The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  We slowed and felt the pack swallow us. We rejoined at their pace, and we listened as they chatted. These powerhouses, with their immaculate bodies and fine-tuned machines just talking as if on their way to a village tavern. They talked. I watched Harry listen, his eyes flicking from racer to racer as laughs were had and stories shared. Opperman, he wanted to run ahead but somehow knew this was just a ruse, some pretend waiting game. We cycled beside greats, André Leducq, the Algerian François Louvière, Nicolas Frantz from Luxembourg and current champion of the Tour. They were mere men until one of them, Leducq, the French road champion, punctured and the 31 other riders went mad and bit their lower lips and powered away. We went with them. It was a race suddenly. Men turned to sweat as muscles unwound, tightened and convulsed. The conversations disappeared, all went hard at the road. The leaders swapping out, letting others take their slipstreams for a few minutes before peeling off and letting another head the pack in the vanguard. We kept pace. After 40 minutes Leducq had rejoined the peloton and the pace once more fell away and the conversations started up again. Hands off the handlebars as men gestured and protested or agreed. A fraternity of riders heading south-west towards Brittany. I heard Louvière speaking Arabic and it felt familiar.

  I came 19th, one place behind Harry, 11 behind Oppy. He rode beautifully and was in the papers. The owners of le Tour, L’Auto, mentioned our names.

  We raced to Brussels with the flu deep in my body. Harry’s cones became loose and he had to leave the race to have them fixed. By the time he had rejoined me, Oppy had disappeared. He’d latched on to Nicolas Frantz and gone with him. I was lost, coughing out mucus. Harry was a pacer. The erratic speed of the continentals wasn’t to his liking or technique and we lingered near the back until I cried off before the borderlands. I returned to Versailles by train. During the journey I drifted in relief, the train rocking me through to a state I hadn’t experienced since being merged with these men to a group, a calm. A calm, for I wasn’t ready to ride so far north, not yet. I arrived at the club late in the evening to find news that Opperman had come third.

  L’Auto took his photo. We were complimented and applauded in the strangest ways.

  On the team’s return we came together and fêted him. We bought the best meal we could afford. Many of the French riders joined us and we drank wine, something that made my heart stand and salute. The French who took our company made conversation in fractured English. It was amusement for both sides and in exchange Harry and Oppy tried their poor French. We talked until dawn when the wine took us all out onto the streets. We asked ourselves if we were ready. No one had an answer.

  That was all in May. Now it’s June. June 17, 1928, and I tell myself to wake up.

  Harry checks the spare tubes he has wrapped around his body like strange eels. We carry four of the things. Any more punctures than four and we will be forced to unstitch the inner tube from the canvas bag it resides within, then use glue and a patch before stitching it up once more. We’ve heard tales of men bribing local seamstresses to do their work, begging them not to tell the officials who linger about the race hoping to add hours to a rider’s total, to shove him back in the pack with a bad wish. I recall stories told that night after Brussels. Battles between riders and officials. I think of them and look around searching for their protagonists amongst the riders, believing that they must all be here somewhere, even if they aren’t racing. I realise I have no idea what they look like, though I have formed faces for their heads. So I ask: these men of fame, whose memories are they made of? For surely they aren’t real. They all seem an eternity away, though I understand that they are not, they are at the distance of that flag fall, or whatever signal we shall receive to begin this thing. For at that moment we will all be in this race together, its pasts and this moment, each suddenly unveiled to each other. We wear matching deep blue shirts with a green band. Who or what these colours represent no one has said.

  I start concentrating, shift the periphery out of focus and think about the shape of my body draped over the frame, the adjustment of each angle of joint and limb – each so vital, more so than the organs within. Indeed, all we need is a heart for blood and lungs for air, all the rest are extra weight. We are soon to be engines. Soon to be flyers, eagles, bats, whatever kind you like. White caps and goggles, a mouthful of bugs and dust.

  We depart 10 minutes before the gaggle of routiers, 40 minutes after Alcyon-Dunlop. The official starter nods, counts down and points the five of us on our way. We push off. We have, it seems, finally left New Zealand.

  Despite this, my legs won’t work. I’m coasting with limp limbs rotating with the wheels. Ernie looks behind him and sees me struggling. He mouths at me, I hear him perfectly as if his mouth were beside my ear. I shrug and he yells. There’s nothing but the slow glide from the push Monsieur France had given my behind. A sensation like butterflies in my thighs as they slowly turn. Harry looks back, then the others. A cry from the crowd. There is nothing, and it seems there will forever be nothing. I am a skiff pushed out into the wash, surrounded by surf sound and drowning men. I am a failed tide. I move, but it’s a strange powerless movement amongst the shapeless noise, the volume of rows and rows of shouting mouths. Whose faces do I see? I look for them, family, and friends. Of course I see no one, not until I see a scarf around the neck of a woman. It is yellow, bright. Harry sways outwards, his bike following his gaze back over his shoulder. I see our manager shouting at me, he’s running alongside shouting. I grin at him. Slowly, with a curious returning, my legs begin to move, migrating energy from my thighs to the road. Harry says something and I find myself following him as I have time and again.

  Someone. Someone deep in the crowd laughs and I join in for a moment.

  Hallelujah, as the angels say.

  Now we flow down the street, the dawn light bouncing off green steel. We are beneath the stare of thousands. I struggle to deal with their dimensions and I do calculations in my head. A habit of a habitual amateur mathematician; I struggle to resist giving numbers to things. The air remains hard with sound. We are within a shell. Children scream, though I doubt they know who we are or what it is we are doing; they are screaming for the sake of the scream, the facial contortion that lets their air join the others’ (their parents, their siblings, their friends, and so on until each person on the end of each held hand is a part of this sound). It’s immense and I know we all do it, we all fear the noise. It’s everywhere, all about us, so we don’t listen. We ride into a silence only we know how to make.

  2

  Then we are in the countryside. Wide green pastures and the run of a smooth road. Paris has gone, not even an echo of its noise hangs in the air. An hour, two hours. We have joined other riders. Individuals riding on their own: isolés, provincial and trade teams. The pack smells of coffee and skin and leather. I look over my shoulder and expect to see evidence of the capital, but there is nothing, just the country.

  Opperman sits behind Osborne’s wheel and turns and gives me a wink and I go. I ride to the front and try to get a sense of the mood. I listen to them breathe, watch the pack twitch at the movements of others. For the moment there is a lazy breathy air about us. No one is talking, no one is willing to think out loud and nobody makes a break. I sweat and feel the drips fall onto my thighs. I watch my fellow riders and I’m amazed by some men’s ability not to lose water as they blaze through the sun.

  Farmland and trees hanging their greenery over the road. The paving alternates between gravel and concrete. In the villages the cobblestones begin once more and our bodies jar as if shaken by a distant hand. The French wave to the crowds lining the streets and eventually we do the same.

  We jump from our bikes beside a river and run to tables strewn with foods. Bananas and bread, apples and coffee. There’s chops and they taste muttony, but we swallow them down anyway. Twenty or thirty grown men with fat glistening on their chins. Monsieur France is there, he’s saying: ‘You must hurry. Hurry and hurry.’

>   Soon we are back in the race and France rides in the car behind us with Bruce Small (Hubert’s friend from Melbourne) and our interpretor, René. Placed on the bonnet is a Union Jack and strapped to the back a kangaroo. Toys for tourists. This is our support as we chew off the day’s kilometres, 207 in total. They unravel, distinctly, as if words spoken between two cities. We trade positions, shift places in that long missive, amazed at the people we have become.

  Rain flattens the dust.

  The format is a time trial, a team time trial. We race the clock, though we don’t know what it says. Any riders that come alongside are potentially quite some time behind us, or ahead. The lot of us make a clattering sound when we hit a crossroad made of cobblestones. We forget who is where and it is only when Bruce Small comes alongside that we have information. He shouts with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a cone, a hailer that supposedly amplifies his voice but to my ear makes it thin and inaudible. Percy seems to understand the fragments and relays time and distance.

  We find ourselves passing stragglers: one from Alcyon, two out of Alleluia, riders who have fallen behind their packs. We overtake them as they dawdle. Slow like campers. I hear Ernie shout out, ‘Pitch a tent, ya filthy frogs.’ I barely understand him but enjoy the titter that runs through our group. Riders and groups of riders jockey for position, elbows and hips bang. People swear in their own sweet voices and riders threaten to break away. There are grunts, noises of animals as one rider makes gestures and feints, puts on a fake rush to lure riders out. And some go. Most stay, waiting.

  Outside of Lisieux the Louvet team ride straight through us and Percy shouts and Hubert goes with them and I try to follow. I pace him for an hour until my legs start to lose rhythm and I fall off to the rear. At Caen I come in five minutes behind him, 300 yards ahead of Percy and Harry. 19th. There are still 150 others on the clock behind me. Opperman receives flowers and kisses. We come together in the evening to discuss and unwrap the day. We talk of tactics, of our bodies. There is the burning sensation and a sharp smell in small successes.

  ‘You know what I’m doing?’ Percy says. ‘You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking ’bout Louvet.’ He’s got a mouthful and stops to swallow. He’s heavy set for a cyclist, jokes that he got lost on the way to footy training and ended in these strange levels of hell. ‘How close they get to each other. I’m thinking –’

  ‘They’re French, they don’t care about the smell,’ Ernie says. ‘They’ll ride up their own arses.’ There’s mud under his eye, has been there for hours.

  ‘I’m being serious. I’m gunna ask if they take passengers next time they come through. “Excuse me dear sir, would you mind awfully –”’

  ‘Use your elbows,’ Ernie says. ‘Just get in there.’

  ‘Just the way they went through us,’ Percy says. I look over at him and see that he is thinking, perhaps thinking over what we know. The facts of energy. The fact of our effort and how the effort we expend on poor technique is the effort they expel riding at a rate faster than we can summon. We are aware of this: we make a rattle in our ride which could be a fraction of a horsepower pulling us through. He won’t blame his build for his slow pace, but seems certain about the French, how they understand form in a way we couldn’t hope to know.

  Harry taps me on my shoulder as I tear bread with my teeth. It is rubbery and I squint at him as he speaks. ‘Tomorrow, we go together. If he goes,’ and he nods at Opperman, ‘we make sure of it. All right?’

  I nod and drink water. ‘I’m happy with that.’

  ‘The way they went through us,’ Percy repeats. ‘I just, I just – I’d hate to know the place that kind of discipline leads to.’

  ‘Mate, they’re starting their own monastery,’ Ernie says. ‘Them and Alcyon. You’re their first –’ and Ernie has his old mate in a headlock for a second. They do this: rough-housing the love out of the late evening.

  ‘But the thing is,’ Harry says, ‘if he goes and I’m not there, you go, right?’ I watch him for a long time and realise he is being serious. His expression some kind of rule of measurement against my slowness to respond. I nod and lightly punch his shoulder. A friendly punch. The act of a young man too close to caring to have anything intelligent to say about it.

  After eating I leave the men and walk.

  3

  On this first night I find myself watching down at the street from three storeys up, in a room recently decorated. The length of the road below is full of men in cars making their presence known, honking and yells. I watch and try to get the names of these vehicles in my head. For the last month Harry has had me repeat words hoping they will stick, but most often they fade instantly, like a cheap sherry spilt in the sun – an aroma briefly hazes and then vanishes and who knows what it ever tasted like or cost. The woman whose hotel room this is watches me by the curtains, the way I lean, or perhaps the way my head keeps looking from side to side out the window and down the street, I’m not sure, but she calls out and says for me to stop doing what I am doing.

  ‘I’m watching for rain,’ I say.

  ‘Not going to come yet,’ she says. ‘Due in the morning.’

  ‘So I understand. I’m watching for it. I’m not looking forward to it, so I watch for it.’

  ‘Wait for it tomorrow,’ she says. She speaks a fine English, though the accent leaves its trace like a snail’s trail over glass. Some province in this country making a blur in her voice.

  ‘What colour is it?’ I ask. ‘The car, what colour is the car?’

  ‘Blue. Come back here.’

  I go to her on the bed and sit and she touches the hem of my trousers as I tuck a leg under the other. She reaches into her bag. She doesn’t have a name yet, not one she wishes to offer and that is fine as long as she doesn’t expect me to remember if I see her tomorrow at the start and she leans out and shouts.

  ‘More of this?’ she says. I look at the bottle in her hand, then back at her face. She is at least ten years my senior, though she retains a distinctly youthful aspect. She smiles and hides a small scar at the edge of her mouth.

  I call her Miss Mademoiselle. She says: ‘How do you know?’

  ‘How do I know what?’

  ‘To call me that. Here.’ She leans close to me and puts the topette in my hand, a small ornate bottle. ‘Put a little on your handkerchief and wear it like, erm. Wear it like this.’ She takes her own handkerchief and places it over her nose so a triangle of white falls over her mouth. She looks like a bandit, though one used to finery and the feel of lace.

  ‘You look ready for a robbery. Ready for a hold-up.’

  ‘Yes, I am a thief. Now –’ And she looks at me for a moment and then gets up and goes to the window. She’s waiting for a car. Earlier in the evening I had come across her outside the Abbey of Saint-Étienne as I walked looking for architecture of interest. My neck ached and caused a limp somehow. She said my name and looked shy, as if she had made a mistake and I wasn’t the rider she thought she recognised from my profile in L’Auto. But I was that rider, I still am in fact, despite the effect of the ether she gave me when I came to her hotel room. I am slightly awash.

  ‘Do you have family?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Do you have family? Children?’ She speaks quietly, as if hushed by the presence of other sounds she would prefer to hear.

  ‘No children. Though I am likely to work on that. One day I will work on it. How about yourself?’

  ‘At home?’ she asks. ‘At home in New Zealand?’ I can’t tell if she is biding time here or interested. She keeps looking toward the window. A car is due. She says she needs to get in it. That’s all I’ve been told.

  ‘At home,’ I say. ‘A brother.’

  ‘A sister?’

  ‘Once. She’s –’ I put my hand up, I wave goodbye to the thought.

  ‘Mmm. I’m sorry. So, and – what about here? Out here: these old countries? Extended family. If I see a man or woman from the colonies I can�
�t help but wonder, where are they from? Their family, I mean. What stock, if I may?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and laugh lightly. ‘Family in England. Margate. My mother emigrated back in the 90s with her sister and brother. She has family back in England, another sister. My father, I’m not sure. But yes. Family. Family are everywhere.’

  ‘Aren’t they?’ she says. ‘Aren’t they always somewhere? So uncles and aunts. Then cousins. I have cousins in South America. Lord knows.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  She lies down on the bed and says nothing for a moment, as if concentrating on something, a pure sensation of the sort I don’t expect to be privy to, but then she says, ‘God. My feet. My feet feel so perfect. Do you ever have that sensation – they are. It’s like I have never noticed them before.’ She looks at me.

  ‘They’re nice feet; nothing fancy but nice,’ I say, then look up at her. ‘Don’t take me seriously,’ I say in recompense.

  ‘Nothing fancy. Well, I’ll tell you something,’ she says. She laughs quietly. ‘England. Any intention of travelling there once this is done?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not so much. They are coming to me,’ I say, and look at her. I feel the secret parts of me fade: the loose connections I have to this place, things I’ve told few about. Harry tells me I’m too easy to con out of my own ideas, and by the smell of this woman, I fear he’s right. ‘At least it seems so. I have a cousin. She’s nearby apparently.’

  ‘A cousin?’

  ‘From Margate. I’m likely to meet her in the next few days if things go to plan. We made plans over the months.’

  ‘A plan?’

  ‘If our correspondence matches up.’

  She doesn’t reply, but rather stands on her tiptoes and looks down at the road. ‘Mmm –’ she says.