“I’m hit!” she said. Her voice was muffled and there was a mask obstructing her mouth. She struggled and tried to sit up, but Dad pushed her back down to the pillows.
“You’re not hit, baby. It’s the anaesthetic. You’re going to feel a bit confused for a little while.”
Sophie blinked up at him. She looked around. There was a bank of instruments with wires trailing towards her body. She followed the wires to the points where they ducked under the edge of a sheet. The sheet covered her. She looked underneath and saw her own familiar body there, dressed in a hospital gown with a happy blue dinosaur on it.
Something was wrong. Dad’s big strong hand was painfully tight on her small one. Mum’s was too hot; there was sweat running down her arm. And the Hickman line was gone. This wasn’t normal. She didn’t belong here. This was the dream, she realized. She closed her eyes and tried urgently to wake up. There was a battle raging on the forest moon of Endor, and they needed her. This was no time to sleep.
“Sophie,” said Dad. “Stay with us, okay?”
She opened her eyes again, irritably. “You’re not even real,” she said.
Dad grinned. “That’s my girl.”
She struggled weakly and tried to rip off the thing that was covering her mouth. Mum’s hand closed around her wrist and stopped her.
“It’s suffocating me!”
“Darling, that’s your oxygen mask. It’s helping you breathe.”
Sophie struggled for a moment, then collapsed back into her pillows. She lay for a while, catching her breath, then she opened her eyes wide.
“Am I late for school?” she said.
Dad looked at Mum, and Mum looked at Dad, and they both smirked.
“What?”
she said crossly.
Mum leaned down and kissed her on the forehead.
“You are a bit late for school, Sophie. You’re about two months late, but I’m sure you’ll catch up very quickly. Fingers crossed, the doctors think you might actually be getting better.”
Sophie scowled. “I’m not going in thicky maths with Barney,” she said.
Mum and Dad laughed, which was really annoying because everything she said now they seemed to think was hilarious.
She was so angry that she used the Force on them, which you were only meant to do in a battle and never with people in your family, but she was so enraged that she couldn’t stop herself. She raised her right hand, which was plumbed in all its veins with catheters that were taped down to the wrist, and she pointed her thumb and first finger at Mum and Dad. She narrowed the gap between her digits and made the special frown with her eyes that caused the Force to flow from her fingers.
Her parents looked across at each other again and widened their eyes in fright. Sophie nodded with satisfaction: they weren’t so cocky, now that the tables were turned. First Dad and then Mum put their hands to their throats and made small choking sounds, struggling for air.
When she decided she’d made her point, Sophie released them.
Mum and Dad collapsed down into their seats, gasping, and when they’d got their breath back, they held her hands while the monitoring machines showed her pulse slowly returning to normal.
“Do you want some good news?” said Mum. “I think I’m going to the Olympics.”
Mum was watching her, waiting for a response. Sophie had been half listening, and because it seemed important to Mum, she made an effort. She ran the words over in her mind, trying to get the sense of them, but she was exhausted. The words made no sense. There were just these ten pink toes poking out of the end of her sheets. This shiny blue linoleum floor that made you want to roller-skate. The bright, clean smell of the hospital, like electric washing-up liquid. It was beautiful and it made her happy but all of it was suddenly too much, and the darkness lurched again and swallowed her up and dragged her back down into sleep.
Tom waited for Zoe in his office underneath the track. She was taking forever in the shower, and he didn’t blame her. There were two decades of racing to be washed away.
He got through to Jack, who told him that Sophie was very weak in postop. He tried to put it outside his mind for now, to break it out of the problem space and concentrate on the needs of his athlete.
“My athlete,” he said aloud, feeling the sound of it in the dead air of his little room.
Unless she wanted to carry on in the sport at some more terrestrial level—and he couldn’t really see her showing up to race at the Nationals anymore, or the Northwest Seniors’ Track Meet—then maybe she was no one’s athlete now. What should you say to a woman like Zoe, now that no one was paying you to say it? As her coach he’d always known what to tell her. It had been easy to help when it had mattered how high she should keep her pedaling cadence or how many grams of
protein she should be eating a week before race day. Now that real life was the game, it would be easy for her to lose it. She would be helpless in a world where victory was rarely complete and defeat was often negotiable.
He didn’t know what to tell her. He couldn’t protect her the way he’d done when she was nineteen. He’d put her up in his flat in the week she spent at the hospital, after Jack’s crash. He’d cooked for her, he’d talked cycling with her, and then when she’d decided she couldn’t be with Jack, he’d hosted her for another week and tried to keep her head together. He’d looked after her the best he could, and there’d been a bond between them since then.
It was hard to see how he could help her now. He wanted to suggest that she come to stay with him again, but he was scared to ask. She might imagine he was in love with her, that he was a lonely old man appalled at the prospect of the remaining days of his life continuing to report for duty, one after the other, without her in them. She’d be right, of course—women always were—but maybe love wasn’t the word. You surrendered the right to be in love with a thirty-two-year-old woman the minute you did something as careless as being born in 1946. No, love wasn’t it. It was just that without her the incessant days would be sea lions at the zoo, mounting the podium and slapping their pliant fins to solicit some answering applause that he supposed he would have to train himself to produce. It was a trick that people managed. Maybe, with practice and an occasional glass of red, he could manage it too.
She came into his office, bleached by sadness, smaller than he’d ever seen her.
Since he didn’t know what to say to her, he said, “Tea?”
She nodded and sat down on his desk while he made two cups.
He said, “I’m proud of you. What you did on that track today was the best thing I’ve seen an athlete do.”
“Now I wish I hadn’t.”
“Well, you’re only human. I mean, I’m fairly sure.”
She managed a weak smile, and they drank their teas.
She looked at him over the rim of her mug. “What am I going to do, Tom?”
He pulled a pad and a pen off his desk. “Let’s make a list, eh? First we need to talk to British Cycling and work out a career path for you in the sport, find you a first coaching position, get you started. Then we ought to put together a press release. Before that you’ll probably want to talk with your agent and your sponsors. Then we need to—”
“Stop,” said Zoe quietly. She held the heels of her hands to her forehead. “I don’t mean what am I going to do today. I mean, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
Tom blinked. “
Life
is a big word, isn’t it? Let’s break it down into smaller segments. Let’s find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we’ll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as a training unit…”
He was getting into it, using his hands to sculpt compliant units of time into the stuffy air of his office. He tailed off when he saw how she was looking at him.
“I just lost by a thousandth of a second,” she said. “Don’t tell me about weeks and months.”
He put the pad and pen back down on his desk, unmarked.
She looked at him, her knees jiggling nervily, her expression intent. “You had a kid, right?”
He nodded. “I still do, somewhere. Matthew. I haven’t seen him for, I don’t know, twenty years.”
“In all this time, you never talked about it.”
“Well it was never
about
me, was it?”
He smiled, but she didn’t.
She said, “Do you ever have those dreams where you’re in the street and you’ve lost a child, and the dream goes on and on, and you search more and more frantically, and all you find is the kid’s little shoes?”
The smile slowly faded from Tom’s face. He looked at her wordlessly.
“The kid’s fucking
shoes
, Tom. Sometimes they’re full of blood, right up to the rim. They’re so full that if you go up to them and press the side of the shoe, even very gently, then the blood wells up over the side and drips down onto your fingers. No?”
“Oh Zoe,” he said. “When are you ever going to tell me what happened to you?”
She ignored him. “I have that dream most nights. Other nights it’s the one where something’s chasing me. That’s why I’m frightened of being alone. Do you never get frightened?”
He looked down at his hands. “I reckon you get used to it.”
She exhaled unevenly. “I don’t get used to it. The only thing that ever helped me was racing. That’s the only time I can’t think about anything else.”
“Okay,” said Tom, “so let’s work on it. Let’s look at some of the triggers that give you the bad dreams and work out some coping strategies.”
She gave a short laugh, high and upsetting. “The trigger is being alive. Think I should knock that on the head?”
“Don’t even joke about it.”
She looked away. “I suppose I’ve been making less of an effort to stay alive. I take risks I shouldn’t. I ride out in front of traffic. I look down off the roof of my building and I kind of lean out and…”
“And what?”
Her eyes glittered as she stared at him, her face tight with tension. “Can you help me get my daughter back? Can you help me get Sophie?”
Tom took a sip of his tea and put the mug carefully down on his desk. “That’s not the kind of question you can really ask your coach.”
She moved her hand to his, sweeping the tips of her fingers across his wrist. “I’m not asking you as my coach, Tom.”
He fought against the shiver of pleasure that ran up the afferent nerves of his arm, found his spinal cord, and evolved as it propagated
through the more sophisticated matrix of his central nervous system into a sharp ache that was indistinguishable from longing.
He hesitated, then gently moved his arm away.
“As your friend, I’m telling you that you won’t be thinking straight till you’ve come down off the back of this. It’s natural that you feel like hammered shit right now. For a few days it’ll feel like the world has ended.”
She reached across and took his hand again and held it in both of hers, studying it as if it were a map that might offer a way to navigate the conversation. “I’ve trusted you since I was nineteen,” she said finally. “I’ve never questioned what you said. When you suggested Sophie should go home with Jack and Kate…”
He freed himself again and put her hand back down on the desk. “I never told you what to do. You didn’t feel you were in a position to look after Sophie, and we all respected you for putting her into the care of someone who was.”
She glared. “Well, now I am in a position to look after her, aren’t I?”
He tried a smile. “Give it a couple of days, will you? Get some rest, get your head straight, and then let’s talk about Sophie. She’s ill, Zoe. It’s not the right time for her or for you to be getting into this.”
“So when is the right time?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when you’re not riding out in front of traffic.”
Zoe gripped the edge of the table. “You could tell them you gave me bad advice, couldn’t you? You could tell them I was lost and I didn’t know what I was doing and you should never have let me give up my daughter.”
“Tell who?”
“Tell the courts.”
He sighed. “You don’t want to get the courts involved, Zoe. If you go to the courts, then the media comes with it. You know what the media will say, if it all comes out?”
She looked at him and shrugged.
He forced himself to hold her eyes. “They’ll say Kate Argall gave up the Olympics for her child, while Zoe Castle gave up her child for the Olympics.”
She flinched. “That’s not fair.”
He shrugged sadly. “Yeah, but is it completely untrue?”
“I thought it was true that I had to keep the pregnancy, because
you
said they’d never leave me alone if I got rid of it so I could race. Then I thought it was true that I had to keep quiet about being Sophie’s mum, because
you
said the press would tear me apart if they found out.” Her voice rose, ringing with accusation.
“Don’t tell me that wasn’t true.”
“Yeah, but I’m tearing
myself
apart. This is worse than anything the papers could do to me.”
He tried to keep his breathing even. “You were okay with it when you were winning. You took the golds and you stood on that podium and you raised your arms in the bloody air.”
She glowered at him. “My arms, Tom? Let’s look at my arms.”
She yanked up the left sleeve of her jacket and showed him the graze from her crash, still weeping through the gauze.
“This one is a true story,” she said. “You’ll go too fast, you’ll crash, and it will really fucking hurt.”
She jerked up her other sleeve and showed him the Olympic rings on her skin, lurid and inflamed. “This one is a lie.
Swifter, higher, stronger.
It just makes you more and more lonely. People see me standing on the podium and they think they’re seeing glory, and all they’re seeing is the one shining minute when I rose up out of the mess I made to get there. Look at every single champion you’ve ever met. Look at me and Jack. We’re wrong in the head. We spent our whole lives putting ourselves first. Now look at Kate, always coming second. The saints were all losers, Tom. But they don’t give out medals for this”—she waved her grazed arm at him—“they give them out for this.” She pushed her tattooed arm towards his face, hard, and he recoiled from it.