“It’s just a fucking tattoo, Jack. It’s the Olympic rings. It’s not like I’m getting Tony Blair’s face.”
Zoe watched the confusion coming into Kate’s expression and wondered what Jack could be saying. It wasn’t like him to be a dick about something like this. Zoe knew Jack, she really did.
In the autumn of 2002, they’d all been twenty-two. Jack had been winning some big races, and Zoe had been winning everything she entered. Pursuit events, sprints, time trials. All the other girls were racing for second place that season. Zoe was racing so often, she hardly needed to train. It went on like that all through the summer, and Zoe got used to the sight of Kate on the second step of the podium, viewed from slightly above. Now that they were friends, it was easy to make a joke of it. Your turn next, Zoe said each time, and they laughed about it while the medal ceremonies went on around them. It wasn’t until Zoe lost that she realized it wasn’t funny at all. In the autumn, one week before the National Championships in Cardiff, Kate beat her in a nocturnal sprint race in the Manchester Velodrome which was broadcast on national TV in prime time. Zoe couldn’t bear the feeling. Tom had to force her to go out for the podium group and collect her silver medal. She had to stand on the second step and look up at Kate’s radiant grin and her dainty little elfin cheekbones. It left an ache in her neck that lasted for the whole of the next week.
The Nationals were huge that year. Cycling was starting to get big, and the crowds were a thrill. All the finals were broadcast live on ITV. Jack won the sprint. Zoe and Kate had come through their heats and were scheduled to race each other next. While Kate watched Jack climb the podium, Zoe looked for his phone in his kit bag and sent herself a text. Later, while they were stripping off their warm-up suits by the side of the track and preparing to race, she pretended to receive it.
She gasped, then tried to look flustered. “Oh …”
Kate put a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?”
Zoe shook her head. “Nothing. Sorry.”
She grabbed her helmet and shoes and headed for the start, forgetting to take her phone. That was all it took. On the line, Kate was in pieces. The sprint final was best-of-three, and Zoe didn’t need the third race. On the podium, on the silver step, Kate couldn’t stop crying.
It felt worse than Zoe had thought it would. In her room in the hotel they were all using, Zoe sat on her bed the whole afternoon, staring at her National Champion’s sprint gold medal, wishing she could give it back.
At the end of the afternoon, Jack knocked on her door. He was shaking. He couldn’t speak.
Zoe’s eyes were red from crying. “Is she still here?”
Jack shook his head. “She’s gone home.”
“You didn’t go with her?”
“She wouldn’t let me. I need you to phone her and tell her the text was from you.”
“She didn’t believe you?”
Jack shook his head.
Zoe gestured helplessly. “So why’s she going to believe me?”
Jack stared at her for a long time, and she watched the despair come into his face as he realized she was right.
“Why are you like this?” he said, finally.
She started crying again then, and she couldn’t stop. She didn’t ask him to comfort her, and he didn’t offer.
They went for a walk, by the harbor. She told him she was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again. It was a cold, gray day with the rollers ghosting in. Her hair was growing out by then, and it whipped and tangled in the wind. The seagulls sounded like angels who’d lost their jobs. The air tasted of salt. She threw her National Champion’s medal into the harbor. It didn’t splash into clear water. It snagged on a floating coil of blue polypropylene rope and hung from its ribbon, the gold glinting dully just below the gray surface. They watched it for a long time, but it wouldn’t sink.
Zoe was back in Manchester twelve hours later, and she started training for Athens fifteen minutes after that. With less than two years to go, the work had a fresh intensity. Every yard she forced a bike around a track was one yard closer to glory. The sense of destiny made her skin tingle, but her mind was unsettled and it took her a fortnight to understand why. She realized she couldn’t entirely focus on training until she’d apologized and made things right with Kate. It was a new feeling for her, this knowledge that her own well-being had in some way become linked with that of another. It was an unexpected snare. As the feeling intensified, a weakness grew in her body in direct proportion to it until she could hardly lift a barbell off the mat. Her unease mounted and she resented Kate more and more—almost began to hate her, in truth, for the fact that she liked her too much.
She invited her out to lunch, never intending to say anything about herself. She’d been planning just to do something nice for Kate and say sorry, but then it had happened and she’d told her about Adam dying and found herself crying in the middle of the Lincoln—actually weeping, with tears running down her face while Kate hugged her and the pianist played the Dukes of Hazzard theme tune affrettando, getting faster and faster as he realized it wasn’t cheering her up.
She worked out with Kate every day after that. Her strength returned straightaway. She was amazed that Kate was able to forgive her for Cardiff. As the winter wore on, Kate asked a few times if she would consider seeing a psychologist. She heard herself agreeing, more to prove she was sorry for what she’d done than because she thought it could help. She committed to going once a week. Kate walked with her to the sessions and left her at the door with a smile and a supportive squeeze on the arm. Zoe sat in a chair that was self-consciously not a couch while the psychologist asked short, leading questions and then settled back in his own chair, which was carefully selected to set his eye level lower than hers.
He made the room into a silent vacuum that she was supposed to populate with memories. As though such things could safely be surrendered. As if they’d served their purpose, like the spent phases of a rocket, and could tumble soundlessly back to earth. There was no allowance made for her growing suspicion that her memories weren’t done with her yet, that they still held unspent fuel, that to relinquish them now was to reduce her chances of escape. The more she talked about Adam, the more she felt the pull of gravity.
Talking made her empty and weak, even as the psychologist insisted that it was doing her good. At the end of each session he would steeple his hands, touching the fingertips to his lower lip as he offered a summing-up and humbly solicited her opinion as to whether his précis had merit. She found herself agreeing that she had a problem with anger and that she suffered from an inability to accept the occasional defeats that were an inevitable and healthy part of being alive.
But it only made her more angry, hearing herself admit that she had a problem with anger. It made her feel defeated, admitting that she couldn’t handle defeat. After every session Kate would meet her outside the clinic and they would go for coffee and Zoe would make sure to laugh and order an extra shot of hazelnut and admit that she really did feel much better.
Her results in training suffered. When she lined up for the practice sprints with Kate, she found she could no longer summon the old fury from deep inside her and focus it in her muscles. In place of the rage was a quiet ache, as chill and gray as the sea in November, and she was beaten even before the starting whistle blew. On the days when she watched Kate getting further ahead with each lap, her worst fear was that the psychologist might cure her.
Tom raced her against Kate every week, and when she stopped winning altogether, she stopped going to the psychologist. She told Kate she’d turned the corner, and Kate was happy for her.
The next session, in training, she beat Kate for the first time in a month. For a couple of weeks she listened to the psychologist’s patient voicemail messages suggesting that she return to therapy. After a while he stopped phoning.
Things intensified between Kate and Jack. Zoe tried to be happy while Kate told her about their plans—how they were going to buy a ho
use together, maybe think about getting married and having children. Kate started inviting her back to their place after training, and she got used to chatting with the pair of them over tea. At first it was awkward, with Jack, but as she got used to it she found herself loosening up around him, to the point where she and Kate could take turns berating him for his music. Finally there came a morning when the three of them were laughing around the kitchen table, while Jack leaned back and Kate stirred the tea and Zoe did Tom’s accent, when Zoe thought to herself, This is it. My life has finally started, and these are my friends.
Then, at the end of March, Kate and Jack argued. Zoe didn’t hear about it from Kate. She only noticed a cooling-off in their banter at the training sessions and an unexplained halt to their post-training invitations to Kate and Jack’s house. Kate made excuses, saying she was tired or claiming other appointments, until it got to the point where they hardly spoke outside the track. Zoe was worried at first, then confused, then heartbroken. Her voicemails all went unanswered. Kate was her first friend—her only friend—and losing her was disorienting. For the first time in her life, Zoe found it hard to get up in the morning. She sat on the edge of the bed, holding her head, feeling vacant.
Finally she bumped into Jack at the velodrome and asked him about it. He told her he’d split up with Kate. They’d been talking, and the subject of Zoe had arisen, and Jack had made the mistake—mistake was his word—of admitting how he’d felt about Zoe at the beginning. There’d been an argument—a stupid argument, since it was all in the past. Wasn’t it stupid? Wasn’t it a sad row over water that had long since flowed under a very distant bridge?
Zoe had found herself agreeing that yes, it was a very sad row, over nothing at all, and then she’d gone back to her flat and lain awake half the night thinking about both of them.
A week later Jack traveled alone to the British Cycling spring training camp in Gran Canaria, a day ahead of Kate. Zoe was already out there. She knocked on his door, late at night. They told each other it was okay, but it wasn’t okay. Kate was a thousand miles away, but the more they tried to lose themselves in each other, the more her presence grew in the room. Zoe felt it—the first sense of unease growing into an undeniable tearing at her heart. Naked in bed with him, coming down off the euphoria of their first hours together, she saw in his eyes that he was feeling it too.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s fine. I’ll go.”
He held her. “You don’t have to. Stay and just sleep, okay?”
They both pretended to, lying with their backs to each other and their eyes staring at the walls until a pale gray light began to seep beneath the blinds.
Zoe left him lying there, gathering her things quietly and tiptoeing across the floor to allow them both the dignity of the notion that, were it not for the fact that he was sleeping, one of them would have spoken words of farewell that would have been weightless and wise and made the whole terrible thing all right. It was important to leave space for the idea that such words were available to be spoken, requiring only to be plucked from the low hanging branches of the dawn.
She walked down from the hotel to the beach, left her clothes in the dunes, and stepped into the Atlantic as the nude sun rose through the waves. Three pelicans in tight formation flew low over the water, silhouetted against the light, gliding without sound. The horizon was youthful and smooth. With her toes just touching bottom she faced out to sea and washed herself clean of the night. The water was soft and the breeze subtle. She surrendered her footing and struck out to sea in an easy freestyle.
Beyond the shorebreak, where the seafloor dropped off into sudden indigo, the bottomless cold engulfed her. Her chest tightened, and she gasped. The fresh breeze out here blew the tops from the waves in clear salt sheets which slapped at her. She had to turn her face from the wind and float on her back to get her breath. It was the first time she had looked back. She sank and rose on the swell, and in the troughs she was entirely alone in the brightening folds of water, and on the peaks she saw that the beach was much further than she had thought. The hotel and Jack and training and racing were a low concrete block cresting the distant dunes. Out here, it was just her.
Her leg brushed against something big and heavy. She kicked out in terror, ready to fight, but the thing floated to the surface. It was a section of a wooden boat. It hung beside her, black with age and waterlogged, sheathed in hard white barnacles on the underside. When she took a stroke away from it, it followed her, languidly, sucked along by the eddies her body made. She forced herself to be calm. She floated on her back, her limbs extended in a star, staring up at the blue-gray dome of the dawn. There, with her chill white body suspended in the ocean and tingling with the memory of Jack’s, she felt the terror of having no one. The feeling was wide and cold and savage as the sea.
In the tattoo parlor, Kate dropped her phone on the floor and it disintegrated, the battery shooting one way and the shattered plastic casing the other. The sound broke through into Zoe’s thoughts, and she looked up. Kate was staring at her.
“What is it?” she said.
Kate’s hands were shaking. “Tom’s on his way here. He’s got news.”
Silver-gray Renault Scénic
Mum had a white surgical dressing taped over her right shoulder blade. Sophie could see the corner of it above the neckline of her yellow T-shirt. She sat watching it from her seat in the back, while Dad drove them home. She tried to work out what it meant.
“Mum,” she said, “what’s that on your back?”
“It’s nothing, Sophie.”
“Did you crash?”
Dad said, “It’s nothing, okay?”
He used the voice that made you fold back into yourself, like an anemone in a rock pool when you touched it with your finger. Sophie shut her mouth.
Mum and Dad were talking in the low voice grown-ups used when they didn’t want you to hear. Grown-ups thought your ears were worse than theirs, but your ears were actually better. This is the order it went downwards in, for hearing: Jedi, bats, owls, foxes, dogs, mice, grown-ups.
“What were you thinking, anyway?” Dad was saying.
“Don’t be a shit. You think this isn’t bad enough?”
“I’m just saying, I mean … what was in your head?”
“I don’t know, okay? Do I always have to know?”
“What? Is that your question? If it involves skin that’s permanently attached to you? Might it be sensible to be sure?”
Mum said in a sad voice, “It’s my skin.”
Sophie’s stomach sank. It was cancer. This is what it was. It was skin cancer on her back. That was why the surgical dressing was there. Sophie knew all about cancer, and Mum had it of the skin, and she’d gone for an operation. That’s why she’d disappeared after training, because grown-ups always tried to be secret about cancer and things. But this is the order it went downwards in, for keeping secrets: Jedi, foxes, grown-ups. Mum had gone for an operation, and it had gone wrong, and now everything was bad.
Dad was saying, “But the Olympics … I mean, shouldn’t you have got there first?”
“We thought we were there, didn’t we? We’re number one and number two. No one else is even close. And now this happens. And if that isn’t bad enough now I’ve got this fucking … thing on my shoulder.”
Sophie watched in the rearview mirror and saw how her mum’s hands twisted around her seat belt. Dad looked across at Mum, then reached out to touch her knee. She looked back across at him, and the sadness in her face softened slightly. Straightaway Sophie felt better too. It was like Mum’s knee was the okay button and Dad just pressed it.
“I know,” Dad said. “I’m sorry.”
“Mum?” said Sophie.
Her voice was so small that Mum didn’t hear it. She tried again, filling her lungs with a hissing wheeze and forcing the sound out through the tightness in her throat.
“Mum?”
Mum turned to
look at her and she reached out her hand, between the two front seats, to touch her.
“It’s okay,” Sophie said. “It’s actually not as bad as you think.”
“I’m sure you’re right, darling.”
“Sometimes you’ll feel really sick but if you do all your chemo you actually will get better. You will.”
She looked at her firmly, nodding so Mum would see how sure she was. Confusion came into Mum’s face.
“Sorry?” she said.
“The thing on your back,” Sophie said. “The cancer.”
Mum looked at her for a long time, and there was a strange expression in her eyes that Sophie didn’t understand. She swallowed. She shouldn’t have said cancer. She was used to it, but the new people took a long time. At the hospital a lot of them couldn’t say the word, especially the grown-ups. The women said I’ve got a tumor, which made it sound small enough to catch hold of but not so small that it would slip through your fingers. The men said I’m fighting the big C, which was better for them because they could think of this massive C-shape from the alphabet posters attacking them, like a crab, and it was easier for them to imagine how they would fight something like that than some smaller, softer C, like a cell.
“It’s okay, Mum,” she said. “Dr. Hewitt says it actually makes you stronger if you use its real name.”
There were tears in Mum’s eyes. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. It isn’t cancer. It’s only a silly tattoo.”
Dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and they both got out and climbed into the back seat. They unstrapped her and hugged her tight, and the three of them sat there while the dusk gathered and the early evening traffic rolled by with the rain flaring in its headlights.
“Whatever happens,” said Dad, “it’s nothing next to how proud we are of you.”
“What?” said Sophie. “I didn’t do anything.”
This made Mum and Dad laugh for some reason. Why were they proud of her, when all she’d done was to get it completely wrong? A tattoo was really different from skin cancer. Really.