Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (94 page)

Slowing, their wheels rumbled in the echoing space.

“Who won?” said Sophie.

Jack looked at Tom with the question in his eyes.

Tom shook his head. “Mate,” he said. “Too close to call.”

After training Kate felt tired and good. Head-to-head training was always a battlefield, but she’d held her own. She’d put down at least as much power as Zoe, and she hadn’t risen to any mind games. And that bit at the start, with Sophie in the basket of the butcher’s bike—that had been fun. Zoe didn’t feel like the threat she once was.

She hurried into the shower before her muscles could cool, took her time to dress, then sat in front of the mirror to sort her hair out.

Zoe was already changed. She took the comb out of Kate’s hand and stood behind her to sort out her tangles. Kate let her, wincing at the brutal way Zoe dealt with knots.

“Your hair’s fucked,” Zoe said.

Kate yawned. “My hair can be combed out.”

Zoe caught her inflection. “You’re saying my life can’t?”

“I’m just saying you should lie low for a bit.”

“Not an option.”

“Because…?”

“Because the papers go to print at nine. I’ve only got three or four hours to do something, you know? My agent says I have to give them a photograph, today. Something family-friendly.”

“What are you going to do? Sleep with a Teletubby?”

Zoe laughed. They were keeping it almost weightless. To Kate, conversation with Zoe often felt like walking on ice while clinging to almost enough helium balloons to counteract your weight. You lowered yourself gingerly onto the surface. This was the kind of lightness they had now. It wasn’t unusual, Kate supposed. This was just friendship: this faith to believe that you could grab more balloons as the baggage you carried multiplied. You got on with it; of course you did.

“So what are you going to do?” Kate said.

“I’m getting the Olympic rings tattooed. Here. Photo op.”

Zoe indicated the place by sweeping the comb along her uninjured forearm, then resumed work on Kate’s hair.

“This afternoon?” Kate said.

“Why not? There’s a place round the corner. Want to come and get yours done too?”

“Zoe. Be serious. I’m me.”

“So? Be you with a tattoo.”

“That should be their slogan.”

“They don’t need a slogan. They’ve got needles and ink and baldy men with ponytails and latex gloves and… ooh, it’s so
sexy
, Catherine! Say you’ll come with me!”

Zoe hugged her around the neck and dropped her face close to Kate’s, making a pouting face in the mirror.

Kate shook her off. “What about this meeting with Tom?”

Zoe stood straight again. “No time. We’ll sneak out the back door. I mean, what’s the old man going to do? Run after us?”

Kate made a skeptical face. “Seriously. With the newspapers… shouldn’t you just stay off-radar for a bit, Zo? I mean, I would.”

Kate felt the comb stop moving for a moment and looked up to see the unguarded expression Zoe wore in the mirror. The look said,
Yeah but that’s you, isn’t it?

The look said Kate didn’t have the face, didn’t have the imagination, didn’t have the charisma to think any bigger. Kate watched Zoe trying to take the look back, trying to turn it into something less judgmental, but it was out there now.

She tried not to mind. It wasn’t as if she was unaware that next to Zoe she was less mysterious and less attractive and less interesting. But you got used to these facts, and it was easy to tie each one of them to an equal and opposite lightness. For example, she was a great mother, she really was. She was helpful and patient with Jack and Sophie. She was quite intelligent. She had learned a huge amount about blood disorders and developmental nutrition. She noticed other people’s feelings.

She tried to give Zoe back a look that was neither intimidated nor tipping over the other way into aggression. It came out looking slightly bovine. God, it was sometimes so hard to know how to
be
around Zoe. Something about Zoe always made Kate feel like a good person and a coward, both at once. When she thought about Zoe’s relationships, it was sometimes with a serene sense that thank God
she
wasn’t like that but more often it was with a kind of tired fascination—not that her friend was insatiable, but that she herself was grateful for so little. For the longest time, she’d just been happy that Jack was happy with her. That had been the extent of her ambition.

When she’d found out that Zoe had been phoning him, right at the start of their relationship, it wasn’t just that she’d felt threatened. She was sure that Jack didn’t love Zoe, and the proof was that it hadn’t gone further than phone calls. She was sure that Zoe didn’t love Jack either, and that she was only after him to destabilize her. What disheartened
her was the realization that Zoe considered it all to be part of the race. This was before they were friends: there was no good history between them yet to offset the hurt.

It was the start of the off-season. The National Championships were behind them, and Tom ordered them to take a month away from training to let their bodies recover from the summer of racing. Kate tried to rest but it was tedious, cooped up in the flat she and Jack were renting in East Manchester. Jack had been told to relax too, and he lay on the sofa with his legs up and his earphones in, glassy-eyed from the forced inactivity, nodding his head to jigs and reels and Scottish indie rock. She tried to forget Zoe’s phone calls but every time Jack’s phone rang—his mother checked in on him constantly, and his coach made sure he wasn’t training—she imagined it was Zoe, which was probably, she thought, exactly what Zoe wanted. She read novels listlessly, or she got halfway through and chucked the books against the wall, disgusted that the protagonists could never seem to just sort themselves out. There was rarely much in the characters’ lives that Tom wouldn’t be able to fix by breaking down the problem into solvable components, or by calmly unpacking their psychology, or occasionally just by ordering them to brace up. She felt sorry for Anna Karenina and Clarissa Dalloway and Holly Golightly that they couldn’t simply phone their coach, and glad that she herself would never get so tangled up in life’s knots.

Nothing happened, day after day. The sky was slate-gray and the roads were black with rain. The radio, with a soundtrack of Christmassy bells, was already offering to consolidate all your credit card debts into one easy-to-manage monthly payment.

Kate sat at the window brooding, watching the cars crawling through the November sleet. The off-season was a presentiment of death. There was no action on the track, and the sporting press lost interest in you completely. The disconnection was as sudden and absolute as if a switch had been thrown. All summer they fought over you for photos and gossip and interviews, and then they went quiet and you lived until spring
in an obscurity so complete that only you knew you were still alive. You inhabited the town like a ghost, wandering without purpose. You’d been so busy training and competing and doing interviews all year that you’d made no civilian friends to hang out with, and yet you didn’t want to see your friends from the sport. Sometimes there were off-season gettogethers but they were awkward affairs where the riders stood around making in-jokes about cycling. They were like office parties where all the nibbles were optimized for protein delivery and no one got drunk and photocopied their assets.

Kate climbed the walls in the flat. One afternoon, after a fortnight of resting, she gave up and put on waterproofs and took her training bike out into a full gale. She headed up into the hills of the Peak District, and with each turn of the pedals she felt better. Rain lashed her face and she opened her mouth, liking the untamed taste of it. She rode through Glossop and out along the Snake Road, climbing the long, steep gradient into a gusting headwind and relishing the burn in her legs. The wet road rose through the scrubby moorland and the low pines; she knew each twist of it by heart. It was the only big climb on the standard loop that all the riders did once a week in training: east out of Manchester, a whirl around the Peak, and then home. She settled into the rhythm of the hill, standing in the pedals when the road kicked up, easing down into the saddle where the gradient relented a little.

The summit of the pass came into sight two hundred yards ahead, with another rider cresting it from the opposite direction. It was windier up on the top, without the shelter of the hill, and the other rider was getting blown all over the road as she began to descend, too fast on the wet road, yellow waterproof whipping in the gusts, no crash helmet, eyes screwed up against the rain.

“Zoe!” Kate shouted as the rider flashed past her.

She stopped, panting, and watched Zoe skid to a halt fifty yards downslope. Zoe turned her bike in the road and pedaled back up the hill to her, smiling.

Kate half regretted calling out. Maybe she was stupid to try to be friendly. It wasn’t as if she’d forgiven Zoe. Still, the adrenaline of the climb made her bold, and maybe the fortnight of isolation had left her glad to see anyone.

Kate returned Zoe’s smile as she approached.

Zoe shouted over the noise of the wind. “What are you doing up here?”

Kate was still out of breath. “Two weeks. Sitting around. I was going mental. You?”

Zoe laughed. “I’ve been out here every day. Don’t tell Tom. I’m a nuclear submarine. Stop running the turbines, I melt down and take civilization with me.”

Kate smiled again. “Headed home?”

Zoe nodded. “Unless you fancy some company?”

Kate sniffed and wiped rain off her face with the back of her glove. She looked down at the ride computer on her handlebars. “I’m doing another forty-five, fifty,” she said.

Zoe scanned the sky to cross-reference this information against the strength of the wind and the heft of the rain clouds.

“Via a nice hot coffee?” she said.

Kate hesitated, then laughed. “Go on, twist my arm.”

They rode to the top together and cruised the four downhill miles to the Snake Pass Inn. They left the bikes outside and sat down either side of the fire. They didn’t talk at first. They arranged their shoes to dry, took off their waterproof tops, and steamed as the coals glowed.

Zoe held her coffee in both of her hands to warm them, watching Kate over the rim of the cup.

“What?” said Kate finally.

“I’m sorry,” said Zoe. “I’m sorry for the phone calls.”

Kate looked sharply at her. “Going to make a habit of it?”

Zoe dropped her eyes. “No. It’s done. I’m over it.”

“Fine, then.”

Kate took off her gloves and draped them over the brass fender of the fireplace. They sizzled as the water boiled out of them.

“You sure?” said Zoe. “I’m forgiven?”

Kate smiled, feeling the weight lift off her too. “Yeah.”

Zoe raised her coffee cup. “Drink to it?”

Kate smiled at Zoe’s bedraggled hair and her hopeful expression. For the first time, she realized that Zoe might be okay.

“Not with coffee,” she said. “Let’s have a glass of wine.”

Zoe looked panicked. “Wine?”

Kate nodded. “French people make it from grapes. It comes in red or white.”

Zoe frowned, trying the feel of the word in her mouth. “Wine…”

“Oh come on,” said Kate. “It’s off-season. Live a little.”

She went to the bar before the adrenaline of the climb could desert her and ordered two glasses of pinot grigio. She hadn’t drunk in a pub since her sixteenth birthday and she was surprised by the size of the glasses the barman gave her: there was almost half a pint of wine in each. She dug into the back pocket of her gilet for money, paid with a damp twenty-pound note, and was surprised by how little change she got back.

Back at the fire she passed a glass to Zoe and sat down.

“Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers.”

They clinked. Zoe sniffed the wine, eyed it skeptically, then drained the glass. She put her hands to her mouth, rocking. “Ew. God. Yuk.”

She reached into the pocket of her waterproof for a caffeinated energy gel. She tore the top off the sachet, sucked out the gel, swallowed, and made a face.

“God,” she said. “They taste better on the bike, don’t they?”

Kate laughed. “Most people go for bar snacks.”

“Most people didn’t just ride eighty miles in that wind,” said Zoe. “I could eat the actual bar.”

She got up and went in search of food. Kate sat looking into the fire, feeling the warmth bringing her fingers and toes back to life, sipping her wine and liking the unaccustomed glow. They were the only people in the pub, and outside, the storm was building. Water streamed down the windows and the wind delivered buffeting gusts that drowned out the sound of Robbie Williams on the jukebox.

Zoe came back from the bar with a tray of sandwiches and two more glasses of wine. Kate’s eyes widened.

“What?” said Zoe. “I got him to make them with wholegrain.”

“You know what I mean.”

Zoe motioned to the window with her head. “Yeah, but who wants to go back out there right now? There’s freezing cold water actually coming out of the sky. I should never have moved up north.”

Kate snorted. “This is the south, love. You should try it up in the Lakes. Our rain comes in from the Arctic.”

“I’m from Surrey,” said Zoe, sipping her wine with her little finger extended. “Our rain comes in bottles labeled Evian.”

Kate laughed and finished her first glass of wine to catch up.

Zoe eyed her. “It’s not a race, you know.”

Something in Zoe’s eyes struck Kate as a challenge, and she drank her second glass of wine straight down without thinking about it too hard. Zoe followed, and they put down their glasses at the same time.

“Photo finish,” said Zoe. “Crowd goes wild.”

“I think you might just have edged it,” said Kate, thinking the opposite.

They sat together, looking into the fire.

After a while Zoe said, “What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“Growing up in the Lakes.”