North Manchester General Hospital, 3:30 p.m.
Zoe arrived at the main desk of the hospital and signed in as a relative. They told her where Sophie was, and she followed the signs to pediatric intensive care. She walked the long linoleum lines of the corridors, feeling the weakness in her legs from the aftereffects of racing. In defeat there was no endorphin high to offset the aches. At the junction of two thoroughfares she had to rest, taking her weight against the wall for a minute until the sharp pains in her ankles subsided. Hospital staff flowed by, moving with the undramatic efficiency of bodies rarely pushed close to their operational limits. The pain in her ankles made her think about Tom. Was this how it had started for him—the arthritis and the joint problems? Did it hit him the very minute he sank out of the sport? The body was like that: it had a capacity to hold itself together until it was allowed to fall apart. People walked out of burning buildings on two broken legs, only collapsing when they were safely away from the flames. Spouses died within days of each other, and they called it a broken heart.
Sparks of gold light floated across her vision, and the floor seemed distant and uneven. She hadn’t eaten since before the race—she’d been too upset to remember her recovery drink—and now her blood sugar was crashing. She ignored the pain from her ankles and forced herself to move again according to the directions the receptionist had given her.
Kate was sitting in the corridor outside the entrance to the recovery unit, on one of a pair of vinyl-covered chairs that bracketed the double swing doors. Opposite the chairs there was an aquarium with slow fulvous fish gnawing at the thin green lamina of algae on the inside of the glass. There was a notice board with government posters recommending the daily ingestion of vegetables and outlining how best to sneeze.
Kate looked up at the sound of Zoe’s trainers on the lino. She didn’t seem surprised to see her. Her face was blank, drawn with fatigue. She was still wearing her racing skinsuit, with her raincoat over the top of it.
“Hi,” she said quietly.
Zoe scowled. “Tom told you I was coming, right? I’m going in, okay?”
She put her hand on the push plate of the door.
Kate didn’t look at her. “Just sit down, Zoe.”
There was something in her voice that made Zoe hesitate.
“You can’t stop me,” she said.
“I know,” said Kate. “So sit down.”
Zoe sniffed. “Okay. One minute, and then I’m going through.”
She sat in the other chair and twisted it sideways to face Kate.
“Sophie’s very weak,” Kate said.
Zoe felt the last of her own strength leaking away. The gold lights drifting through her vision multiplied until she could barely see. The chair seemed to lurch beneath her and the floor listed away so that she had to grip the armrests or fall.
“Is she going to be okay?”
She watched Kate pressing her lips together, trying to control her emotions.
“We think so.”
Zoe sagged with relief. “Thank God.”
Kate’s mouth contorted for a moment, then settled back into a pale, tired line. She said, “Are you okay?”
“I feel like I got the shit kicked out of me.”
Kate nodded. “Tom said you were upset. He said you were talking about telling Sophie the truth.”
Zoe looked across at her. It was hard to see Kate as the winner, even now. Since they were nineteen, Zoe had developed a habit of looking for the weaknesses in Kate’s stance, the signs of hesitation in her face, the insecurities in her speech. She had leapt on every advantage Kate conceded, even though afterward she had always been sorry. Now there was no more afterwards. It was hard to adjust to the reality that Kate had finally won—had won everything. There she was, sitting in the exact same kind of chair Zoe was sitting in, and yet the knowledge that Kate was going to the Olympics made her chair a throne. Zoe had spent so many years in awe of the Games that it was impossible to stop feeling the force of it now. All the power that she had invested in London was suddenly Kate’s.
What made it worse was that Zoe hadn’t even been beaten, not really; she’d given Kate a second chance at the race today because it seemed the right thing to do for Sophie, who wanted her mum to win so badly. Her mum. As she looked at her rival sitting palely across from her, it struck her with full force that Kate had rarely beaten her fair and square. Zoe had given up Jack and surrendered Sophie and gifted the Olympics. Kate had merely been there, pathetically hanging on in second place, in order to be the closest to Zoe when she loosed all these precious things from her grasp. While Zoe had battled with ghosts, Kate had hoovered up after her like a good little housewife.
Zoe’s eyes narrowed as she felt some of her strength return. “Yeah,” she said. “I do want to tell Sophie the truth.”
She watched the tears welling as Kate took it in. In the tank on the opposite side of the corridor the imprisoned fish worried away at their thin layer of green slime, flicking their tails and sending up grains of gravel that fell in silence back to the aquarium floor.
“Alright,” Kate said finally. “You do have a right to tell Sophie, if that’s what you need to do. But …”
She stood, came over to Zoe’s chair, and knelt to take her hand.
“You’re my best friend, Zoe. I know how hard this is for you. I do trust you to do the right thing for Sophie. Will you wait, though? Will you wait till Sophie’s stronger before we tell her together?”
Zoe looked down at her and felt a tearing force in her chest. This was how they always got you—Kate, Tom, and Jack. They talked so sweetly that you felt an answering surge in the buried part of yourself that you so desperately wanted to believe could be you. You surrendered to it, just for a moment, and the next thing you knew they’d taken something else from you.
Hot rage rose through her. “I’m not just talking about telling Sophie. I want us to do something about it.”
“What?”
“I want to be Sophie’s mother, Kate. I want nights without nightmares. I want everything you took from me.”
Slowly, Kate shook her head. “Oh God, Zo. I didn’t take Sophie from you. I took her in, because you … couldn’t.”
Zoe shook her head furiously. “You took me in. All of you.”
She watched Kate’s mouth twist in a soundless howl as she realized Zoe meant it. “Please,” Kate said. “Please.”
“Please, what?”
“You can’t.”
“I can. If you won’t do what’s right, then I’ll fight you in the courts. I was in pieces, Kate. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Please. You’re not thinking about what this will do to Sophie.” Kate collapsed against the arm of the chair. “I can’t stand this, I can’t stand it.”
Zoe looked down at her coldly. “Then you should have left me with something. You should have stayed down when you crashed today.”
Kate looked up at her through tears. “Is that what this is about? Because you can have it. You can have my place in London. I’ll phone British Cycling right now. I’ll tell them I cheated. I’ll tell them I sabotaged your bike. I’ll tell them anything you need me to, Zoe, just please leave Sophie out of it.”
Zoe stood and stepped around her. “No. I’m not going to let you trick me again. I’m going in there right now and I’m going to tell Sophie the truth.”
Kate grabbed hold of her arm. “Please. I’ll give you anything.”
Zoe tried to pull her arm back but Kate clung to it fiercely, increasing the weight on Zoe’s ankles so that she had to stifle a yelp.
“Get off me!”
“Please, Zoe. If you have to do this, then at least don’t do it now. Okay? I’ll give you my place in London if you just leave Sophie alone for a month. Just let her get stronger, okay? If you love her at all, then take my place in the Olympics—take whatever you need—but just give her a few weeks to get better. Then you can do whatever you have to do. Just please—please—don’t do this to Soph
ie now.”
Zoe snapped her arm away and broke Kate’s grip. She put her hands over her ears to block Kate’s pleading. “I’m not listening to you anymore. There’s always a reason why you end up happy, and just for once I don’t want to fucking hear it!”
Zoe stepped out of range of Kate’s reaching hands and projected herself backwards through the swing doors, into the recovery unit. She walked quickly past the nurses’ station, ignoring the pain in her ankles, blanking the uniformed woman who asked how she could help. She heard the swing doors open again as Kate followed her in. She hurried down the unit’s central corridor, looking left and right through the narrow strengthened-glass windows of each room. The fourth room she looked into was Sophie’s. She saw Jack sitting at the bedside and pushed her way in through the doors.
Jack looked up at her but she didn’t acknowledge him. Her eyes fell on Sophie, pale and still, her mouth and nose covered with a translucent green oxygen mask. She stopped.
She hadn’t been expecting this—for Sophie to be unconscious. She’d been holding on to the image of Sophie as she had been two days earlier, laughing in the basket of the butcher’s bike while Kate pedaled her around the track of the velodrome. Zoe had pictured her under the weather—ill, perhaps, but sitting up in bed and smiling bravely. She’d even run through a few of the preliminary things she might say. Sophie, remember how much fun we had at the track the other day? How would you like to have fun like that all the time?
This perfect silence, this absolute stillness pulled her up short.
Sophie’s face, motionless and waxy, was a perfect echo of a face that lay deep in the silence of Zoe’s memory. Zoe raised her hands to her mouth and gasped. A rising dread flushed all the heat from her blood and she froze, staring at Sophie’s face, fighting against the surfacing of another bone-white face that she hadn’t seen since she was ten years old.
“Oh God …” she whispered.
She staggered and gripped the steel guardrail of Sophie’s bed to stop herself from falling.
Jack’s hand was on hers and Kate’s arms were hugging her around her shoulders, but she didn’t feel any of it. They were asking if she was all right, but all she could hear was the cold, close silence of the room. The sharp disinfectant smell of the hospital quickened the memory that was rising unstoppably now. The hospital bed on its rubberized casters supported it, and the green hospital sheets shrouded it, and as she sank to her knees, the height of her eyes descended until she was ten years old again and walking with a female social worker through the echoing, empty corridors of a hospital basement.
They’d given her pills to make her calm, but the only effect had been to lodge a high whining note in her ears and a dizzy, lurching confusion in her mind. Adam had come off his bike—that was all she remembered. Adam had come off his bike, and she needed to find him and take him home. She had to do it herself because their mother couldn’t. Something had happened in their mother’s heart or head that meant she couldn’t get out of bed and she couldn’t stop crying and shouting.
It was forty-eight hours after the police had picked Zoe up, delirious and riding erratically along the dual carriageway after the accident. Her legs still ached badly, and it hurt to walk.
“Is it much further?” she said. “Which room is Adam in?”
The social worker stroked her hair. “Adam’s body, darling. It’s that door at the end.”
The words were all mashed up in Zoe’s head. The social worker was pointing at a battered, unpainted metal door at the end of the corridor. Zoe hurried towards it. She pushed against it but it was locked.
When the social worker reached her, she knelt down and said, “Alright, darling. Now I do just want to check that you’re still okay to do this. It’s going to be very difficult for you to see Adam the way he is. I’m afraid it will make you very sad, but we’ve found that in the long run you’ll probably be more sad, and more upset, if you don’t actually see the body.”
Zoe wasn’t listening. Now that they’d reached Adam, she couldn’t bear that the social worker was making her wait. She pushed insistently on the door until the woman unlocked it for her.
Inside, it was very cold. There were no windows, just a set of overhead strip lights. The floor was tiled, and there was what looked like a sink and ordinary kitchen units along one side. In the center of the room, Adam was sleeping on clean green sheets in a high steel bed. His head was towards her and she saw his shock of glossy black hair on the pillow.
She smiled with relief. “Adam!”
The bang of the accident had been so loud, it was good that he was so peaceful. She’d worried that he might be injured and shouting with the pain, or just shouting for no reason the way their mother was. On the top of the kitchen units along the side of the room there was a pair of red rubber gloves and nothing else. She didn’t understand why there was no food in the kitchen, or why her brother was sleeping in it. Maybe he was as confused as she was.
He’d drawn the green sheet up over his face to make it dark enough to sleep. She padded up to the bedside and drew back the sheet and he didn’t move at all, just lay there perfectly asleep. He was pale but he was himself, and so calm. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek, and then her smile twitched, because his skin was chilly. She drew back and looked at him and noticed again how pale he was. She touched him.
He was so cold.
“Adam, wake up!”
He didn’t open his eyes straightaway, so she shook his shoulder. It didn’t move the way it should have. Instead, his whole body rocked from side to side. She shook his shoulder and watched his feet following the motion, under the sheets, at the far end of the bed.
“Adam?” she whispered.
A terrible fear flashed over her and she let go of Adam’s shoulder to make the fear be not true, and she ran out of the room and along the corridor. She was quick, even with the pain in her legs, and it took a long time for the social worker to catch her. She felt herself being picked up off the ground and held as she struggled to escape.
After a while she was too tired to fight anymore, and she let herself be carried to a little room with a low table and carpet tiles and scratchily upholstered chairs. She listened carefully to what the social worker told her. The words came through more clearly this time, but since it was impossible that they could be true, she went into a kind of long and terrible dream for more than twenty years, and she tried again and again to wake up from it. Athens didn’t wake her and Beijing didn’t wake her and then, finally, she did wake up, at thirty-two years of age, kneeling beside this hospital bed and watching Sophie’s face on another green hospital pillow, pale and absolutely still.
Zoe’s shoulders shook, and Jack and Kate knelt on either side of her and told her that everything was going to be okay.
They brought a chair for her, and the three of them sat by Sophie’s bedside all afternoon. Slowly, as she watched the slight rise and fall of Sophie’s chest, Zoe felt the ache of the day’s defeat subsiding. She watched the natural, unconscious way that Kate tended to Sophie—now turning her sheet down when she seemed to be hot, now adjusting the strap of her oxygen mask when it slipped. Slowly, she remembered something she had forgotten in the bitter aftermath of Kate’s victory: that this job Kate had been doing wasn’t something that she herself could do. It wasn’t just hard, it was always a wheel-length ahead of impossible. Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting. If Sophie had been hers to look after, through the long years of her illness, Zoe knew she wouldn’t have made it.
The pain didn’t disappear with the acceptance, but it slowly became easier to hold within herself. Each moment layered small consolations around it, working to smooth its sharp edges. Sophie was alive—this was the main thing. And Zoe had Tom and Kate, and so she wasn’t completely alone.
All afternoon the three of them sat in silence around Sophie’s bed, never taking their eyes from her face, willing her to get well.
Finally, with the red su
n setting beneath the ragged gray clouds outside the hospital window, Sophie opened her eyes.
She was quiet for a few minutes, looking around her and taking in the presence of Zoe, Kate, and Jack. Kate fetched her a glass of water and took off her mask to help her drink it, and Zoe watched Sophie’s calm eyes as she looked up into Kate’s face and smiled.
“Mum?” she said in a cracked whisper. “Why’s Zoe here?”
Zoe felt Jack and Kate watching her.
She leaned in and took Sophie’s small, warm hand in both of hers. “I just wanted to tell you …” she said. Then she faltered, feeling the sting of tears.
“Tell me what?” said Sophie.
“Something I’ve never told you before. Something I should have told you years ago.”
Sophie blinked. “What?”
Jack and Kate shifted on their chairs. Jack was about to say something, but Kate stopped him with a hand on his arm.
Zoe squeezed Sophie’s hand and smiled at her. “I just want to tell you who you’ve got as parents. You’re a very lucky girl, Sophie. You have a dad who cares about you so much that he could hardly ride his bike straight for thinking about you, even in the biggest race of his life. There aren’t very many men like that in the whole world, I hope you know. And you have a mum, Sophie …”
She swallowed and tried again. “You have a mum who loves you so much that she was ready to give up the most important thing in the world for her, just because it was the right thing to do for you.”
She blinked rapidly, forcing back her tears.
Sophie looked at her quizzically. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
As the tears began, Zoe felt an arm around her and let her head fall onto Kate’s shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m just so tired.”
Kate’s hands stroked her hair. “Shh,” she whispered. “It’s okay. We’re just tired because we’ve been racing so long.”
Two weeks later, the Townley pub,
Albert Street, Bradford, Manchester
Tom came back from the bar with a double Scotch for him and a sparkling water for Zoe. She was sitting at a corner table, on a bench seat set into a wall alcove, with her chin on her knees, watching him.