Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (90 page)

She heard Jack’s steps coming up the stairs. He stood in the bathroom doorway, watching her for an explanation. She mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, pointed at Sophie and the toilet.

Jack clapped his hand to his forehead.

Kate mouthed,
What?

“I fed her a Mars bar. Just a half. I thought it’d be okay.”

Kate was too relieved to be angry. She put the dietician on speakerphone. Jack listened for a moment, then grinned and mimed words coming out of his arse, swirling in eddies, and dispersing in the air of the room with an odor that was disagreeable to him. Sophie and Kate giggled, which stopped the dietician in midflow.

“Is everything alright, Mum?”

“Yes, I’m sorry, everything’s fine. Look, something’s come up, I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back.”

She clicked the phone off and stared at Jack. “You twat,” she said simply.

Jack aped the dietician’s voice. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Mum, you’re thinking in a much too narrow way. Consider all the very many foodstuffs that exist on this big wide planet of ours. Have you tried tractor grease and tiger milk? Have you tried cuttlefish roes and wolfsbane? No? Then kindly do so at once, before phoning up to bother me with news that your daughter has puked up a Mars bar.”

That made Kate laugh, and Sophie too. Jack knelt and gathered them into him, and they hugged on the bathroom floor in the little house, and it seemed true to all of them that a moment like this was worth the unceasing work of ignoring the little things that might spoil it.

Before training that day, at the velodrome, Jack’s coach gave him the news about the Olympic rule change. Jack listened without changing his expression. Then he nodded and said, “Fine.” He strapped on his
aerodynamic helmet, clipped into his pedals, and trained so hard he almost blacked out on the track.

He warmed down from the bike session, then hit the basement gym. There was an energy in him, a fury. He got rid of some of it with abdominal work, then he began clean-lifting an eighty-kilo barbell, just snatching it up and slamming it straight above his head. Some of the guys from British Cycling were warming down in the gym. They were all national-level athletes themselves, and they stared at Jack as if he was a freak.

The mood he was in, he could have lifted more. He tried to wear himself out but he couldn’t. He felt muscle fibers ripping and forced himself to stop before he ruined something. There was still so much furious energy. He showered and stood with a towel cinched around his waist, looking at himself in the mirror above the basin in the locker room. He caught his own eye, held it for a second, then somehow walked away before he punched the mirror.

It was two in the afternoon. He jogged home to pick up Kate and Sophie and drive them back to the velodrome for Kate’s training session. All the way home he rehearsed how to give Kate the news about the rule change. He slowed to a walk as he got closer to home. The walk got slower, became a dawdle. When he finally turned his key in the door, Kate was standing in the hallway, impatient. Her annoyance turned to concern when she saw his face.

“What is it?” she said.

Jack’s courage left him. He forced his face to become calm. He said, “Nothing. I’m sorry I’m late.”

Kate had packed a bag with all Sophie’s bits in it as well as her own, so all Jack had to do was drive. His legs ached from the track work, his shoulders hurt from the weights, and his fingers would hardly grip the wheel. Ideally he’d be horizontal at this moment, in recovery, with his legs slightly elevated and an ice pack on his deltoids. At the elite level it wasn’t the training that set you apart—all the guys trained themselves to
the edge of destruction. Victory lay in how well you managed the recovery phase.

“Don’t kick the back of my seat, please.”

The kicking stopped. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Sophie was hunched in her car seat with her arms crossed tight. She looked out at the traffic, her eyes huge under her baseball cap.

“So why were you late?” Kate said.

Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry, okay? Dave wouldn’t let me go.”

“He’s your coach, Jack, not your boss.”

“Don’t nag me, please.”

“Then don’t be late, please. This is shit for me.”

“Twenty minutes late. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Don’t be petty. You’re not a petty person.”

She shot him a look that said,
No, but you’re an arsehole
.

He drove through traffic that was sluggish and getting slower. He thought about recovery. You were meant to have time to yourself, to settle your thoughts while your body replenished the energy and fluids you’d lost in training, and set about new protein synthesis. You weren’t supposed to be on the go, twenty-four hours a day, juggling sport and this illness.

The truth was, with their final Olympics only four months away, he and Kate were getting tireder each day. And now here was this rule change, and suddenly the pressure on them was doubled. It was another heavy blow to take. Last year the IOC had announced that the individual pursuit had been axed from the Olympics. It had been hard for all of them, to have one less chance to medal, but it had been hardest of all for Kate since the pursuit was her best event. She’d taken the news uncomplainingly, rebuilt her body into a new configuration to focus everything on the sprint—and now this. He tried to find the words to give the news to her, but he could hardly think about it coherently himself.

In the passenger seat beside him, Kate snapped her fingers
impatiently. Zoe would have been warming up for half an hour already. Kate probably imagined that this was her biggest problem at this moment in time. She exhaled loudly.

“Can I help you?” he said.

She pointed at a gap in the traffic that had just closed ahead of them. “You could have got through there.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

Jack hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and looked away. She was putting this crawling traffic on him, as if it was somehow his fault that everyone in Manchester had picked this exact moment to jump in their vehicles and go to buy geraniums, or deliver photocopier toner, or whatever people did with their time when they didn’t have an Olympics to prepare for.

Sophie started drumming her feet against the back of his seat again; Kate clicked her fingers. Jack thought,
Of course this is my main job, ferrying these women around
. He realized the thought lacked dignity, but it was hard not to feel resentment. His competition wasn’t as close as Kate’s, but still. There was only one male sprint place for London in play, and only so many joules of energy in his body. His rivals would be chilling out right now, recovering. They’d been clever enough to choose wives without sports careers and kids without cancer.

Jack cursed himself for thinking it. He nosed through the slow-moving traffic and tried to grip the wheel. He carefully changed lanes to put a high-sided van between their car and one of the billboards of Zoe.

Kate said, “This lane’s even slower.”

“So I made a mistake.”

She looked at him sharply. “Are you okay? You’re being shitty.”

“
I’m
being shitty?”

“Yeah.”

He kept his eyes straight ahead. “I’m being fine.”

“Training go alright?”

“Yeah, I ripped it up.”

“You’re not smiling.”

“I’m knackered, Catherine. Okay?”

“Catherine?”

He raised his arms. “Sorry.”

She sighed. “Yeah, me too.”

“I’m knackered, Kate, truth be told.”

“What, even your little face muscles?”

She made a mischievous face and jabbed his cheeks, insistently, until she raised a smile.

“That’s better,” she said, and straightaway it was.

Jack’s mood evaporated. He clicked on the hazard warning lights, brought the slow-moving car to a stop in the right-hand lane, and leaned across to kiss her. They kissed while the outraged traffic blared and diverted around them. Motorists made the sign of mental incapacity, stabbing their fingers at their temples to indicate the locus of the deficiency. It made Sophie anxious.

“Come on!”
she whispered.
“Move!”

Jack felt for her, but he wasn’t in a hurry. Now that his irritation was gone, there was the post-training high, a cozy analgesic cocoon within which it was hard to prioritize the needs of the impatient world over his own. Reluctantly he pulled back from the kiss. In moments like this an old anxiety struck him with fresh shock: he couldn’t understand why she had chosen him, and why she had stuck with him through everything that had happened, and why she continued to stick with him. Sometimes he felt like a clawed animal who’d been given a rose to hold. He knew just enough to know it was beautiful, but not enough to know how to look after it.

Kate was welling up, and Jack wiped away her tears with his thumbs. Behind them, Sophie was freaking out. Outside, the car horns had massed into an imbroglio of indignation. Their fellow motorists were
beginning to make the other sign, of the extended middle finger, with its implication that there was some rectum or some vagina into which something—possibly the finger being displayed, or possibly some other item for which the displayed finger was a proxy, signifier, or understudy—might usefully be inserted in such a way that it would expedite the plaintiff’s journey to whichever furniture superstore or cross-platform marketing meeting constituted their immediate destination. This soon after lifting heavy barbells, Jack found that it was hard to take people or their hand signals particularly seriously.

“You’d better drive,” Kate said. So he did.

“Finally!”
said Sophie, in such a prissy voice that it made all three of them laugh.

The traffic seemed to ease up a little.

Trying to keep his voice casual, Jack said, “That text from Tom, this morning—did it say what he wants to talk to you about?”

Kate shook her head. “Just to put aside some time after training. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Jack kept his eyes straight ahead.

When Dave had given him the news that morning, his first thought had been how he was going to secure his own place in London. He’d thought about how he could train harder. He didn’t care if he had to train the world to spin the other way on its axis. That place in London was going to be his.

Turning, now, into the car park of the velodrome, Jack realized how typical it was of him not to have thought about what the news meant for Kate until afterwards, in the locker room. When his head was in the game, the existence of others—even the ones he loved—could easily not occur to him for hours on end. People just flickered in and out of his awareness, like figures in a dark room where some unbidden hand turned the light switch on and off at times not of his choosing. As soon as he remembered them, he wanted to do the right thing. That was all you could say in his defense, he supposed.

He parked and went to help Sophie out of her seat. He lifted her to his hip and nudged the rear door shut. His eyes met Kate’s across the roof of the car. She was hopping from foot to foot with the anticipation of imminent training. The kit bag swung on her shoulder and her hair blew in the wind that whipped around the gray dome of the velodrome. Now would be the moment, if he was going to do it. He should tell her about the rule change and give her at least the tiny psychological edge of knowing before Zoe did.

But here she was, happy, and here was Sophie in his arms, excited to be out of the house for once, thrilled to be allowed to watch Kate training. Jack realized he wasn’t going to say anything. The next hour, the next minute, even the next ten seconds of happiness was as far as his mind wanted to think. While there was laughter in bathrooms, and kisses snatched from traffic, and smiles in windy car parks, let it persist. Jack held on to the moment and held on to his wife’s small warm hand as they walked the short distance from the car to the velodrome entrance.

Kate hurried off to change and Jack took Sophie to sit by the track. He sat her down carefully on a stacking chair beside the technical area and wrapped a black fleece blanket around her.

“Comfy?”

“Yeah.”

Sophie pulled the top edge of the blanket over her head to make a Jedi cowl. Her eyes were fixed on Zoe as she warmed up with smooth, fluid laps of the track. On the steep curves at each end Zoe swung high, all the way to the top of the banking at the apex, hung for a moment between energy and gravity, then swooped back down to the black line with a rising note from her wheels. She wore a white skinsuit and a white helmet with a black visor that flashed with the reflected lines of the track.

Sophie was transfixed. She raised her hands towards Zoe, fingers slightly bent.

“What are you doing?” Jack said.

Sophie frowned, annoyed that he’d broken her focus.

“I’m using the Force on her.”

“Why?”

Sophie dropped her hands and stared at him. “To make her crash, of course.”

Jack opened his mouth, but he couldn’t think what to say. Sophie turned away and raised her arms again. He left her to it, kissed the top of her head, and walked over to Tom in the technical area.

“Zoe’s looking good,” Jack said.

Tom reached up to shake his hand. “Excuse me if I don’t stand. Bloody knees are worse than ever.”

“Yeah, Kate said. You ever going to have them operated?”

“Mate, I’m going to have them amputated. More trouble than they’re worth. Going to get my feet attached straight to my arse, cut out the middleman.”

“Works for penguins.”

“Yeah, it’s a Southern Hemisphere thing.”

They watched Zoe working the track.

“You told her yet?” Jack said quietly.

Tom shook his head. “When did you get told?”

“Before training this morning.”

“I was going to tell the girls after. Keep their heads in the game for this session at least.”

“Might do the same if I was you.”

Tom looked up at him. “You say anything to Kate?”