5
As we hit the low hills of Collines de Normandie any conversation is halted. Opperman signals to me, his great ears sticking out, and I take the front. With my head down I force a pace upwards. I stand and feel the four men behind me hold the imaginary rope that hangs from the small of my back and I take each of us forward into the slope.
These hills, hillocks really, are nothing in comparison to the visions we anticipate. Things that will define the race, end it in some ways. But they must be ridden at hard. In moments, distracted moments, I look up and scan the southern sky for hints of what is to come. The insanity of such a gesture doesn’t escape me but I look nonetheless, trying to span the 700 kilometres with my eyes, eyes that believe they can penetrate the dust in the atmosphere, and defeat the curve of the earth. If there is a farce about me it is that I am a man whose actions seek cracks in science. For this reason, my sister once said, it is best that I am hidden from view.
It was O’Shea who taught me about hills and their importance. He taught me this amongst many things, but this most of all – air pressure: it is why we force the pace when we climb. In the open all ride at close to the same speed, kept there by the force of the air in our faces. To make any significant distance on the flat means a superhuman effort. Though, believe me, I am seeing superhumans. The Algerian, for one, has collided with our pack and ridden off without us several times. He is a monster, but the time he gains is small compared to that which the mountain climbers will make. A mile’s gain in the Pyrénées or the Alps is 10 miles on the flat. This is the rumour I spread.
I remember him as tall, O’Shea, but in reality he is short, small like Opperman. What is it about pocket-men that makes them fit to fire themselves across the land like cannon shot?
I take us up, pull us through gravity’s yank. Our breathing is heavy though not so much it weighs us down. On the plateau we look out beyond the farmland to a brief lake of mist over fields where the sun has yet to make itself welcome. Harry takes my place and I drift back to rest a small amount and the pace is quickened. Opperman rides in front of me, telling me to take it easy. The unison of our pedalling is hypnotising and the wake of another’s shape moving through the air is something.
We begin a descent, my legs being pulled by the cranks, and this is the closest one gets to coasting in these gears we have chosen for the day. The conversation stops, as it does often for long periods. I sense concentration, that something is happening. Percy heads to the front and pushes. We follow as our small pack ducks into the coming valley. The sun falls away and the cool is at us. We are near sprinting as we fall. The chronic beauty of speed while time is forgotten as if drunk long ago. My colleagues form into a snake.
I become a hollow in the wind as it rushes over Percy’s hunched frame, over Bainbridge, over Harry, over Oppy, and I am like sound racing to your ears. This is why we do this. I’ll speak for the others because I believe it is true. Speed doesn’t need kilometres, it doesn’t need time, it only needs the will to take it faster.
A hum in my ears as we fall. A ring, and then they pop.
Percy grunts in the rush. ‘I’ve a dog,’ Percy is saying to Ernie.
‘What’s its name?’
‘I haven’t given it a name. Not yet, anyway.’
‘Good-looking dog? I like a handsome dog,’ Ernie says. ‘A dog with a good set of knackers. You know a joker’s got pedigree behind it, with a good set of knackers.’
Percy says, ‘Uh huh, he’s no ugly brute. Pig dog.’
‘Pig dog.’
‘What kinda dog takes on a pig?’ Hubert Opperman says.
‘The lad’s a city boy,’ Percy says, turning our leader into a subject for slight derision. ‘Any dog with eyes wider than there is to see. That’s your pig dog.’
‘Whatcha gunna call him,’ Ernie says.
‘I haven’t got a name.’
‘Pig dog, huh,’ Ernie sighs.
‘He’ll get amongst it,’ Percy says.
‘What about them other kind?’ Ernie says. ‘Them other pigs? Get amongst them?’
‘Uh huh,’ Percy says. ‘Damned snitcher.’
‘The two-legged kind.’
‘Those boys in black cars,’ Percy confirms to himself.
‘The two-legged kind in black cars with a siren. Bumbling down St Kilda.’
‘Hope not. Need them to keep the shearers off my sister. Dog only bites so hard.’
And the boys are laughing. Though they speak this way, it is not always their mode of conversation and I can’t say whether it is this or the more formal garb they occasionally dress their sentences in which belongs to them most utterly; one is the mimicked voice and one is their own. ‘He’ll muck them up,’ Ernie says and I think for a moment how some men are actors and some just act. Whatever the case for the next 10, 15 minutes I’m thinking about an imaginary doe-eyed killer of a pig dog resting his head on Percy’s lap out at his parents’ farm, a snarl for the approach of a cruising police officer, the lift of a lip and a sudden bark. I list in my thinking and daydream, imagining the bite of these teeth, the sinking and settling of salivating tooth into muscle.
I daydream out of day into night. A habit and it seems I have had it forever. I listen to these men and their talk and I drift into a world of daydreams. I drift and inhabit the world and all its stories. I let them all down with my witless fumbling. I say words never spoken, become a thief of friends, family and more famous ones. I become the prince of unlikely persuasions. It seems to me that I know too little, that there have been large amounts of time I afforded to other things, to daydreams and more. Large farcical amounts of time, amounts of time that were slow and eager. Time that might have contained better actions, reading, watching, seeing. Readings that contain the history of things, of revolution, of war; the last war and the future of war. Centuries of it sitting in libraries as I rode my cycle about the town hunting out visions of women I’d seen sometime, somewhere earlier, and had to spy again. The cut of a dress, the flow of hair, the hint of rose in the skin, the sound of stockings against cotton, the way a glance is taken – all of these I had to see repeated. I reduced all humanity, women and men, to these simple things. I rode over and again to street corners believing this action would produce the vision once more. Sadness lingers in each longing you take with you. Jenny Fisher, her friend, Janice Adamson. How could I not love them when they grinned at the curve I made in the road, arcing around corners just to see them again? Sharon Fuller, Deirdre Learner, Katherine Frier. What is it about the shapes bone and muscle make under skin? Why does it reduce me to the grand-king-waster-of-time? Hanker and want; for such things we could go to war, but we are always told it is something else. We were told it was another largely abstract kind of love: The King. The Country. Those marvellous ideas whose scope I have barely considered.
I ride the plains and search out eyes and mouths. I whisper my strange English towards the eyes and mouths of faces I can’t know the names of. That is where time has gone; vanished into the eyes of women I gaze at with such solemn hankering. So much history wasted on faces and the hunt for their names and their smile. I try for new thoughts to replace the time I have wasted. Thoughts bold and grand. And during this exercise I find these thoughts have a landlord, every emotion seems to belong to another. The effect is I don’t have to feel so involved in the certainty I fear; that time is the one fundamental that is true without physics to prop it up. In fact, it doesn’t even need numbers, it just happens.
See me glide past the small shelter as we climb once more where two young women in aprons are stalled waiting with a boy for us to pass, waiting so they might cross back to the other side of the road where a farm gate is open and a set of goats are threatening to walk right through. I take my hands from the handlebars and raise the wide white peak of my hat and smile. Percy does something similar though he is behind me and I don’t see what it is he offers. It is something, though, as I hear the women speak. They sound like birds waking in the dawn.
I chuckle and I hear stern Ernie do the same. Percy is as married as the other boys, but he can’t but look. I heard him one evening talk with Mavys back in Paris, admitting his sins. Young Mrs Mavys Opperman, who had come with her husband this far, was quiet and shaking her head, perhaps at wonder as to why he would feel the need to admit to such shallow misdeeds. But I understand it. As soon as we admit to things, a part of us disappears.
This reminds me, I should really name my bicycle.
I feel something, a person. A breathing chest full of air and heart. The sound of the chain of another, another chime, a crystalline tune running smooth. I slowly turn and catch a glimpse of the Algerian again on our tail: 10 yards back and gaining. A strange speed about him as he pushes through the air and comes alongside. He’s bald and hatless, a dark head in the sun.
‘Good day,’ I say. I assume he has no English except for a few scant words, as I do French.
‘You ride,’ he says.
‘Very good,’ I say, and tip the peak of my cap his way.
And that’s what we do.
Now, the impressions of an amateur: speed is a thing. Though its measure is ratio, all else about it is malleable; remove your hand from the bars as you drop off a hillside and feel the thickness of the air, open your mouth and chew on its rubbery substance. The sky, the hills, the trees – they become rumours, then the whole world is a blur and you’re the only stationary thing. That is speed. And here we reach for it. All, each of the five riders. I bury my forehead into the space between my hands and sprint. I say something and I ride out from the train we make and head for the apex of a distant corner, the point of which is calculated by some magic in the brain. Beyond the bend is a stream, a stand of trees, the first one there wins. It doesn’t need discussion. Louvière tears out from my shadow and comes alongside once more; he is hardly pedalling. I look down at his gearing and see a huge cog at the front of his machine turning with his cranks. I blurt a word, quickly forgotten for it did not need a language, and feel him pull away. He looks a champion steed and the bend comes and he is through it. Soon enough I am only watching his dark form reduce down in the morning light so he is merely a smear in the vanishing distance. I ride at the front for a good 20 minutes. I feel like a shadow, the wind’s shadow itself as he goes. Something powerful, and simple. I find it hard to believe I am in the same race as him. There are spectacular stories and I’m not sure I belong to any of them.
An hour passes by. Two, three. No other riders approach. Then Louvière is beside a tree. He has his tackle out and is pissing. I feel us all slow and come to a stop beside his bike. It seems we are set to join him. It is the first time I have seen him standing alone without a bicycle leaning on him or astride its wheels. He is at least six-foot-four and I finally notice this fact. His nose is long and shaped like the Matterhorn. We all flop out of our shorts and begin the long exercise of easing off four hours of tight bladder. The splash and tinkle in the grass and wood.
‘You caught me?’ Louvière says. He taps me on the shoulder.
‘Sorry?’ I blurt, not expecting this English.
‘You caught me?’ he says again.
‘You must have slowed,’ I say in a kind of stutter that comes directly out of the belief no conversation was ever likely to form between the two of us. Rumour was he worked as a metal worker in Marseille before he came to cycling. That he was deaf. That he was illiterate. I heard all sorts of things and believed them all because that’s what you do in foreign countries, you believe everything because these places, even small places are vast for the things you don’t know. Every step of the way you wish to fill the void, just to bring them down to size so you might fit them in your head. ‘Did you slow?’ I ask. Indeed, we had made no real effort to catch him, he was just found there on the side of the road. So that’s what I say next: ‘We found you.’
He grins, an unexpected expression that ranges up as he scratches the back of his neck.
‘We found you here,’ I say.
‘Okay,’ he says and nods. ‘Okay. No matter. Can you?’
‘Sorry, sir,’ I say. It’s the first time I have said sir to anyone without volition since I left university in that odd funk five years ago.
‘Take a look,’ he says. And then I realise my eyes are following his hand as it descends from his neck where the edges of his beard begin, that I can see a grimace in his features. The hand falls down his chest and over the slight convex mound of his belly to his thigh. Sticking out of the muscle is a thin splinter of stone. It’s buried deep, it bulges and seems to thicken in the muscle. His hand hovers over the pain as if feeling for the hurt, as if the pain has an aura, its own halo perhaps, that he can touch and rub, or even hold if need be. ‘Can you?’
‘You want me to pull it out?’
‘After the hill I went into a fence. Here,’ he says.
‘And this –’
‘This went in. Yes.’
‘You want me –’
‘Yes.’
I get on my hands and knees and look at the sliver of slate. It gleams, the silicon or quartz catching the sun. I touch it and feel a vibration, a lingering nerve twitch coming out from his leg.
‘Come on,’ Harry says behind me, and I realise everyone is watching.
I touch it again and this time he makes a noise. An utterance attached to the same nerve endings I’d just triggered. ‘Just pull,’ he says.
In the end there is a tiny piece of rock lying on the ground and blood on my handlebars as I ride off. Louvière is back behind us pushing that huge cog around as we make to disappear into the distance where towns and food and bandages await. Eventually all I will recall of the day is his blood, the fact of his blood and the thought of how blood becomes memory.
6
I have seen riders drinking in the minutes before the race, and some during. Taking wine when they pause at the side of the road. Red wine, cognac, various spirits I don’t recognise the names of. Brandies and liqueurs. I have smelt it on them at the cafés into which we find ourselves falling after the stage for soup, bread and coffee. I find the effects of coffee quickly debilitating and avoid it. Harry and the others cannot stop themselves, feeding on the black substance they serve in small cups. I drink wine instead and the French riders raise their glasses to me.
This is a grand adventure.
The regional teams have their local specialties. Red wine from Beaujolais, white from Alsace. Burgundy from Burgundy. I could be making this up; I enjoy symmetry, a god in the inclination of things to pattern. Whatever the case, most try to hide it: from themselves, from those around them, I’m not sure. It was a Spanish lad from the Discuter team who told me he drinks most of the day, wine in his bidon. Then he sleeps straight after the race before rising, eating and sleeping again. He’s 20, he’s a domestique and spends half the day sprinting until his lungs are jumping out of his ribs, the other half just struggling to make it to the next control. He says he rides this race and others and sends his earnings back to Catalonia to his family, his father who works in a factory and his mother who is bedridden, her back broken by a fall from a horse. He says he won’t make it back to Paris, that the Pyrénées are likely to kill him, or if not that, the Alps. I tried his cognac last night. It threatens the nostrils then lights up your eyes.
Harry finds me on the stairs of our lodging and pulls me up by the arm. He’s a strong one. Built like a fence, all wire and struts, could stop a bull if needed. I tell him that and he shakes his head down at me. I take up my satchel and walk with him to the street where Oppy is standing.
The French had started with the name a month back, Oppy. Calling out to him as we trained. If we were on the track the Olympic team would shout out to him, ‘Oppy.’ He is easy with people, quiet but with a brow that inclines you to know that you are being listened to. His eyes glisten, separate emeralds as if from far beneath terra firma, which, let me say, adds an eager depth to his demeanour. There is volume to his quietness; people wish to be near when he spe
aks, and when he rides. Harry lurks when he is beside the man, and though he has told me he enjoys his company he appears to me to exhibit an unease when they are stood at each other’s side. It could be a tall man uncertain in the presence of the small. Either way, they don’t fit in the same box.
We walk upwards towards the keep of Château de Dinan. Opperman narrates for me and Harry, or perhaps just for himself. He tells us the history of the area, the keep and the ramparts that encircle the old town, closing it off in a grey hedge of stone. I take peeks at my companions as I walk behind. There’s no reason for secrets, other than one’s shame. And I’m not sure I have such a thing, but I hide the bottle anyway.
Harry came in 7th fastest. Opperman 8th. And Percy, Percy was there too in 9th. I was number 10, 30 yards back. I’d shouted as I had in New Plymouth, but not for any feeling other than being overcome by elation as those three powered to the finish. I had caught them, to a degree, running off Louvet – who’d earlier come though us – with a sprint that was forced out of me by annoyance at a crash 60 kilometres out which tore my shin and knee so blood was everywhere, in my shoes, in my shorts. I lost two minutes picking myself out of the rocks and bending my seat and handlebars back into position. I came at the extremely picturesque finish a bloodied fool and drank with a small elation for the placing. Indeed, from Cherbourg we had set out first, in Dinan we had arrived first. And though I was 11th fastest there was a certain rapid thrill in hitting the end with the entire field behind us. More inches in the papers, our names coming from the mouths of radios. At control I’d signed my name as ‘Bit Knackered’.
So we didn’t rest. After eating a huge amount of food for dinner we sang and astounded our hosts with the lack of harmony in our voices. Then we left the hotel for a walk. Ernie and Percy absent on their own stiff-legged dawdle.
The Invisible Mile Page 4