Sophie smiled.
Mum’s voice said, “Is she waking up?”
Colors came into the light. Red first, then green, then yellow. It glowed through her eyelids. It was like the day finding its felt-tips one by one, down the back of the sofa and in the cutlery drawer and wherever it last left them. Her head really hurt. She wanted water or juice or something, with a straw. Just to drink cold water or juice. She was so thirsty she could drink for a million years.
Mum said, “Zoe’s all over the TV again this morning. They were comparing me and her.”
“Aye, I saw.”
“Tom was right to get this over with. What if they dig around and something comes out?”
Dad said, “Shh, she’s moving.”
She felt Dad’s hand on her forehead, and she struggled to open her eyes and sit up. Her body felt as if it was getting reattached, like C-3PO when they put him back together after he got disassembled. But the wires were getting connected all wrong. She tried to move her legs but they wouldn’t go. The last few mornings had been like this. It was getting harder each day to wake up.
The light grew stronger through her eyelids.
Sometimes, before you came awake, it was hard to stop being a Jedi. It was beautiful, the forest moon of Endor. They were radiant, the star fields of the Moddell Sector. Every day, more and more of you wanted to stay out there. It would be so easy.
She had to concentrate, that’s what she had to do. She had to remember who needed her on Earth. So she said in her head over and over again, I am Sophie Argall, I am eight years old, my mum and dad are champions. I am Sophie Argall, I am the human wearing the pink pajama bottoms and the Star Wars T-shirt, and Mum and Dad need me.
She felt a hand stroking her cheek.
Mum said quietly, “What are we going to do? Do you think I should forget the Olympics?”
“No. Why?”
“To look after Sophie. To spend more time with her.”
“We’ve been through this. Focus on the race. You can beat Zoe.”
“I know.”
“Then do it, and then get ready for the Olympics. We’ll worry about everything else afterwards.”
“But what if there isn’t an afterwards?”
“Don’t say that.”
“But what if there isn’t?”
“Please, stop it.”
“What if I make it to London and Sophie … you know … doesn’t. And I’m sitting there for the rest of my life with a gold medal and the feeling that I could have done more for her. You know? Can you imagine putting that medal around your neck?”
“This is exactly how you mustn’t think. Sophie’s going to be fine.”
Sophie felt Dad’s hand on her forehead again.
“Look,” he said, “there’s no point in both of us waiting for her to wake up. Why don’t you go out for a ride, get your head together, go to the venue early like Zoe does?”
Mum was quiet for a moment, then Sophie heard her kiss Dad.
“Thanks,” she said.
“My pleasure. Now piss off and win. Call me when you’ve annihilated her, okay?”
“Jack …”
“Shh. No drama. You’re the best. Get out of here.”
“I love you, Jack.”
“While I am only an actor paid to impersonate a man who loves you.”
“I hate you.”
“While I am merely indifferent.”
Sophie heard Mum leaving the room, then she heard Dad’s voice again, soft and close by her ear.
“You okay, little one? Christ, you’re really hot. You’re burning up.”
She half opened her eyes and then she had to screw them tight shut again, because the light was the brightest light in the entire universe. Sometimes Mum and Dad told her not to look straight at the sun. Well, this light was stronger than the sun. If you actually lived on the sun, this would be the kind of light that your mum and dad would go on at you not to stare at. It was that strong.
Dad said, “Sophie? Can you hear me?”
Sophie knew she had to wake up properly now, before he could start worrying. Dad took a breath to talk again, and Sophie forced all of the Force into her muscles and sat up straight in bed even though it hurt really badly. Her head thumped and she opened her eyes and the light was too much and sick came out of her mouth. She sat there in this light that was brighter than the sun, and Dad was suddenly quiet and the room was quiet and everything was silent except for the fast, hard thudding of her heart against her ribs.
203 Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester, 7:55 a.m.
“I’m fine,” Sophie said. “I feel great.”
Jack cleaned up the sick and showered her. He dried her with a towel that he’d warmed up specially on the radiator.
“Are you going to be sick again?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
He helped Sophie dress.
“Breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
“DVD?”
She shrugged.
“Games?”
“Okay.”
He found her iPad for her and watched as she swiped at it lethargically. He spooned more paracetamol into her, and she accepted it without taking her eyes off the screen. He pulled the Star Wars baseball cap over her small, bald head while she ignored him completely, her tongue wedged between her teeth in concentration.
Jack was relieved that her attention had settled on something. He went downstairs to get breakfast for them both and to count out the day’s pills into the silver cup. He made a bowl of Rice Krispies for her and a bowl of granola for himself, listening to the Exploited on the kitchen stereo. He went upstairs humming along to the tune, and when he reached Sophie’s room, she was slumped on the floor with her cheek pressed into the screen of her iPad and an endless line of letter Gs spooling across a text input window.
He grabbed her, sat her up, and looked into her face. Sophie was unresponsive at first, then her eyes opened and she looked at him.
“What?” she said.
“Sophie, are you okay?”
“Yes!”
She pawed him away. Her cheeks were flushed, and a string of dribble hung from the corner of her mouth. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Did you faint, Sophie?”
Sophie shook her head furiously. “I was just resting.”
“You fell down on the screen.”
Sophie shook him off. “I. Was. Resting!”
Jack hesitated. Maybe he was overreacting. Looking at Sophie now—at the force of her indignation—it was true that she didn’t look too awful. It was hard to know what should be taken in your stride and what should stop you in your tracks. When he’d left, Sophie had been concentrating and engaged. When he’d returned less than ten minutes later, she’d been fully unconscious. Did that need a visit to the GP or a trip to the hospital or a call for the air ambulance? Somehow you were meant to take responsibility, minute to minute, for deciding which events you would call manageable, now that none of them were.
He swallowed. “I’m sure it isn’t anything but I do think, you know, that we should maybe pop by the hospital and maybe get you checked out.”
Silver-gray Renault Scénic, 8:45 a.m.
Jack strapped Sophie into her car seat and drove towards the hospital, faster than he should have.
“Dad!” said Sophie.
“What?”
“Slow down!”
“Sorry,” said Jack.
He braked momentarily, then gently brought the speed back up. He heard Sophie jiggling around in the back seat and sighed.
“What is it? Do you need a wee?”
The poor kid was stressed because he was. His nerves were shot. He’d probably overreacted to Sophie’s high temperature. These things happened all the time, but he’d panicked. He’d hurried Kate off to her race without making enough of a fuss of her, which was going to do God-knew-what to her morale, and here he was
on his way to the hospital, where the pediatrician would smile reassuringly, call him “Dad,” and send the two of them home with instructions to give Sophie paracetamol every four hours until her fever abated.
He slowed down, wondering whether he should skip the hospital and go back home.
“Sophie,” he said patiently, “if you don’t need a wee, please can you stop kicking the back of my seat?”
She kept on doing it. Jack decided to ignore it for now. He eased the car into the nearside carriageway, which would let him duck into a side road, do a three-pointer, and head home.
“Want some music?” he said.
She answered by increasing the frequency of her feet drumming on the back of his seat. He felt a flash of irritation.
“I’m not playing this game today, Soph. I’ll take that as a yes then.”
He stuck on De Rosa doing “New Lanark” and sank back into the headrest while the guitars washed over him. He forced his hands to loosen their choke hold on the wheel. He needed to calm down.
He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I dragged you away from your game. Are you still feeling poorly?”
No answer from the back seat. The petulant drumming against the back of his seat continued, a little less forcefully but still enough to be annoying.
“No need to sulk, eh?”
Jack sighed and deployed the windscreen wipers against the shower that was starting to fall. The cold April rain had the smell of change about it. Now that he was thirty-two, it bothered him in a way he couldn’t pin down.
The shower intensified. Jack dialed up the wipers to their top speed and cranked up the hot air to demist the windscreen. A side road was coming up on the left. He put on the indicator to signal into it, then hesitated and flicked it off again. The hospital was only a couple of minutes away. It might not be the end of the world to take Sophie for a quick checkup, then maybe grab both of them a hot chocolate from the vending machine in the hospital lobby. Sixty pence, option A3—he knew the selections by heart.
“Sophie?” he said. “If you stop kicking my seat, after the hospital we’ll get a nice drink, okay? And then we’ll go to the toy shop and I’ll buy you a new Star Wars figurine. Any one you like. Okay?”
There was no answer.
“Sophie?”
Still nothing.
He angled the rearview mirror back to see her.
Sophie’s head lolled in her seat. Her eyes rolled, her arms twitched.
He pulled in to the side road, whipped off his seat belt, and dived into the back. Sophie’s legs were kicking spasmodically. He unstrapped her and laid her down. She kept on twitching. He held on to her arms and tried to make them still, but there was a terrible force inside her.
Jack felt the blood draining from his head. He couldn’t think at all. He let go of her with one hand, took his phone out of his pocket, and made the emergency call. The voice asked him which service he required, and he didn’t know. The voice was cool and professional. It asked him, “Police, fire, or ambulance?” Inside the car, De Rosa were unraveling the sad silvery fabric of a dream. Inside himself, all Jack could hear was a high, thin screaming. The voice on the phone asked him what was the nature of the emergency. Jack got it together enough to shout that he needed an ambulance, but in truth the nature of the emergency was that he and Kate had lied to themselves about what had been going on. The nature of the emergency was that they had drawn a curtain between their daughter’s degeneration and their dreams of gold, and there was no obvious type of vehicle with any kind of specialist crew inside or any sort of siren on top that could possibly be vectored to his position to fix that.
National Cycling Centre, Stuart Street, Manchester, 9:00 a.m.
Tom had the velodrome booked for four hours from ten o’clock. At nine he checked the girls’ bikes over again with the mechanic, while the juniors trained on the track. In the kitchen along from his office in the warren of rooms underneath the track, he made up a batch of isotonic drink, put it into bottles, and stacked them in a cooler. He took out more clean bottles and mixed the girls’ recovery drinks. Zoe favored a powdered protein shake made entirely out of freeze-dried excellence, which came in a gold-and-black tub printed with extravagant nutritional promises. The smell of it made Tom retch, but it was true that it was perfectly optimized for minerals and essential amino acids. Kate preferred skimmed milk whizzed up in the blender with berries and honey. Tom bought milk and soft fruit for her once a week and kept them in the fridge in his office, on the shelf above the blood and urine samples.
He poured the girls’ drinks into their bottles and added them to the cooler. It was twenty to ten, and his hands were shaking with nerves. He lugged the cooler up to trackside and watched the juniors warming down. Their faces were aglow and they were larking about. They were the under-sixteens, and they still believed they were pretty lucky to be there.
When ten o’clock came, he got the crew up from the maintenance room to sweep the track and run the machine around it to clean off every trace of sweat, lube, and grease. He phoned the control room and got them to put on the full floodlights, the way they would for an evening competition. He had them initialize the Lynx photo-finish camera on the start/finish line. At ten thirty the physio came in and set up two stationary bikes to Kate and Zoe’s dimensions, at opposite ends of the warm-up area.
With everything ready, Tom lowered himself into a trackside seat where he could see the main entrance. He waited for Zoe to arrive first.
Kate arrived at ten to eleven, skipped down the stairs, and dropped her kit bag at the side of the track with a boom that rolled around the space. She kissed Tom on both cheeks.
He said, “I don’t need to ask you if you’re ready.”
“I feel great. This was a good idea.”
“You sleep okay?”
She smiled. “I can sleep when this is over. Is Zoe getting changed?”
“She’s not here yet.”
Kate blinked. “Okay.”
“Yeah, I know. Think she’s found a whole new way to mess with your head?”
Kate laughed. “Oh come on. We’re over that.”
Tom held out his hand. “Still, you’d better give me your phone.”
Kate sighed as she handed it over. “There’s no need, really.”
Tom pocketed the phone. “Race day rules. We’ll keep the two of you apart till start time. We’ll run this just like a big event. No contact. No psychology. I’ll have you use the changing room one after the other, then I’m going to isolate you and have you warm up at opposite ends of the space.”
“Okay.”
Tom put his hand on her elbow. “Just for once, let’s make it all about what happens on the track, shall we?”
He sent her off to change, then sat down to wait again. Kate was out of the changing room at eleven, and he sent her off with the physio to warm up on her stationary bike. At ten past eleven he phoned Zoe, but her voicemail picked up.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re meant to be here.”
At twenty past, three blazered officials from British Cycling arrived to witness the race. A shower was intensifying outside, and they came through the doors shaking out umbrellas and bitching about being called out. Tom briefed them on the race rules: best of three sprints, the winner to remain subject to the new Olympic selection procedure, the loser to formally announce that she was not available for selection. No journalists, friends, or family supporters to be present, no press conference, no recording equipment besides the photo-finish camera. He gave each of the officials a copy of the governing documentation, and all four of them signed. Tom explained how the sprints would be organized, with one official to act as the approved starter while the other two would hold the girls’ bikes steady at the start. The three officials would then umpire the sprints, with Tom recusing himself from the process.
Tom settled the officials in their seats and organized coffee and biscuits for them. At half past eleven, Zoe was still nowhere. To calm himsel
f he checked the girls’ bikes over again. He brushed invisible spots of grit off the track. He tested the photo-finish equipment, walking across the line and calling the control room to check that the image was being triggered and displayed on their screens.
He called Zoe and got her voicemail again. He left a message that he struggled to keep unemotional. He went up to the reception area and looked out. The sky was graphite gray, the rain wasn’t letting up, and there was still no Zoe.
Kate was fully warmed up now, and Tom went over to the mat where the physio was taking her through some light stretches.
“All good?” he said breezily. “Legs still attached?”
She looked up at him. “Any news?”
He shook his head.
“What if she doesn’t show up?”
He looked at his watch. “She’s still got twenty minutes. You know her. She’s just playing with you. She’ll be hiding around the corner, doing her own warm-up.”
Even as he said it, he was aware of the heavy rain hammering on the skylights high above their heads. Kate peered up into the glare of the floodlights, shielding her eyes with a hand.
“Yeah, but what if she doesn’t come?”
Tom sighed. “The officials are here. The papers are signed. If she’s not through these doors by noon, then you’ll go to the Olympics and she won’t. She knows the rules for today. You both agreed to be bound by them.”
Kate shook her head quickly. “If something’s come up, I wouldn’t hold her to the rules.”
Tom nodded his head at the officials. “These guys would. Unfortunately nine-tenths of the race is about making it to the bloody start line. You should understand that better than anyone else on earth.”
He watched her face as she took in the information.
She said, “Let me call her, okay?”
“No. See? This is how she’s getting into your head. She’ll be here. You just need to keep your mind on your own race.”
Kate closed her eyes and took a breath. “Okay.”
At ten minutes to twelve, Tom heaved himself up the stairs to the reception area and stood looking out through the doors at the street. His chest was tight and he felt nauseated and angry. Why did Zoe have to be like this? Why couldn’t she just use the talent she had to win on the track, without wrenching everyone to bits beforehand?