The nurses wrote Sophie on the baby’s wristband and wall chart. An unspoken optimism took hold in the ICU, now that the girl was attached to the world by more than her feeding and breathing tubes. The medical staff seemed to move more lightly, and a brightness came into their tone. Tom liked the name. There was something soft and hopeful about it that befitted a child whose claim to life was still provisional.
When Jack next came to the hospital, Kate came with him. They took over from Tom, taking it in turns to sit with Sophie while the other one trained. Tom watched Jack becoming the besotted father and Kate falling in love with the baby too. He watched them for a month, with the same careful attention to positioning and body language that he gave to his riders on the track. Then, when he was sure it was going to work out, he helped them to arrange the legal papers. Jack had custody, Zoe had access rights, and the newspapers had a different story entirely. The papers would have destroyed Zoe for giving up her child, so Tom had her agent tell them that she’d had a stillbirth. It was the only cycling story the mainstream papers ran in the whole of the off-season. For a while they called her BRAVE ZOE, or TRAGIC ZOE, and they printed photos of her leaving training in dark glasses.
Three months later, Sophie was strong enough to leave the hospital with Jack and Kate. They waited another month, then announced through the British Cycling press office that Kate had given birth to a daughter and wouldn’t be racing that season but still planned to be fit for Athens. She didn’t give any interviews, and Tom whispered into the ear of one or two reporters that this was out of respect for Zoe’s loss. Jack did a three-minute segment on the BBC breakfast show and a lighthearted, self-mocking piece about new fatherhood in the Times, which appeared under his name with a photo of him in his racing kit holding Sophie gingerly and was based on some vague notes he’d phoned in to the subeditors at the paper. Because it had all happened in the winter and Kate hadn’t been seen in public since the Worlds, no one asked questions. She was just one more promising female athlete who’d put family first; Jack was just one more handsome guy rendered likeable by an anecdote about poo going everywhere at nappy change time.
Tom had run the whole deception. He’d broken every problem down into its parts and solved it. And in the years that followed, whenever Zoe broke down into parts, he’d done his best to solve her too.
Phil Collins faded out. Tom pushed his coffee cup away and looked at the newspaper photo of Zoe and Kate. Every day now the newspapers would raise the temperature. He knew they wouldn’t all get through three months like this, before the Olympic qualifiers established which of the girls was going to race in London. Sooner or later, something would give. Zoe would do something stupid, or Kate would collapse under the pressure, or some hack would dig up the truth about Sophie. When you broke this problem down it had two parts: one, that the media was all over the rivalry between Zoe and Kate; and two, that they had a whole three months to make hay with it.
He put a fiver under his coffee cup, pulled himself upright, and made his decision. He couldn’t change the media, but there was a way of shortening time. He nodded at the waiter, hobbled out into the light, and phoned his girls one after the other.
Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester
It was still early when Zoe ended the call, put the phone down on the kitchen counter, and went to the window. It was a bright morning with cumulus clouds idling in the synapse between the skyline and the sky. She watched their shadows trailing at street level. The gaps between the shadows were surprisingly even. From up here you noticed patterns that seemed random when you lived on the ground. The clouds arranged themselves in the sky with the same instinct for separation as people in crowds. There were a lot of them up there, but you never saw them collide. There was no clumsiness in the way their ranked shadows marked a dappled time across the escapement of the city’s roofs.
She put a hand against the plate glass to balance herself and lifted her ankles in turn to stretch her quads. Tom had phoned to ask if she would agree to race Kate the next morning and to abide by the result. It would be better, he’d said, to get it over with than to tear themselves to pieces for three months while they waited for the formal qualifiers. She’d said yes without thinking, the way she always said yes to Tom.
Down in the city center, on Princess Street and all along Portland Street, she picked out the adverts with her face on them. If she lost against Kate tomorrow, there wouldn’t be another campaign. She’d be papered over with new ads. Here and there out in the suburbs, in this economy, a few orphaned posters might linger on the billboards. Green would be the last color to fade. Her flesh tones would go first, then the silver edges of the ice cubes in the glass she held. Finally only her eyes would be left, with the slash of green lipstick and the fringe of green hair, tinted in postproduction. She would look out across the gray streets from the white of washed-out adverts.
She shivered and pushed the image away. She couldn’t think of it happening like that. The only way she was going to wave good-bye to the sport was from the top of the podium in London. Tom must think she was going to beat Kate, or he wouldn’t have asked her to race. He knew she wasn’t built to survive a slow fade-out.
The only thing that kept her alive was winning, and without winning there was only blackness and despair. It had been like that since she could remember. She’d been born in a speeding ambulance after a very quick labor, and the first sound she’d heard was sirens. What could you do, when you were born under a blue flashing light instead of a star sign? You could only keep ahead of your destiny. You could only count calories, and do three hundred abdominal crunches every morning, and make your body your home.
At ten months she crawled faster than the other babies. When there were rusks and rattles to reach, she reached them first. At eleven months she toddled while the others only teetered. The old photos showed a blur of her in a tiny dress. At two she ran with her elbows sticking out, so no other kid could get past her.
Her mother found her secondhand machines to ride until she turned ten. Then, on the morning of her birthday, she raced downstairs and her first brand-new bike was waiting. It was wrapped in two kinds of paper, one a canary yellow, one red with stars. One roll hadn’t been long enough. The bike was pink with white tires, tinsel streamers on the handlebar ends, and a basket to put her doll in. She didn’t love her doll, not so blindly that she was going to give her a free ride, so she unscrewed the basket to save weight. She loosened the screws with the point of a carrot peeler, then teased them out with her fingernails. She snipped off the handlebar tinsel with her mother’s haircutting scissors. She knew boys rode their bikes quicker, and she reckoned maybe the difference was tinsel. She left it in plain sight on the kitchen floor, without sweeping it up, and she knew she’d get in trouble for it later. But if later really cared, it should try turning up at places sooner. She called upstairs to her brother Adam and told him it was time to race.
Adam was seven and a half and much smaller than her. He rose up on his toes when their mother marked off their heights against the doorpost, but his mark still came a head below Zoe’s. They had the same hair, a glossy blue-black. Their mother cut it for them while they sat on a three-legged stool in the kitchen, kicking their legs and listening to the Chart Show on BBC Radio 1. Debbie Gibson and the Fine Young Cannibals. It didn’t matter if you were a son of hers or a daughter: the haircut their mother gave out was the one Luke Skywalker wore in the first Star Wars film, the one where he journeyed throughout the galaxy but didn’t meet anyone who took him aside and said, Listen up, Luke, either grow it long and raffish or cut it properly and let’s see those nice cheekbones. Zoe wanted to be a boy, and it upset her that Luke was so bad at it. Still, their mother wouldn’t cut her hair short, and Skywalker’s hair was what she had to settle for. Rather Luke than Leia.
They shared a bed in a small room under the eaves, and when their mother climbed the ladder to wake them each morning, they’d be tangled around one another, puffy-eyed
from dreaming or wide awake and bickering about the details of a dream they’d shared. Their mother dressed them more or less the same, but she put butterfly-shaped hair-clips in Zoe’s hair, which Zoe could sometimes persuade Adam to wear if she took responsibility for his wetting the bed. As well as the hair, Adam had the same jade green eyes and the same skill of not being in the room by the time you finished your sentence. They’d learned the trick of living fast and then accelerating away before they got in trouble for it. So of course she called for Adam when it was time to test her new bike from the top of Black Hill to the bottom. The handlebar tinsel was still on the kitchen floor, all mixed up with the jet-black clippings of the haircut their mother had given her for her birthday. She was supposed to sweep them up, but there was no time. Jobs like that, when you were ten, they took about two hundred years.
They lived in a small farmhouse with its own field at the end of a long lane. Their father had left when Zoe was four, so their mother did everything. As well as Zoe and Adam, there were four dozen bantam hens and nine Jacob sheep. The Jacobs had four horns and devil eyes; they looked like Lucifer in a woolly sweater. There wasn’t much to do apart from look at the sheep, and there weren’t many cars in the lanes, so they rode their bikes wherever they liked. Black Hill was their local mountain. It was 212 feet high, which was the highest altitude to which a human being could ascend without supplementary oxygen. From the top of the hill you could see the curvature of the Earth, if you held your head upside down at a particular angle.
The day of her birthday was hot. It was the alivest part of summer, the part where you could actually see the plants growing, out of the corner of your eye, although they froze the moment you looked at them. The wheat was on the turn but it was still fresh and green, with the poppies and the cornflowers spangling it. They rode out along the lanes, singing “Back to Life” by Soul II Soul and taking their hands off the handlebars to clap out the rhythm. Swifts swung down to buzz them and flashed back up into the heights, screaming. When they reached the foot of Black Hill, they got off and pushed their bikes. The hill was so steep.
They shared a water bottle, one of the aluminium ones that the pro riders used in the old days. It was dented and scuffed, with just the vestiges of its original paint. Adam drank from it often and noisily, making sure Zoe noticed how pro it made him. It also made him have to stop and wee. She closed her eyes and listened and pretended that the sound of Adam’s urine was hers, scattering insects and seeping into the soil and releasing the dark scents of clay and cool flint. She supposed boys took this consolation for granted. However bad things got, you could always make ants flee and beetles race for higher ground.
At the top of Black Hill they stopped to catch breath. They tightened up their race helmets. It was 1989. It was before safety was invented. But Greg LeMond had just won the Tour de France in a futuristic streamlined hat—it had been on the television news—so she and Adam had made aerodynamic helmets out of chicken wire, paste, and newspaper. The newspaper was the Daily Telegraph, which their mother took. Under the paste of Zoe’s helmet you could see three-quarters of the photo of the man in Tiananmen Square, standing in front of the tanks. The tank man was famous for being slow. Four tanks bearing down on him, every nerve of his body screaming at him to run, and somehow he stood his ground. It was the only kind of race you could win without moving.
Adam and Zoe drew up beside the oak tree they always used as a start line, and they turned their bikes so they pointed downhill. The lane was seven feet wide, lined with beech trees that roofed it in. The light was green and soft. She took the left-hand side of the road and gave Adam the right. She was older, so she could push him around like that. She chose the left side because the road curved to the left all the way down the hill, so her side of the road was shorter. She had a shorter line and she had a new bike with straight wheels. She was going to beat Adam hollow. He just grinned at her. He never worked out why he always lost their races. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t mind. Adam just cared less than she did.
Their helmets were held on with string. You could see a fragment of a newspaper headline on the front of Adam’s. It said JUBILATION AS. He grinned in the green light, with gaps where his grown-up teeth were growing, and the smell of blooming plants in the lane, and JUBILATION AS. She wondered, As what? They counted down from five and then they stood on the pedals. She began to inch ahead of Adam. Soon they were pedaling like crazy. She could hear Adam struggling for breath and giggling at the same time. The harder he chased, the quicker she rode.
They went so fast that her eyes began to stream. She couldn’t see much, but there wasn’t much you needed to see—just the high banks of the lane to steer between. The air roared over her ears, and she was shouting with the excitement of it, and so was Adam. You got up to this speed where the bike started humming beneath you, where the vibrations through the handlebars and the saddle drew you into a trance of concentration. You noticed everything. Every click of wing cases opening as ladybirds in the long grass verge took fright at your approach. Every concussion of tiny chips of stone, thrown up from the asphalt by your tires and striking the tensioned steel of the bike frame. Time had the quality of indecisiveness. Everything was unusually quick and unusually slow.
She whooped. Adam echoed her, somewhere behind. Around the curve a car came quickly up the hill, black and soundless against the roar of the rushing air, and impossibly close. She saw the face of the woman who was driving it. She saw the O that her mouth made. Her lipstick was neon pink, unnatural. Zoe was hugging the bank to her left and the driver was hugging the bank to her own left, and Zoe shot through the gap between the car and her side of the lane. She was surprised. She thought, You don’t see many women wearing lipstick in these lanes. Then she heard the bang, which was much louder than the end of the world, and she kept on pedaling.
She knew it wouldn’t be true unless she looked back. She was certain that if she could ride faster than the news, the news would never reach her. This was the hour in which she began to emerge distinctly from the main fluid of time. She and time were oil and vinegar shaken up and left to stand: they began to separate back into magic and water. She rode flat out for twenty-five miles, and when the police finally found her, it was dusk, and she was on the dual carriageway, wobbling with exhaustion while juggernauts swerved and blared their horns. She was delirious. She asked the policemen if she was in trouble for cutting the tinsel off the ends of her handlebars and leaving it on the kitchen floor. They put her in the back of the police car, and they took off her papier-mâché helmet and laid it on the seat beside her. They took her to hospital and they gave her fluids, and later they gave her the news.
Her mother came to the hospital the next afternoon and drove her home, in silence. The tinsel and the hair were still on the kitchen floor. Her mother went to bed without a word getting said and stayed in her room for ten days, until her mind allowed her to answer the phone and consent to Adam’s being taken from the cold room and driven to the church to be cremated.
Cards and flowers arrived in the house. Zoe wasn’t as sure it was over as everyone else seemed to insist. Several times a day she climbed to the top of Black Hill and raced down again, as hard as she could. The deal was, if she could ride faster than she had ever ridden before—if she could ride faster than time—then she would look around and Adam would be there again, racing along behind her. She was sure she could bring him back. There were so many deals she had made as a child, after all, and about half had worked and half hadn’t. Once on Christmas Eve she’d slept in her sleeping bag on the floor, leaving her bed for Jesus to sleep in. In the morning she’d checked to see if the pillow had been slept on. It hadn’t. But another time she’d ridden past a fox that had been killed on the road, without a mark on him, and he was still warm and his eyes glittered with black fire, and she made a deal that if she carried him to the foot of a silver birch tree and put acorns close to his head for when he woke up, then he would come alive again. And wh
en she went back the next day to look, he was gone, and that was proof.
If she could cheat time of a fox, she could try to rob it of her brother. She rode down Black Hill again and again, faster and faster, and each time she looked back and Adam wasn’t there, she thought, Next time I’ll just go quicker. I’ll never lose a race.
She didn’t remember any one particular day when she stopped believing that winning would bring Adam back. She didn’t know when she stopped looking behind her when she raced, to see if he was on her wheel. She just gradually grew up, and time with its self-regarding eye built a monument to itself out of her memories, raising it from the plains of her experience until it blocked her view of the past.
203 Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester
While Kate was still on the phone to Tom, Sophie came downstairs, hanging tight to the banisters and screwing up her eyes against the light.
“Tom,” Kate said, “I’ve got to go.”
“Sure. Will you do it?”
“Yeah. I’ll race her.”
“You can take a bit more time if you want. A week or two if you need to mentally prepare.”
She closed her eyes for a moment while she thought about it. “No,” she said. “I’m fine to race tomorrow.”
“Anything I can help you with? Anything you want to talk through with me?”
“No,” said Kate. “Just have my bike ready.”
“That’s my girl,” said Tom. “Midday tomorrow then, okay? Come at eleven and get warmed up.”
“Alright.”
Kate pocketed the phone and hugged Sophie. “You okay?”
Sophie was puffy from sleep. She broke out of the hug and looked at Kate as if trying to place her in the general taxonomy of species. “Excuse me,” she said in a cracked voice, “but what planet is this?”