The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  The winger beat two, was scragged on the 25-yard line. The ball went to ground and the boys were kicking at it, the forwards rushing with the ball at their feet. ‘Dive on it,’ Thomas shouted. ‘Somebody fucken dive on it.’ A woman behind us hit him with her umbrella. He turned and scowled at her, ruining her with a look of hatred. These were the first words I’d heard him say above a mumble since he’d returned. I gave the woman a similar look, the kind of look that one hopes the recipient will understand well; that they are a fool unworthy of a tongue. The ball bouncing off feet as grown men hacked. The sound of shins clattering, knees sprigged and torn, fists bursting into the faces of other men. Elbows, ribs, kidneys. Mud and water kicked up and into our eyes. They were just feet away. Marya was standing right on the dead-ball line. The hooker from Hawera took a speculator, the ball spinning off the side of his foot backwards into the in-goal area. It came at us, at Marya. The ball still in play, the game still open. Four of our players descending on it, ready to fall on it. It bounced, rolled quickly, spinning in the wet grass. Our centre leapt and threw out his arm as Marya panicked and took a swipe at it with her foot. Oh, dear Jesus if she didn’t connect and send it to the sideline. The referee blew the whistle and ended the match and the hopes and deep wishes of all. The crowd went silent and the mud-soaked players lay in the grass staring at the place where the ball was moments before. The instant before my sweet sister kicked it out of reach and out of the game.

  We went back to the car. I started the engine, turning the crank, and got inside. We sat in silence. ‘It was going to hit me,’ she said. ‘It was going to hit me so I, what? I kicked it.’

  ‘You little shitter,’ Thomas said.

  ‘Steady on,’ I said.

  ‘You stinking little – you little bitch.’

  ‘Thomas,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marya said. Her face was breaking. ‘I just –’

  ‘What kind of little cunt are you?’ Thomas said.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. Thomas spat and his saliva splattered against the windscreen. He thrust his forearm across my neck, pinning me to the seat, his elbow at my Adam’s apple. I flung my head back trying to get out, but I was pinned.

  ‘You shut up. You shut up and listen to what I got to say. You little fucks. You listen to what I’ve got to say.’

  Marya shouted out something crude. She leant forward and bit on Thomas’s tricep. Teeth in muscle. He grunted and his arm came off my throat. Whether he’d felt me choking or not, I don’t know but I breathed great armfuls of air as he put his face into his hands. He was panting hard. Sweat was pouring out of him, dripping from his nose and chin. The sound of his breathing was hypnotic, and it took some time for me to realise he was trying to speak.

  ‘Forget this. Please. Do that for me. Christ –’ he went on in a low plead for the two of us to forget what he’d just done. My throat ached and I put my hand there to feel the bruising.

  ‘Shut up, Thomas,’ Marya said. ‘Don’t ask me that.’

  ‘Please,’ our older brother asked. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Don’t ask me that.’ She put her hand up to the back of my head and whispered that she wanted to go home. I mumbled and started driving. The three of us in some poverty of hope that this hadn’t happened, wouldn’t happen again in our minds. That was my thought for the three of us. Involuntary dismissal of the violence that engulfed us in the Ford. I try to see her face, but it is gone. Vanished in time’s shadow. I wonder now, rethinking that afternoon, if she was too young to forget, that she didn’t have anything she wanted to forget. I wonder too if that is just this older version of myself thinking back. But then that evening with my brother at the pub getting himself primed to get into a fight she took my arm and we walked in the gravel out in the front of the house.

  She was crying, a wet face in the soft dew falling. She started talking: ‘People like that. I don’t want to hear him speak again. Don’t let him speak like that again.’ I held her and she was small and shaking. We stayed outside until we were both wet and I had to head to the pub to collect him for dinner before taking him to the dance.

  The three of us, it all seems entirely precarious. As if any memory we have is liable to slip off time’s wheel and vanish in the mud. But then I think, too, that it is not time that holds memories in place but something quite other. Hope, love, blind anger. Such things.

  Eventually I come out of the mountains and find riders harrying to the sea. I join their packs, though within sight there are no men I know.

  At Villefranche de Conflent we tear through a town so ancient it seems made of pure past and the stuff the past is made of, rumours and dust. A fortress town of walls and buttresses and lookouts and great doors which we make through like knights setting out. Walls that won’t be breached until the earth beneath it cracks and the mountains lurch skyward another five feet. That is when history happens, when the land is done with you and the scholars must remember without firm advice.

  The road to Perpignan.

  15

  Perpignan. Men with eyes that no longer see. Some hardly pedalling as they come in. They lean on each other at control. Others ignore the fact they are still living and lie in a heap, discarding clothes and watching their wounds weep. Most barely know how to talk. I stand staring in the street. They totter as if hit by a hail of stones, stoned as certain parts of the bible seem to suggest is an apt judgement for men like us, full of prideful dilemmas. Shouting comes from team lackeys and whispers spill from men like me who still know how to stand but for whom words are now brackish: the taste of our own skin has entered our mouths and we are barely brave enough to speak.

  In Bagnères-de-Luchon I rode in at 11th. I was 15 minutes behind Opperman, two hours ahead of Bainbridge and Harry and Percy. Here I took us home. And here I watch the return and it seems I should not be in this position. Harry glares at the road as he steps from his bicycle. He is used up and doesn’t let me take his arm. He has a cold and should not be on a bike. The rest sit hunched. I feel guilt as if my small success is a violence on men I love. Somewhere back in the mountains I should have hung back and stayed with them. But I didn’t. I rode forth and somewhere in the murk I went past Hubert.

  Monsieur France comes to me and stands with our young interpreter René de Latour who made friends with Opperman back in Paris. He asks where I was. I tell him. He asks me my time and I tell him. I was 15 minutes over 13 hours. He walks away and I call out, asking him if he knew where the Discuter team were staying. He asks why and I shrug. I wish to see the boy, the Spanish boy. But I say nothing more and start to walk. I wish to see if he made it through.

  In the minutes before our departure, I saw the youth with his body bent as if leaning on a cloud. I gave him the opportunity to inhale the cocaine given to me by one of the team managers. A return of sorts for the charm of his offer that full week before, of wine and friendship. He managed a smile and shook his head. He opened his satchel and I saw he had all he needed. Vials of dynamite. The bonuses of proper management. He seemed happy, aware that something was happening around him. Perhaps his end was coming sooner than I thought. That he would be replaced at the terminus of this stage. I could understand if that were the case. He’d seemed thin, like sticks bundled. He was also rosy cheeked and ready as if adrenaline was overriding his malady and his need to escape this race before something broke. Each time I have seen him on the road he has smiled, and that is something.

  Two days ago I was held up. I was stopped as I rose on Aubisque between two bunches of riders. My neck was out, it had been for days. From my forefinger to the crown of my head, a stream of signals made the injury known as if volts harrying through wire. Occasionally it pinched at the muscles across my cranium, tightening them, and the pain was quick like a nail thrust home. My arm became weak also, like the muscle was unhitched to the bone. I fell sideways on that impossible mount and onto the side of the path; the only rider in the history of the race to fall whilst climbing. I pulled
my bike into the small gap in the stones that line the route so not to be a hindrance to the riders coming up behind. I closed my eyes and let the pain pierce its hole and leave. I intended to get back on the bike immediately but instead I glanced back at the trail we had made up the side of that mountain. An impossible depth below. The cut of the path seemed hopelessly haphazard, as if drawn by a child with the sharp of a compass. Madmen ride this, I thought, madmen and me. I sat for only seconds and soon found myself riding again and once more moving upwards. I laughed for the sight of it all. But any sense of amusement began to go hard, as if it had developed the material of a horn about its skin. I sensed the anger, the frightful thing that makes me go so rigid at the sight of the world and too gives rhythm to my ride. I commanded myself to make time, to undo the waste my damned neck had made of the last few minutes. And I did find rhythm, I looked back behind at the 17 switchbacks I could count below. I felt the idea that it was impossible that I had ridden those lines, that child’s idea of a race. That within those lines was a pattern of knowledge I was unable to conceive of, brilliant like a fine lie. But I had and I rose. I rose and felt myself drawing a group ahead towards myself. Finally I saw it was the Discuter team. They were crawling. I went through them, barely a word was stated because at that altitude words are wind you can’t afford to blow.

  Only the Spanish lad had called out, and that is what I remember. He shouted out a sound that might have been my name. It was pitiful, a fragment through accent and dialect. I didn’t look back until I had made the summit, the col.

  But now I don’t see this boy. I don’t have a question for him in any case. I just want to see whether he’d made it through. So I leave. I walk and find the woman in the hotel she’d stated would look towards the Palace of the Kings of Majorca. I expect to see the sea from her room. I stand at her window staring out looking for the shore and the opulence of loungers and bronzed bodies hazy at the Mediterranean. She asks me what I see and I say I see nothing. There is only city and houses and more land.

  She laughs cautiously. Celia.

  Celia. Some moments in the last few days I have caught glimpses of her in the car. She rides up ahead, or far behind, sometimes close enough to know it is her, the yellow shimmer of the Citroën. Some hours I don’t know what I know and think I’ve seen her hair amongst the crowds who shout us onwards, calling my name. If I see her there I see her hiding for she never wishes to be seen by the crowds, so she says. She says she watches from the verges and I stare at her hidden in the folds of the throng, sometimes running to her car doors. I think to call out but realise she wouldn’t respond and my mouth remains half open. She doesn’t acknowledge me in the mélange after either of the last two legs when all gather and salute the day’s winners and slowly remove our garb. I come to know her by the way she avoids all eye contact.

  She tells me to go to bed and close my eyes and shut out the light. I eat what I can, bread and beans, chicken, bananas. Then I take her advice and lie down and breathe in the smoke that smells surprisingly sweet, and begin to dream with the sheet pulled up to my face as if it were the sheepskin I had as a child and kept close and would rub under my nose. She is, it seems, as much present at that moment as she is any other.

  She says she is from Algeria, the self-same land as Louvière, though she is pale, alabaster, a scarf wearer against the sun. Algeria, Africa. The continent of Arabs and animists, Boers, Egyptians and Kenyans and Congolese, tall men impossibly thin without shadows on the plains, caravans and camels, lions, simians, and the Mountains of the Moon. What do I know of the place? I have just listed it. The lot, the entirety of my knowledge in a list! She announces stories and dreams of an ancient city. Algiers. Algiers the White. She describes the city from afar on the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, the buildings crawling up the hill to the crown of the Kasbah, the citadel at the head of the city built by the deys in the years of the Ottoman. She describes the interior of her childhood home, a courtyard within the sprawl of the house, vaulted archways white and gleaming with porcelain tiles, with the intricate latticework of the balustrade beneath which her father and her father’s father and his friends would sit and bet on cards and tell old stories of the old city beside the drip of a fountain drawing fresh water from a well until everything was old and the new was only an intrusion. She tells me of her father and uncles, her grandfather and brothers, how they export furniture, shipping it across the Mediterranean in large boats like the Moors had for centuries. Her father rich, moneyed beyond my comprehension. She tells me now as I lie looking at the ceiling how banks open and close on his whim.

  ‘But don’t believe me,’ she says. ‘It is dangerous to believe such things.’

  I blink and wait for her to go on, but she doesn’t. Instead we lie on our backs beneath imagined clouds. We lie within dreams, scheming outrageous in the bloom of quite conscious minds.

  She later offers jars of pills for the whole of the team but I wave the tender away despite what the race is doing to us. Here, I’ve made her a list:

  Sprained wrist.

  Broken finger.

  Dislocated thumb.

  Abdominal bruising.

  Broken teeth.

  Nipple rash.

  Boils.

  Back strain.

  Diarrhoea.

  Gravel rash.

  Abrasions to the knees, elbows, forearms, forehead, torso, shoulder, ankles.

  Influenza.

  Cold.

  Sprained ankle.

  We lie in the bed where our bodies separate into feet then toes, twenty of them in the still air, mine bent and pointing off in strange directions, hers slender and small, the little one red and permanently curled. ‘I have known him for nine years,’ she says. ‘Louvière.’

  ‘Just after the war?’ I ask.

  ‘After the war.’

  ‘How long have you been following this?’

  ‘A hundred years,’ she says. ‘Long years. They stretch out.’

  ‘Just the last few years –’

  She nods and looks at the end of the sheet. She has a fan of oriental origin and she uses a long nail to run along its ridges so to make a collection of sounds like a tuneless xylophone.

  ‘What will he do?’ I ask and notice for the first time the way she closes one eye when she isn’t going to answer a question. A slow unconscious wink and I am reminded of ice and the way it falls. Seven years ago I drove with Thomas and Katherine on the South Island’s West Coast during the month prior to my race in the Timaru Classic. We walked to the face of the Franz Josef Glacier carrying small ice-axes for show. Katherine wore a set of my brother’s trousers and looked somewhat triumphant there in front of the ice standing 100 feet above her. The depth of the noise as a sheet fell away. Celia blinks and I think of this, the long wait for the ice to distend, drift down and collapse in a white rush. I look at her and wonder if she has any means of knowing where my thoughts run. ‘You know him, though, don’t you?’ I ask.

  ‘François? Of course,’ she says. ‘I know all of you, every racer.’ She smiles for me, and it’s a small smile, one which states she is making me into something I will struggle to escape. She shakes her head. ‘Tell me about the ride. The mountains.’

  ‘I met a girl,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘A pretty girl I hope?’ She wafts the fan at my face and a petite wind beats over my head.

  ‘What other kind is there?’ I look at her for reaction but she just smiles.

  ‘There are many kinds of girls.’ Her eyes tell me this is a fact that I hadn’t fully comprehended before. I watch her mouth move and don’t feel any need to explain the girl’s rejection of my presence as I tried for the soft parts of her. How I had to take rest on the street before finding that deep sleep. Rejection is the key to one locked and miserable room.

  ‘You know I looked out for Louvière, today, during the race. I looked for him everywhere.’

  ‘He’s in traction. I’ve had my spies tell me everything.’ Sh
e kisses my brow and whispers the smoke from the pipe beside my mouth.

  ‘But before the war,’ I say, ‘did you meet him then?’ I report words but I don’t know if they truly are words or the sound one makes when confronted by extraordinary choice. Celia replies, speaks in a language I don’t know and soon I am drifting. I lie quietly and eventually sleep. The morning passes into the afternoon. The light stands naked in the room and I’m summoned to get up and walk as she sleeps a deep untested slumber. And I do, I walk out into the streets through the centre of a dream.

  A boy offers flowers. He speaks and I can name the vowels or consonants but little else. It is a Sunday, he walks with me towards the church and we catch up with his parents. He takes my hand and calls me Monsieur. He feels so light and small, a weightless soul to hold up and smile into. I feel his parents gather in concern. They watch my approach and call the boy to their side.

  I stand looking up at the church as the family make their way up the street. A man approaches me. He turns and comes up close with wine breath.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I say.

  ‘I met your father,’ he says, his face next to mine. His eyes running over my own, over my face and the air about my face. ‘In Cairo. In the war. I met him, I have been there.’

  ‘Where?’ I ask, quite intrigued.

  ‘1915, I met your father.’

  ‘My father. My father was never in the war. Not my father, not my pop.’

  ‘I met a man. So,’ he says and kisses my mouth. I hold him for a good 10 seconds before he pushes me off and leaves. It takes some getting used to, this being kissed by men.

  I head indoors to see and watch. I immediately remember the comfort, the smell of wax and incense. The scent of tears. You forget the smell of tears until they are once again on your cheek. I watch as two priests come into the nave from the vestry and complete a service as I sit impassive. They offer each other communion, they eat and drink as all good people do. The things we do each day to survive. Eat. Drink. I think to call out to them as they light candles and quote verse. But I am only a calm observer. They move softly from moment to moment, the wine, the bread. I watch. On evenings like these, I think to myself: Some days you eat, some nights you just drink.