The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  I asked him as we drove towards home who he was fighting. He didn’t say a word. Truth: he hadn’t said a word in the time since he’d arrived from Scotland. Barely a word. The talk would come later. At that point I assumed he didn’t know who he was hitting, just as he didn’t know what words he could state. I think this as wheels bang against my own, as handlebars bruise my hips, and I see no faces. I wonder if it is easier to fight when you don’t know who surrounds you. Blackness and the edges of darkness. Silence there and the willingness to hit out at whatever comes near; the honesty of silence and how it bridges everything, lives everywhere there aren’t words. My brother before he learnt to speak again with blood on his face, swinging. Violence a remedy against the stillness of solitude. I discover it is near morning when the puncture comes, many pass and I am alone.

  It is the unstated hour of dawn when I squat beside a brook with tools in my hands and speak with an elderly farmer and his son, who have arrived with the faint sun. That bright globe broke out of the shackle of the mountains and filled the valley with a silver pink. They came from the field adjacent to watch me correct my tyre and offer water from a gourd he carries over his shoulder and the light from his lantern. It tastes sweet, as sweet as water can taste without an additive of honey or juice squeezed from a fruit. He speaks through his son. The man, my age at a guess, though I am wary of comparison, explains that he works in Toulouse as a teacher. His English is stuttered but that seems not to matter. I glance at his left hand; the skin is folded over several times and where I expect to see fingers there is only a red twist of scar. I gather, then, that he is more likely my brother’s age than mine. The old man speaks quickly, knowing the lack of time I have to offer as I undo the bolts holding my wheel to the frame and remove the tube from around my shoulder. His son translates rapidly and thoughtfully. I’m asked where I am from. I tell him. ‘Nouvelle-Zélande.’

  The farmer confers with his son. They speak, one with his head down, the other looking up at the sky. There is a softness, as if they speak what is under their skin. They swap their gaze, one up, one down. The farmer stammers out a word several times until I understand. He is asking if I am Ernie. There isn’t time for corrections so I smile and hold the name a moment. ‘Ernie Bainbridge, that is right,’ I say.

  ‘The priest!’ the old farmer says.

  ‘That’s right!’ I say. Though how one might confuse Harry and Ernie, I can’t say.

  The old man puts out both his hands and I briefly offer him mine to shake and he holds it, his skin improbably rough. He talks to his son as I work.

  ‘When the first race came here,’ the son says, ‘my father had never saw a bicycle, he had never hear a bicycle. He poor. His mother did no speak French, you know? And when my grandpapa died she want to leave this valley and he was almost forced out to beg. She wanted to travel to her family in the north.’

  I look at the farmer. ‘What language did his mother speak, then?’

  The young man coughs out a rough noise. He tells me he doesn’t know. Then the farmer speaks, an atavistic rattle from his mouth, talking to his son who looks down at me nodding. I dig my tyre irons into the space between the rubber and the wooden rim where I lever them apart, that old air smell of rust and water. Eventually the son says, ‘My father. He want to know. He want,’ the young man says, ‘he want to know if you come here before.’

  ‘To these mountains?’

  ‘No. No, to France. You were made to fight? This is what he ask.’

  ‘Did I come here during the war?’

  ‘Yes. He want to ask you.’

  I put down the tyre irons and wipe my hands and stand and cough to clear my throat. ‘I was too young.’ I indicate something small by placing one hand above the other, pushing them closer as if compacting the air into a balloon. I put out my bottom lip and shake my head. ‘Too small,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ the son says. He speaks more with his father and I go back on my knees and begin laying the tube on the tape protecting the rubber from the ends of the spokes where they met the rim. The young man taps my shoulder. ‘He also want know if you saw north. Hell of North. You know Hell of the North?’

  ‘Sorry? Did I ride there?’ I look at him waiting on something. I shake my head.

  He shakes his head. ‘He say you here before. You here and you fought.’

  Sweat becomes cold on my face and in my clothes. I can feel my blood start to slow. Seconds make their presence known as water comes down the creek by which we stand. Apart from the gases we breathe, it sometimes seems everything in this world is in a race to the sea. I look around, to make sure no one who knows better is listening. ‘I was here,’ I say. ‘I flew RE8s.’ I make my arms into the shape of an aircraft’s wings and push air through my lips so they flutter and fart. ‘Aeroplanes in the north. Flew in the north. I flew RE8s. Rubbish aircraft, really. Slow, poor manoeuvrability.’

  ‘And you live through,’ the young man says.

  I laugh. ‘Well, I did. I fell out of the sky, eventually. But I got through. Crashed near the sea. That was my war.’

  ‘But you live. I happy to hear. I first spoke English with Australians, men at front. They taught me to say, “My helmet, my head.” The rest come easy for me. I learn the rest off sisters at monastery. Then I teach.’

  ‘You do well enough.’ I cough on the cool air. I’m telling my brother’s story. Seems simple enough. My brother, he was as poor as I at the exchange of languages. He crashed into a dune on the wrong side of the line. We are amongst pasture lining a valley deep within mountains which loom and offer little resistance to the slight but overbearing fear that sometimes stuns logic when the path seems to offer no route out. Fear has a phantom’s face. Fear operates by its own rules, as though it is just and reasonable. ‘I lived,’ I say. ‘Well enough to ride again. But I have never flown again.’

  The old man is speaking once more as I struggle with the tube. He puts his hand on his son’s shoulder and they both laugh. I notice for the first time they are holding hands. The young man’s hands bigger and wider than his father’s. With his free hand the farmer points upwards but I don’t follow his gesture. I put the wheel back into place and loosely tighten the nuts.

  ‘My father, he say,’ the young man says, ‘he once saw flying machine. He call it flying machine. He once thought he saw aeroplane. He, up on the ridge,’ he says, and he points with his stump to where his father pointed moments earlier. I have to look over my shoulder. There I see a col where two ridges come together some thousands of feet above where the sun glints off the rocks. ‘He thought he saw an aeroplane. This is what he say, he say he found two dead goat up on ridge and was angry and sad and sat trying to think what to do and he saw it.’

  ‘Dead goats? That sounds, what? That sounds ominous.’

  ‘Yes. They bloody, gored. Fresh. This what he say in his story. He might carry back down the mountain but they too heavy and wasn’t leaving hill for week. He repairing fences which had fallen to the winter. He wonder about the weather and look up. Up high near sun, he saw shape, a heavy shape like cross and he steady himself. He think he seeing an aeroplane. Flying machine. He listen for engine and hear nothing. He not know what aeroplane might sound like but he think because it was in the sky the noise of its engine just flew away. He didn’t know because he had never seen one. Perhaps sound rose softly away. Mmm: steam. Smoke. That what he thought. He jump and he wave to machine, hoping to catch the attention of flyer. Then machine seem to turn and slowly fall, it started – err. Like a boat collapses?’

  I nod for him as I make a final adjustment of my wheel so it is lined up straight. ‘List?’

  ‘List, okay. Good. List. Good,’ he says. ‘And my father, he watch and the speed of thing got faster and faster until it must have been screaming but it not, it just fall towards him and so he ran and ran to pile of stones and there he hid expecting a great explosion but there was nothing and he looked and saw what he saw all time. Eagle two metres over t
he ground.’

  ‘An eagle?’ I say. I laugh and pull the canister of compressed air from my bag. ‘There are eagles?’

  ‘And you know, he sat, my father, and watched this eagle, something he has seen many times before. But the idea, the idea of the aeroplane, such a strong thing to think, but he watched this eagle as it stood beside two dead goat on guard. It was size of a hog, he like to say. And then came the foxes, and then came the cats, the lynx. You know them?’

  ‘And then after two days. After two days those goats were picked clean,’ I say, finishing his story. ‘Talons like clawed fists.’

  ‘Yes. That right. You know story?’ They are still holding hands, the young man’s fingers wrapped about his father’s, the other hand gesticulating at his side, ghost fingers somewhere saying something.

  I affix the nozzle to the valve and smile back at him. I release the air and in seconds the tyre is full once more, and hard enough to support my weight. I tighten the bolts one last time. I wave as I push off and begin my descent towards the floor of the valley from which I see the first big climb ahead under the new sun. I will catch my team by rising quickly, that is my plan. But before that I will crash and crash again and I will search the sky for shapes, and for clues as to what those shapes might be. I look back and wish I’d said what I think now, that I have in my head now: all stories are rhythm, and all rhythms return.

  We come down the zigzag below Portet d’Aspet. I push ahead through the village as it follows the curve of the valley in pursuit of faster men, Opperman amongst them. A boy stands looking at me, a boy standing on the track, the way lit by candles, more candles, but this time in the hands of children cuddled in their parents’ wind shadows. The boy stands calm and expectant, as if for a rider who isn’t me, nor anyone else I have seen on the path. I imagine my face is without inspiration or heroism. It is sagging, banging as I run over the ruts.

  The village is set on a curve and I run through as if chased by something violent and heavy. And I am, the entire peloton sits on my heels. But it isn’t them I imagine, rather it’s a creature with black wings diving from the roof of the sky. I’d thanked the farmer for his story, thanked him for the water and his time. But all his tale offered me was this: black wings and the black air to fly upon. Heavy air, fear in its folds. It was his question in the main, and not the question itself, but the repetition of the question. And now what? What response comes? How close are we to being another, to being ourselves? I feel no guilt for stealing his story. A bout of alert words had stretched out from inside, touched things I shouldn’t touch. Being someone, anyone, it seems, is merely a habit we don’t wish to halt. In moments like these I suspect skin is the only real thing we know. I feel a need to tell someone afresh this idea. If my cousin makes an approach, I shall admit my sin and these thoughts and wait for her to tell me how mad I have become. As if that will resolve everything.

  The light slowly becomes more apparent, surrounds reveal themselves to be green, an uplifted forest. Above us trees hang their limbs and drag their leaves across the path. My cheeks are grazed as branches burst and cut against my face. I jostle with riders I don’t know the name of. I shove and hug low into the hairpins. I pull the brakes and slow my legs then sprint out again like a Belgian on a short course race up in Wallonia. The villages come and I hit their cobblestones on my own, 100 metres to the riders in front and 50 to those behind. I am alone in the valley that I believe takes us to Saint-Girons. No one approaches and the leaders do not slow. I flash glances behind, always expecting Louvière to follow and get in my shadow.

  I am angling south-east to the last of the mountains. My team somewhere on the track ahead or behind. I can’t tell. I shout out in the middle of a valley where mountains converge. I yell Harry’s name. I shout it many times, and Hubert’s, and Ernie’s, and Percy’s. I shout my own as those hills close in around me and I have a sudden thought that I am no longer in France. That the mountains are no longer of France but of Catalonia. I am in Spain. Though I know, according to the map I have a habit to memorise before the stages begin, I am not to leave these borders. I have a fright that I’ve missed a turn. I slow and speed up. I find a group of riders. They try to speak to me but I have nothing to say back. We ride together in a deep valley until we turn to face the mountains, winding up the massif through switchbacks and hard mud.

  One by one the riders fall away. I pass men on the side of the path, faces exchanged for crumpled paper. The sun’s breaking the sky open and the heat is rising out of the earth. I recognise one of the teammates of the Spanish youth I’d met in Cherbourg sitting with his bidon open above his head and streaming down his face. For a moment I fear I am following that lad, that the Spaniard has disappeared into the hills to make his way home. I call out to the lone rider. ‘Bonjour,’ I say. I have no idea what country he is from, where he rides out of. Everyone uses French, even if they know no proper words. The man’s face is ruined by an open mouth and a dozen black teeth. All the muscles stretched, a pain somewhere deep deafening all else so nothing gets through but this grimace.

  And my God, if I don’t come to the realisation that something is peculiar about my ride. In my attitude, my demeanour, I’m not sure. But it is this: I somehow find the agony acceptable. It’s as though it rides beside me and I see it and ignore its demand that I kiss its hand. I don’t go near. And it is agony, it is nothing else. My face would paint its picture, I am sure. The utter rude elementary pain that runs from toes to legs to lungs. Lungs shaped like hard flat river stones. Pain that runs the whole circuit of your body, an agony harder than iron and deeper than love. Deeper than love. I’ll never kiss anything whose eyes I can’t see.

  I reach the col and pause to drink and flip my back wheel to the highest gear. Two men run at me. They come carrying newspapers. I say, ‘What?’ They lift my shirt and place the papers against my skin.

  ‘Contre le froid. Le froid,’ one says. Then they run towards the sun and slip away. I call my thanks and search below amongst the riders climbing slowly towards me. I see not one I recognise. No one whom I could ride on with and talk with. I hope that the Spanish lad might show, that we could ride together. I have seen him ride previously. He was tough, one expression for the road. It seemed he would make good company in the stead of my friends. I climb back on my ride, I’m reminded to think of the farmer who shared his water, who shared his story through his son and I think of those two goats on the ridge, their eyes picked clean away by the hard beak of the eagle, curved like its own talons whose sharp puncture the animal’s flank each time it moves to step. I think how unruly this land is, these mountains and the rude rules we attempt to make as we describe it with our ride and our demand for better roads, for roads at least.

  I think how much a memory is like the eagle swooping in my mind, hunting for carrion amongst the cracks in the massif to keep it alive so it might at some moment swoop on hardier prey and claim meat from the bone. It is always hungry, always looking to be made full. I look up for the bird and imagine what it might do to a lone rider, how it might aid in his escape from this torture. My, how you hide in your own thoughts when the day seems unending. I realise that memories are never quite finished with you because again I think of that day in August ten years ago which nearly ended with my brother throwing bad punches at the air but didn’t and instead finished at a dance with him in a heap and Katherine looking on. But the memory’s not for their sake recalled, rather it’s for my sister and something she said with her arm in mine against the cold.

  I played my school game that morning. Then I stood and watched on the sidelines as the remains of our club’s senior team were beaten in a match organised to raise funds. A thousand of us in the crowd. My Marya and Thomas stood beside me unmoving. Every weekend of peacetime winter I went to watch that team play. Its ranks obliterated by the war but I still believed, each week, each Saturday, that the moment would come and the grit and pain and rain for each one of us in the hundreds shouting from the sidelines w
ould somehow evaporate, that blood would be stolen from our veins and be suddenly replaced by a kind of gold. The grunt and grind, the heave, the placement of the ball over a line. How it amounted to such a thing I didn’t know, but we believed that that moment would come and all those rain-soaked days of tribulation would pass. All things would be erased from memory, forgotten. We put our hearts in the hands of young men, ageless giants. Thomas walked with me about the field in the rain. We stood at Hawera’s dead-ball line with time nearly up. Our team were behind by two when a bomb went astray. The ball hung in the air, its shadow shot across the earth against the low sun. Our fullback caught it on his 25-yard line and started to run. Thomas muttered something in his gumboots. I didn’t hear him, I said, ‘What, Tom?’ He replied, but again it was inaudible. All around us men were mumbling.

  Marya was holding my hand. She slipped so often I was always in the process of pulling her up. She kicked my knee. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He said,’ she said, ‘“Just kick it. For fuck’s sake, just kick it.”’

  ‘Don’t use that word,’ I said and went on my tiptoes to see over the players. The fullback got it to a winger who went around his man and hit the 10-yard line.

  ‘That’s what he said.’ She was 14 with something about her that wished to be a young woman. Childhood clothes had given way to hand-me-downs from our other sister. Her hair was somehow different, though perhaps it was the angles of her face changing. But more than this her voice had changed, not in timbre, but rather within its timbre. Was it girlish that she wanted to hold my hand? I hope not, I hope she always felt love, an uncomplicated love.