Gold (10 page)

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you brought me here to say.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You can go now.”

Kate said, “Can we lift you?”

“Catherine, honey, I’m sixty-five kilos. You could bench-press me.”

She laughed. “Would you put some clothes on first?”

“Maybe. If you train hard.”

She made as if to punch him. “You’re an arsehole, you know that? I thought you’d had a heart attack or something. I was worried.”

“You kids worry at the drop of a hat. When I was your age it hadn’t been invented.”

Zoe squeezed his hand. “You’re
frozen
.” She looked at him, and he was amazed to realize that she actually cared about him. He felt the sting of tears and fought them back.

He coughed and looked away. “Let’s get me on my bloody feet, shall we?”

They got him upright, and he took most of the weight on his legs as they helped him into the living room and sat him in a chair by the simulated fire. Zoe brought the duvet from his bed, laid it over him, and turned the simulation on.

“Oh, the fucking glamour,” he said.

He started shivering harder then. The cold had hit him worse than he’d thought. Kate brought him a tea and he closed his hands around it, trying not to jitter the whole lot out of the mug.

He had to get on top of the situation.

“Okay, you two,” he said. “Different speech from the one I was planning. We have eighteen weeks till the first heats in London. Every minute counts, and look at me. I’m the oldest coach in the business, and this is the last Olympics for both of you. I have to advise you, as your coach, that you might want to think about working with a guy who has knees.”

He watched their faces to see how they reacted. But they turned away from him. They looked at each other. Something passed between Zoe and Kate and they looked back to him, their minds clearly made up.

“No,” Kate said. “You’re our coach. Who else would put up with us?”

Zoe nodded. Her face was calm. “Don’t bring it up again, please.”

Tom swallowed. “You’re both bloody idiots,” he said.

He walked painfully to the kitchen and did something he hadn’t done since Mexico ’68. He allowed exactly two tears to roll down his cheeks. Then he coughed, wiped his face dry, and went back to the living room.

“I’ll get both of you to the Olympics though,” he said. “And that’s a simple promise.”

“Yeah yeah,” said Zoe. “But what happened to your
teeth
?”

“Ask me again and you’ll be picking up your own.”

Kate laughed. “But seriously?”

“Seriously,” he said. “A nice girl like you doesn’t want to know how I lost my teeth.”

Back outside, Kate said, “I reckon he crashed.”

Zoe shook her head. “I reckon he had them removed so he could give better blow jobs.”

Kate winced. “You need help.”

Zoe showed her the middle finger. “
You
need an extra foot of pace in the finishing straight.”

“I’m quicker than you.”

“No you’re not.”

“I’m way quicker,” said Kate. “When I let you win sometimes in training, I’m just messing with your head.”

Zoe threw her a dark look. “When I let you mess with my head sometimes in training, I’m just winning.”

Their road bikes were chained to a railing outside Tom’s flat. It was
dark, and the drizzle was colder now. They unlocked their machines, wiped rain off the saddles, and set the front and rear lights flashing. Kate strapped on a helmet and zipped up a yellow reflective vest; Zoe didn’t bother with that stuff.

Zoe grinned when Kate looked up.

“What?” Kate said.

“Race you to my new place.”

“What, your sky palace? Your high-rise Xanadu?”

“Go on, take the piss. If you had these cheekbones you’d be living up there yourself.”

“I’m not like you. I don’t need the affirmation.”

“God!” said Zoe. “If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be one of those chubby yet strangely judgmental columnists.”

“If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be working through your esteem issues in porn films, getting banged by men with calf tattoos.”

Zoe threw back her head and laughed the bright, carefree laugh she only used when a joke frightened her, but when she looked back at Kate her face was composed.

She said, “Yeah, but we’re racers, so let’s race.”

Kate didn’t see how she could say no. She’d overstepped, and now she had to give something.

“Okay,” she said. “If you really need to.”

“Ooooh!” said Zoe, twisting her toes with excitement and flapping her hands at her sides like a chick attempting flight.

Kate felt the tension released and she could only laugh—Zoe really did love to race. The stuff they couldn’t talk about was more unbearable by the day. At least they could duel it out on the bikes. It was more dangerous than fighting but safer than conversation.

“Let’s go,” Kate said.

“You know the way, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just give me your apartment key, will you?”

“Why?”

“Well I’m going to get there before you, aren’t I? I can go up and put the kettle on, have a nice cup of tea waiting for you.”

“Save it for the bike.”

The two women clipped into their pedals and rode out into the cold black drizzle, streaks of red trailing from their taillights. By tacit agreement they took it easy for the first couple of minutes, keeping each other close as they wove through the slow traffic rolling into the city center. Then, as they rode past City of Manchester Stadium, they looked across at each other, nodded, and picked up the pace. Theirs was the easy, loping style of riders who made no distinction between their skeletal systems and the bones of their bikes. They dug in and accelerated to race speed.

They had a clear run for a mile now, west along Ashton New Road into the city center, and although it was only one lane in each direction, there was a wide band of chevrons between the lanes. They raced along that median strip, side by side, one rider now dropping back to slipstream the other before accelerating into the lead. Twice they had to swerve into the margin of their lane to dodge oncoming motorbikes filtering in the other direction along the central strip. Zoe clipped a wing mirror, a horn blared out, and she screamed with excitement.

Zoe was happiest when she was street racing. It was dirty and it was fast and everything you could see wanted to kill you. The car drivers were either dozy and inattentive or alert and seething, and either affliction might make them suddenly swerve out and hit you. The white chevrons you rolled on were slick in the rain and slippery with spilled diesel and strewn with broken windscreen glass that could shred your tire and spill you into the path of traffic. If you fell you could only roll like a gymnast and hope you hit the curb before you hit a car. The rain got in your eyes and made the approaching headlights a blur of speed and glare, and in the midst of this chaos you were racing another human being at the top of her game, so your heart rate was on the rivet and the adrenaline blitzed your senses.

They went quicker. Zoe grinned into the wind. This was pure racing because there was no prize and no glory and no one knew who you were. There was no recognition and no fame. You could ride to a place beyond yourself. This was what she loved. When she raced like this, she couldn’t think about her life. You were intent on not making the tiniest error. You could ride so fast that the speed fed on itself and your wheels began to roar in the dark and your heart was going so hard that you thought one more beat per minute might kill you, and then suddenly you heard a motorbike and you looked round and you saw the white headlight behind you, and somehow you went even faster. Lights flashed past like laser bolts. You leaned and you wove and you accelerated. Street racing was the only part of her life where Zoe felt in control. It was the only time she could ride past a twenty-foot-high floodlit billboard of her own face and notice only the helpful illumination it gave to the road surface.

Kate and Zoe jockeyed for position on the narrowing central strip, first one pulling ahead, then the other. They were perfectly matched. After nearly a full mile, with lungs bursting, neither could open up a gap on the other. The central strip was getting too skinny for them to come alongside each other in safety, and twice they bumped shoulders and had to hold their line hard not to careen off into the cars.

Two hundred meters ahead, a set of traffic lights marked the T-junction where their route went left onto Great Ancoats Street. The lights were green.

Kate looked up the roadway and judged the point at which the lights could show amber and she would still carry on rather than braking. Without signposting it in her body language, she suddenly kicked hard and opened up five bike lengths on Zoe. This was a power play in a street race: you dug extra deep for a few seconds, way beyond your aerobic limit, knowing that if you gapped your rival, then there was a chance the traffic lights would catch them after letting you through. The risk was that the lights might not change, in which case your rival could cruise past you as you drowned in your own oxygen debt.

Kate risked it, grimacing as the pain in her body began to spike. She badly wanted to win. To beat Zoe now, even in a play race like this, would be to lodge a negative association in Zoe’s mind the next time they lined up together on a serious start line. She kicked harder. At this intensity a single second seemed unendurable, and twenty unimaginable. By an effort of will, she called the image of Sophie into her mind. This was how she coped with suffering. She thought,
If I win this race, Sophie will get better.
There was no logic to it, but her mind above one hundred and sixty beats per minute of heart rate had no use for logic. As she powered on through the dark, she visualized Sophie ahead of her, and the image pulled her forward.

Zoe knew the traffic-light trap by heart and she’d been expecting Kate to jump ahead. She steeled herself and powered up her pedal stroke, refusing to let her rival open up more of a gap. She looked at the roadway, and now she was judging the point beyond which an amber light would not stop her. Her muscles were in agony, but she didn’t acknowledge pain. Her tires slipped and skidded from the lateral force as she cranked the bike forward so hard that the frame gave out cracking noises.

Kate was operating at her limit. Just as the pain in her muscles and her lungs reached an unendurable pitch, the lights went amber. She was still fifteen meters short of the point on the roadway that she had marked as the absolute point of no return. She had a flash of relief: she could brake now. She risked a quick look behind her to check that Zoe was thinking the same. But Zoe was going for it. Eyes glazed, she was rocking from side to side in a trance of effort; Kate didn’t think she’d even noticed her looking back.

Kate hesitated. Was she being too cautious? She was only five meters short of her judgment point now, and the light was still amber, and there was a pretty good chance she could carve through the left turn while the light had only just turned red. She flicked a glance right, across the face of the junction to where the traffic waited in the last second of its own red light. It was a dual carriageway. There was a black Volvo and a
blue BMW at the front. There was a courier motorbike filtering up the outside. Kate watched the cars tinted orange in the overhead lights of the junction. They looked okay. Neither of them stood out as obvious psycho wheels. Odds were that they wouldn’t go dragsters off the amber light.

Kate stamped down hard for two pedal strokes, then hesitated again. She thought about Sophie. Suddenly the zone into which she was traveling seemed as starkly demarcated as the painted stop line on the carriageway suggested. She was the mother of a young child. Was she seriously assessing the risks involved in riding out at full speed onto a T-junction that was about to be overrun with traffic? She pictured Sophie’s face, and her daughter’s eyes connected so forcefully with her tendons and forearm musculature that without even thinking about it, she was braking so hard that her wheels almost locked.

When the lights went amber, Zoe noticed Kate’s hesitation and upped her pace instinctively. She was thirty meters short of her own decision point, but she wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking about Adam. Here, at her physical limit, she felt her dead brother watching her with the same curious, unabashed gaze that Sophie had shown her earlier that day. Here was this ripple in time again, widening from their shared point of origin, keeping pace with her however fast she tried to outride it.

As Kate slowed, Zoe swerved and whipped past her. She flashed across the hard white stop line and ran the red light at twenty-five miles per hour, leaning hard into the perpendicular left turn with her wheels squeaking on the wet tarmac, at the very limit of adhesion.

The driver of the blue BMW told the investigating officer that he hadn’t had anywhere to go. He was three-quarters of the way across
the intersection and accelerating through maybe fifteen miles per hour when Zoe appeared in his lane, a wheel-length ahead of his bumper. He’d had less than one second to react. To his left there’d been the black Volvo; to his right, the motorbike courier. He’d managed to get a touch on the brakes but he’d still clipped Zoe’s back wheel. He’d felt something go under his tires and he was pretty shaken up because he’d thought it had to be her.