Half-a-dozen riders from a youth squad were training on the track, and their coach’s instructions rang through the otherwise empty building. Tom let the action revolve around him at a distance while he focused on his preparations.
He spun the wheels on both bikes, looking for trueness and alignment. He checked that the mechanic had installed the right gear for each rider. He made sure the tires were new and checked the air pressures. All of this was the mechanic’s job tomorrow morning, but Tom didn’t want to leave it that late to discover that some vital part was defective.
When his checks were done, he stood between the two bikes, one hand loosely closed around a handlebar of each. In the way the machines were set up, you could feel something of the riders. Zoe’s bike was bigger, with two more inches of height in the frame and three extra inches of reach. She rode with a bigger gear and used the long levers of her legs to power the pedal stroke around. Kate’s ride was more compact, with a lighter gear that she spun till her legs were a blur, making up for her relative lack of power with a phenomenal work rate. Kate’s machine was painted simple white, with a passport-sized image of Sophie’s face smiling up from the top tube under the clear lacquer of the finish. The bars were wrapped with a light pink bar tape that was springy and warm to the touch. Zoe’s bike was unpainted, so that the functional lay-up of the dark carbon fiber was visible under the matte varnish. Her bars had a black rubberized grip on the drops. On each side of the seat tube, visible from whichever side her opponent lined up beside her on the start line, was written UNDEFEATED in large gold letters in an Old English typeface. While Kate’s bike was designed to make her feel at home in the cockpit, Zoe’s was calculated to intimidate.
There was an intimacy just in touching these machines whose frames fitted each rider as precisely as her own bones, these frames that had carried their riders, the two people he cared most about, to limits of pain equal to, and occasionally beyond, their emotional breaking point. Tom gripped the handlebars and grappled with the feeling of knowing that after tomorrow, one of these bikes would never be raced again. By one p.m. the next day he would be wheeling one of these machines back down to the British Cycling gear room, while the loser took her ride home with her as a souvenir, to sit in the hallway for a few months and then finally, when the pain and the shock had sufficiently receded, to be auctioned off to benefit a charity of her choice.
When he allowed himself to visualize the aftermath, the physical act of wheeling the winner’s bike back down to the room where dreams were held in trust, he knew it would be better if Zoe won. It wasn’t that he would prefer her to win: he’d never allowed himself to confuse the closeness he felt to her with a wish that she should prevail over his other athlete. It just seemed true to him, as the coach of both women, that if he extended his remit beyond simple results on the track and into the domain of their general welfare, then it would be better for Zoe to beat Kate tomorrow. Kate had reasons to carry on living if she lost.
It was shitty, though. If anyone deserved a go at the Olympics it was Kate. Back in Beijing, when Sophie was first diagnosed, there’d been six days to go before the cycling events. He’d caught up with them an hour after the doctor gave them the news, when they didn’t know if Sophie was going to die or not. He’d been briefed by the doctors, and because it wasn’t his own kid, he’d had just enough detachment to ask some follow-up questions. He knew more than Jack and Kate did.
He’d had to fight his way into the hotel through a press of reporters. Somehow, the media had worked out that there was a story. The opening ceremony was under way, and Jack and Kate weren’t there, and the reporters had done their asking around. Britain’s two best medal hopes, and some kind of medical emergency. That’s all they knew, and Tom wasn’t giving them anything else. He’d barged his way through the pack in the hotel lobby, stonewalled their questions, and got the general manager to take him upstairs in the service lift.
When the manager let him into the room, Kate and Jack were kneeling by Sophie’s bed. Her eyes were motionless behind her eyelids. Kate’s phone was going off and so was Jack’s. The TV in the room was on quietly, showing the opening ceremony. There were fireworks, and showering silver stars from the roof of the stadium. All the teams were draped in their flags, smiling and waving as they lapped the track.
He made them both sit down on the end of the bed and he took away their phones. They sat there like children, looking up at him.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ve been talking to the doctors, so let me break this down for you.”
He pointed at Sophie. “Fact one. Ninety-one out of a hundred kids in her condition recover, so this is a very positive situation we’re managing here. Fact two, you do not want to get her involved with the treatment protocols in this country, because none of us will understand what the hell is going on and you won’t be able to make the right decisions for her. Therefore, fact three, one of you has to fly home with her in the morning. This is what I gather from talking with the doctors here, and I’ve also been advised by a consultant in Manchester who’s ready to organize Sophie’s admission.”
Kate couldn’t look at him. She leaned over and buried her face in Sophie’s neck.
Tom said, “Unless you think there’s another way to do this? We could assign someone to fly home with Sophie, but you’re not going to let her go home without one of you, are you? Not to start chemo. If I thought there was any way we could still have both of you medaling at these Games, then that’s what we’d be doing. But one of you competing is the best we’re going to get out of this situation.”
Jack put an arm around Kate. He said, “We’ll both fly back.”
She squeezed his knee. “Yeah. We’ll both go.”
Tom knelt on the floor. He looked from one of them to the other. He said, “No.”
There was silence.
Tom said, “I don’t blame you for not seeing it straight, but this is all about winning outcomes. You can get Sophie better. And you can win gold. If one of you stays, you can achieve both of those things as a family. That’s how you have to look at this.”
Jack said, “No, Tommo. No.”
“Dave will tell you the same, Jack. Call him if you like.”
“You’ve talked to him?”
“Of course we’ve talked. We both reckon one of you needs to win now, for the three of you. You simply don’t train as hard as you guys have trained to come away with nothing.”
Kate looked at Jack. Both of them were stroking Sophie’s hair and face, as if they might make her better with their hands.
Kate said to Jack, “Is he right?”
Jack held his head and grunted, as if containing an explosion in a limited space.
“And I’m sorry,” Tom said, “but you need to think about the money side of this too. At least one of you has to keep your sponsor happy. The next couple of years are going to be hard, and the last thing you need is to drop both of your incomes.”
Kate turned to Tom, and he watched her forcing herself to breathe. “Okay,” she said at last. “Who stays, and who goes home?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? I think you two have to choose.”
Jack groaned again, and the sound was so desperate that Tom found his own hands twisting. He wondered if Kate was getting her head around the situation more quickly because she was stronger than her husband, or whether it was easier for her because it wasn’t her biological daughter who lay on the bed between them—dying, for all any of them knew. Maybe there was a deeper level of pain in the blood. Certainly when he’d told Zoe, she’d taken the news like a direct hit from a bus. She was only out there now, at the opening ceremony, because Tom had made her attend. They couldn’t risk the media making a link between her and Sophie.
Kate looked at him. “How would you decide, if it was just about the results?”
“On purely sports performance grounds?”
“Yes.”
Tom hung his head for a long time. He massaged the back of his neck.
/> “You know I hate this, right?”
“Yes.”
He looked straight at her. “Jack’s a surefire bet for gold, I reckon. And you’re in the form of your life. If this was about results, I’d ask Zoe to take Sophie home.”
He watched her face carefully as the shock came into it. She drew closer to Sophie and held her, instinctively. “No,” she whispered.
He pushed a little harder. “Let’s send Jack home with Sophie, then, and let you race. It’s your turn.”
She shook her head and stroked Sophie’s hair. “I can’t leave her,” she said.
She swallowed. She knew it was the end.
Jack put his hand on Kate’s shoulder. “But it is your turn,” he said.
She looked down at Sophie and ran her fingers over her pale cheek and neatened up the collar of her daughter’s dress where it had become folded inwards.
“I just can’t leave her,” she said simply.
Tom stood up and took a step away, to give them a little space. “Then I’m sorry, Kate. You’d better pack your things.”
Kate said, “Fine.”
He could tell she was concentrating on not crying. The next few days were going to be all about helping her to break the hours down into achievable goals: not crying, not screaming, not fainting. If she could perform these feats to Olympic level, there was a possibility that she would get through the week.
Jack put his head in his hands. Now that the decision was made, no one knew what to say.
The BBC sports anchor was on the television in the hotel room, looking serious. He was standing in the downstairs lobby, talking to camera. They cut to footage of Jack winning gold in Athens and Kate on her doorstep accepting his marriage proposal on live TV, with Sophie in her arms and the flag draped around them. They cut back to the sportscaster, who had one hand on his earpiece and one hand holding the mic. “All we know at this time is that this looks like a grave, grave situation.”
Sophie woke up crying. She said, “I feel bad.”
Jack cradled her head. He whispered in her ear. “It’s going to be okay, brave big girl. You’re just tired. You’re going home with Mummy for a nice rest.”
“Puts the whole thing into stark perspective,” the sportscaster was saying. “We can easily forget, underneath all the glitz and the glamour of an Olympics, that these are real people, real families like yours and mine.”
Tom watched Kate looking down at Sophie, and at that moment Sophie looked up at her and reached out her arms in that gesture small children make when they want to be held. The trust in her face was simple: she felt terrible, and it was something she knew Kate could deal with. She didn’t know this was different from all the banged knees and the earaches and the bad dreams that Kate had spent years soothing.
Kate picked her up, and Sophie clung to her and laid her head on Kate’s shoulder. Kate stood with her for a long time. Then Sophie reached out to Jack, and he took her and rocked her and whispered into her ear.
Kate walked to the window and looked down on the street where a crowd of cameras was already gathering.
Tom went over to her. He said quietly, “More than anyone, I know what you’ve gone through to get to these Olympics and I know what it will cost you to walk away. In a few hours you will get on a plane with your daughter, and doing that will hurt more than childbirth. And do you know what? This is how you’ll know you’re her mother.”
Kate leaned gently against him. “Thank you,” she whispered. Tears welled in her eyes.
“You can do this,” Tom told her. “You can make your daughter better. The doctors tell me it’ll be a hard and painful and slow road, but she is going to get well again.”
“I know I can do a hard road,” she said. “I know I can do a painful one. But you’ll have to help me deal with slow.”
203 Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester
As the sun sank below the bowed roofs of the terrace, Jack ran Sophie a bath and helped her get undressed. She was listless and vacant in the tub. She sat upright and twisted the flannel halfheartedly between her hands while Jack made up a story for her. He had Luke Skywalker and Han Solo pilot the Millennium Falcon through a difficult asteroid belt. Doing all the actions and sound effects himself, he had the two heroes beat overwhelming odds to defeat an attack fleet of TIE fighters. Then, since none of it provoked a response from Sophie, he had the exultant Han and Luke kiss passionately in the cargo bay of the Falcon. They were surprised in the act by Chewbacca, whose rage response showed that he had old-fashioned views on human love, which were typical of his species and yet unbecoming in such a well-traveled Wookiee.
Jack watched Sophie’s face but she only stared, glassy-eyed, at the taps.
“Are you even listening, missy?”
He snapped his fingers. “Hey! Earth to Sophie Argall. Come in, Sophie!”
She turned her head slowly and squinted at him. Her expression was that of a naturalist who thought—but was not entirely sure—that she might have detected the outline of a well-camouflaged creature amidst the foliage.
“What?” she said.
“Are you okay, darling?”
She closed her eyes. “I just want to go to bed, please.”
Her voice was a whisper that barely carried over the buzz of the extractor fan in the bathroom.
Jack lifted her out of the bath, toweled her, pajama’d her, and sat her on his knee to clean her teeth.
“It’s going to be alright, honey,” he told her. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Yeah,” she said.
He kissed her on the forehead. Her skin was hot, but maybe it was just from the bath.
“Think you’ve got a temperature?”
She shrugged.
Jack found the digital thermometer in the bathroom cabinet and took a reading in her ear. The little screen said 101.5.
“I’m going to give you some Calpol,” he said. “I don’t want you to tell Mum, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because she’s got a big race tomorrow. We don’t want her to worry about a little thing like this, do we?”
Sophie shrugged again. “I’m fine,” she said, but she let Jack feed her two spoonfuls of the liquid paracetamol.
He put her to bed and she went down without a murmur. She felt hotter than she had before. He knew he should say something to Kate, and at the same time, he knew he shouldn’t. He sat on the top stair for a long time, thinking it over before he went down.
Kate was sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes closed and her hands gripping the table edge, leaning to the left in her chair.
“Tea?” he said softly.
She frowned, still with her eyes closed. “Shh. I’m visualizing.”
He touched her on the shoulder. “Visualize a cup of tea?”
She leaned her head against his arm. “Yeah, go on then.”
He busied himself with the kettle and the teapot.
When he came back to the table, Kate said, “How was Sophie?”
He put the teapot down. “Great. We were doing a story and she loved it.”
Kate poured a cup and blew on it. “I have trained you to use a teapot, Jack Argall. Of all that I have achieved, this will be my legacy.”
He studied her face. “You okay?”
“Excited. I think I can beat her.”
“I think you can too. Just don’t do what I did in Beijing.”
She smiled and held his hand. “It’s different now. Sophie’s getting better.”
“Yeah,” he said, brightly.
He looked down at their hands, entwined on the tabletop.
In his first heat in Beijing, he’d lined up against one of the French riders; he hadn’t even learned his name. He’d shaken his hand on the start line and tried out his French on the guy, in the name of international relations. He’d said, “Bonjour, feller.” The Frenchman had smiled but he’d looked scared shitless. Jack had felt sorry for him, coming up against Jack Argall in the first roun
d.
That velodrome in Beijing was astonishing. It was packed. There were twenty thousand men, women, and children in the stands, and half of them were taking photos. As the clock counted down to the start, the camera flashes increased like the souls of the saved until they weren’t individual points anymore but one great urgent web of light, shimmering and pulsating across the surface of the crowd like the signals flowing over the skin of a creature from the deep. And the roar the crowd made—it was colossal. It gave Jack the fear. He had earphones on inside his helmet, and an iPod tucked into the sleeve of his skinsuit. He was listening to the Drambuie Kirkliston Pipe Band blasting out “Battle of Killiecrankie.” That was a tune to make the devil afraid, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the din of the crowd. The whole surface of the track was trembling. He could feel the buzz of the crowd transmitted right up the seat tube of the bike and through the rigid carbon saddle to his arse. The insides of his lungs vibrated with it. His teeth hummed as if they were picking up radio. The atmosphere sliced through his nerves and pulled them free from his carcass and discarded them like the string from a Sunday roast.
Trackside, there were TV cameras everywhere. They had a camera on a zip wire that hovered in to a foot in front of his face, like a huge black wasp. It showed his face, twenty meters high on the gigantic screen they had there, suspended above the center of the velodrome. He had his helmet on with the blue silvered visor that came all the way down past his nose, so naturally he gave the crowd his Judge Dredd face. And they loved it, and they gave him a cheer and stamped their feet till the whole venue shook.
He looked across to the Team GB support crew in the technical area. His coach was giving him the hand signals to calm down, to focus on the countdown and stop playing with the crowd. So naturally Jack raised his hands high above his head and began to clap out a rhythm in time with the music in his ears. The crowd roared even louder. They clapped when he clapped. The noise was incredible. Twenty thousand souls from every nation on Earth clapping out the rhythm to the “Battle of Killiecrankie.” It was possible to forget, just momentarily, that Sophie was five thousand miles away, in a small room, starting chemo.