“So?”
“I haven’t raced.”
“Injured?”
She looked at the ground. “My dad died. Sorry.”
“And you thought screwing up your racing career might bring him back?”
She looked up at him again, shocked.
“We tell it like it is here, Kate. When you’re as good as you are, so long as your legs are still attached, you bloody well keep riding. Okay?”
She blushed even deeper. “Sorry.”
Tom smiled. “I’m sorry for your loss. Do you have all your kit with you?”
She came up to the reception desk and showed him her kit bag. “I think so. I mean I’ve just brought what I used to race in. I don’t know if I’ve got the right stuff.”
Tom looked at her. “You really don’t, do you?”
“Don’t what?”
“Know if you’ve got the right stuff.”
She stood there and let her arms drop to her sides. She was perfectly flustered now.
Tom leaned back in his chair. “You’re alright, Kate Meadows. We’ll get you back on track. Go through, and the coach will be with you at nine.”
He checked in the other kids as they arrived. At nine o’clock, when all of them except Jack Argall had showed up, he closed the reception desk and went through into the velodrome to observe how his new prospects interacted with each other in the half-light.
They were eleven altogether, six girls and five boys. The boys sat together high in the stands, slouching in the flip chairs and talking about Keats and fine bone china, or whatever it was that boys talked about when they were about to spend eight hours racing each other. They looked like standard athletic models with few moving parts. Zoe stood with her feet shoulder-width apart and watched them from the brightest place trackside, where everyone could see her. She laid out her kit across the best seats and moved as if she owned the place. Tom watched her watching the other girls warm up.
Four of them were friends from the English junior circuit: Clara, Penny, Jess, and Sam. Tom had been to watch all of them compete. They sat together on the floor in the technical area, laughing and helping each other with their stretches.
Tom watched Zoe analyzing their form. Clara was bulky, a weight lifter on a bike. She would be unbeatably powerful right up until the moment when her muscles filed a polite request for oxygen. Tom could see Zoe dismissing her with her eyes. Penny was harder to call. She was helping Clara to stretch, one hand on the small of her back while Clara touched her toes. Penny’s arm on Clara’s back was skinny, scrawny even. She’d clearly been training for long distance; her body fat looked close to zero and her muscle mass was right down. She looked more like a triathlete than a track star. Her face was sharp, and when she laughed at something Clara said, her gums looked shrunken. It was a fine balance—one tiny fraction too much training could do it—between being acutely fit and chronically ill. Penny didn’t look as if she was getting it right. Zoe seemed to relax.
Jess and Sam were sitting face-to-face with the soles of their feet touching, gripping each other’s wrists for leverage and working together to stretch their backs alternately. Jess was pretty, her hair dyed with crimson streaks. She’d had a tattoo done on her lower back, a stylized sun with a face and a mane of sunbeams. Each time she stretched, the sun rose over the waistband of her track pants. She had a good back and she stretched like a gymnast, springy and resilient. But maybe she was too slight to impose her will, physically, on a contested situation. When a narrow window opened up just ahead of you on the track, you needed to have the power to go instantly to another level and leap through that gap before it closed. Jess looked as if she had good power, but maybe she didn’t have that jump. Studying her, Tom gave her fifty-fifty, and when he looked back at Zoe he could see she was curious too.
He saw her attention shift onto Sam, but it was obvious that Sam didn’t have it. She had a stiffness in her back when she stretched and a brittleness in the way she held her shoulders that made Tom wonder if she was carrying an injury. She wasn’t smiling, and Tom could tell she was feeling the superior force flowing through Jess’s body as they stretched together. Perhaps she was suddenly wondering what she was doing there.
That only left Kate. Tom watched Zoe homing in on her. While the other girls were wearing their club warm-up kits or their champion’s colors, Kate wore a plain yellow tracksuit, a hooded civilian number from Adidas. It had oversized draw-cords around the waist and the hood. She looked around the velodrome, as excited as Zoe had been but without the sense to hide it. Everything about her body language was giving away a psychological advantage to anyone who could be bothered to watch.
Tom saw Zoe stand as Kate approached her.
Kate smiled, stopped, and left a space for Zoe to come the rest of the way if she wanted to. Some people left those careful empty spaces for others, just the right shape to accommodate them. These people, Tom knew, were rarely champions.
He watched as Zoe smiled back, coldly, then cut Kate down with her eyes and turned away.
Tom wished she wasn’t right, but he couldn’t argue with her conclusion. Kate’s results were the best of any of the girls on the program, but the fact was that she was the kind of girl who would stop training when her dad died. Zoe was different. She struck Tom as the kind of girl who, if her family ever got in between her and training, would kill them herself.
It didn’t matter if Kate beat her this week. Bit by bit, race by race, year by year, a girl like Zoe would stay afloat in the sport while Kate slowly sank under the weight of real life. Tom had seen it a hundred times.
It was ten past nine, and Tom was about to go trackside and introduce himself to the prospects when a boy jumped the turnstiles and headed for the track. He was six foot. He was all muscle. He wore a T-shirt that said The Exploited. He had blue jeans, wild black curly hair, and headphones hanging round his neck.
Also, the kid looked quick. He looked wind tunnel–tested. He ran down the steps from the entrance like a rock star running into a stadium. He shouted, “Hello! Hello!” He dropped his kit bag. He stood on the track in the middle of the start line, clapped his hands, and all the kids went quiet.
Tom hung back, fascinated.
“All right, everyone! Gather round! My name’s Jack Argall and I’m the assistant coach. Thomas Voss is indisposed, and he’s asked me to take charge. I will be taking you through various warm-up exercises and assessing your suitability for each of the track disciplines. Right, so if I could have the lads in a line here … that’s right … and the lasses in a line here … thanks, that’s lovely … and if I could have you all jogging on the spot for two minutes, just to get the circulation going.”
Tom watched openmouthed as the kid marshaled the riders into lines, chivvying them in a thick Scotch accent.
The riders all jogged on the spot. Even Zoe stalked out onto the track and warmed up. Jack applauded.
“That’s very nice, very nice indeed! Okay, so now if I could have the lads jogging around the track in an anticlockwise fashion … thanks … that’s very nice … and if I could have the lasses do some upper-body stretches for me, hands clasped behind your backs and extend your chests forwards … thanks, that’s very good. A really good stretch now, ladies. The ones of you who are most flexible will be given the quickest bikes.”
The girls laughed but they pushed their arms back and their chests out. Kate strained till her veins bulged. The boys jogged back round to the start line.
“Right, lads!” Jack said. “You can give me another lap, but this time jogging backwards. And lasses, I want you to stand with your feet a shoulder-width apart and touch your toes. Ah yes, that’s very nice. Show me how low you can go.”
Watching from high in the stands, Tom couldn’t help laughing. The boys were struggling to run backwards on the track, with the angle of it. They stumbled. There was swearing. The girls had their bums in the air and their hands on the ground.
“Right, gentlemen,” Jack shouted. “I want you
to carry on jogging backwards, only now I want you to slap your thigh with the palm of the opposite hand on every second step, and on every eighth step I want you to slap the back of your neck with both hands. The one who’s best at it, I will be reporting to the coach that he has the best coordination.”
The boys were terrible. There were slaps and falls and swearing echoing through the velodrome. The girls started laughing and stood up from their stretching to watch the boys. On the far side of the track the boys were losing it. It was falling into chaos.
Jack grinned at the girls. “Now, ladies, if I could have your kind attention, I have a terrible admission. My name really is Jack Argall, but Thomas Voss didn’t ask me to do this. I’m just one of you. I have no idea where Thomas Voss is, to tell the truth. So I would just like to take this opportunity to inform you girls that I am the reigning Scottish National Champion on a push bike, that these are my real biceps, that I am currently single, that all of you are extremely beautiful and stretchy, and that at this exact moment I’m the only male athlete in the building who isn’t looking like an arse and doing the backwards Bavarian slap dance. I thank you.”
He bowed. From the waist. With a flourish.
There was silence from everyone. Kate started laughing, and Jack winked at her. It turned into a coughing fit, and Jack touched her on the elbow. He said, “I’m sorry, are you okay?” Kate nodded at him, tears streaming.
The boys came back to the start line. They were seeing the funny side. They swore at Jack, and he put up high fives. Everyone was laughing now, or nearly everyone. Zoe stepped up to Jack. She was as tall as him. She looked him in the eyes. Her face was an inch from his, and she was shaking. The laughter stopped.
Zoe said, “Who. The fuck. Are you?”
Jack spread his hands wide. “Aw, come on! I was just playing!”
“Get a good look at us, did you? How was it?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, very pretty …”
Zoe punched him in the gut. She put her full weight behind it. It caught him unawares, and he staggered and bent double. “Now,” she said. “Look at me differently.”
Jack got his balance back. He smiled. He held up a placatory hand. “Please …”
Zoe slapped him across the face, and the sound echoed around the velodrome. Tom felt it. He physically felt the sting and felt the breath catch in his chest.
Jack was rubbing his face.
“Remember that feeling,” Zoe said quietly.
All the kids stared at her in the half darkness. Her eyes were wild. Her face was white. The echoes took too long to die away.
“The fuck are you all looking at?” Zoe shouted. “Is this not serious for you? This isn’t Girl Guides. This isn’t something I do on Saturdays so my mother can have the house free to tidy.”
As they stood in shocked silence, Tom took his phone and made a quick call to the velodrome’s control room. The floodlights powered up from orange to white. The shadows shrank, the velodrome filled with light, and the prospects stood caught in it and blinking.
Tom walked calmly down to the track, taking some weight off his knees on the handrail. He looked them all in the eye.
“Okay, guys,” he said. “My fault entirely, I reckon. Jack, you’re a dick. Are you injured?”
Jack rubbed his face. “No.”
Tom said, “Zoe, you’re a menace. Are you sorry?”
She looked straight at Jack and shook her head.
“Well, can I rephrase? Zoe, if we all agree that Jack’s behavior was out of order and we were wrong to laugh, will you agree to take out your aggression on the track?”
She shrugged. She made a face that could be read both ways. Tom was old enough to take that, while it was on the table.
“Well okay then.” He held up his hands. “Look, I’m Tom Voss. I’m not proud of what happened just now. I play the receptionist trick every year. I’m a decent coach but I only get three days to sort out which of you might cut it internationally, so I go undercover and learn the psychology. I think I’ve learned all I need. Now, let’s ride, shall we?”
The prospects smiled. They couldn’t help it. Their bodies changed. From standing stiff, they loosened. Their knees bent slightly, their fingers flexed. Balance shifted from heels to balls of feet. Calves tightened and breath quickened.
Tom grinned back at them. “Christ, you lot are like bloody wolves! Never let it be said you bastards aren’t keen.”
He issued bikes. They were pretty basic. The frames were heavy steel with dents. He let them fine-tune the bikes to size and had each of them write their name on their machine, in marker pen on masking tape stuck to the top tube. He watched them peel off the last rider’s name.
He told them to strip down to their race kits and warm up for half an hour. He had them do slow laps, each of them watching the others, circling like ships in a whirlpool.
Tom observed as they orbited him. He analyzed their form and after a dozen laps he already knew which three of them would make it to the highest level. Under these shadowless arc lights he saw that Zoe, Kate, and Jack would graduate to the big events. They would be the ones to race one-on-one around the banked wooden curves of the world’s velodromes—these gladiators’ arenas, encircled by the roaring crowd, where human speed and human loneliness were contained so that they might be witnessed. They would become the most powerful athletes on earth, propelling their silent machines to speeds where the air started to scream.
In the velodrome their sprints would last for less than two minutes, but the making of those minutes had begun before his eyes. They would come up in the sport together, have these angry confrontations together, love and loathe and make up together, and peak together in their late twenties and early thirties. They would match each other breath for burning breath, pedal stroke for pedal stroke at the speed of a swooping bird, and win or lose by millimeters. The tiniest error—the lightest touch of wheel on wheel—and bones and bikes would shatter. They would wear no protective armor, only aerodynamic suits that showed off every lean and sculpted muscle. They would wear mirrored visors, hiding their eyes. They would become unknowable. Their minds as they raced would transcend. They would be aware of the swirling vortices of the rival’s slipstream; of the precise burn in every particular fibrous strand of each muscle group; of the constantly fluctuating parameters of heat, humidity, and surface texture that determined the limits of tire adhesion on each square centimeter of the track. They would be aware of the hope they were chasing and of the failure that stalked them, they would be aware of their future and their past, and they would be aware of every pixel of the moment, from the knots in the boards of the track all the way up to the plaits of the little girl in a blue checked dress, in row thirty-eight, catching her breath as she realized she wanted to be just like them. The jurisdiction of the psyche in their races would remain unmapped by literature or science. More would be known about the minds of hunting sharks.
The best Tom could do for these kids was to coach them to Olympian level, where they rode to destroy each other, once every four years and for less than two minutes each time, on the greatest of the world’s stages. They would ride for the thousands roaring in the stands and the three billion watching at home. The winners would receive their own childhood dreams of glory, smelted into a disk and presented back to them on a ribbon. The medal itself would be sixty millimeters across, three millimeters thick, made of silver and gilded with six grams of pure gold. Tom remembered when the gold medal used to be solid—but these days, what was?
Tom watched as the warm-up period ended. He saw Kate’s latent strength and Zoe’s perfect flow and Jack’s incandescent energy. They were looking over at him now, excitedly, waiting for his signal that would end the warm-up and start the action.
He held the starting whistle between his lips. When he gave the signal, these people’s lives would change in ways they couldn’t yet know. It would be harder for them than they realized, because outside those exalted two minutes o
f each race, they were condemned to be ordinary people burdened with minds and bodies and human sentimental attachments that were never designed to accelerate to such velocities. They would go through agonies of decompression, like divers returning too quickly from the deep. They would have this one certain, strange, and mercurial quality, these unknowable people with their eyes hidden behind visors: at exactly the moment they crossed the finish line, they would become human beings just like anyone else.
Tom hesitated. He held the whistle ready, but he didn’t have the heart to blow it.
And then Kate swooped down from the high side of the track and brought her bike to a stop beside him. She took off her helmet and beamed at him, and Tom felt his heart melt. He frowned back at her sparkling blue eyes and her cheeks pink from the warm-up.
“What?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
She gave him the middle finger. “Can we bloody race yet, or what?” she said.
He laughed. All her hesitation and her awkwardness were gone. She was a different girl on the bike. This was what you did on the track, for better or worse—you raced yourself. And for a while at least, you could win.
“Race?” said Tom. “Ah, so that’s what you’re here for.”
He blew the whistle and called the riders in to him.
Now Tom picked his head up off the desk and looked at the email again.
You will need to have a word with Zoe and Kate ahead of the IOC announcement.
There was no sense whinging about it. It was on him, and he wasn’t going to shirk it. If you were honest, you called these heartbreaks in to you the moment you blew that whistle.
Forty-sixth floor, Beetham Tower, Manchester
Zoe woke on the dark sheets of her own bed in the first wash of the pale April light. It was always like this. The slightest hint of dawn snapped her eyes open and sent adrenaline surging through her limbs. Immobility was impossible. You couldn’t train your body up to this pitch and also require it to lie still, however nice that would be.