Gold (44 page)

It was hard to see how he could help her now. He wanted to suggest that she come to stay with him again, but he was scared to ask. She might imagine he was in love with her, that he was a lonely old man appalled at the prospect of the remaining days of his life continuing to report for duty, one after the other, without her in them. She’d be right, of course—women always were—but maybe love wasn’t the word. You surrendered the right to be in love with a thirty-two-year-old woman the minute you did something as careless as being born in 1946. No, love wasn’t it. It was just that without her the incessant days would be sea lions at the zoo, mounting the podium and slapping their pliant fins to solicit some answering applause that he supposed he would have to train himself to produce. It was a trick that people managed. Maybe, with practice and an occasional glass of red, he could manage it too.

She came into his office, bleached by sadness, smaller than he’d ever seen her.

Since he didn’t know what to say to her, he said, “Tea?”

She nodded and sat down on his desk while he made two cups.

He said, “I’m proud of you. What you did on that track today was the best thing I’ve seen an athlete do.”

“Now I wish I hadn’t.”

“Well, you’re only human. I mean, I’m fairly sure.”

She managed a weak smile, and they drank their teas.

She looked at him over the rim of her mug. “What am I going to do, Tom?”

He pulled a pad and a pen off his desk. “Let’s make a list, eh? First we need to talk to British Cycling and work out a career path for you in the sport, find you a first coaching position, get you started. Then we ought to put together a press release. Before that you’ll probably want to talk with your agent and your sponsors. Then we need to—”

“Stop,” said Zoe quietly. She held the heels of her hands to her forehead. “I don’t mean what am I going to do today. I mean, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

Tom blinked. “
Life
is a big word, isn’t it? Let’s break it down into smaller segments. Let’s find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we’ll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as a training unit…”

He was getting into it, using his hands to sculpt compliant units of time into the stuffy air of his office. He tailed off when he saw how she was looking at him.

“I just lost by a thousandth of a second,” she said. “Don’t tell me about weeks and months.”

He put the pad and pen back down on his desk, unmarked.

She looked at him, her knees jiggling nervily, her expression intent. “You had a kid, right?”

He nodded. “I still do, somewhere. Matthew. I haven’t seen him for, I don’t know, twenty years.”

“In all this time, you never talked about it.”

“Well it was never
about
me, was it?”

He smiled, but she didn’t.

She said, “Do you ever have those dreams where you’re in the street and you’ve lost a child, and the dream goes on and on, and you search more and more frantically, and all you find is the kid’s little shoes?”

The smile slowly faded from Tom’s face. He looked at her wordlessly.

“The kid’s fucking
shoes
, Tom. Sometimes they’re full of blood, right up to the rim. They’re so full that if you go up to them and press the side of the shoe, even very gently, then the blood wells up over the side and drips down onto your fingers. No?”

“Oh Zoe,” he said. “When are you ever going to tell me what happened to you?”

She ignored him. “I have that dream most nights. Other nights it’s the one where something’s chasing me. That’s why I’m frightened of being alone. Do you never get frightened?”

He looked down at his hands. “I reckon you get used to it.”

She exhaled unevenly. “I don’t get used to it. The only thing that ever helped me was racing. That’s the only time I can’t think about anything else.”

“Okay,” said Tom, “so let’s work on it. Let’s look at some of the triggers that give you the bad dreams and work out some coping strategies.”

She gave a short laugh, high and upsetting. “The trigger is being alive. Think I should knock that on the head?”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

She looked away. “I suppose I’ve been making less of an effort to stay alive. I take risks I shouldn’t. I ride out in front of traffic. I look down off the roof of my building and I kind of lean out and…”

“And what?”

Her eyes glittered as she stared at him, her face tight with tension. “Can you help me get my daughter back? Can you help me get Sophie?”

Tom took a sip of his tea and put the mug carefully down on his desk. “That’s not the kind of question you can really ask your coach.”

She moved her hand to his, sweeping the tips of her fingers across his wrist. “I’m not asking you as my coach, Tom.”

He fought against the shiver of pleasure that ran up the afferent nerves of his arm, found his spinal cord, and evolved as it propagated
through the more sophisticated matrix of his central nervous system into a sharp ache that was indistinguishable from longing.

He hesitated, then gently moved his arm away.

“As your friend, I’m telling you that you won’t be thinking straight till you’ve come down off the back of this. It’s natural that you feel like hammered shit right now. For a few days it’ll feel like the world has ended.”

She reached across and took his hand again and held it in both of hers, studying it as if it were a map that might offer a way to navigate the conversation. “I’ve trusted you since I was nineteen,” she said finally. “I’ve never questioned what you said. When you suggested Sophie should go home with Jack and Kate…”

He freed himself again and put her hand back down on the desk. “I never told you what to do. You didn’t feel you were in a position to look after Sophie, and we all respected you for putting her into the care of someone who was.”

She glared. “Well, now I am in a position to look after her, aren’t I?”

He tried a smile. “Give it a couple of days, will you? Get some rest, get your head straight, and then let’s talk about Sophie. She’s ill, Zoe. It’s not the right time for her or for you to be getting into this.”

“So when is the right time?”

“I don’t know. Maybe when you’re not riding out in front of traffic.”

Zoe gripped the edge of the table. “You could tell them you gave me bad advice, couldn’t you? You could tell them I was lost and I didn’t know what I was doing and you should never have let me give up my daughter.”

“Tell who?”

“Tell the courts.”

He sighed. “You don’t want to get the courts involved, Zoe. If you go to the courts, then the media comes with it. You know what the media will say, if it all comes out?”

She looked at him and shrugged.

He forced himself to hold her eyes. “They’ll say Kate Argall gave up the Olympics for her child, while Zoe Castle gave up her child for the Olympics.”

She flinched. “That’s not fair.”

He shrugged sadly. “Yeah, but is it completely untrue?”

“I thought it was true that I had to keep the pregnancy, because
you
said they’d never leave me alone if I got rid of it so I could race. Then I thought it was true that I had to keep quiet about being Sophie’s mum, because
you
said the press would tear me apart if they found out.” Her voice rose, ringing with accusation.

“Don’t tell me that wasn’t true.”

“Yeah, but I’m tearing
myself
apart. This is worse than anything the papers could do to me.”

He tried to keep his breathing even. “You were okay with it when you were winning. You took the golds and you stood on that podium and you raised your arms in the bloody air.”

She glowered at him. “My arms, Tom? Let’s look at my arms.”

She yanked up the left sleeve of her jacket and showed him the graze from her crash, still weeping through the gauze.

“This one is a true story,” she said. “You’ll go too fast, you’ll crash, and it will really fucking hurt.”

She jerked up her other sleeve and showed him the Olympic rings on her skin, lurid and inflamed. “This one is a lie.
Swifter, higher, stronger.
It just makes you more and more lonely. People see me standing on the podium and they think they’re seeing glory, and all they’re seeing is the one shining minute when I rose up out of the mess I made to get there. Look at every single champion you’ve ever met. Look at me and Jack. We’re wrong in the head. We spent our whole lives putting ourselves first. Now look at Kate, always coming second. The saints were all losers, Tom. But they don’t give out medals for this”—she waved her grazed arm at him—“they give them out for this.” She pushed her tattooed arm towards his face, hard, and he recoiled from it.

“You’re not seeing it straight.”

“I can see it with my eyes closed, Tom, because it hurts. It fucking hurts.”

He sighed and sank back in his chair. “You wanted to win. My job was to help you do it.”

She shook her head furiously, angry red blotches rising in the skin of her face and neck. “I feel like my heart’s been ripped out. I feel like I could start screaming and never stop. If you ever really wanted to help me, you’d have warned me eight years ago how I was going to feel today.”

He stared at her, incredulous. “Please. I couldn’t change you. No one could.”

She smiled savagely at him, almost a snarl. “Then your job was just to sell tickets to the freak show, the same as everyone else.”

“That’s not fair. I care about you. I always did.” He realized he was blushing.

She said, “If you care about me, then let me stop all the lies. It’s my turn now.”

He looked at her sharply. “How do you mean?”

“I want to tell Sophie the truth. I want to do it today.”

He spread his hands in a pleading gesture. “She’s in the hospital, Zoe.”

Straightaway, he wished he hadn’t said it. He watched her muscles tense and her body spin on the swivel chair, configuring itself to get up and leave.

He grabbed her wrist. “Please, don’t go there now. Just give it some time. I’ve seen this before with athletes at the end of a long run. Today is the worst you’re ever going to feel in your life, but believe me, you do have a future.”

She pulled away from him. “Not without my daughter. I mean it, Tom.”

He looked into her eyes then, and he believed her.

“I’m going to tell Sophie the truth,” she said. “I’m going to the hospital and telling her now.”

She got up from his desk and he stood to block her, but his knees flared with pain and his spirit sank. He fell back down in his chair.

“I can’t stop you,” he said.

And then, when Zoe had left his small, airless office, he said, “I never could.”

He looked down at his hands for a minute, then picked up his phone to warn Jack and Kate.

Zoe arrived at the main desk of the hospital and signed in as a relative. They told her where Sophie was, and she followed the signs to pediatric intensive care. She walked the long linoleum lines of the corridors, feeling the weakness in her legs from the aftereffects of racing. In defeat there was no endorphin high to offset the aches. At the junction of two thoroughfares she had to rest, taking her weight against the wall for a minute until the sharp pains in her ankles subsided. Hospital staff flowed by, moving with the undramatic efficiency of bodies rarely pushed close to their operational limits. The pain in her ankles made her think about Tom. Was this how it had started for him—the arthritis and the joint problems? Did it hit him the very minute he sank out of the sport? The body was like that: it had a capacity to hold itself together until it was allowed to fall apart. People walked out of burning buildings on two broken legs, only collapsing when they were safely away from the flames. Spouses died within days of each other, and they called it a broken heart.

Sparks of gold light floated across her vision, and the floor seemed distant and uneven. She hadn’t eaten since before the race—she’d been too upset to remember her recovery drink—and now her blood sugar was crashing. She ignored the pain from her ankles and forced
herself to move again according to the directions the receptionist had given her.

Kate was sitting in the corridor outside the entrance to the recovery unit, on one of a pair of vinyl-covered chairs that bracketed the double swing doors. Opposite the chairs there was an aquarium with slow fulvous fish gnawing at the thin green lamina of algae on the inside of the glass. There was a notice board with government posters recommending the daily ingestion of vegetables and outlining how best to sneeze.

Kate looked up at the sound of Zoe’s trainers on the lino. She didn’t seem surprised to see her. Her face was blank, drawn with fatigue. She was still wearing her racing skinsuit, with her raincoat over the top of it.

“Hi,” she said quietly.