Kate and Zoe jockeyed for position on the narrowing central strip, first one pulling ahead, then the other. They were perfectly matched. After nearly a full mile, with lungs bursting, neither could open up a gap on the other. The central strip was getting too skinny for them to come alongside each other in safety, and twice they bumped shoulders and had to hold their line hard not to careen off into the cars.
Two hundred meters ahead, a set of traffic lights marked the T-junction where their route went left onto Great Ancoats Street. The lights were green.
Kate looked up the roadway and judged the point at which the lights could show amber and she would still carry on rather than braking. Without signposting it in her body language, she suddenly kicked hard and opened up five bike lengths on Zoe. This was a power play in a street race: you dug extra deep for a few seconds, way beyond your aerobic limit, knowing that if you gapped your rival, then there was a chance the traffic lights would catch them after letting you through. The risk was that the lights might not change, in which case your rival could cruise past you as you drowned in your own oxygen debt.
Kate risked it, grimacing as the pain in her body began to spike. She badly wanted to win. To beat Zoe now, even in a play race like this, would be to lodge a negative association in Zoe’s mind the next time they lined up together on a serious start line. She kicked harder. At this intensity a single second seemed unendurable, and twenty unimaginable. By an effort of will, she called the image of Sophie into her mind. This was how she coped with suffering. She thought, If I win this race, Sophie will get better. There was no logic to it, but her mind above one hundred and sixty beats per minute of heart rate had no use for logic. As she powered on through the dark, she visualized Sophie ahead of her, and the image pulled her forward.
Zoe knew the traffic-light trap by heart and she’d been expecting Kate to jump ahead. She steeled herself and powered up her pedal stroke, refusing to let her rival open up more of a gap. She looked at the roadway, and now she was judging the point beyond which an amber light would not stop her. Her muscles were in agony, but she didn’t acknowledge pain. Her tires slipped and skidded from the lateral force as she cranked the bike forward so hard that the frame gave out cracking noises.
Kate was operating at her limit. Just as the pain in her muscles and her lungs reached an unendurable pitch, the lights went amber. She was still fifteen meters short of the point on the roadway that she had marked as the absolute point of no return. She had a flash of relief: she could brake now. She risked a quick look behind her to check that Zoe was thinking the same. But Zoe was going for it. Eyes glazed, she was rocking from side to side in a trance of effort; Kate didn’t think she’d even noticed her looking back.
Kate hesitated. Was she being too cautious? She was only five meters short of her judgment point now, and the light was still amber, and there was a pretty good chance she could carve through the left turn while the light had only just turned red. She flicked a glance right, across the face of the junction to where the traffic waited in the last second of its own red light. It was a dual carriageway. There was a black Volvo and a blue BMW at the front. There was a courier motorbike filtering up the outside. Kate watched the cars tinted orange in the overhead lights of the junction. They looked okay. Neither of them stood out as obvious psycho wheels. Odds were that they wouldn’t go dragsters off the amber light.
Kate stamped down hard for two pedal strokes, then hesitated again. She thought about Sophie. Suddenly the zone into which she was traveling seemed as starkly demarcated as the painted stop line on the carriageway suggested. She was the mother of a young child. Was she seriously assessing the risks involved in riding out at full speed onto a T-junction that was about to be overrun with traffic? She pictured Sophie’s face, and her daughter’s eyes connected so forcefully with her tendons and forearm musculature that without even thinking about it, she was braking so hard that her wheels almost locked.
When the lights went amber, Zoe noticed Kate’s hesitation and upped her pace instinctively. She was thirty meters short of her own decision point, but she wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking about Adam. Here, at her physical limit, she felt her dead brother watching her with the same curious, unabashed gaze that Sophie had shown her earlier that day. Here was this ripple in time again, widening from their shared point of origin, keeping pace with her however fast she tried to outride it.
As Kate slowed, Zoe swerved and whipped past her. She flashed across the hard white stop line and ran the red light at twenty-five miles per hour, leaning hard into the perpendicular left turn with her wheels squeaking on the wet tarmac, at the very limit of adhesion.
Thirty-meter cordoned-off section of the nearside carriageway,
Great Ancoats Street, at the junction with
Ashton New Road, Manchester
The driver of the blue BMW told the investigating officer that he hadn’t had anywhere to go. He was three-quarters of the way across the intersection and accelerating through maybe fifteen miles per hour when Zoe appeared in his lane, a wheel-length ahead of his bumper. He’d had less than one second to react. To his left there’d been the black Volvo; to his right, the motorbike courier. He’d managed to get a touch on the brakes but he’d still clipped Zoe’s back wheel. He’d felt something go under his tires and he was pretty shaken up because he’d thought it had to be her.
“I don’t know what to say,” he told the investigating officer.
The officer had an incident form on his clipboard and a ballpoint pen on a string. “You could say she turned into your braking distance,” he said. “That way it’ll be clear for your insurance.”
Measuring up the scene, and judging from the marks on the road surface and the detritus of shattered registration plates and indicator light housings, the investigating officer was inclined to endorse the male motorist’s account. The female pedal cyclist had come off her machine and rolled across the carriageway, probably passing fractionally ahead of or fractionally behind the motorcycle before coming to rest against an illuminated bollard on the central traffic separation island. She’d been fortunate to walk away with cuts and bruises.
Her pedal cycle—this is how he described it on the road traffic incident form—her pedal cycle had come off worse. He lifted the wreck of it into the back of his patrol car, its frame snapped and the rims twisted. It had gone under the wheels of at least three vehicles. The cyclist was sitting upright now, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket and shivering in the back of the on-scene ambulance while her friend comforted her.
When he set out the facts of the incident on the form on his clipboard, and came to the final box headed SUMMARY, he didn’t reckon it was any more complicated than this: that the injured party had continued into the path of oncoming vehicles, while the friend had applied the brakes. This was just how the world was. There were two kinds of people when a light turned red. One kind accelerated, the other kind braked. It was Eve and Adam, Abel and Cain. There wasn’t any use doing your head in about it. Not on his pay grade, anyway.
His pen hovered for a few seconds above the box headed OTHER COMMENTS, but no words came. The officer clicked the button that retracted the pen point, shrugged, and winced as cold rain dripped from his uniform cap between his neck and his hi-vis jacket. He wondered what the hell it was in this woman’s life that meant she couldn’t just brake like everyone else.
Interior of Iveco Daily 40C15 first-responder ambulance,
unit 72, North West Ambulance Service
Rain streamed down the rear window as the paramedic made Zoe comfortable sitting upright on a stretcher. The stretcher had an information panel indicating that it was rated for patients weighing up to 400 kilos or 880 pounds.
“It’s the weight of an adult female buffalo,” the paramedic said, inviting the conversation away from the fact that the casualty had willfully ridden into the path of moving traffic.
Kate smiled and looked to Zoe to respond, but Zoe turned away and frown
ed at the rain.
Kate filled the silence. “Do you get many buffalo?”
“We get ladies who just really like donuts. We actually have a crane to get them on the stretcher. We call it the Krispy Kreme Express.”
Kate laughed, but Zoe was still zoned out. Kate held on to both of her hands as the paramedic used tweezers to pick grit out of a deep graze on her forearm. Kate wasn’t expecting Zoe to flinch, and she didn’t. If you were very attentive, you could feel the slightest twitch of Zoe’s fingers each time the tweezers connected.
“Would you look at me?” Kate said softly.
Zoe looked out the rear window.
“Look at me!”
Zoe turned to her, exasperated. The paramedic paused in his work until she was still. When he resumed, the morsels of grit he removed from her arm made little clicking sounds as they fell into a surgical steel dish. The ambulance moved at the speed of the traffic, its sirens off. Twin overhead tubes secreted a bright sickly light.
Kate said, “Why did you do it?”
“I wanted to win.”
“You could have been killed.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“No. Well. Clearly.”
Zoe screwed up her face in irritation. “Oh, what are you? My mother?”
“I’ve known you longer than she did.”
Zoe was looking out the window again. “Yeah, but if I’d gone under that car, it would’ve made things simpler for you.”
Kate reached up and turned Zoe’s face back to hers.
“Look at me. If you’d gone under that car, I’d have died too.”
The paramedic paused again and the small percussions of falling grit stopped.
Zoe said, “I don’t see why. You have things to live for. You have everything.”
“Not everything.”
Zoe exhaled irritably. “Christ, Kate. It’s a lump of yellow metal on a shiny red string.”
“Easy to say when you’ve won it.”
“You think?”
“You know what?” said Kate. “I don’t even care. So long as we both get to that final in London, and we’re both on that podium, I don’t care which of us wins it.”
“No, nor do I,” said Zoe. “So long as it’s me.”
Kate smiled and shook her head. “Honestly, Zo, what are we going to do with you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Really, though? I’m worried. You seem a little bit out of control.”
“The road was wet, Kate. Crashes happen and we bleed. The girls who couldn’t handle the damage dropped out of this game years ago.”
Kate sighed. “I’m not talking about crashes. I’m talking about real damage.”
Zoe looked away, and Kate squeezed her hands. “We don’t always have to be psyching each other out, do we? We can call a truce. We can talk about what’s bothering you.”
“Nothing’s bothering me.” Zoe took her hands out of Kate’s to put air quotes around the phrase.
Kate hesitated, then took Zoe’s hands again. “It’s Adam, isn’t it?”
Zoe looked at her sharply. “No.”
“It is though, isn’t it? I know you. When you get like this, it’s because you’re thinking about him.”
Zoe looked at her steadily. “I’m thinking about boys and shopping.”
The paramedic resumed his work in silence and the ambulance rolled on through the slow, rain-soaked traffic.
Kate didn’t know how to handle her friend when she was like this. If you closed your eyes you could believe you were talking to a drunk at a bus stop—one of those puffy-eyed women who were alternately morose and acerbic, squinting through their own cigarette smoke while their fingers spun a thread of imagined oppressions from the air and knitted them into a shroud. But when Zoe went on a downer like this, she did it from behind those clear green eyes in that perfect face with its unblemished skin and its Olympian glow of health. The incongruity shocked you, like being punched in the face by a Care Bear.
“Want to come home with me after the hospital?” Kate said. “Have a bite to eat with us?”
“I’m not hungry,” Zoe said, as if that was an answer to a question Kate had asked.
Kate had to remind herself that Zoe wasn’t always like this, and that she was always sorry afterwards. She cared enough to try to explain, at least, and that was how Kate had first learned about Adam. Years ago, well before Athens, Zoe had got into one of her moods and done something so viciously personal that Kate had actually lost a race at the National Championships because of it. In the weeks that followed Zoe had been incandescent with remorse. That was how it had seemed to Kate—that her friend had actually flickered with a pale and anxious light that sought to expel the shadows cast by her behavior. She’d invited Kate to lunch—begged her to come—and they’d met up at one of the best restaurants in town, the Lincoln. Kate couldn’t have afforded the place, and she doubted Zoe really could either.
In the busy dining room clad in Carrara marble, a low-slung hipster with a three-day beard and a linen suit was playing Debussy in shoes but no socks. Zoe inhabited the room naturally, un-made-up in jeans and a loose gray tank top but still attracting covert glances. Kate ducked down behind the menu and failed to find one single item on it that didn’t seem expressly conceived to worsen her power-to-weight ratio on a bicycle.
She was furious with herself for accepting this invitation to a reconciliation that was looking more and more like a bid to humiliate her.
She looked up in misery and saw Zoe watching her back with a panicked look.
“Shit,” said Zoe, “this isn’t helping at all, is it?”
“Oh no, this is great,” said Kate. “It’s really nice.”
Zoe held up her hand. “Wait,” she said. “I can fix this.”
She stood, crossed to the pianist, and sat down lightly beside him at the piano stool. The Préludes faltered for a moment as she whispered something in his ear, then they picked up again with a hint of allegrezza. Kate saw the pianist’s grin as Zoe came back to the table.
“There,” she said.
“What did you say to him?”
Zoe flicked a hand dismissively and blew a strand of hair off her face. “I said I’d give him my number if he made you laugh.”
Kate felt a surge of anger. “It’s not funny.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I treated you like shit, Kate, and I don’t know how to make it right.”
As Kate looked into Zoe’s eyes, trying to work out if she was being sincere, the pianist segued seamlessly into Britney Spears’ “Oops! … I Did It Again,” with sober classical phrasing and a completely straight face.
Kate couldn’t help smiling.
“I don’t know where my head goes,” Zoe said. “I want to win so badly, I forget that you’re you. That we’re friends.”
Kate felt her anger dissolve in the bubbles of the mineral water and the impressionistic flourishes with which the pianist was retrofitting Britney’s chef d’oeuvre.
“Well,” she said. “Just don’t forget again. Write it on your fucking hand or something.”
Zoe bit her lip. “I know I have a problem with relationships. I told you … I tell everyone that I’m an only child, but actually I had a brother and I lost him when I was ten, so … you know. Boring old story. People get too close, I push them away. I’m sorry.”
“God, no, I’m sorry. Oh Zoe, you should have said something.”
Zoe looked up. Her eyes were brimming, but the pianist lurched into Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone,” grandioso, and she laughed instead.
“It’s not something you say, is it? You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“In Manchester?”
“Or any other planet.”
“Doesn’t Tom know?”
Zoe frowned. “It’s not a performance issue.”
“Still, I think it’s the sort of thing you should tell him.”
“I think … it’s the sort of thing you should tell your best
friend.”
Zoe waited for Kate’s reaction. Before Kate could think what to say, a waiter arrived and placed plates before them, covered with silver cloches. He whisked away the cloches, gave a half bow, and glided away. On each of their plates were 150 grams of plain steam-cooked wild rice, 60 grams of chopped raisins, 100 grams of canned tuna in brine, and a 30-gram, carob-coated ProteinPlus PowerBar in its blue-and-yellow wrapper.
Kate blinked, incredulous.
Zoe grinned. “I asked Tom what was on your eat sheet for today. I knew the menu would freak the piss out of you.”
Kate stared at Zoe, while the pianist threw in a quick intermezzo of baroque variations on the theme from Knight Rider.
“What?” said Zoe.
Kate studied her for a moment longer, then smiled and shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Bon appétit,” which was easier than trying to find the words to explain that just sometimes—in the rare moments when she wasn’t causing quite serious mental discomfort—being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace.
This was what Kate was thinking about as the two of them rode the ambulance to the accident and emergency unit.
“Are you okay though, Zo?” she said. “Really, I mean?”
Zoe looked at the ragged mess of her forearm, then back at Kate.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’ll mend.”
Flat 12, the Waterfront, Sport City, Manchester
When the girls left the flat, Tom was tired. He retrieved his denture from the toilet, scrubbed it down with bleach, rinsed it, and reinserted it. He stuck the front door shut with duct tape and put the chain on it. He sat down in front of the simulated log fire and took two Nurofen and an inch of red wine for his joints.
He came awake to the sound of his own sobbing. He was disoriented. He made it to the kitchen on his stiff knees and boiled the kettle for tea.
He breathed. It was okay. It was okay. Here were the blue-and-white ceramic kitchen tiles. Here was the old work surface with all its rings and scratches that you could run your fingertips across. It was okay. You had to stop thinking of these dreams as proof of damnation. They were just your bloody neurons crackling and fizzing, like jaded ladies fabricating gossip.