She threw her head back and laughed. “You got that impression?”
He put up a hand. “Look, it’s none of my business who the father is, but you should consider asking him to help, at least. Babies are hard work. It’s relentless. They need feeding and changing and carrying, day and night.”
“So I’ll do those things. We’ll work out how many hours it takes and I’ll fit it in.”
“It’s not like it’s a list of tasks I can schedule round training for you.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s a life. You’re supposed to give a shit.”
She looked past him, down the track. “Of course I give a shit.”
“Then get off the bike, Zoe. You’re twenty-three years old. All this will still be here for you when you’re ready to come back to the sport. But right now, you need to get off the bike.”
She stared at him. “It’s Jack’s baby, Tom. I’ll get off the bike when Jack does.”
He was so surprised that he let go his grip on her handlebars, and she was so angry that she stamped down hard on the pedals and built up her speed way past any kind of safe limit. Each time she flashed past him he begged her to slow down, but she only rode harder. Finally he just slumped in a seat and watched her ride.
After twenty laps Zoe slowed to a stop, racked her bike, and warmed down slowly on the fixed machines in the center of the velodrome. Tom took her a clean towel and an isotonic drink at ambient temperature.
“You okay?” he said.
She looked up at him. Her face was pale and there were black rings around her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. I’m just an old bastard who never got it right myself. I reckon you can do better than I did, is all.”
He arranged the towel across her back and squeezed her shoulders and used a corner of the towel to dab the sweat away from her face. She stopped pedaling then. She closed her eyes and leaned her head into his chest. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he left them hanging helplessly by his sides. They stood there for a minute while the decelerating flywheel of the stationary bike made a mournful, descending note in the echoing space of the velodrome.
“I’m so tired, Tom,” she whispered.
“You’ll feel better,” he said.
“Will I?” she said. “Do you?”
He thought about it and then, because he was her coach, he said, “Yeah.”
She smiled up at him. “Liar.”
When it happened it was sudden. She got up from the exercise bike, took two steps towards the dressing room, and collapsed with a shout. He ran to her and she gripped his hands. When he realized what was happening, his legs almost buckled. He had just enough presence of mind to get her to change out of her British Cycling kit and into her civilian clothes. Whatever was going to happen now, he knew it would be easier for her without all the attention. When the ambulance came, he got in it with her and she held on to his hands again, her eyes rolling. When the paramedic took his clipboard and asked him for the details of the patient, he gave them his mother’s maiden name.
She was still gripping his hands forty minutes later, when the paramedics wheeled her into the delivery room. They peeled off her clothes and laced a hospital gown around her, and Tom was careful not to look while they did it. The medics gave her injections to stop the contractions, but they didn’t work. An hour after they’d arrived, the midwife told them that nothing was going to stop the baby coming.
“Are you the partner?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “I’m just a friend. I’ll wait outside, okay?”
Zoe gripped his hands. “Don’t leave me alone. Please.”
“I’ll just be outside.”
She looked up at him, pleading. “Please.”
Tom closed his eyes and opened them. “Okay.”
The midwife looked levelly at Zoe. “Just to confirm, are you happy for this gentleman to be present at the delivery?”
Zoe’s face convulsed with the pain of a contraction. When it was gone, she looked up at the midwife. “I don’t have anyone else.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
They gave her pethidine, and gas and air, and after that the contractions seemed to bother her less. He held her hand and dropped to his knees to whisper encouragement in her ear. Thirty-five years before, they hadn’t let him into the delivery room, but he told Zoe what he’d told his own wife just before they’d wheeled her away from him. He said what he’d said to all of his athletes, for decades: “Breathe.”
Zoe was disconnected with the shock and the opiates and the gas. She squeezed his hand and groaned.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.” He knew this was what you were supposed to say when it wasn’t.
She rolled her head to look at him, and her eyes were frantic.
“Tom,” she said. “When they let me out of here, let’s go straight back and finish the training session, okay?”
“Just breathe, alright? There’ll be plenty of time for all that.”
She shook her head and writhed with pain. “I have to get back.”
Sweat beaded on her face and her hand gripped his so hard that her nails drew blood. The midwife told her to push.
Tom was making sure to keep his eyes on her face, and Zoe had her eyes squeezed tight, and the doctors took something away but neither of them noticed, and no one explained anything to them.
Fifteen minutes later Zoe delivered the placenta, and both of them thought it was the baby.
“It’s coming,” Zoe groaned. “Oh God, it’s coming.”
Tom felt an arc of tension rise in her body, and as it subsided, he heard the heavy, flaccid weight of something coming out of her. He looked, expecting to see a newborn. Instead he saw a steak-sized parcel of gore in the midwife’s hands. It was wrapped in a translucent and gelatinous jacket, like a clear dumpling. The umbilical cord trailed from it. He forced himself to look again, following the cord to the place that must be the belly button, and trying to make sense of what he saw. He stared at the placenta for the longest time, thinking it to be the convexity of the belly, and searched at its extremities for the places where tiny arms and scrawny legs and an outraged little face should be. Not finding them, he felt a rising panic and a clawing shame that something had gone terribly and obscenely wrong. There was a hot metallic stink of blood, and the midwife was flustered and uncommunicative. Her attention was turned to what was happening now on the other side of the delivery room, where doctors and nurses were crowding around something on a table that was blocked from his sight by their bodies.
Zoe was flat on her back, exhausted.
“Is it okay?” she whispered.
Tom squeezed her hand and tried not to vomit.
“Yeah,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”
An orderly reached down with a latex-gloved hand and grasped the thing that had just come out of Zoe. Tom watched as the hand lifted the yielding mass into a large stainless steel dish, covered it with a plain green cloth, and placed it without ceremony on the middle shelf of the stainless steel trolley beside the bed. Of course, he thought. These people saw such things from time to time. It was natural that they were unsentimental.
So that’s it, he thought. The thing wasn’t viable.
He couldn’t block out the image of its terrible malformation. He was only grateful that they weren’t going to make Zoe look at it.
He knelt by her ear. “Look, sweetheart,” he said. “I have to be straight with you here. It was beautiful, but it was stillborn.”
She looked at him then, and he saw the relief in her eyes.
A few minutes later the doctors wheeled over the thing they’d been working on. It was a clear acrylic box, besieged by monitoring machines and perforated by cables. Inside was a tiny premature newborn, much smaller than the hideous thing that the orderly had placed in the dish and taken away. This newborn was almost completely obscured by ventila
ting pipes, feeding tubes, protective headgear, and plastic sheeting. Tom wondered why they were showing Zoe some other woman’s baby. Maybe it was a psychological thing. Maybe if you’d just given birth to something monstrous, there was research that showed you needed to see a normal child immediately.
“What’s this?” he asked them.
The midwife ignored him and smiled at Zoe. “It’s your daughter, Mum.”
Zoe waved her away as politely as she could while the orderly dabbed at her thighs with baby wipes. She explained to the doctors, clearly and calmly, that it was okay—that it was kind of them, but that she didn’t need some other woman’s baby. She told them it wasn’t the end of the world for her that her child had been stillborn.
Tom watched their startled reactions.
“There’s only nine months to go till Athens,” Zoe explained. “I need to get back to training.”
The doctors had a whispered consultation, then hurried the baby away to the neonatal ICU.
Even when Tom grasped what had happened and talked Zoe through it, she didn’t seem to feel any connection with the thing in the incubator. The doctors told her it was breathing mostly on its own. They were pleased: at twenty-six weeks, it was the best possible news. They set up a bed for Zoe next to the incubator, and they showed her how to scrub her hands and push them through the airlocked vents in the side of the box. She was supposed to touch the baby. Instead she fell asleep, washed out with fatigue.
Tom called Jack and Kate to the hospital. They came straightaway and stood by the bedside, holding hands. They looked at the baby in its box. Kate sighed, and Jack held her tightly.
“She’s beautiful,” said Kate.
“Yeah,” said Jack.
“She’s got your little face.”
Jack said nothing, just looked at his daughter while tears ran down his cheeks.
Kate looked up at Tom. “She told you the baby’s Jack’s?”
He nodded.
She looked down at Jack’s hand in hers. “What do you think?”
Tom shrugged. “I don’t think. I’m just here to help.”
They all looked at Zoe sleeping, on her side, with her knees drawn up. Her black hair was plastered to her face with perspiration. There was blood on the sheet that they all tried not to notice.
Kate stroked Zoe’s face. Zoe didn’t stir.
Kate knelt by her bed. “Look what’s happened, Jack,” she said quietly.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Kate didn’t respond to him. “She looks so weak. Zoe? Zoe? Oh God, is she going to be okay?”
“She’ll be fine. Doctors say she’ll be flat out for a while, but you know Zoe. She’ll be breaking down the walls if they don’t let her home in a couple of days.”
He tried to make it light, but Kate wasn’t smiling.
“I should have just talked to her. It’s been months since we spoke. I can’t believe I just left her alone to deal with … all this.”
Tom touched her arm. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s not like any of us knew how to cope.”
Kate didn’t take her eyes off Zoe. “I’ll make it up to her. She’s my friend. And now look at her … look at all this blood … and she didn’t have anyone.”
Tom nodded. “But look at the baby, won’t you? Don’t tell me she isn’t beautiful. None of this is something to be sorry about.”
They all looked in silence while the baby’s pulse beeped softly from the monitoring unit attached to the incubator.
Kate stood and turned to Jack. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to stay here with Zoe and … your daughter? Do you want me to leave?”
He shook his head.
Kate hugged him around the neck and pressed her face against his. “I should,” she whispered. “I thought I could handle it, but I’m not a part of this. I should go.”
She looked at him with perfect desperation and hurried out of the room. She paused in the doorway, and Jack took a step towards her, but the despair came back into her eyes and she was gone.
Jack looked Tom in the eye and nodded sadly.
“Oh, mate,” said Tom.
They hugged, briefly. Jack turned back to the incubator. He placed both hands on top of it and looked down at the face of his daughter.
“Coffee?” said Tom, after a while.
“Thanks.”
Tom went out for twenty minutes. He found a vending machine, bought a chocolate bar, and ate it slowly to give Jack some time to get his head together. He bought two plastic coffees from another machine and held one in each hand as he reversed back through all the swing doors to the ICU. When he returned to the room, Zoe was still asleep and Jack had his hands inside the incubator, stroking the baby’s cheek very carefully with the tip of one finger.
He said, “Is she going to be okay, do you think?”
Tom put Jack’s coffee down on Zoe’s bedside table. “I don’t know. The doctors say she’s twenty-six weeks. I don’t even know how early that is.”
Jack nodded slowly, still looking down at the incubator. “You think I’m an arsehole, right?”
“You talking to me or the baby?”
“You.”
Tom sipped his coffee. “I don’t think you’re an arsehole. You fucked things up is all. That’s our primary role as fathers.”
Jack laughed sadly. “I did it sooner than most.”
“Well, I always said you were spectacularly quick.”
Jack stared down into the incubator. “Do you think she’s alright in there?”
“She’s probably looking up through the glass and asking the same thing about you. She looks snug as a bug.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Nah. I grabbed a Twix out in the corridor.”
Jack didn’t answer, and Tom realized he’d been talking to the baby.
“Jack,” he said. “Have you been seeing Zoe often?”
Jack shook his head. “I slept with her once. After Kate chucked me out. It was a rough patch.”
“Think you could live with Zoe? Raise the kid?”
Jack turned to watch her sleeping. “I’ll help her raise the kid,” he said finally.
“No happy families, then?”
Jack looked at him. “I don’t love her. She doesn’t love me either. I think it took us sleeping together before we could see that straight.”
Tom looked away.
“What?” said Jack.
“Mate, what is it with blokes your age? You’ve got psychological answers for everything. Look at Zoe. Look at her. She’s fragile as hell, and just about the only thing that makes any sense to her is going to Athens. And now she’s got a baby, and you’ve got away with it. Back in the day I’d have run you out into the bush and beaten the crap out of you till you took your bloody responsibilities.”
Jack looked him in the eye. “You’re not her dad,” he said quietly.
Tom stared back, blood pumping. He was so furious he could have punched him. Slowly, the pounding in his chest calmed down and he looked at the ground. His shoulders sagged.
“True,” he said.
Jack took a step back and ran his hands through his hair. “I care about Zoe, but what am I meant to do? Emotionally speaking, she comes up to here on me.” With the flat of his hand he indicated a planar surface two feet above his head. “I think I could look after a baby, but I don’t know how to look after her, and I don’t want to. I don’t love her, I love Kate.”
Tom looked down at Zoe. In sleep, the hardness was gone from her face. Her hands were tucked beneath her cheek and her nostrils flared softly with each breath. She looked very young.
Tom said, “I think I can look after her, but I don’t think she can look after the baby.”
Under the naked lights of the ICU room, Tom and Jack said nothing for a long time.
In the café, Tom finished his coffee. A measure of the thick sediment made it into his mouth, and he ground it b
etween his molars, tasting its bitter blackness. Phil Collins was still singing that he could feel it coming in the air tonight.
Tom was pretty sure that if Phil could be bothered to express the problem a little more honestly, he’d be able to coach him how to break it down into its constituent parts and solve it. This was how it worked, with coaching. If you were honest about the challenge, there was always a way to break it down.
Zoe hadn’t wanted the baby; Jack hadn’t wanted Zoe. Once Tom had expressed it like that, the solution had seemed straightforward. He’d sent Jack, Kate, and Zoe off for a week to give everyone space to think about it, and he’d stayed in the hospital with the baby. Within a week Zoe was back in light training, and he was helping the nurses to change the baby’s tiny nappies and switch the cylinders on her feeding tube. He slept in the bed they’d put there for Zoe, and he ate the food from the vending machines. The nurses called him Grandad, and he found it easier not to correct them. He called Zoe every day and asked her to come in, and some days she did. He would sit with her while they both looked at the baby’s tiny hands swatting invisible flies in the incubator.
“Don’t you want to hold her?” Tom asked.
Zoe twisted her hands together. “I can’t feel anything for her.”
“You can’t, or you can’t let yourself?”
Zoe hadn’t taken her eyes away from the baby. “If she isn’t with me, it’ll be better for her.”
“But are you sure you want Jack to take her? How do you know you won’t feel different, a few months down the line?”
She pulled her knees up to her chin and stared at the baby.
“It’s not about how I feel, is it? It’s about how I am. I won’t be good for her, Tom.”
A few days in, on one of Zoe’s visits, Tom said, “At least give her a name.”
“Sophie,” she said, without hesitation.
“Oh. You’ve been thinking about it.”
“I’ve been thinking about her all the time. I haven’t been thinking about anything else.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know if I could give her a name. I didn’t know if I had the right.”
He hugged her. “You just give her as much as you can. That’s all any of us can do.”