Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester
Zoe got out of the car. As it drove off she waved the Argalls away and watched Sophie’s new-moon face watching her back, through the rear window. The child’s eyes fastened unself-consciously on her own, the way her brother Adam’s used to, and the fact that there was no reproach in them only made her feel worse.
She realized she was actually trembling. She’d hardly slept, and then the Death Star had upset her, and the car journey back had been worse. Sophie really looked as if she was on her way out, and Kate was in denial, and Jack … well, she couldn’t decide what Jack thought.
A single day with that family had felt like the whole of her life. She didn’t know how they could bear it. There was an insane amount of emotion, but nothing sufficiently concentrated to cry about at any particular second. It was impossible.
She decided she would go up to her apartment and drink coffee. That seemed a reasonable thing to do. She could easily imagine a woman with more manageable emotions than she had at this moment saying to herself, You know what? I think I’ll grab an espresso. This was the best she could hope for today: to do the things that ordinary people did, and to hope that by some kind of sympathetic magic their ordinary sense of well-being would accrue to her.
The early April rain was falling. The pavement in front of the Beetham Tower’s lobby was cordoned off with tall orange cones and red-and-white safety barriers. A yellow crane was hoisting olive trees up into the sky, one by one. Zoe stopped to watch. There were a dozen trees waiting to go up. They were eight feet high, with their trunks swathed in bubble wrap and their roots balled into orange sacks. In the vortices of wind that spun around the foot of the high tower, the undersides of the olive leaves flashed as they turned, all at once, as if at an unseen signal, like shoals of silver fish.
Zoe wrinkled her eyes against the rain and watched a tree spinning on its halter, mirrored in the windows of the tower as it rose up into the slate-gray sky. The lift had been going on for two days now. The trees were going up to the penthouse, one floor above her own apartment. Management was making a “green space,” with birds and plants and a water feature. It would be nice up there—a souvenir of Earth.
Zoe wanted to watch the trees going up but she couldn’t stay too long out on the street before people would begin to recognize her. Over the road from the tower there was a ninety-six-sheet backlit billboard. It showed an image of her own face, twenty feet high, her big green eyes framed with green hair and green lipstick. Her hand, the nails painted green, was holding a bottle of Perrier dripping with condensate. Best served cold, said the text on the advertisement. Across the right-hand third of the billboard, as tall as her face, were the Olympic rings glazed with a frosting of ice.
She looked up, to where the looming orange shape of a wrapped tree was disappearing into the cloud base. The smudge of color hung for a moment at the limit of vision, then surrendered to gray. Zoe felt a panic that she couldn’t pin down.
She slipped away before any passers by spotted her, and entered the lobby of the tower head-down. She hurried across the marble and took the lift to her apartment on the forty-sixth floor.
Inside, with the roar of the city five hundred feet below, she dropped her single Yale key into a wide pewter dish that served only that purpose. The chime the key made in striking the dish was the only sound. Beside the dish, a very old dented aluminium water bottle was the only other item on the black high-gloss hall stand. She removed her trainers, balled newspaper into the toes, racked them, and put on the gray felt slippers that were exactly where she had left them.
She tried to remember the name of the man she’d left sleeping in her bed. He’d been sweet. Tall, Italian-looking, a few years younger than her. Carlo, she was pretty sure, or Marco. A something-o with a grin that said this was in no way serious. Still, sometimes you hoped.
She called, “Hello?”
No answer.
There was no note on the fridge, no message on the kitchen counter. She checked the living area—nothing.
In her bedroom the bed was trashed—she remembered them doing that—and his boxer shorts were in the corner where she’d thrown them. The rest of his clothes were gone. Her four gold medals weren’t on the shelf where she’d put them, and for a second her heart stopped. Then she saw them glinting under the edge of a pillow and picked them up. She held the cold metal to her chest, and sighed. He was an arsehole for not leaving his number, but he wasn’t a thief. She supposed she’d been lucky again, if you could call it luck.
There was a stillness in the apartment, and maybe the ghost of the smell of him.
She made an espresso with the built-in coffee machine and went to sit on an armless, low-backed charcoal-gray sofa in the living area. Clouds obscured the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
She’d only been living here a week. On the two days of clear weather she’d been able to see the National Cycling Centre, where she trained and competed, three miles away to the east. It had looked like the domed gray back of a beetle; as if it might crawl away from her through the understory of industrial estates and logistics hubs that fringed the city. Looking to the horizon through the binoculars the estate agent had left, she’d also seen the mountains of Snowdonia, the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool, and Blackpool Tower and beach. Her third night she’d watched lightning storms and seen the wind boiling over the Cheshire plains.
Now there was nothing to see, only gray. It was hard not to feel like a ghost. Zoe held up her hand in front of her face and was amazed she couldn’t see through it. She stood, moved to the kitchen area, and ate a dry slice of multigrain bread. The texture of it was reassuring. She drank a glass of water and went back to sit in the living area.
She wondered if this was supposed to be her life now, moving alone between these designated spaces, inhabiting them according to patterns of usage envisioned by the architect.
Paolo—that had been his name. She flipped open her laptop and found him on Facebook. He was even better-looking than she’d remembered. It had been a nice night. The sex had been good, but it was more than that. There had been a tenderness—something that had moved her. She was slightly surprised he hadn’t left a note.
She closed her eyes and let herself believe that he was on his way up in the lift, right now, with flowers. She smiled. It was silly, but you had to believe these things were possible. Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that were moments away from being revealed to you. It was a mistake to take disappointments at face value. You were only ever a tap at the door and a dozen fresh-cut blooms away from happy.
She opened her eyes and clicked on the man’s profile. Her smile disappeared. She read what he had written about her and saw the photos he had posted from her apartment, half-naked, with her Olympic golds around his neck. Then she read again what he’d written. She was insane in the sack. She was aggressive. She had to be on top.
She phoned her agent.
“I think I might have a slight issue,” she said carefully.
Afterwards she put the phone down beside her on the sofa, leaned back, and looked around her at this place she’d bought with a thirty percent deposit that the Perrier sponsorship had afforded her, plus a million-pound mortgage that she had no prospect of continuing to pay unless she won gold in London in four months’ time and landed another sponsorship deal.
The extra pressure helped her push through the pain threshold in training. You had to keep yourself desperate—as wild as you’d been when you’d had nothing. You had to double up your stake each time, or watch as someone more frightened than you were rode you off their wheel.
It amused her that this place she’d bought to scare herself was trying so hard to be soothing. The walls were painted in Farrow & Ball. They had the quality of neither reflecting nor absorbing. The shade was called Archive. The tall plate-glass windows responded to the external light level, sparing one’s pupils the stress of it all.
On a low i
ronwood coffee table beside the sofa there was the new copy of Marie Claire with Zoe’s face on the cover, smiling. She flipped through it. She was fiercely determined. She was ruthless and unstoppable. She was driven by her demons. This is what they wrote.
None of it felt like her. She closed her eyes and tried with her breathing to calm the panic that was spreading from her stomach. There was no traffic noise, no sound of the neighbors’ TV, nothing. This high above the world’s surface, the thing the estate agent had marketed as privacy felt quite a lot like solitude. This high above the city she’d climbed out of, the silence seemed irrevocable.
She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. Maybe that she could leave her problems forty-six floors below, on Earth.
She tried to focus on her breathing. She wished Tom were here. He would know what to say to help her work through how she was feeling. Since she’d met him, at nineteen, she’d trusted him to get her through the difficult days. The trouble was that the difficult days weren’t the race days anymore. Competing in an Olympics didn’t scare her now. The thought of stepping up into the full roar of the crowd, in London, seemed simple and natural and good. It was ordinary days now that frightened her—the endless Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons of real life, the days you had to steer through without the benefit of handlebars. Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions—like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere—when all she’d ever trained it to do was pump blood.
She shuddered, and picked up her phone to call Tom. She pulled up his number and paused. She knew he would ask her to formulate the problem for him, and she tried to think what to say this time. Probably she should lead with a question about her diet, or her Pilates regimen, and then let Tom work out what was really wrong. This was often what she did now, when she called him. She was a champion, after all, and it was humiliating just to say out loud, Please, I’m not coping. She hesitated, gazing out into the gray mist that cloaked the city.
An Italian olive tree ascended silently past the window, spinning slowly as it rose.
Barrington Street, Clayton, East Manchester
Jack turned into the Argalls’ home street and slowed down to walking pace as he edged the car over the potholes. He looked in the rearview mirror to check he wasn’t shaking Sophie around too badly. The rain had eased, and half a dozen children wrangled their bikes lazily down the long, straight ribbon of road between the banks of identical red brick Victorian terraced houses, each with its single step and low wall separating a painted front door from the pavement. The children stopped their bikes to blow bubble gum and watch the Argalls pull up outside their house.
Jack opened his door, stepped up and out into the last of the rain, and frowned.
“Don’t you kids ever go inside?”
The tallest child was a girl of eight in pink leggings, white trainers, and a green parka with the hood up. She inched her bike forward from the others, gripped the brake levers, and tilted her head to one side. She wrinkled her nose and looked at Jack as if he was slightly retarded.
“There’s nowt on telly, is there?” she said. “Just shite.”
He frowned.
“What?” said the girl. “I only said shite. Is that not a word in fuckin’ Lapland or wherever you come from, Mr. Argall?”
She leaned over and spat on the road. A long strand of drool failed to detach, and she sucked it back like spaghetti between the gap in her front teeth, looking amiably at Jack all the while.
“I come from Scotland,” said Jack. “You’d know it if it came on TV. Bagpipes? Kilts? Heroin?”
“Whatevs,” said the girl. “Is your Sophie alright?”
“Ask her yourself, Ruby. She does talk.”
Kate had got out of the car and was leaning back in to undo Sophie’s straps. The girl footed her bike up to her.
“Mam left a cake for you, Mrs. A. On your step.”
Kate looked up and there they were, one Tupperware box and one metal biscuit tin on the front step of their house.
“Two cakes,” she said. “That’s so kind.”
“Nah, the tin is from Kelly’s mam. It’s biscuits but I wouldn’t eat them if I was you because Kelly’s mam’s dirty.”
“Ruby, honey, that’s not nice,” Kate said.
Jack gave her a look over Ruby’s head that said “Yeah, but …” and she tried to keep a straight face.
“Let’s have you out of there, Sophie,” she said, cradling her daughter’s head as she lifted her out of the car.
Sophie looked over Kate’s shoulder at the other girl. She blinked against the drizzle.
“Alright, Soph?” said Ruby.
“Amazing,” said Sophie, “we actually went to the Death Star and we actually met Darth Vader and it was really him because otherwise why would I have these memories?”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “When are you coming back to school?”
“I don’t know, do I?”
“Soon, Ruby,” Kate said. “When she’s better.”
“You’ve missed two months now,” Ruby said. “Miss any more and you’ll have to go in thicky maths with Barney and he’ll show you his willy.”
Sophie shrugged nonchalantly. “Already seen it.”
Ruby smiled, then she reached up quickly and took Sophie’s hand. She looked into her eyes for a second and tilted her head forward, as if she was trying to direct forces from inside herself, through her arm, into Sophie’s body. Then she let go of her hand, popped her bubble gum, and pedaled away to join the other children riding circles in the street.
Sophie let Mum carry her inside. The house smelled of toast and bike oil. Her parents’ road bikes hung on hooks in the hallway. Mum set her down on her feet and she kicked her way through the chaos of shoes, unpaired gloves, and discarded coats on the hallway floor to get to the toilet under the stairs.
Sophie bolted herself into the toilet and collapsed on the floor in the dark. She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. That half a minute of talking with Ruby had wiped her out. It was good, though. Mum had seen it, Dad had seen it. That counted for an hour when they wouldn’t worry. After that she knew she would start to see the lines creeping back into their faces, and hear the sharp edge coming back into their voices, and notice the little sideways glances they shot at her while they pretended they weren’t looking. They would start to have arguments with each other, about stupid things like training hours and long-grain rice, and they wouldn’t even know why they were doing it. She would know, though. It meant that they were scared for her all over again, and she would have to do one of the things that made them forget it for another hour.
If you were in the car, you could kick the back of the seat. That made them annoyed, which was the opposite of scared. If you were in the house, you had more choices. You could answer back or be lippy, which made you seem less ill. You could do a drawing. You could hurry up the stairs and make a lot of noise so they noticed you doing it, even if you had to lie down on your bed afterwards for ten minutes. You could make it look like you’d eaten all your toast, even if you had to post it down your T-shirt and flush it in the toilet later. You could play boys’ games like Star Wars that had fighting and spaceships and made you look tough, even if you weren’t tough enough to ride a bike.
Night was more difficult. At night when you had nightmares, and when Mum or Dad came running, you could tell them it was about a wolf or a robber—the stuff that healthy kids had nightmares about—and not Death, that made you so scared you could never even make your voice come out to call for Mum and Dad. When you got Death, you just had to keep quiet. Other nights, you could pretend to be asleep when Mum came in to check on you at ten p.m., one a.m., and four a.m. If you set your iPod alarm for five minutes before hers, you could make it seem as though you slept soundly, even if you were really reading Star Wars comi
cs half the night.
There were a hundred things you could do to make Mum and Dad not worry. You could polish your own shoes and clean your teeth and get dressed nicely, even though you were so tired all you wanted to do was lie down and close your eyes. You could talk about the future—they liked it when you talked about the future, so long as it was close. If you said “Tomorrow can I go to the shops with you?” it made them happy, because it meant you were being optimistic. Dr. Hewitt called it positive engagement and it was a sign that you weren’t suffering from the thing everyone was most scared of, which was failure to thrive. So if you said “Can I go to the shops tomorrow?” they would say “Great!” But if you said “Next year can we go to France for our holidays?” then they would get a hollow look in their eyes, and give each other those sideways glances, and say something like “Let’s just take it a day at a time, shall we?”
If you wanted them to not worry, there were also a hundred things you could not do. You could not cough, you could not be sick, and you could never say you were tired or sad. If you actually were sick there were ways to hide it, and if you actually were sad there were ways too.
There were so many ways to make Mum and Dad not worry, it was easy to think of a thing for every single hour. The only hard bit was that all of it made you very tired, which was one of the main things you had to never be. That was why you had to rest like this sometimes, in the toilet, in the dark.
Now that she’d rested, Sophie reached up and pulled the light cord. The wooden handle had come off the end and got lost, and Mum had tied on one of her Commonwealth gold medals in its place. It swung in the light of the bare bulb, flashing as it spun.
Music started up from the kitchen. Sophie smiled. Dad was in a good mood. The Jesus and Mary Chain were doing “Never Understand.”
Dad’s music was shit.
Through the toilet door she could hear Dad singing along. It sounded like anyone’s dad singing words. Sophie loved the moments when Mum and Dad were happy. If you concentrated and arranged them in your memory then you could collect them, like old copper coins, or crystals.