Now, I watch the castle come near.
I try to imagine the men who built it, those who took the stone in carts and those who lifted and swung it into position using extraordinary cranes made from pinewood and rope. A remarkable edifice, one that seems older than the mathematics that hold it in place. The castle’s donjon, 100 feet high, projects out of the ramparts, almost beckoning an enemy from the surrounding woodlands to upset its balance and topple it into the river. We walk onward to where a moat and drawbridge divides the interior from the world beyond the ramparts, a stronghold against both outsiders and townspeople disturbed by rumour and plague. Harry walks with his left hand in his pocket, the other rubbing his fingers together in an indication of thought. He and Opperman both seem half-hearted about their placing and walk at a pace that suggests bickering minds. We walk on for some minutes in the sun that pours bright upon the surrounds. Oppy stops before the donjon. Harry trots ahead to search for a way into the tower. He is heavy on his feet, proving a rider shouldn’t run. Opperman squints at the strange sight of Harry jogging towards the donjon as if he were that lone soldier destined to infiltrate by trick of deed the hard stone of the Duke’s redoubt.
Hubert starts talking about Melbourne, the months and the lead-up to this, all this. Opperman is 23, four years my junior, but often it seems youth is merely something his body enjoys. The preparations, the communications and letters and how the strange fact of our participation slowly became truth. He tells me he had seen a list of names Ravat had organised to ride with our team. Jean-Luc Maron was one, he says, so was François Louvière. Only a couple of days ago we found out we weren’t going to get our other riders. Opperman and Bruce Small attempted to get us transferred into the JB Louvet Company, but nothing transpired there.
‘This whole thing –’
‘It’s like playing footy, fifteen against five,’ I say.
‘That’s it,’ he says.
I look at him and know he is disappointed, not just having had his time beaten, but by something else. With the race being run as a time trial many of the subtleties of road racing have been lost. The complexity of racing as a pack, the chess play of feints and attacks proper, of defence and fake drama and true fatality. All this is replaced by guesswork, brute force and numbers on your side. We are few and any tactics we might hold up our sleeve are useless when racing against ourselves. 46 have left the race already, but we remain. I say this.
He nods and scowls, a face of lines marking out a sadness born, quite possibly, back in Melbourne in the still moments of a hot night when all about you doubts hang heavy like the bats we saw in the trees at the oasis springs of Egypt and Alexandria. I think for a moment he is likely to shout. But he just puts that face in his hands and lets a lot of air out through his fingers. I offer him the bottle when he shows his eyes again. He shakes his head. I take a long drink and feel the depth of the burn. He looks at me. ‘You’re used to it? The booze?’ he asks, nodding at the bottle.
I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say.
He laughs and takes the bottle from me and reads the label. ‘Do you know what it’s like,’ he asks, ‘when you believe you’ve been told something that will change your life. And it slowly becomes apparent over time this fact has changed. That no one believed that you – the one whom it would affect the most – would be concerned?’ He hands me back the bottle. ‘Do you ever get that sense that things are not true at all. That others take it for granted that what they tell you is a fabrication and only a fabrication to protect themselves from attack until after it matters?’
‘Of course.’
He nods. ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘And it’s eighteen players. Eighteen in a footy team. Eighteen against five.’
I rough up his hair as Percy and Bainbridge come back around with Harry. Three riders whose shapes look embarrassingly lean against the stone of the keep, their hard thighs and absent calves. Three riders who don’t have a chance.
7
I puncture twice within 10 minutes of Brest. At the second rupture I throw my bike on the side of the road and kick at it, pull the tubes from my shoulders and get the wheel off. I had been within sight of the broken conical roof of Tour de la Motte Tanguy and was watching it come near as metal pierced the tyre and ruined the inner tube. I yell at children who close in and they run shouting. I’ve lost time already and sit for a moment cursing, a sacrifice of base words. I soon realise I know something about the tower. I have never seen an image before, but have fashioned it in my head. I sit with the wheel between my legs and the tyre irons between the wood of the rim and the rubber and recall this: from the tower one can see over the port and down the Penfold River to the harbour. It was once the seat of justice for the lords of Le Châtel, once in the keep of the French royal family. My cousin Alice somehow knew these things, and now, as I observe the edifice, so do I. And I know this much as it is the stage-end where I am due to meet her. Alice Sévellec of Margate. A cousin whose face I have never seen, or at least never identified – though in my mind she looks almost precisely like my Marya. Compact and light, a set of smiles she saves for the times I make her humour twitch.
There was once a photograph sent from England of her family beside a river where willows draped their branches to the water. Out of the fifteen pictured, eight were young women. I remain ignorant of her looks, her demeanour, her voice. Though I know well the tone of her hand. For years she had given to me many hours reading, describing in her letters the cities of Europe, the towns and villages she travelled through from a young age. Her family journey regular summers in the south, west, east or indeed the centre of the continent. She wrote long explications of their travels in the kind of longhand that swept the page like sails running on a breeze. I wrote back, a hurried excitement. After a number of years her letters began to change, they became more personal and eventually were addressed to just myself, though I still read them to my family in the lounge and they laughed and commented on the luck of that side of the family. I left out the parts where she responded to my questions, the independent queries I had of her life up here in the north. In December of ’27, when it was confirmed that I would be the fifth member of the team, I wrote to her and expressed my surprise and delight. In Paris I received a missive thirty pages long filled with encyclopedic entries describing the towns through which we now ride. She appeared to have had knowledge of the route before I did, a description of the towns, the highlights, the food, the best hotels. Indeed, she had described this odd tower, fallen into disrepair, almost leaning on old memories of how it once was.
Though I’m due to meet her in the evening, I lose the hurry to right my ruined tyre. For much of the ride from Dinan I was anticipating my arrival at the café on rue de Siam; it is there I am to meet her, it is there I am due to lay eyes on her and know her face for the first time. Seven hours ago we were the last to leave that little town and I found myself deep in undulating countryside with my teammates. There we found a rhythm and tracked down the teams who’d set forth before us. We sat on their tails for an hour and then Harry led the way out, he paced us across the countryside. It flashed, it blurred. Green and blue. Tall trees and farm gates and the sun in my eyes, all this only made the ride more serene as tears made rivers in the dusted sweat that clung on to my face. Even another crash into a sudden hedge could not dull the ride. All a beautiful postcard to return to the family, a beautiful thought to hand over to my cousin when I finally saw her. Eventually we spread out, Percy and Ernie dropping off as the three of us reached for extra speed. Then this, a disappointment to match yesterday’s ill-timed crash. I pause here taking in the outskirts to the city, the ruined hump of a tower, the way things survive centuries to become artefacts and proof of an idea we have of the past: history and all its failings.
I lean into the embankment as Ernie rides by. He nods an old man’s nod. Though he is less than 40, there’s an age to him I can’t touch. I left him behind some two hours ago. Now I spit on the road and watch it juice in the
dust. Ernie, whose speed is failing, whose legs aren’t what they once were. The veteran of France and of the road, though none of us knows, with the exception of perhaps Percy Osborne, where he served. They might have discussed this return of sorts sometime in the past, or even on the boat on the way over. Possibly when we sat poised in the Suez awaiting Alexandria and the mouth to the Mediterranean. I have no idea where he served, what front or what company. I also have no clear idea if he knows our proximity to the sites of his service. At the end of our days he rides at the back where he has long hours to himself; I imagine him gauging his place on this continent by a centre once forged in fields far north 10, 11, 12 years ago. I see him ride smoothly on and think that in these two months together we have rarely spoken.
A car slows to watch me and I don’t look up, I don’t want to connect eyes with any other soul. Annoyance is making my spirit foul. And, as if to damn myself with my own arrogant will, I’d looked forward to riding into the velodrome where thousands would stand and applaud and scream as the three of us hit the track and put on a sprint. I’ve thought for months how Alice would be there amongst them and how she’d see the shine on my head, my concentration, the deliberate power and easy manoeuvre. Instead, I will ride in alone.
I wipe the blood from the graze on my shin across my cheek and set off. I am a Red Indian.
As I walk towards our meeting place I wonder what she saw when I finally came into the velodrome. I had been able to catch Ernie, once I had got my tyre back on. He was struggling to get his bike about the turns and tight streets. We shouted as I went past. When the velodrome rose in front of me I felt the grip of my abdomen squeeze at my stomach. All the organs on the inside clenched. I took a group of four as I bounced into the stadium. Two more in the home stretch. I bellowed, saliva fell from my mouth and hung off my chin as I grimaced almost dying for the crowd. The triumph was corporeal, thick. The stuff you breathe through a pipe and feel deep within. And they screamed out, the crowd, they yelled as they do time and again.
Harry and Opperman finished seven minutes in front of me, the amount of time I had lost to bad luck and children’s pranks. I found the two of them. Their faces were blurs. My legs were shaking. Harry said something. Even when he is happy he looks serious. I heard a group yelling, ‘Oppy!’ They’d come in close to the leaders, places 12 and 13. They were within 10 minutes of Alcyon. Harry shook his head and he poured two bidons of water over my crown. I was on my knees. I only heard sounds. I didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed. Things were black. It’d all come back, I remember thinking. Opperman poured his water down the back of my neck. I looked up at Harry though he had no outline. ‘Wait till the mountains,’ he said.
Bodies walking around like meat too hard for the oven, too hard to make taste. The outline of genitals clear for all to see in our tight shorts.
I laugh as I walk, ducking into small alleys. I look up at the names of these streets and wonder how long these places have had names, how long they have existed. On and on. I walk, I walk. I lose north, I lose east and south and west. I give up and head for a main street. I step past a cart of vegetables that appear to have been abandoned. It is from this kind of predicament I might be rescued if I am indeed lost, Bruce Small – Hubert’s mentor from Melbourne – jogging about the streets making enquiries. The man does an incredible job. The job Ravat are supposed to do but don’t. Some nights he is up until the morning making provisions for the next day, correcting our bicycles, repairing any relations undone by poor translation on my or anyone’s part.
I fear I am late for my cousin and break into a trot as clouds shut out the light. I watch them briefly gauging wind shift and direction, recalling the breeze that came off the Atlantic an hour or so earlier and hope for bearings. All they seem to do is expand over the sun. I recall how Alice once described a sky-borne thing she and her sisters saw coming across the countryside on their way to London during the war: an airship imitating a cloud. It was summer in the south, the sun ripe as Europe plundered its men. She wrote of a young aeronaut at the rear manning a set of large guns, that he waved as the gargantuan thing flew on by as if a cloud and things of the sky were controlled by a man wearing a jacket festooned with bright brass buttons.
Soon I find a group of people but notice how I veer away as they turn to look at me. I am obvious, a rider out of uniform, which is surely another uniform itself. I feel the proximity of language, of words forming about myself, my presence audible in their voices. It’s an odd loneliness, your name amongst words you can’t say.
I sit outside away from the other riders who have found this eatery and made it their resting spot for the evening. They drink and shout. I hope not to be recognised. I hope the girl who wants to take my order does not, despite her charms and simple beauty, return until I am acquainted with my cousin. I fear, in this immediate moment, that I will stumble in the attention my strange accent attracts, for I am not British, and I make this clear. No, it seems I am something quite foreign.
I enjoy the fact the tablecloth is chequered red and white.
I have seen pictures of scenes such as this. They were black and white but I knew the colour was red.
The waitress flashes me looks. Eventually she brings me a wine bottle full of water. She lingers as she pours the liquid into the tall glass. Her perfume is blue and there is a hint of her own smell and I want to touch her hand, to taste her fingers. But all this I put aside as I feel Alice watching me. Feel that she is near and this is perhaps some test. For half an hour I wait, then an hour. Time echoes time. It seems my paranoia is just that and she is not in the vicinity and never was.
I think about my brother, or I think about how I think about my brother each time I sit at such a table in such a street, how I assume he has been here before me. It is an assumption guided by long hours of imagining, of seeing his face in the crowds and not feeling startled, but rather somehow relieved. In my youth I imagined him in such places, that angry face and his lack of recognisable words. I imagined how women knew he was a flyer and remembered how jealous I was that I wasn’t, that I wasn’t a flyer and never would be, despite the speed I managed on the rather poor cycle I owned as an adolescent. Jealousy is a poor motivator, it’s a motivator that only leads to harm. Though oddly, I believe the only harm he caused me was not born from such a thing, but another, stranger, but no less violent contagion: the stories he told and the infection they spread.
I watch a woman wearing a yellow scarf jog across the road to a blue car. She puts her head into the window and talks to its occupants. It takes a few seconds for me to realise it is her, the woman from the hotel. The movement of a body is a fascination hard to ignore when you slow it down and start to imagine bones and muscle. I think to call out but the waitress comes back. She starts to speak but soon stops. A look of confusion and regret crosses her face. I know, suddenly, that she knows I am a mute, and possibly dumb with it. She points at a wine glass on another table and I nod and smile and nod again.
‘Have you seen a young woman?’ I ask. I realise I am indicating towards her. She jabs at her solar plexus and raises her brow. ‘Yes, yes,’ I say. ‘But no. Erm. La femme est plus âgée que vous.’
She angles her head at me, picks up a wine bottle and pretends to swallow its contents.
‘Drink?’
‘Mmm,’ she says. She totters as if truly full of alcohol and grins for me.
‘Certainly,’I say and laugh. I look away thinking what to say, then look back but her attention is taken by the arrival of François Louvière. Bodies seem to shift as the rider walks through. The ripple effect of fame and the illusions of rapport that cling to it.
‘Louvière,’ she says and smiles more. She points at me. ‘Mmm, Ernie Bainbridge,’ she says, and she raises her impressively even eyebrow so I see the smooth of her pale skin rumble below her hairline.
‘Huh?’ I laugh.
‘Le Tour,’ she says and points at me as I had earlier at her. ‘Monsieur Bainbridge.’
I grin. She touches her mouth, puts her head to the side. I reach for her hip. She moves her hand up my forearm. Then, the sound. We hear it coming across the court. Patrons scamper inside where drunk men stand and stare from the tall windows: the rain. I stand under a sun umbrella watching and the girl hops back into the café. I’m there for 20 minutes before I decide I must get wet. I step into the rain. It does not stop.
Before I return to my rooms I look about for the woman, but I see her nowhere and notice the car she ran to has gone also. Washed away in the rain. At our hotel I go to the bikes and remove my back wheel and chain. I take them up the stairs into the room I share with Harry. He has his wheel on the floor, a cog in his hand and a set of tools on the small table.
‘Did you have a nice evening?’ Harry asks.
‘No,’ I say. I am dripping on the floor. I tell him how I got lost and was late to the café. I tell him how I sat admiring the waitress. I tell him about Louvière’s entrance and he laughs. We are getting used to the stars, the way they alter the gravity of any given situation and drag eyes in their wake.
‘But she wasn’t there?’
‘Sadly not.’
‘How long since you last had communication?’
It’s six weeks since I last heard from her, but instead of saying this I lie. ‘Five days before the race. I received a postcard. I showed you. You saw it.’
Harry shrugs. ‘Possibly.’ He wipes his hands on a cloth. ‘I see everyone’s postcards. Everyone gets a postcard and everyone shows it around. Have you noticed?’
‘I’d never shared a postcard before I got here.’
‘It’s something they do. They share the scents of their girlfriends.’
‘Habit from the war?’ I ask.
‘They share the scents of their girlfriends. They share postcards.’
‘Perfumes?’
‘Some Belgian put a photo of his girlfriend under my nose yesterday,’ Harry says. ‘It had writing on the back. It smelt of rose water.’ He laughs or sighs, I’m not sure which, and looks out the window.
The Invisible Mile Page 5