“Did you check the fuses?”
“Gosh, Ken, my Barbie brain did not entertain that option.”
“Sorry.”
Kate sighed. “No, it’s okay. I tried to fix the fuse but Sophie wouldn’t let me.” Straightaway, she realized how sulky that sounded.
“Our daughter is pretty strong for her age,” said Jack, “but I still reckon you should be able to kick her arse in a straight fight.”
She laughed. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just having a shitty time here.”
“I know. Thank you for looking after her. I miss you.”
Tears formed in her eyes. “Do you?”
“Oh my God,” he said, “are you kidding? If I had to choose between flying home to you and racing for gold here tomorrow, you know I’d be right back on that plane, don’t you?”
She sniffed, and wiped her eyes. “I’m not asking you to choose, idiot. I’m asking you to win.”
She heard his smile down the phone. “If I win, it’s only because I’m scared of what you’ll do to me if I don’t.”
“Come back home to me when you win gold, okay? Promise me you won’t stay out there with her.”
“Oh Christ,” he said. “You know you don’t even have to ask me that.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
Through the phone connection, the noise of the crowd peaked again.
“The second race is starting,” Jack shouted over the roar. “I’ll call you back, okay?”
“You think she’ll win it?”
“Yeah, absolutely. She made round one look like a Sunday ride.”
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you,” she said. “More than ice cream after training.”
“I love you too,” he said. “More than winning.”
She smiled. It was a perfect moment, and then she heard herself ruin it by saying, “Call me when the race is over, okay?”
She cringed at herself for being so needy, for putting this extra demand on him. Love wasn’t supposed to require constant reassurance. But then again, love wasn’t supposed to sit watching its own reflection in a dead TV while temptation rode a blazing path to glory.
Whatever Jack said back to her, the crowd drowned it out by chanting Zoe’s name.
She clicked the call off and let the phone fall softly to the washable, hard-wearing cushion covers. It wasn’t just that she’d stopped believing she would ever get to the Olympics. Now, if she was really honest with herself, she wasn’t even sure if she could win the kind of races you rode on kitchen chairs and sofas.
She stared with glazed eyes through the window. In the shimmering heat of their little back yard, a squirrel had found something in the bottom of a crisp packet.
She thought, Is this my life now?
She held her hands to her temples, more gently now, and timed the pulse in them against the second hand of the living room clock. It had been months since she’d trained hard but even now—even with this stress—her heart rate was sub-sixty. The second hand was back where it started, and she’d only counted fifty-two. Sometimes this was the only small victory in her days: this knowledge that she was fitter than time.
She looked up and saw that Sophie was mimicking her, trying to press her own tiny hands against the sides of her head. Kate laughed, and for the very first time Sophie laughed back.
Kate brimmed with euphoria.
“Oh my God, darling, you laughed!”
She dropped to her knees, picked Sophie up, and hugged her. Sophie grinned—a gummy, prototype grin that faltered and twitched lopsidedly and then shone again. She gurgled noisily, delighted with herself.
“Oh, you clever little thing!”
Wait till I tell Jack, she thought, and the thought was so light and so simple that she suddenly knew everything would be okay. What did it matter if Zoe won gold today or if Jack won gold tomorrow? Kneeling here in the untidy living room, holding her baby close and breathing the warm curdled scent of her, it was impossible to believe that anything mattered more than this. Who even cared that she had until recently been able to bring a bicycle up to forty miles per hour in the velodrome? It seemed absurd, now that real life had begun for her— with its real progression through these lovely milestones of mother-hood—that anyone even bothered to ride bicycles around endless oval tracks, or that anyone had had the odd idea of giving out gold to the one who could do it quickest. What good did it ever do anyone to ride themselves back to their point of origin?
God, she thought. I mean, where does that even get you?
After a minute, during which her heart beat forty-nine times, she smiled wearily.
“Oh, who am I kidding?” she said out loud, and Sophie looked up at the sound of her voice and produced an experimental expression, unique to her and perfectly equidistant between a laugh and a lament.
Eight years later, Monday, April 2, 2012
Detention deck 9 of the Imperial battle station colloquially known as the Death Star
The Rebel—the kid—resisted, so they locked her in a dark metal holding cell that smelled of machine oil. It was too much for her and she grinned and wriggled with excitement. She clung to her father. He held the kid’s skinny neck in the crook of one arm and squeezed with just enough pressure to restrain her or to convey silent affection, the way fathers will apply forces. The child squirmed to escape, giving the hug an aspect of violence: parenting didn’t seem to change much, wherever you went in the universe.
Two Imperial Stormtroopers stood guard over the pair. They exchanged a look, decided that the detainees were secure for now, and nodded. Leaving the detention block of the Death Star, they slipped discreetly out of a side door and emerged into the bright April light of the car park. They took off their helmets, shook out their hair, and bought two takeaway teas from a catering van. They were both thirty-two. They were athletes in real life. They had sponsorship deals and privacy issues with the press and body fat below four percent. In the world rankings for sprint cycling on the track, they were numbers one and two.
“The things I do for you,” Zoe said. “It’s far too hot in these.”
Strands of black hair were stuck to her forehead with sweat.
“I could do with a wee,” said Kate. “How are you meant to go in these costumes?”
“They weren’t designed by a woman.”
“The Death Star wasn’t designed by a woman. There’d be curtains. There’d be a crèche.”
Zoe shook her fists at imaginary higher-ups. “Yeah! Can’t you brass hats figure out some way of balancing motherhood with suppressing this damned Rebel Alliance?”
Kate shook her head sadly. “With insubordination like that, you’ll always be a Stormtrooper.”
“You’re wrong,” Zoe said. “They’ll recognize my zeal and my passion. They’ll promote me to the command of their battle station.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. They’ll take one look at your personality profile and make you a droid. Highly specialized but basically single.”
“Oh, get fucked,” said Zoe, smiling. “I wouldn’t swap for your life.”
A cold squall rippled the yellow-brown puddles of the film studio car park. On the far side, in a blue S.U.V. splashed with mud, the next group of ticket holders for the Star Wars Experience was already looking for a parking space. Kate checked her watch. The Death Star was theirs for another twenty minutes.
“We’d better get back in to Sophie,” she said.
The two women rushed their teas. Zoe looked at Kate over the rim of her cup.
“Be honest with me,” she said. “Is Sophie dying?”
“No,” Kate said, without hesitation. “The chemo’s going to work. I’m one hundred percent sure she’s going to get better.”
“Honestly?”
“We’ve proved it before. When she first got sick, the chemo worked and she went into remission. This is just a little relapse, and now the chemo will work again.”
Ther
e must have been doubt in Zoe’s face because Kate began pursing her lips and nodding her head determinedly. Zoe watched the certainty building, going up the dial and into the red. One hundred and five percent. One hundred and ten.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. But do you really think these day trips help? They don’t just exhaust her?”
Kate smiled. “Let me worry about that.”
“Let me ask, at least. As your friend.”
Kate’s smile stiffened. “Would I put her through all this if it wasn’t helping?”
Zoe touched her arm. “Of course not. But are you sure you don’t organize these trips slightly for your own peace of mind? Just so you can be doing everything in your power as a mother, I mean.”
“What, and you’re an expert on motherhood now?”
Zoe recoiled as though she’d been slapped. Slowly, she collected herself and looked down, twisting her hands together.
Kate faltered, then stepped forward and took her hand. “Shit, Zo, I’m sorry.”
Zoe turned her head aside. “No, no, you’re right. I was out of order. I know what you go through.”
Kate moved to put herself back in Zoe’s eye line, then held her gaze. “I know what you go through, too. This must make you think about Adam.”
“It’s fine,” said Zoe. “And you know what else? Your hair’s all fucked up.”
Kate laughed. “Oh, have I got helmet hair?”
“You think that’s bad? I’ve got Stormtrooper’s tits. I swear to God, these costumes are so tight …”
Under the relief, Zoe’s heart was still snagged on the wire of the fence her friend had put up between them. She wished she hadn’t brought up the subject. She needed to learn when to keep her mouth shut, which was nearly always.
She looked down into her Styrofoam cup, where an inch of tea— the same yellow-brown as the puddles—was reaching the temperature at which the warmth no longer disguised the bitterness. You could get tired of being unattached, of having no partner to undertake patiently the task of winnowing your days from your demons and showing you which was which. You could get to hoping for a companion of your own—and yes, even a child—despite the overwhelming evidence that children too were bottomless, echoing wells of need into which exhausted women like this one, her best friend Kate, endlessly dropped brave little pebbles of certainty and anxiously listened for a splash that never came.
“We really should get back to the Death Star,” Kate said, pulling Zoe back from miles away.
“Hmm?”
Kate pulled her Stormtrooper helmet back on, and her voice was changed to a metallic rasp by the modulator built into the face guard. “The Death Star? Big round naughty spaceship? Promising acting debut, got a bit typecast, never appeared in another film after the Star Wars series?”
Zoe rolled her eyes.
“Oooh,” said Kate. “Touchy.”
Zoe flicked her hair back, suddenly irritated.
“Listen,” Kate said, “it’s that time of the month and I’ve got a blaster, so don’t start.”
Zoe looked carefully at her, gauging the extent to which things might now be back to normal between them. It was hard to tell. Kate might be smiling, or she might not. This was the thing with Storm-troopers: they only showed the multipurpose expression molded into the face plates of their helmets—a hard-wearing, wipe-clean, semi-mournful expression equally appropriate for learning that one’s soufflé, or one’s empire, had fallen.
Command module of the Death Star
The battle station hung in the cold black vacuum of space. Sophie Argall could feel the vast metal mass of it under her feet. It was huge. It had its own gravity, though it didn’t seem as strong as Earth gravity. Sophie realized there was extra bounce in her legs. Standing on the bridge of the Death Star was like standing at home would be, if Dr. Hewitt had just told you that your leukemia had gone into remission.
Sophie reviewed the data. She was eight. The Death Star was younger. Sophie didn’t know by how much. The Death Star was defended by 10,000 turbo laser batteries and 768 tractor beam projectors. A crew of 265,675 kept it running, kept it clean, and did the cooking and laundry for 52,276 gunners, 607,360 troops, 25,984 Stormtroopers, 42,782 ship support staff, and 167,216 pilots and technicians. Despite these precautions, both the Death Stars built before this one had been destroyed. Statistically, the chances of a Death Star surviving combat were zero. The chances of Sophie surviving acute lymphoblastic leukemia were better than ninety percent. When you considered the odds, it was presumptuous of the battle station to be exerting a gravitational pull on her.
Sophie knew the stats by heart. She had drawn pictures of the Death Star a thousand times, in felt tip and in crayon, but nothing had prepared her for standing here, on the bridge, looking out through the portholes at the stars. She listened to the low electronic hum of control circuits and the soft cool hiss of the air conditioning.
They had taken the Argall family car—a silver-gray Renault Scénic—to the space port at the film studios: Sophie, her parents, and Zoe. The car ride had taken three hours and thirty-six minutes, which Sophie had timed using the stopwatch feature on her iPod. She’d listened to the original Star Wars soundtrack by John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra. She’d made crosshairs with her fingers and aimed them out of the windows on the motorway. The Nissans and the Fords were friendly Rebel craft. The Mercedes and the BMWs were hostile TIE fighters.
They’d used a transporter to get from the film studio car park to the Death Star. It had taken forty-nine seconds. The transporter had looked like an ordinary lift, but it hadn’t been. Dad had been captured with her, as soon as they stepped out of the transporter. As far as Sophie knew, Mum and Zoe remained at liberty somewhere within the Death Star.
Sophie was still amazed to be here. She had to keep looking down at herself, to check that all the atoms in her arms and legs had made it okay through the transporter beam.
Two Stormtroopers patrolled the bridge in their pristine white armor. They checked the settings of every switch on every control panel. They spoke to each other in terse, metallic voices. Their helmets had full visors so you couldn’t see their faces, but you could tell they were nervous. There was a rumor that Darth Vader was arriving in his personal shuttle. Sophie’s mouth was dry and her heart pounded. She held her dad’s hand and squeezed tightly.
She knew none of this was actually real, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. On the rare days she was well enough to go into school now, school never felt real either. The other girls had moved on. They were into YouTube, and they thought she was weird for still being into kids’ stuff. She tried to get into the things they were into, but the truth was that she didn’t want to learn the dance moves from pop videos. She wanted to be a Jedi knight.
Leukemia didn’t feel real either. They put tubes into you and pumped you full of chemicals that made your ears ring and your skin go so transparent that you could see right inside yourself. You could touch the tubes with your fingers and look at your tendons with your own eyes. It was possible that you weren’t dreaming, it just didn’t seem very likely.
After a while you stopped worrying about what was real. The rare school days lasted six and a half hours, and then they were gone. Life lasted till you were very old—with odds of ninety percent—or for another few months, with odds of ten percent. Being here on the Death Star would last as long as it lasted. That was how you had to look at it.
Her dad knelt and put an arm around her. “You’re not scared are you, big girl?”
Sophie shook her head. “No.”
She made her voice sound as though the question had been stupid, but Vader was coming and the truth was that she was more scared than she had ever been in her life—more scared than she’d been in January when Dr. Hewitt had told her the leukemia was back. It was important not to worry Dad, though. It was harder for him.
“You prisoners, stop talking!” said one of the Stormtroopers. Then, in a softer voice: ??
?Are you guys alright for drinks and so on? Can I get you a juice or a biscuit?”
Sophie asked, “Is there Ribena?”
“Magic word?” said the Stormtrooper.
“Is there Ribena, please?”
“Of course,” said the Stormtrooper, and produced a carton from a blue isotherm bag.
“We’ve got one of those bags at home,” said Sophie.
“Wow,” said the second Stormtrooper. “Small universe.”
The first Stormtrooper spun around to look at the second, then quickly turned back to Sophie.
“Prisoner!” said the Stormtrooper. “Our master is expected at any moment. When he arrives, you must stand at attention. If you are invited to speak to him, you must address him as “Lord Vader.’ What must you address him as?”
“Lord Vader,” said Sophie in a small voice.
“What’s that? I can’t hear you,” said the Stormtrooper, cupping a gloved hand to the place on the helmet where an ear would be.
“Lord Vader!” said Sophie, as loud as she could. She was tired from the long car journey. Her voice had a slow puncture and it was letting out air.
“That’ll do,” said the Stormtrooper, and went off to whisper to the other.
A hush fell on the bridge. The Stormtroopers stiffened to attention. Sophie’s legs trembled. The music of “The Imperial March” sounded from hidden speakers. An involuntary whimper came from Sophie’s throat. A blast door opened. Clouds of dry ice billowed. Darth Vader emerged from his vapors, stood mightily in silhouette, and stepped onto the bridge. His respirator hissed and clicked.
He stared at Sophie and Dad, and nodded slowly.
“So,” he said. “The captured Rebel fighters.”
Sophie felt urine running down her legs, shockingly hot. It splashed on the brushed steel floor. The noise was undeniable.
She looked at the pooled urine on the floor and felt tears coming. This was going to really freak Dad out.
She looked up at him. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
There was a moment of surprised silence on the bridge. Vader’s respirator wheezed.
“Uh … are you alright?” he said.