Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set (95 page)

“I don’t know. Wet.”

“Any brothers or sisters?”

Kate shook her head.

“Me neither,” said Zoe. “Only child. Were you happy?”

Kate thought about it. It wasn’t a question with an easy answer, and it freaked her out a bit that Zoe had asked.

“Why?” she said finally.

Zoe held up a hand. “Sorry. My mouth.”

“No, it’s okay.”

The wine’s first rush ebbed away from her. With the warmth of the fire creating a burgeoning gravitational field and the wind outside shrieking, she started to regret the second glass. She ought to think about riding home to Jack. She imagined him lying on the sofa. She imagined coming in from the rain, soaked to the skin, and letting him warm her up. He would take her in his arms and help her peel off her kit and… well. It was nice to have someone to go home to.

Zoe was eating a sandwich. She sighed, threw the crust down, and nodded at their empty glasses.

“Best of three?” she said.

Kate smiled. “We should head back. It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”

“We could dial a taxi. Put the bikes in the back.”

Kate hesitated, thinking of Jack. “I really should get going.”

It came out sounding rather formal, and the tiniest flicker of desperation in Zoe’s eyes made Kate wish that she’d been able to find a warmer way of saying it.

“Of course,” Zoe said quickly. “I was only kidding.”

“Oh, right,” said Kate, dropping her eyes and giving a small self-deprecating laugh that she hoped was enough to make her out as the one who had embarrassed herself.

Zoe began collecting her gloves and waterproofs. “You heading home?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Kate. “You?”

“Oh, I’m going to my boyfriend’s.”

“Great,” said Kate, thinking about the ride home. “In town?”

“No,” said Zoe, gesturing south. “It’s that way.”

Outside, after the glow of the fire, the wind and the rain were even stronger. Zoe turned left and Kate turned right and it wasn’t until half an hour later, while she was rolling down from the hills and the first of Glossop’s streetlights were drawing the rain out into bright splinters, that Kate realized there was nothing at all in the direction Zoe had indicated—nothing for fifty miles except the bleak and rainswept Peak with its sodden hills black against the wet gray disk of the setting sun. She wondered if there really was a boyfriend or whether Zoe was still out there in this weather, riding a lonely arc from the fading glow of the alcohol to the clutch of the gathering night.

The more you got to like Zoe, the harder it was to know how she made you feel. In the changing room, Kate let her eyes fall away from Zoe’s in the mirror, while Zoe combed her hair. She watched herself. She hated these mirrors with their harsh halogen lights: they showed you nothing but the truth. Her face had aged in the last few months, this was undeniable. She’d kept the looks of her early twenties beyond their return date and now life had chosen this year, of all years, to call in the loan. The mirror didn’t admit to the possibility of a time when she had been radiant, when there had actually been a difficult choice for Jack to make between Zoe and her. Now she really looked like a mum, and Zoe still looked like a model. She tried not to feel resentful. It had been her choice, after all, being a mother. No one had forced her to do it.

And here she was, thirty-two and looking it, and here was Zoe asking if she would come with her and get a tattoo. Time clawed at the back of her neck in the sharp, insistent strokes of Zoe’s comb. Zoe watched her in the mirror, waiting for her response with that same almost perfectly concealed desperation she’d shown by the fireside on that rainy training ride, the first day they’d become friends. Silence settled and the inchoate moment persisted.

“Yeah, fuck it, Zo,” Kate said suddenly. “I’ll come to the tattoo place with you.”

Zoe called her agent and her agent had a photographer dispatched to the tattoo studio. He arrived after forty minutes, on a scooter. He was young and convinced of his charms. Zoe needed good shots, so she smiled as if she concurred. Kate smiled too, and the pap took the pictures while the tattoo artists worked.

Zoe was having her forearm inked with a triple
X
, beneath Olympic rings the size of fifty-pence pieces.

In the chair next to hers, Kate was getting the rings done small, the size of five-pence pieces, exactly where Zoe had known she would: high on her shoulder blade where a T-shirt would cover them.

When the shots were done, Zoe signed the pap’s shirt for him with a magic marker. She handed it to Kate so she could sign too, but the pap was already turning to leave. Zoe watched the hurt flicker across her friend’s face, then the quick recovery. She felt for Kate. Something caught under her ribs, and she allowed the feeling to swell for a moment. It reassured her that she felt something. It wasn’t as if she was heartless.

A moment later, Kate seemed to be over it. She got on the phone to Jack, giggling as she admitted to him what they were doing.

“We’re just down the road! We’re having
tattoos
.”

She whispered the word, elongating the
oo
into a delighted exhalation of wonder at their own daring.

Sometimes Zoe wondered if Kate was ever going to grow up. She listened to her friend on the phone. There was a hesitancy in her voice—a timidity, almost—in the way she broke the news of a little ink to the man she’d been married to for eight years.
Jack
, for goodness’ sake. As if he had any right to judge her.

She sighed. The needle buzzed away on her arm, hurting when it came close to her wrist but not hurting so much as, say, sprint cycling. She didn’t know what to do for Kate. Just because Zoe was the one who had taken Kate’s confidence away, it didn’t mean that she knew how to give it back. It was easier to believe that Kate didn’t suffer too much from it all, that she was unaware of how unfair it had all been on her. It was easier to hope that Kate didn’t see how tired she was starting to look next to Zoe or didn’t notice how much the burden of Sophie was slowing her down.

It was all a bit shitty to contemplate. If Kate really understood what had happened to her—what was happening to her still—then the fact that she
wasn’t
crying about it made Zoe want to cry.

There it was: a prickling in her eyes. Zoe charted it and connected it with the other points of reference—the pangs and lurches and catches of breath that she felt when she let herself think about Kate too hard. There did seem to be a constant pattern inside her—a constellation of disconnected emotions which, when viewed in its entirety, seemed to form the shape of someone who cared. But then again, you could connect the stars any way you liked. Some people saw a big dipper, while others only saw a plow.

Zoe was wary of the idea that on some level she might be a good person.

She eavesdropped as Kate’s call with Jack turned sour.

“What’s the matter?” Kate was saying. “Oh, don’t be like that. It’s just a bit of fun.”

Zoe watched her face fall.

“It’s just for an hour or something. You guys can wait that long, can’t you? Okay,
Christ
, I mean tell Tom we’re sorry. We shouldn’t have sneaked out like that.”

Another silence.

“It’s just a fucking tattoo, Jack. It’s the Olympic rings. It’s not like I’m getting Tony Blair’s face.”

Zoe watched the confusion coming into Kate’s expression and wondered what Jack could be saying. It wasn’t like him to be a dick about something like this. Zoe knew Jack, she really did.

In the autumn of 2002, they’d all been twenty-two. Jack had been winning some big races, and Zoe had been winning everything she entered. Pursuit events, sprints, time trials. All the other girls were racing for second place that season. Zoe was racing so often, she hardly needed to train. It went on like that all through the summer, and Zoe got used to the sight of Kate on the second step of the podium, viewed from slightly above. Now that they were friends, it was easy to make a joke of it.
Your turn next
, Zoe said each time, and they laughed about it while the medal ceremonies went on around them. It wasn’t until Zoe lost that she realized it wasn’t funny at all. In the autumn, one week before the National Championships in Cardiff, Kate beat her in a nocturnal sprint race in the Manchester Velodrome which was broadcast on national TV in prime time. Zoe couldn’t bear the feeling. Tom had to force her to go out for the podium group and collect her silver medal. She had to stand on the second step and look up at Kate’s radiant grin and her dainty little elfin cheekbones. It left an ache in her neck that lasted for the whole of the next week.

The Nationals were huge that year. Cycling was starting to get big, and the crowds were a thrill. All the finals were broadcast live on ITV. Jack won the sprint. Zoe and Kate had come through their heats and were scheduled to race each other next. While Kate watched Jack climb the podium, Zoe looked for his phone in his kit bag and sent herself a text. Later, while they were stripping off their warm-up suits by the side of the track and preparing to race, she pretended to receive it.

She gasped, then tried to look flustered. “Oh…”

Kate put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”

Zoe shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry.”

She grabbed her helmet and shoes and headed for the start,
forgetting to take her phone. That was all it took. On the line, Kate was in pieces. The sprint final was best-of-three, and Zoe didn’t need the third race. On the podium, on the silver step, Kate couldn’t stop crying.

It felt worse than Zoe had thought it would. In her room in the hotel they were all using, Zoe sat on her bed the whole afternoon, staring at her National Champion’s sprint gold medal, wishing she could give it back.

At the end of the afternoon, Jack knocked on her door. He was shaking. He couldn’t speak.

Zoe’s eyes were red from crying. “Is she still here?”

Jack shook his head. “She’s gone home.”

“You didn’t go with her?”

“She wouldn’t let me. I need you to phone her and tell her the text was from you.”

“She didn’t believe you?”

Jack shook his head.

Zoe gestured helplessly. “So why’s she going to believe me?”

Jack stared at her for a long time, and she watched the despair come into his face as he realized she was right.

“Why are you like this?” he said, finally.

She started crying again then, and she couldn’t stop. She didn’t ask him to comfort her, and he didn’t offer.

They went for a walk, by the harbor. She told him she was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again. It was a cold, gray day with the rollers ghosting in. Her hair was growing out by then, and it whipped and tangled in the wind. The seagulls sounded like angels who’d lost their jobs. The air tasted of salt. She threw her National Champion’s medal into the harbor. It didn’t splash into clear water. It snagged on a floating coil of blue polypropylene rope and hung from its ribbon, the gold glinting dully just below the gray surface. They watched it for a long time, but it wouldn’t sink.

Zoe was back in Manchester twelve hours later, and she started training for Athens fifteen minutes after that. With less than two years to go, the work had a fresh intensity. Every yard she forced a bike around a track was one yard closer to glory. The sense of destiny made her skin tingle, but her mind was unsettled and it took her a fortnight to understand why. She realized she couldn’t entirely focus on training until she’d apologized and made things right with Kate. It was a new feeling for her, this knowledge that her own well-being had in some way become linked with that of another. It was an unexpected snare. As the feeling intensified, a weakness grew in her body in direct proportion to it until she could hardly lift a barbell off the mat. Her unease mounted and she resented Kate more and more—almost began to hate her, in truth, for the fact that she liked her too much.

She invited her out to lunch, never intending to say anything about herself. She’d been planning just to do something nice for Kate and say sorry, but then it had happened and she’d told her about Adam dying and found herself crying in the middle of the Lincoln—actually weeping, with tears running down her face while Kate hugged her and the pianist played the
Dukes of Hazzard
theme tune
affrettando
, getting faster and faster as he realized it wasn’t cheering her up.

She worked out with Kate every day after that. Her strength returned straightaway. She was amazed that Kate was able to forgive her for Cardiff. As the winter wore on, Kate asked a few times if she would consider seeing a psychologist. She heard herself agreeing, more to prove she was sorry for what she’d done than because she thought it could help. She committed to going once a week. Kate walked with her to the sessions and left her at the door with a smile and a supportive squeeze on the arm. Zoe sat in a chair that was self-consciously not a couch while the psychologist asked short, leading questions and then settled back in his own chair, which was carefully selected to set his eye level lower than hers.

He made the room into a silent vacuum that she was supposed to
populate with memories. As though such things could safely be surrendered. As if they’d served their purpose, like the spent phases of a rocket, and could tumble soundlessly back to earth. There was no allowance made for her growing suspicion that her memories weren’t done with her yet, that they still held unspent fuel, that to relinquish them now was to reduce her chances of escape. The more she talked about Adam, the more she felt the pull of gravity.

Talking made her empty and weak, even as the psychologist insisted that it was doing her good. At the end of each session he would steeple his hands, touching the fingertips to his lower lip as he offered a summing-up and humbly solicited her opinion as to whether his précis had merit. She found herself agreeing that she had a problem with anger and that she suffered from an inability to accept the occasional defeats that were an inevitable and healthy part of being alive.