Zoe drank the coffee and rinsed the cup and went to the bathroom for her second shower of the morning. She let the water wash the junior doctor away, and her agent away, and the memory of the crash with Jack away. When all of it was gone and she was alone again, she cried. There was no fuss. It felt mechanical: tears welling from a simple buildup of pressure. It was almost silent, just tears mingling with the shower water. Everything came out. She practiced her London gold medal speech to drown out the ache in her body.
You know, I’m just pleased I gave it my best on the day and didn’t let down the other members of the team and I have to say the support I’ve had from everyone and all the fans has been amazing and wow to see all those British flags thanks guys.
Jack lifted Sophie to carry her downstairs, holding her carefully so as not to put any strain on the Hickman line. On the threshold of her bedroom, he paused.
“Are you sure I can’t tempt you to get dressed, wee lassie?”
Sophie giggled and kicked. “Nah!”
“Are you going to stay in these pajamas your whole life then?”
Jack felt but couldn’t see Sophie’s nod against his shoulder.
“Pajamas? Really? Even when you go back to school? Even on your wedding day?”
Sophie nodded again.
“Even when you step onto the Olympic podium to hear them play ‘God Save the Queen’?”
“I’m not going to be an athlete, remember. I’m going to be a Jedi.”
“Ah, I forgot. Sorry.”
“You will be.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.”
Jack laughed, then winced as Sophie punched him in the side of the head.
“Hey!” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be a poorly tomboy.”
He squeezed the child just enough to make her giggle and squirm, but not so much as to provoke her white blood cells into any more unhelpful behavior. You got a feeling for how hard to press.
He carried Sophie down and sat her at the kitchen table. Kate was already there, making tea in the big brown glazed teapot. She stirred it, brought it to the table, and carefully covered it with the Union Jack tea cozy. Steam rose from the spout and wove soft coils through the weft of the April light. Kate wore knickers and a white T-shirt that rode up over her bum when she leaned over to fix the tea. Jack grinned.
“What?” she said.
“You’re the sexiest woman alive who still favors the use of a tea cozy.”
She batted his hand away. “You Scots. You’re so insatiable.”
“Only because you’re so invadable.”
She hissed,
“Stoppit!”
and squirmed in his grip.
He kissed her neck, let her go, and winked at Sophie. Kate went into the next room to fold clothes and Jack plugged his phone into the stereo and stuck on The Proclaimers singing “500 Miles,” because it was Sophie’s favorite and because what other way was there to start a day like this, with the hours of hard training still ahead and the clean rising sun the color of children’s promises?
Sophie joined in with the words. Jack loved how she liked The Proclaimers, the fierce wee men from Leith with their cheap jeans and their best Sunday shirts tucked into them, and their ugly glasses and hair. If they were still gigging maybe he’d take Sophie to see them one day, once she was better, so she could watch how they stood on the stage. The one with the acoustic guitar and the other one just with his balls, belting out this song like they were firing iron bullets into the guts of the devil himself. The chorus came on and Jack picked Sophie up and spun around the kitchen with her.
“An AH would walk five HUNdred miles! An AH would walk five HUNdred more! Just tae BE the man who’d walked a THOUSAND MILES tae fall down at your door!”
Sophie shouted the words and Jack felt a furious love for her. It was a shout of defiance, was what the song was. It was the reason he and Kate and Sophie all knew she would get better. In his heart Jack was sure they could all win against this leukemia just by being sufficiently Scottish.
After the music there were Sophie’s chemo pills to be taken from their various brown bottles and arranged for the day. Sophie clung to his legs, wobbly after dancing.
“C’mon, Sophie. Sit down, big girl, hmm? I’m sorting out your pills.”
Shit, and now he’d lost count. Six of the tiny yellow capsules. Four of the blue-and-whites. Six of the red-and-greens. Into the old silver cup with the yellow ribbons on the handles that said
CHAMPION
. Sophie knew the order to take the pills in. They also had a printout of it on the fridge, in Comic Sans, with sunny clip art. It was fortunate that chemotherapy
was so cheerful, really, otherwise Jack might have found it quite frightening.
The little hand was pulling on his leg again. “Dad?”
“What?”
Jack said. And then, more softly, “What?”
“Need a wee.”
“So? You know where the toilet is.”
“Yeah but I’m
tired
.”
“What, you can’t be bothered to walk to the toilet?”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
He grinned back, trying to keep things normal. Was she really too weary to move, or was she just winding him up? It was so hard to tell, sometimes.
Jack waggled an admonishing finger at Sophie. “Don’t go all English on me now.”
Kate skipped in from the next room, put her phone down on the table, and lifted Sophie to her hip.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll take her.”
Sophie smiled, wrapped her arms around her, and buried her face in her neck. Kate leaned over and kissed Jack, openmouthed and unhurriedly, her free hand finding the small of his back under his T-shirt.
“You…” she whispered, and just like that his fear passed.
Jack sat at the kitchen table, watching her perfect arse as it receded, wondering what calculus life might possibly have used to ascertain that he deserved her. Maybe fate had simply become distracted, and counted the wrong pills out of the jars.
Kate carried Sophie through to the loo and pulled the light cord for her. She took off her daughter’s Star Wars baseball cap because the peak fell over her eyes when she sat down on the toilet seat. She waited for Sophie to pee. Sometimes wee sprayed forth from the child almost before
her pants were down, or sometimes you could stand for more than a minute like this, waiting for her to go. Sometimes it was a false alarm, and you waited in solemn silence until it seemed safe for you both to stand down. This was the thing with chemo. There was nothing it didn’t affect.
She thought about the text message she’d just received.
“Me and Zoe have to see Tom after training this afternoon,” she called through to Jack. “Some kind of situation. Can you look after Soph a bit longer today?”
“No bother,” she heard Jack shouting back. “I might bring her to watch you train anyway.”
Kate stood and watched her daughter’s thighs tensing and relaxing as she tried to go.
“Do you want to come and watch Mummy and Zoe train? It might be quite cold in the velodrome.”
She half wanted Sophie to say no, but her daughter said, “Okay.” Wee had still not made an appearance.
While she waited, Kate revised the logistics for afternoon training. If Jack was bringing Sophie to watch, they would have to leave for the velodrome with her kit bag bulging. They would need the oxygen cylinder and the Hickman kit and the list of on-call doctors. They would need Sophie’s emergency injections, her inhaler, and the complete set of her Star Wars action figurines. And they would need the dozen small things that had somehow ended up in the bottom of the emergency bag. You forgot what they did, but you knew you’d remember the day after you chucked them out. Which would be more than shitty in their case. They couldn’t let Sophie die because Mummy and Daddy binned the little adapter for her oxygen line, mistaking it for some detached part of an obsolete bike pump.
Zoe, on the other hand, would leave her apartment with just her cycling kit in a bag and one slim Yale key in the back pocket of her jeans. To get to the velodrome Kate and Jack would have to strap Sophie into
her car seat, run through the safety checklist, then drive defensively past a dozen billboards with Zoe’s face on them. Her green eyes, her green hair, her green lipstick on the rim of that green frosted glass.
Perrier:
best served cold
. By the time the Argalls had run the gauntlet and made it to the velodrome, Zoe would have been warming up for an hour already. How could Kate compete with that? Zoe lived alone at the top of the highest tower in Manchester. Kate lived down here on Earth, with her family.
“Give up?” she said gently.
Sophie sighed. “Yeah.”
She helped Sophie to pull her pajamas up and hugged her. She knew she’d be thinking about Sophie in the head-to-head training session that afternoon. Suddenly Tom’s whistle would go and she would come back from distraction to reality, to Zoe being one-tenth of a second ahead already. Freedom made Zoe quicker and sadder than her, and if Kate had the choice she wouldn’t trade. Still, she had to work hard sometimes not to feel resentful. Even knowing what drove Zoe, even understanding what had happened with her brother, it was hard to forget the times she had put the fight before the friendship. Then again, maybe this was how everyone felt. Perhaps everyone struggled with the possessive flaw in human memory that hoarded the episodes you most wanted to let go. Maybe by the time you reached thirty-two, it was a miracle if you could completely forgive your friends.
Kate shivered, and forced the thought away.
She smiled down at Sophie and smoothed a thin strand of hair back from her daughter’s forehead. The strand stuck to her finger and came away from Sophie’s scalp at the roots. It was the very last of her hair. Sophie didn’t notice.
Kate popped the baseball cap back on.
“Off you go and play with Daddy,” she said brightly.
When Sophie was gone, Kate folded down the toilet lid and sat heavily on it, collapsing as if winded by a blow. She stared at the clump
of Sophie’s hair on her finger. The tiny yellow roots trembled on the ends of the black strands like bulbs disinterred. She held the hair up to her lips and kissed it, feeling the softness of it on her lips and inhaling the slight scent of chemo and dust. Then she stood, lifted the toilet lid, let the hair fall into the bowl, and pulled the flush. There was no point making a fuss about it. Jack could notice what had happened if he needed to; otherwise it was kinder if she didn’t mark the moment. Deception was too strong a word for it. She thought about what she did as something a stage magician might do: performing a sleight of hand, palming these ominous moments and directing the family’s eye to other, healthier signs. This was the trick. A family was as sick as you let it be.
Kate watched the water cascading from the cistern into the toilet bowl.
The first time Sophie had had enough hair to cut, at the age of two, Kate had cut it herself. She’d put the first lock she snipped off into an album. She’d sellotaped the dark curl to the page, and written Sophie’s name and the date in her best writing. She’d actually gone out to the corner shop to buy a pen that wasn’t a biro.
And now here was the last lock of her daughter’s hair, irrepressibly buoyant, floating in the toilet bowl. She pulled the handle again, but the hair wouldn’t flush. In truth, life never would.
After Jack’s crash at the Elite Prospects Programme, Kate hadn’t known what to do. Tom had announced to the other riders that Jack had been taken to the intensive care unit in North Manchester General Hospital, with broken bones at least. And that was the end of the program, two hours earlier than scheduled. In dull shock, with her thoughts muffled like voices in fog, Kate had showered and begun walking from the velodrome to the train station. Her kit bag weighed heavily on her shoulder and her hair was still damp.
As she walked in the cold air she remembered Jack’s hand on her arm, the long talks they’d had between races, the way he had playfully
touched her face. She saw his fingers now, snapped and swollen, a sharp edge of bone protruding. Or was it his arm, or his legs, or his spine? Her mind flashed up these images. What was she doing, walking away?
Longing
or
attraction
were not her style of words for it. She just realized that she minded—that she needed to know exactly which of his bones were broken.
And yet she squirmed at the idea of going to the hospital. To do what? To sit by his bedside and examine his hand and, if it wasn’t too badly broken, to hold it? It didn’t feel as if she had any right. She’d only known Jack three days. But it felt wrong to do nothing, to board her train back home as if nothing important had passed between them. Was this merely a natural reluctance to leave the scene, simply because conversations with boys were not supposed to end like this, with the boy being immobilized by a sedative injection and removed from the scene of the conversation in a full brace by medical technicians in gloves and green overalls? For all she knew, every one of the other girls on the program was having exactly the same thoughts. Hadn’t Jack smiled at them too? Had she been the only one whose heart had accelerated? Maybe what she was feeling was nothing out of the ordinary but—on the contrary—simply the sensation of being a commonplace and rather inexperienced northern girl, mistaking rain for rainbows.
Pedestrians faltered, corrected their trajectories, and flowed by on either side as Kate stopped dead in the street.
She held her head and tried to think. There wasn’t any established etiquette, in peacetime, to smooth out this sudden step from a nice flirtation to a serious hospital visit. There was no emotional jurisprudence, just this doubt about whether the feelings she might be beginning to have for Jack actually qualified her to feel that what she now wanted to do was to sit by his hospital bed and hold his hand in hers, and maybe to cry a bit. Yes, that was it—she wanted to cry. With, for, or about him, she didn’t know.
If she had seen someone else in this wretched state, holding her head
in the street, she would have politely averted her eyes. Was this normal? Did other women feel half-mad like this? Or was this predicament unique to the intensity of the life she’d chosen? Perhaps she was not overreacting after all. Perhaps these were her real feelings, so sharp as to be suddenly unbearable, suppressed by thirteen years of hard training and now cutting the gum like adult teeth.