The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  THE INVISIBLE MILE

  David Coventry

  PICADOR

  for Laura

  We suffer, from start to finish we suffer.

  You want to know how we keep going?

  – Henri Pélissier to Albert Londres

  in Café de la Gare, Coutances

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Part 2

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Part 3

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  Author’s note

  Prologue

  I arrived in Canterbury, the flat lands and the unerring sky. It was 1921 and the sun bore holes in my eyes and shrank the lakes to salt and mineral. At Timaru I borrowed a bike in borrowed shoes and raced in the dust storm ripping from the tips of the Alps across those dry plains to the side of the sea. The road was planted in the centre of the wind. The air shaped into a tunnel, at times narrowing to draw us towards the edge of speed, at others to wreck us in a swift twist of dirt and heat. It was a brute summer that could only be imagined.

  For 100 miles I paced beside men and older men, each of them breathing hard and some in the throes of a cough, rough patches of voice when they called out. We ran across creeks where there were no bridges, we scrambled in the dust as it rose around us, searching for the road, and when there was no road we ran in the mud, our bicycles held high above our heads. No man was free until he quit. And many quit. The first run of the Classic since that rail car on the outskirts of Compiègne. I knew nothing of the men I rode beside.

  My brother Thomas and his wife drove behind. He shouted anything to keep me going on. Thomas and Katherine leaning from the car in the rush. Men tried to talk to me, to harangue me, to encourage me, but I just rode on in silence. For an hour rain buckled in the wind-hit and the blood was washed straight from our wounds. Then the sun, and I stared up the road. Silence and the red buttons on her sleeves as Katherine waved from the window, a Butchers Carbine balanced in her hands. Her pale arms and the arch of her neck.

  In a scramble for the line I placed fourth behind Phil O’Shea – a man from before the war, a hero after – and he gave me congratulations. Somebody took my bike from my hands and I stood wondering what it all meant. O’Shea carried flowers in a bouquet like somebody else’s baby. He put an arm about me, congratulated me and welcomed me to this religion of suffering and dirt. His words, my misery. I didn’t know his name till after. By then any memory I had of his face was gone, but I shall make sure he was handsome.

  This was the first race in which I’d worn a numbered shirt, the first not around the mountain with my pals from the club taking turns to race me in relay. In truth, I should have been last. A squalid 19-year-old, I could not gain muscle, I was a rake with fast-moving tendons between its tines. I had a beard, but the hair shot out like actors’ fake bristles. All my thoughts were life and this damned speed I wanted like the train that barrels on rails towards the moment where they narrow near the horizon and collide. Life, speed and a future I couldn’t adequately imagine, that was my constitution. I placed in front of named riders, riders of solid years’ pacing. I had my back patted by men of uncertain intentions. I was smiling like lipstick on a glass still warm from wine. I whistled between my teeth when congratulated. Still, I struggled with the belief I’d got through, and Katherine, she said as much.

  In the night, my brother and I were drunk. Singing and high and I imagine smelling rank. We parked the car at the rough waters of the Waimakariri and drank in the light of the Ford’s headlamps. I told him what others had said. I had none of my own phrases, they were still out there under the bridge. I told him about the wind and mud. I had twigs in my hair and grass down my shirt front. My brother with his beaten face nodding as several wethers wandered through. He smiled and cursed. He shouted beside the car as we drank our beer. It seems sad I can’t recall what I smelt of, what taint was in my clothes and deeper in my skin. It’s the most personal of the senses: the hardest to dismiss, the hardest to diminish. That memory is absent, as if exchanged for some fate I was suddenly a part of.

  Indeed, I should never have finished. I should have been last. I should not have made my fine sprint into the aerodrome in which four riders slipped behind as if I had paused time for them and made my own out of another curiously quicker rate. A bridge over the Rangitata and the race was split: those who passed the span prior to the truck’s entrance, and those who scrambled in its path as it lost control and wheels slid and the smell of brakes forced the air to close itself. I rode somewhere between disaster and triumph, a pair of half-blinked eyes racing amongst dung and dust. I avoided its path through luck and blind reaction. I should have been sitting in a ditch, nursing my bad pride, building a cairn in tribute to past things: my sister Marya and all I saw in the moment when the truck came and I rushed forth out of death’s way. Instead I stood leaning on the Ford with Thomas and the night and things that get said in the night.

  He socked me, eventually. His hit took out a tooth which I picked up from the dirt and placed in my pocket. He’s a short man, powerful shoulders with strong arms and a look that betrayed the violence he had been guilty of in certain pasts. Indeed, he’d had a calm since the war passed through him, as if suited to a life on a farm, or nearby so he could walk in pastures and brush the hindquarters of a calf, fix the hinge of a gate that rattles against the night. All as if he has no fear of memory. An impression that quite disappeared in those few moments. For all that had been done to him in the sand south of Middelkerke – the pitiless maimed proprium, the war’s death wash and stain – it showed out.

  We stood with blood on ourselves. I couldn’t see the water but for occasional flashes of white where it broke and tore. He sat on a log and his face disappeared out of the light.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked. ‘To Marya?’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘What did you say to her? What did you say to Marya?’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘What did you say?’

  He stood and came to me. He lurked. Leaned on the darkness and stood over me. He began talking, mumbling and cursing. He said my name, my sister’s name. He said all our names as if we were there. As if Marya and I were there ready to listen to what he had to say. He gestured and mouthed, stared and spat. But Marya and I, we heard nothing, nothing but the throttling run of the river, the hustle and speed of the river as it slowly made mountains into rocks and rocks into sand.

  Part 1

  1

  I suspect none of us have ever foreseen the gaze of so many thousands, these faces and the bodies behind. These 50,000 eyes, brown, blue and hazel, all staring. I sit on the seat as Harry steadies the bicycle. He’s tall and he stands at my handlebars, looking past my shoulder. His own eyes are quite distant, their whites bloodshot with coffee and sugar and a hundred varying queries. The cobblestones make the wait awkward; I fear my bike is going to topple before we set off, a fool before the Paris thousands. I ask the time but no one will answer me. It is within the hour in which the Tour starts and that is all we know. 9:20 is our due; when it’ll arrive I can’t say. Harry nods at me but then his jaw stiffens as a draft of noise comes off the crowd. He blinks a
nd this sound flattens for an instant, the faces and mouths and all the brilliant eyes dim, fold and brighten again. I adjust the brake lever. I make the change in racing position. Then I change it back.

  It should be warm but pockets of night still sit in the shadows, its air running over our arms, over the run of nerves which have pimpled the skin. A pretty girl leans out of the crowd on the balcony above trying to get a rider’s, any rider’s, attention. She’s wearing a coat but pleasantly all the buttons that matter are undone. One of our team says, ‘Phew.’ It’s Percy and his accent’s rough, so rough the French look at their shoes when he speaks. He’s nervous and slaps Harry on the back. Nobody looks him in the eye. At least not Harry, because I know what he’s contemplating as he looks back at the crowd, what half the men are asking as they ready themselves.

  ‘What’s –’ Harry starts.

  ‘What’s what?’ I say back.

  ‘Do we know –’ But he stops again as he’s drowned out. All the noise, the cathedral sound of le Tour. Another team has left the line. We each wait out our turn, suspended on the rattling noise of the city.

  I doff my hat the girl’s way. She seems to shout something out. I smile at all of us. Harry asks me what her name is, but then the crowd begins again. It surges, the sound seems to move and gather, setting a high point in its tide. He twists his neck and elbows my side. I nod and see what he is looking at. We all sense the dense weight of the eight touristes-routiers standing in the rear about to set off on a warm-up. Some I recognise. François Louvière is amongst them. I go quiet. As does the crowd. I watch him stretch his legs.

  Harry’s squinting once more. I watch him because I believe I know what he is thinking, what he is doing: he’s asking how the dark has fallen outside his house, he’s asking what might be on the table inside the house at the end of the road at the start of the plains, for it is that approximate time back far in the south. He’s thinking of the room where his wife stands beside the quiet boil of the pot. I know how comforting these thoughts can be to one who fears the noise, the cauldron sound of murmurs growing to calls and shouts and moans. It surrounds us, crawls under our shirts and runs along our skin. The sudden loneliness hits and you turn and look around and think back to the things of food and drink, of love and quietness. I know because everyone fears the noise.

  ‘Hey,’ Percy calls out to the girl. She winces but grins. Three Australians and two New Zealanders, we can’t know what we sound like this deep in Paris. And I say Paris but we are really in the outskirts at Le Vésinet, but still, the city is here.

  Ernie Bainbridge yawns. He starts humming a song, but Percy interrupts, or is already interrupting as he had never really stopped talking. It’s a nervous monologue, joking and serious and uncertain. Words he’s said before, said before we left for Brussels, said when we flowed out of Perth that March dawn. Something about mornings and Percy Osborne.

  ‘We’re gunna sink,’ he says.

  ‘You’re a nervous nelly,’ Ernie says.

  ‘A bridge’ll be out and you jokers’ll go down. I won’t be there, I’ll have quit.’

  Harry smiles and opens his mouth.

  ‘You’re nervous,’ I say.

  ‘Damned right, I’m nervous,’ Percy says. ‘I’m nervous. I’m filthy. I’m filthy nervous.’ The repetition seems to help, seems to summon up some new pluck I hadn’t noticed previously because he whistles to the girl, doffs his hat and waits as she blows a kiss across all of us. She beams but this time I can’t say if her smile is a secret gift for Harry, Percy, Ernie, me, or indeed for Opperman who’s happily listening in and keeping quiet, or if it’s a gift for the broad sweep of the scene she must be seeing from up there; tens of thousands bright.

  ‘Do we know,’ Harry says, ‘what –’

  ‘What signal we get?’ I ask, and Harry nods.

  ‘Who?’ asks Percy.

  ‘Us. What signal do we get to start?’

  ‘Hubert?’ Harry says, and turns to find Opperman, who is concentrating on his handlebar tape.

  ‘How do we know the race has begun?’ Percy asks.

  Opperman puts out his bottom lip and shrugs. ‘I dunno, Percy. When we’ve started racing, I’ll let you know.’

  Percy mumbles something, says in half a voice not quite his own: ‘Asked for a captain and they send us young sonny cadet here.’ His brow is furrowed and he’s thinking, surprised at where this voice came from: some butcher in the lane, a broken digger at the station selling stamps and newspapers, perhaps a relative who’s been here before. It’s all as if he’s taken aback by the sudden need to be another to be himself.

  ‘It’s not the Sinai,’ I say.

  ‘You mean the Somme.’

  ‘Fuck the Somme.’

  ‘Do we go to the Somme?’ Harry asks.

  ‘Oppy?’

  Our leader jerks his head at Ernie Bainbridge, who nods. ‘Not really,’ he says.

  ‘Somebody do some more star jumps,’ Percy says, and Opperman laughs as he bends to adjust his toe clips which do not need adjusting. An official waves for us to move up another place towards the line and the crowd sounds out like the inside of a wave tearing itself apart; we know a favourite has left the line. We look at one another and wonder which of the darlings has made their start. Monsieur France shouts to us from up ahead. He’s our manager and speaks without uttering a word of English. Mister France. We take bets on his first name. ‘What’s he saying?’ Percy asks – but we know it doesn’t matter, what he says, not in this noise. It’s the look in his eyes that tells us what we need to know, and it is saying we are up next, the next to ride into the howl this city makes when men are set free.

  We were hosted by Le Vallois Cycling Club at Les Loges-en-Josas. We lived in an attic as the chalets were overrun by the French Olympic team. They too were there to train, man machines. Much to admire in their movements on the track. We watched them in the misted mornings, before our training had us on the roads covering anything from 40 to 60 to 95 kilometres. They streamed around the track like the chains between their sprockets, they seemed effortless, a calm fury in their speed. We mimicked their hunched stance over the handlebars. Monsieur France manhandling us in our saddles to get our arses in place.

  Calm fury. Harry said those two words on one wet morning at Versailles and they made me smile as we walked those grounds, not so far distant from our lodgings.

  We burnt the effects of the sea in weeks of endless concentration and blind application. We boiled water in the room with eucalyptus leaves Percy Osborne had stuffed in his pack and placed towels over our heads and breathed in the steam. Our sinuses were thick from colds and everything else we picked up on arrival. Bainbridge was particularly affected. He had a stomach complaint and we stopped often to allow him to vomit the breakfasts we received in the early morning. A sight often seen: Ernie Bainbridge with his fingers in his mouth coughing and hacking beside a culvert away from the side of the road. He wished to be alone as he went through these moments. Privacy was hard fought.

  They drank coffee by the pot and stared at their shaking hands. I read letters from London sent by a family member of such a distance it burns to think whether she is related at all; I have seen her name written a few dozen times, the men we see competing, hundreds.

  We watched races, the Bordeaux–Paris Classic, we watched the track. Extraordinary riders, the shape of them as a group. We tried to imitate cycling as one, each pump of the leg in tune with the man in front, the man behind. Our bodies pitched forward, la cadence. We found a smooth speed. I purchased clothes from a shop in the lane. I bought a beret. My teammates laughed at me, but soon had the same urge to melt in when crowds became too much. Yes, we mimic the French, but that is what we must do to survive. Seat position, head position. At a six-day event we were introduced to the crowd. We did a circuit of the indoor track and waved and men and women yelled. Opperman said we’re a boon for French racing, foreigners of a truly foreign kind.

  We had our lights turned
out at 9:30pm. At night I could hear Bainbridge talk in his sleep.

  At six we’d arise to ride again, to be laughed at once more by Frenchmen who believed our presence to be an amusement of some cruel kind. They pointed at our outdated machines and our tyres and soon we were forced to buy them anew. Thin, road-quick tyres we hadn’t seen before arriving on the continent. We bought new handlebars so we could align our backs as we imitated the French. We found new pace, and while training with the Olympic team we could match them for speed on the longer days: Harry and Opperman stretching out leads once they passed the 100-kilometre mark. We rode with intent. Fitness made us machines to match the new bikes we were later given for the Tour by the organisers. Cycles that took weeks to get used to, to fine-tune into something that fitted our bodies and their complexity of shape and form.

  I did not trust my new machine at first, none of us trusted them. The fittings came loose, the handlebars shifted, the seat twisted when I made an effort on the pedals. It took us two weeks to make the bikes roadworthy. And when finally we did, they flew. Harry wrote home making complaints. He wrote to O’Shea, the former champion who’d taken him under his wing since Harry first won the Timaru–Christchurch, two years after my first compete, who’d become his mechanic and made his machines fast. He complained in letters. Read them out loud in the attic before sending them on. We’d murmur our agreement.

  We walked in Paris and I wondered how it was just as my brother said it would be: grand avenues and shrunken alleys, horse-borne heroes unmoving in statue and a million shuttered windows shaken by the tremor of perfect light, all of which we rode through in the long evening as we became one with the bicycles.

  We fought our first battle racing from Paris to Rennes. It was still May, Spring, a season laced with winter hailstorms and sleet. At 2am we rode. We hunched over and pedalled outside the peloton. We were not there to win, just to practise and compete, though we found the five of us in the lead. After five minutes we were looking over our shoulders. The Frenchmen were lazing, just drifting at a pace akin to an outing in the heat of summer down shaded lanes. A sluggish education.