding his arm.

The woman whispered, “You’ve
scared
her.”

Kate’s mind yawed between her dream and this incomprehensible reality.

The man looked curious or hostile or both. “Are ye here for Jack?”

Kate sat up and hugged her coat. “Um. Yes.”

“Are ye a rider?”

“Yeah. I’m Kate.”

The man stared at her. His face was all mixed up with Jack’s. It was freaking her out. She blinked hard, chasing sleep out. She pressed her knees together, suddenly ashamed and panicky. Images from her dream fell away. She wondered if she’d made any sounds in her sleep.

“Are ye the girl who made our lad crash?”

Oh God—these were Jack’s parents.

She shook her head.

“So why are ye here, then?”

Kate realized she was blushing.

“Ah, let the poor lass alone,” said the woman.

“Robert Argall,” said the man. “An this is my wife, Sheila.”

Sheila was wearing blue jeans. Blue T-shirt. Beige suede boots with the suede worn shiny on the insides of the ankles. She was maybe forty. She was skinny and pale. She had dry hair and blue eyes with dark black rings around them. Not like someone who’d been beaten, but like someone who’d been eating poison. In small amounts, quietly, and for years. You looked at her skin, and it was slightly yellow. You could actually visualize her slipping away to the cupboard under the stairs, taking the lid off the shoe polish, and having a quick sniff and a lick. Then hurrying back to the kitchen to make Robert his tea. Robert looked… Kate didn’t know. Like the kind of man who might drive you to try shoe polish.

Sheila smiled up at her quickly, then looked down at her hands and fiddled with a folded denim jacket.

Robert was smaller than his son. He was thinner, bald, and ill-looking. Facially he did look a bit like Jack. But he’d smoked the life out of himself. His skin was yellow and leathered. Kate couldn’t get her head around how beautiful Jack was versus how completely poisoned his parents looked. Jack was a bird of paradise hatched from a pickled egg.

Robert and Sheila sat down on the opposite side of the corridor, facing Kate. They left an empty chair between them. Robert dropped car keys on it and a folded-up newspaper, the kind with tits on page one with little stars superimposed on the nipples so that nobody could be offended. Next to the keys he put down a mini-lighter and a packet of ten Benson & Hedges. He wore a brown leather jacket with shoulder tabs. There was a bitter smell of cigarette smoke and cow. He didn’t look at Kate. He stared at the wall above her head.

“Our son is here tae excel in the sport, not tae go chasing after the lasses. So dinnae go gettin any ideas.”

He let his eyes drop down the wall until he was looking at Kate.

“Right?”

Even the whites of his eyes were yellow, the irises milky blue.

Sheila blushed. She crushed her hands around her jacket. She didn’t look at Kate, but she said, “We’re sorry, Kate. Honest we are. But you don’t know what it’s like, where we’re from. This is his chance to escape all that.”

She shook her head several times, quickly, to make it true.

Robert picked up his cigarette lighter. He flicked the spark wheel, several times, also quickly, but without pressing down on the gas.

He said. “We drove straight down when the hospital called. We didnae know if he was alive or
dead
.”

Sheila said, “Alive or
dead
.”

“We came on the M6. And petrol a pound a liter. But he’s our son.”

Sheila said, “Our son.”

Kate heard herself saying, “I’m sorry.”

She didn’t know why she’d said it, and she was confused, and the sudden reality of waking out of her dream of Jack and into the presence of his parents was too much. She quickly said good-bye and picked up her kit bag and hurried away down the corridor.

Now she saw it. Her misreading of the situation had been excruciating.
She wondered how she could have been so naive as to confuse Jack’s flirtation with anything deeper. Of course he said sweet things to the girls. And she’d had no immunity to it. All the years when the other girls had been inoculating themselves against boys through progressive exposure, she had been riding bikes faster and faster in circles, and now here she was, sabotaged, outridden by these forces inside her.

She cringed with shame as she walked in her damp knickers with her heavy kit bag through the dark and the rain to Manchester Piccadilly, where she just made the last train up to Grange-over-Sands. Then, after the cab ride home and the sleepless small hours looking through her window at the black waves licking the beach, she rode her training bike back to the station and bought another ticket to Manchester. She was too exhausted even to be surprised at herself. She boarded the first train south and sat meekly in a corner of the quickly filling carriage. She wasn’t even being brave. Her hands folded in her lap and her face angled to watch the rain as the high-speed airstream drew it in horizontal rills across the windows, she waited in simple acceptance for the humiliation she was sure was waiting for her.

She was a condemned prisoner on the walk from Manchester Piccadilly back to the hospital. She climbed the stairs to the ICU with heavy legs, and when she arrived in that corridor the nurses told her that Jack had been moved to a ward. With her head ringing from hunger and sleeplessness she navigated the bright primary-colored signage of the corridors until she found where they’d taken him. She stood with one hand flat against the steel push plate of the heavy swing doors. She didn’t know how Jack would react when he saw her. With incredulity, maybe, and then embarrassment, and then pity. Her pulse hammered in her head, and she felt her vision thinning, as if she might faint.

She pushed open the doors. On the other side, halfway along the half-empty ward, Jack was asleep on a bed. He lay on top of green sheets with his neck in a brace and one shattered leg in traction. Beside
the bed in a brown stackable chair, with her shaved head and black puffa, looking as if she hadn’t slept since the accident either, was Zoe. She was holding Jack’s hand, tenderly, in both of hers.

When Kate entered the ward, Zoe looked up. Their eyes locked. The look Zoe gave Kate then—the fear and the challenge and the misery in it—was something that Kate could never forget, even now, all these years later, when she thought of Zoe only as a friend.

Kate tore off two sheets of toilet paper, folded them into one along the perforation, and laid the sheet carefully flat on the surface of the water in the toilet pan so that it covered the last lock of Sophie’s hair. The cistern was full again now—time had renewed itself—and Kate pulled the handle and flushed the hair and the toilet paper away. When she was sure it was gone she closed the lid and sat back down on it, under the light of the bare bulb. As she sat, she brushed against the light cord. She watched her old Commonwealth gold medal swing back and forth on the end of the gray, frayed string.

Jack heard the toilet flushing for the third time.

He shouted, “You okay in there?”

“Fine,” Kate shouted back. “Just cleaning this bloody loo.”

Jack smiled. This was how Kate was—how they both were—tolerating the chaos and the grime of parenthood but occasionally losing patience and making an example of a toilet bowl, or a sink, or a cooker, as if by administering a punitive cleaning, they might shock the other inanimate parts of their life into falling in line. Maybe he should hire a cleaner. That would be good for both of them. And it might not do Sophie’s health any harm to have the surfaces cleaned by someone whose heart was in it, rather than in the top one-thousandth of one percentile of the population for ventricular capacity at anaerobic threshold.

Jack whistled a happy tune.

Here was Sophie now, shuffling back into the kitchen and sitting down abruptly on the blue-and-white tiled floor. She sagged like a roofline weary of the rain.

“Did you wash your hands, big girl?”

Sophie shrugged and stared at the floor. It wasn’t like her.

Jack eased himself down next to her. “You okay?”

“Great.”

“Sure?”

Sophie placed her hands palms-down on the tiles, playing with her fingers, interweaving them.

Jack said, “Do you feel poorly?”

Sophie hesitated, then shook her head.

“Good girl. You’re getting better. If you feel tired, that’s the effect of the chemo starting to have its way. We’re four sessions into this round, aren’t we? That’s the feeling of your body getting better.”

Sophie rolled her eyes.

Jack smiled. When his daughter looked at him as if he was the afflicted one, she seemed like a normal healthy girl for a second.

“Sophie?”

“What?”

“Even if you think I’m full of shit, I’m still your dad, okay?” He squeezed her shoulders. “We’re going to beat this illness. We’re going to stay defiant.”

“I’m going to stay strong.”

“You have to be defiant too.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Defiant, Sophie Argall, is if you ever find yourself in front of a firing squad, you say no to the offer of a blindfold.”

“Why?”

“So you can keep looking for a way to escape, right till the last second. The captain of the firing squad asks if you have a last wish, and you
say, ‘Yeah, gimme a cigarette,’ and you smoke it as slow as you can, and you look for an escape route and you find one. That’s defiance.”

“That’s smoking.”

“Yeah, but you know what I mean.”

“It gives you cancer. Dr. Hewitt says.”

Jack grinned. “Look, baby, you can tell Dr. Hewitt from me that if I ever catch you smoking when you are not literally standing in front of a firing squad, I’ll shoot you myself.”

His daughter looked up at him patiently. Jack felt some of the tiredness enter his own body.

“Oh, sweetheart. I say these things because I love you, not because I particularly want to see you get killed by bullets. It’s just part of my job as a dad, okay? Same reason I’m strict about bedtime and brushing your teeth. Defiance at all times. Is that clear?”

There was no answer. Jack watched as Sophie tilted her head. Her expression was inscrutable.

“What is it?” Jack said.

“Are you sometimes not sure, Dad?”

“Me? No, I’m always sure.”

“You always sound sure.”

“Aye. Because I am.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

Sophie closed her eyes. “Nothing.” She swallowed again. The color was gone from her face.

“Are you feeling sick?”

“No.”

Jack felt her forehead. “You are a wee bit hot.”

“I’m fine.”

He held her hand and sat with her, there on the kitchen floor. Sophie leaned her head on his shoulder and kept her eyes closed.