The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  I longed to be amongst them. Instead, I was vomiting in the roses on the outskirts of Hendaye. The woman on her haunches asking if I was all right. At least I assume that is what she was asking, she spoke all in French, whispering my name in goggles tinted to keep out bright light. She held me up as I coughed and wiped my mouth and face. She looked at me closely then stepped to her car and quickly returned. She had colour in her face, something I hadn’t noticed in the cool of the cathedral and the dawn amongst the standing stones. I flashed a look over her shoulder as she squatted and her knees inside her trousers clicked in unison. I hoped again for the strange stones, that congregation. Instead I saw the arrival of François Louvière to the town. I realised he must have been behind me the entire stage, I was used to seeing him overtake us in the late of the afternoon as he chased Frantz. Today he was struggling in the heat. He slowed as he came near, watching me as I drank from the bottle the woman held to my mouth as I took down the pills. He spoke, but the words were just the words of a cyclist fading as his wheels took him past. The woman looked up and took those goggles from her face, she squinted an eye. Soon I was finishing with the stragglers, a burning sensation in the back of my mouth. She knows my name, I know her face.

  I search for her in the café. We’ve come here to have a single drink. A celebration of the day’s small victory. A man with a clipboard is talking seriously to a number of the Alcyon team and I manage a smile to the racers. Despite still feeling sick from ether, my heart is racing. Ephedrine, that’s the word she used and it’s in a race of its own. I take a seat and feel the flicker of candlelight on my face. They nod and one winks and I sense they are happily impressed with our effort. I see the eyes of Louvière flash across the room. He does not see me but I hide my face in the crook of my elbow anyway to keep it that way, pretending I have a cough. Why I think the woman would be here, I do not know. It’s a night of emptying out and nerves.

  Five men I recognise as soloists sit and salute one another with wine. I ask a local man what they are saying. He shakes his head and says, ‘Démissionner.’ His bottom lip is out. ‘Erm,’ he sounds, ‘quitter.’ One of his eyes stays still as he looks around. A dead eye.

  I nod and he nods back vigorously. I take it the men are leaving the race. I reach for his shoulder as he walks away so I might ask something more. So I might ask him why. But I know why. I know what the day after tomorrow’s rest day brings, or at least I believe I do. He steps out of reach and I’m alone as I wait for my boys to return from the stalls out on the street.

  Tomorrow is a rest day if one looks at the schedule, however we are due to begin the next stage at midnight: at the fall of the first minute of the next day. The threat of this is with everyone. When Harry returns, he is alone. He tells me he is going to the hotel with the others. I turn and see Ernie wave from the door. He is bandaged and smiling, the motorcyclist having made a mess of his arms. I inform him I am staying. I’m shouting to have myself heard. ‘He’s all right?’ I say, nodding to where Ernie just disappeared.

  ‘He’ll do, he’s fine,’ Harry says. ‘But I need sleep.’

  ‘You can sleep at any time,’ I say. He smiles and turns. He leaves by the front door and I am alone for a moment. I stand still waiting for something, someone. The air is thick with the things of men: their smell and the smell of wine, smoke, shouts and small crimes as liberties are taken on the waitress’s behind. She slaps at hands and cringes and moves quickly.

  ‘Hola.’ It is the young Spaniard from Discuter. I eye him and he smiles. I hear myself say, ‘I’m amazed anyone sleeps, if you consider it.’

  ‘Si?’ he says and steps back as he comes forward.

  ‘You close your eyes,’ I say. ‘It happens, dust settling; it’s like that. Birds coming in to roost. Amazing.’

  ‘You close your eyes, and what is it?’

  ‘That’s my question,’ I say. ‘What actually happens?’

  ‘I – I have no –’ the lad stammers.

  ‘But something happens. Something always happens.’

  ‘Sleep?’ the boy says.

  ‘That’s right,’ I say. I look at him, he has a kind face, young and unhurt. ‘How are you, my señor?’

  ‘Mmm. Tired. I am tired and broken,’ he says.

  ‘Tired and broken?’

  ‘Si.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you again,’ I say.

  ‘Mmm, yes.’ He raises his eyebrows. Barely five-foot-something but with a set of moustaches that flow down past his chin. I like him very much for this. We stand smiling at each other.

  ‘I fear I’m going to lose it,’ I say and feel my brow tighten. ‘I sit around asking myself where it is, so I know how to look for it if it disappears. Sleep, I’m talking about sleep.’

  ‘Like breathing.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘I don’t know where it is,’ the Spaniard says. He’s looking past me. ‘Excusas, I’m going to bed. I’m going to have a big sleep. Something my old people, they would’ve sung songs to. Ha!’

  I laugh and take his hand. ‘Sounds terrifying,’ I say.

  ‘Sleep?’

  I nod. I look around. He kisses my cheek and is gone. I smile into his wake. All around – young men and the old: somehow this race takes us all.

  Earlier we walked past churches and stood beside the cross at Saint Vincent’s. Hubert had sought that site out, telling us it was supposed to portend the imminent end of the world. A purifying fire to engulf us all. We stood, watched and waited before we moved on. For hundreds of years the cross has stood by that church quietly inert, but its prediction written on the stone has remained quick, waiting. We walked beside the sea and watched the breakers smash on the sand. We walked amongst palms, old and disconcerting. We ate bread, cheese and tomatoes in a café looking across the estuary. At each one of these way stations I had hoped to see her, hoped the lines we walked somehow connected the two of us to a meeting point. I had hoped she would be able to explain to me the stones, as much as anything. In Bordeaux I had asked anyone who looked like they might speak English; I asked if they knew what it was I had seen that night. Nobody seemed to have anything to offer. I thought of telling the team, of admitting to Hubert that I had been out an entire night, driving in the countryside with a woman whose name I couldn’t confess. There seemed no good reason to excuse my behaviour, for that is how I suspect my absence in the night would be interpreted, behaviour. And not something appreciated. Instead, I walked the town and stared up at the buildings and wondered what they knew. Everything attached to age seems to know something. But then at times I look at the world and realise I quite fear the tissue that links things, the connective tissue. I fear the stuff it is made of, I fear how it explains itself when we put together words. And perhaps that’s why I desired to see her, that she might speak English once more and tell me some truth about those old rocks staring across the fields in such colossal dedication. How she might have done that I’m not sure. I hoped too that she’d then offer me an antidote to the drug I had ingested just a few hours earlier: I wanted confirmation of my inner eye. I also wanted to be able to sleep.

  I use the toilet stall and begin to leave. I am halted by my name. It is Louvière.

  ‘Kiwi,’ he says across the room. ‘Nouvelle Zélande.’ His voice is neither deep nor resonant, but it cuts through the conversations and reaches my ears in a way that I know it is him. I have the choice not to turn, not to look him in the eye, but I do. I find myself walking, eyes flashing from candle to candle, towards him. I didn’t know until this moment that the odd temporal sense I have of the Algerian is, in fact, fear. I had previously taken it to be admiration.

  ‘I hear you, err,’ he says and indicates to his mouth and points at his tongue. He nods to the vacant seat beside him.

  ‘Vomited. Yes. Not so unusual,’ I say.

  ‘You might have had,’ he looks at the ceiling waiting on the word, ‘erm. Victory.’

  ‘I never win,’ I say.

  He
laughs and nods. ‘Your team, I mean your team. Yes? Ravat. Third is good for five. For five of you racing. It’s good, no?’

  ‘Yes, no.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘Second is good. But as I say, I never win.’

  ‘Domestique,’ he says. I nod, though I hadn’t thought of myself as such, but supposed I was, that he was right. A word which if either of my parents were to hear would cause upset and pointing. The son of a doctor and a town councillor does not belong on the road hunting miles and rough agony. He certainly should not be doing it for the glory of another. Despite this I nod. For that is what I am. I am Opperman’s domestique, though it has never been said, and I am happy to be that way. I stand there for a while and he says nothing more, he is drinking water and I nod and he pours one for me also. I sit. ‘Some say they le moine,’ he says. ‘Some, domestiques. I: le moine.’

  ‘Le moine?’

  ‘Slow, like. Erm, concentrated,’ he says. ‘How do you say? Frier?’

  ‘Oh. Friar. A monk.’

  He nods. Pauses and looks concerned for a moment and I suspect he is working through a sentence he has never said before, in English or French. ‘They not real thing. Though – though without le moine, the race would be –’ and he looks up and puts out his hands. ‘They. True devote.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Happy sacrifice.’ He shakes his head. ‘Not really. I not really know. I never one.’ We both laugh, though in truth it doesn’t somehow feel consensual. As if I have been dragged into the joke without quite knowing its full purpose.

  ‘Your leg? How’s your leg?’ I ask.

  ‘My leg? It is fit,’ he says. ‘You did good job.’

  ‘I haven’t seen you on the road.’

  ‘I pass you in your sleep.’

  ‘You’re a brave man,’ I say, ‘to approach me in my sleep.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I pass you as you dream.’

  I give off a laugh, put my hands through my hair and look at him.

  ‘You dream?’ he asks. ‘Of her? Celia.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her name – Celia. You want. Want ask me her name.’

  I laugh. ‘Ah,’ I say. ‘That’s her name?’

  ‘Yes, and you dream of her. Am I right?’ He pulls a pipe from his pocket.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Until now I haven’t thought such a thing but now it is true. I have dreamed of her. I look at him and feel myself play the part of a man asking a name, the name of a woman who’s recalled in my memory only by a wide thin mouth and eyes that meet at her nose from slightly different angles. It is all I can think of for the moments that go by. Louvière seems to understand what rushes through my mind, for he looks at me with an eyebrow raised. He has strong eyebrows and they rise up as he packs the bowl and puts a flame to the tobacco, seemingly knowing the precise nature of the word I was looking for. Sex. Or if not that word, another that speaks to it.

  ‘Who is she?’ I ask.

  ‘Those men are quitting,’ he says and nods to the touristes-routiers. Five men chatting to the Discuter team.

  ‘Not unreasonable,’ I say.

  ‘I do not,’ he starts and stops. ‘I do not think. I detester. Erm, the idea. Hate.’

  I look at him and wait for more. I’m not certain what he means. I assume he wishes to say he despises the idea of these men quitting. I approach my response with this as its kindling. ‘Of course. We all do, don’t we? At least, so do I,’ I say. ‘But it’s not unreasonable.’ It had never been an option until I saw these men celebrating their demise. I couldn’t name the specific frustration I felt looking at them so I look back at the Algerian.

  He raises his eyebrows. ‘My old team,’ he says, and nods at the men from the young Spaniard’s team.

  ‘Discuter?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he says. ‘Now run by – what? Bad quality men. Old team.’

  ‘You quit two years ago. I know that much.’

  ‘Men with hard attitude. Don’t go near them. After war, I ride with them. No more. Now, no more.’

  I squint at him.

  ‘Old story,’ he says. ‘People know my story. If they have read a newspaper. Bad attitude men. Six-foot-four of them. Ready with sticks. I ride on my own. You know my story.’

  ‘She’s a friend?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t answer for her. Not something I do.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She is from nearby I grew up. Not France.’

  ‘North Africa? When did you come to France?’

  ‘Mmhm. We buried my father when he die. Sail to Corsica, to Nice. The first time I see France. Sunrise. City red. Boomed, it almost –’ and he puts two hands up in front of me and shakes them ‘– it shook.’

  ‘It is one of the cities –’ I say, waiting for something. Something, and I realise I believe there is something he is going to tell me. Or I wait on what it is I am going to say because I realise fame has the power to extract something from me. I feel like a sentence spelt long ago, that its shape resides inside me but has yet to be traced and made extant.

  ‘I hope you make it,’ he says.

  ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘No. There is little choice.’ He blows smoke out from beside the pipe resting between his teeth. ‘You have a brother?’

  I nod and Louvière leans forward, his face wrinkled by the flicker of a candle’s wandering. I pause but he squints and I take it as a signal to continue on. ‘He went to the front in ’17,’ I say. ‘He flew. Quite something. I ride. In New Zealand my name is known in circles, nationally, though I am no star. But my brother – he flew, and that’s got to be something.’

  ‘He died? Most brothers seem to die.’

  ‘No. But he did get taken out.’

  ‘He was shot down?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He nods. ‘My brothers – they’re all gone. We need something to drink.’ He stands and gestures to the man at the bar. ‘I saw flyers go down,’ he says. ‘I saw the ways men could die. Out of nowhere they would come screaming. Battles so high above you weren’t aware it was happening.’

  ‘How could you not be aware?’

  ‘There is a lot of noise. Men would suddenly stop moving. One moment talking or walking and next, they fall to ground.’

  Again I sense I know the moment he is arriving at, that it is a part of me I am yet to speak.

  ‘The earth shattered and limbs and stomachs and lungs were thrown about. You heard those coming. God and Mary. Noise everywhere. Whistles. Din and blare. It’s black and thick and it is full of holes. He survive?’

  ‘He survived.’

  ‘I was lucky enough,’ he says and coughs and hacks. ‘I’m from Bagnères-de-Luchon, now I’m from Bagnères-de-Luchon. Wasn’t always from there. The mountains teach you how to ride. You’ll find out about that tomorrow. If the skies are clear you get to see them all. Every last star and they sing, they have song all to themselves. I returned there after war, everything was a surprise.’

  I watch him for long time, waiting for something else.

  He nods.

  ‘I look for it everywhere,’ I say.

  ‘This is the south. Nothing happened here.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I hunt it out. I look for it everywhere.’

  ‘You hunt out what? Wait. Wait for the north. I was in Wallonia when it started. Cruel. Go there if you want to remember cruel things.’ He looks composed, waiting. I have the sense that I am supposed to leave all of a sudden, that my time with the man is up. I am readying myself. But he says: ‘I remember boys falling, like struck by sleep. But you don’t remember, no one remember. Every day. Every day. There’s no memory, just, erm. Just experience. Experience. Experience because it is always, always happening; it hasn’t ever stopped. And to say it, to make imitate of it; that is a cruel violence in itself. How was your brother?’

  ‘My brother coming home?’

  ‘What of him?’

  ‘He took over the house. He walked the house. Stal
ked it. Walked the halls. Silent vigils. We couldn’t escape him. He was everywhere. Silent. Wanting nothing of us. Except from our sister. I remember how he and my sister walked the rooms of the house.’

  ‘Her name?’

  ‘She is a sleepwalker. They would follow each other about the house.’

  ‘Her name?’

  I say nothing for a moment. I’m not sure how true to his definition of memory and experience I have been here. I fear I don’t want to argue against it, just as one doesn’t argue against a man’s definition of God. When there is no science, there is nothing but the whim of personality. ‘Marya,’ I say finally. ‘That’s her name. I think about it often enough. I think my mother liked the virgin birth, but not quite enough to go the whole way. The whole solemn nature of the ordeal. Such an occasion, imagine it.’

  A smile starts in the small places of his face and rises up so it is in his eyes. This is something that makes my blood warm, though its source isn’t such a true statement; my sister’s oddly exotic name is as much a mistake as a gift. My father gave her name as Mary to the registrar, I am told he paused between the giving of the first and the second. He said, ‘and – Annette. Mary Annette.’ Thinking he was saying Maryanne, the registrar placed an ‘a’ to the rear of the ‘y’ and lifted her pen and waited until something was forgotten and it was the fact of the ‘a’. The intruding article wasn’t noticed until days after my baby sister was brought home and Thomas made attempts to read the document, left in the top drawer of the bureau in the dining room. He saw the word Marya and read it as such. So did the family gather around and ponder. And so did the name stay pinned to her, much like the brooch handed down and glinting in such a way to set off her dark blue eyes with the light of generations; it took no leave. So my brother gave her the name. And he blamed me years later for taking it away from her. When that Model T hit the fence and was torn apart, he said in the after that I had broken her. But that wasn’t ever quite true, never quite able to be made truth.