The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  I lean over so her hair is on my cheek and it feels as if the tiniest of razors is falling across my skin, and I breathe through the holes she has made and I listen. It seems she is talking of prayer, but I imagine she would deny that.

  ‘I hope and ask. I drive on and watch. You each flicker through the streets, the change in sound as you hit those cobblestones. And then I hide.’

  ‘You don’t seem shy.’

  ‘Not shy, no.’

  And then I am laughing, because the smoke is in my nostrils. She begins to laugh also, lightly, as if treading on petals. ‘I once sat watching a young man,’ she says quietly. ‘The race had passed through Metz, you were all on your way out. On the outskirts is a churchyard that looks out over the road and I dare to sit watching you all sing. Beside the few very old headstones is a grotto, inside a blind Mary. It rains each time I have visited. I have hidden under the eaves peeking out from the draping vines that have grown over and down the front like the fringe of a fine young lady. I was hidden in beside this Mary –’

  ‘You said blind?’ I say. I sound strange. It is as if I had spoken long ago and only now do my words make sounds.

  ‘Blind. Yes. Someone has scratched the marble so the round of her eyes is rutted. How long ago I don’t know. Such cruelty. Such cruelty. Each year I have visited her and she has always been blind. I sometimes imagine centuries of abuse. I imagine natural occurrences: water in small cracks turning to ice. Then later in the spring expanding and taking away the marble like sand, year in, year out. People had left messages on her. All over her body, people had put their names. Everywhere. Names, sentences. Little memories.’

  ‘Well,’ I say.

  She looks at me. Reduced pupils: two drops of black ink. She points a finger like a quill. ‘You were both here before,’ she says. ‘You were both in the war? Your brother and you. Did both of you come here before? Maybe you know Metz. Maybe you were there before.’

  I shake my head. ‘Just me.’ I take a moment before I look up. I expect everything to break: the room, Celia and the way she touches my arm, the way it should turn to water. But she isn’t looking at me and nothing breaks; she is preparing the bowl of the pipe. Nothing breaks a fictive world but its author, and when he goes, it all crumbles to the dust it is and always was.

  ‘So?’ She pouts and pauses – then goes on. ‘So, I watched a rider from the grotto sitting next to dear poor Mary mend his puncture. But he didn’t mend his tyre, instead he rested. The peloton had long left him in their wake and he took the opportunity to lie down and rest. He removed his goggles and lay under a tree and closed his eyes for 40 seconds. He began to cry, so I knew he wasn’t sleeping. He began weeping. He sat up and looked at his hands. And then, then he seemed to just jump to attention and got to work on his tyre. He took the tubing out and tossed it in the garden and slipped the new in. Filled it with air from the compressor. He bolted the wheel back in place. The air seemed to become very still as if he were beckoning all molecules to stall.’ She kisses my forehead. ‘Then he screamed. He shouted out. He looked right at where I was huddled behind the vines beside that Mary and let out the worst noise. He pointed his face to the church spire and screeched. He put his leg over the saddle and hopped on and went on his way. It was then I knew that none of you ever lose.’

  I hoot, a little owl.

  She’s coughing and waits for it to settle. ‘Nobody will ever lose this silly race. You will never lose because slaves don’t place.’

  I laugh and summon enthusiasm. ‘Tell my father. He isn’t keen on my losses.’

  ‘Yes, I joke. But he screamed and screamed on. Then he rode off.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘A rider.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That first year I followed Louvière.’

  ‘Louvière? It was Louvière? You know, he was supposed to be on our team. He was supposed to ride with us.’

  ‘Why would he want to do that?’ she says. Her face is so bright. When she laughs she has a beautiful laughter, it shines across the ceiling amongst the banisters and slides to the windows.

  ‘You met Louvière back then?’

  ‘Louvière, yes. He’s always been near. He’s bitter about this. This crash and the rest.’

  ‘It feels thin now. I feel thin when I think about him heading off that hill.’

  ‘Airborne Louvière. He’s bitter. I say it again; it’s the right word. He flew off the road and survived and he’s bitter the race goes on without him. Did you see?’

  ‘I was a few hundred yards behind.’

  ‘Behind. There are a dozen of you who could have pushed him. I look for men who might have pushed him,’ she says.

  ‘He just missed the corner. There was no pushing.’

  She looks at the window and raises her eyebrows. I’m uncertain quite what this means. I hope for a change in subject. I wish she’d return to describing Algiers so I can nod with the vision of her voice as I slip into the depth of dream as when you dream lying with your eyes quite open. As far as I know it is a Monday and on the Saturday she told me old stories of her town. Old stories and the physical nature of her city, the white stone and the steps leading everywhere and the markets and the mosques, the charmers and the peddlers and fossil hunters and the smell of that North Africa untainted by the facts of empires and republics and the rest. It’s all desert without her words. Such is the illusion rendered by this smoke we inhale as I imagine Chinamen in their dens take it in through the vestibules and tubes of their lungs and further into their imaginings in brutal Singapore. I feel I am somehow allied by this act to an unfurling history, and to Tao and the Buddha, to shrines and wise words I do not understand.

  ‘My cousin wrote to me,’ I say. ‘She said he was something to watch. You can’t help but watch. I have ridden behind him; I know what she meant. They look, people look. Stares, stares and the joy of staring.’ Celia watches me as she rubs her forefinger and thumb together, thinking, as if between them was my slim knowledge of the world. She is at least ten years my senior and fixed in place by a deft beauty that doesn’t seem to shift with the hours nor break with the dawn. She snaps those fingers so I’m lifted from my abstraction.

  ‘But the truth. You’d like the truth?’ she asks. ‘You want to know the truth of the man?’

  ‘About what happened up on Tourmalet? I believe he missed the corner.’

  ‘The truth. You want to know the truth of the man?’

  ‘Quite probably,’ I say.

  ‘He’s a vile hindrance to the progress of evolution. He coughs and farts – birds fall from trees,’ she says. She makes a sound of avian distress. ‘They think he won’t ride for a team because he hurt someone, somewhere. That he was removed from Discuter for the love of a faint-hearted girl whose heart was broken. Perhaps, but I say he rides on his own because he hates to share the prize money. They call him the Eunuch of Paris. He won’t dance, he won’t kiss, and he won’t fuck again.’

  This is the first time I have heard a woman of means utter this great word and I feel the blunting instrument of the opium run from my body and my senses harden and I try not to let my provincialism show, but I can’t help it and she smiles. Her short dark hair bounces and she looks sorrowful and intelligent like a big cat stalking something outside of the picture frame. Every creature has its rituals; hers involve the pipe and this moment when she is high and high outside the worldly and spirited familiarities of such a young man as me. She touches my face and leans in so our bodies are touching, her arm on my waist. ‘Really?’ I say.

  ‘You know what Desgrange says? You know?’

  ‘He wants all of us mad. Names us all mad. He controls the idiocy.’

  ‘It’s easier to sell newspapers when there’s madness involved. It keeps it at a distance. We’re happy to give money to it. But, no. No, I’m talking about something else. Yes, he owns the madness, but it is something else. He says, he says if there were just one survivor, it would be the perfect race.’
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  ‘He should hide men in the bushes with clubs.’

  She falls away from our half-embrace. She reaches for the pipe and packs it once more and makes sure it is in there clean. ‘You’re here for the ritual,’ she says, and then sounds almost girlish, ‘and me, I’m here for something else.’

  ‘Mm hmm,’ I laugh.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I wait for you to get drunk, get – erm – relations, fall on your faces. Now –’ She pulls herself up and goes to the smallest of her cases from which she pulls out a camera. It is the same make as the one Katherine brandished all those years ago as I rode from Timaru, Butchers Carbine. ‘Sit up,’ Celia says and I do. She angles the lens and she has a look on her face of slight agony as she tries to capture something. What, I don’t know. I have always wondered what men and women are trying to find when behind such devices.

  Indeed, a cameraman once came to our house with his equipment and ideas. It was the March before Serbia and all the confusion. The man brought in his tripod and camera, the three of us children were told to change into our smartest attire. Marya wore a pinafore and Thomas a tie. I recall nothing of my clothes, but I do remember my shoes were shined for me by my mother. The man with the camera was affable, a tight-lipped serious man whom one would expect to work the vaults of a bank if it weren’t for his particular skills. He smiled at our tired jokes and japes, until, that is, we refused to respond to his requests to pose in a reasonable way. Marya ran out of the frame just as the photographer was saying ‘. . . aaand’. She returned holding a vase coloured like damp sand, one of my father’s acquisitions from his year ‘on the Silk Road’, as he liked to refer to it. She held the vase as though it were a baby, looking into the white-painted clay as if her life were a part of it, and as beings they were linked beyond propriety, sharing blood and all the cells that move and pulse and squirm, all the soul that makes family. She was 10 and had yet to begin to walk at night. The man behind the camera refused to flash the lamps and open the lens and mark the picture. My mother, full with bright humour, asked him what the matter could be.

  The image lives now in its frame on the mantelpiece not far from where the coarse vase rests. My brother and I look identical. Marya: a better version of us both. People smile and ask if we still own the piece of pottery when they stand before the picture. Marya, serious with her own delight. She looks out and tells me to breath.

  ‘When you first came here,’ Celia says as she lights the pipe once more, ‘when you first came, did you fight in the north? Or were you in the Middle East? Jerusalem?’

  ‘Me?’ I ask and she nods and looks out the window to the dark and the sounds in the dark. I feel my mouth move. ‘Not as such. Yes, but not as such. In the north. I went down there.’

  ‘Where? Do you have scars. I have an interest in scars. Burns, marks. It’s morbid, yes? That I have this, erm, thing.’

  ‘I crashed in the dunes out in Belgium.’

  ‘You talk about it, tell me about it. Talk about it. Tell me.’

  ‘No, but – everything I have to say, it’s everything you have heard before.’

  ‘No. That isn’t true.’ She kisses my neck lightly. ‘When people speak, it is always a secret,’ she says. ‘I saw nothing, I know nothing. I lived a plain life waiting for it to come to me. I waited for men to come to our house and for everything to change. For the door to open and for men to stand in the frame surrounded in light. Their features in shadow, but you’d know what they were there to do. What they were going to say, even if they wouldn’t say anything, you knew.’

  ‘No one came?’

  ‘No one came to the door.’

  ‘You had a brother? A sister?’

  ‘I had no one.’

  I awake in sweat. All the water of a summer rain in my hair. Noises, sounds of foot and claw. Animals seem to be outside the room. Celia has the covers pulled up to her neck. She is shaking, the wind banging at a door. What sort of wind bangs in the summer night? What kind of shift in the atmosphere makes this occur? I think of the glass in the window and how it might shake if the clouds I’m imagining expanded to the black extreme implied by my dreaming. Oh, and how I can dream the worst. As a boy I summoned the demons as a widow does the ghost of her most hated husband, a man I imagined strapping the rear of the steely woman’s cracked thighs; evil men were everywhere. Evil skies beckoned with fists in their murk. Celia puts her hand on my chest as I try to exit the bed and see who is there, what or which phantom is angling to enter our room.

  I stand. My cock like a startled goose neck in the breeze.

  ‘Back in the cover,’ she says. ‘You’ll pimple in the cold.’

  But I stand and listen at the scratching. A dog with a wet, fascinated nose. A rat. Though it isn’t that kind of hotel.

  ‘Back, back,’ she whispers, and I’m beginning to fall in love with the creases at the corners of her mouth that, despite her age, must have always been there, for her smile seems timeless, a clock without hands.

  ‘Louvière?’ I whisper. I turn back to Celia. ‘He wants his women back. He wants to eat them with coffee and truffles.’

  ‘Vous êtes plein de merde, stupid Australian.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

  She murmurs my name, I think it’s an apology. Her voice says something more, it drifts.

  ‘Louvière,’ I say. ‘What do you want from me?’ I creep to the door. ‘Is it Celia you want?’

  ‘You vile man,’ she says.

  There is no more noise (if there ever was one) and I turn and head for the window. I pull the curtains apart to the city and the sounds of a near night, a faint glow from the street rising as if a mist from a river warming in a morning distant. People call out in another part of the city. Tentative words projecting familiar tones which bounce off the yellow-white stone and come to us mellowed and plaintive.

  I am reminded of hours we spent anchored at Ismaïlia, the city at the border of the Nile Delta and the desert. The Otranto had sailed the Suez Canal; all assumptions were we would continue to Port Said, towards the shores of the Mediterranean, but we weighed anchor for eight hours in the lake harbour of Timsah where the canal was suddenly widened, where it seemed as if a sea was threatening to engulf the surrounds of white sands. The night came in as the ship swayed and we heard the call to prayer for the first time, voices riding across the harbour from the minarets pointing from a mosque that remained unnamed in my mind until an Egyptian trader came through the ship and I asked him to give a word. He said it several times but I couldn’t recreate the precise sound of the syllables as I tried to repeat them in my mind. I had him write it down in my diary:

  Often I find myself looking at those marks on the page and mouthing shapes so I might know what it was that the trader said. I made a fetish out of his scrawl in my efforts to untangle the lines and loops. It is beautiful and perplexing, as too is the sound of the people meandering their way to me in this hotel room from which I have a view down rue Massenet to the sea and the promenade. I sometimes wonder if beauty is the effect of something seeming so near, so close we believe we know it truthfully and without blemish. I wonder too if the souls on the street knew on whose ears their sounds lighted, whether they would change their subject.

  Celia sits up in bed and I return.

  In the hours after, I am with him, with Louvière. It seems I walk to the window once more and open it so I stand above the street on the balcony, that I take myself from the balcony to the next by clinging to the ivy and swinging my legs around, over and over until I am at his room six storeys up. His curtains billowing as I enter his chambers. His room is cool as though I’m treading near ice. I put myself at his bedside. His thigh bone gleaming and puncturing the air with that pointed end like a tooth loosed from the mouth of a fighter and glinting. I say nothing and wait. The room is still until I see a dog in his corner, a mastiff breathing through his nose.

  An hour seems to pass. Suddenly he speaks, but I feel no surprise: ‘When we colla
pse they take whole parts of us. They, they take them with them,’ he says. I ask who. ‘The people who call out.’ His voice is straining against the morphine. He speaks in rasps. ‘The old ladies and their husbands. Men who tear open shirts and glisten and cry. Cry from alley once peloton passed. Hairs greyed. All wonder. Babes in swaddling and the women who leave them in the cot to cry not because they must see me. No. But because need is to let out another cry. Congregation clinging to balcony and its balustrade waving and shouting. Shout my name. They fall to the street. They a hungry pool. Writhing arms and twisted legs snapped and jagged.’

  He nods at the phial near the bed and I nod and take a syringe and needle from my shirt pocket and tie off with a belt and push the contents of the vessel into my arm, though I have no waking knowledge of how this is done.

  ‘You should take her,’ he says. ‘You should dash her head against rock.’

  I stay until morning. The room smells of hot prone body.

  She lies with her head balanced on her palm. She says my name – loudly or softly I can’t tell. The way she shifts at her voice I know she can’t be far from standing and being half naked before the light of the brilliant morning. She just needs it suggested. Her mouth open and her eyes roaming under their lids. I open my own mouth to speak, to offer her the contents of my dream which sit in my body like unready wine. I say nothing. I eat five hot rolls and quaff four goblets of wine. I stand at the window. The remains of the original 162 are seen walking in the streets. We are skinny men like candles without the light; half of us ghosts. Skinny men, snuffed candles, puddles at our feet.