“Noooooo!” screamed Luke in her earphones.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang and she heard the front door opening.
The vomit tried to come up again. Her concentration was gone. She took out her earphones and she was Sophie again, suddenly spent, in her upstairs bedroom on Earth. She hurried to the door, then stopped, sweating and jiggling from one foot to another. Dad was in the bathroom—she couldn’t be sick in there. And Mum and Zoe were downstairs, so she couldn’t run down and use the toilet under the stairs. She held her hands over her mouth as the nausea came in waves that rose higher and higher. She looked around the room, in panic, for something to be sick in. The wastepaper basket was wicker. Her pencil case was too small. She climbed on her bed and tried to unscrew the Death Star lamp shade, but she was too small to reach it properly, and the sick was coming now, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She stepped off the bed, knelt on the floor, and threw up into the Millennium Falcon. Hot sick flooded the underfloor smuggling compartments. It shorted out the Koensayr TLB power converter and rose to the waists of the action figurines of Skywalker, Kenobi, Solo, and Chewbacca. They said nothing, just stared at her in disgust. When it was finished, Sophie was so tired that she could hardly wipe away the long strand of mucus that trailed from her mouth.
Her head throbbed. She didn’t know what to do. Downstairs, Zoe and Mum were talking. She heard their voices getting louder.
Mum said, “I’ll just go up and see if she’s okay to leave.”
Sophie’s heart hammered. She grabbed the top section of the Millennium Falcon, snapped it onto the base, and shoved the model under her bed. The sick sloshed inside it, but it was contained. She jumped back into bed, pulled the covers over herself, and plugged her earphones back in.
“I will not fight you, Father,” said Luke.
Mum appeared in the doorway. She smiled at Sophie. “How are you feeling, darling?”
Sophie looked up from the screen. She shrugged. “Fine.”
“Need a hug?”
Sophie shook her head. She couldn’t let Mum come into the room and smell the sick. Sophie saw the hurt in Mum’s face. It was okay. Hurt was better than worried.
She pointed at the screen. “This is an important bit.”
Mum nodded. “Okay. I just came to see if you’re good for a while. Zoe wants me to go round to Tom’s with her.”
Sophie shrugged and looked at the screen.
“Look,” Mum said, “I can say no to her, if you need me.”
Sophie shook her head. “I’m fine. I’ll just watch this.”
Mum sighed. “Well, if you’re sure. Dad’s just in the bathroom if you need him.”
Sophie felt the sick rising again. Under the duvet, she clenched her fists to keep it down.
She said, “Just go, will you? You’re making me miss the best part.”
Mum looked at her for a moment, then turned and closed the door behind her. Sophie rolled out of bed, took the top off the Millennium Falcon, and threw up again. The sick rose to the middle of Skywalker’s chest. Sophie knelt on the floor, panting.
Remembering the look on her mum’s face made her want to cry, so she put the earphones back in.
“If you will not be turned, you will be destroyed!” said the Galactic Emperor.
She turned the DVD off.
The front door slammed, and from outside in the street she heard the snapping sounds of Mum and Zoe clipping into their pedals.
“Is she okay?” Zoe said.
“She’s just off in her own world these days,” Mum said. “It’s like she doesn’t want to connect with me at all.”
Their voices faded as they rode off down the street.
Sophie knelt with her arms crossed over her stomach. She watched Chewbacca, now up to his armpits in sick, looking at her accusingly.
If she hadn’t felt so bad, she’d have laughed. She could actually hear the Wookiee’s mournful cry.
Bathroom, flat 12, the Waterfront, Sport City, Manchester
Tom tried again but he still couldn’t get out of the bath. He needed warmth to get the necessary strength, and he needed strength to get out and get warm. It was like a shitty version of Catch-22 where you were stuck in a bath instead of a bomber squadron. It was too bloody realistic, was what it was, plus Zoe was going to show up in five minutes. Say what you liked about the girl, she was never late. As someone who made her living by arriving milliseconds ahead of the quickest people on Earth, Zoe seemed to find punctuality less challenging than civilians did.
He heaved up again on the edge of the tub, using all his upper body strength. A cold muscle tore in his shoulder and he splashed back down into the bath.
“Oh you treacherous little bastards,” he said to his left deltoid group.
He shivered, massaged the shoulder, and thought about the situation. When you analyzed it, his best-case now would be to die of hypothermia, nice and quick, before Zoe got here.
The doorbell went. He sighed, picked up his phone, and dialed Zoe. She answered after a couple of rings.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I might as well be up-front about this. I’m stuck in the bath. My knees are locked.”
“Shit. I mean, okay. Has someone got the key?”
“Christ, Zo. Who would I give a key to?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, you don’t, and that’s because you have a basic lack of curiosity about other people’s lives. Now Kate, on the other hand—”
“She’s with me.”
“What?”
“I thought if I brought her, you wouldn’t tell me off so much. Do you want us to break the door down?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Can you?”
“Hang on …”
He heard a splintering, then the sound of his front door slamming back against the doorstop.
“Yeah,” said Zoe. “That’ll be all the gym work you make us do.”
“Wait there,” said Tom. “Okay? Don’t come in yet.”
The only thing he could reach was the bubble bath, and he emptied out a third of the bottle and whipped up a froth so they wouldn’t see his bony body with his skin hanging loose from the depleted muscles, and his cock hiding from the cold.
He forced himself to relax. This was just a bad situation, that’s all. He could get them to pass him a towel, or something. A way could somehow be found to preserve everyone’s dignity as the girls helped him out of the bath. This was just one of those unfortunate moments in life, like going to dinner parties. You didn’t need to enjoy it to survive it.
They’d get it over with, him and the girls, and then they’d laugh about it afterwards over coffee. It wasn’t as if he was asking to have his arse wiped or anything. In fact that was exactly the line he would use to make the situation okay.
“You’d better come in,” he shouted.
He heard their footsteps in the hall and he looked towards the bathroom door, preparing the wry grin he was going to use when they entered. Then, on the far side of the bathroom, he saw his partial denture standing in three inches of Listerine in its glass on the side of the basin; the six front upper teeth, molded in acrylic and stained progressively over the years to match his real teeth. His stomach lurched. He pushed his tongue to the front of his palate and found the concavity there, with its twin surgical steel pegs that docked with the denture. He didn’t know what he’d been hoping for—that his teeth might be in two places at once, simultaneously there in the glass and here in his mouth. Somewhere in his mind his front teeth were scattered white seeds on the boards of a velodrome track. But Christ, he didn’t want that memory.
Seeing his falsies in the glass gave him a desperate strength, and he hauled up again on the sides of the bath. This time he was able to heave himself over the rim. He collapsed on the floor like wet meat and dragged himself to the basin, racing the girls’ footfalls as they came up the hallway. The gap in his teeth was a nakedness worse than nudity. He went faster, dragging
his useless legs across the lines in the linoleum, and he felt every tenth of every second cutting into him.
He heard the bathroom door opening just as his hand reached up and found his denture. He grabbed it, brought it up to his mouth, and fumbled it with his freezing hands. It bounced off the rim of the sink and spun through the air. It sank, with the discreet splash of a near-perfect dive, into the toilet bowl.
He said, “Oh … fuck you, life.”
Kate and Zoe found him collapsed on the blue linoleum floor, a slug trail of water stretching from the bath to his feet, his skin wrinkled from prolonged immersion and goose-bumped with cold, twisting his neck to look up at them, and wearing nothing but a toothless grin.
“You should see the state of the other guy,” he said. It was the best he could do in the circumstances.
Zoe put her hand to her mouth, between laughter and shock. Kate blinked at him over Zoe’s shoulder.
Tom sighed. “Well don’t just bloody stand there, admiring my birthday suit.”
Zoe took down his dressing gown from the peg on the back of the door and wrapped him in it. She knelt beside him and took his hand. Her eyes flicked around the room, looking for an explanation.
“Knees completely locked,” he said. “Trouble exiting the watery grave.”
“Should I call an ambulance?”
He grimaced. “Call the vet. Have me put down.”
The girls were shaken, he could see. He was a fixed point in their lives, and God knew they needed fixed points. He’d better get back to being one, but he was shivering so hard his legs were banging on the lino. He was flapping like a landed fish.
“Let’s all just relax,” he said. His mouth was John Wayne and his body was Flipper the dolphin.
Kate said, “Can I get you some blankets or something?”
He waved the idea away. You got to a certain age and kindnesses became these invisible flies to be swatted.
“What can we do?” Zoe said.
“You, sweetheart, can sell your luxury apartment. It’s not good for you. Come and live in my spare room, I’ll cook you three meals a day and keep you out of mischief.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you brought me here to say.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You can go now.”
Kate said, “Can we lift you?”
“Catherine, honey, I’m sixty-five kilos. You could bench-press me.”
She laughed. “Would you put some clothes on first?”
“Maybe. If you train hard.”
She made as if to punch him. “You’re an arsehole, you know that? I thought you’d had a heart attack or something. I was worried.”
“You kids worry at the drop of a hat. When I was your age it hadn’t been invented.”
Zoe squeezed his hand. “You’re frozen.” She looked at him, and he was amazed to realize that she actually cared about him. He felt the sting of tears and fought them back.
He coughed and looked away. “Let’s get me on my bloody feet, shall we?”
They got him upright, and he took most of the weight on his legs as they helped him into the living room and sat him in a chair by the simulated fire. Zoe brought the duvet from his bed, laid it over him, and turned the simulation on.
“Oh, the fucking glamour,” he said.
He started shivering harder then. The cold had hit him worse than he’d thought. Kate brought him a tea and he closed his hands around it, trying not to jitter the whole lot out of the mug.
He had to get on top of the situation.
“Okay, you two,” he said. “Different speech from the one I was planning. We have eighteen weeks till the first heats in London. Every minute counts, and look at me. I’m the oldest coach in the business, and this is the last Olympics for both of you. I have to advise you, as your coach, that you might want to think about working with a guy who has knees.”
He watched their faces to see how they reacted. But they turned away from him. They looked at each other. Something passed between Zoe and Kate and they looked back to him, their minds clearly made up.
“No,” Kate said. “You’re our coach. Who else would put up with us?”
Zoe nodded. Her face was calm. “Don’t bring it up again, please.”
Tom swallowed. “You’re both bloody idiots,” he said.
He walked painfully to the kitchen and did something he hadn’t done since Mexico ’68. He allowed exactly two tears to roll down his cheeks. Then he coughed, wiped his face dry, and went back to the living room.
“I’ll get both of you to the Olympics though,” he said. “And that’s a simple promise.”
“Yeah yeah,” said Zoe. “But what happened to your teeth?”
“Ask me again and you’ll be picking up your own.”
Kate laughed. “But seriously?”
“Seriously,” he said. “A nice girl like you doesn’t want to know how I lost my teeth.”
Back outside, Kate said, “I reckon he crashed.”
Zoe shook her head. “I reckon he had them removed so he could give better blow jobs.”
Kate winced. “You need help.”
Zoe showed her the middle finger. “You need an extra foot of pace in the finishing straight.”
“I’m quicker than you.”
“No you’re not.”
“I’m way quicker,” said Kate. “When I let you win sometimes in training, I’m just messing with your head.”
Zoe threw her a dark look. “When I let you mess with my head sometimes in training, I’m just winning.”
Their road bikes were chained to a railing outside Tom’s flat. It was dark, and the drizzle was colder now. They unlocked their machines, wiped rain off the saddles, and set the front and rear lights flashing. Kate strapped on a helmet and zipped up a yellow reflective vest; Zoe didn’t bother with that stuff.
Zoe grinned when Kate looked up.
“What?” Kate said.
“Race you to my new place.”
“What, your sky palace? Your high-rise Xanadu?”
“Go on, take the piss. If you had these cheekbones you’d be living up there yourself.”
“I’m not like you. I don’t need the affirmation.”
“God!” said Zoe. “If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be one of those chubby yet strangely judgmental columnists.”
“If you weren’t a bike racer you’d be working through your esteem issues in porn films, getting banged by men with calf tattoos.”
Zoe threw back her head and laughed the bright, carefree laugh she only used when a joke frightened her, but when she looked back at Kate her face was composed.
She said, “Yeah, but we’re racers, so let’s race.”
Kate didn’t see how she could say no. She’d overstepped, and now she had to give something.
“Okay,” she said. “If you really need to.”
“Ooooh!” said Zoe, twisting her toes with excitement and flapping her hands at her sides like a chick attempting flight.
Kate felt the tension released and she could only laugh—Zoe really did love to race. The stuff they couldn’t talk about was more unbearable by the day. At least they could duel it out on the bikes. It was more dangerous than fighting but safer than conversation.
“Let’s go,” Kate said.
“You know the way, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Just give me your apartment key, will you?”
“Why?”
“Well I’m going to get there before you, aren’t I? I can go up and put the kettle on, have a nice cup of tea waiting for you.”
“Save it for the bike.”
The two women clipped into their pedals and rode out into the cold black drizzle, streaks of red trailing from their taillights. By tacit agreement they took it easy for the first couple of minutes, keeping each other close as they wove through the slow traffic rolling into the city center. Then, as they rode past City of Manchester Stadium, they looked across at each other, nodded, and picked up the pace. Theirs was
the easy, loping style of riders who made no distinction between their skeletal systems and the bones of their bikes. They dug in and accelerated to race speed.
They had a clear run for a mile now, west along Ashton New Road into the city center, and although it was only one lane in each direction, there was a wide band of chevrons between the lanes. They raced along that median strip, side by side, one rider now dropping back to slipstream the other before accelerating into the lead. Twice they had to swerve into the margin of their lane to dodge oncoming motorbikes filtering in the other direction along the central strip. Zoe clipped a wing mirror, a horn blared out, and she screamed with excitement.
Zoe was happiest when she was street racing. It was dirty and it was fast and everything you could see wanted to kill you. The car drivers were either dozy and inattentive or alert and seething, and either affliction might make them suddenly swerve out and hit you. The white chevrons you rolled on were slick in the rain and slippery with spilled diesel and strewn with broken windscreen glass that could shred your tire and spill you into the path of traffic. If you fell you could only roll like a gymnast and hope you hit the curb before you hit a car. The rain got in your eyes and made the approaching headlights a blur of speed and glare, and in the midst of this chaos you were racing another human being at the top of her game, so your heart rate was on the rivet and the adrenaline blitzed your senses.
They went quicker. Zoe grinned into the wind. This was pure racing because there was no prize and no glory and no one knew who you were. There was no recognition and no fame. You could ride to a place beyond yourself. This was what she loved. When she raced like this, she couldn’t think about her life. You were intent on not making the tiniest error. You could ride so fast that the speed fed on itself and your wheels began to roar in the dark and your heart was going so hard that you thought one more beat per minute might kill you, and then suddenly you heard a motorbike and you looked round and you saw the white headlight behind you, and somehow you went even faster. Lights flashed past like laser bolts. You leaned and you wove and you accelerated. Street racing was the only part of her life where Zoe felt in control. It was the only time she could ride past a twenty-foot-high floodlit billboard of her own face and notice only the helpful illumination it gave to the road surface.