“Stop talking now. This photo op. What do I need to do?”
“We need to create a positive event. Something to generate sympathy.”
“Like what?”
“Could you visit some charity or something?”
“What sort of charity?”
“I don’t know … something with kids?”
“You know how I feel about kids.”
“Okay. Sport, maybe?”
Zoe closed her eyes. “I do enough sport.”
Her agent took this in for a beat. “Well, can you rustle up a particular friend? Is there like a BFF angle we could work, a feature piece, something to make you look more human?”
“Well, there’s Kate.”
“I’m not talking about a photo on the bike. We need you doing something interesting.”
“And bike racing isn’t?”
“Darling,” her agent said. “What humans are interested in is human interest.”
“Fine, so Kate and I will do something human.”
“You’d better. Or tomorrow’s papers will eat you. And remember to smile in the photos, okay? You have a really lovely smile.”
Zoe was silent, thinking about Kate. Every now and then a moment came—like the aftermath of the previous day’s crash—when she realized how close they’d become. It had meant everything to Zoe to have one person in her life, amidst the black rain and the blue flashing lights, who was picking her up off the road surface not because it was her job but because she wanted to. Later, in the back of the ambulance, they’d talked the way she imagined sisters might. It had scared her. Her reluctance to open up, her sharpness—it was a bid to put back some distance. She needed Kate but she didn’t trust herself. She’d been more naturally equipped to deal with the relationship when all Kate had been was her rival—someone to destroy on the track and demoralize off it. “What’s wrong?” said her agent.
“Nothing,” Zoe said. “I was just remembering when none of this was about news cycles.”
“What, you still think it’s about bicycles? You can’t get all sentim—”
Zoe clicked off the call and closed her eyes.
The first day she met Kate, on the first morning of the Elite Prospects Programme when they were both nineteen, she’d only beaten her by psyching her out. She and Kate were the two quickest girls on the program by far, and Tom had set them up for a head-to-head sprint over three laps.
They’d sized each other up. Zoe’s heart had been fluttering. She couldn’t think straight from the adrenaline. She sat on her bike next to Kate, on the start line. Tom held Kate’s bike up and Jack held Zoe’s. Zoe’s skin glistened. She’d ridden three races in a row.
Kate said, “Are you okay to ride? Don’t you want to rest first?”
Zoe shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m warmed up. It’s you should be careful. How long have you been out of competition?”
“Six months.”
“Don’t break anything.”
Zoe had meant it to be psychologically unsettling, but Kate seemed to take it at face value.
“Thanks,” she said.
Zoe began working up a hypothesis that Kate was maybe not all that bright.
Tom counted down. “Five … four … three … two …”
Zoe looked down at Kate’s pedals. She made her eyes go wide.
Kate said, “What is it?”
Zoe said nothing.
Tom said, “One …”
Kate looked down. She was confused.
Tom blew his whistle for the start.
By the time Kate looked up, Zoe was already ten yards down the track. It was an impossible lead to reel in over three laps, but Kate almost did it. On the line, Zoe only beat her by a wheel.
Kate said, “Fuck!”
They rode two warm-down laps. They were gasping. They got off the bikes and collapsed. Kate drew up her knees and Zoe knelt beside her.
“Are you okay?”
Kate stared at Zoe. Her eyes were bloodshot. She said, “I’ll beat you next time.”
Zoe shook her head in some kind of admiration. “You’re fucking bionic,” she said.
Kate smiled. Jack came over, and when Zoe saw his hand on Kate’s shoulder, and the way she looked up at him, a knife turned in her chest and she stalked away.
By the last day of the program she was sitting apart from everyone whenever she wasn’t racing. She ate lunch high in the dark stands above the banking at the south end of the velodrome. She watched Kate and Jack putting each other’s numbers into their phones far below on the bright floodlit track. They’d been starry-eyed for three days.
She had a tray of fruit salad and she speared green grapes with a plastic fork as though each one of them had spited her. Tom climbed the stands to reach her. He held on to the handrail and pulled himself up with painful steps.
He said, “You don’t think she’s his type, do you?”
“I don’t think. I ride.”
Tom laughed. “Still pissed off at me for the receptionist trick?”
She looked up at him, crunched an apple slice, and said nothing.
“You okay?” he said.
She turned back to monitoring Kate and Jack. “If I keep winning, yeah.”
“And if you don’t?”
She shrugged. “Not an option.” She screwed up her eyes to see them better.
“I like you, Zoe. I’m pleased you came on this program. I can help you work through your issues, if you like.”
“I don’t have ‘issues.’ ”
“It’s just that you don’t seem very happy.”
“Like you are?”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m the bloody coach.”
She drummed her fingers on the seat back in front of her.
After a while he said, “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“I know.”
Tom waited, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”
He stood to go.
As he was turning, she said, “What happened?”
“To what?”
“To your knees. To you.”
Tom smiled. “I’d just as soon not talk about it.”
Zoe smirked. She mimicked his tone. “Just so you know I’m here to support.”
“Shit, Zoe, I’m only doing my job.”
She looked away and smiled.
Tom said, “Ah, I get it. You have to win everything. Even conversations.”
Zoe massaged the back of her neck. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”
Tom sat down again and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m a pretty fair coach. I’ve helped a lot of riders.”
She shrugged, but she didn’t shrug his hand away. He squeezed her shoulder quickly and took his hand back himself.
Zoe stared down at the track. Kate and Jack were laughing, the arc lights full on them. Jack threw back his head and guffawed, and Kate stretched to punch him jokily on the shoulder, and light flashed on her hair and light sparkled in his eyes and both of them glowed with fucking light as if they were hollow and illuminated from the inside by searchlights of one billion candlepower blazing through air-blown clouds of gold and silver glitter that filled their body cavities in the places where ordinary people had livers and lungs and intestines.
Zoe scowled. “How come they like each other, just like that?” she said, snapping her fingers.
“Ah, it’s chemistry, isn’t it? You see it all the time as a coach. There’s nothing on this earth more ready to fall in love with itself than youth at high velocity.”
Zoe opened her mouth to say something, then reconsidered.
“No, go on,” Tom said.
“Okay,” said Zoe. “You ever fall in love?”
He laughed. “Only twenty or thirty times a day. Doesn’t count at my age. Apply the voltage and the frog still kicks, but it’s dead as a disco on a Tuesda
y morning.”
“No,” she said irritably. “I mean properly.”
Tom sighed. “Love?” he said. “Yeah. Shit. I mean, long time ago.”
“What does it feel like?”
“You’re asking the wrong bloke. Like I say, it was in another life.”
Zoe was still watching Kate and Jack. She said, “I just feel kind of flat inside, mostly. Kind of dead. And other times I get super angry.”
“Does it scare you?”
She thought about it. “Yeah.”
Tom nodded acquiescence, like a doctor inclined to agree with his own diagnosis.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. But I mean, surely that counts as an issue.”
“I’m just being honest about how I feel.”
“You’re just being nineteen, Zoe. It gets easier.”
She made the hand signal of a mouth flapping away.
Tom smiled. “No. Seriously. As your coach it’s my solemn duty to inform you that you haven’t seen everything yet.”
“Whereas, what? You have?”
“Time moves on, is all I’m saying. You’ll find someone you care about.”
She gave him a hard look. “I’m not scared of being alone. Are you?”
“Oh my God, are you crazy? I’m shit scared of being alone.”
They sat there for a couple of minutes, watching Kate and Jack. They didn’t talk. Finally, Zoe passed Tom her fruit salad tray and he took a grape.
He said, “Thanks.”
She said, “Don’t get used to it.”
Tom laughed, Zoe didn’t.
“I want to race Jack,” she said.
“Are you kidding?”
“No. He pisses me off. Let me try to beat him.”
He looked at her skeptically and she looked back, forcing her face to be blank. She held his eyes and a certain sadness took shape between them. It made Zoe ache and she didn’t know what the feeling was. Her own fragility, maybe. Her sudden doubt that she was stronger than days, that she could be the fixed object that time would curl around like smoke in a wind tunnel.
Tom said, “I’m more of a bike coach than a matchmaker. I mean, if you fancy Jack you’d probably be better off just going down there and talking with him.”
Unexpectedly, Zoe blushed. “I don’t fancy him.”
“Then let it go.”
She tossed her head dismissively. “Fuck letting go.”
Tom regarded her carefully.
“What?” she said.
He weighed two invisible masses in his cupped palms. “You’re going to end up on a podium or in a body bag. I’m trying to work out which.”
Zoe snorted. “Like you care.”
“I’m paid to care, okay? This is my job. I strongly believe that with the right coach, you could be an incredible champion.”
“I don’t need a coach. I just need to race.”
“Then I’ll make you a deal, okay? If I let you race Jack, you let me coach you for a month. If you still think you don’t need me at the end of that month, then I’ll release you back into the wild. Maybe put some kind of tracking device on you, make it easier for the police to find your corpse.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
Tom patted her on the shoulder. “Good girl. Now look, how do you want to race Jack? You’ve got no chance if we make it a sprint race, have you?”
She looked down to where Jack was still laughing with Kate at the side of the track. He was big for a rider, six feet of muscle, and he had no body fat at all, just long bones with quads and glutes and abdominals deployed on the framework like an anatomical diagram. Zoe looked him up and down, and there was no lack of power.
“Distance?” she said.
“I can’t disagree. Make him work a few laps and he might fade. Ever raced pursuit?”
Zoe nodded. Individual pursuit was the simplest kind of racing. The two riders started at opposite sides of the track and rode anticlockwise, chasing each other down. You went hard from the start, and whoever caught the other rider was the winner. If no one made the catch, the winner would be whoever finished the distance first.
“Okay then,” said Tom. “Fourteen laps?”
“Fine.”
They walked down the steps to the track, and Tom called the riders in and shouted out the rules of engagement. Zoe kept her eyes locked on Jack, and he watched her back with amusement. His eyes did something to her. She fumbled her helmet straps before finally getting the buckle to snap closed. She hid behind her mirrored visor and whispered, “Come on, come on.” She controlled her breathing.
She closed her eyes tight and let all the buried fury come to the surface. Here was the deep rage she felt at herself. It started to rise in her, quicker and quicker, until she knew that if she didn’t get on a bike immediately and turn it into forward motion, a scream was going to come out of her that would get her taken away from the group.
“Let’s go,” she said with her eyes closed. “Come on, come on, let’s go …”
She let herself be ushered to the start line. Someone wheeled out her bike. Her body was shaking itself apart with adrenaline. She was alone on her start line. All the other riders on the program wanted Jack to win. They were clustered round his start, on the opposite side of the track. Zoe was fine with that. But there was no one to hold her bike up for the start. Tom called for volunteers, but no one would. In the end Tom came over and held her bike up himself.
He took her arm, but she shook him off.
“Come on, Zoe,” he said quietly. “Let’s set a realistic expectation for you here. Just try not to let him catch you inside ten laps. If you hold him off till the last four laps, you and I will call that a win, okay?”
She managed to say, “O-k-k-kay.”
Tom shouted out to get ready for the countdown, and the girls were excited at the other side of the track and they were shouting, “Go on, Jack!”
“Kick her arse, Jack!,” all thighs and glowing faces. Zoe looked across the center of the velodrome and Jack was looking back at her, smirking.
She snapped her gaze away. Tom yelled out the countdown.
Ten seconds to go. Zoe stared at the black line on the track ahead of her front wheel. The thin black strip that brought you back to yourself. She breathed hard, getting the oxygen into her blood. Focusing. She looked along the curved black line that bent gravity around the locus of her fury and called in all her demons and bound them together into one infinitely hot point of energy in the center of her. She shook with the force of it. She held it on the very edge of control as the countdown reached its end. The absolute anger of her energy would kill her if she had to hold it for more than a few more seconds. She fought to keep it contained. The speed struggled hysterically to be born. For the three last impossible seconds she restrained it, focused between the race and the real world, under starter’s orders. Her lips moved: she was praying for the whistle to go.
She felt the shriek of it down her spinal column. The sound connected directly with the life that she’d focused into one vengeful incandescent point. The whistle released that life into motion. She was stamping down on the pedals before her brain had heard the gun. She only became conscious twenty yards down the track. The first and last properly formed thought arrived: Oh, look at this, I’m racing.
The technique returned to her. All the training she’d coded into her body began to take control. Round the first steep curve, she eased down onto the saddle. She took her hands off the wide part of the bars, braced her elbows, and settled into her aero position. Her brain churned out random chatter. It said fuck fuck fuck I am going to lose. It said shoes, I need a new pair of shoes. It said her name is Rio and she dances on the sand. By this time her heart was doing 140 beats per minute and her digestion had shut down to save energy. Anger was transfigured into muscle burn. Muscle burn became speed. Her brain said indium, tin, antimony, tellurium. Her brain said I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. When she got to the second steep curve
she was on her line and getting into her rhythm, and her heart was already at 150, and her mind had gone numb and the edges of her vision were starting to blur. This was her body shutting down the blood flow to nonessential systems. Her brain gave one last chatter and faded into silence. Great Burnham Wood. Eject! Eject! Her heart rate hit 170. Involuntary whines escaped from her body. By six laps in, her heart rate was 190. She couldn’t think or even recall her name, and she was almost blind. Then something surprising happened.
A very slow peace came over her. Every bitter joule of rage had been converted into speed. She was empty. There was no pain. The air whistled past her ears. She listened intently. That silent music was all there was. It was the sound of the universe showing her mercy. Finally, she was no one.
These were the moments.
But then it started to go wrong. Slowly, as a whisper at first and then an undeniable roar, she heard Jack’s wheels behind her, and the ragged sound of his breathing. With eight laps to go, he was catching her. She was working at her maximum and so was he. Jack was just quicker. There wasn’t anything to be done about it.
Being chased down by another human being is a very intimate thing. She’d never been caught before. She heard each gasp of Jack’s lungs. She heard the catch in his breathing each time he reached the top of his pedal stroke. She heard the hiss of the airflow around him change its pitch as he dropped even tighter in to the frame of his bike. Her vision was down to a single bright green tunnel in a haze of black, as if she were riding with a tinted headlight. Behind the racing edge of the darkness there was only her breathing and Jack’s, getting closer. Somewhere out there, other human beings were chanting Jack’s name. The darkness filled with hallucinations. She saw the tall trunks of beech trees flashing past her. She saw green dappled shade and a tarmac road curving leftwards ahead. She heard a child’s giggling over the noise of the airstream, and she stamped down harder, hoping that her heart would burst and she wouldn’t have to hear it anymore.
And then Jack said something to her. He didn’t have to shout, because he was so close now. He said, “Sorry, Zoe.”
He was sorry. She knew it was the only kind of apology that meant something. With both of them at 200 heartbeats per minute, with the peace of exhaustion coming over her, she understood the effort it took him to say that. She realized what it must have cost him.