Gold by Chris Cleave Page B

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 thatshe 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