I’m soon out on the street. Harry is near. Harry walks me away. He returns me to our rooms and again I sleep. I dream and wake and dream and within it I am wet with a fever. I am told by a nameless face I must ride back to Luchon. Back to the steep of the Tourmalet and the dark and there I must speak to Louvière. Dreams set out vast cruelties. What makes us follow them, I do not know.
16
We drift on the plains, Harry ahead. He rides well, clean in his rhythm. This morning we saw Match L’Intran’s Table of Honour for the Pyrénées. His handsome photo amongst the climbers and winners. They like to put fighters on their pages, men of heart. Harry rides ahead and I find myself at the back, then, when it is my turn to take the lead, slowing the pace. Only in the afternoon when I ride alone with Ernie do I feel the energy to talk, to respond to questions and listen to the old rider’s stories. We ride at a decent pace, enough to keep our place in the field for the next few hours as we make the move to the north. Ernie rides in front of me for a half-hour, and then we swap and I lead the way before my legs struggle and the veteran is once more in the pained position of having to be my leader.
Fields run out before us, a sight I am happy to read. I can’t see a hill in our path, nor to our side. Everything is flat save for mild undulations. Workers visible far to our left. They put down whatever implements they have in their arms and wave out. I lift my hands and put them over my head. Ernie does the same. We slowly begin to make our way towards the east, another shift in the continual ballet on the compass that, until this moment, had been stilted so the curve of the great bay we corner over the hours on the way to Montpellier is noticed only by our relation to the sun. It sits hard in the sky, unmoving, tamed by the summer of its making, its face quite in agony. When even a plain day such as this seems dramatic I wonder about myself.
I think I see them, the stones in rows. I arch my neck looking over my shoulder and slow, certain at what I have seen. Cold blood flushes through me and I take in quick air. But they are never there, rather it is the light on a fence, or a barren stand of trees, dead from fire from a strike of lightning.
Two teams come at us together. For a time we ride amongst them, Ernie talking on despite the company. We match their speed until I don’t last and we fall off the back. We watch them disappear, strange dancers fading into the light. The first time this happened, the second, the third, I felt guilt. Back on the other side of the continent riders went through us, ten of them as a pack, JB Louvet; they rode at the coming sunsets brilliant on the light. Their team is now decimated, broken so they too creep along the plains. The guilt was heavy then, and slowed us more, encased my legs in its weight like canvas. There was never any coming back and slowly this became the reality. But we remain and we aren’t letting the air of our pride escape completely, we aren’t the breath of a black-eyed fighter waning in the mud. Opperman is in the top 15, Harry and I in the top 30. Some would say we are fools, but these numbers don’t say it, they say something quite other. But today, today I am the cold stone dropping to the floor of this old river.
Despite this poor showing, men, women and children cheer us onwards, shout for our efforts. I can’t help but admire them, their ability to stick with us. I look in their eyes any chance I get, so they know they are a part of this. And there, a pair of black-robed priests. They stand under the gables of a stone church, smiling and talking, watching us come through their village.
‘What’s their interest?’ Ernie asks.
One lifts a hand and shouts as we come close. I start to sneeze, tears are mingled with my sweat.
‘Ah?’
‘What’s their interest?’
‘We’re racing, we’re in a race,’ I say. ‘You never seen a priest before?’
‘I’ve seen plenty, plenty-plenty. You go to a war, that’s one thing you see plenty of.’
‘What then?’
A crowd of men, women and children as we bend through the main street. The voices rise up, men with beer in long glasses. I wish to reach out and grab them, instead I listen as Ernie says, ‘I’m interested in how. How is it they care?’
‘You want me to call you an idiot?’ I say. ‘I’ll call you an idiot.’
‘Call me an idiot,’ Ernie says.
‘It’s the dirt, Ernie. It’s the filth.’
‘I mean. But we’re a couple of jokers, a couple of jokers in shorts and shoes.’
‘They listen on the radio. They read about us in the papers. It’s the mud on our faces.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But how? How the hell did it get to this.’ He laughs a little.
‘They hear our names on the radio,’ I say. ‘Read about us in the papers. We’re inching our way forward.’
‘We’re hardly conquistadors, mate.’
‘Yes, but who’s to know that? We could be in the throes of a big move. We might be making a move, we might be coming up through the field after something has gone awry. I’m a hero. I’m taking old Ernie with me to the finish.’
‘You’re done. I’m dragging you.’
‘I’m just playing for time,’ I say.
‘Playing for time,’ he repeats. ‘I’ll tell you something.’
I watch him peel off and slip in behind me, shadowing me. We dip our way through a ford. The water is launched up over our legs and I feel it drip down my calves and into my shoes. It’s cooling, and that makes me feel better about the day. But the bike becomes rough on the road. The clatter and weight of a ruined tyre. I look down and see my front tyre is flattened. ‘Shit on a shit,’ I say. We both stop beside a fence and jump off our bikes. Ernie helps me get the wheel off. I fumble with the tools. I think how I’ve seen priests – those same priests it always seems – blessing riders of this race. Men knelt, eyes down, the padre in prayer, words repeated and adored. The things a man might be filled with and the way he staggers in the after moments. I want that now. I fill my tyres and want a robed figure uttering phrases that’ll make us greater, fitter, sturdier in our staying. Blessed and reconciled against the poverty of our bodies – so thin now if there were a soul we’d certainly see it clear between bones. But we are alone, so I say: ‘You got any idea – ’bout this?’ I pull the pump from the valve. The hiss of escaping air, I glance back at Ernie. ‘Any idea what this is about?’
He takes his right hand and puts his fingers through his hair like a rough comb and shifts a dingy lock to the side. ‘I have no answer. But I’ll tell you something.’
‘My sister once said that answers are for the weak. She was a joker. I don’t know either.’
‘Ha. Well, no. I was talking about everyone watching, just before, everyone watching us on the side of the damned road. I was watching them and I realised I think about quitting. Here’s an admission, mate. I think about quitting. You do it right? You think about it? But I think about something else too. We ride and it’s a constant companion, quitting, but I think somehow it isn’t. Something I heard once.’ I wait for him, but nothing comes, just a quiet pit of thought. We climb back on the bikes and the pedalling begins again. The rhythm returns. I flash looks, wondering if he is talking and the sounds of our wheels are overriding him, but his mouth is still. We go on and onwards, me waiting, him riding. Thinking, and riding forward. The road dips to the right for 20 yards, then races through a stand of trees, a creek in its centre, and we burst back out into the light. Suddenly he is speaking once more. We break into the sun and it feels as if he was waiting for the trees and their shadows to pass over us before he talked, for that small marker to pass. But now I’m not sure it is his voice I hear. He sounds altered, a new person in his stead steering his cycle. He speaks, he says: ‘“To drop out is to die.”’
‘That’s dramatic.’
‘You ever hear that?’
‘I hate the idea of it,’ I say. ‘Makes me filthy. Dropping out.’
‘You ever hear that though? Not sure if it’s a saying, but I heard it once. Twice, I heard it twice.’
‘Not sure. Sounds like
something I might have heard. Sounds like something someone might have said: then became something people say. In jest or to be dramatic, or for whatever reasons people say things. I don’t know, Ernie.’
‘I met a man in Melbourne, in St Kilda where I was on a weekend with some of my boys from the army. We’d met at the pub at ten in the morning and we weren’t quitting till they kicked us out. This was back in 1920, I think. I had been home awhile. But you come home and that doesn’t mean much for a while. Takes time. You know; you have a brother. But we were drinking and telling stories. Telling the same stories we’d told before. We told them again because they were the stories we have. We have others, but these were the ones we told when we were together. That’s just the way things are. And I’m not going to tell you my stories, because, well, I’m just not.’
He pauses and I nod in his periphery and I doubt it matters whether he sees me or not. I just do it because it is a part of the rhythm. And I say it too because it is part of the rhythm.
‘But there was this joker. He was fat, that was my first impression of him. Big fat lad who’d had his fair share. He was sitting with us. I didn’t get his name, or if I did, it didn’t stick with me other than he was of Irish birth and had moved out to Victoria when he was a tyke. But by lunchtime when the sandwiches were brought out he was talking. He was talking like he’d just won at the races and he couldn’t be stopped. A man and luck – such a damned combination, mate. You can’t shut a winner up. But this guy, he wasn’t anything like that, not when you realised what he was saying. He was talking about Turkey. Of all places, Turkey. I thought Gallipoli and the peninsula and was ready to listen to all that again, ’cause that was what we did. Listened and forgot so we could listen again. But no, he wasn’t a part of that. He was a mechanic. He fixed planes, but he operated in the Sinai, and then after that out in Kut.’
‘Thought they were all Poms out there,’ I say.
‘No. Not at all. Indians, Aussies, and Poms for certain. He was an airplane mechanic. I can’t imagine it. How fiddly those things must be. To make something fly? I can’t imagine it. But anyway, you heard of the Berlin–Baghdad Railroad? A track through from Mesopotamia to the heart of it all. What a thing to conceive, but it was conceived and the Germans and the Turks, they were trying to get this thing done in the middle of the war. Made slaves out of 12,000 POWs and the rest. This fatso was one of them. They were marched across the desert into southern Turkey, then to Anatolia. 900 miles. Jesus. He told us this and I’m looking at the fucker thinking, boy. And he says he was a part of it, he was made to walk. For weeks and weeks they were strapped and shoved with rifle butts, hit and hit over again. Barely a drop of water. No food. If they fell out of line they were kicked until they got up or they just lay there. It was a death march, this guy told me, that’s what he called it. The walk of 12,000 barely dead souls. Men with feet rotting, feet blistered and caked in sores. They went through valleys of stone, rock twisted and hard. There were deserts, broken places he said. Moonscapes of grey stone cratered with age and the hard facts of so many things lived. One night he fell asleep with his head on this one chap’s thigh. He was woken up the next day by something moving beneath him. The bloke under him was dead and there was a great gash in his arm. A dog was pulling at the man’s leg and another was trying to get some flesh away from his bicep. Another day they were marching and an Indian officer tripped and fell. The Turks were on to it and went to beat him but as they got to him they realised he wasn’t breathing and just stood around looking at one another. He said there was a sudden peace, a tranquil pause as they stood there waiting for something. And another time, and another time. Death and violent death was just a way. Disease and malnutrition. Starvation. He said he tried sometimes to redirect his pain towards awe, awe for the fact of the land they were walking through. The bed of civilisation, of writing and numbers, how many religions and how many wonders. All of that. But he couldn’t summon it, it meant nothing he said. It meant nothing because if this was what civilisation had amounted to, he didn’t want to know. It was a place aghast at its own severity. His words. I wouldn’t say such a damned thing.
‘Eventually they were taken to the Taurus Mountains. That’s where they worked on the railway. They built viaducts, worked in tunnels for days at a time. One in four died, he said. One in four. But it was back last year when we were racing in the Dunlop, and this is why I say this, why I’m telling you. That was when I remembered this guy, so damned fat it’s hard to imagine he was ever starving to death. Jesus. But I was riding in the sun and half baking. I was with Percy and Harry and Opperman and a few others. So deeply, bleedingly hot. We went past a cool-looking pond and one of us called out and all just jumped off our bikes and leapt in. Jeez, now that’s a kind memory. I’d do it right now if I had a choice. Anyway, we were larking about and Percy lost his God-damned shoe. We’re all climbing out of the pond and ready to get back on our bikes, and he’s fishing about for his shoe. We’re all in hysterics, ready to leave him behind. He and Harry are bopping and diving trying to get this shoe. We’re saying we’re going to leave them behind and we make to ride off. Then Harry dove under and he popped up with this big grin on and he’s holding this shoe. Soon we were back riding, sopping wet but happy for it. Percy and Harry had to catch us up half a mile. But pretty soon we’re riding and teasing poor Percy, saying how we would have left him behind. He became indignant, sullen. He said nothing for half an hour. But then he suddenly shouted out: “To drop out is to die!”’
‘He said that?’
‘He said that. And I’ll tell ya. I felt a strange shock. How he came to say this I wasn’t sure, how those words went from one place to another. One mouth to another. It got me thinking that there’s nothing we say that isn’t part of something. I thought that because Percy yelled it out and I remembered suddenly this joker, this fat bloke, saying these same words in the pub. It was something he’d said. He said: “We were driven, beasts driven into the desert,” he said. “To drop out was to die.”’
‘There was no choice.’
‘Well, no. There never is choice, not if you get down to it, mate. It’s always one thing, because there’s only one thing you ever do. The idea that there was a choice, that’s an illusion mate. It’s only in retrospect you seem to have a choice. One of time’s tricks. Choice is the trick of time and money.’
‘Money. Ha. And you say volition, it just —’
‘Not there. Not after what we saw. And not after I heard that story. We were a part of it. And when you realise there’s no choice, you just get to thinking some things, or all things are fated. I’m not getting past it. Maybe one day, but not yet. And think of that bloke’s fate, the guy with his leg being eaten by some cruel animal. I think, has it vanished? If so, what came in to take its place?’
I fear I’m unable to argue with any man in flight like this. I doubt he knows I’m watching him. I try to answer his question, even if it wasn’t posited for answering. ‘Regret?’ I say.
‘The right to regret. God. Or to forget. The opportunity not to forget? I don’t know. And the right to regret. Yes. But I do know something. Every moment since the end,’ Ernie says, ‘feels like the fade-out of the last scene at the flicks. It’s as if my life and everybody else’s around me – you, Jack ’n’ Jill, everyone’s life – was lived between the years 1915 and ’17. Between my age, between 26 and 28. All the rest so far, it’s like I said. A slow fade-out. For men to stand up in the metal? Christ. If you want to know, this is it if you want to know: we were all a part of some unrelenting fate, if you want to know. That’s the only way to look at it, otherwise – well. You’re a madman: you did it by choice, then you’re a madman.’
‘What did you see?’ I ask.
‘Me? Nothing. These eyes see nothing.’
I look over at him and he nods and that is the end of the conversation. Something concentrated about his presence as we ride, as if this new revelation has compressed Ernie into the bones and skin ridi
ng beside me. As if he has passed through the lens of a camera and is suddenly described in light and sound. But we ride on and I realise that I have never before recognised his voice over others, it was never a voice that I could have pulled from a crowd and named. But moments ago, as his voice again found its familiar range, I realised there is far more to know of any soul than just their long fibrous tales. There are the stories one doesn’t tell, doesn’t give away.
The coast comes and we see it, the Mediterranean. A great wash of blue, ships on the blue, clouds skiffing on the distant blue, the sky on the blue. Scud, screecher and foul: maritime words. White sand and broken rocks. Seabirds diving and hitting the water in small detonations. A stretch of water, the great waterway; somewhere out there the key to Western Civilisation. I say out loud so Ernie can hear me: ‘You see that though, eh? Old man, right? You see that?’ He laughs and lets me take the front. I feel energy return as I head into the light diminishing somewhere out beside the edge of the sea. Slowly I put space between us. He says farewell as I pull away. I turn and wave and he waves and we watch each other and the sound of the sea washes and he smiles and waves, and it is as it always is when you bid goodbye to a friend: as if we’d shared a secret.
And he is gone out the back of my periphery and I take a banana from my supplies and peel it, I eat it and wash it down with whatever liquid is in my second bidon. I bite through the fat of a cutlet and chew it thoroughly. I drink. I have been sipping from the first most of the day and now I sip from the second for it isn’t just water and soon I’m not riding entirely alone.
17
That night we drink. At least I drink. Quantities of wine. I hear Percy lamenting the lack of a lager to cool his chest burnt in the white sun. Exhaustion demands we celebrate something, anything that isn’t the ride. We’re in a café. André Leducq won the stage and is seen pissing onto the floor from his table. The celebrations of men can be the oddest thing.
The Invisible Mile Page 13