Gold (25 page)

Zoe’s first call to Jack came after four months, while Kate was away at the National Championships and he was out on one of the long, slow, painful rides that marked the start of his rehabilitation on the bike. He was taking it steadily, not pushing himself too hard. His phone went when he was halfway up a long incline in the Duddon Valley, and he was grateful for the excuse to stop and see who it was.

When he saw Zoe’s number, he hesitated with his thumb on the green button. It was a brightening day with a fresh breeze and distant clouds trailing rain in tendrils. The air held the scent of sheep and wet bracken. He was in a good place. He was happy to be on the bike, and enjoying the scenery. He could have easily ignored the call. Still, the thing with Zoe seemed far away in time and distance. It would be harmless to talk.

“I can’t believe you’re not here at the Nationals,” she said when he answered.

“I’m still getting strong.”

“So Kate told me. I just beat her in the final. I’m the National fucking Champion! I’m still out of breath.”

“What did you do? Loosen her spokes?”

“I just rode straight past her. It was easy. She’s been doing you instead of doing training.”

“That’s low.”

“It’s true. You’re making each other soft. She’s dragging you down to her level.”

“You’re calling to gloat?”

“I’m calling because I miss you.”

She was getting her breath back, and her voice was soft and urgent now. In the background of the call, a velodrome crowd was shouting. Jack felt a cold rush of adrenaline.

He took the phone from his ear for a moment and looked down over the valley. In the breaks in the cloud shadow, nudged on by the breeze, golden patches of sunlight rode across the low hills and up the flanks of
the high fells. Ravens called from the sheltered oaks and the bleating of sheep carried from the flocks grazing above the bracken line.

“Kate and I are doing just fine,” he said.

“You should be back in competition by now. She’s not good for you.”

“What wasn’t good for me, Zoe, was breaking my back.”

She laughed. “That’s such a tight-arse thing to say. Even your voice sounds tight. You’re getting domesticated.”

He laughed too. “You’re tripping. I love Kate, okay?”

“Love, love, love. You drip that word around like chain lube.”

He couldn’t pretend to be amused anymore. “I know what I feel.”

“Kate, though? I mean I like Kate too, and she’s pretty enough, but she has this terrible habit of coming second. Have you not actually noticed that?”

He ended the call, furious, and glared out at the ruined day. The hills were still beautiful, the light was still subtle and soft, but all of it felt far from the action now. He pocketed the phone, got back on the bike, and rode the rest of his route with an angry intensity. His lungs burned and his muscles ached but the suffering felt good again. He’d reconnected with the power inside him, and the realization that it was Zoe who’d put his head back in the game only added to the venom with which he attacked the hills. When he got home to Kate’s flat he was spent but there was an energy in him that the ride hadn’t managed to dissipate. He stood in the shower and thought about Zoe.

Thirteen years later, she could still get inside his head just by looking at him. Jack hugged Sophie close and tried to concentrate on his daughter while Tom finished the girls’ warm-ups and lined them up for a head-to-head sprint. Tom put Kate on the inside line and Zoe on the outside. They edged their front wheels up to the start line. They looked across at each other.

Tom blew the whistle.

“Watch this,” Jack whispered to Sophie.

They started very slowly. They stood on their pedals, looking across at each other, their eyes unreadable behind the mirrored visors. They sized each other up and waited. Kate edged forward, and Zoe moved to cover her. With exquisite balance, tiny movements of the handlebars, and little changes of pressure on the cranks, they maneuvered for infinitesimal advantages of position. Kate, on the inside line, could be direct. The outside line was subtler and longer, but Zoe could ride higher on the banking so that any attack would be launched with the assistance of gravity. The riders sped up by imperceptible degrees. Kate eased ahead, still traveling very slowly, craning her head back to watch for any response. Zoe lingered behind, poised to ambush her if Kate’s attention wavered for an eyeblink.

Jack knew it wouldn’t. He hardly blinked himself. You didn’t see better racing than this. They’d been doing this since they were nineteen, and they knew each other’s style. Each rider perfectly anticipated the other, and no advantage was conceded. Now Kate and Zoe slowed again and converged and leaned shoulders on one another. They slowed to an absolute halt and became motionless, each unwilling to risk giving away the tiniest advantage of body position by turning her head to watch the other. They watched instead for any alteration in the stark outline of their arc-lit shadows conjoined on the maple boards of the track. They balanced together, listening for any telltale acceleration in the other rider’s breathing.

Using each other for balance in that moment, they resembled neither rivals nor teammates but, in the intimacy of their mutual dependency, lovers.

Sophie said, “They’ve stopped.”

Jack squeezed her arm. “No. They’re just starting.”

When it happened, it happened incredibly fast. Without surrendering any premonition at all, Kate twitched and made a break. Zoe responded, the power in her legs instantly up to maximum. Now each rider was making snap decisions, picking her course by instinct, by
immediate and irrevocable reaction to what the other rider had done. You steered left or right and you couldn’t ever take it back. Within seconds the air was shrieking as they parted it. On the second lap Zoe closed the gap and tucked into Kate’s slipstream. The two riders worked explosively, on the limit of human force. On the third and final lap Zoe pulled alongside Kate in the final straight and you saw the skull beneath the skin as her jaws gaped for air. The two riders crossed the finish line flat out, lungs bursting, throwing their bikes forward, looking across at each other to see who had inched it. Always, this was how it ended, whether the audience was three or three billion. Kate and Zoe looked not to the line on the track or the flags of the umpires or the banners of the crowd but at each other.

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.