Gold by Chris Cleave
Playing with the crowd, he grinned. He watched himself clapping on the massive screen. It showed him in slow-mo. The muscles punched out so hard each time his arms engaged, there looked to be an alien under his skin, fighting to get out. Christ, he thought, I really am stupendously strong. The camera zipped in close to his face again, and without thinking about it he yelled, “This is for you! Get well soon, Sophie!”
He looked across at the GB crew. Next to his coach was the mechanic. Two hours before Jack had even showed up, this guy had been here to disassemble his bike, clean it, lubricate it, and reassemble it, using a chart recording his setup preferences to the half millimeter. The man had cranked every Allen bolt to within 0.5 percent of its optimal tightness using a digital torque wrench. Then he’d examined Jack’s tires, inch by inch, with a magnifying glass, looking for the tiniest sign of damage. If he found anything, he replaced the tire and started again. One hour before Jack had left the hotel, his coach had showed up at the velodrome, checked the mechanic’s work, and made sure there were clean towels trackside and a static warm-down bike ready and cleaned for after the heat. Next to his coach and the mechanic was the assistant coach. Half an hour before Jack had arrived, the assistant had turned up with an insulated bag containing isotonic energy drinks for use during his warm-up and high-protein recovery drinks for after the heat. All these drinks were brought to body temperature, in order to place the minimum physiological stress on his system. Next to the assistant coach was the team physio. He’d been monitoring Jack’s pre-warm-up stretches and preparing the massage room for after his postheat shower. Next to the physio was the GB medic, and he was on station in order to respond within fifteen seconds in the event that Jack should crash or collapse or go into some kind of seizure induced by the combination of adrenaline, twenty thousand cheering human beings clapping to his rhythm, and a bagpipe tune commemorating a victory by the forces of James VII of Scotland over William of Orange of England. Jack wasn’t sure what the medical term for that would be.
He looked at all of these people—all of this apparatus that was supposed to make him win—and a hollow feeling grew in his stomach. He couldn’t keep his focus away from the fact that Kate and Sophie were riding a harder race. The bagpipes careened around his head. The crowd drowned out the drone notes. He tried to keep his head in the game, but a chill was quickening inside him.
Two things happened then. One, the French guy rode away from the start line. Two, Jack’s coach started making frantic hand signals, pointing at the disappearing Frenchman as he rode off down the track. Jack was thinking, That’s inexperience for you. The poor bastard’s so nervy, he’s gone before the whistle. But his coach was still waving his hands and shouting, and the French rider was twenty meters down the track and looking back over his shoulder. Jack was thinking, The guy’s going to see what’s happened, and he’ll have to turn around and come back to the start line, which will be mighty embarrassing even for a man accustomed to the popular music of Johnny Hallyday and Jean Michel Jarre. But the guy didn’t turn round. He put his head down instead and sped up. So Jack turned off his iPod to get a better idea of what was happening. That’s when he heard the entire crowd falling into a sickening silence. In the sudden quiet his coach was shrieking at him to “Go! Go! Go!”
Shit, he thought, I’ve only gone and missed the start. But he knew that with the kind of effort he was easily capable of putting in, he could still catch the French rider. He was calm. He popped up from the saddle and powered down onto the cranks. The Frenchman had fifty meters on him, and he’d abandoned any tactics: he’d seen his chance and he was just going flat out for the line. Jack dug deep. He put everything into the chase, and by the end of the first lap the gap was down to thirty meters. He could feel his face contorted with pain, but it was working. As he crossed the lap line, his coach gave him a double thumbs-up from trackside.
He wound it up even harder, forcing that last fraction of one percent out of his body. He was getting there. The frame of the bike was flexing with each pedal stroke. It was the stiffest bike ever built, and it couldn’t cope with the power he was laying down. By the end of the second lap, the Frenchman was only ten meters ahead. Jack’s heart rate was at 195, power at over one thousand watts. The journalists covering the race from the press pit could have run a two-bar electric heater off him and still had enough power left over to drive their laptops. Jack was thinking, This is what they will write about me: Awesome, awesome, awesome.
And then he thought, Sophie.
A picture formed in his mind. He was alone in a room, holding Sophie’s hand as she lay absolutely still. It was hard to tell, from the picture, if she was alive or dead. The image snatched his breath and broke his rhythm. He lurched, and for a moment he stopped gaining on the French rider.
He tried to get back on the pace. Pedal pedal pedal. Breathe breathe breathe.
But the image came back to him, more distinct now. Sophie’s hand in his, her face a mask of stillness.
His coach was making more frantic gestures from trackside. He was shouting, “Step it up! Step it up!” At the end of the third lap, Jack was twenty meters behind. He wound it up as hard as he could, and his coach was shouting, “Let’s go, Jack, that’s it!”
The picture came back.
He couldn’t block it out anymore. All the force poured out of him, as if someone had pulled plugs from drain holes in the soles of his feet. The Frenchman beat him by forty-five meters. Jack was only just coming out of the curve onto the home straight when he saw him cross the line with his hands in the air.
The crowd was very quiet. There was a stillness in the velodrome. The humidity was overwhelming. Sweat poured off Jack in hot sheets. He slowed to a halt over two laps and grabbed the trackside rail to lean on. His chest was heaving. He was too exhausted to even get off the bike. The medic raced over with his bag. His coach ran up and put an arm around his shoulders.
“The fuck just happened there, Jack? Are you okay? The fuck was that all about?”
The pain was burning all through him. It was agony—he realized he was actually groaning. The medic was asking him could he tell him the name of the prime minister? He had a stethoscope on Jack’s chest. Dave was in his face asking was he alright? He sat there with his body shaking and he let the physio cool him down with a sponge, like you’d do with a racehorse.
His mind kept lurching between the moment and that terrible room where he’d sat holding Sophie’s motionless hand. He was so frightened and confused he could have screamed. This was how a bull in a bullfight felt, bleeding from all the lances. He wanted to destroy things. He wanted to die right there, by the side of the track. He wanted the world to be burned to ashes and all of the people to be gone and nature to start again without him.
The camera on the zip wire zoomed right up to his face, and he stood up and started yelling at it, and trying to punch it away with his fists. He stared it right in the lens, to show that he wasn’t broken. He was trying to stare two billion people down. Dave grabbed him round the shoulders and turned him away.
“Leave it, Cassius Clay. Let’s get you out of here.”
“But the next race …”
His coach shook his head. “We’re going to concede, old friend. You’re cooked.”
And that was the end of his Beijing Olympics. As they walked towards the dressing room, his legs buckled and he started to cry.
There was a man with a Steadicam, walking backwards, capturing every moment. Jack looked up and saw him and said the only thing he could think of to say, right into the camera.
He said, “I’m sorry, Sophie. I’m so sorry.”
In the calm of the kitchen now, he hugged Kate tightly.
“Just keep your head in the race tomorrow,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Sophie’s getting better, and you’re in the form of your life. All you need to do now is ride.”
Kate kissed him on the tip of his nose. “Sport’s so much simpler than life, isn’t it?”<
“That’s why it’s so much more popular.”
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester, 6:35 a.m.
The morning of the race was cloudless and chilly. For the first time since moving to the tower, Zoe did her warm-up on the roof deck, five hundred feet above the rush-hour traffic, in the direct lightspeed blast of the sunrise, with the Blade Runner theme in her earphones. Sometimes life was okay. It was impossible not to be lifted by the elevation.
She had a spinning bike up on the roof, pushed up against the railings on the east side, and she took the cover off it now and clipped into the pedals, warming up as the sun climbed higher. As her heart rate rose steadily and smoothly up into the 130s, a simple happiness trembled in her: at the atomizing brightness of the light, at the barely contained potential in her muscles, at the undertones of approaching summer in the cold clean breeze blowing in off the Pennines. As her heart rate hit 150, she felt as if she could unclip from the pedals, climb over these rails quite unfussily, and just fly. It didn’t feel as if she weighed nearly enough to get hurt.
The feeling freaked her out. She dialed the resistance down, spun the lactate out of her legs, and came to a halt. Then she burst into tears, quite unexpectedly.
She calmed herself, unclipped from the spinning bike, and went down off the roof into the cool marble staircase of the tower. She let herself back into the apartment.
In the living area, she watched herself on TV. She was all over the morning news. A psychologist in a lime-green skirt suit and gold book chain necklace was agreeing with the presenter that it would be better if Kate went to the Olympics.
The presenter said, “A lot of our viewers will be asking whether it’s acceptable for someone to represent Great Britain when she’s being written about for all the wrong reasons.”
The psychologist said, “That’s exactly the point. Girls are inspired by these Games—my daughters are inspired by these Games—and they look to someone like Zoe for an example of how to be a successful female.”
Zoe flicked the TV to mute and felt herself balancing on the edge of control.
After coffee and 300 grams of steamed long-grain rice with dried fruits, she stood under the shower and let herself imagine that she’d chosen another life. She imagined being Sophie’s mother—feeding her carefully, carrying her around like eggshells, giving her all those pills in the right order, doing everything she saw Kate do.
Her tattoo stung on one arm, the graze from her crash stung on the other, and she tried to hold them both outside the jet of the shower. She couldn’t wash herself, only revolve futilely. She tried to get her head back into the uncluttered space where she needed to be to beat Kate.
It was frustrating that her mind was doing this to her, today of all days. There were days when she didn’t think about Sophie at all. Then suddenly, like this morning on the spinning bike, out of nowhere, she would cry for a few minutes. Most nights she had dreams where she had lost something nameless and was frantically searching for it. At first she’d imagined it was gold she was looking for, but after she won gold in Athens, and again in Beijing, the dreams carried on. And sometimes too she had dreams where she was racing and something horrible was chasing her and would catch her if she ever slowed down. But then again, everyone had those dreams.
She got out of the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and went back to look at the TV while she dried her hair. They were showing yesterday’s back page now, with the photograph of her and Kate in the tattoo parlor. Zoe stared at the inset photo of Sophie. She still found it impossible to link the child Sophie was now with the tiny thing in the incubator that everyone had insisted was hers. When she saw Sophie—at the track yesterday, for example, grinning in the basket of the butcher’s bike—she found her appealingly mad in the manner of all children, and sobering in the manner of all the undifferentiated sick, but still, nothing really moved inside her. She felt more for Kate: she knew Kate had suffered and was suffering, and it touched her.
Now, though, as she looked at the inset picture, it was undeniable that Sophie resembled her. There was much more of Jack in there, but by forcing herself to look, she could see a very slight ghost of her face in Sophie’s. It disturbed her, watching this evidence of herself surfacing through the features of a man she had put behind her. And she had put him behind her. This was the one thing she had done that she was proud of.
In the sink in the kitchen area she ran cooling water across the hot rawness of her new tattoo.
What would her life be, if she hadn’t given Sophie up? Would Jack have left Kate for her? Would the three of them be together now?
She allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to have Jack in her bed, softly breathing, in place of the howling emptiness of the wind blowing in from the hills and swaying the tower in the gusts. An old anguish surged through her and she ground her nails into the raw tattoo, forcing a cry of pain.
On the TV, the psychologist was explaining that someone called Zoe Castle had all the classic markers of someone in denial. She counted off the telltale behaviors on fingers ringed with diamonds and tipped with cherry-red lacquer: the promiscuity, the insatiable need to win, the lack of contrition.
They cut to the back page of the newspaper again. The picture caption said, “Sophie: Mum’s gold would mean so much to me.”
Zoe tried to remember the state she’d been in when she left Sophie behind at the hospital. Those days were clouded in her memory. When she thought back to them, there was just the obfuscating haze of the analgesic drugs and the certainty of tears if she tried any harder to access what had happened.
For the first time, she wondered whether Kate might be not someone who had shouldered a burden that she couldn’t carry, but someone who had arrived when Zoe was at her most vulnerable and taken something from her.
She bit her lip and tried to think clearly. What if Tom was in on it too? What if Tom had liked Kate best all along? What if everything he had done was to manipulate Zoe and get Kate what she wanted? What if it wasn’t in Zoe’s interests at all to race against Kate today, and this was just one more of Tom’s confections?
She pushed the thought away. It was wrongheaded, she knew it was. Tom was a good man and she knew how he felt about her. She liked him back.
On the TV, the psychologist was counting off paranoia, delusional thinking, and pathological self-obsession on her fingers. There was so much wrong with this woman called Zoe Castle that the psychologist had to start counting on the fingers of her other hand.
Zoe closed her eyes, trying to block out everything but the calm visualization of the race she would ride against Kate in less than four hours’ time. The image of Sophie’s face came to her instead. Something she had been fighting for years stirred inside her. It was a small ache at first, something barely differentiable from the rising crackle of emotion that wouldn’t let her think straight this morning. She shifted her weight from foot to foot and clenched her fists so tight her nails bit into her palms, and slowly the ache grew into a hurt, and then a wound, and then a furious agony that she could no longer hold inside.
Sophie was her daughter, and she had let her be taken away. Whenever the thought had started to surface, she had pushed it back under, into the cold depths where light rarely reached, but she had always known that this had to be part of why she felt the way she did, why she had spent all these years racing from one championship to another, bedding this man and that. Was this why nothing came close to touching the raw and inconsolable place inside her?
Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.
She’d thought she’d done the right thing. She’d believed it was best, given that she had no feeling for the child, to give her to someone who did. Now, though, all she could think was that in giving up Sophie, she had given up life. She let the grief surface and howled.
Later, when her tears had stopped, she felt cold and calm and clear. She went back up onto the roof. The sun was still bright but the breeze was freshening, and darker rain clouds were rolling in off the hills. By leaning on the rail and screwing up her eyes, Zoe could make out the street where the Argalls lived—the terrace of roofs that they must be eating breakfast beneath even now.
She felt the ache again, somewhere in between love and despair. The need inside her was frantic. She needed to see Sophie. She tried to get her head clear to race, but for the first time in her life, she didn’t know if she wanted to win.
Mum’s gold would mean so much to me.
She shook her head violently, trying to get the thought to leave. She spat over the railing, and watched the white fleck spiraling down through the rising vortices to lose itself in the bright white tones of masonry.
She could barely remember how she had reached this height, but she could see now that it was a very, very long way down.
Forest moon of Endor, Outer Rim Territories, Moddell Sector,
43,300 light-years from the Galactic Core,
grid coordinates H-16, 7:45 a.m.
Sophie saw Vader’s real face for the first time as Vader lay dying. When the spirit was gone, she held him in her arms for a long time. Though he had led a bad life, at the end he had been a good father. She took his body to a clearing on the forest moon of Endor and built a pyre to cremate him. As the flames rose, the dream began to disintegrate.
Somewhere outside it, Mum and Dad were talking.
Dad said, “Are you ready to race?”
Mum said, “I think so.”
Sophie tried to open her eyes but she was still too sleepy. Through her eyelids there was light the color of smoke. The sound of Mum and Dad talking was twisted around itself. Her chest hurt.
Mum’s voice said, “I love you.”
Dad’s voice said, “You too.”