The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘They here?’

  ‘I go now,’ she says and signals for me to stand.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Men and the kind of men who aren’t family. Part of this thing.’

  ‘The Tour.’

  ‘Mmm. The Tour. In June, in July, everyone’s part of the Tour. Now,’ she says and hurries me up. I wave the topette at her and she looks at it for a few moments as if weighing the contents. ‘No. You carry on with it. There’s pain to come.’

  Outside I bid farewell and head in the opposite direction as she walks towards a car parked across the road. I flick my eyes towards her as I walk away. She circles the car in a slow motion ponder before opening a door and disappearing into the leather interior. I want to name the car as a Ford, but then all cars are Fords to me at first glance. My father’s first car was a Model T. He bought it in February 1914. I, my brother, and Marya my sister, we each stood staring as it came up the drive interrupting our tennis match. Thomas the eldest at one end and we younger ones at the other. We walked about it as he came out of the driver’s door. We walked around and around, watching our reflections in the black that wasn’t splattered in the mud from the ride, from the docks where he’d received the vehicle and a lesson in its functions and particulars.

  Half an hour had passed in the woman’s room: one day’s pain was reduced to a hum. Now I walk towards the end of the street thinking about how easily she had slipped inside the car. I think this because of how impossible it was for either Marya, Thomas, or me to get into my father’s new machine. We each stood there as he rushed inside to relieve himself. The car, the way it sang and we all stood around.

  ‘You do it,’ Marya said. ‘You’re the boy.’

  ‘What’re you afraid of?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not afraid. I’m being polite.’ How old was she? Nine, ten. Something like that. She knew nothing of being polite, no one at that age knows anything of manners. She sidled up beside me and put her arm into the crook of my elbow. ‘Yours to drive,’ she said.

  ‘Thomas?’ I called out to my brother. ‘You drive the thing. We’ll watch.’

  ‘No, not Thomas,’ Marya said. ‘He’s so much more the handsome of the brothers. If one of you needs to be maimed, well –’ She had a wonderful ability not to qualify jokes with laughter. She stared at my brother, squeezing my arm. Such were her directions for her siblings to act. Thomas put his arm around me and we both went and sat in the front seat. We looked at each other and the levers and the steering wheel, the pedals and the horn. Nothing was as I thought it would be, nothing was quite as simple as the one lever I imagined which would take you forward. Our father came out and told us to get out and get the hose. It needed cleaning, it needed the distance of 25 miles washed off. We sprayed the vehicle. He told us it was the 3,000th Model T sold in New Zealand. We all nodded in a kind of trance. For years, even all the years my father no longer spoke to me, I was in the trance of truth, that this was true, a fact. The 3,000th car. But as I jump to the side of the road and watch the woman and the car come towards me, I know it was a lie, a bluff and puff. But such are the things of lies, their harmlessness and play, it was a fine story to tell my friends. I could tell it to anyone and it made a hush in the mouths of young men.

  A rattle and the car coughs on the street. The woman passes a look my way from the window as they go by, and hints at smiling. I nod with the shy eagerness of an uncourted man.

  4

  The dawn is serene and Harry rides out of the morning, a pacer through the plains and gentle undulation. We are under a grey sky graduating the deepest imaginable blacks to white. We ride out of it into the day – the rain gone, the woman from the hotel in some other time, reduced to memory and the things we forget. Our small train, we hustle until we ride in unison and our pace is tied to Harry’s, then Percy’s, then mine and so on as we head east and slightly to the north. The Cotentin Peninsula, Cherbourg. I try to remember all skies, a marker of place and the time spent beside them. I watch the clouds and say to myself that I must remember.

  For weeks we have prepared for this. Worked our bodies into a shape that would allow them to survive the rigour. Harry made complaints that we would never get fit for the mountains taking jaunts across the farmland outside of Paris. Of course he was right, but we had little choice but to ride and ride on to prime ourselves the best we could. And riding in the plains helped prepare us for this, this long scoot to the hills. Still Harry stammers his disquiet.

  Mr France last week decided we were all, excepting Hubert and myself, sitting too far forward on our saddles. Inefficient, he’d said through a translator. Now I watch my fellow riders and notice how they have inclined to move forward once again. I tap Harry and point to his rump and he shifts without engaging my eyes. He finds pace, though I suspect it is not an effect of his alteration that speeds him, rather a reflex against my observation. Nobody wants to be told anything at this hour.

  We ride. The five of us cross the land. Though, and I am not certain why, it seems in some moments it is only Harry and myself. We are used to each other, used to habits of acceleration and deceleration, of powering up hills or pulling back that small amount when the rise becomes precipitous. Our bodies are oddly intimate with the signals they send: I know the way his bike tilts to the right side minutely when he decides to add extra revolutions to his wheels and gain pace on the pack. I know his sounds, the quickening of his breath when something seems ready to happen amongst a clutch of riders setting to break. And I expect he knows things similar about me. Though we have never been on the same team, we have raced beside each other for many hundreds of hours, within which things became familiar, strong and necessary. This only became obvious to me the first day we set out on our initial practice ride in Paris, the morning after our arrival. We were each feeling as well as a slept-on limb, pathetic and unworthy. And though slowly the rhythm returned, I found myself in an old pattern sitting on Harry’s rear wheel and watching his long legs for signs of change, as if he were talking and telling. I realised I knew him in ways intimate, as if there were a love between us never before signalled.

  It is from Caen we ride, the plains ahead. Harry takes us forward. Few riders catch us, and we too overtake only a clutch. 140 kilometres, not much more than a training ride and Opperman leaves us with 20 to go as we each seem to puncture in a row. Harry’s pump falls out of its bracket and catches in the wheel causing further delay. He rides as though a steep anger has taken him and laid on him strength to beat them all. We watch and sweat in the afternoon sun. My promise to him unfulfilled.

  Without Opperman we make our own runs and feel the distance he puts on us, the strength and power he can summon. Hubert Ferdinand Opperman, we found out that second name when stealing glances at one another’s passports. Percy always ready with a guffaw. He used to be Oppermann with an extra ‘n’, as his parents remain. When he changed the spelling no one is sure, but Percy takes bets that it was during the war, that he rubbed it out as if erasing that particular limb on his father’s family tree which connected his ancestors to old Prussia. An utterly Australian act, Percy claimed, but I’m sure an act repeated the world over in those crushing years. So a mystery, his name, no mystery as to his brilliance. But on the long straights on the outskirts of Cherbourg we are caught by ten riders barely panting. We watch ahead, Hubert’s outline slowly being dragged in. He is out there close to the horizon and still they catch him, still they swallow his ride.

  Half an hour later, Harry and I hit the entrance to the stadium and feel the sound of thousands. It wells around us, starting in one section then running through the rest as recognition spreads. Half the souls can’t see past the person in front and I sense something. I sense the point is not to see but to be amongst it, to feel the movement of the crowd, to sense the race through the movements of others, tiny movements, to hear with hands, to see with skin. The trading of senses: that is what makes it all seem so holy. I want desperately to leap from my seat and jostle m
y way into the centre and hear what they are hearing, for it isn’t spoken in French, not in English. It’s a voice wholly other. Muscles rolling through a snake. We sprint against one another almost in jest. We coast across the line 11 minutes behind, but still they call for us in our mock duel. A giant call, a hum of multitudes asking for a prayer. They’d almost got it in Opperman. He’d fought those ten men with just a bicycle and a hard nerve. He came within six minutes of their shadows.

  I sit myself down on the track. We watch André Leducq, Nicolas Frantz and Jan Mertens spray the crowd with a hose. Nearby men are quaffing fortified wine and the rich smell of it drifts to where we sit. I recall the sensation of communion bread, the way it would crumple on my tongue. Harry sits beside me and I ask the whereabouts of Opperman. He shakes his head but points towards the stage. I search about for him, the kid whose first job was as a courier, a kid who cycled all over Melbourne with missives and parcels. He did it every day after school until he was racing for money. Now he owns records too many to repeat. I can’t see him anywhere, though I suspect he is amongst the champions, charming with his lack of real French.

  People say our names over the fence. I can’t but laugh and wave.

  Harry pulls out a postcard. A picture of the city we’d ridden through before we hit this stadium. He reads his words slowly as he puts them onto the card. I know what they say before they are said. He writes to his wife, he writes dearly. I write to my brother and his wife. I place accents atop random vowels within their names to make my English seem French and the French seem nearer.

  Some of the crowd yell our whole names, then say our home towns as if they are in charge of something we can’t name.

  ‘There’s one or two riders who are going to win this thing,’ Harry says. ‘One, two, three, four or five.’

  ‘Four or five,’ I say.

  ‘And they know our names. Is that something to be concerned about?’

  I laugh.

  ‘I’m not serious, obviously,’ he says. ‘But maybe I am. Maybe I’m being serious. When it becomes every town.’

  ‘Then I’ll worry with you.’

  ‘People have more important things to remember,’ he says, ‘wouldn’t you think?’

  ‘Than Harry Watson of Christchurch?’ I say. ‘I believe they have more important things to remember, yes.’

  ‘Such and such of Dingo City, New South Wales. If we get to Charleville and they are saying our names and towns.’

  ‘I was talking to a woman last night. Last night? Some night. She asked if I thought we’d make it up that far.’

  ‘To the north?’

  ‘The old borders in the north. I improvised. I told her we would make it to the end.’

  ‘Of course you did. Let me finish writing this. Did you sound convincing?’

  ‘Yes, maybe.’

  ‘What else would you say? I mean – anyway. You seeing her? When you seeing her?’

  ‘This woman?’

  ‘No. Your cousin.’

  ‘Brest.’

  ‘What a name for a town. Let me write this.’

  Harry reads to me what he writes and I think of my brother. I write to Thomas and Katherine in the mornings before we ride. Thómãs and Kãthérinë. It is a long letter I will not send until this is over. There are parts of him I sense in the race, I hear voices and turn expecting my brother’s face, but he is far from here. I write to him of the race. I write telling him I’m due to meet our cousin in a few days. Such a thing, to be meeting someone so distant. I think to create space on the page to include my memory of our father’s first car, that hard machine in the entrance to the home where horses used to ride and stand blinking at flies in the sun, the car which I eventually ruined on a bright morning of fence posts and mud. But there isn’t room for that, just the spread of words describing this race. This race and the sense there is nothing beyond it.

  ‘“I miss the early hours,”’ Harry says, quoting himself. ‘“Mornings and the sun with you in it. Love and all thoughts.”’

  ‘Amen.’

  Harry and I, we share things, the things we love and doubt, we share how to ride against the tide of Frenchmen who pour down these roads leaving us wanting. We share memories of this place we have borrowed from others, memories and expressions we practise with our faces. All of it adds to questions we have of this land and of this race. We are unsure if we have an answer, so we share silences too.

  The first time we raced, Harry was behind from the beginning, right up until we entered Pukekura Park in New Plymouth. I was started 30 minutes ahead of the scratch bunch due to bad form during the early summer, I had 11 miles’ advantage when he set off. And, I swear oaths, even with those 11 miles I heard each of his breaths at my back. The crowds that leant from farm fences for a glimpse of the race barely saw me, did not recognise me, though they cheered me on. No, they were looking for the Cantabrian.

  I rode under the cone of Egmont, mapping its slopes with my widening eyes, the slopes of white snows and volcanic black. We circled the national park, the centre of which belongs to Marya and me. The place where we climbed, the place where we made stories and laughed. The air under the shadow of the great peak was cool and the legs struggled all the harder as they exported blood to drive the muscles and force the cranks hard and pull the chain and caress the axle. There the earth smelt different, the vegetation was close, the dirt close, the run-off stink was close, the dung and shepherd’s tea was close and I sucked in the air and pumped it out again. I rode through riders who’d set off an hour before me. Overtaking riders and riders and riders, each of them in a deep ritual of breathing and pain and ecstasy as they headed for New Plymouth. We chatted, each asked about the southerner.

  ‘He’s behind me,’ I’d say. ‘He’s coming.’

  Then, the group I was looking for, men from my club. I sat on each of their wheels and listened to them speak as my body recuperated and I drank from my bottle in their slipstreams as they paced me, used up all their energy repairing my shaky limbs. They spoke of their own tiredness. My clubmates, my teammates who had planned to meet me there, to help me rest while keeping my pace. We sailed through Stratford singing songs. I left them soon after and they dropped off. I said cheerio, leaving them to their eternal conversation and awaited the Priest’s arrival at my rear wheel. They sang handsome words behind me.

  The Priest. I am not the only one to name Harry as such and you will later see why.

  Another hour. Another hour. Soon the city. Soon the sunset. I took out riders barely crawling, as if their bodies had finally given up. I hunted them all down.

  I was expecting a hurricane, a tornado of sweat and limb to catch me and tear me up. But there was only the soothing chime of my chain against the growing crowds shouting. Eventually, though, I turned. Harry was 60 yards back, a serene silhouette pouring down Vivian Street like the sun did behind him. In the last invisible mile he came alongside, his cap discarded, his hair the only exclamation and he was at pace.

  We burst at the gates of Pukekura Park, sweat, thighs and cries, and entered the dense surround of green. Two thousand in the terraces and we raced. He was suddenly 10, 15 yards ahead. I doubled over to make a shell to thwart the wind and hide me from the winter ills, though it was summer and it was I who made the wind.

  He was inelegant when he walked, a vulture stumbling about a corpse, but on his bike he flowed, a river long and smooth. I dug my thighs into the pedals and forced my lungs to the edge of breathing. My heart and veins fought. I thought of broken things, the things that had cracked through time and landed their sharp pieces on my life. I needed anger to break the limit my legs placed on progress. My body built to a scream. I shouted. The throng shouted back, their daydreams beginning to unfold.

  Harry must have heard my noise but still he didn’t stand on his pedals, and still he maintained that pace. My body raged and hustle came into my blood, ligaments stretched and barely held the muscle to bone. I watched his back wheel come towards me, I went
outwards and felt my wheels spinning as the pain was overcome, the knowledge that I had him, that I was passing him with 30 yards to go. I felt him stand on his wheels beside me and give one last push, but it was too late. I took him by half a bike length and suddenly the whole length of the race was counted; in an instant I was no longer racing. I had raced and a story was made of it.

  My lungs punched out.

  Of course I hadn’t won, Harry had won. I was merely a man in front. Time is what mattered. He had beaten me by half an hour and we sat together after the race in a rotunda. We didn’t speak, only breathed like horses kneeling at the trough, ragged but for the desire to drink. But I felt a calm in him, a sense that neither placing mattered, it was the way we had crossed the line that gave strength to the fact of our duel. If he had a complication in his personality it was a set of understandings that allowed him to think beyond his time to the instant of the finish. It was how one finished, he seemed to be saying.

  ‘Two exclamation marks,’ he said. He told me to come south where we could ride again. And a week later, maybe more, I took the boat across and down the coast. He met me at the harbour and from the Port of Lyttelton we cycled through the old volcano hills to Christchurch. I met his wife and his two sisters. I stayed with them as we both prepared to do battle once more. A slow rivalry that, from then on, always saw me behind.

  We sit on the track watching all the men mill. I see men, I see women open their mouths and shout for the winners still on the podium. Sailors merge with the girls and I make a guess as to their conversations. Sailors are everywhere as once soldiers were. They move in circles of striped sleeves and short trousers. They seem unfit for the land, uncomfortable and diffident. I watch as the sweet wine washes on their mouths and down their shirt fronts. The crowd stammers as the officials move off the makeshift stage and the riders cast weary grins to teammates and to each other. In the morning we will ride again, but I don’t think of that. Instead I find myself thinking of Harry’s wife as he writes to her of our day. Back home she is so pregnant we get shy when her name is mentioned.