The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘Hey,’ I say. They stay still, as if my voice is empty, as if something outside of thought. I look hard; I try to see their eyes; I want to know why they are staring so intently at me. I look to the woman who appears to still be sleeping. Beyond her I can see at least a dozen more men and I choke on the phlegm in the back of my throat. I push her shoulder and try to rouse her.

  She touches my hand, takes my fingers in her own and whispers. ‘You see them?’

  ‘What do they want?’

  She says, almost inaudibly: ‘I can never quite decide.’

  ‘What?’ The purple crinkles and lets pink shine onto the land and it becomes clear that there aren’t a mere dozen surrounding us, but hundreds. ‘Good God,’ I hear myself whispering. They move slowly as the light comes, closer. Shadows leaning towards us. I cough again. Nothing moves. Nothing is moving, only my heart and eyes. My head and hands are still. So many hundreds. How quickly my heart is racing. I am fit, but it never runs this fast. They seem an army at least. I turn back to the farmer and see his shape is not that of a farmer but a hooded man.

  ‘I wonder, sometimes,’ she says so quietly her breath is barely breaking.

  ‘What –’ I start and realise what I am about to say. Or, what it is I am seeing. I feel a red shame in my cheeks. Stones. Standing stones. Everywhere I look, rows upon rows of stones, each neatly lined up equidistant from the other, grey rock standing staring into the sudden reign of the new day.

  ‘You see them now, don’t you? You see.’

  I nod and whisper, ‘What are they?’

  ‘Stones. Menhirs. You amazed? Be amazed. I wonder sometimes,’ she says, ‘whether they are permanent or just visiting.’

  ‘God. My heart. Put your hand here.’ She touches my chest and keeps her hand there. ‘What are they –’

  ‘They are, they’re anything, really. No one knows. Not to guess at least. I imagine they are stand-ins,’ she says. ‘For who, I can’t be sure. I come here and look. They’ve been waiting five thousand years, more. Just waiting for us to come and look.’

  ‘Five thousand? How many?’ I ask. ‘How far do they go?’ and I point back behind us where the lines reach a low ridge and it seems they go on and on. I stare, gawk. Ancient stone, silent; always ever silent. I look for eyes in their form, I look for mouths, but most of all I listen for sound.

  ‘So,’ she says. Her eyes are wide also, large eyes whose globes seem twin planets in orbit of her thoughts.

  ‘So,’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ she says, and I see her smiling. ‘This is something, no?’

  I’m nodding like an idiot and I realise my mouth is open and that the word ‘gape’ has precedence, it’s not just a word in fiction. And I realise, too, why we are here. She has brought me to another kind of church, another cathedral, but in the open for all to see. Standing stones, inscrutable and ancient. Ancient and dead but for the moss that has spread over their faces. A strange congregation, like stand-ins for those who couldn’t wait out time.

  ‘I know they are mute, but –’ she says. She murmurs to herself for a moment. She takes my elbow in her hand. ‘I expect them to have mouths, to make them move.’

  ‘You got an idea about what they’d say?’

  She shrugs. ‘Mmm. Now you can laugh. Now you can find me funny. But let’s –’

  I step out of the car in time with the woman and walk amongst them. I step slowly, making as little noise as possible. Even so, a fox is startled from its sleep at the foot of the first stone. My first fox. I look and see a sweetness in its eye. Its brush is red. I feel an ease with the animal. It is what I had always believed it to be from books and tales. The woman takes my arm again. ‘Those things bite,’ she says. ‘So–’ And she grimaces. I walk and touch what I’d believed to be faces. I put my arm about the stones like old friends, lost and now returned. I laugh and look at the woman and she follows me. We amble about the exact lines standing in a precise array. Hundreds, thousands, and thousands of years old. Measured in what numbers – form, standard and length? It’s the result of this order, the manner of their arrangement, their harmonious arrangement, the gaps, the distance between each weighted rock, that has me think they must speak, they must say something.

  ‘All I can think,’ the woman tells me, ‘is a great violence happened here. That’s all I can think. Markers? Look at them. Memorials? Do you think? Some, some great thing. I walk, and –’

  ‘Stand-ins. You said stand-ins,’ I say. ‘Stand-ins for what?’

  ‘I do not know,’ she says. ‘But sometimes I wonder, I wonder if at some point they became the actual thing. They no longer had a past and became the real thing. Look at them.’

  I stand. I look. Hard stone, their shadows in the grass where the fox hurries through.

  9

  Each day we ride. Each day the experience begins to mould on the road: 110, 120 kilometres pass, the four of us stay with Hubert Opperman. We stay linked in the run south towards the mountains, a five-man chain fastened by the slipstream that starts at my front wheel pushing through the air and over my head bent forward into the breeze. Harry sits behind, a foot to the left off my rear wheel in the displaced air, Osborne in the same approximate position, and then Bainbridge, then Oppy. I peel from the head of our strange snake and let Harry go forward. Eventually Ernie will drop off, then Percy, then Harry and myself. Opperman will ride alone, the sole signifier of the urge to break away. Such is the pattern; he will ride alone.

  For now we are a chain.

  Then others join the chain, two groups from the lesser teams. The road is straight for many miles and flanked by plane trees marking the borders of farms to our left and right. We ride as if on a dreamt river towards a never-nearing hillock out of which these trees ride up and over; from the centre of the road they appear to border a canal through the farmland. I think of the people who take such things, shepherding their barges to the cities and towns, never settling, a life on thin strips of water. I imagine a life as such for us, that we may never leave the road, just take its purpose to its towns and there share what we have from the saddlebags of our bikes. Meagre lives on meagre land.

  Our feet are cooled by fords. The raw skin blanched.

  At each low hillock I expect another army of stones to be waiting, their impossible stare. An unnamed woman standing amongst them. Their glare demanding we stop and watch their motionless jaunt across time. But I have yet to see them again, nor the woman. Instead everywhere we go we are greeted with kind words and kisses. Percy and I make jokes, Harry too. Oppy has his smile, a gift for everyone. Children come up to us with shy smiles, holding their mothers’ skirts and saying incomprehensible things. Harry and Oppy seem to understand and chat with the mothers, offer nods and courteous words. Crowds cheer when we wave from our bike seats, sometimes they are ten men deep, but mostly it is the countryside and green fields. Green fields and green fields and it seems I am thwarted each time I search for their presence, a disappointment which prompts me to search all the more for the long shadows, the staring stones watching us ride.

  Another thing I search for. And I can’t help it, and nor – as I discovered – can Harry. Though we are hundreds of miles south of the front, we search for signs of trench and battlement. When the sun gets behind the lip of a hill and the grass turns black and the fences and gates silhouette against a reddening sky, then they turn into broken men and their machines. Now, to add to this, I also search for stone men staring out of the past, looking for men to set them free. That’s what I imagine.

  And what Harry says – Harry claims France is just another kind of Holy Land. He said this to me in Dinan as we admired the surrounds. We laughed and he went on in the kind of voice that knows the weight of its own mirth. But he might’ve been right.

  We watch and search and we are watched. We’re watched from windows and awnings, we’re watched from verandas and balconies, we’re watched from gaps in the hedgerows, from the steeples by bellringers and their pets, we’re watch
ed from the sky when small planes loop in from the blue, we’re watched from balloons, we’re watched from cars paused at the side of the road, their drivers in purple scarves and goggles, we’re watched from school gates where 500 children shout names hoping for faces to turn, we’re watched by police and clergy, teachers and butchers and carpenters and masons and thieves and rapists and killers and heroes of the war, amputees and the blind holding handfuls of flowers at their chests, we’re watched from the edge of the road. We’re watched by all. So we ride and make our song.

  And it seems quite barmy. ‘I’m going mad by the sun,’ I hear Percy say one night. ‘Shit in the air. I’ll tell you I’ve got inner visions marking me out for the mad house.’

  ‘Come on,’ Ernie says.

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘I’ll tell you about mad people,’ Ernie says.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘You’re gunna say something?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  So we ride, and each day we start 10 minutes ahead of JB Louvet, each day they catch us. We are made fools by their strength. These days are long, longer than I know how to ride, longer than Percy and Ernie’s bodies can deal with, longer than Harry’s sick body will let him. Opperman drags us into the countryside. Disappointment is rich and though he says nothing I understand he longs to be a part of the French tide of racers who pour down these roads. I see him talking to Bruce Small. They don’t share their words for they are made of frustrations.

  We are sponsored in this race by fools. Ravat and their idiot ideas, or lack of them.

  So many miles for such disappointment.

  Then, as if the sail cracks and awakes him, Hubert sets off with only 40 kilometres between our formation and the velodrome at Les Sables d’Olonne. He takes the front, I go with him. Harry goes. Osborne goes. Bainbridge has done his day’s work and retreats to the rear. Slowly Oppy leaves us behind and for two hours I ride alone.

  And a word, a word on being alone, on the loneliness. A pit, a hole, a place to which we fall when no one is around to see how wretched we have become. These are my brother’s words; I have no fear in telling that. From Egypt, from Cairo where the army had him in its hospital waiting on his recovery so he might join the rest at Gallipoli, in the Dardanelles where men clung to the hillsides like burnt rope with ships just a few miles out to sea in the Mediterranean wash magnificent and sullen, Thomas wrote to me. He’d had to look up the Dardanelles in the atlas when he was well enough to venture out beyond the confines of the hospital. Not I: a stone’s throw from Troy, I knew its place beyond the Bosporus and the strange site of Constantinople on the crack between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. A crack between the worlds as we have defined them. Despite what I knew and what he didn’t, he had reason to know loneliness. He had months in hospital waiting on a queer illness that had neither name nor fever, waiting on limbs that were broken then repaired. Months walking in the streets and bazaars once a recovery was upon him, walking amongst the Islamic and descendants of men who built pyramids and stone armies to stand guard over the city. He walked until the English took pity on him and put him to the air. He wrote and now I ride again over the land of his eventual education, if I may call it that. That was loneliness.

  I kissed both her cheeks when we departed, that woman and I. Now I expect her at every turn, the woman standing there ready to listen.

  We ride. I note that direction is hard to determine. We look to the peripheries. We look within: I touch my thigh and remind myself of the muscles operating, the mechanics of limb and bone, the hard twitch as they undulate and turn, as they produce wattage and heat. Energy transferred from bread and water and wine to blood, speed and words as we shout out. We see riders stop at the sight of an orange grove where they jump from their saddles and gorge themselves momentarily. We yell at them and they hear nothing. We see a rider brake at the sight of a girl and pause to pull her close, hand about her waist. We shout. We see riders stop at the sight of a church and run inside to find the silent solitude to replace that of the road, the strange noise we all make as we go forth. We see men stop to piss in the hedges. We see men crying. We see their knees wrecked and torn, their bikes twisted. We leave them, we don’t stop. This race, it goes on. A sentence unwinding in the hills.

  10

  Les Sables d’Olonne, France. Bordeaux, France.

  I murmur the word to myself, France.

  Hills like teeth. People in their midst.

  I remove my goggles, pale circles where the grey and sun hasn’t got to my eyes. At night we lie in salted baths. Some pour vinegar into the water and claim it soothes their muscles. Dirt and dung gets everywhere. Infection finds places to hide and bloom. At night Harry shows me his back. Boils have taken hold.

  11

  My body is still, I ride from the hips. Handlebars bang off the men beside me. Hips and wheels collide. I am still. I am in the sunset, the breeze that runs from its heart. I’m just rhythm and the world has no sound but the chains wrapped about our gearing.

  My eyes shut and I drift.

  I hear the close voice of each man’s breath. The mind’s eye makes their mouths. The life of their mouths, their jaws’ clatter: men who say such things as the names of their children; who say such words as the rivers that mark their towns; who say the shape of smoke is a sign of things to come; who say the things to come can’t be trusted because these are the sorts of things men say. I keep the light out of my eyes until I sense I’m falling, slipping from the road. I open them to see a mass of yellow nodding heads: sunflowers just outside of an unnamed town like a soft sea on the surface of the sun. Nodding heads like the cawing crowds that line the streets, that yell at us and summon us forward, nodding like they know something that we can’t possibly know.

  I ride beside Harry, but it is for Opperman that we keep the pace taut.

  In Bordeaux they shout, ‘Long live the Australians!’ We keep the pace taut.

  Bodies beside me. Blood and power. I close my eyes and drift onwards. For a moment I’m out of the race. I depart this odd exodus and float in a short, manmade darkness.

  I open them again, I always open them again and I ride, the ether-soaked kerchief fastened about my chin and over my nose. Vapour running through my sinuses, nausea thick in my body.

  You hear them from a kilometre out, the populations of four villages congregating in a hamlet. They have gathered at a street corner chosen by an urge to come and see, to scream us onwards. We near and feel the ache in our limbs dissipate; the shouting burrows into our spines and makes us grand machines. We flow, we are the blood in one another’s veins. The shout of a single face. A desire for our speed, for the rapid turn of our wheels rotating quicker and ever faster. They scream for everyone. A boy jumps and jumps again as we come close. Those around him jump. A woman throws flowers in our path and she jumps so her scarf falls from her head and black and grey hair descends her shoulders. There is a single noise arising out of the racket. A chant, a sound. Mesmerised, as if touched by a virus, I become a shell and all around me falls quiet.

  Cameramen stand on verandas and watch our pass. I suspect them to be the same two individuals in each town. Men with a curious eye for our ride; who knows what they see? I don’t believe, after all the mud, after all the rain and heat and salt and hunger, my image will stick to the nitrate that winds through the cameraman’s apparatus. Why should it? Why would my image last in prosperity? I see no reason for it to last. The crowd knows our names, that is surely enough. They call to us as we try to make the evening ours.

  I begin by dragging the front of the pack forward until we are strung out along the flats, prayer beads in the rough dust heat, my silhouette daring the rest to follow. Opperman sits in my slipstream and I pull him headlong into the evening. He lets go and peels off as planned. The crowds shout us forward, a screaming mass of Frenchmen running at our side. Australians too, men with flags. He will ride until the wind screams at his ears and the day wil
l be crimson as it completes its hours with him standing on the podium, a blue-eyed specimen of old martyrdoms re-enacted each day in the waning dusk.

  Such was the idea.

  There seemed a conspiracy amongst the teams on this last day before the mountains. That there would be no big fight for time, that bodies were to be rested. Teams rode sedately, easy against the weight of expectation. So I took the lead as the pack lazed. We headed out and flung Opperman forward like a stone from the mitt of a slingshot, just as Harry had suggested. No one expected us to rush, and only panic halted our victory. That and the fact we are five versus ten, the unmerciful team of Alcyon–Dunlop, the unstoppable Alcyon–Dunlop. Frantz of Luxembourg, André Leducq of France, Maurice De Waele of Belgium. They’re all champions in one way or another. The fuckers.

  We rode hard, in tune; we have for the last three days. Opperman saying slogans, that we were a true team riding. The fight was keen, graphic. We pushed. Jammed out of the scramble of riders and faced the wind only leaders can feel. For 60 miles we led and breathed. Five fingers in a fist punching through the plains. Alcyon’s general manager put his car alongside and watched our pace. We did not divert our eyes, just rode at the road and on and harder until he relayed our pace to his team. Alcyon put all ten men into the task of chasing us, dragging us back behind their time. Opperman came 9th, Harry 10th, Ernie 20th. As a team we were 3rd. And if not for being knocked from their machines by a motorcyclist veering out of the road they might have won the stage. It was close. Small minutes the time it took to check their bones.