Read Gold for Free Online Page B

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 ironwood coffee table beside the sofa there was the new copy of Marie Claire with Zoe’s face on the cover, smiling. She flippedthrough 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