He changed his mind and dialed another number. She picked up, out of breath. “Yeah?” She sounded as if she’d been running.
“It’s me,” he said.
A long pause. “I deleted your number.”
“I’d have done the same.”
“Yeah.”
“I hurt you.”
“It’s fine. Look, I’m running, so—”
“Kate, please. I want to explain. I was concussed. I didn’t remember you till after.”
“You remembered Zoe.”
“Not at first. And then she didn’t let me forget.”
Another long pause. In the background, he heard the sound of traffic. She said, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Just recently I was the quickest rider in the galaxy, and now I’m in a wheelchair with … I’m checking my pockets here … nine pounds forty and a four-millimeter Allen key and three paracetamol. My leg needs another operation. I’ve got vertebral fissures. The doctor reckons it’s fifty-fifty whether I’ll race again.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I could beat odds like that with an egg whisk.”
She laughed. “Did the doctors say they could do anything about your ego?”
“No, I’m afraid it’s gone secondary. It’s completely inoperable.”
“You’re completely impossible.”
He smiled. “Are you okay?”
She sighed. “I spent a week hating myself, then a week hating Zoe, then a week hating you. I was just getting round to me again.”
“Sounds like I phoned just in time.”
“Stop it. Are you seeing her?”
“No.”
“Did anything happen between you?”
“Nothing good.”
“So now you’re phoning me?”
“Well, you are the only English girl I know who hasn’t tried to kill me.”
She laughed again. “What makes you think I won’t?”
“I made a mistake. I got taken in, and I’m sorry. That’s all I rang to say. And good luck, and be a little bit careful of Zoe. She’s alright, but she’ll do stuff to win that isn’t healthy.”
She paused. “Thanks.”
“Great. Well. I’ll see you around, okay? I guess I’ll see you on the track.”
“Yeah. Get better, okay? And thanks. Thanks for calling.”
She hung up, and Jack sat in the wheelchair in the hospital reception lobby. He gripped the chromed handrims of the wheels, applied some torque, and wondered how it would feel to race one of these things. Not too bad, probably. You’d want to get one of those fancy chairs, with the aero position and the caster wheels way forward like a Formula 1 car. Then you could really tear it up. He held the image too long, and the morphine high was crumbling. He stared at his phone, thinking of Kate’s voice, and a hollow sadness crept into his chest. His broken leg throbbed, elevated on the front rigging of the chair.
For the first time in his life, he felt breakable. He sank down into the cracked vinyl upholstery of the wheelchair, and his eyes half focused on the TV. Two contestants, equipped with buzzers, were guessing the price of retail items. He watched and tried to learn, in case his injuries were going to make him a civilian.
His phone rang.
“Look,” Kate said. “Where are you?”
“I’m in the hospital. Just psyching myself up to call my folks to collect me.”
A slight pause. “Don’t move,” she said.
She walked into the lobby a little under two hours later, still in her running kit.
“I’m an idiot for coming,” she said, smiling shyly. “I stopped twice on the M6. I nearly turned around.”
“You look amazing,” Jack said.
She shrugged. “You look like shit.”
They didn’t talk much. They listened to Radio 2 on the motorway north in the old VW Golf she’d borrowed from a work friend. As they passed Preston the sun came out, and The The came on the radio playing “Uncertain Smile,” and Jack reached across to put his hand on her knee. She picked it up without drama and carefully gave it back to him, keeping her eyes on the road. He liked the way she drove, too close to the wheel with her hands bunched up at the top of it, frowning through the windscreen as if she were navigating something more complicated than a flat straight strip of tarmac with neat lane demarcations, populated by evenly spaced production cars traveling at velocities that closely approximated their own.
It was only later that he found out she’d had a problem with her contacts and didn’t want him to see her in her glasses.
At the time he said, “You drive like an old lady.”
Again, that slightest of pauses. “An old lady wouldn’t let you in her car.”
When they stopped for coffee at a service station, she had to take the wheelchair out of the back for him and set it up. He wheeled himself to the disabled toilet and parallel-parked next to the high porcelain bowl, reversing himself into position and then ankling his trousers and hoisting himself across. He pissed sitting down, gripping the big chrome safety rails for balance and trying not to think of all the bed-sore arses that had sat where his now rested. When he wheeled himself back out to the car park, the wheelchair picked up dog shit and smeared it on his right hand. Back at the car he sat there wiping it off on a tissue she gave him, while she explained how she wasn’t promising anything. It was a long speech. He got the impression she’d been practicing it in the middle lane of the motorway, all the way down south.
Her flat was one small room looking out over the brown water of Morecambe Bay, with a bed that folded down. Since he was the one with spinal injuries, he slept on the bed while she lay on an air mattress on the floor. During the day she went out to her job at the gym while he did his physio exercises and read her cycling magazines. She didn’t have a TV. In the evenings she trained on her road bike and came back late. He cooked pasta for her, reaching up from the wheelchair to use the sink and the cooker.
Twice a week she drove him to his physio appointment in Manchester, and every morning she supported his head and neck while he lay on the floor and did his abdominal exercises. When for the first time he was able to stand up from the wheelchair and balance unassisted, she was there to see him do it, and she was there to hold his hands and help him down into the chair when the pain in his back got too much.
That time was full of flashes of progress followed by setbacks. In the second month he walked from her flat to the corner shop and back, then lay in bed for two days and nights with back spasms. On the second night of that she came into the bed, and although she still wouldn’t kiss him, she slept with her arm around him and her face pressed into his neck. The next morning, though, nothing was said and they started the day as normal, each one careful to avert their eyes while the other dressed.
A happiness was growing between them. It felt normal when, on the first day he could walk that far, he walked to the gym where she worked. It felt natural that she kissed him in the car on the way home. They shared the bed, and the air mattress was propped up against the wall. On the first day it seemed too dramatic, or too definitive, to pull the stopper out of it. The next day Kate was out till late, and Jack idled in the house, eyeing it, but a unilateral deflation seemed presumptuous. On the third day, while Jack was out walking around the block, Kate got as far as putting her hand on the stopper. It was already too good to be true, this thing that was happening between her and Jack. She didn’t want to jinx it. By the end of the week they had both stopped seeing the mattress. Besides, its top edge was useful for draping training kit on after it came out of the wash. It stood against the wall for a month, slowly leaking, sagging as their bond became firmer, until it lolled so badly that it no longer made a useful clotheshorse. Then Kate dealt with it matter-of-factly, its talismanic qualities forgotten. She laid it on the floor, pulled out the stopper, and rolled it to expel the vestigial air. The room that she and Jack now shared so easily was suffused with the uncertain breath that she had b
lown into the mattress on the first night he arrived.
Zoe’s first call to Jack came after four months, while Kate was away at the National Championships and he was out on one of the long, slow, painful rides that marked the start of his rehabilitation on the bike. He was taking it steadily, not pushing himself too hard. His phone went when he was halfway up a long incline in the Duddon Valley, and he was grateful for the excuse to stop and see who it was.
When he saw Zoe’s number, he hesitated with his thumb on the green button. It was a brightening day with a fresh breeze and distant clouds trailing rain in tendrils. The air held the scent of sheep and wet bracken. He was in a good place. He was happy to be on the bike, and enjoying the scenery. He could have easily ignored the call. Still, the thing with Zoe seemed far away in time and distance. It would be harmless to talk.
“I can’t believe you’re not here at the Nationals,” she said when he answered.
“I’m still getting strong.”
“So Kate told me. I just beat her in the final. I’m the National fucking Champion! I’m still out of breath.”
“What did you do? Loosen her spokes?”
“I just rode straight past her. It was easy. She’s been doing you instead of doing training.”
“That’s low.”
“It’s true. You’re making each other soft. She’s dragging you down to her level.”
“You’re calling to gloat?”
“I’m calling because I miss you.”
She was getting her breath back, and her voice was soft and urgent now. In the background of the call, a velodrome crowd was shouting. Jack felt a cold rush of adrenaline.
He took the phone from his ear for a moment and looked down over the valley. In the breaks in the cloud shadow, nudged on by the breeze, golden patches of sunlight rode across the low hills and up the flanks of the high fells. Ravens called from the sheltered oaks and the bleating of sheep carried from the flocks grazing above the bracken line.
“Kate and I are doing just fine,” he said.
“You should be back in competition by now. She’s not good for you.”
“What wasn’t good for me, Zoe, was breaking my back.”
She laughed. “That’s such a tight-arse thing to say. Even your voice sounds tight. You’re getting domesticated.”
He laughed too. “You’re tripping. I love Kate, okay?”
“Love, love, love. You drip that word around like chain lube.”
He couldn’t pretend to be amused anymore. “I know what I feel.”
“Kate, though? I mean I like Kate too, and she’s pretty enough, but she has this terrible habit of coming second. Have you not actually noticed that?”
He ended the call, furious, and glared out at the ruined day. The hills were still beautiful, the light was still subtle and soft, but all of it felt far from the action now. He pocketed the phone, got back on the bike, and rode the rest of his route with an angry intensity. His lungs burned and his muscles ached but the suffering felt good again. He’d reconnected with the power inside him, and the realization that it was Zoe who’d put his head back in the game only added to the venom with which he attacked the hills. When he got home to Kate’s flat he was spent but there was an energy in him that the ride hadn’t managed to dissipate. He stood in the shower and thought about Zoe.
Thirteen years later, she could still get inside his head just by looking at him. Jack hugged Sophie close and tried to concentrate on his daughter while Tom finished the girls’ warm-ups and lined them up for a head-to-head sprint. Tom put Kate on the inside line and Zoe on the outside. They edged their front wheels up to the start line. They looked across at each other.
Tom blew the whistle.
“Watch this,” Jack whispered to Sophie.
They started very slowly. They stood on their pedals, looking across at each other, their eyes unreadable behind the mirrored visors. They sized each other up and waited. Kate edged forward, and Zoe moved to cover her. With exquisite balance, tiny movements of the handlebars, and little changes of pressure on the cranks, they maneuvered for infinitesimal advantages of position. Kate, on the inside line, could be direct. The outside line was subtler and longer, but Zoe could ride higher on the banking so that any attack would be launched with the assistance of gravity. The riders sped up by imperceptible degrees. Kate eased ahead, still traveling very slowly, craning her head back to watch for any response. Zoe lingered behind, poised to ambush her if Kate’s attention wavered for an eyeblink.
Jack knew it wouldn’t. He hardly blinked himself. You didn’t see better racing than this. They’d been doing this since they were nineteen, and they knew each other’s style. Each rider perfectly anticipated the other, and no advantage was conceded. Now Kate and Zoe slowed again and converged and leaned shoulders on one another. They slowed to an absolute halt and became motionless, each unwilling to risk giving away the tiniest advantage of body position by turning her head to watch the other. They watched instead for any alteration in the stark outline of their arc-lit shadows conjoined on the maple boards of the track. They balanced together, listening for any telltale acceleration in the other rider’s breathing.
Using each other for balance in that moment, they resembled neither rivals nor teammates but, in the intimacy of their mutual dependency, lovers.
Sophie said, “They’ve stopped.”
Jack squeezed her arm. “No. They’re just starting.”
When it happened, it happened incredibly fast. Without surrendering any premonition at all, Kate twitched and made a break. Zoe responded, the power in her legs instantly up to maximum. Now each rider was making snap decisions, picking her course by instinct, by immediate and irrevocable reaction to what the other rider had done. You steered left or right and you couldn’t ever take it back. Within seconds the air was shrieking as they parted it. On the second lap Zoe closed the gap and tucked into Kate’s slipstream. The two riders worked explosively, on the limit of human force. On the third and final lap Zoe pulled alongside Kate in the final straight and you saw the skull beneath the skin as her jaws gaped for air. The two riders crossed the finish line flat out, lungs bursting, throwing their bikes forward, looking across at each other to see who had inched it. Always, this was how it ended, whether the audience was three or three billion. Kate and Zoe looked not to the line on the track or the flags of the umpires or the banners of the crowd but at each other.
Slowing, their wheels rumbled in the echoing space.
“Who won?” said Sophie.
Jack looked at Tom with the question in his eyes.
Tom shook his head. “Mate,” he said. “Too close to call.”
Changing room, National Cycling Centre, Manchester
After training Kate felt tired and good. Head-to-head training was always a battlefield, but she’d held her own. She’d put down at least as much power as Zoe, and she hadn’t risen to any mind games. And that bit at the start, with Sophie in the basket of the butcher’s bike—that had been fun. Zoe didn’t feel like the threat she once was.
She hurried into the shower before her muscles could cool, took her time to dress, then sat in front of the mirror to sort her hair out.
Zoe was already changed. She took the comb out of Kate’s hand and stood behind her to sort out her tangles. Kate let her, wincing at the brutal way Zoe dealt with knots.
“Your hair’s fucked,” Zoe said.
Kate yawned. “My hair can be combed out.”
Zoe caught her inflection. “You’re saying my life can’t?”
“I’m just saying you should lie low for a bit.”
“Not an option.”
“Because …?”
“Because the papers go to print at nine. I’ve only got three or four hours to do something, you know? My agent says I have to give them a photograph, today. Something family-friendly.”
“What are you going to do? Sleep with a Teletubby?”
Zoe laughed. They were keeping it almost weightless
. To Kate, conversation with Zoe often felt like walking on ice while clinging to almost enough helium balloons to counteract your weight. You lowered yourself gingerly onto the surface. This was the kind of lightness they had now. It wasn’t unusual, Kate supposed. This was just friendship: this faith to believe that you could grab more balloons as the baggage you carried multiplied. You got on with it; of course you did.
“So what are you going to do?” Kate said.
“I’m getting the Olympic rings tattooed. Here. Photo op.”
Zoe indicated the place by sweeping the comb along her uninjured forearm, then resumed work on Kate’s hair.
“This afternoon?” Kate said.
“Why not? There’s a place round the corner. Want to come and get yours done too?”
“Zoe. Be serious. I’m me.”
“So? Be you with a tattoo.”
“That should be their slogan.”
“They don’t need a slogan. They’ve got needles and ink and baldy men with ponytails and latex gloves and … ooh, it’s so sexy, Catherine! Say you’ll come with me!”
Zoe hugged her around the neck and dropped her face close to Kate’s, making a pouting face in the mirror.
Kate shook her off. “What about this meeting with Tom?”
Zoe stood straight again. “No time. We’ll sneak out the back door. I mean, what’s the old man going to do? Run after us?”
Kate made a skeptical face. “Seriously. With the newspapers … shouldn’t you just stay off-radar for a bit, Zo? I mean, I would.”
Kate felt the comb stop moving for a moment and looked up to see the unguarded expression Zoe wore in the mirror. The look said, Yeah but that’s you, isn’t it?
The look said Kate didn’t have the face, didn’t have the imagination, didn’t have the charisma to think any bigger. Kate watched Zoe trying to take the look back, trying to turn it into something less judgmental, but it was out there now.
She tried not to mind. It wasn’t as if she was unaware that next to Zoe she was less mysterious and less attractive and less interesting. But you got used to these facts, and it was easy to tie each one of them to an equal and opposite lightness. For example, she was a great mother, she really was. She was helpful and patient with Jack and Sophie. She was quite intelligent. She had learned a huge amount about blood disorders and developmental nutrition. She noticed other people’s feelings.