Beside her was the junior doctor who’d checked her over in A&E the night before. Seeing that no bones were broken, and since his shift finished at eight, he’d offered her a lift home and she’d offered him a euphemism. Coffee was probably the one she’d used—she didn’t recall.
In sleep he’d taken up a position along the far edge of her bed, lying on his side, incurved like a closing parenthesis. She stroked his cheek and he didn’t respond—he was in deep sleep. Zoe ran light fingers over the soft skin of his shoulder. His stillness moved her.
There was a language of sleeping together and most men shouted it. Even good lovers became strident in sleep: fidgeting, sprawling, holding on to you. As if you needed to be held. As if it was against all odds that you had managed, for thirty-two years, not to fatally injure yourself by tumbling out of your own bed due to the absence of a relative stranger to anchor you.
Zoe stroked his cheek again. His eyes opened. They were pale green, and something stirred in her. He looked at her blankly for a moment, then closed his eyes again without waking. They worked the juniors a hundred hours a week, she’d heard.
Asleep, he looked really young. Zoe liked the tidy, self-contained way he slept. She hadn’t wanted the sex as much as she wanted to share this space with another human being, forty-six floors up in the clouds. Sex was cheap money that you could print on demand and use to buy a reprieve from loneliness till morning.
Afterwards the man had collapsed, exhausted. He’d said this nice thing that had made her smile: “In my professional opinion there is quite literally nothing wrong with you, Zoe.”
“I might want a second opinion.”
“I might want some sleep.”
She’d laughed, and they’d lain together quietly in the dark. She’d felt his heart beating, and he’d felt hers. The rate of it had made him anxious to the extent that he’d taken hold of her wrist to measure her pulse.
“I don’t mean to worry you, but …”
She’d ruffled his hair. “My pulse is thirty-nine. I know. It’s okay, I’m not dying. I’m superhuman.”
He’d smiled sleepily. “What are your special powers?”
“Oh, you know, I just like to keep myself fit.”
He didn’t know who she was, and she hadn’t told him. It was easier to be herself that way. She’d kissed him, and he’d fallen asleep with the lightest touch on her wrist. She’d lain there listening to his breathing. She hadn’t moved her wrist from beneath his hand. Her whole life was filled with people who knew who she was, and who gave her training schedules, and who took her pulse day in and day out. They measured her maximum heart rate, her lactate threshold heart rate, her heart rate at optimal power output. It had felt good to lie quietly in her own private darkness beside this man who seemed to care, however slightly, what her heart was doing when it was resting.
In the feeble dawn light Zoe pulled the duvet up around the doctor’s shoulders and left him alone to sleep.
In the living area she put the news channel on mute while she did two hundred abdominal crunches, eighty side planks, and sixty seated oblique twists with a medicine ball. She stretched, then showered with her grazed arm held high to protect the surgical dressing. She toweled her hair and made espresso. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows, she sipped it as the sun rose over the wide human sprawl of Manchester. The bright light connected with the postexercise glow in her chest and she felt weightless and uncomplicated. For the first time since moving into this high tower, she felt okay about it.
She smiled to herself and bounced on the balls of her feet.
These were the moments of happiness; you had to take them. You had to notice the minutes of stillness where memory was clement and the surface of your life was the mirror of an unruffled sea. You could almost believe you had raced so hard that you had outrun the past. The sensation was indistinguishable from that of being forgiven.
Spires reached, glass burned, painted gasometers gleamed in the new light.
Zoe stretched up on her toes, steadying herself with one hand against the glass. Slowly, she sank back down to her heels as her face became still again. The act of realizing she was happy had been enough to set the moment’s foundations crumbling. Sooner or later, the junior doctor would have to take the elevator down to the street and emerge, in yesterday’s clothes, to be confronted with a twenty-foot-high billboard image of her face. Once he knew who she was, the process of disintegration would begin the way it always did.
She made another espresso, her hands shaking slightly, and went to look in on him sleeping. He’d shrugged off the duvet again and his slender back glowed in the rising sunlight. She remembered the curve of it in darkness, the sense of complicity she had felt with him.
She sat on the bed with her back against the headboard and her knees drawn in to her chest, waiting for him to wake up. She fidgeted, weighing whether to stay or to go for a run. If she did, she wondered if he’d still be here when she returned. She pressed a button and a screen rose silently out of the foot of the bed. She put it on to the morning show, with the sound off and the closed captioning on. Pirates had taken a freighter off the Somalian coast. Arsenal had lost quite badly. A planet had been discovered in a nearby solar system, at approximately the right distance from its sun to theoretically support life. The newscaster imparted these things without presuming to order them hierarchically.
The text message alert on her phone went off, startling her and bringing the man awake. He sat up in bed and blinked at her. When his eyes adjusted, he smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi. I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“I’m not.”
He reached up and touched her hip. She hesitated. The morning hadn’t stolen his looks.
She looked down at her phone. The text was from Tom, asking her to put aside an hour at the end of afternoon training.
“Everything okay?” said the man.
“Fine. Just the office.”
“What time do you go in?”
“Oh … you know. I’m working from home today.”
“Want me to leave you in peace?”
Zoe smiled. “No.”
They lay on the duvet and their bodies were lit by the mute TV as the captions flashed. There has been more protest in Pakistan’s troubled North Waziristan tribal region, say officials as he kissed her body and sixteen civilians were reported buried alive in the rubble of a building destroyed by an unmanned drone and she rolled him onto his back and knelt over him and dignitaries began arriving for the official opening of the London Olympic Velodrome and she closed her eyes and bit down on a moan and opened her eyes and there she was, suddenly face-to-face with herself.
Through eight years of time she stared out of the TV screen from the top step of the podium in Athens, in the infamous clip where she looked miserable. The TV showed her stepping down from the podium and journalists shoving microphones in her face, asking her how she felt.
Zoe blinked. She remembered exactly how she’d felt. With all the adrenaline crashing out of her blood, unconsoled by the gold medal that hung around her neck, she’d lost her nerve like a terrified child who had suddenly found herself in a grown-up’s body and wished the nightmare would end.
Oh I feel very happy, said the closed captioning, in yellow, to indicate that the words had come from her.
You don’t look happy, said disembodied green text on the screen.
Honestly, said the yellow text beneath her speaking face, no one is as happy as me.
The TV showed the soft line of her mouth in the moment when she had understood that victory changed nothing. That had been after the sprint final. The next day she’d won gold again, in the individual pursuit, and that had felt no different. Gold came out of the ground, and she had felt the weight of it dragging her back down there.
Zoe realized that she had frozen in the middle of sex. She became aware of him pushing up into her, nudging her back into motion. She couldn’t respond.
“Is everythin
g okay?” he said.
“Yes, everything’s fine.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“God, nothing terrible’s happened, has it?”
His eyes followed hers to the screen. Blue text: the sports presenter’s voice superimposed on the archive footage of her podium moment: There she is, Little Miss Sunshine. The shot cut to the two presenters laughing on the newsroom sofa. The confirmation in white text: [LAUGHTER].
The picture cut back to the archive footage of her, pale, mumbling the national anthem.
Blue text: And now of course she’s in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Red text: Some pretty racy details doing the rounds on Facebook, and now these further revelations in this morning’s paper.
Blue text: Apparently she’s been described as “sexually aggressive.”
Red text: Now there’s a surprise!
[LAUGHTER]
Now they were showing the front page of Britain’s biggest daily. Her face stared out of the page, beneath the Olympic rings.
XXX-RATED, was the headline. It was the thirtieth Olympiad. Beneath her she felt the man’s body shift. “Oh my God,” he said softly. “It’s you.”
“Yeah,” Zoe said quietly.
She moved off him and sat with her chin on her knees, watching the pictures.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he said.
She shrugged. “I’m smaller in real life.”
Red text: Thirty-two years old. Scandal aside—and we should stress that this latest story is only allegations—is thirty-two too old for a realistic Olympic prospect?
Blue text: Well, thirty-two is old for any professional athlete, Doug, and even if Zoe is still selected for London after this, there’s no doubt it will be her last Olympics.
Beside her on the duvet, the man touched her hand. “You should have said something. You should have—”
“What?” she said. “What should I have done?”
“You should have told me who you were.”
She flashed irritation at him. “You didn’t tell me who you were.”
He spread his hands in despair. “I was wearing a name badge.”
“Oh please,” said Zoe. “I was wearing my fucking face. Excuse me for not actually having green lips and hair.”
He looked at her, and his face softened. “You’re beautiful. You’re not at all like they make you out to be.”
She gave a quick, bitter laugh. “What—the ice queen? The frozen-hearted destroyer of rivals?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just need a moment to get my head around this.”
On the TV the red text said, Have you been able to speak to her?
Blue text: No, her agent tells us she isn’t available for interview today.
He stared at her. “You told me you worked in an office.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that when people find out who I am, this happens.” She waved her hand at the TV.
The doctor flushed. “What, you think I’m going to run to the papers now?”
She looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. “If you do, then at least tell them I’m an alright person, okay? Tell them … I don’t know. Tell them I offered you breakfast.”
The TV cut to an image of the high street of a provincial town in the rain. Bunched under bright umbrellas, charity collectors outnumbered shoppers.
Is consumer confidence returning to the high street? said white text. Zoe stood.
“I don’t have much in the cupboard that normal humans eat. I mean … I can offer you rice, or dried fruit? Or rice and dried fruit, if you’re going for a PB today.”
“PB?”
“Personal best. Like when you’re training and you really smash it up and you clock your quickest lap. You want to be fueled up for it.”
“We don’t really have PBs in A&E.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So how do you motivate?”
“Mostly we just resuscitate.”
She pulled on her bathrobe and went to the kitchen area to make two more coffees while he looked for his clothes. The hissing of the espresso machine was the only sound in the apartment, as it pumped steam into the silence but failed to entirely fill it.
When he was dressed he came up to the counter in the kitchen area and she leaned across and took his hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It would really be okay if you stayed for breakfast.”
He was helpless in his confusion. Zoe squeezed his hand. “It’ll blow over by tomorrow. And anyway, I’m B-list. It’s not like they’ll start stalking you. Actually I’d really like to see you again.”
“Yeah, but this is … I mean, God. I don’t know if I’m up for all this.”
As he said this, he looked away from her to the window and swept the Manchester cityscape with his hands. The gesture seemed to link their situation with a billion tons of masonry, and Zoe felt the sudden concrete drag of it.
“But I like you,” she said. “Can’t you ignore what they’re saying about me? It’s jealousy, that’s all it is—they hate me because I’m successful and they’re just little people who’ve never done anything with their lives. And they sit on their arses and criticize the way I’m living, and it’s like they’re stealing my life from me. The more they criticize, the less I can have a normal relationship, and the less I can have a normal relationship, the more they criticize. I can’t win, and now if you’re standing here and telling me you care about what the papers will say, then that does my head in because I’m a winner, okay? I’m a winner and I can’t fucking win.”
She realized she was failing to keep the desperation out of her voice, to hold back the rising anger as she squeezed his hand tighter.
She let go of it, cast her eyes down to the kitchen counter, and took a long, shaky breath to calm herself.
“Sorry,” she said.
He looked at her for a long time with his pale green eyes, then touched her shoulder.
“Look,” he said softly. “Can I write down a number for you?”
He took a pen from his pocket and she passed him the copy of Marie Claire, flipping it onto its back so he wouldn’t see her face on the front.
“Here,” she said. “You can write on this.”
He clicked the point of the pen out and began to write a name and phone number across the face of the face of a rival brand of bottled mineral water. Zoe couldn’t help laughing.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. You’ve got really crappy handwriting.”
He grinned. “Typical doctor, huh?”
“Mmm.”
Relief flooded her. It had been an awkward morning, but at least he was leaving his number. Mostly, the guys she liked didn’t do that. She watched the strong, soft movements of his hand where it held the pen, and let herself begin to believe in the possibility of seeing him again.
He clicked the button that retracted the tip, replaced the pen in his pocket, and spun the magazine around so that the phone number was the right way up for her.
She smiled. He smiled.
“This is the number of a very good friend of mine from med school,” he said gently. “She’s actually a clinical psychologist but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. She’s just a very good person to talk with about anything that’s on your mind. I can’t imagine what you’re going through with all this media intrusion, but it can’t be very easy to deal with.”
Zoe felt an icy clutch in her chest, and forced herself to keep smiling. She smiled as if this was not utterly terrible, and not unbearably embarrassing, but instead exactly what she had been expecting and hoping for him to do at this exact moment in the long and troubled history of her romantic life: to write her a referral.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll call her.”
She smiled as he put on his jacket, grinned as he kissed her neatly on the cheek, and beamed as he prodded questioningly at the minimalist opening mechanism of the apartment’s high-gloss olive-la
cquered sliding front door.
“It’s open,” Zoe said.
The man turned and smiled back at her for a moment.
“I’ll be rooting for you, okay?”
“Yeah,” she said brightly. “Great.”
The door slid open and then back between them on air-damped runners with a hydraulic closing system that made only the tiniest sound, hardly louder than her soft exhalation of breath as the smile could finally be abandoned to make room for the neutral expression her features fell into.
In frustration she slammed her free hand down on the kitchen counter and winced as the movement tore at the wound under the sterile dressing.
She walked over to the windows, leaned forward, and looked down over the city for a long time.
At nine in the morning, with the sun glittering on the wet streets far below, her agent phoned.
“You alright?” her agent said.
“Yeah. No worries. You’re calling about the story?”
“Yes. You saw the TV? We need to wrap our arms around this situation. If we let them rebrand you like this, your sponsors will walk.”
“It’ll blow over.”
“Do you want to take that risk? I think you have to give the newspapers something bright and shiny to distract them. And I mean before they go to press. Otherwise this could run another day, don’t you think?”
“What do you want me to give them?”
“Any positive photo op would work. You need to be smiling. And showing a bit of skin.”
“Oh, please.”
“I don’t make the rules, okay? I make fifteen percent by imploring you to follow them.”
Zoe pulled her dressing gown tighter. On the TV, the closed captions were trailing a daytime staple. Jules Hudson and the team are in Worcestershire to meet Meg Cox and her teenage daughter Melissa. Melissa may be blind but that is not stopping her from achieving her dreams. With a great talent for music, she hopes the team can uncover enough items of value in their beautiful home to purchase a 12-string guitar.
Zoe shivered. “Okay. I’ll do what I have to.”
Her agent’s relief came through the line. “I’m sorry. We both know you’re better than this but it’s the news cycle, you know? I mean—”