Gold (11 page)

“I don’t know what to say,” he told the investigating officer.

The officer had an incident form on his clipboard and a ballpoint pen on a string. “You could say she turned into your braking distance,” he said. “That way it’ll be clear for your insurance.”

Measuring up the scene, and judging from the marks on the road surface and the detritus of shattered registration plates and indicator light housings, the investigating officer was inclined to endorse the male motorist’s account. The female pedal cyclist had come off her machine and rolled across the carriageway, probably passing fractionally ahead of or fractionally behind the motorcycle before coming to rest against an illuminated bollard on the central traffic separation island. She’d been fortunate to walk away with cuts and bruises.

Her pedal cycle—this is how he described it on the road traffic incident form—her pedal cycle had come off worse. He lifted the wreck of it into the back of his patrol car, its frame snapped and the rims twisted. It had gone under the wheels of at least three vehicles. The cyclist was sitting upright now, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket and shivering in the back of the on-scene ambulance while her friend comforted her.

When he set out the facts of the incident on the form on his clipboard, and came to the final box headed
SUMMARY,
he didn’t reckon it was any more complicated than this: that the injured party had continued into the path of oncoming vehicles, while the friend had applied the brakes. This was just how the world was. There were two kinds of people when a light turned red. One kind accelerated, the other kind
braked. It was Eve and Adam, Abel and Cain. There wasn’t any use doing your head in about it. Not on his pay grade, anyway.

His pen hovered for a few seconds above the box headed
OTHER COMMENTS,
but no words came. The officer clicked the button that retracted the pen point, shrugged, and winced as cold rain dripped from his uniform cap between his neck and his hi-vis jacket. He wondered what the hell it was in this woman’s life that meant she couldn’t just brake like everyone else.

Rain streamed down the rear window as the paramedic made Zoe comfortable sitting upright on a stretcher. The stretcher had an information panel indicating that it was rated for patients weighing up to 400 kilos or 880 pounds.

“It’s the weight of an adult female buffalo,” the paramedic said, inviting the conversation away from the fact that the casualty had willfully ridden into the path of moving traffic.

Kate smiled and looked to Zoe to respond, but Zoe turned away and frowned at the rain.

Kate filled the silence. “Do you get many buffalo?”

“We get ladies who just really like donuts. We actually have a crane to get them on the stretcher. We call it the Krispy Kreme Express.”

Kate laughed, but Zoe was still zoned out. Kate held on to both of her hands as the paramedic used tweezers to pick grit out of a deep graze on her forearm. Kate wasn’t expecting Zoe to flinch, and she didn’t. If you were very attentive, you could feel the slightest twitch of Zoe’s fingers each time the tweezers connected.

“Would you look at me?” Kate said softly.

Zoe looked out the rear window.

“Look at me!”

Zoe turned to her, exasperated. The paramedic paused in his work until she was still. When he resumed, the morsels of grit he removed from her arm made little clicking sounds as they fell into a surgical steel dish. The ambulance moved at the speed of the traffic, its sirens off. Twin overhead tubes secreted a bright sickly light.

Kate said, “Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to win.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“No. Well. Clearly.”

Zoe screwed up her face in irritation. “Oh, what are you? My mother?”

“I’ve known you longer than she did.”

Zoe was looking out the window again. “Yeah, but if I’d gone under that car, it would’ve made things simpler for you.”

Kate reached up and turned Zoe’s face back to hers.

“Look at me. If you’d gone under that car, I’d have died too.”

The paramedic paused again and the small percussions of falling grit stopped.

Zoe said, “I don’t see why. You have things to live for. You have everything.”

“Not everything.”

Zoe exhaled irritably. “Christ, Kate. It’s a lump of yellow metal on a shiny red string.”

“Easy to say when you’ve won it.”

“You think?”

“You know what?” said Kate. “I don’t even care. So long as we both get to that final in London, and we’re both on that podium, I don’t care which of us wins it.”

“No, nor do I,” said Zoe. “So long as it’s me.”

Kate smiled and shook her head. “Honestly, Zo, what are we going to do with you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Really, though? I’m worried. You seem a little bit out of control.”

“The road was wet, Kate. Crashes happen and we bleed. The girls who couldn’t handle the damage dropped out of this game years ago.”

Kate sighed. “I’m not talking about crashes. I’m talking about real damage.”

Zoe looked away, and Kate squeezed her hands. “We don’t always have to be psyching each other out, do we? We can call a truce. We can talk about what’s bothering you.”

“Nothing’s
bothering me.
” Zoe took her hands out of Kate’s to put air quotes around the phrase.

Kate hesitated, then took Zoe’s hands again. “It’s Adam, isn’t it?”

Zoe looked at her sharply. “No.”

“It is though, isn’t it? I know you. When you get like this, it’s because you’re thinking about him.”

Zoe looked at her steadily. “I’m thinking about boys and shopping.” The paramedic resumed his work in silence and the ambulance rolled on through the slow, rain-soaked traffic.

Kate didn’t know how to handle her friend when she was like this. If you closed your eyes you could believe you were talking to a drunk at a bus stop—one of those puffy-eyed women who were alternately morose and acerbic, squinting through their own cigarette smoke while their fingers spun a thread of imagined oppressions from the air and knitted them into a shroud. But when Zoe went on a downer like this, she did it from behind those clear green eyes in that perfect face with its unblemished skin and its Olympian glow of health. The incongruity shocked you, like being punched in the face by a Care Bear.

“Want to come home with me after the hospital?” Kate said. “Have a bite to eat with us?”

“I’m not hungry,” Zoe said, as if that was an answer to a question Kate had asked.

Kate had to remind herself that Zoe wasn’t always like this, and that
she was always sorry afterwards. She cared enough to try to explain, at least, and that was how Kate had first learned about Adam. Years ago, well before Athens, Zoe had got into one of her moods and done something so viciously personal that Kate had actually lost a race at the National Championships because of it. In the weeks that followed Zoe had been incandescent with remorse. That was how it had seemed to Kate—that her friend had actually flickered with a pale and anxious light that sought to expel the shadows cast by her behavior. She’d invited Kate to lunch—begged her to come—and they’d met up at one of the best restaurants in town, the Lincoln. Kate couldn’t have afforded the place, and she doubted Zoe really could either.

In the busy dining room clad in Carrara marble, a low-slung hipster with a three-day beard and a linen suit was playing Debussy in shoes but no socks. Zoe inhabited the room naturally, un-made-up in jeans and a loose gray tank top but still attracting covert glances. Kate ducked down behind the menu and failed to find one single item on it that didn’t seem expressly conceived to worsen her power-to-weight ratio on a bicycle.

She was furious with herself for accepting this invitation to a reconciliation that was looking more and more like a bid to humiliate her.

She looked up in misery and saw Zoe watching her back with a panicked look.

“Shit,” said Zoe, “this isn’t helping at all, is it?”

“Oh no, this is great,” said Kate. “It’s really nice.”

Zoe held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “I can fix this.”

She stood, crossed to the pianist, and sat down lightly beside him at the piano stool. The
Préludes
faltered for a moment as she whispered something in his ear, then they picked up again with a hint of
allegrezza.
Kate saw the pianist’s grin as Zoe came back to the table.

“There,” she said.

“What did you say to him?”

Zoe flicked a hand dismissively and blew a strand of hair off her face. “I said I’d give him my number if he made you laugh.”

Kate felt a surge of anger. “It’s not funny.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I treated you like shit, Kate, and I don’t know how to make it right.”

As Kate looked into Zoe’s eyes, trying to work out if she was being sincere, the pianist segued seamlessly into Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again,” with sober classical phrasing and a completely straight face.

Kate couldn’t help smiling.

“I don’t know where my head goes,” Zoe said. “I want to win so badly, I forget that you’re
you
. That we’re friends.”

Kate felt her anger dissolve in the bubbles of the mineral water and the impressionistic flourishes with which the pianist was retrofitting Britney’s chef d’oeuvre.

“Well,” she said. “Just don’t forget again. Write it on your fucking hand or something.”

Zoe bit her lip. “I know I have a problem with relationships. I told you… I tell
everyone
that I’m an only child, but actually I had a brother and I lost him when I was ten, so… you know. Boring old story. People get too close, I push them away. I’m sorry.”

“God, no, I’m sorry. Oh Zoe, you should have said something.”

Zoe looked up. Her eyes were brimming, but the pianist lurched into Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” grandioso, and she laughed instead.

“It’s not something you say, is it? You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“In Manchester?”

“Or any other planet.”

“Doesn’t Tom know?”

Zoe frowned. “It’s not a performance issue.”

“Still, I think it’s the sort of thing you should tell him.”

“I think… it’s the sort of thing you should tell your best friend.”

Zoe waited for Kate’s reaction. Before Kate could think what to say, a waiter arrived and placed plates before them, covered with silver cloches. He whisked away the cloches, gave a half bow, and glided away.
On each of their plates were 150 grams of plain steam-cooked wild rice, 60 grams of chopped raisins, 100 grams of canned tuna in brine, and a 30-gram, carob-coated ProteinPlus PowerBar in its blue-and-yellow wrapper.

Kate blinked, incredulous.

Zoe grinned. “I asked Tom what was on your eat sheet for today. I knew the menu would freak the piss out of you.”

Kate stared at Zoe, while the pianist threw in a quick intermezzo of baroque variations on the theme from
Knight Rider
.

“What?” said Zoe.

Kate studied her for a moment longer, then smiled and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Bon appétit,” which was easier than trying to find the words to explain that just sometimes—in the rare moments when she wasn’t causing quite serious mental discomfort—being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace.

This was what Kate was thinking about as the two of them rode the ambulance to the accident and emergency unit.

“Are you okay though, Zo?” she said. “Really, I mean?”

Zoe looked at the ragged mess of her forearm, then back at Kate.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’ll mend.”

When the girls left the flat, Tom was tired. He retrieved his denture from the toilet, scrubbed it down with bleach, rinsed it, and reinserted it. He stuck the front door shut with duct tape and put the chain on it. He sat down in front of the simulated log fire and took two Nurofen and an inch of red wine for his joints.

He came awake to the sound of his own sobbing. He was disoriented. He made it to the kitchen on his stiff knees and boiled the kettle for tea.

He breathed. It was okay. It was okay. Here were the blue-and-white
ceramic kitchen tiles. Here was the old work surface with all its rings and scratches that you could run your fingertips across. It was okay. You had to stop thinking of these dreams as proof of damnation. They were just your bloody neurons crackling and fizzing, like jaded ladies fabricating gossip.

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.