The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘Babies.’

  ‘We stood in the grass with our backs pinned against the stone of a coal house in bramble of an untended bush, listened. They were nearby. Germans, of course. I’m not talking about Germans for the sake of saying Germans. I’m talking about insane people. How they went from normal peoples to those things. I don’t understand well.’

  ‘Where?’ I ask, but she just shakes her head and I know only because my hand is on her neck and I feel it twist.

  ‘Between us and them was small stream running between the house and this little structure by which we hid. I saw a woman come out of the house and run. Her dress was half removed, torn I guess. She went towards the soldiers, as if she hadn’t seen them, and then back the other way. She was carrying a baby and dragging a toddler. The tot’s feet in the mud as he was pulled. She was crying, the mother. Everyone was: the children and the mother. Then she zigzagged directly away from us. Men came out of the house after her. They stood laughing, one in his breeches. One of the soldiers pulled out his side arm and shot her in the thigh so she went over. Then they were laughing because of the way she fell and how the baby went forward and landed on its head and then slowly went over and its little feet bounced up. And there are things I’m forgetting to say, I’m forgetting to say how much noise there was coming from the woman and the toddler. The baby too. But I remember the smell mostly, somehow that’s in my memory. The smell of mud and stream, smell of the stream. But it’s meaningless to relate any of that.

  ‘And then, I’m not certain what they did to the woman, but I imagine. They carried her inside and the other soldiers who hadn’t gone into the house stood around looking at each other. Then one was walking straight at us and I don’t know why but we just stood there. I don’t know how he didn’t see us. But he came within three feet of our position and didn’t see. He had things he was looking for in the coal house, and he found them. A box with nails and a hammer. Whether he was intentionally looking for them, for those specific things, it is hard to know. But sometimes I think about it. Where his intent lay. Did he know what he was going to do before he did it, or was this toolbox some kind of, I don’t know, was it some kind of impetuous –’ She pauses, not able to name the thing she wishes to identify. Then: ‘I don’t know, but I search around in the options, trying to find the nature of this event. I search for motivation.’ I hold her arm as she speaks, my other hand on her foot under the sheet. ‘A war is a thing of animals, of grunting, fucking animals. What is it, how is it that they can finish the war and continue? To go home to families, to their own children and know that on a Saturday in 1914 they were at a farmhouse and they took a small child and put him against the wall of the house and began nailing. Hammering as his mother was inside being tortured by men’s cocks and fists. They put them through his legs and arms.’ She stopped. She breathed slowly, deliberately as if looking for a reason to keep telling me what she was going to say. Her voice a tremor, the susurrant conversation of near grasses. ‘The baby,’ she says and stops. She cradles her chin in the palm of her hand and looks for a place in the room to rest her eyes which holds no distraction. ‘The baby they kicked until it stopped making sound, and then for some time after that. I remember one of the men bending down to pick up the thing by the foot and how the leg and the body separated and how he dropped it. The look on his face, the look of sudden disgust. He shivered and then turned to his comrades and shook again for them – exaggerating his initial revolt like some pantomime. He looked at his hands, as if they meant something or said something, he looked at them and cocked his head as if they were something curious and new.’

  ‘That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ I say, barely moving my lips. ‘The main thing that stays with you.’

  ‘The way he turned and looked at his friends. If they were friends. Do friends do that kind of thing? I have no idea. The way he turned. He looked, his face caught by the revulsion deep in that moment, his eyes retreating and his body shivering and how quickly that deserted him when he deliberately shook himself and then smiled. I think back and I think of his quick shift to a smile. I think how hard it is to fake that kind of thing. So I believe he wasn’t faking. There’s no undoing who you become. It’s the attempts to hide who you were, that’s what defines people. I was a teacher and –’

  ‘And the war was only a few weeks old,’ I say. I’m no longer looking at her, rather at the sheet hem so delicately sewn, so finely made by deft, intelligent fingers.

  ‘Count the weeks on your hand,’ she says.

  23

  Frantz drags us behind him across the land. He nods to me when he sees me. We can’t catch him. We ride for other reasons now. It is clear, has been for some thousands of kilometres.

  I feel the move towards it. The road bends, we tend north. We move in an arc through time and history. Soon I will have to remember, I will have to recall. It seems inevitable: memory must arrive out of the land and be part of this ride. Wars have dragged horse and men, carts and guns, artillery and tank and stock and sword and lance and mace and men and the nightmares they die with across fields like these a hundred times. We ride in their wake. I think of the death sentence of the war and how despite the shells, despite the wire, the smoke and gas and the lungs full of fluids and the faces burnt and legs cut in two by thick bullets and the meat men become, how people live on. They take physical form again and again. I fear this, that I have to recall any of this.

  France. I am in awe of her. In her cafés and bars I look for men half-broken. I look for men who will speak mad sentences and whisper. I never expected the words I heard when Celia spoke. They sit with me, in my bones as if marrow diseased yellow, a rare sick feeling that can be countered only by higher rituals.

  We don’t sleep now.

  We ride as a pack, the four of us in unison. We feel slow, despite the slowest of our party no longer riding with us. Our bodies do little in the way of making up on lost time. The Alps have taken much from our determination and replaced it with a kind of grey silence. We were rested for a day, but it wasn’t enough. A week and we might have begun slowly healing, but only hours were offered. I feel a lag in the connection between my arms and the handlebars, between my fingers and the brakes I wish to tug tight to draw the day to a close, a lag between my capacity for thought and the thought. I am, strangely, enjoying myself.

  We come upon a church which we saw from quite some miles out, its steeple pointing to the moon that’s distinct in the blue sky since overtaking us through the morning. I hear Percy begin to sing. It’s a long melody, and his voice is neither sweet nor good but it is kind and we join in. Humming. There’s a game that develops as we head down the country lanes through this lazy wine country. We take turns recalling hymns when we see a new spire ahead. I have a poor memory for song, so I make them up. Appalling words, borrowed melodies. Oppy can harmonise, as can Percy. But together we’re blunt with tonsils like wire. Song is self-sustaining, it’s everywhere, in all lives, on all roads.

  And we’d done something similar, Thomas, Katherine and I, when we finally left the West Coast and drove over Arthur’s, then south again into lake country amongst the Southern Alps, though our song was not based on the sudden arrival of a church steeple, rather the sight of any building we saw rise out of the land. We sang long and in harmony, at least Katherine and I did. Thomas mouthed the words. He mouthed and conducted Katherine and me.

  Harry is barely with us: diarrhoea, dehydration and sores, these have made him a ghost turning the wheels. I think of what Louvière said last night in my dream, or perhaps not a dream. I suspect I now talk to him quite consciously before I sleep. I open my eyes and he’s somewhere near. He said that by the end of the race your brain aches, it hurts as though it has computed the stars’, and all the planets’, trajectories, their light and their future, then explained it all concisely. It is as if he knows this because he has studied the night sky through a telescope and felt the significance of our narrow horizons. In truth he knows it beca
use he has completed this race and felt the numbness of a mind depleted of its own brain matter; the body begins to eat its own by the time this is done. And Harry’s time in the mountains was a particular nightmare, worse than I can conjure in my conversations with Louvière. It has made him quiet like the lie of a ball forgotten in the rough. I ask why he goes on. He shakes his head.

  ‘We stop,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t stop,’ he replies.

  ‘You take the car to the nearest town. Bruce’ll drive you,’ I say. ‘And then. And then from there you take a train to another station. You carry on, eventually you arrive in Paris at the Metro. From there you go anywhere. You mingle amongst the people, the damp platforms.’ I stop for a moment and put my hand up to my eyes. The wind wraps around us and sends up dust but we seem to ride through it as if it were a real tunnel and a shelter from all the elements including the sun. He remains quiet. ‘You could be with your wife,’ I say. I slip behind him and take his slipstream. I watch his back, his head still. I think of his wife back home, so pregnant that surely his only thought has to be for her, for her and the child’s arrival. I ponder that likelihood, her swollen belly, her feet in his leather boots surrounded in snow as she stands at the gate looking off toward the Port Hills from which he will eventually ride. I think of her hearing the milkman’s cart making a noise up the street and imagine her stretching her neck to see, but it is only that man slowly coming with his canisters of milk fresh for the homes of the few that live on this last street before the gardens beyond where Harry’s parents dig the soil and plant the seeds for the vegetation to grow. And she feels the sigh of her child as it turns in her womb, and Harry feels it too, such is my imagination. Bludgeon me for being a romantic, but I imagine that is what he feels when he looks with his eyes across the plains and our front wheels are pointed south for the brief moments the road is turned from its purpose to take us north. There is a boat in the harbour, ready, waiting. I imagine he is capable of seeing things that the rest of us can only speculate upon.

  We ride through the afternoon, the threat of the hills nearby. They remain on our right-hand side, looming as we head down valleys and across chequered plains. At times the clouds shroud the peaks but mostly the skies are clear and we head towards the German border and Strasbourg. We head north. We are the rain in the valleys and we head north.

  I’m watching him in thought as he rides. I have an urge to break into his thoughts and stop him from thinking. Tell him something small. Tell him how hungry I am. I whistle, but it sounds out so thin I wonder for a moment what a real whistle sounds like. He only coughs and keeps going. There is a pain in my chest. A raw twitch. I concentrate on my breathing, as I was told to do not so long ago, a man in robes with a surprising array of English words for a monk. Anapanasati. Anapanasati. We were at Gangaramaya, a temple beside a lake. With our ship paused in Colombo we took to the streets and walked for hours in the heat that had our bodies pouring out all sorts of odours we’d picked up during our horribly idle hours on the Otranto. The three of us stood before an array of young Buddhas seated in a gallery overlooking the courtyard. Each made of stone, sitting, staring at us. And we stared back. We watched as if they were seated in a stand, perhaps watching the ongoing pilgrimage of those who came to look and pray. I was reminded of the cricket ground just to the north where we could hear the occasional yell and gasp. A monk came by and spoke to us in a pleasant English. When we told him what we were doing he said to be mindful of our breathing. Anapanasati, he said. The physical mantras that take you outside of the skin that hide muscles and blood and organs. Breath, be mindful of breathing. Anapanasati.

  ‘You ever wonder why we are racing?’ I ask. ‘You ever wonder?’

  ‘Because we were God-damned invited to. We race because it is the right bloody thing to do.’

  ‘But you wonder, right? We could be anyone. Anyone could replace us. We’re just here to remind people there’s a race and they’re a part of it. We don’t matter, interchangeable. Swap us out with any gullible sook. It’s the line we draw around France that matters. This is France. We’re just reminders.’

  ‘Or, we were just asked and that’s why we’re here. It’s practical to continue. You feel your legs?’ he says. ‘They’re disappearing. Your muscles are fading, you’ve never been so skinny. Never. That’s the wonder. If you think there is a wonder to be had,’ Harry says and says nothing more. He seems content to ride in silence. He gazes straight ahead, the road and more road, the ever-unfurling road. Silence is the right of all men, silence and the right to hold it. We pass through hamlets and brief flurries of excitement. We round steeples, we ride into stretches of cloud cover then light. All silent. But suddenly he speaks, he says: ‘You’ve never been so skinny. That’s true. Truth is always a lot harder, a lot colder than you want it to be. Truth is always cold. Muscle is running thin. My body is eating its muscle to stay alive.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘You haven’t noticed it. You haven’t noticed the same?’ he asks.

  ‘We’re only ever half here anyway,’ I say.

  ‘Who said that?’ he asks and coughs. I waggle my head as we are overtaken by the Belgians we had seen back in Nice. They have speed and take us on the outskirts of a village before the road turns to cobblestones and threatens to topple us in the turns. They say something but I have no idea what. I hear the word Australia and that is it. They look back at us expecting a response. Oppy is up in front and they exchange words in French. ‘Who said that?’ he asks again.

  ‘Someone, not me,’ I say.

  ‘Well, don’t believe everything you think,’ he says. ‘Not everything. Sounds desperate.’

  ‘I don’t even know what it means. Something Marya said,’ I tell him.

  ‘Marya? Little sister. How old was she?’

  ‘She was sick. She was dying, I guess. People shouldn’t have to go through that. They should just die. How can you trust someone who’s dying?’ I ask and feel the embarrassment of my comment and my face heats. I spit a dry tangy glob from my mouth. ‘Forget about me,’ I say. ‘I’m in mourning. My body and the rest.’

  ‘You miss your sister?’

  ‘I always miss my sister, I always want her around,’ I say. ‘But I get you instead. I get Harry bloody Watson. Harry Watson, Mile Eater.’

  I watch him nod. Solemn and in time with his pedalling. We ride with such precise rhythm. Our strokes each equal as we are sharing the same gearing. Ratios Louvière gave us back before the mountains. Unused by him, of course, but trusted by us. When I think of things such as this I get the sense we’ve become part of some greater ritual. Blood, wine. Et cetera. Pain and repeated words. Harry stops pedalling for a moment to laugh and it’s a relief. Then says: ‘It feels like someone’s revenge, this whole thing. What do you think?’

  ‘That you’re a bit stupid.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ I expect him to laugh again, but he doesn’t, instead he puts on a burst of power and we speed, coming out of a bend and into the hill. ‘Where’s that woman?’

  ‘We don’t see each other every day,’ I say. In fact I haven’t seen her at all today except for a moment, a brief moment as she leant into the interior of the car I’ve seen trailing behind Discuter, who collected her all the way back in Caen from outside her hotel. I have seen her amongst the men who step from that vehicle, I have seen them talk in slow whispers. But today I only saw her thin back as she leant inwards. I look for her in the crowds but most times there is no one of her description. I told her what I told her, she has been absent since then. Since she told me what she told me. ‘I fear she has taken that car from the road, plummeted.’

  ‘That’s what this is like. Makes one fearful. You fell in love?’ he asks.

  ‘Easily. Look at me, it’s what I do. I am a bunch of holes, I’m waiting to be filled up.’

  ‘You want to fill them in with bad loves.’

  ‘She thinks I’m older than I am. She thinks I was here before. She thinks, you kn
ow –’

  ‘You were in the war?’ He laughs. ‘You look older. Since I met you, you’ve gotten hard in the face. Not kind words but –’

  ‘It’s the wind. You got any idea how old the Spanish lad is?’

  ‘You say “lad”, so –’

  ‘20.’

  ‘How old does she need you to be?’ he asked. ‘For you to have fought?’

  I shake my head. I don’t want to talk any more of her, to hear her voice in my head, for I fear if I do I will repeat all the words she has said. I say it again: they sit within me. Metal and flesh and horror I doubt can be honoured by any kind of remembrance. ‘I’m desperate to destroy my body,’ I say.

  ‘How is it holding together?’

  ‘It’s dandy. I’m not trying hard enough, obviously. Gotta find other means.’

  Harry laughs and breathes. He coughs twice, then laughs, and then once more he coughs. As if he has something caught in his throat he keeps coughing. We sail on for a hundred metres and he’s still coughing. The road smooth and clean. His eyes pinched. He takes his hands from the handlebars, the bike veers, it heads off the road towards the fence barring the farmland from our wheels. Coughing and more coughing. I shout. He comes back the other way into the centre of the road where the gravel lies in mounds. He jumps off his cycle and stumbles forward whilst his bike continues on its way, its cranks still stirring. He dips into the ditch on the other side of the road. I hear him retching, but I see nothing come from his mouth as I too jump from my machine. Riders behind us skirt our bikes and merge once more. I run to his body bent like a card marked by a cheat, a trickster. He coughs on and on. I thump his back as I arrive. He punches the air behind him, warning me off. But it is not stopping and I notice the race is slowing for the sake of men staring, watching my friend choking on the air, for it seems there’s nothing but oxygen in his throat. His noise is the harshest scratch, like wood dragged through rough stone. Each time I approach he waves me off with a hand. His convulsing body, his lungs rushing to fill with air in the brief moments he is able to halt his rasp, and then, like a carpenter’s hammer the harsh wrack continues unabridged as if searching for a perfect melody as it bangs out its rhythm. He kneels in the ditch, beside him the bones and fur of a fox massacred by the wheels of a car angling in the night to the small eyes its driver spies from the wheel and feels the desire for death and blood and ridicule, but Harry doesn’t even notice for his life seems to be breaking itself in two, or four, or a thousand as he coughs and coughs, this unending noise attempting to escape his body and show itself to the world.