Gold

  He watched Kate on the start line as she checked and rechecked her pedals. He put himself into her mind. She would be thinking of ways to slow the race down, and since Zoe had the inside line this time, it wasn’t going to be easy. If he could whisper in Kate’s ear, he would tell her to go like a rocket off the whistle. That way if Zoe had decided to go to full power too, then Kate wouldn’t have let a gap open up and she could tuck into Zoe’s slipstream, but if Zoe had decided to start slow, then Kate could drop down in front of her, slow down, and use the lead position to dictate the speed of the race.

  He swore at himself then, and he had to smile. This was what it had come to, after forty years of high-level coaching: his best tactical advice to his two best riders would be to ride their bicycles as fast as they were able.

  It was unbearable though, watching his girls lining up to hurt each other like this. In less than a minute the starter would step forward, and then, three minutes after that, all of their lives would be changed. There was an intimate distance at which Kate and Zoe had held each other for more than a decade, now calling it friendship and now calling it rivalry but always keeping each other less than a finished sentence, less than a ragged breath, less than a wheel-length away. This final race was the knife that would cut that link between them and send them falling into their separate lives.

  If he was honest with himself, the reason he had come up here to sit on his own in the stands was not that he was afraid of giving in to the temptation to coach Zoe to win. It was because he was finding it harder and harder to resist the impulse to go down to the start line and beg the two of them not to race at all. You’re thirty-two, he wanted to tell them, so why not give it up without killing each other first? Sooner or later you’ll both need to climb down from the Olympic heights and learn to walk quietly in the valleys with whatever remains of your strength.

  He hated himself for the part he’d played in bringing this final confrontation forward. He’d done it to protect them from the media, but now he wished he’d played it differently. He raised his hands helplessly, wishing he knew how to make the signal that would make them look across at each other on the start line and understand all this for themselves. A cyclonic motion, perhaps, but in the anticlockwise direction, meaning, Please, when the whistle goes, forget everything I ever told you.

  As the starter counted the seconds down from ten and the start line tension came into the bodies of his two athletes, his arms slowly dropped to his sides. He was the best coach he knew. He had nothing else in his life, and his focus was perfect and absolute. He knew everything there was to know about making human beings go quicker, but nothing at all about how to make them stop.

  He fell back down into his seat as the whistle blew. It didn’t surprise him at all that Zoe and Kate both did exactly what they should have done, going hard off the line. Because Kate had anticipated her quick start, Zoe failed to open up a gap on her, and by the time they came out of the first bend, Kate was tucked into her wake. With the pace high, Zoe was doing all the work, and with each meter they raced, she was conceding the energy she’d conserved in the first two races. She swerved across the track from the well up to the high side and back, trying to expose Kate to some air resistance. Kate responded well, matching every twist of direction that Zoe made.

  As they entered the second lap, Tom watched with his heart hammering. His riders were at full speed now, swerving and ducking at thirty-five miles per hour with Kate’s front wheel six inches from Zoe’s back wheel as Zoe tried desperately to shake her off. Another lap of this and Zoe’s legs would be blown, leaving Kate to pick her moment to pop out of her slipstream and ride past her. If Zoe couldn’t drop Kate from her wind shadow very soon, then she would have to slow the race down to the speed at which the slipstream wasn’t an advantage.

  Even before it happened, Tom saw the risk. He rose to his feet again and his hands went up to his mouth. He watched Zoe signaling, by the relaxation of her shoulders and the slight lifting of her head, that she was slowing down. Either Kate didn’t see it or she decided Zoe was faking, because Kate didn’t slow or turn. At close to full speed, at the high side of the track, her front wheel made contact with Zoe’s back wheel. Zoe’s bike twitched and sent her into a high-speed judder, but she managed to control it. Kate was less fortunate. Her steering twisted and sent her over with her feet still locked into the pedals. She skidded along the smooth boards on her side, her bike still attached to her. She came to a stop in the well of the track, screaming with shock and distress. In less than a second, everything was over.

  Tom watched as Zoe slowed and looked back at her fallen rival. Kate had already picked herself up and was standing helplessly with her bike, gazing after Zoe. Zoe had slowed to a crawl now, craning her head back to look. Tom felt a wave of disgust. It was one thing to win by a stroke of luck—that was how it went in racing—but she didn’t have to gloat. She should just quietly ride for the line now.

  While he watched, Kate slowly raised her arm and gave the thumbs-up. Tom’s eyes filled with tears. All of her dreams ended by a crash—the worst way to lose a race—and here she was, five seconds later, accepting it and telling Zoe she was okay. As his heart rate began to wind down, Tom sighed. This was the reason Kate was going to be okay in whatever afterlife awaited her, while victory would only postpone Zoe’s disintegration.

  He began the painful walk down the stairs to console Kate and congratulate Zoe.

  “Come on!”

  Zoe’s shout echoed through the velodrome. Tom looked up.

  Zoe shouted again, “Get back on!”

  He saw Kate’s confusion. “What?”

  “There’s still a lap left, you lazy cow! You can stop when this is over!”

  Kate hesitated. Her gloves were already off and discarded at the side of the track. She shouted, “Are you serious?”

  Zoe laughed. “Yeah. Are you?”

  Tom froze on the steps. Was Zoe actually waiting for Kate? He couldn’t allow himself to believe it. He almost wished that Kate wasn’t spinning the wheels of her bike to check that nothing was bent, and climbing back over the frame, and clicking a foot into the pedal. He couldn’t bear to watch Zoe sprinting away from her before she drew level, or to witness the despair replacing the tentative hope in Kate’s body language as she realized it had been a cruel trick.

  It wasn’t. As Kate brought her bike up to speed and clicked her second foot into its pedal, Zoe was still waiting for her, rolling at the slowest possible speed at which she could stay upright. By the time the two riders were abreast, they were coming into the straight that would lead them into the final lap. He watched as Kate and Zoe looked across at each other. They looked for a long time and then they looked forward again. Without anything being said, they accelerated, side by side, and hit the line together. The bell sounded and both of them stood up on the pedals and launched the sprint.

  There were no tactics now, just a flat-out blast for the finish. Kate squeezed into the inside and Zoe rode alongside her, both riders with their heads down, rocking their bikes from side to side as they wound up to an impossible speed. Beneath their visors their mouths gaped for air and the agony of the effort was written in the lines their jaws made. As they came around the first bend of the last lap, Kate edged ahead by a few inches, but Zoe pulled it back on the straight and went into the final bend half a bike-length ahead. The inside line helped Kate to bring herself back, and as the two riders entered the finishing straight, there was nothing between them. They flew down the last fifty meters in a blur of speed, matching each other pedal stroke for pedal stroke and breath for breath, and as they threw their bikes forward in the last desperate lunge for the line, they looked across at each other to see which one of them had taken it.

  Postoperative recovery room,

  North Manchester General Hospital, 1:15 p.m.

  It had been a very quick operation—three strokes of the scalpel, then the deft withdrawal of the Hickman line. Almost before Jack had rea
lized the surgeons had begun, the porters had arrived to wheel Sophie next door.

  Here, the quiet and the stillness destabilized him. The nurses were gone for the moment; they’d left him alone with Sophie. The monitoring machines were set on mute. He asked the question with his eyes, but Sophie’s breathing was so shallow that there was no answering movement of her chest. The rise and fall of it was his only pendulum, and without it this was a room outside time. He held her hand. Through the glass pane in the door he could see people moving in the corridor, arriving for their shifts, complying with visiting hours, oscillating according to their natural frequencies.

  Jack whispered, “Sophie?”

  He stroked her face. There was a stillness in it beyond simple motionlessness. This is what frightened him more than anything. It looked like Sophie, and yet the anaesthesia had stilled even the echo of character that her face showed in sleep. These were Sophie’s features, faithfully reproduced in their superficial aspects but unmoored from their animating spirit.

  Very lifelike was the phrase that flashed into Jack’s mind. He tried to unthink it, but you couldn’t do that.

  The air was neutralized for humidity and temperature-controlled at 19.5 degrees Celsius. It was recycled air from wide-mouthed stainless steel ducts and it smelled of other people’s tragedies. Jack closed his eyes and prayed.

  Please don’t take her, he said.

  He waited. And then, when there was no answer either in the vocalizations of his mind or in the neutral pressure of Sophie’s hand on his, and since Sophie’s features were as still as a pool from which the wider sea had ebbed, he said, If you let Sophie live, I will live for her from now on. I will hang up my bike. I will make her life my only gold.

  This was the deal that Jack tried to make with the universe. He was thirty-two. He realized that this moment, with Sophie’s hand in his, in this little room, had been with him from the start. It had been with him, gnawing away at the underside of his small talk, when he stood in his boxer shorts while the tailor first fitted him for the Athens Olympics. It had been with him, growing in definition in his mind’s eye, while he held his head in his hands in the Beijing hotel.

  He’d always been in this room.

  He opened his eyes, hoping to see some movement, but Sophie was perfectly still.

  National Cycling Centre, Stuart Street, Manchester, 1:17 p.m.

  Tom climbed up to the control room with the three race officials to look at the image from the photo-finish camera. The officials clustered around the monitor while the control room technician downloaded the picture. Tom wasn’t ready to look. He sat on the far side of the little room, looking down on the track through the floor-to-ceiling safety-glass windows. The floodlights were off and Zoe and Kate were arm in arm in the gloom, walking around the track with their shoes and socks off, warming down. As he watched, they looked up at the control room. He waved, but they couldn’t see him. The control room glass was one-way.

  He put a call through to Jack and got his voicemail. He was about to leave a message when the technician called over that the image was ready to view. Tom stood, walked the five steps to the screen, and made himself look.

  Ten thousand times per second the camera had taken the narrowest cross section of the finish line, giving ten thousand microscopically thin vertical lines. The software had arranged the lines side by side, from left to right, in the order in which they had been taken. Tom squinted at the screen. You had to remind yourself that what you were seeing was the opposite of a normal photo, where space was frozen in time. This was an image created for use by professionals of the fractured second. It showed time frozen in space and it lent the strangest distortions to the bodies of the two athletes he knew so well. The quality of relative stillness translated well from space into time, and so their arms and their faces were faithfully reproduced, but their legs, which had been spinning so fast, were thinned at the top of the pedal stroke where they had been traveling faster than the bike, and thickened on the back stroke. The wheels of the bikes were neat circles, but the spokes described eerie parabolas from the hubs to the rims.

  It spooked Tom to see his girls smeared across time like this. This was how he had lost out on a medal in ’68. Back then they had used real film, continuously exposed as it was dragged across a thin vertical slit. The old machine had stamped lines on the image at intervals of one-tenth of a second. That was what he had lost by: one-tenth of a second, one-eighth of an inch of time. That was the thinnest they could dice it, back in the day, and anything closer was called a tie. In those days they still left a fraction of a second for the idea that what God had joined together, no man should split apart.

  He looked at Zoe’s face, perfectly at peace as she crossed the line, and he was proud of her. It seemed to him that whatever happened on the line, she had won the race of her life. It was a symptom of this fallen age that the three race officials were asking the technician to superimpose a vertical red line that intersected the leading edge of Kate’s front wheel and making him zoom in and pointing excitedly at the tiniest sliver of pale light between the fine red line and the foremost extremity of Zoe’s front wheel.

  “Shit,” Tom said quietly.

  The senior race official turned to him. “Is there a problem?”

  Tom opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head. It was useless to explain that for most of his life there had been no technology in the world that could have separated his two girls today. It was impossible to express his outrage that they had atomized the second to the point where Zoe could lose by a thousandth of it.

  “There’s no problem,” he said finally.

  “I’m sorry,” said the senior official. “Do you want me to tell them?”

  Tom shook his head. “No, it’s on me.”

  The walk back down the steps to the track was long, with his knees protesting every movement. Zoe and Kate stood at the foot of the stairs, watching as he approached. He worked to keep his face neutral, and when he reached them, he took Kate’s hand in his right and Zoe’s in his left.

  “Kate won,” he said. “By one-thousandth of a second.”

  He held their hands tightly for a moment, then released them. They turned to each other and stood in silence while the information began its slow metamorphosis into understanding.

  He said, “You can look at the photo if you like.”

  Zoe didn’t take her eyes from Kate’s. “No, it’s okay. Well done.”

  Tears welled in Kate’s eyes. She shook her head and put her hands to her mouth. “Let’s race again.”

  Zoe shrugged, helpless.

  Kate turned to Tom. “Can we do it again? Just the last race.”

  “You know we can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Zoe,” said Kate. “I’m so sorry.”

  Zoe didn’t react. It worried Tom, the way she stood there with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes unfocused.

  He put a hand on her arm. “Come on,” he said gently. “Let’s talk.”

  She shouldered him away. “There’s nothing to talk about, is there? That’s why they paint a finish line on the track, so you know when it’s over.”

  He sighed and dropped his head. He had to find the strength to be her coach now, to provide the simple minute-by-minute instructions she would need to get through the next hour and the shitty days that would follow.

  “Go and get a shower. Then get dressed and come and see me in my office. Okay?”

  She sniffed and looked down at the raw Olympic tattoo on her forearm. “Okay,” she said finally. She turned to Kate and tilted her head slightly. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  Kate took her hands. “Zoe …”

  They hugged hard, almost painfully, until Zoe broke it off and turned to walk to the dressing rooms. Tom watched her go, then he flipped down a seat for himself and indicated to Kate to take the one beside him.

  “How are you feeling?” he said.

  She looked at the ground. “Like shit.”

&nb
sp; “That’s about right, I’d say. You’re a good girl, Kate, but she didn’t let you win. She only let you race.”

  “I shouldn’t have got up again. I shouldn’t have let her bring me back in.”

  “So why did you get up?”

  Her face crumpled and her voice came out in a thin, strangled whisper. “Because I’ve tried so hard, Tom. I wanted to win. I wanted to go to the Olympics.”

  “And now you will. Unless you break three legs or someone pops up from nowhere in the next three months who’s anything like as quick as you, then you’ll be going to London. Think about that for a moment, will you?”

  Kate held her head. “I’m trying. But when I get there, I’m just going to be thinking, Zoe should be here, not me.”

  He put an arm around her. “Zoe is where Zoe is. If she hadn’t let you back in after that crash, she’d have lost more than the race, and I think she knows it.”

  “I still feel like crap.”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “You’ll handle it, Kate. It’s about time you caught a break.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, watching the maintenance crew buffing the track.

  Tom took a deep lungful of air and exhaled it slowly. “Kate?” he said carefully.

  She looked at him warily, sensing the change of register. “Yes?”