On balance he was not guilty. He’d made a fair job of his life, that’s how you had to look at it. After his own Olympics he could have stayed in Oz and had people buy him drinks for a few years, but he hadn’t done that. He’d made a good decision, flown out here to try a new life as a coach. He’d started a family too, and it hadn’t worked out, but he’d had this idea that if he could help other kids, it would make up for the mess he’d made with his own.
He couldn’t even remember much about his boy now. Maybe it was a good sign. At some point all the okay stuff you did had to start canceling out the bad things, even the memories.
He’d got into coaching with the juniors, and when BMX came along in the eighties he’d had a lot of success. BMX was Wacky Races—all those kids with their full-face helmets and their legs hammering like tiny steam pistons. He let the races take care of themselves and he worked with the kids between competitions to find out where they were coming from, so he could help them be mentally stronger. A kid’s psyche was a hundred times more powerful than an adult’s. If you could work out which kids were racing away from their past and which were racing towards their future, then you unlocked a lot of power.
When it came to race day, his kids were always on their game and they won every bloody trophy in sight. He loved those furious little shrimps who only came up to his waist. He especially adored the angry kids. You helped them to win enough times, and bit by bit their grin on the podium was a little bit less fuck you, and a little bit more hey, I’m secretly enjoying this. Maybe he was still waiting for that moment to arrive with Zoe, but he was patient and he knew he’d live to see the day she smiled an uncomplicated smile.
He’d done an okay job with his life. If you put it all on the scales—your own attempt at parenthood on the one side, and all the kids you’d helped on the other—then who could say where the bastard thing would balance? You just did your best with every hour—that’s all you could do.
He poured the boiling water and stirred up a tea. Squinting at the clock on the cooker, he made out that it was just before nine p.m. He was no fool. He was going to give his dream half an hour to vacate the building before he risked sleep again. He sipped the tea and leaned against the kitchen counter. His knees hurt, but he didn’t dare sit down in case he couldn’t get up. He didn’t need the girls to have to rescue him again.
Still, wasn’t it a hell of a thing that they’d looked after him?
He’d always believed that the most important thing was the results. He’d imagined that the thing that would make him happiest would be seeing his athletes improve. After years of getting kids to the top of BMX, he’d been promoted to run the Elite Prospects Programme for British Cycling. The idea was to take the seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-olds with the best record on the track at national level, and see which of them had the stuff to go international. It was death or glory for those kids, and they ran the program out of the best venue they had, which was the National Cycling Centre at Manchester Velodrome. It was the big time for Tom. He got to pick the athletes he wanted to work with. Most often he picked girls. They tended to think harder about what they were doing than the guys ever did, and that suited Tom’s coaching style, which was more confidant than drill sergeant.
He’d picked his girls, and then he’d picked the best of the girls, and finally he’d dropped everyone else for Zoe and Kate, because he couldn’t think of anything more sensible to do with his life than to get those two to the top. He’d given his best years to them, and all he’d ever wanted was to see them achieve. But the truth was, Zoe’s four Olympic golds and all of Kate’s near misses didn’t mean half as much to him, now, as the fact that his two girls still believed in him even when all the evidence pointed to their coach’s being a decrepit old wreck.
Tom chucked the last of his tea in the sink and went back to lie down on his bed.
He felt good for once, he really did. Maybe the deal was that life had to break your body down before you could see it. Maybe there wasn’t any other racket in town except this one that brought you to your nadir and challenged you to build yourself back up from it, then showed you that what you’d done at least meant something to someone.
Tom laughed with his head on the pillow. He felt drowsy again, and he closed his eyes. He could almost see the rest of his life, and it looked pretty simple now. He’d get both his girls to the Olympics, he’d watch the best one win, and then he’d retire and take his knees back to Oz, maybe even buy the old house if it still stood. He’d drink red wine on the veranda and be at peace with all that had happened. You weren’t a finished man till you could look at your memories and be … not unmoved, but unafraid of them.
Cubicle 12, accident and emergency department,
North Manchester General Hospital
Kate squeezed Zoe’s knee. “I should get home,” she said. “Jack and Sophie will be wondering where I am.”
Zoe smiled. “Cool. Thanks for staying with me.”
“Will you be okay?”
Zoe looked at the slim, good-looking doctor who was carefully taping a sterile dressing over the graze on her arm.
“Yeah,” she said. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”
Headquarters of the International Olympic Committee,
Lausanne, Switzerland
In a sports administration unit on a high floor of a modernist office building, six middle-ranking officials were gathered around a midcentury burr walnut boardroom table. They were finalizing a small change to the rules governing the running of Olympic track cycling. It was nearly midnight, and they wanted to get it done and go home to their families. Tomorrow they would be reviewing modern pentathlon. There were half-empty cups of cold black coffee and half-empty cans of warm Diet Coke on the table. Subordinates were dispatched to vending machines. Clauses were redrafted. In the long corridor outside, the cleaners were vacuuming the carpets.
The officials were changing the rules for entry into the Olympics, to satisfy stakeholders in TV scheduling operations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The schedulers demanded that fewer riders should participate, because they wanted fewer heats and more finals in Olympic prime time. They needed this to satisfy secondary stakeholders—the advertising buyers in twelve hundred regional markets—who needed to deliver better value to their clients. The clients were squeezed because the bankers had sucked the marrow out of the money, so the customers had less to spend.
The officials agreed, therefore, that the competition in the velodrome would need to be accelerated. This was what had become of the world that children used to ride their slow bicycles through in careless arcs. Time had been restructured like bad debt. The long languid hour had been atomized. Manifestos were shrunk to memes and speeches were pressed into sound bites and heats were truncated into finals and it wasn’t the officials’ fault if the consequence of all this devaluation was that an old man would now have to choose between two riders who’d grown up with him, and a girl suspended between life and death would now feel that fragile cord unraveling.
The officials locked the revisions into their documents and stood up from the boardroom table. As they walked through the empty building, trading small talk about their families, lights on automatic detectors sensed their presence and flickered on with low, metallic popping sounds. On timing devices, they stayed illuminated after the stakeholders had passed, then clicked off in the order in which they had first been lit. It was as if another group of officials, silent and desirous of darkness, had stalked the first group through the building. The corridors became silent and still.
The officials took the lifts directly down into the underground parking facility. They climbed into the mannered black or silver-gray vehicles—Volkswagens, Audis, Volvos—that were available to middle-ranking administrators in the organization. Some of them played music, others preferred to drive in silence. If they thought about it at all on their short journeys home to their families, it would seem to them that they had only made a sm
all change to the competition. It wouldn’t even make the papers.
Cloud City, in high planetary orbit 60,000 km above
the surface of the gaseous planet Bespin, 49,100 light-years
from the Galactic Core, Outer Rim Territories,
Anoat Sector, grid coordinates K-18
Sophie was fighting Vader, with lightsabers, on the observation deck of Cloud City, the sun a livid purple as it set beyond the boiling gaseous clouds of the planet far below, when the alarm on her iPod went off. She woke slowly and killed the alarm. She ignored the weakness that weighed down her limbs. She knew what she had to do. This was a Jedi mission, and Jedis didn’t worry about being ill.
She switched on her battery-powered lightsaber. It glowed green. It was light enough to see by. She climbed out of bed and tiptoed into Mum and Dad’s room. She stood at the foot of their bed, with the lightsaber raised so she could see them. It was fine. They lay close together in sleep, with her head resting against his chest, as was the custom on Earth.
She tiptoed back to her bedroom and leaned the lightsaber against the wall. Kneeling, she pulled the Millennium Falcon out from under the bed. She carried it perfectly level, so that the vomit would not slosh and leak.
“Easy, kid,” whispered Han Solo. “One false move and this old crate will tip out of control.”
“Hey, this is nothing,” whispered Sophie. “This is just like maneuvering my land speeder back home.”
She piloted the Millennium Falcon down the stairs, evading hostile TIE fighter patrols and stepping on the edges of the treads so that space-time wouldn’t creak. In the kitchen she docked the Falcon on the draining board, removed the top section, and tipped out the vomit carefully into the sink. The smell was awful, but she was very used to it. She turned on the cold tap and sluiced water through the model until all the vomit was gone and the action figurines were clean again.
“Are you done yet, kid?” whispered Han Solo. “This water is cold.”
Chewbacca just made his mournful noise.
“Relax, won’t you, you big ball of fur?” whispered Sophie. “Do you want the Empire to be able to track us by our smell?”
When the Falcon was clean, she ran water into the sink and swirled it round and pressed the last few chunks through the apertures of the plughole. Then she toweled off the Falcon and the figurines, clipped the top section of the model on again, and navigated back up through the asteroid belt to Cloud City. Halfway up the stairs, where the gravity was exceptionally heavy, she got space-sick and had to rest for a few minutes. She sat down in the dark, feeling the burning in her chest and the nausea rising from her stomach. After a while it subsided, and she stood up and carried on.
When she reached the landing, she made a mistake. She moved too quickly in the dark, and she stumbled. The Millennium Falcon lurched and scraped against the wall.
“Watch it!” said Han Solo. “She may look like a heap of junk, but she’s the fastest smuggling ship in the galaxy.”
Sophie froze. From her parents’ bedroom, she heard someone stirring.
Dad’s voice came, heavy with sleep. “Is that you, big girl? Are you okay?”
Sophie tiptoed the last few steps into her bedroom, tucked the Falcon under the bed, and slipped under the duvet.
“Sophie?” called Dad. “Is everything alright?”
“I’m fine,” she called back. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s my girl,” said Dad.
She closed her eyes, made the jump to hyperspace, and headed back to Cloud City.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Flat 12, the Waterfront, Sport City, Manchester
Tom woke with the April light seeping through his curtains and the DJ on his clock radio announcing heavy traffic coming into town.
He stood, opened the curtains, and let the thin, bright sunlight wash over him. Yawning, he eased himself into his desk chair, taking the weight on his arms so as not to overstress his knees. He sparked up the software he would need to make Zoe and Kate’s training schedules for the week, and while it was loading he checked his email.
The first email was from the locksmith, about his broken front door. The second was from his boss at British Cycling.
Tom, it read, bad news. Late last night we received a memo from the IOC, who will shortly announce a change to the entry criteria for the London 2012 qualifiers. Only one athlete per Olympic nation will now be allowed to contest each sprint event in London. You will need to have a word with Zoe and Kate ahead of the IOC announcement, as obviously only one of them can now qualify.
The email continued with offers of support and an assurance of a forceful appeal against the IOC’s rule change—complete with a warning against investing too much hope in that appeal.
“Oh God,” he said quietly, and he read the email again.
He sighed and let his head sink slowly down to the desk.
He’d met the girls on the same day, in 1999, when he was running the Elite Prospects Programme. He’d been running two Prospects classes a year back then, at Manchester Velodrome, and at each event he’d had exactly three days to screen a dozen kids for talent. It wasn’t much time. He’d developed a trick over the years: on the first day he sat behind the front desk of the velodrome and pretended to be the receptionist. That way he could talk to the new kids as they arrived and check out their attitude when they weren’t on their best behavior. You got a better insight when you saw them that way.
Zoe arrived first on day one, nineteen years old, tall and fierce in a black puffa jacket, with black eyeliner and a shaved head. She didn’t smile, but hey. Tom respected a kid who showed up early. If you arrived first, you claimed the space. On the track, the others would be waiting for your move in the sprint. They’d be looking for that little twitch in your leg muscles that showed you were starting to put down the power. And by the time they were able to react, you’d already be that tiniest fraction ahead. By arriving one hour early at the velodrome, a kid could gain one-tenth of a second on the track. These were the ratios that victory was made of.
Zoe walked right up to the reception desk and dumped her kit bag on it.
Tom said, “Morning, miss. What can we do you for?”
Zoe looked past him and through the turnstiles that divided the entrance hall from the velodrome proper. She said, “Elite Prospects Programme.”
Tom grinned. “We’re a prospect, are we?”
She wasn’t in the mood to play. “Zoe Castle. I’m on the list. The coach is Thomas Voss.”
“Voss? Not that old guy?”
She rolled her eyes. “Look. Could you please just check on the list?”
Tom looked around on the desktop, affecting perplexity.
She said, “They probably haven’t put it out yet. I’m early.”
“Early for what?”
She obviously couldn’t handle it anymore. “Look, I told you. I’m here for the—”
“Well, let’s just hope your riding’s as quick as your temper, Miss Zoe Castle.”
She gave him a dark look, and Tom buzzed her through. She managed to get the handles of her kit bag stuck in the turnstile and fought with it for a moment before she got them free. Her fuse was completely blown. Tom watched her with the shocked-but-thrilled expression of a child who’d banged on the glass of the reptile house and woken up something furious.
He gave her a minute, then followed her through into the velodrome. He liked to watch how an athlete reacted to this space. Twelve thousand seats rose all the way to the domed roof, so high that the light from the glass panes didn’t penetrate down as far as track level. Wide square bars of sunlight fell through the huge void and faded to a fossil gray that only just put a shine on the varnish of the track. It was a bright winter morning, but down at track level it was twilight. Tom watched Zoe reach trackside and drop her kit bag near the start line. The echo rolled through the empty space.
She took off her shoes and socks and stepped out onto the track, testing the a
ngle beneath her bare feet. She walked a lap, anticlockwise. On the straights the angle was shallow, but on the turns the banking was so aggressive that her feet only just kept traction. She broke into a jog and then into a run, and Tom felt the hairs go up on his neck as she stretched out her arms and screamed into the echoing space.
Thirty minutes later, with Tom back at the reception desk, Kate showed up. She was wrapped against the cold in two fleeces and a bobble hat, her blond hair sticking out from under it.
She smiled at Tom. “Sorry. I’m too early aren’t I? I didn’t know how long it would take to walk from the hotel. I mean I can come back later if it’s … you know.”
She stopped, halfway between the revolving entrance door and the reception desk. Tom tilted his head and watched her.
“I’m here for the Elite Prospects Programme?” she said. “It is today, right? I got the letter from this place. But maybe there are lots of different sessions? I’m sorry to mess you around.”
Tom put his elbows on the table, cupped his chin in his hands, and smiled at Kate. “Deep breath.”
She took one and laughed. “Sorry.”
“Let’s start at the beginning. Were you issued at birth with a name, honey?”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Catherine Meadows. Kate.”
Tom blinked at his clipboard.
“Catherine Anne Meadows, North of England Champion on road and track at under-twelve, under-fourteen, under-sixteen, and under-eighteen. Our file is showing a tidy set of results for you, but nothing for the last six months. Did we forget to keep winning?”
She blushed. “No.”