The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘Silly words, silly lies,’ I say.

  ‘You remember getting lollies when you were a kid with the change for the cheese and tobacco for Dad, and you lied to your mother about what you did with the money? That is this race.’

  ‘In a thousand postcards.’

  ‘Eight thousand, a hundred.’

  ‘You counting?’ I ask. ‘What’s that smell?’

  He nods to the front pocket of his satchel where I see several cards poking through. He murmurs to himself, a half-laughter, a common cough at the end, as if all things are finished by a common cough.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ I ask again. The room smells of mustard as if in a sandwich with corned beef and butter.

  ‘Here,’ he says and leans over and passes a small box. ‘It’s for you.’ I look at the label, ‘Mustard Plasters’, it reads. ‘Put them on your legs,’ Harry says, ‘put them anywhere. Anywhere that hurts.’

  ‘Where’d they come from?’

  ‘No idea. Opperman was given them. He gave them to me. Told me to pass them on.’ He lifts up his shirt and displays an array of the items on his side where his liver resides under his skin. ‘They’re some kind of cure. We’ll see.’

  I say little and paste them on my calves and thighs as Harry suggests. ‘Gears?’ I ask.

  ‘Here,’ he says. He tosses me a piece of paper with ratios written in handwriting I don’t recognise. Indeed, at the top of the page the words are written in French.

  ‘Alcyon?’ I ask.

  He nods. ‘Ludo came by,’ he says and slowly twists his neck and several vertebrae click in or out of place. Ludo Feuillet, Alcyon’s manager. The man has befriended Opperman, offering advice to the rider. They lent equipment and words. ‘They know we’re nothing,’ Harry says.

  ‘Come on now,’ I say. I laugh for him, trying to stir his heart. But he says nothing more, just uses his rag on the bike, clearing away dust caught in the oil. The bike is a beautiful thing when pulled apart and its constituent parts are lined up on a table. It is so simple, each part finely machined, factory-born, lingered over by mechanics with breath that smells hairy, then sent our way. Each bike the same, a copy of the last.

  ‘Did you get the towns mixed up?’ he asks and I’m reminded we are talking about Alice. Harry has an ability to change subjects without saying anything.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ I say. I go to my tool bag and take out the items I want. Crescent, pliers and oil. We work in silence. I inspect my chain for fatigue.

  8

  We exit Brest in that still-falling rain and ride forward. We ride in pursuit through the tight dark streets. Always hungry men; our bodies feeding on muscle tissue, fat found in unsuspected places and the things that make our organs. A chain of always hungry men in the wet. I feel us looking for things to occupy ourselves. The road is a grey stretch, dust and shingle settled by the rain. Our tyres throw up a thin veil of water and spray our legs. I watch the arrival of road and road and road and road, a clay streak through endless provinces, through gangs of animals barely looking up to see us pass, through country divided by fence and hedge, beside the unending trough that separates road from farm where water collects and runs off to streams, to rivers, past hamlets where a woman watches from her door, under the shadows of great trees thick with summer leaves (how I’d hate to see this land once winter hits and they are barren, how skeletal and cruel it must be), over bridges built by what seems to be the same hand for centuries and years, under the eyes of the same officials who watch us pass again and again as their cars rumble at the side of the road waiting to take them on so they might watch us again as we aggregate the miles. Concentration, stamina, cold, trust, rain, belief, wind, endurance, pain, skin, heat, urine, blood, scabbing, stench, faith, filth, food, water, wine, blister, drug. The undoing of men is this repetition: the everyday agonies we can take; it’s the boredom that kills us off one by one.

  And I have seen them. They finish and make some protest and raise their hands above their heads saying some words and walk right on past control where poor Ernie is leaning over some poor Frenchman signing his poor signature. Then he goes to bed where he coughs and lets his body shake with the flu. The others celebrate their departure from the race raising glasses. I feel black and want to lash out. Instead I step outside and take a cigarette from a passerby and smoke it leaning on the back of a car I can’t name the make of and wait for someone to tell me not to.

  Everything an education.

  And each day I learn something new. Weather and words, names. I find myself writing mean humidity percentages on the map I am slowly drawing in my head. Toulouse, 83 percent. Montpellier, 79 percent. Dinan, 55 percent. I join the numbers with shaky lines and recall how the woman in Caen told me the Tour had given a map to the average Frenchman’s idea of this country. Before 1903, she claimed, people didn’t have a precise notion of its outline. Before the turn of the century 80 percent of Frenchmen did not speak French, so descriptions were no use either. Now, every July since that year, it is printed in the newspaper and pinned to walls and glued to windows. The regions named, the cities circled, the riders handed aliases and fantastical reputations by Henri Desgrange. Hippolyte Aucouturier: the Terrible. Ottavio Bottecchia: the Bricklayer of Friuli. Cyrille Van Hauwaert: the Lion of Flanders. Maurice Garin: the Little Chimney Sweep. Lucien Pothier: the Butcher of Sens. François Louvière: the Assassin of Algiers. As Desgrange had phrased it: ‘Those reckless and uncouth sowers of energy who are the great professional riders of the world.’ I remember that from Harry’s own memory. (And today’s 23rd placegetter: ‘the Monk’. Antonin Magne, so taciturn I am yet to hear him speak. A man to love well.)

  At 8am Brest’s temperature was 18 degrees Celsius, by midday it was 25. In Vannes it was 35. Tonight it will be 14 degrees and in five days there will be no numbers, just elevation, feet and metres, yards and the faces of Hieronymus Bosch chiselled into men. The Butcher, the Terrible, the Assassin. Whether Louvière ever killed a man is a matter for the war to tell.

  In Vannes I find myself ambling towards the cathedral. The centre of the city accented by the church. Close alleys and streets complicate and merge and narrow and open into the square where the church awaits. You walk, everything moves backward through years and days and centuries towards the mark in time when the basilica was the centre of all idea. Things are so narrow the shadow of the spire has no room to move or stretch. There’s a sense of compression, shops and goods, the calls of the keepers and their patrons becoming small and hard, everyone needs each other, everyone needs their need for the centre. I pass a shop from whose frontage, as if carved from rock, protrude the upper torsos and faces of two amused men looking down at the passersby from above. I watch them as if expecting them to change expression as I walk; I expect the sound of leering amusement. A man holds up a fish and murmurs its qualities. He watches me walk. My gait is that of a tourist and nothing more.

  I enter the basilica through a small entrance cut into the larger, 15-foot main doors, which are pink and strangely so. The entry is colossal, the arches render the intruder insignificant to the owner of the house. You are welcome, these doors gesture and suggest, but know how slight you appear before the Almighty. That is how I feel about it. Also, I feel the urge to do something stupid, something vulgar and loud. Though as soon as I step inside this urge is replaced by an urgency to be naked, to be still and recorded in some great mind as a soul unburdened by fact or cloth. It’s an unusual request my mind makes. I am as sober as a goat.

  I find myself shifting my eyes towards two young woman. This glance hopes one might reveal herself to be my kin. Since Brest I’ve watched the movements of women hoping one will step forward and announce herself as my cousin Alice. I am lonely, I admit. It is a strange lonesomeness, one that contains a proximity to things I know well, and things I cannot explain, which is at once beautiful and unkind.

  I stare upwards.

  I walk towards the main aisle that leads to the altar. The wood
of the pews rubbed smooth by 600 years of touching as each parishioner moves in to pray palming the wood and reducing it to the true shape of the common hand. Christ posed on the cross. We stand and stare, we don’t turn away. Above me the arches. I look to where the two sides meet, a vanishing point. I’m surrounded by the absolute well of human silence. I close my eyes and put my hands out as I feel the sensation of a long fall. There are no walls, only the sense that I will be caught before the foundations arrive and crush me. A promise that marks eternity. It is a silence one can’t replicate by means of architecture other than this.

  A priest joins another at the altar. They bless themselves and the air about them. Incense and Latin. Nobody is a part of the service. The two men eat and drink on their own.

  I head for the small alcove where I believe no one is sitting, nobody needs to bother the saint who resides there. I look about for signs of artefacts. The strange loot of bygone days when the holy strode the earth making gestures that soon gathered momentum and became impossible deeds, then legend, then myth. Some of my favourite things, so do not suppose I think ill of them. We must recycle stories or we would not know what for.

  Beatification.

  There are more than 3,000 saints. I heard that recently.

  A painting sits in the corner. It’s in the process of being shifted from one part of the church to another. I make this assumption because I see no space for it on the walls which are rich with the icons attached to the saint to whom it is dedicated. I sit and look close at the piece. A saint and his left eye slightly closed over, his right hand holding fire. In his left is the bible, at what page it is open I do not know. But his fingers are clenched and the pages are rippled by his grasp. He looks quite unwell, as if on the verge of something, the turning point of an illness perhaps, or at the instant of revelation. It could be anything. But I suspect he is at the end.

  The silence amplifies the smallest sound.

  There’s the sound of shoes as another enters the alcove, but I don’t look up, instead I look closer at the bible held in place by the saint. I’m hoping to understand the numbers written on the page so I might someday inspect the verse. I find myself squinting and feel a large difficult lump halting my breath. I stand and walk to the back where I feel faint. I put out my hands to steady myself and I am swung by my forward motion into a pew where my head falls into the palms of my hands. I’m not breathing. I seem to be choking and I soon realise I am crying, my body hugging itself as it softly heaves. I cough and it sounds out around the church, echoes of an unknown source as I can’t anchor this moment to anything I recall.

  A woman sits two rows in front of me. I imagine her touching her beads, running them through her fingers like a chain. I imagined the feel of them on her skin, the smooth nubs and the way they made such a soft sound. I close my eyes when I see her stand and turn towards me. It is her, the same woman from Caen but I don’t look up, not for the moment. My head between the palms of my hands. The slight echo of sandals. Her voice starts and I watch her speak.

  We drive in the dark, her at the wheel and my body snug in the small seats of her Citroën. The breeze catches. It’s cool, dry, and I wear only the cotton shirt I purchased in Colombo back in late March against the hit of air. She gives no inclination of the direction into which we drive. I sense it to be north but have no true gauge to measure against my assumption; the stars are shrouded by distant stratiform as if flour flicked there by a waitress’s finger on dark cloth. She stays silent, whether to keep me ill-informed or because she knows whatever words she might share are likely to be whipped to our wake, I can’t say. All I know is I followed her to her car; I liked the smell of her and quickly was able to imagine her naked. I said nothing as she drove us out of the city. I thought perhaps we would arrive at a small country house and once inside we would pull the curtains.

  Instead I find myself sleeping and when I awake it is still dark and the air immobile, as if tranquillised by a secret dart. The woman is sleeping, a soft murmur in her mouth. It is the first time I have had a chance to look at her without the influence of her eyes looking back at me.

  We’d spoken for an hour quietly amongst the pews. She asked about New Plymouth and I told her about my city there beneath the volcano. It’s hard not to be impressed by a city beneath such a mount; all one needs do is mention Vesuvius and suddenly you are a stout-hearted survivor. She smiled at the idea and touched my hand.

  ‘Your family?’ she asked. ‘You have a brother. You told me you had a brother.’

  ‘He’s a farmer nowadays. My dad’s a doctor.’

  ‘Wealthy?’

  ‘Not poor.’

  ‘You don’t need to ride?’ she asked. She watched me shake my head. ‘And yet you ride. Nicolas Frantz has a wealthy family. You know he used to enter races under false names so they wouldn’t find out. You should be on his team.’ Her smile was sad.

  I nodded for her. ‘I’m sorry you found me like this,’ I said. I was still sitting. My hands salty, the smell of me like a handkerchief.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘If there’s a place to weep, here it is. Look around.’

  But I didn’t have to, I knew precisely the contents of the walls. I couldn’t name the paintings, but I knew what they were saying to me. The sculptures too. Leaning rows of suffering. I felt guilty I wasn’t weeping out in sympathy, in sympathy with the general arrangement of grief that filled this place. ‘This is your church?’

  ‘I’m part of the congregation,’ she said.

  ‘This is your city? You’re from Vannes?’

  ‘Currently. I come from other places too, but today, this year, this is where I am from.’

  ‘And you come here for mass.’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Otherwise I come to mingle. You have been to France before? I understand one of you came before. One of you, during the war. I’m not being rude, I hope I am not being rude.’ She sounded as though she were commanding rather than questioning and I felt my shoulders shrug in deliberation.

  ‘I have never been to a service in a cathedral, at least not like this,’ I said.

  She looked at me, the calm of her voice settled with her wide mouth. That was an answer to a different question and she seemed patient, waiting. But I’m still thinking about it now. The question of the war. And I think about it often: this journey and the places it is likely to take us. I’m not the only one. Harry made mention of it last night. We both reminisced how we were once kids waiting to be old enough. It was just around the corner. It beckoned. That was the war, a beckoning. And Harry and I, we both realised we’d been thinking about it since we got here. We arrived in Toulon and started looking. We’d been here before, that was the sensation.

  She rubbed my arm. Her hands weren’t so much soft but firm, skin youthful and kept that way by the application of creams and ointments I couldn’t possibly name. ‘You’d want to be here on a Sunday then,’ she said. ‘What day is it? Thursday. You ride tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow, yes, for Les Sables d’Olonne.’

  ‘I will be following. I sometimes follow.’

  ‘You can give me a ride, if you like,’ I said and she laughed. ‘How many people come here on a Sunday? I’m guessing, maybe, how many? A thousand, twelve hundred, they come in and sing?’

  ‘Mmm, yes. I haven’t ever counted.’ She smiled for me, but it wasn’t one that stated anything more than restless politeness. ‘Do you explore churches? Is this something you do?’

  I didn’t answer. Instead I stood, finally, with my legs heavy and the strange taste of dry mucus in the back of my mouth. I put my hand in front of my lips, afraid of my breath. It had been a short ride, barely six hours from Brest. I had bathed before I went walking to the basilica, but I feared I still smelt. All of me. She put her hand on my shoulder, she has wide eyes, pupils surrounded completely in white. They are the kind of eyes one shies away from because if you look too long you’ll become in love with something. ‘I come to churches, yes. I like to see, watch
, listen. I’m a poor parishioner,’ I said. ‘I like it empty, or I like it full to the brim. When there are people like me around I get antsy.’

  ‘Antsy?’

  ‘I get frustrated.’

  ‘Is that why you were crying?’

  I laughed. ‘No. God, I cried.’

  ‘It’s okay. It makes you warm inside to cry.’ She had her eyebrows up as if she were suggesting something succinct and inside the moment.

  I nodded and that was all I had in the instant. If I thought why I had cried it would have set me off again, making me vulnerable to her questions, and though I had known her for a bare few minutes, I expect she would have had a great deal to say on the matter.

  ‘If I show you something, will you tell me why you were crying?’

  ‘How far do we have to go?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘I have a car.’

  And we drove.

  Now I have no idea where I am. I’ve no idea what time it is, at least not outside of this car. A car deals with time in different ways, it makes it out of miles instead of minutes. I sense something and I am reminded of the glow off the land in the Taranaki, the rise of a bruise from the volcanic plateau in the centre of the island, I know then the direction I am looking is east, the hint in an otherwise dark sky is the hump of colour slowly emerging across France. I love the coming of dawn, the impossibility of retreat, as if a thought in a crowd spreading out forever. We are parked in a field and that is all I can say.

  The surrounds slowly reveal themselves as low hills, trees on the near horizon in silhouette, thick morning skies waiting to be burnt off by the heat of the sun. The woman stirs. A weight in the air, movement perhaps. My back stiffens. I sense the volume of my breathing, as if in a silent hoar frost and the ghost of my breath hangs for all to see. Someone is watching. I look around for eyes and hands and what they might hold and threaten. I flash my head left and right. A man, I believe it to be a man, standing not five feet from where I sit. ‘Christ,’ I say and flinch, as if a fist is in the air. I feel my lungs and my heart beat. I pant. Slowly another figure appears out of the purple. ‘Hey,’ I hear myself say and retreat to the back of the seat. I watch for movement. I doubt any sound has exited my mouth, though I feel like I have been speaking. I have the idea that the woman has steered us onto the paddock of a farm, that a shotgun-ready farmer stands before us.