Sophie sighed, exasperated. As soon as she’d survived leukemia, she was going to have to survive these parents.
Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester
Zoe let herself into her apartment, dropped the key into the dish, and put a blue plastic carrier bag down on the enameled lava work surface in the kitchen area. She took a screw-top bottle of white wine out of the bag and stood looking at it. She hadn’t drunk alcohol since that rainy training ride with Kate, in the depths of the off-season, more than a decade ago. She didn’t have anything specifically made for putting wine in. She didn’t even know how much you were supposed to drink.
She chose one of the small, heavy white ceramic espresso cups and filled it. She brought the bottle and the cup over to the tall windows and looked down over the lights of the city. She sniffed the wine, screwed up her face, and drank it. She stood for ten minutes, gauging the effect. In a body that was tuned to know its heart rate to the nearest beat and to process the afferent messages running through every highly strung nerve bundle with arctic clarity, there was no warm glow, just an immediate feeling of concussion and a sense of terror at the power of the chemistry. She poured again, and drank another cup.
When half the bottle was gone, she felt brave enough to think about what the rule change meant. If she wanted the Olympic place, she would have to fight Kate for it. She held the thought and turned it around. It was true that she was desperate for the place. Without it, she’d lose her sponsors, and she’d lose this apartment, and she’d lose a reason to keep her heart and lungs functioning. But to be sure of getting the place, she’d need to push her body harder than she’d ever pushed it before. There’d been nothing to choose between her and Kate at training today.
She drank another slug of wine and used the cold coffee cup to cool the raw Olympic tattoo on her forearm. Looking at those rings, she could hear the roar of the crowds in Athens and Beijing. She searched her heart and questioned whether she was capable of destroying Kate, just to hear that sound again. She closed her eyes, leaned her forehead against the cool plate glass, and wondered.
In the months after Gran Canaria—the spring and early summer of 2003—she did almost no competition at all. She saved herself for the Track World Championships in Stuttgart, at the end of July. She was clocking world-record times in training. She left Jack and Kate alone to rebuild their relationship, and she forced all her pain and confusion into energy on the bike.
She flew out early to Stuttgart. British Cycling set her up in the hotel that all the British Cycling squad would use when they came out. It was close to the velodrome, and for the whole month before the event, she trained on the track she would race on. She battled a virus that sucked her energy and spaced her out, but the game had never been bigger, and every atom of her body was focused. She hardly even noticed she was in Germany. The language was different but the track was the same.
Jack and Kate came out together, with one week to go. They were happy again, but not so solid yet that they could comfortably be around Zoe. She smiled politely at them when they met in team meetings or passed each other at the breakfast buffet.
The 2003 Worlds were the biggest they’d ever been. There were teams from as far away as Brazil and China. All the races were broadcast live on Eurosport. Zoe was sick with nerves and excitement. More than once, she threw up in her hotel room. She was calm, though. Her preparation had been impeccable. It was all over the press: she was going to clean up. The media was in love with her. In the Guardian, a popular philosopher wrote a piece about her work ethic. In the News of the World, there were photos of her breasts in Lycra and speculation about whether she wore anything underneath. There was something for everyone.
The World Championships began in a blaze of camera flashes. In Stuttgart, on the last day of July and the first two days of August 2003, Jack got the most gold medals ever won by a British cyclist at the Worlds. Kate won two golds and a bronze. Zoe failed to even qualify for the finals in three of her events. She came second to Kate in the runoff race for the sprint bronze medal. She felt terrible in all her heats. Once she even threw up on the start line. They had to delay the starter’s whistle. A man mopped the track, then they drove off the water with industrial dryers. Zoe lined up again to start. The whistle went and a hot weakness flooded her body. The other girls rode away from her as if she wasn’t even pedaling. A clip of her, trackside, in tears of incomprehension, stamping repeatedly on her nine-thousand-pound state-of-the-art carbon fiber machine was soon all over the internet.
Tom arranged a taxi and took her straight from the track to a clinic. They were there for two hours. The doctors ran tests. Zoe waited. They ran more tests. She waited again, in a tiny white room with fashion magazines in German and air conditioning that rattled. A doctor came in, all smiles, and told her she was pregnant.
“It looks like you are right at the end of the first trimester,” he said. “Congratulations!”
Then, seeing her face, he said, “Sorry, is that not the good word? My English is not so good.”
Zoe made him repeat the test. She didn’t believe it was possible, not when she’d been training as hard as she had. He wasn’t a specialized sports doctor, so she told him about the physiological changes. The way your body saw how low your fat stores were. How it registered the unbelievable pain you went through every day. How it naturally assumed you were dying and made the necessary adjustments to your reproductive system. The doctor listened politely while she told him how her hormone levels had changed, how her estrogen had fallen and her testosterone had built. She told him that she hadn’t had a period for three years, that she hadn’t used contraception since 1999. The doctor said that maybe she should have. The doctors were direct like that, in Germany.
When she walked out of the consulting room and into the lobby of the clinic, Tom was waiting for her. She smiled weakly and told him it was just a stomach bug.
Back in her room in the team hotel, she vomited again. She drank iced water. Kate was still at the velodrome, doing press. Zoe watched her on Eurosport. She was radiant.
She switched off and stared at the wall for an hour. Then she went online, made an appointment at an abortion clinic in Manchester, and started to rough out a revised training schedule for Athens.
Kate knocked on her door. She’d had the decency to leave her medals in her kit bag, but there was no hiding her victory. Gold blazed out of her: through her skin, from her eyes. It glowed in the air around her.
Zoe said, “Happy now?”
“Don’t be like that. I thought you might need someone to talk to.”
“I’ve got Tom.”
Kate paused. “Great. Good. Well, look, I’ll leave you to it, okay?”
Zoe sighed. “Don’t go. It’s nice of you to come.”
Kate sat down on the bed with her. “So what’s wrong? Did the doctors say?”
Zoe gave a small, defeated laugh. “Just gastro. Look, when we get back to England, let’s … you know. Let’s do something. Like go and watch a film, or whatever.”
“Not on our first date. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not that kind of a girl.”
Zoe laughed, but halfway through the laugh she started crying.
“Zoe? What is it?”
She sniffed. She bit her knuckles and whispered, “I’m fucking pregnant, Kate.” Her face was crumpling so hard, the word came out in a squeak.
“What?”
“I’m pregnant. No one knows.”
“No one?”
Zoe shook her head.
“Oh. Wow. I mean … right.”
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s nothing. I have to get rid of it, right?”
Kate blinked. “Oh God, I mean …”
Zoe swallowed. Her voice was broken. “I know. But I have to. Don’t I? I mean, I’m doing Athens. I’m not doing … you know … baby.”
Kate was silent.
“Kate?”
Zoe watched her face distorting, and it made no s
ense. It took her the longest time to work out that Kate was trying not to cry. She felt a surge of anger. What was Kate doing crying, when Zoe was the one whose life was in bits?
“What’s your problem?” she said. “I’ve got no choice, okay?”
“Zoe, please …”
“No choice at all. So don’t guilt-trip me.”
She watched Kate’s red eyes rise up to meet hers.
“Is it Jack’s?” Kate said quietly.
Zoe didn’t feel the impact until a few seconds afterwards. She hadn’t thought about whose child she might be carrying, only about how quickly she could stop carrying it. When the question came, the shock was so total that she couldn’t make her face deny that it was possible.
Kate watched her, her face heavy with sadness.
“I knew something had happened,” she said finally. “He was so quiet in the training camp …”
Zoe got up, left the room, and went for a long walk alone around the streets of Stuttgart. She realized as she walked that there wasn’t any different way to do the maths. She hadn’t slept with anyone since she’d slept with Jack, and not in the month before him either. That meant two things: that the baby was his and that sleeping with him had meant something to her, at least enough to break the pattern of her behavior. Something had been growing in her emotions as well as in her womb, and she would somehow have to find the strength to get rid of both.
On the plane back to London, she was a wreck. She hadn’t slept. She covered her head with a fleece and hugged her knees in a window seat, three rows behind Kate and Jack. Half an hour into the flight she stood and walked up the aisle to them. She wanted to say sorry. More than that, she was desperate to talk. Tom was furious with her, and with Kate and Jack closed against her too, there was no one to speak with about the agonizing choice she was trying to make. She reached their row. Sensing her looming, expecting her to be a member of the cabin crew, they looked up with the half smiles of people about to politely turn down the offer of coffee or tea. When she saw the shock come into their faces, followed by Jack’s embarrassment and Kate’s miserable confusion, she mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and hurried back to her seat.
There were photographers waiting at Heathrow. She walked through customs into a galaxy of flashes. Money had changed hands. Someone at the clinic had leaked the news. A reporter shouted at her. He was from Britain’s biggest Sunday newspaper. From somewhere behind the crowd barrier he yelled, “Zoe! Zoe! Are you going to keep the baby, or are you going to the Olympics?”
Once it was put like that, in public, it wasn’t her choice to make anymore. A hundred bright flashes caught the bone-white realization on her face.
Kitchen, 203 Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester
After they’d eaten and Sophie was in bed, Kate put the dishes in to soak. On the windowsill above the sink was the drilled metal container holding the washing-up brushes, and next to it was the silver trophy cup into which Jack had counted Sophie’s sixteen pills that morning. It was empty now.
“It’s only the Olympics,” Kate said. “I could just ditch it, you know. Spend more time with Sophie.”
She saw a pale and cautious fear flare in Jack’s eyes.
“Stop that talk,” he said. “You’ll fight Zoe for the place, and you’ll win it, and you’ll go and race in London. You were neck and neck on the track today.”
Kate stared out the window. “I worry about fighting her. I think she’s getting more unstable. I think she’s losing it.”
“Don’t make it about her. Think about how Sophie would feel if you quit. Think about how you’d feel.”
“What about you? How would you feel?”
“If you quit?”
“Yes.”
She watched the strain of it tightening his face.
“I’d quit too,” he said.
She nodded, believing he meant it but not believing he would.
She ran the cold tap and rinsed the suds off the baking dish. Maybe this was how it ended, after all, at thirty-two years of age. Not in defeat or glory on the track, but here, with a new load of their training kit in the laundry basket upstairs, and these three plain white plates with their pasta-bake encrustations soaking in the sink. Detergent breaking down the stubborn grease.
“Maybe I need some time to think,” she said.
“Oh Christ,” said Jack, holding his head. “Since when was this about thinking?”
And he was right—it was terrible to hear herself saying such things. On the cork wall behind them were Sophie’s drawings, from baby to eight years old. The smiling suns and the spaceships. Their daughter’s footprints in yellow poster paint, making the petals of a sunflower. Kate remembered how she had held Sophie’s skinny ankle to stamp each foot in its hour. With her other arm she had held Sophie up; this was before she could stand on her own. The strong stem and the broad leaves Kate had drawn herself, with a green wax crayon, while Jack was on the plane to Athens.
“Just think about it,” Jack was saying. “What would you do, if you gave up?”
She waved a dismissive hand, then winced as the movement stretched her tattoo.
“There are other ways to make a living, right? I mean unless all those commuters are faking it, there are other jobs.”
Jack stroked her cheek. “Not once you’ve heard the crowd.”
She pushed his hand away, gently. In truth, the baying of the crowd had often frightened her. It set your adrenaline pumping, yes, but there was a particular silence at the heart of it. The crowd got thirty minutes for its lunch break. The crowd smoked outside its office building in the rain, stubbing out its cigarettes and disposing of the smoldering ends by inserting them through the metal grille of a wall-mounted disposal unit according to a directive contained in an email that had been circulated. The crowd was Jack, if his dad hadn’t pushed him out of his comfort zone. The crowd was her, if her own father hadn’t taken her to a bike race when she was six. It was the thinnest of separations, and the crowd noise carried easily across the space and haunted her.
She shivered. It was dark outside, and here were these dishes in the sink and the laundry in the basket and the orange blush of streetlamps revealing the rooflines. From their neighbors’ windows, that warm and self-assured glow. That underlying flicker of TV. And in the sink, this scud of soap bubbles, thinner each time she looked.
Tom had always warned them about this: One day, sooner than you think, your sporting life will be over.
This soft sound of soap bubbles popping in the bowl.
This despair in her husband’s voice as he said to her, “Think about what’s good for you, for once. You don’t owe anyone else one more thing.”
She turned and watched him. “Even so, I think I’d rather look after Sophie than fight against Zoe.”
“It’s not an either/or. Oh Kate, is this about your confidence? I know you can beat Zoe. The only thing stopping you is the fear you might lose.”
She heard the sharpness come into her voice. “I’m scared I might win. Winning is all she has. I’m nervous what she might do to herself if we leave her with nothing. I’m terrified of what she might do to us.”
She saw from his eyes that he felt it too, that he’d been struggling to formulate it until now. He didn’t think past the immediate, this was the thing with Jack. The sheer simplicity of him was the reason they’d ended up with a life of such complexity. It wasn’t his fault that she could deal with the complications and he couldn’t. People had their natural habitats, after all, demarcated not in ecologies but in ages. He’d been perfectly adapted to being nineteen, and she was better at being thirty-two.
She kissed him, carefully, on the cheek, and both of them circled around this thing that she had finally said out loud. They reached for ways to ring it around with more words, to make it safe.
Jack said, “She can’t hurt us anymore, Kate. That was nearly ten years ago. We’re older and wiser now.”
“So’s she.”
“
But what can she actually do to us, if we trust each other and we don’t let her get between us?”
The question hung there between them.
Kate looked out the window at the dark back yards and the dark terraced houses darkening further under the sudden hammer of rain. She could have had so many other lives.
When she was six, Dad had taken her to her first bike race. It was something they could do together, out of the house. Dad had seen the race advertised in the local paper; it could just as easily have been tiddlywinks or judo.
Mum and Dad had argued at breakfast, that day. Kate was eating fried eggs. She didn’t think about the argument too much. Mum had been grumpy for weeks; her new job made her miserable. She sold door-to-door, working for a company selling fabrics by the yard. Sometimes she went on road trips, and once or twice a month she had to stay the night away from home.
At breakfast on the day of the race, Mum snatched her plate before Kate had finished. She crashed it down by the sink. There were rings under her eyes. Dad said, “We’ll be back late, okay? I’ll take Kate out for a pub lunch after the race.” He smiled and squeezed Kate’s hand. She was thinking of plowman’s lunch, with the thick brown bread and the butter in a little gold wrapper. With cheese and chutney and pickled onions, strange and translucent, that you could prize the layers off one by one. Dad would have a pint of mild and she’d get a Diet Coke.
Mum said to Dad, “Why do you always get to be the fun one?” And Dad said, “That’s rich.” That was when they argued. Kate put her fingers in her ears. Sometimes, at night, she dreamed about finding money. Hundreds of pounds that she would dig up in the garden and rush inside and give to Mum, so she wouldn’t have to work all the time.
Dad drove them to the race in the Rover 3500. The old car was beautiful. It was the dark, rich yellow of egg yolk. It was creaky and it rattled. But it was lovely and big and solid. It was your own world inside there, completely safe and unbreakable. Dad said she could sit in the front, for a treat. Mum was saying something. Dad closed the car door on the end of her sentence. “What time are you planning on being—” Clunk. And then silence, because the doors were so big and heavy. And the smell of the vinyl seats. Also the smell of Dad. He did up her seat belt. He wore an aftershave called Joop! with an exclamation mark, as if you were meant to shout it. Sometimes, when she was all alone, she did. Without really knowing why.