Gold (16 page)

“It’s open,” Zoe said.

The man turned and smiled back at her for a moment.

“I’ll be rooting for you, okay?”

“Yeah,” she said brightly. “Great.”

The door slid open and then back between them on air-damped runners with a hydraulic closing system that made only the tiniest sound, hardly louder than her soft exhalation of breath as the smile could finally be abandoned to make room for the neutral expression her features fell into.

In frustration she slammed her free hand down on the kitchen counter and winced as the movement tore at the wound under the sterile dressing.

She walked over to the windows, leaned forward, and looked down over the city for a long time.

At nine in the morning, with the sun glittering on the wet streets far below, her agent phoned.

“You alright?” her agent said.

“Yeah. No worries. You’re calling about the story?”

“Yes. You saw the TV? We need to wrap our arms around this situation. If we let them rebrand you like this, your sponsors will walk.”

“It’ll blow over.”

“Do you want to take that risk? I think you have to give the newspapers something bright and shiny to distract them. And I mean before they go to press. Otherwise this could run another day, don’t you think?”

“What do you want me to give them?”

“Any positive photo op would work. You need to be smiling. And showing a bit of skin.”

“Oh, please.”

“I don’t make the rules, okay? I make fifteen percent by imploring you to follow them.”

Zoe pulled her dressing gown tighter. On the TV, the closed captions were trailing a daytime staple.
Jules Hudson and the team are in Worcestershire to meet Meg Cox and her teenage daughter Melissa. Melissa may be blind but that is not stopping her from achieving her dreams. With a great talent for music, she hopes the team can uncover enough items of value in their beautiful home to purchase a 12-string guitar.

Zoe shivered. “Okay. I’ll do what I have to.”

Her agent’s relief came through the line. “I’m sorry. We both know you’re better than this but it’s the news cycle, you know? I mean—”

“Stop talking now. This photo op. What do I need to do?”

“We need to create a positive event. Something to generate sympathy.”

“Like what?”

“Could you visit some charity or something?”

“What sort of charity?”

“I don’t know… something with kids?”

“You know how I feel about kids.”

“Okay. Sport, maybe?”

Zoe closed her eyes. “I do enough sport.”

Her agent took this in for a beat. “Well, can you rustle up a particular friend? Is there like a BFF angle we could work, a feature piece, something to make you look more human?”

“Well, there’s Kate.”

“I’m not talking about a photo on the bike. We need you doing something interesting.”

“And bike racing isn’t?”

“Darling,” her agent said. “What humans are interested in is human interest.”

“Fine, so Kate and I will do something human.”

“You’d better. Or tomorrow’s papers will eat you. And remember to smile in the photos, okay? You have a really lovely smile.”

Zoe was silent, thinking about Kate. Every now and then a moment
came—like the aftermath of the previous day’s crash—when she realized how close they’d become. It had meant everything to Zoe to have one person in her life, amidst the black rain and the blue flashing lights, who was picking her up off the road surface not because it was her job but because she wanted to. Later, in the back of the ambulance, they’d talked the way she imagined sisters might. It had scared her. Her reluctance to open up, her sharpness—it was a bid to put back some distance. She needed Kate but she didn’t trust herself. She’d been more naturally equipped to deal with the relationship when all Kate had been was her rival—someone to destroy on the track and demoralize off it.

“What’s wrong?” said her agent.

“Nothing,” Zoe said. “I was just remembering when none of this was about news cycles.”

“What, you still think it’s about bicycles? You can’t get all sentim—”

Zoe clicked off the call and closed her eyes.

The first day she met Kate, on the first morning of the Elite Prospects Programme when they were both nineteen, she’d only beaten her by psyching her out. She and Kate were the two quickest girls on the program by far, and Tom had set them up for a head-to-head sprint over three laps.

They’d sized each other up. Zoe’s heart had been fluttering. She couldn’t think straight from the adrenaline. She sat on her bike next to Kate, on the start line. Tom held Kate’s bike up and Jack held Zoe’s. Zoe’s skin glistened. She’d ridden three races in a row.

Kate said, “Are you okay to ride? Don’t you want to rest first?”

Zoe shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m warmed up. It’s you should be careful. How long have you been out of competition?”

“Six months.”

“Don’t break anything.”

Zoe had meant it to be psychologically unsettling, but Kate seemed to take it at face value.

“Thanks,” she said.

Zoe began working up a hypothesis that Kate was maybe not all that bright.

Tom counted down. “Five… four… three… two…”

Zoe looked down at Kate’s pedals. She made her eyes go wide.

Kate said, “What is it?”

Zoe said nothing.

Tom said, “One…”

Kate looked down. She was confused.

Tom blew his whistle for the start.

By the time Kate looked up, Zoe was already ten yards down the track. It was an impossible lead to reel in over three laps, but Kate almost did it. On the line, Zoe only beat her by a wheel.

Kate said, “Fuck!”

They rode two warm-down laps. They were gasping. They got off the bikes and collapsed. Kate drew up her knees and Zoe knelt beside her.

“Are you okay?”

Kate stared at Zoe. Her eyes were bloodshot. She said, “I’ll beat you next time.”

Zoe shook her head in some kind of admiration. “You’re fucking bionic,” she said.

Kate smiled. Jack came over, and when Zoe saw his hand on Kate’s shoulder, and the way she looked up at him, a knife turned in her chest and she stalked away.

By the last day of the program she was sitting apart from everyone whenever she wasn’t racing. She ate lunch high in the dark stands above the banking at the south end of the velodrome. She watched Kate and Jack putting each other’s numbers into their phones far below on the bright floodlit track. They’d been starry-eyed for three days.

She had a tray of fruit salad and she speared green grapes with a plastic fork as though each one of them had spited her. Tom climbed the
stands to reach her. He held on to the handrail and pulled himself up with painful steps.

He said, “You don’t think she’s his type, do you?”

“I don’t think. I ride.”

Tom laughed. “Still pissed off at me for the receptionist trick?”

She looked up at him, crunched an apple slice, and said nothing.

“You okay?” he said.

She turned back to monitoring Kate and Jack. “If I keep winning, yeah.”

“And if you don’t?”

She shrugged. “Not an option.” She screwed up her eyes to see them better.

“I like you, Zoe. I’m pleased you came on this program. I can help you work through your issues, if you like.”

“I don’t have ‘issues.’”

“It’s just that you don’t seem very happy.”

“Like you are?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Because?”

“Because I’m the bloody coach.”

She drummed her fingers on the seat back in front of her.

After a while he said, “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

Tom waited, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”

He stood to go.

As he was turning, she said, “What happened?”

“To what?”

“To your knees. To you.”

Tom smiled. “I’d just as soon not talk about it.”

Zoe smirked. She mimicked his tone. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”

“Shit, Zoe, I’m only doing my job.”

She looked away and smiled.

Tom said, “Ah, I get it. You have to win
everything
. Even conversations.”

Zoe massaged the back of her neck. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

Tom sat down again and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m a pretty fair coach. I’ve helped a lot of riders.”

She shrugged, but she didn’t shrug his hand away. He squeezed her shoulder quickly and took his hand back himself.

Zoe stared down at the track. Kate and Jack were laughing, the arc lights full on them. Jack threw back his head and guffawed, and Kate stretched to punch him jokily on the shoulder, and light flashed on her hair and light sparkled in his eyes and both of them glowed with fucking light as if they were hollow and illuminated from the inside by searchlights of one billion candlepower blazing through air-blown clouds of gold and silver glitter that filled their body cavities in the places where ordinary people had livers and lungs and intestines.

Zoe scowled. “How come they like each other, just like that?” she said, snapping her fingers.

“Ah, it’s chemistry, isn’t it? You see it all the time as a coach. There’s nothing on this earth more ready to fall in love with itself than youth at high velocity.”

Zoe opened her mouth to say something, then reconsidered.

“No, go on,” Tom said.

“Okay,” said Zoe. “You ever fall in love?”

He laughed. “Only twenty or thirty times a day. Doesn’t count at my age. Apply the voltage and the frog still kicks, but it’s dead as a disco on a Tuesday morning.”

“No,” she said irritably. “I mean properly.”

Tom sighed. “Love?” he said. “Yeah. Shit. I mean, long time ago.”

“What does it feel like?”

“You’re asking the wrong bloke. Like I say, it was in another life.”

Zoe was still watching Kate and Jack. She said, “I just feel kind of flat inside, mostly. Kind of dead. And other times I get super angry.”

“Does it scare you?”

She thought about it. “Yeah.”

Tom nodded acquiescence, like a doctor inclined to agree with his own diagnosis.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing. But I mean, surely that counts as an issue.”

“I’m just being honest about how I feel.”

“You’re just being nineteen, Zoe. It gets easier.”

She made the hand signal of a mouth flapping away.

Tom smiled. “No. Seriously. As your coach it’s my solemn duty to inform you that you haven’t seen everything yet.”

“Whereas, what? You have?”

“Time moves on, is all I’m saying. You’ll find someone you care about.”

She gave him a hard look. “I’m not scared of being alone. Are you?”

“Oh my God, are you crazy? I’m shit scared of being alone.”

They sat there for a couple of minutes, watching Kate and Jack. They didn’t talk. Finally, Zoe passed Tom her fruit salad tray and he took a grape.

He said, “Thanks.”

She said, “Don’t get used to it.”

Tom laughed, Zoe didn’t.

“I want to race Jack,” she said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No. He pisses me off. Let me try to beat him.”

He looked at her skeptically and she looked back, forcing her face to be blank. She held his eyes and a certain sadness took shape between them. It made Zoe ache and she didn’t know what the feeling was. Her own fragility, maybe. Her sudden doubt that she was stronger than
days, that she could be the fixed object that time would curl around like smoke in a wind tunnel.

Tom said, “I’m more of a bike coach than a matchmaker. I mean, if you fancy Jack you’d probably be better off just going down there and talking with him.”

Unexpectedly, Zoe blushed. “I don’t
fancy
him.”

“Then let it go.”

She tossed her head dismissively. “Fuck letting go.”

Tom regarded her carefully.

“What?”
she said.

He weighed two invisible masses in his cupped palms. “You’re going to end up on a podium or in a body bag. I’m trying to work out which.”

Zoe snorted. “Like you care.”

“I’m paid to care, okay? This is my job. I strongly believe that with the right coach, you could be an incredible champion.”

“I don’t need a coach. I just need to race.”

“Then I’ll make you a deal, okay? If I let you race Jack, you let me coach you for a month. If you still think you don’t need me at the end of that month, then I’ll release you back into the wild. Maybe put some kind of tracking device on you, make it easier for the police to find your corpse.”