Gold

  Joop!

  Dad pulled out onto the road and she watched through the side window as Mum’s lips moved. “What’s Mum saying?” “I don’t know.” “Shouldn’t we go back and find out?” Dad sighed and squeezed her hand. He switched on the radio. The Challenger space shuttle had exploded the day before. It had broken apart after launch. They were still talking about it. It was such a shock. One moment it was white and intact, like a milk tooth, a bright white shape in the clean blue atmosphere. And then the blue sky was full of the tiny pieces of white. Each color was full of the other. Kate was sad because one of the astronauts was someone’s mum. They’d said, “Challenger go at throttle up,” and then everything had disintegrated, the radio said. But Kate didn’t want to hear. She hummed a tune with her fingers in her ears.

  In the middle of the Rover’s steering wheel there was a big, silver hexagonal bolt that held the steering wheel on. It was an instrument just like the others, always telling you that you were exactly eighteen inches away from death. People got killed by those bolts. The police arrived at accidents and they found dads with perfect hexagonal wounds right between the eyes but no expression of surprise on their faces. They’d been aware of the risk. It had stared them in the face for years.

  When they arrived at the race, Dad got her bike out of the boot. He held her hand and carried her bike to the start. There were forty or fifty kids there, and she was scared. Lots of the other girls were bigger than she was. Some of them had fast bikes, with drop handlebars and thin tires. Hers just had Scooby-Doo stickers. She hid behind Dad’s legs till it was time for the race to start.

  It was a grass track, with the course marked out by wooden stakes with thin orange rope strung between them. Kate was much faster than nearly all the others. She was so far ahead, she thought she’d done something wrong. She waited for someone to shout at her. Only one other girl was as quick as she was. They rode side by side for a while. Kate looked across and smiled, but the other girl didn’t. Kate could have gone faster, but it felt mean to leave the other girl alone, so she stayed with her. When they got back round to the start line at the end of the first lap, Dad was smiling. He gave two thumbs up. The other girl’s dad was there too. He was shouting, “Come on, come on! You can beat her!” The other girl tried to go faster. Her face was getting red. Kate slowed down a bit, so that the other girl could too. They got around to the start line again. Dad cheered. The other girl’s dad shouted, “Come on! You’re quicker than this!” He was angry. Kate was scared for the other girl. On the last lap she slowed down even more, but the girl was getting tired. She clipped a stake with her handlebars and rolled across the grass.

  Kate stopped her own bike and dropped it. With cold fingers, breathing in the muddy smell of wet grass, she picked up the other girl’s bike. She said, “Quick!” She was nervous because of the girl’s dad. The girl looked at her. She was very small. She had mud on her face and the front of her tracksuit. She was starting to cry. Kate whispered, “Don’t.” She held the bike up and the other girl got on. The girl rode away, and the others all rode past while Kate was still getting back on her bike. She crossed the finish line last, in tears.

  Dad said, “That was so bloody unfair.” Kate was sobbing. She said yes yes yes, and she meant it was unfair that the other girl was scared of her dad. She couldn’t explain it—why it made her sad that her life was easy, why she was scared of how happy she was.

  Dad drove them away. The gears crunched. Dad drove faster than normal. His knuckles were white on the wheel. He said, “You’ve got a kind nature, Kate. People will try to take advantage of that.” On the radio, they were talking about the objects they’d recovered from Challenger. A thousand tiny things had fallen to the sea, all at their own particular speed. There were mission patches floating on the waves. The heavy things had sunk beneath. Some of them would never be recovered.

  Dad said, “That girl shouldn’t just have ridden off.”

  Kate said, “She was frightened. I wanted her to win.”

  Dad was quiet for a long time, then he said, “Kate, I’m more proud of you than if you’d won.”

  He drove too fast around a roundabout. The tires screeched. Kate closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of Joop!

  Dad said, “I’m sorry you had to hear all that, at breakfast.”

  He said it quietly. He drove loudly. The bolt on the steering wheel glinted.

  Kate said, “It’s just because Mum’s tired.”

  Dad said nothing. He drove faster.

  He said, “We’re all tired, Kate.”

  She held on to her seat belt with both hands.

  Dad drove straight past the pub.

  Kate said, “What about our pub lunch?”

  Dad said, “Let’s see if Mum wants to come with us.” His voice was tight.

  They got back home and Dad braked hard. Kate had to brace her arms against the glove box. There was another car outside their house, black and shiny and new.

  She said, “Who’s that?”

  Dad said, “That’s your mother’s boss.” His voice was too quiet. “Stay here while I go in.”

  He made her wait in the Rover. That was okay. Nothing bad could happen while she was in there. Dad left the radio on. There was a lot of shouting from inside the house. She turned up the radio. They’d found hundreds of pieces of paper. They were sheets from flight manuals. They’d fluttered down to the sea. Some of them were just ashes. The heavy parts had gone under—the binders from the flight manuals, the metal binder rings. The instructions were floating loose on the sea. For how to fly to space. For how to reach escape velocity. Dad came out onto the driveway with Mum’s boss. They were pushing each other. Kate was scared. She ducked down in her seat. She peeked over the dashboard. Mum was watching them from the front door, in her dressing gown. She saw Kate looking at her, and she looked away.

  After the shouting, Mum left with her boss and Dad took Kate to the pub. She had plowman’s lunch and he had pie and chips. He had a pint of mild. She had a Diet Coke, with ice cubes and a quarter slice of lemon floating in it. They didn’t talk. The ice cubes in her drink were shaped like thimbles. If you held them upside down against the side of the glass with your straw, they filled up with bubbles. Dad sighed when he saw her doing it. She leaned against his chest. She whispered, “Joop!” Dad said, “What?” She said, “Nothing.” She smiled at him. The ice cubes floated and clicked. Some of the words never sank and some of the heavier things were never recovered.

  Dad smiled. He said, “Before she left, Mum told me to tell you she loves you.”

  She knew he was lying.

  “Dad?” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m more proud of you than if you’d won.”

  Twenty-six years later, as she passed the plates to Jack to dry, she gave him the same quiet smile she’d given Dad that day.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “Maybe we’re being paranoid. Maybe Zoe doesn’t want to beat me any more than I want to beat her. Not if it means the other one can’t go to the Olympics. I really think she’s changed.”

  He touched her arm. “Well, one of you has to win.”

  She tilted her head. “Do you ever regret choosing me over her?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “You know I don’t.”

  She scuffed a foot across the stained pine floorboards of their kitchen. “Because this is the only track I really want to beat her on.”

  Jack looked at her for a moment, then grinned.

  “What are you smiling at?” she said.

  “We should sell tickets, then. If this is where the action is, we should get some seats in here, charge fifty quid a head, make a fortune.”

  Wednesday, April 4, 2012

  Turkish Café, Ashton New Road, Manchester

  Tom went to a place where they had all the papers. He tucked himself away at a corner table. He was the only customer, and it was too early in the morning. This was more of an evening place, with narghile pipes
on the shelves and dark purple on the walls. From behind the brushed aluminium bar the waiter watched him with the polite curiosity reserved for old men who had become dislodged from their proper place in time.

  Tom ignored him and spread out a paper. For a minute he couldn’t bear to look. He waited, massaging his knees, watching the bright morning sun through the red, white, and blue plastic strips hanging in the doorway. His coffee came, strong and muddy with sediment in a clear Pyrex cup. He eyed the newspaper sideways.

  Everything about newspapers made him feel tired and defeated. The columnists were flies buzzing against a window, needing to be let out into life. The editorials chose their lines like intermediate skiers opting for the safety of the green and blue pistes, yet finishing with the rhetorical flourish and the triumphant fist pumps of a downhill champion skidding to a halt after a winning run. He wondered why people never grew weary of the bullshit. He hated that he’d allowed his athletes’ lives to be so warped by it.

  Every column inch had been an incursion into territory that he should have protected. If he’d been strong he would have said to Zoe, Have your termination or don’t, and who cares what the papers say about you? If he’d had the integrity that the papers also lacked, he’d have made his riders choose, on day one, whether they wanted to be media faces with sponsorship deals or athletes with a single focus on results. Looking at the newspaper now was like looking at himself. He’d allowed his girls to race on the pages of the paper instead of the boards of the track: that was his failure.

  He made himself look.

  In the end the tattoo coverage could have been worse, but it still wasn’t great. They’d gone big on Kate on the back page and used Zoe for contrast. Kate was in the foreground, looking shy and excited about her tattoo. They’d linked the photo to the news about the Olympic entry change and treated it like a bet, as if Zoe and Kate had known before they had the tattoos done that only one of them could go to the Olympics. BRAVE KATE HAS SKIN IN THE GAME was the headline. Under the picture the caption read, “Tats the spirit: Underdog Kate Argall gets inked alongside scandal-hit rival Zoe Castle, after shock ruling that only ONE of them can go for gold in London.” There was an inset photo of Sophie, bald under her Star Wars cap, smiling at the camera. The caption read, “Sophie: Mum’s gold would mean so much to me.”

  He sat in contemplation for a moment. His athletes were unraveling: this was undeniable. He’d always imagined that they could hang on, the three of them, for one last Olympics and then decide what to do. Now, though, he had to put his coaching head on and look the odds in the eye. The longer this went on, the more Zoe would get unbalanced and Kate would get demotivated. It didn’t do to keep this tension between them, and as their coach it was his job to understand how to break it as quickly as possible.

  If only he’d managed to straighten things out between them after Stuttgart, then maybe a lot of what had happened next might have been smoother. Instead, there’d been no reconciliation for months. Jack had become taciturn, taking his mood out on the track. However Kate had squared it with him, she hadn’t been ready to forgive Zoe, and Zoe hadn’t felt she’d been the only one to blame in any case. Zoe had felt resentful and trapped with her pregnancy, and Kate had suffered more with each day Zoe’s bump grew. He’d done nothing—as a coach or as a friend—to get them talking, until the damage the silence did had brought them face-to-face on its own. He couldn’t fail them like that again.

  He drained his coffee and signaled for another. The radio was on in the café, playing Gold FM. Like the DJ said, they were number one with the solid gold hits of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Phil Collins came on, doing “In the Air Tonight.”

  The waiter arrived with the coffee.

  Tom smiled at him. “Brings back memories, eh?”

  The waiter looked blank. “What does?”

  “Phil Collins.”

  “Who is Phil Collins?”

  Tom pointed at the speakers. “Him.”

  “Oh yes,” said the waiter. “Very good music. Very nice.”

  He nodded with pantomime enthusiasm and took Tom’s empty cup away.

  Tom wobbled his denture and a light sadness settled over him, like snow on a barbecue in winter. Away from the track, young people had begun to humor him. When they treated him like a relic it made him think of future rooms where he would be encouraged to sit on wipe-clean vinyl recliners alongside others of his generation. He saw himself insisting that he’d once competed in an Olympic Games, while uniformed carers politely agreed with him. I missed out by one-tenth of a second, he’d tell them. One bloody tenth.

  That’s lovely, Thomas, now eat up your soup or you won’t be in top shape for the next Olympics, will you?

  When he’d thought about old people’s homes, he’d always imagined a soundtrack of Bing Crosby and the wartime greats. Now he realized that by the time it was his turn to be geriatric, the nostalgia music would be MC Hammer and Sade and Phil Collins. He imagined himself in a group of half a dozen tracksuited octogenarians doing seated light aerobics to Madonna’s “Vogue,” and he understood immediately that he would need to kill himself in pretty much the same month he retired from coaching. He would give himself maybe a week to get his papers in order, then find a sensible way of doing it. There was bound to be something involving pills—something relatively undramatic. He’d write a quick note and then do it in a way that made the least possible mess for others to clear up.

  He worried about whom he should write the note to. An email to the police seemed overly self-pitying; it was surely an exaggeration to pretend there was no one else who needed to know. On the other hand, a suicide note would be a shitty way to get back in touch with his family. Matthew was best off not hearing from him again. This too was undeniable. He’d wanted his son to succeed where he’d failed and so he’d bullied him too hard in training. The kid had snapped one day and taken a bike lock to him, and that was the end of Tom’s front teeth. A week later, his wife had left and Matthew had gone with her, and that had been that.

  Sometimes Tom thought about it—had a flash of Matty’s face for a moment, like now—but then his mind recoiled from the pain of it. It was okay, really. Each year the sharp edges of it grew softer.

  In the empty café, Tom listened to Phil Collins and tried to analyze the lyrics the way he would if the artist were one of his athletes. Something was coming in the air tonight. Phil could feel it coming, so obviously it was something big. The guy had been waiting for this moment all his life, so whatever it was, it wasn’t as if they came along every half hour.

  These haunting chords; this echoing drum; this insistence that some cataclysm was imminent. Tom frowned as he thought about how he would advise Phil. He sat in the café and pushed his denture about with his tongue and stirred his coffee anticlockwise, languidly. His professional conclusion, finally, was that Phil Collins was just a fucker for never saying what the something was—this something that he alone had detected coming, like some balding airborne early warning system with drumsticks and a reverb unit.

  This was how Tom’s mind rebounded from thinking about his son. Always, it skimmed the surface of the pain, then skipped off and attached itself to the nearest harmless distraction.

  He looked at Zoe’s photo in the newspaper. He knew there was grief in her past, as deep as his. He had no other explanation for the desperate way she behaved or for the strong connection he felt with her. It wasn’t love—he was too old for that—but it was a kind of unbearable affection. It wasn’t even that she made him wish he were thirty years younger. Life did that all on its own.

  He growled at himself. It was frustrating. When all you knew was heart rates and lactic thresholds, it was as if life gave you big emotions but only these cheap little instruments to gauge them with. Phil Collins’s lyrics held meaning the way a pocket mirror held the moon, and yet these insufficient things were all he had: these old pop songs in empty cafés, these gold medals his athletes had won, these small redemptions
refunded by an idiosyncratic history that disqualified whole decades but counted every second in tenths.

  Time had never behaved itself around him. It played like a scratched record, now repeating an endless phrase, now skipping whole verses so that things happened too late or too soon.

  He could still feel the fierce pressure of Zoe’s hands on his, in the delivery room. It was his fault that she hadn’t carried the baby to term. It still haunted him that he hadn’t been able to persuade her to stop training. All he’d managed was to slow her down slightly. She’d dealt with the pregnancy the way she would deal with an injury—keeping her training ticking over whilst accommodating the temporary restrictions on performance. Even when she was twenty-six weeks pregnant, he hadn’t been able to get her to think of the baby as something that was actually going to happen. He’d talked to her about it at the velodrome one afternoon. He’d actually stepped out in front of her on the track so that she had to stop, and he’d held her handlebars while she struggled against him.

  “Please,” he’d said.

  “Please what?”

  “Please stop. You’ll hurt the baby.”

  Her chest was heaving and the sweat was pouring off her. “Don’t be so melodramatic. I’m not pushing it. I just need to keep my basic fitness level up, and then as soon as it’s out, I can get back to race fitness for Athens.”

  “Except that as soon as it’s out, Zoe, it’ll be a human being and you’ll be its full-time bloody mother.”

  She nodded and waited, as if further explanation was required.

  “Well?” he said. “Are you telling me the father’s going to care for it? I got the impression he isn’t involved.”