Gold by Chris Cleave Read Free Book Online Page B

crystals.
    Sophie pulled herself upright on the hand basin, sat on the toilet seat, and peed. This time her urine was a bright lime green. She was glad Mum and Dad couldn’t see it, because it would freak them out. She flushed the toilet and washed her hands carefully in the little basin with the cake of soap that had been formed by pressing together the tailings of the last two. She dried her hands on her jeans. Through the door she heard her parents laughing in the hallway. Mum was telling Dad to shut up with his singing.
    Sophie stood on the toilet seat to look into the mirror above the hand basin. She had to check how she was doing, every day. She did it in here, so no one could see. She took off her Star Wars baseball cap and examined her scalp. She had one lock of hair left now, hanging down over her forehead on the left side. In the mirror there were dark circles under her eyes. That was just the effect of the harsh overhead bulb. Her face seemed thinner, though. She put her hands to her cheeks, ran her fingers over the cheekbones, and felt the sharp edges of them. She was scared for a moment, but then she realized it wasn’t the leukemia. This was just what it did to you, the microgravity of the Death Star. It made you waste away. This was probably what all the Stormtroopers looked like, under their helmets.
    She put her baseball cap back on and checked herself in the mirror. She rubbed her cheeks to put color in them. She planned what she would do now: go into the kitchen, look healthy for about a minute, tell Dad his music was rubbish, then go upstairs to her room and liedown. No, she would say “Your music’s shite ,” the way Ruby would say it. And Dad would grin, and drop to his knees and play-fight with her, and Mum would laugh when she saw them, and that would be one more hour when Mum and Dad wouldn’t worry.
    “Shite,” said Sophie quietly, practicing the word.
Bathroom, flat 12, the Waterfront, Sport City, Manchester
     
    Tom Voss still remembered how it had felt for him, back in Mexico in ’68, to miss out on Olympic bronze by one-tenth of one second. He could feel the anguish of it even now, in his chest, raw and unavenged. Forty-four years later he still noticed the sharp passage of every tenth part of every second. The inflections of time were the teeth of a saw, bisecting him. This was not how other people experienced time. They noticed its teeth indistinctly in a blur of motion and were amazed to wake up one day and find themselves cut in half by it, like the assistants of a negligent magician. But Tom knew how the cut was made.
    He took a call from Zoe’s agent while he was soaking in the bath, persuading his knees to unlock.
    “She’s been sleeping around again,” the agent said. “It’s all over Facebook.”
    “Facebook?” said Tom.
    “It’s a social networking site, Thomas. People use it to exchange information with friends. A friend is someone who—”
    “Ha ha,” Tom said. “I know what Facebook is. Zoe’s got a lot of likes on it, right?”
    “Ninety thousand, last time I looked.”
    He held the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he massaged his knees. His inflamed ligaments weren’t responding to the application of ibuprofen rub. In truth he knew they would only respond to his applying several decades of top-level coaching insight to his own life. It was maybe time to admit that a sixty-six-year-old man shouldn’t bedoing clean and jerk with a heavy barbell. But hey. There were accountants who bolloxed up their own taxes. There were doctors who smoked Marlboro Reds. Why should he be the first old man to listen to himself? He was a sports coach; he wasn’t some kind of bloody pioneer.
    “So anyway,” the agent was saying. “She sleeps with this guy, and apparently he wakes up and realizes who she is, and he goes and plasters it all over the internet. Where, right at this moment, the salacious details are being read by every single person on Earth with the