She stuck her fingers in her ears. “It’s not helping!”
“What’s that you say, big girl? I can’t hear you above the sound of four hundred kilted Scotsmen telling leukemia where to stick it!”
She tried her hardest to scowl but it came out as a grin instead.
“That’s my girl!”
The two of them listened to the pipe bands for a minute, and Sophie even managed half a reel around the kitchen floor with him. Jack was happy, and given that there was a fixed quantity of happiness in the universe, then he could only assume that in an equal and opposite kitchen somewhere on Earth, the father of another sick girl was listening to Mozart’s Requiem and not dancing.
When Sophie needed to get her breath back, Jack took a Mars bar from the fridge, broke it in two, and offered half to her.
“Get that down you. All the vital food groups: toffee, chocolate, and the mysterious beige matrix that we must assume to be vitamins.”
He lifted her onto a kitchen chair and watched her chewing. The pipe bands finished up on the stereo.
“Dad, can I ask you something?”
“Sure thing, big girl. What is it?”
She sighed, her expression implying that Jack might not be the brightest light in the room.
“Is Mum okay?”
“Yeah. Of course. Why?”
Sophie dropped her eyes and flushed. She laid one hand on top of the other on the tabletop, then removed the bottom hand and put it on top. She repeated this, faster and faster, zoning in.
“What is it?” he said.
She stopped abruptly. “Is she training hard enough?”
“Absolutely.”
“Did she miss training yesterday for me?”
“No. She had a rest day in her schedule. Me and Zoe too.”
“Honestly?”
Jack crossed his heart. “Honestly.”
“I want Mum to win gold in London.”
“So do I.”
“It’s her turn, Dad.”
He shrugged. “There aren’t turns in sport. They do it by whoever’s quickest.”
She looked steadily at him. “What if she isn’t quickest, and it’s because of me?”
He stroked her cheek. “Oh Sophie. I’m sure if you asked Mum, she’d say there were some things more important than winning.”
She held his eyes for a second longer. She blinked.
Straightaway, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. She turned away. Jack turned her back to face him and she sat there passively, shoulders hunched.
Jack hesitated. Of course you could turn a child so that she physically faced you. This was something you could do when you were six foot tall and superhuman. The trick was in knowing what to say.
“Maybe you should talk to Mum about it,” he said gently.
Sophie shrugged simply. “I can’t talk to her like I can talk to you.”
“Why not?”
She sighed. “I just can’t.”
Jack felt a constriction in his chest—an ache—whether for himself or his daughter or his wife he didn’t know. He’d never asked himself such a question. If he’d thought about it at all, he’d always felt that Kate was closer to Sophie. Nevertheless he’d sometimes felt guilty for his unshakable state of happiness, while Sophie was going through so much. He’d often worried that it had to be a certain detachment that permitted him to feel good, from moment to moment. Kate suffered more. She was the one who agonized about nutrition and nursing, she was the one who dropped everything when Sophie took turns for the worse, and she was the one who set her alarm three times a night to go and check in on their daughter. And yet here he was, apparently closer to her.
He dropped his eyes and stared miserably at the backs of his hands.
“I was the first person who held you, did you know that?” he said quietly. “When you were nine hours old. I didn’t know how to do it. They showed me how to scrub my hands and put on the latex gloves, and they showed me how to put my hands through the holes in the incubator. Then they stopped giving me the instructions. So there I was, with my hands sticking through the glove holes and your little body lying on the blue plastic pad and all the wee tubes and whatnot coming out of you, and I said, ‘What do I do now?’ And they said, ‘Just hold her.’ And I was so scared I was going to drop you. I didn’t know how to do something as simple as hold you, Sophie. Sometimes I still don’t.”
“It’s okay,” said Sophie. “I don’t mind.”
They hugged for a while, and then Jack carried her up to her room for a rest.
Kate came into the kitchen when he was back down there, making more tea.
She laughed. “Real tea, in a pot? Okay, what have you done?”
He jumped at the sound of her voice and spun round. “What?”
“You’re the tea-bag-in-a-mug guy. You only make me proper posh tea when you’re sorry for something.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Once when you forgot our anniversary and once when your dad got pissed and tried to kiss me.”
He frowned. “I never realized.”
She kissed him. “See? I can read you like a book.”
“Which book?”
“One of those early readers with a list of new words we learned at the back.”
“And which new words did we learn?”
“Gorgeous, handsome, bloody, idiot.” She counted them off on her fingers.
He put his arms around her. “Sorry,” he said.
“What for?”
“For being so bloody gorgeously idiotically handsome.”
“This is what my pot of tea is for?”
“Yeah. Don’t drink it all at once.”
She twisted in his arms to look up at him. “Really, though. Is something wrong?”
“If I make you a pot of tea, it has to mean there’s something on my mind? This is your contention?”
“Indeed.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Well, I’m sorry for that. But honestly, nothing’s wrong.”
“Truly?”
He hugged her tighter. “Truly.”
After a while Kate switched on the radio, and they looked out through the kitchen window and drank their teas while The The played “Uncertain Smile.”
“Remember this?” said Jack.
“Oh God, I do.”
“After my crash? Driving up the motorway? When you still thought I was an egotist?”
“I still think you’re an egotist now.”
He looked at her to see if she was being serious, but she was looking out the window and he couldn’t tell. He followed her gaze. Propped against the little shed in the small, sunny back yard, Sophie’s bicycle was rusting.
Bathroom, 203 Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester
When Kate went upstairs, she found Sophie vomiting into the upstairs toilet. She was puking undramatically, with the resignation of a girl doing something less pleasant than cleaning her teeth but less arduous than homework.
Kate rushed to her. “You poor thing,” she said, stroking Sophie’s cheek and feeling the hot dryness of her skin. “Why didn’t you call?”
“I’m fine,” said Sophie, wiping her mouth.
“Have you been feeling poorly?”
Sophie shook her head.
“It was just really sudden?”
“Yeah.”
Kate ran a flannel under the bathroom tap and cleaned her up.
“Feel better now?”
Sophie smiled up at her. “Much better.”
Kate held her tight, and sighed. She must have fed her something wrong, which was bad of her because Sophie could eat so many things. This is what the dietician told her. Sophie had allergies and intolerances, of course, which was normal with leukemia and diminished immune function. The dietician told Kate that she just had to be imaginative. Don’t obsess on what’s prohibited, he insisted. Think of the millions of things in nature. See it this way: your daughter can eat almost anything.
And he was right,
thought Kate, so long as it wasn’t food. She rinsed the flannel and wrung it out. Sophie was wheat-intolerant and she couldn’t do shellfish. She could eat fresh fruit and sparingly cooked vegetables and she liked those things about as much as other kids did. Also, she had no resistance to germs. Everything got boiled or peeled. Theoretically she could eat fish. The dietician had told Kate: Fish is nature’s superfood, Mum. It’s nutrition with fins. It’s lunch with a face on the front. Your daughter will live till she’s ninety on fish.
Sophie hated fish, though. She made outraged faces and spat it out. Because as well as having leukemia, she was eight. There were multiple protocols to treat leukemia, but the only known cure for being eight was being nine. In the meantime, no fish. Or yeast. Or soy. Or ground nuts. Or nuts from trees. Or citrus fruit. Sometimes Kate opened the fridge and just stared. Why, she didn’t know. In case they’d invented a more edible kind of food, perhaps, and she’d cleverly bought it without remembering. She could sometimes stand there for a whole minute, gazing into the bright white light as if a cure might be hidden between the baby sweet corn and the carefully scrubbed new potatoes.
She was sure she hadn’t fed Sophie anything on the banned list, and yet here was this vomit. She sat on the edge of the bath and phoned the dietician, while Sophie sat with her back against the warm radiator and played with her Millennium Falcon.
Kate had to go through the hospital switchboard and ask to speak to the food doctor. There was an assumption on the pediatric unit that the technical vocabulary would bamboozle you. If you asked for the dietician they would say, “Do you mean the food doctor?” and you would have to say, “Yes please,” and that would be another ten seconds of your life that you’d never get back. The nutritionist was the food doctor, the hematologist was the blood doctor. The first time they had met Sophie’s pediatrician, he’d bounded up to them and said, “Hi! I’m the baby doctor!” After a while, you learned to play up to your role in the pantomime. The script was that you were not very clued up, but the doctors were patient and kind with you, and all of the children were brave.
After some paging, the food doctor came on the phone.
“And how are we today, Mum?”
“Sophie’s been sick. We haven’t even done breakfast yet, and I wondered if you had any ideas to settle her stomach.”
“Well, Mum,” the dietician said, “what you have to understand about leukemia is that it is a condition affecting the blood, and because blood is such an important part of the little one’s body, it will affect all her systems, so you have to be prepared for food tolerances to change …”
Kate zoned out and let her eyes defocus on the bathroom tiles. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting the dietician to say. Try Marmite, perhaps, or Custard always goes down well. Instead she was getting this lecture, apparently aimed at parents with head injuries, and yet there was still a certain comfort in it. Sometimes, even with Jack in the house, she felt alone. It could feel as if you were only orbiting the planet that normal families lived on. Hospital voices on the phone reassured you, like the babble of mission control. They made you feel that at least you were orbiting something substantial and not simply drifting in space.
She heard Jack’s steps coming up the stairs. He stood in the bathroom doorway, watching her for an explanation. She mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, pointed at Sophie and the toilet.
Jack clapped his hand to his forehead.
Kate mouthed, What?
“I fed her a Mars bar. Just a half. I thought it’d be okay.”
Kate was too relieved to be angry. She put the dietician on speaker-phone. Jack listened for a moment, then grinned and mimed words coming out of his arse, swirling in eddies, and dispersing in the air of the room with an odor that was disagreeable to him. Sophie and Kate giggled, which stopped the dietician in midflow.
“Is everything alright, Mum?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, everything’s fine. Look, something’s come up, I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back.”
She clicked the phone off and stared at Jack. “You twat,” she said simply.
Jack aped the dietician’s voice. “Oh for goodness’ sake, Mum, you’re thinking in a much too narrow way. Consider all the very many foodstuffs that exist on this big wide planet of ours. Have you tried tractor grease and tiger milk? Have you tried cuttlefish roes and wolfsbane? No? Then kindly do so at once, before phoning up to bother me with news that your daughter has puked up a Mars bar.”
That made Kate laugh, and Sophie too. Jack knelt and gathered them into him, and they hugged on the bathroom floor in the little house, and it seemed true to all of them that a moment like this was worth the unceasing work of ignoring the little things that might spoil it.
National Cycling Centre, Stuart Street, Manchester
Before training that day, at the velodrome, Jack’s coach gave him the news about the Olympic rule change. Jack listened without changing his expression. Then he nodded and said, “Fine.” He strapped on his aerodynamic helmet, clipped into his pedals, and trained so hard he almost blacked out on the track.
He warmed down from the bike session, then hit the basement gym. There was an energy in him, a fury. He got rid of some of it with abdominal work, then he began clean-lifting an eighty-kilo barbell, just snatching it up and slamming it straight above his head. Some of the guys from British Cycling were warming down in the gym. They were all national-level athletes themselves, and they stared at Jack as if he was a freak.
The mood he was in, he could have lifted more. He tried to wear himself out but he couldn’t. He felt muscle fibers ripping and forced himself to stop before he ruined something. There was still so much furious energy. He showered and stood with a towel cinched around his waist, looking at himself in the mirror above the basin in the locker room. He caught his own eye, held it for a second, then somehow walked away before he punched the mirror.
It was two in the afternoon. He jogged home to pick up Kate and Sophie and drive them back to the velodrome for Kate’s training session. All the way home he rehearsed how to give Kate the news about the rule change. He slowed to a walk as he got closer to home. The walk got slower, became a dawdle. When he finally turned his key in the door, Kate was standing in the hallway, impatient. Her annoyance turned to concern when she saw his face.
“What is it?” she said.
Jack’s courage left him. He forced his face to become calm. He said, “Nothing. I’m sorry I’m late.”
Kate had packed a bag with all Sophie’s bits in it as well as her own, so all Jack had to do was drive. His legs ached from the track work, his shoulders hurt from the weights, and his fingers would hardly grip the wheel. Ideally he’d be horizontal at this moment, in recovery, with his legs slightly elevated and an ice pack on his deltoids. At the elite level it wasn’t the training that set you apart—all the guys trained themselves to the edge of destruction. Victory lay in how well you managed the recovery phase.
“Don’t kick the back of my seat, please.”
The kicking stopped. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Sophie was hunched in her car seat with her arms crossed tight. She looked out at the traffic, her eyes huge under her baseball cap.
“So why were you late?” Kate said.
Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry, okay? Dave wouldn’t let me go.”
“He’s your coach, Jack, not your boss.”
“Don’t nag me, please.”
“Then don’t be late, please. This is shit for me.”
“Twenty minutes late. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Twenty-five minutes.”
“Don’t be petty. You’re not a petty person.”
She shot him a look that said, No, but you’re an arsehole.
He drove through traffic that was sluggish and getting slower. He thought about recovery. You were meant to have time to yourself, to settle your thoughts while your body replenished the energy and fluids you’d lost in training, and set about new pro
tein synthesis. You weren’t supposed to be on the go, twenty-four hours a day, juggling sport and this illness.
The truth was, with their final Olympics only four months away, he and Kate were getting tireder each day. And now here was this rule change, and suddenly the pressure on them was doubled. It was another heavy blow to take. Last year the IOC had announced that the individual pursuit had been axed from the Olympics. It had been hard for all of them, to have one less chance to medal, but it had been hardest of all for Kate since the pursuit was her best event. She’d taken the news uncomplainingly, rebuilt her body into a new configuration to focus everything on the sprint—and now this. He tried to find the words to give the news to her, but he could hardly think about it coherently himself.
In the passenger seat beside him, Kate snapped her fingers impatiently. Zoe would have been warming up for half an hour already. Kate probably imagined that this was her biggest problem at this moment in time. She exhaled loudly.
“Can I help you?” he said.
She pointed at a gap in the traffic that had just closed ahead of them. “You could have got through there.”
“Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
Jack hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and looked away. She was putting this crawling traffic on him, as if it was somehow his fault that everyone in Manchester had picked this exact moment to jump in their vehicles and go to buy geraniums, or deliver photocopier toner, or whatever people did with their time when they didn’t have an Olympics to prepare for.
Sophie started drumming her feet against the back of his seat again; Kate clicked her fingers. Jack thought, Of course this is my main job, ferrying these women around. He realized the thought lacked dignity, but it was hard not to feel resentment. His competition wasn’t as close as Kate’s, but still. There was only one male sprint place for London in play, and only so many joules of energy in his body. His rivals would be chilling out right now, recovering. They’d been clever enough to choose wives without sports careers and kids without cancer.