Gold (6 page)

Zoe thumped her chest lightly above her heart. “It just gets me more than it used to. I mean, Sophie’s so ill…”

“But you’re fine?”

Zoe hesitated. “Fine…” she said, seeming to test the feel of the word in her mouth as if it hadn’t been used for some time, like
housewife
, or
Rhodesia
. “Fine,” she said. “Yeah. I mean… fuck, how could I not be?”

Jack turned to look back through the windscreen, and they sat in silence as Kate pulled Sophie’s jeans back up and brought her back to the car.

“What are you two talking about?” Kate said as she swung open the car door.

“The Tour de France,” said Zoe.

“Oh, I’ve heard of that,” said Kate.

She reseated Sophie and reattached her seat belt. Jack watched in the mirror and knew what his wife was thinking: how skinny their child was becoming. In three months of relapse she’d lost half the weight she’d put on in three years of remission. He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat, and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored.

With Sophie safely strapped in, Jack drove away.

“Sophie?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time you kick the back of my seat, I’m taking you back to the Death Star to be brought up by the Sith.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

He slowed almost to nothing on the speed bumps of the film studio’s exit road, and he checked in the rearview mirror to make sure that Sophie wasn’t jolted too much. When he pulled out onto the main road,
he drove defensively. He’d been on a course to learn how, since it was unlikely that any kind of road traffic accident would improve Sophie’s prognosis. Jack planned in which direction it would be safe to swerve in case the green Mercedes waiting at the upcoming junction pulled out early. When it didn’t, his eyes moved on to the next car ahead, and then to the mini-roundabout after that.

“Sophie…”

“Yeah?”

“Kicking.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

Jack was thirty-two years old, he was an Olympic gold medalist, and he was one of the top five quickest male cyclists in the world.

He said, “Sophie? If I’m going too fast you just tell me, okay?”

On the motorway they drove in the slow lane, wedged between lorries. Sophie knew it was to keep her safe. This was the effect she had on people: they drove twenty percent slower, they gripped the handles of boiling saucepans twenty percent harder, they chose their words one fifth more carefully. No one was going to blow a tire and crash her, or spill a pan and scald her, or say the word
worry
or
die
.

She wanted to tell them that it all just made you twenty percent more scared, but she couldn’t do that. They did it to cope with how they felt. She felt bad for making them feel that way.

Out the side window, she saw normal families cruising past. They were mostly families who weren’t on the good side like the Argalls or on the dark side like the Vaders. They were families who weren’t anything except on their way to the zoo or the shops. Quite often you could see them squabbling as they drove past. Their mouths moved crossly behind the glass. It was like a museum of human families, where the display cases moved past you without labels. Sophie wrote the labels in her head:
Mum Bought the Wrong Crisps,
or
Dad Won’t Let Me and Chloe Listen to the Chart Show
.

When Sophie got bored of watching the other families, she watched
Star Wars
in her head. She’d seen the films so many times now, she didn’t need the DVDs. She watched the AT-AT Walkers attacking the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth, to take her mind off how sick she was feeling. She felt so bad today, it was scaring her. Everything hurt. Her head pounded, her vision was blurry, and her bones ached the way they did when it was freezing and you were out on a long walk and the rain just kept getting harder. Waves of nausea rolled over her and gave her the icy chills.

It was incredible how Skywalker flew his fighter ship. It was because he was a Jedi. There were special cells in your blood, called midichlorians, that made you a Jedi. Sophie knew the changes in her blood that Dr. Hewitt thought were leukemia were actually just the start of midichlorians forming. You couldn’t expect Earth doctors to diagnose it right: they would be lucky to see a single case in a lifetime of medical practice.

Even so, when she felt as sick as she did today, there were times when she thought she would never become a Jedi. Even at sixty miles per hour, she was uncomfortable. The rumble of the road surface was shaking her up and making her insides hurt. How would she ever be able to fly a ship at hundreds of miles per hour between the feet of an attacking Imperial Walker?

She swallowed. “It’s okay if you want to go faster,” she said.

Dad shook his head. “We’re good like this.”

Sophie looked at Dad’s wiry forearms on the steering wheel, and then she looked at her own. She squeezed her fists to make her muscles bulge.

“You okay?” said Mum. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

The veins in her arms were dark blue and thin and led nowhere, as if someone had taken a biro and drawn the wiring diagram of a useless droid on her body before stretching human skin over it. Her dad’s veins bulged like cables under the skin and made purposeful lines, powering
the blood back to his heart. Dad was the strongest man in the world, probably. She didn’t understand how Dad could look at her—at the fragile, sickly sight of her—and not be scared. She had to try to seem strong and brave.

“It’s okay if you swerve a bit,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

Dad looked at her in the rearview mirror. “And why would I do that?”

“There’s actually a TIE fighter chasing us.”

In the front passenger seat, Zoe looked serious. “Right. Divert maximum power to the aft deflector shields please, Sophie.”

Sophie grinned and pressed the button on the side of the child seat that executed Zoe’s order.

“Fire the turbolasers!” said Zoe, and Sophie did.

“Make sure you lock on to their coordinates!”

Sophie was amazed that Zoe was so good at this. When the TIE fighter was destroyed, and they were all safe again, she relaxed in her seat. “Thanks, Han!”

Zoe turned and there were tears in her eyes, which was something that Sophie didn’t get. She hadn’t complained and she’d tried really hard not to look ill, and it made her a bit angry and sad if people felt sorry for her.

She made sure to keep smiling.

“It’s okay,” she told Zoe. “I actually feel great!”

Zoe got out of the car. As it drove off she waved the Argalls away and watched Sophie’s new-moon face watching her back, through the rear window. The child’s eyes fastened unself-consciously on her own, the way her brother Adam’s used to, and the fact that there was no reproach in them only made her feel worse.

She realized she was actually trembling. She’d hardly slept, and then
the Death Star had upset her, and the car journey back had been worse. Sophie really looked as if she was on her way out, and Kate was in denial, and Jack… well, she couldn’t decide what Jack thought.

A single day with that family had felt like the whole of her life. She didn’t know how they could bear it. There was an insane amount of emotion, but nothing sufficiently concentrated to cry about at any particular second. It was impossible.

She decided she would go up to her apartment and drink coffee. That seemed a reasonable thing to do. She could easily imagine a woman with more manageable emotions than she had at this moment saying to herself,
You know what? I think I’ll grab an espresso
. This was the best she could hope for today: to do the things that ordinary people did, and to hope that by some kind of sympathetic magic their ordinary sense of well-being would accrue to her.

The early April rain was falling. The pavement in front of the Beetham Tower’s lobby was cordoned off with tall orange cones and red-and-white safety barriers. A yellow crane was hoisting olive trees up into the sky, one by one. Zoe stopped to watch. There were a dozen trees waiting to go up. They were eight feet high, with their trunks swathed in bubble wrap and their roots balled into orange sacks. In the vortices of wind that spun around the foot of the high tower, the undersides of the olive leaves flashed as they turned, all at once, as if at an unseen signal, like shoals of silver fish.

Zoe wrinkled her eyes against the rain and watched a tree spinning on its halter, mirrored in the windows of the tower as it rose up into the slate-gray sky. The lift had been going on for two days now. The trees were going up to the penthouse, one floor above her own apartment. Management was making a “green space,” with birds and plants and a water feature. It would be nice up there—a souvenir of Earth.

Zoe wanted to watch the trees going up but she couldn’t stay too long out on the street before people would begin to recognize her. Over the road from the tower there was a ninety-six-sheet backlit billboard.
It showed an image of her own face, twenty feet high, her big green eyes framed with green hair and green lipstick. Her hand, the nails painted green, was holding a bottle of Perrier dripping with condensate.
Best served cold,
said the text on the advertisement. Across the right-hand third of the billboard, as tall as her face, were the Olympic rings glazed with a frosting of ice.

She looked up, to where the looming orange shape of a wrapped tree was disappearing into the cloud base. The smudge of color hung for a moment at the limit of vision, then surrendered to gray. Zoe felt a panic that she couldn’t pin down.

She slipped away before any passersby spotted her, and entered the lobby of the tower head-down. She hurried across the marble and took the lift to her apartment on the forty-sixth floor.

Inside, with the roar of the city five hundred feet below, she dropped her single Yale key into a wide pewter dish that served only that purpose. The chime the key made in striking the dish was the only sound. Beside the dish, a very old dented aluminium water bottle was the only other item on the black high-gloss hall stand. She removed her trainers, balled newspaper into the toes, racked them, and put on the gray felt slippers that were exactly where she had left them.

She tried to remember the name of the man she’d left sleeping in her bed. He’d been sweet. Tall, Italian-looking, a few years younger than her. Carlo, she was pretty sure, or Marco. A something-o with a grin that said this was in no way serious. Still, sometimes you hoped.

She called, “Hello?”

No answer.

There was no note on the fridge, no message on the kitchen counter. She checked the living area—nothing.

In her bedroom the bed was trashed—she remembered them doing that—and his boxer shorts were in the corner where she’d thrown them. The rest of his clothes were gone. Her four gold medals weren’t on the shelf where she’d put them, and for a second her heart stopped. Then
she saw them glinting under the edge of a pillow and picked them up. She held the cold metal to her chest, and sighed. He was an arsehole for not leaving his number, but he wasn’t a thief. She supposed she’d been lucky again, if you could call it luck.

There was a stillness in the apartment, and maybe the ghost of the smell of him.

She made an espresso with the built-in coffee machine and went to sit on an armless, low-backed charcoal-gray sofa in the living area. Clouds obscured the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

She’d only been living here a week. On the two days of clear weather she’d been able to see the National Cycling Centre, where she trained and competed, three miles away to the east. It had looked like the domed gray back of a beetle; as if it might crawl away from her through the understory of industrial estates and logistics hubs that fringed the city. Looking to the horizon through the binoculars the estate agent had left, she’d also seen the mountains of Snowdonia, the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, and Blackpool Tower and beach. Her third night she’d watched lightning storms and seen the wind boiling over the Cheshire plains.

Now there was nothing to see, only gray. It was hard not to feel like a ghost. Zoe held up her hand in front of her face and was amazed she couldn’t see through it. She stood, moved to the kitchen area, and ate a dry slice of multigrain bread. The texture of it was reassuring. She drank a glass of water and went back to sit in the living area.

She wondered if this was supposed to be her life now, moving alone between these designated spaces, inhabiting them according to patterns of usage envisioned by the architect.

Paolo
—that had been his name. She flipped open her laptop and found him on Facebook. He was even better-looking than she’d remembered. It had been a nice night. The sex had been good, but it was more than that. There had been a tenderness—something that had moved her. She was slightly surprised he hadn’t left a note.

She closed her eyes and let herself believe that he was on his way up in the lift, right now, with flowers. She smiled. It was silly, but you had to believe these things were possible. Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that were moments away from being revealed to you. It was a mistake to take disappointments at face value. You were only ever a tap at the door and a dozen fresh-cut blooms away from happy.