Gold (12 page)

He couldn’t even remember much about his boy now. Maybe it was a good sign. At some point all the okay stuff you did had to start canceling out the bad things, even the memories.

He’d got into coaching with the juniors, and when BMX came along in the eighties he’d had a lot of success. BMX was Wacky Races—all those kids with their full-face helmets and their legs hammering like tiny steam pistons. He let the races take care of themselves and he worked with the kids between competitions to find out where they were coming from, so he could help them be mentally stronger. A kid’s psyche was a hundred times more powerful than an adult’s. If you could work out which kids were racing away from their past and which were racing towards their future, then you unlocked a lot of power.

When it came to race day, his kids were always on their game and they won every bloody trophy in sight. He loved those furious little shrimps who only came up to his waist. He especially adored the angry kids. You helped them to win enough times, and bit by bit their grin on the podium was a little bit less
fuck you
, and a little bit more
hey, I’m secretly enjoying this.
Maybe he was still waiting for that moment to arrive with Zoe, but he was patient and he knew he’d live to see the day she smiled an uncomplicated smile.

He’d done an okay job with his life. If you put it all on the scales—your own attempt at parenthood on the one side, and all the kids you’d helped on the other—then who could say where the bastard thing would balance? You just did your best with every hour—that’s all you could do.

He poured the boiling water and stirred up a tea. Squinting at the clock on the cooker, he made out that it was just before nine p.m. He was no fool. He was going to give his dream half an hour to vacate the building before he risked sleep again. He sipped the tea and leaned against the kitchen counter. His knees hurt, but he didn’t dare sit down in case he couldn’t get up. He didn’t need the girls to have to rescue him again.

Still, wasn’t it a hell of a thing that they’d looked after him?

He’d always believed that the most important thing was the results. He’d imagined that the thing that would make him happiest would be seeing his athletes improve. After years of getting kids to the top of BMX, he’d been promoted to run the Elite Prospects Programme for British Cycling. The idea was to take the seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-olds with the best record on the track at national level, and see which of them had the stuff to go international. It was death or glory for those kids, and they ran the program out of the best venue they had, which was the National Cycling Centre at Manchester Velodrome. It was the big time for Tom. He got to pick the athletes he wanted to work with. Most often he picked girls. They tended to think harder about what they were doing than the guys ever did, and that suited Tom’s coaching style, which was more confidant than drill sergeant.

He’d picked his girls, and then he’d picked the best of the girls, and finally he’d dropped everyone else for Zoe and Kate, because he couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do with his life than to get those two to the top. He’d given his best years to them, and all he’d ever wanted was to see them achieve. But the truth was, Zoe’s four Olympic golds and all of Kate’s near misses didn’t mean half as much to him, now, as the fact that his two girls still believed in him even when all the evidence pointed to their coach’s being a decrepit old wreck.

Tom chucked the last of his tea in the sink and went back to lie down on his bed.

He felt good for once, he really did. Maybe the deal was that life had to break your body down before you could see it. Maybe there wasn’t any other racket in town except this one that brought you to your nadir and challenged you to build yourself back up from it, then showed you that what you’d done at least meant something to someone.

Tom laughed with his head on the pillow. He felt drowsy again, and he closed his eyes. He could almost see the rest of his life, and it looked pretty simple now. He’d get both his girls to the Olympics, he’d watch the best one win, and then he’d retire and take his knees back to Oz, maybe even buy the old house if it still stood. He’d drink red wine on the veranda and be at peace with all that had happened. You weren’t a finished man till you could look at your memories and be… not unmoved, but unafraid of them.

Kate squeezed Zoe’s knee. “I should get home,” she said. “Jack and Sophie will be wondering where I am.”

Zoe smiled. “Cool. Thanks for staying with me.”

“Will you be okay?”

Zoe looked at the slim, good-looking doctor who was carefully taping a sterile dressing over the graze on her arm.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”

In a sports administration unit on a high floor of a modernist office building, six middle-ranking officials were gathered around a
midcentury burr walnut boardroom table. They were finalizing a small change to the rules governing the running of Olympic track cycling. It was nearly midnight, and they wanted to get it done and go home to their families. Tomorrow they would be reviewing modern pentathlon. There were half-empty cups of cold black coffee and half-empty cans of warm Diet Coke on the table. Subordinates were dispatched to vending machines. Clauses were redrafted. In the long corridor outside, the cleaners were vacuuming the carpets.

The officials were changing the rules for entry into the Olympics, to satisfy stakeholders in TV scheduling operations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The schedulers demanded that fewer riders should participate, because they wanted fewer heats and more finals in Olympic prime time. They needed this to satisfy secondary stakeholders—the advertising buyers in twelve hundred regional markets—who needed to deliver better value to their clients. The clients were squeezed because the bankers had sucked the marrow out of the money, so the customers had less to spend.

The officials agreed, therefore, that the competition in the velodrome would need to be accelerated. This was what had become of the world that children used to ride their slow bicycles through in careless arcs. Time had been restructured like bad debt. The long languid hour had been atomized. Manifestos were shrunk to memes and speeches were pressed into sound bites and heats were truncated into finals and it wasn’t the officials’ fault if the consequence of all this devaluation was that an old man would now have to choose between two riders who’d grown up with him, and a girl suspended between life and death would now feel that fragile cord unraveling.

The officials locked the revisions into their documents and stood up from the boardroom table. As they walked through the empty building, trading small talk about their families, lights on automatic detectors sensed their presence and flickered on with low, metallic popping sounds. On timing devices, they stayed illuminated after the
stakeholders had passed, then clicked off in the order in which they had first been lit. It was as if another group of officials, silent and desirous of darkness, had stalked the first group through the building. The corridors became silent and still.

The officials took the lifts directly down into the underground parking facility. They climbed into the mannered black or silver-gray vehicles—Volkswagens, Audis, Volvos—that were available to middle-ranking administrators in the organization. Some of them played music, others preferred to drive in silence. If they thought about it at all on their short journeys home to their families, it would seem to them that they had only made a small change to the competition. It wouldn’t even make the papers.

Sophie was fighting Vader, with lightsabers, on the observation deck of Cloud City, the sun a livid purple as it set beyond the boiling gaseous clouds of the planet far below, when the alarm on her iPod went off. She woke slowly and killed the alarm. She ignored the weakness that weighed down her limbs. She knew what she had to do. This was a Jedi mission, and Jedis didn’t worry about being ill.

She switched on her battery-powered lightsaber. It glowed green. It was light enough to see by. She climbed out of bed and tiptoed into Mum and Dad’s room. She stood at the foot of their bed, with the light-saber raised so she could see them. It was fine. They lay close together in sleep, with her head resting against his chest, as was the custom on Earth.

She tiptoed back to her bedroom and leaned the lightsaber against the wall. Kneeling, she pulled the
Millennium Falcon
out from under the
bed. She carried it perfectly level, so that the vomit would not slosh and leak.

“Easy, kid,” whispered Han Solo. “One false move and this old crate will tip out of control.”

“Hey, this is nothing,” whispered Sophie. “This is just like maneuvering my land speeder back home.”

She piloted the
Millennium Falcon
down the stairs, evading hostile TIE fighter patrols and stepping on the edges of the treads so that space-time wouldn’t creak. In the kitchen she docked the
Falcon
on the draining board, removed the top section, and tipped out the vomit carefully into the sink. The smell was awful, but she was very used to it. She turned on the cold tap and sluiced water through the model until all the vomit was gone and the action figurines were clean again.

“Are you
done
yet, kid?” whispered Han Solo. “This water is
cold
.”

Chewbacca just made his mournful noise.

“Relax, won’t you, you big ball of fur?” whispered Sophie. “Do you want the Empire to be able to track us by our smell?”

When the
Falcon
was clean, she ran water into the sink and swirled it round and pressed the last few chunks through the apertures of the plughole. Then she toweled off the
Falcon
and the figurines, clipped the top section of the model on again, and navigated back up through the asteroid belt to Cloud City. Halfway up the stairs, where the gravity was exceptionally heavy, she got space-sick and had to rest for a few minutes. She sat down in the dark, feeling the burning in her chest and the nausea rising from her stomach. After a while it subsided, and she stood up and carried on.

When she reached the landing, she made a mistake. She moved too quickly in the dark, and she stumbled. The
Millennium Falcon
lurched and scraped against the wall.

“Watch it!” said Han Solo. “She may look like a heap of junk, but she’s the fastest smuggling ship in the galaxy.”

Sophie froze. From her parents’ bedroom, she heard someone stirring.

Dad’s voice came, heavy with sleep. “Is that you, big girl? Are you okay?”

Sophie tiptoed the last few steps into her bedroom, tucked the
Falcon
under the bed, and slipped under the duvet.

“Sophie?” called Dad. “Is everything alright?”

“I’m fine,” she called back. “Everything’s fine.”

“That’s my girl,” said Dad.

She closed her eyes, made the jump to hyperspace, and headed back to Cloud City.

Tom woke with the April light seeping through his curtains and the DJ on his clock radio announcing heavy traffic coming into town.

He stood, opened the curtains, and let the thin, bright sunlight wash over him. Yawning, he eased himself into his desk chair, taking the weight on his arms so as not to overstress his knees. He sparked up the software he would need to make Zoe and Kate’s training schedules for the week, and while it was loading he checked his email.

The first email was from the locksmith, about his broken front door. The second was from his boss at British Cycling.

Tom
, it read,
bad news. Late last night we received a memo from the IOC, who will shortly announce a change to the entry criteria for the London 2012 qualifiers. Only one athlete per Olympic nation will now be allowed to contest each sprint event in London. You will need to have a word with Zoe and Kate ahead of the IOC announcement, as obviously only one of them can now qualify.