Gold (46 page)

The pain didn’t disappear with the acceptance, but it slowly became easier to hold within herself. Each moment layered small consolations around it, working to smooth its sharp edges. Sophie was alive—this was the main thing. And Zoe had Tom and Kate, and so she wasn’t completely alone.

All afternoon the three of them sat in silence around Sophie’s bed, never taking their eyes from her face, willing her to get well.

Finally, with the red sun setting beneath the ragged gray clouds outside the hospital window, Sophie opened her eyes.

She was quiet for a few minutes, looking around her and taking in the presence of Zoe, Kate, and Jack. Kate fetched her a glass of water and took off her mask to help her drink it, and Zoe watched Sophie’s calm eyes as she looked up into Kate’s face and smiled.

“Mum?” she said in a cracked whisper. “Why’s Zoe here?”

Zoe felt Jack and Kate watching her.

She leaned in and took Sophie’s small, warm hand in both of hers. “I just wanted to tell you…” she said. Then she faltered, feeling the sting of tears.

“Tell me what?” said Sophie.

“Something I’ve never told you before. Something I should have told you years ago.”

Sophie blinked. “What?”

Jack and Kate shifted on their chairs. Jack was about to say something, but Kate stopped him with a hand on his arm.

Zoe squeezed Sophie’s hand and smiled at her. “I just want to tell you who you’ve got as parents. You’re a very lucky girl, Sophie. You have a dad who cares about you so much that he could hardly ride his bike straight for thinking about you, even in the biggest race of his life. There aren’t very many men like that in the whole world, I hope you know. And you have a mum, Sophie…”

She swallowed and tried again. “You have a mum who loves you so much that she was ready to give up the most important thing in the world for her, just because it was the right thing to do for you.”

She blinked rapidly, forcing back her tears.

Sophie looked at her quizzically. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

As the tears began, Zoe felt an arm around her and let her head fall onto Kate’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just so tired.”

Kate’s hands stroked her hair. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We’re just tired because we’ve been racing so long.”

Tom came back from the bar with a double Scotch for him and a sparkling water for Zoe. She was sitting at a corner table, on a bench seat set into a wall alcove, with her chin on her knees, watching him.

“What?” he said. “An old man can’t have a drink after a day like that?”

She managed a small smile that lit up his mood a little. He was pleased with how she was doing. It wasn’t the sun yet, but it was a candle in a basement. He’d take any kind of progression from the absolute darkness of those hours after her last race.

She pointed at the drink in his hand. “But whisky?”

“If they made anything stronger, trust me, I’d be drinking it.”

She tried another smile.

He hadn’t left her alone for a fortnight. In the daytime he’d kept her engaged with the simple tasks of winding up her sponsorship deal and
moving out of her apartment. In the night, in his small flat, he’d looked into her room every half hour. He’d slept only in twenty-minute bursts shattered by the piping of his wristwatch alarm. Still, at his age, you needed life to forgive you more than you needed sleep.

This morning he’d organized a small white hire car with the rental company’s sticker on the doors, powered by something that was nominally an engine. He’d driven her down south to the decaying Hampshire church with the overgrown graveyard that she’d never visited. It had taken them half an hour to find her brother’s headstone. It was polished and lacquered black marble, in the shape of a teddy bear. The canonical features had been carved into the stone with inhuman precision using a computer-controlled router programmed by a manufacturer that presumably specialized in these stelae and produced them in short runs of ten or a dozen units at a rate determined by statistical algorithms to be proportional to the rate at which children passed away within the geographical purview of the distributor. At a later time, possibly further down the supply chain, the routed lines of the teddy bear’s eyes and smile had been picked out in a patent-protected brand of weather-resistant gold paint that had the property of adhering to metamorphic stone when properly keyed in and staying there pretty much forever.

Tom had hated the stone. The sense of disappointment at a world that had produced such an artifact and compelled this young woman that he cared about to look at it was almost more than he could bear. He’d taken it out on the grave’s overgrowth of long sedge and bramble, ripping it away so violently that his hands were left torn and bleeding. The headstone, when they had finally exposed it, was stark and upright and unweathered in that flat field of lolling, rusticated crosses.

Zoe hadn’t said a word, just silently stared at that terrible child’s monument traveling in eternal locked formation with the softer stones of the elderly dead. Then, kneeling, she took out her first Olympic gold—the sprint medal from Athens on its faded blue ribbon. She hung it around
the teddy bear’s neck. From her jacket pocket she took the dented aluminium water bottle she and Adam had shared. She stood it up carefully on the grave, heaping the white marble chips to keep it upright on its uneven base. “You won,” she whispered. “You must be so thirsty.”

Walking back to the car, they had clung to each other for support. His knees were shot, her ankles were questionable, and both their hearts were in the kind of state where, if they had been any other muscles, he’d have recommended that they should be rested for the remainder of the season.

They’d sat in the car in silence for a few minutes before he started the engine.

“I should have come here twenty years ago,” she said finally. “I should have dealt with it all in my head. That’s what normal people would have done, right?”

He thought about it for a moment, then sighed. “Let’s both not get started on what we should have done.”

Zoe looked out at the churchyard. “Is it always like this, when someone falls out of the sport?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. It feels like dying. Or being born.”

Tom weighed it up, tapping his fingers on the wheel. “No,” he said finally. “I mean by the time they retired, the other riders I worked with had more or less figured out what they wanted to do next. Maybe that’s why they won so much less than you. You never really thought about next, did you? Gave you a hell of an advantage on the track.”

“Was that not fair on the others, or was that not fair on me?”

He grinned. “Sweetheart, fair is a hair color.”

She’d laughed and they’d driven back north in a mellow kind of silence. They’d arrived back in Manchester and dropped off the hire car in the evening. They’d gone up to her apartment on the forty-sixth floor and packed the last of her things into a single Team GB holdall while the moon rose over the city through the tall plate-glass windows. Then
they’d put her single Yale key into a plain white envelope and posted it through the letterbox of the solicitors who were handling the sale.

They’d stood out on the pavement, not knowing what to say to each other.

“I could go for a drink,” Tom had said.

Zoe had shrugged. “I suppose I could go and watch you drink it.”

Now Tom sat opposite her and positioned their glasses on the coasters. The pub was nearly empty. The blood-red carpets were patterned to camouflage whatever might be spilled on them in the future, and musty with the smell of whatever had been in the past. No one had put money in the jukebox and so it was choosing its own tunes. At this moment it was playing “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys.

“How are you feeling?” said Tom.

“Okay.”

“How are you finding the weather, down here where us mortals live?”

She flipped him the middle finger.

The baby-faced barman rang a brass bell suspended from the canopy of the bar, to indicate that time had reached a point of division. “Last orders,” he called.

Tom frowned at his watch. “Sure you don’t want something stronger, Zo?”

She shook her head, and he reached over to touch her arm.

“You want us to go and see Kate and Sophie tomorrow?”

“Soon. Not just yet. I need some time to let it all settle.”

He watched her carefully. “Do you regret not telling Sophie?”

Zoe sniffed and shook her head. “No, I’m glad. Kate
is
her mother. Kate went through hell for her and I just… went.”

Tom squeezed her arm. “You did the best you could. That’s all you ever do. I wouldn’t like you so much if that wasn’t true.”

“But Tom, I love her. It’s possible to love a child even though you can’t be her parent. Isn’t it?”

He smiled. “I reckon so.”

Her eyes were still, the green of them muted and dull. There was a long way to go with her. Soon, maybe in another week or so, she’d start hearing the hints he was dropping. She still wasn’t receptive to the idea that there might be something great she could do with her days. She talked about modeling deals or becoming a commentator or any of a dozen lives he knew would make her unhappy. Still, he wasn’t going to give up. It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.

“Never mind,” he said. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

The barman was putting chairs on tables and spraying the kind of aerosol furniture polish that had the quality of simultaneously being citrus fresh and unsurvivable. The TV in the corner was showing the war in Afghanistan. The jukebox had moved on to Ella Fitzgerald singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”

“You’re a pretty nice person,” Zoe said finally.

“If your ankles get any worse, honey, then you’d better start being nice too.”

She smiled at him then, a full smile that lifted him to a place he hadn’t been in weeks.

Slowly her mouth sank back into a soft and serious line. “You’re good to me,” she said quietly.

“You’re the story of my bloody life,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be good to you?”

The barman gave two strikes on the big brass bell and said, “Time, ladies and gentlemen, please.”

Tom growled.

“What?” said Zoe.

“Time,” he said. “Never liked that stuff.”

Jack sat next to Kate, high up in the stands, watching Sophie train alone on the track. They didn’t talk, only listened to the rumble of her wheels on the boards and the beeps from the lap timer. They liked to wait up here, out of Sophie’s line of sight, letting her get on with it. They liked to listen to Zoe’s excitable shouts as she coached their daughter.

Sometimes, as Sophie carved around the high banking and dropped snugly back down to the racing line, they felt their own hands twitching on phantom handlebars and the muscles in their legs aching to fire. Their heart rates climbed and they were there on the track with her, roaring round those polished maple curves, pushing the biomechanics to that perfect edge where everything clicked and their minds became still.