“You took your sweet time,” she said.
“To …?”
“To be conscious. I got so bored.”
Jack glanced around. It seemed from the many beds with their green sheets and modesty curtains that they were on a hospital ward, or in some kind of budget hotel concept that probably shouldn’t catch on. The girl was saying she was sorry for some crash.
Jack said, “What crash?”
Concussion had set him back a couple of days. He half recognized Zoe, though. Remembered her name, even, but not where he knew her from. He found himself smiling at her. It seemed safest. He remembered having had an argument with her once. Either recently or long ago. Maybe he’d been very drunk. Maybe he still was—maybe that was the problem. He wondered why she was holding his hand.
“Sorry, are we … going out or something?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“Would you like us to? You’re very attractive.”
“God,” she said. “You’re ridiculous.”
She didn’t stop smiling though, and they began talking. She told him how they’d fought at the velodrome, and yes, he remembered it now. He remembered her hitting him, in a rage. He must have pushed all her buttons.
She seemed different now. All of the hardness he remembered, it melted away as she talked. She was beautiful. She struck him as kind of sad, or maybe angry, or maybe she was just talking about fetching tea and a biscuit—he was finding it hard to follow her words. Her voice was slipping in and out of phase like the rainbow of sounds at the end of “Bold as Love.” And all the while here was a white thing in a green sling angling up and away from him. After the longest time he realized that the white thing was his own leg, in plaster, suspended from the ceiling on a chain. This was a weird place to put it. He could see his toes sticking out from the plaster cast, and by making the right movements in his brain, he could make the toes wiggle. It was hard though—it made him cross-eyed with concentration, like bringing a plane in to land. Just wiggling his own toes. He laughed, interrupting whatever she was saying.
“What?” she said, irritated.
“My leg!” he said, incredulous. “The fuck is it doing up there?”
She began explaining the crash to him again, but he cut her off.
“Just feel under my blanket,” he said. “See if this leg’s still attached to me, at least.”
“Under your blanket?” She smirked. “You’ll be lucky.”
He grinned back. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”
“Are you always like this?”
The question confused him. The morphine was wearing off. He lost his train of thought and noticed his broken leg all over again. This time, it hurt.
He looked up and saw Zoe more clearly now. Pale, intense, head shaved like a penitent.
“Tell me about you,” he said. It was something you were meant to say, and he said it to give himself some time.
Her green eyes stared off into space. “Ah, you don’t want to know.”
“I do.”
Her eyes snapped back down to his and he saw a flash of anger, but it quickly dissolved into uncertainty. “Yeah?”
He felt sorry for bringing that expression to her face. She couldn’t work out if he was playing with her.
He squeezed her hand. “Really.”
Something in her eyes closed itself off, and she laughed. “Forget it.”
When she laughed it unsettled him. Her eyes did something different from her face.
A nurse came and gave him more morphine.
“I love you, nurse,” he told her. “You’re the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”
When the nurse had gone, Zoe shook her head. “The fuck is wrong with you?”
The question confused him. Then he noticed his leg again. “I think it’s this,” he said. “Oh my God, I think I might have broken it.”
Hours went by. His parents came and went in a blur of morphine and concussion.
When he woke it was daylight again and Zoe was still holding his hand and Kate was there in the ward, staring at them without words. As soon as Jack saw her face, he remembered her. She was the girl he’d talked with at the track, the one he couldn’t keep away from. He’d loved the way she laughed and shrugged off defeat, the way she turned every negative positive. She was gentle good energy, and it made you feel simpler and stronger being around her.
She looked devastated when she saw his hand in Zoe’s.
He tried to sit up but his ribs were cracked, and he fell back to the pillow in pain.
“I’m sorry …” he said.
“No, no, I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I didn’t realize you two were … I …”
“Oh, it’s not … I mean …”
He stumbled on his words as Kate’s lip began to tremble.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m just so tired. I think I’ll just …”
“No, please, it’s just that …”
Jack took his hand away from Zoe’s, but Kate was already turning to go. They watched her back disappearing down the ward.
“Fuck,” Jack said, raising his head and slamming it back down on the pillow.
Kate’s trainers squeaked on the floor as they covered the length of the ward. The heavy doors swung closed behind her at the end of the room.
Zoe said, “Want me to fetch her back? Your choice.”
They watched the swing doors returning to stillness in diminishing oscillations. When they were motionless, Jack found it quite possible to believe that the scene had not just happened.
He sighed. “Nah.”
He reached over to touch Zoe’s hands again, but she took them back into her lap. Which was understandable but also a bit overdramatic, he felt.
“Okay, I’m a bad person,” he said simply.
“No. It’s fine. I mean, she’s cute.”
“Is she? I mean …”
“Don’t shit me, okay? You’ve been flirting with her for three days.”
“Well, you know, that’s what I’m like. There’s less to me than the bike I rode in on.”
“Is that meant to make me feel better?”
Jack was suddenly tired of apologizing. There was a throbbing pain in his leg and ribs, now that the morphine was wearing off again.
“I don’t care how it makes you feel,” he said.
She blinked. “Thanks for the information.”
“My pleasure.”
They were silent for a minute, then Zoe sniffed and leaned back in her chair. “I know she’s more your type anyway.”
He smiled. “Really? What’s my type then?”
She shrugged. “Pretty happy. Pretty normal. Pretty pretty.”
“As opposed to …?”
Zoe managed a half smile. “I’m ugly on the inside. I’ll mess your head up.”
“Aye, I’ve used that line myself. I’m a bad boy, I’ll break your heart. It’s a good one, really sexy.”
“You think I’m joking.”
“You won’t do it to me,” Jack said. “I mean look at me. I’m indestructible.”
Zoe smiled and shook her head. “No one’s indestructible.”
“Try me,” he said.
He stretched out and took her hand and pulled her down towards him. She resisted at first, then she let him pull her close. She wasn’t smiling now. With their lips almost touching she said, “No one’s indestructible, Jack.”
The movement of her lips brushed them against his. This was their first kiss, this thing that started out as a warning, and as their lips touched he thought about Kate. He didn’t like that. He couldn’t understand why the flash of her face came, or why it bothered him. Nothing had happened between them in the three days of the program, which wasn’t his usual style. They’d flirted but she’d held herself back, and if he’d thought about it at all, he’d imagined that would make her easy to forget. It nagged at him that he was thinking about her now, at exactly the moment when his body was insisting he shouldn’t. Kiss
ing Zoe was good, and it made him think of Kate, which was inexplicable, like getting ready to leave the house and putting on your jacket and shoes and opening the front door and instead of seeing the street, seeing your own hallway looking back at you.
Zoe stayed with him all day and then all that week. There were kisses and whispered conversations, and all of it was good, and slowly the sense of unease subsided and he stopped thinking about Kate when Zoe touched him. He grew used to her lips, and he liked listening to her, and he followed the morphine down into a graceful state just above pain and just below happiness. The ward was starting to fill up. Now that it was getting busy, the nurses began to enforce visiting hours. Zoe had to leave between six p.m. and nine a.m., but the first minute the nurses let her back in, there she would be, pushing the swing doors open. She sat by his bedside for hours. She would slide her hand under the sheets to place it against his heart. He would let his own hand wander from her arm, to her knee, to her thigh. On the second day she suddenly took it and slipped it quickly under her waistband. She cupped it there for a few seconds while the other patients ogled Countdown, blaring out from the TV. While the rest of the ward watched contestants trying to configure six numbers to produce a randomly chosen total, Jack felt the warmth of her sex. It was a juxtaposition he found easy to confuse with the sensation of falling suddenly and delightedly in love.
They dared each other on. He loved how Zoe didn’t give a shit—didn’t really care if they were caught. He loved how she slipped her hand further down under the sheets and cupped his balls and whispered in his ear, “When we get out of here you’re not safe.” He was nineteen and drowning in morphine and he didn’t see the harm in it. This was a game they played: while the ward bustled with patients and their visitors, she would cover her lap with a blanket as if she was cold, and he would slip his arm underneath and she would read him sports articles from the Daily Mail in the most matter-of-fact voice she could muster. “ ‘Whenever football lovers gather to reflect on the beauty of their game they will talk of the night Manchester United gave Juventus a two-goal start before calmly proceeding to place a shroud over Turin. This will rank forever among the most magnificent comebacks in the annals of the European game.’ ” A visitor on the ward would only have noticed the very slight cracking of her voice on “calmly proceeding,” and the sudden flush of blood in her cheeks. Afterwards she would lean back languorously in her chair and read the horoscopes in a dreamy voice.
“Taurus,” she said. “You will meet a tall dark stranger. And somehow or other she swears to God she will find a way to give you a blow job without anyone on this ward noticing.”
“It doesn’t really say that.”
“You’re right, it’s the Daily Mail.” She peered again at the newsprint. “The actual phrase they use is ‘lewd sex act.’ ”
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said.
“That’s why you’re still happy,” she said casually.
The next day Antiques Roadshow came on the TV. It was popular in the ward, and all the eyes were off them. She quietly drew the curtain most of the way round the bed and ducked down under his blankets, and Jack closed his eyes and felt certain that a bond was forming between them that would by some process—the mechanisms of which were yet to be established in his mind but in which his faith grew even as an old lady got to the head of the queue clutching a painting by a local watercolor artist and Zoe brought him to the point of no return—would by some process lead to some shared happiness that would occur between them for some unspecified period—a lifetime, for example—and in locations still to be determined—a rented studio flat, perhaps, with bikes hanging in the hallway, and then a bigger flat, and then maybe a small house with a kids’ room. Lazy with pleasure, afterwards as the TV drifted into the news, this was how Zoe seemed to him: like a future unhurriedly condensing from the white-hot gases of youth, like a star not in a rush to be formed.
He began to feel that he loved her.
This is what he said to her on the fifth day, and he knew straightaway that it was a mistake. He told her in the gray light of a tedious afternoon in that ward that was no longer an empty stage on which they shone alone but which was increasingly crowded with the needy and the sick, who brought with them their own visitors with their corpulence and their flatulence and their rustle of carrier bags full of paperbacks and fudge.
“Sorry?” Zoe said, distractedly.
For a moment he saw her eyes alight on him as they ranged across the ranks of patients.
“I mean there’s an amazing connection, don’t you think?”
The words sounded really stupid, even to him.
“Connection?” she said.
The nurses were distributing trays of tepid food prepared in huge stainless steel kitchens—prepared not with carelessness or even incompetence, but with a kind of indifference to any quality of comfort or sustenance that might be contained within it. A tray of it landed on the wheeled table that bridged his bed, smelling of neutralized masala under its shiny dome with its lifting hole into which a finger could be inserted. Jack was suddenly aware of the dangerous ordinariness of it all—the speed with which their uniqueness had been diluted. The ward—the world—had absorbed them.
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” she was saying. “It’s like your mouth is going mwah mwah mwah.”
His desperation overflowed. “I love you, Zoe.”
She stopped. “Oh …”
“What?”
She ran her hands over her scalp and exhaled deeply. “Wow …”
Jack’s heart was hammering in his ears.
“Look,” she said. “This is a bit quick for me, I mean I only came here in the first place because Kate was into you, and now—”
Jack gripped her hand. “What?”
She stopped and looked at him. “Oh. I thought you got that, no? Kate was obviously going to come here, so I thought I should be here when she did. What? Don’t look at me like that. She came, and you made your choice.”
Jack dropped her hand and tried to sit up. “Kate was into me, so you …”
“Look. She’s going to be my biggest threat on the track, for sure, so I thought—”
He stared at her.
“What?” she said again. “I’m just saying that’s why I came in the first place. I stayed because I like you, so don’t get all stressed. But love is … you know. No offense, but it’s a bit sudden for me. I really like you, but love …”
Jack rubbed his eyes. “You’re here to psych Kate out?”
She shook her head. “Is the morphine making you slow? I came to psych her out. I stayed because of you.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “When were you going to tell me?”
She laughed nervously. “Oh. I just thought you got it.”
“No, of course I didn’t get it. That’s not how my head works, Zoe. That’s not how anyone’s head works.”
She struggled to keep her smile. “I’m sorry. I think about racing too much, probably. I mean if that’s—”
He struggled to keep his voice to a whisper that wouldn’t carry to the neighboring beds. “That’s fucked up, is what it is!”
She strained to keep her voice low. “What’s fucked up is saying you love someone when you don’t even know them. I do what I want, okay?”
“Oh, very good. So how long do you want to stay with me? Just till you’re sure Kate isn’t coming back?”
She looked sadly at the floor. “Don’t be a dick, Jack.”
They watched each other in silence. Slowly, Jack let his weight sink back down to the pillows.
She took his hand, and he let her hold it without reciprocating her pressure.
“I like you,” she said. “More than I thought I would. I really want to believe I could be with you.”
He sighed. “I like you too.”
“I liked meeting your parents. You know? Seeing where you come from.”
He looked sharply at her.
“You met them?”
“When they came to visit. You don’t remember?”
He shook his head. “Did Dad try to chat you up?”
“He was furious with me for making you crash. He grabbed my arms and shook me.”
Jack groaned.
She smiled. “It was fine. I mean once he felt my muscle tone, he was already looking for the first convenient moment to stop.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I liked him,” Zoe said. “I liked both of them. They’re a unit.”
“Mum repeats everything Dad says, you mean.”
She squeezed his hand. “You’ll end up marrying someone like that.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You’ll marry some saintly woman who tidies up your mess.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to end up like my parents.”
“Everyone says that.”
“Don’t you?”
She stared at the ground. “Mine are gone. Dad didn’t stick around, and Mum killed herself when I was twelve. I was fostered.”
She looked up and saw him watching her. “So? It happens. So what?”
He held his hands up. “No, nothing.”
“No, go on, what?”
He said, “That’s pretty intense, is all.”
She stared at him. “Intense …?”
He spread his hands. “Yeah, I mean—”
She laughed, and he saw the bitter flash in her eyes again. “You just told me you loved me. Sorry for being intense.”
She scraped her chair back and stood. He reached for her wrist but she pulled her hand away.
“You’re going?”
A tear escaped and she brushed it away. “I can’t stay.”
Jack watched her go, and each step she took down the ward left an ache he knew he would have to fill with morphine.
When visiting hours began the next day, Jack watched the doors at the end of the ward. Each day he waited, but she never came back to the hospital.
A fortnight later, when he was still high on painkillers, the doctors released him to a program of intensive physiotherapy. Jack sat in an NHS wheelchair in the hospital’s main lobby and took out his phone to call his parents to pick him up. He paused, watching a game show playing on the TV on its high bracket above the reception desk.