The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘Hey!’ I shout at those who have stopped to watch. ‘Hey!’ I hold him and I ignore the decay beside us, I ignore the dank water. He’s coughing and making a sound as if trying to speak, as if this is how new words are forged.

  In the later hours he tells me it isn’t. I argue with him. We fight in a strange language.

  24

  Airships come near. The width of their shadow leaning over the land, a cigar in the hand of a monster and the clouds seem somehow bigger in its presence. One of many ghosts. I’d never expected to see anything such as this. It is colossal. It will fall quickly if punctured, that’s my first thought. We ride beneath, the four of us together barely able to watch the road. I look up hoping to see the controller, but there is only glass darkened by afternoon sky.

  A machine built for speed is forever more beautiful than one built for the sake of its own splendour. I’d once heard this claim and Zeppelins prove the argument. Though they seem to lumber, it is the line they take across the land that makes them pure: machines ploughing through the sea of unknown things. They rise past us like the laden thought that the sky may one day be full of these things, lighter than air.

  For an hour we don’t speak, we don’t listen.

  Beauty: it seems the great placeholder of memory. And sometimes, memories, they take days, weeks, years to come back. Last night as we sat in the warm evening and a night crippled under a blanket of cloud I was surrounded by some of the remaining touristes-routiers as they sneered at their meals and made jokes of the team members, like us, who struggled to survive. They are poor men, as most are. Working class, peasants who have found a way out of their hard lives by living another hard life on the road. Professionals for whom each race is a way to eat, a way to sleep. They scramble for position at the end of each stage, trying to earn another franc more than their competitors. They despise Nicolas Frantz, hate the fact of his upbringing, his wealth and ability. They would hate me also, if they knew how to ask where I come from. I am no peasant and the only poverty I know is of restraint. These are devout men I describe; they have faces almost scarred by the deep lines that come from furrowing their brows as they race.

  I sat with them and listened to them speak. I could pick out words, small phrases, names. I heard them say ‘Zeeland’. I let them murmur it and laugh. I heard them say my name and I took wine from their bottles. I ate a loaf of bread and a large round of cheese, which makes me sick, but I could not stop eating it until it was done. It smelt of urine but tasted like a kind of heaven, as if the cows of this area are force-fed salt each half-hour of the day. I washed it back with the red wine that they drank each night. I fell drunk quickly. The room swimming with names; they were telling stories. Old stories. Octave Lapize. He was the first over the Tourmalet, 18 years ago. They spoke of that. One of these riders was there, an aging wreck of a man with little hair and a face like the loose skin of an elbow. He repeated Octave’s name over and over, he pointed and gesticulated his way through story after story. I couldn’t separate the name and the thought of two strings struck and ringing out simultaneous harmony, it’s impossible and I wondered how his name came to be on the lips of his parents when they named him. The first man over that hump. Lord, and it struck me that I had done the same. That I had ridden over the top of the same cruel col and flown down the far side.

  I had, indeed, forgotten the torment of that day. And, I ask you again, is that history? That resonance of the past with the now, is that what we call history? If so, then there is no circularity, just a plainsong sung in the ages.

  The night finished with eight of the drunk riders – half of whom revealed they were no longer a part of the race, that they had quit with under a thousand kilometres to run – out in the street shouting curses. Two men yelled and threw rough punches at each other’s heads. Their blows glanced and faded. I recognised them and they were the Belgians we had seen in action in Nice. They were weak and neither could make definitive contact with the other. I understood they had replaced members of Discuter, the Spaniard and another. I realised I wanted them to hurt. I wanted them to bleed. They flopped and swung their arms in loose haymakers but rarely touched each other. They flopped, yet, somehow, each managed to break the other’s nose, blood dripped onto their shirts as they held each other, a warm embrace but still fighting. I felt a welling of pity, of pain. I had an anger, a cold white anger inside. It seemed aimed at the Spaniard, that little lad out of Catalonia: how he could leave and be replaced by these men when Harry is forced to carry on in agony and Louvière lists in his bed? Punches, drunks. A man cried. Then it spread, five of the group began to weep. Clothes and faces quite drenched. I recalled my moment in Vannes under the odd stare of that peculiar saint and how it came over me, a rush of love and deep sorrow. I wondered: when the moment comes, when love overcomes hurt, what sure thing separates them.

  But I was talking about memory and how beauty holds it in place. In Belfort we finished as a group, the four of us remaining: 23rd place for Oppy, 24th for Harry, 25th and 26th for me and Percy. A kind of soulful jaunt we made across the finish, we linked arms and rode in with our wheels aligned. It was a good showing and my heart was drugged with love at that moment. The crowd that had gathered shouted out our names and I saw Ernie, not for the first time, weeping as he embraced each of us. I wish to share my better self tonight and I do not seek out Celia though I know her hotel’s name, I know the room to which I would strut if I so desired. But I have none. Instead I sit with the boys and we yarn of the girls, friends, lovers or family we love so hard and so gently, and quickly it is me who cries once more. I cry at stories the men tell of loves so far distant, so near in their breath I think of Marya, the two of us in the clouds. The two of us on the mountain, the volcano in the middle of the Taranaki.

  We once climbed its cone in a summer when the peak was near without snow and the land out beyond utterly clear. We swore we could see the edge of the South Island, so light was the atmosphere. To the east the gigantic hulks of Ruapehu, Ngauruhoe and Tongariro. They waved in the thermal energies that rose across the land. Marya removed her boots and socks and put her hands in the air. She reached out, her feet and toes stretched like her fingers. Her hands above her head as if she were carrying the sky, or something large of the sky. She hummed and I saw her eyes close. The immensity of distance seemed broken, even if just for a short time, an instant, a moment. And a moment long enough to know something with complete precision, that was what her face seemed to show. She held something inside the instant and let it fill her. I recall our times on the mountain effortlessly with this at its centre; warm, blue and undying. It was 1916, November. Thomas had been gone for close to two years. Two more and she’d be no longer. I cry and the men watch how my hands quiver, shake with the presence of loss.

  We are in the land of old irredentist hope, Alsace-Lorraine. Today we crossed the front for the first time, but I’m not aware until Bainbridge mentions it at the bar. There’s an old sadness in Ernie now, as if his departure from the race delivered to him a knowledge containing the absolute nature of defeat. I can see it in the way he seeks solitude by making others question the point of our continuation by his mere presence, then offering no answer for even himself. He informs us of our place on the map and I realise something unsettling.

  It’s the gentle rolling hills that get me, the undulations that seem quite unlikely to hide armies and artillery and guns. I grew up with the names of ridges and towns inked into memory: Messines, Vimy, Verdun, Flanders. I had imagined great rising lands, precipices to conquer and fortify, but I am reminded that their part of the war was a front of gentle mounds on the apron of some poor farmer. It was desperation that made these hillocks into mountains, these gentle rises into great ridgebacks on which life was fought and held. I saw nothing as we rode through. No sign of life or death. Instead I daydreamed, I daydreamed and missed it all.

  We arrived to another medieval sight. Strasbourg in the afternoon. Now, we walk over ponts couverts fro
m tower to tower. We walk in streets surrounded by white homes with such distinctive black trim, buildings so old now I fear who might believe they have ownership. Surely nobody could claim such a thing of something so old. Percy keeps looking at the river; he keeps saying it’s the Rhine. Opperman argues with him and they come to the conclusion they don’t know. There are rivers everywhere and, when they ask, they hear only German in reply.

  I speak to Harry and Harry knows what it is we are looking for: a cracked stream, a burst wall, anything to break the beauty of this place.

  The road seems broken in places, as if chalk marks scrubbed out by an invisible hand, then reappearing once more, furrows where the horses have dragged their carts and men have stood alongside shouting in a language only horses nod at and make noises back to. We are a song and we ride humming.

  But I am lagging. It is a short leg but I am behind. 115 miles. I believe Percy and Oppy are in front, somewhere, some distance of probably miles. But here is Harry, he fell off the back of the rest of the team early on. He’s coughing violently, I ride beside him, his head on my shoulder at times as I put my arm around him. An hour folds in on itself as if in the blackened hands of a typesetter compiling the words as we speak, making the octavo fold before the cut to make the page. I puncture on the outskirts of Saverne and I ride on like that for two miles until the sound of it in the forests before the Vosges becomes too apparent. I only stop when he calls out my name. I toss my machine into the dirt at the side of the road. He circles around and I know he cannot stop, that if he stopped it would be for good. I tell him I will catch him up. But I never catch him. I dawdle through the hills and find no one back in the reaches of my periphery to harry me forward.

  Geldhof of Louvet dropped out after yesterday’s ride from Belfort to Strasbourg so the official count now is 60, 60 of us left, possibly less, certainly no more. Today it is my turn to carry that number on my back. Number 60.

  I see a house shape amongst rubble. I see limbless trees. I stare and try to recall the lines on maps I used to read and think where the artillery stood that rendered these things so. I look to ridges and stands of trees for an inkling. You see how nature starts to remember and force its way out of the cracks and chunks of masonry, limbs of trees wriggling out of stems from seeds and pointing their leaves at the sun, you watch and then you ride on into the hills where they once made trenches across gully and spur.

  On the outskirts of the coming town I keep vigil, my eyes on the churches for a grotto, for a blind Mary. I hope I won’t leap off my bike and run in and look, but I can’t promise myself anything. I know I would want to see her face, just to see if there is any connection between the two: Mary Mother of God and Marya my little sister standing atop a mountain, a volcano, a southern Vesuvius. They look quite the same, I’m sure.

  25

  Metz and I hit the bridge and the signs of a city become apparent. The railway lines bunch and rattle the bike so my arms are made numb. A man signals for me to turn and I pass by lines of housing on my left, a high brick wall of what I imagine is a prison on my right. I think decisively that I will not be able to finish the stage. That I should crawl against the stone and sit resting my head and let Bruce and Ernie pick me up out of the grass. I coast. I remember the stories of men in the early years being dragged by wire, a length of it tied securely to the rear of their support vehicle, a cork at the other end on which they bit with their teeth. I imagine the same and let myself be pulled by the idea of it, the rubber-like wood. I bite the cork and head on to a new river’s edge. In the end I am the final shadow to see the sight of it, the glow of Saint-Étienne de Metz high above the river. The afternoon is full of dark clouds, but the windows are bright with the gigantic glow coming from inside the cathedral. A grand throb of light held in the globe of an ancient chapel. Behold this thing. Do not step back. I spit the cork; all symbol tastes sour at such a sight. I wonder if Louvière has seen this. I’ll ask him in my dreams what he said to himself at the sight of it.

  Harry and Oppy take me from my bike whilst I am still pedalling. I know I am crying. I know that all about me men cry. I take on water but throw it up. They hold me up at control and I sign at my name. I write, ‘This Man Died Three Hours Ago.’ The officials don’t blink at the extra syllables.

  I sit with the boys at the side of the courtyard where we have gathered. There I open my musette and pull out what food I haven’t consumed on the road. I find a raw egg still in one piece, I crack it and swallow the contents. One gulp. I slowly come back as water is put into my system. I hear how Opperman punctured once, Osborne twice, each waited for the other in the verges as the sun grew larger. How they lost two minutes at the gates of a railway crossing closed against them. They rode together over the finishing line with their arms locked: 19th, 20th. Hubert is now in 17th in General Classification, a slip by one place. What could have been if he’d some real riders, not us sick men in need of sleep, water, food, bed and home, in need of him to drag us to the end. To think of this is to think of other worlds.

  I hear Frantz was penalised for interference, but still he held on to win the stage. He and Leducq scrapping it out. It’s another race they ride. I’ve seen a photo of the two of them from last year. Their arms around each other as they ride, great smiles, great friends by the look. But I know this is not true, can’t be true.

  I drink wine in the evening. I lie on a bench and listen to Oppy. He is one full of facts and he gives a new one each day for my book of wonders. This is the town from which Gregorian chants arose, where voices found their invention in the back of monks’ throats. He has a slight look of joy when he offers these morsels up, as if in each word he gains karma and deeper worth, and I don’t doubt it. At each new town his fight to keep alive in this race is celebrated, the number of lips that have grazed his cheeks are uncountable. I ask him what they sound like, these chants. He shrugs for me. Gives a full French shrug with his bottom lip protruding and Percy puts his arm around his shoulders. It is a quiet evening, one of candles and half-light.

  Tomorrow is a short run to Charleville, a distance of 86 miles. We will be riding out at 10am. An easier day by some kind of measurement and I’m not concerned for my late night wandering. I walk back to where the racing was completed and soon find the street lit up enough that I know the direction I must follow. I find myself walking towards the great lantern above the waters’ run. I come closer and the building seems to grow, to loom as if the walls of a sheer valley carved by glacier and time. From this angle it seems the church is built on top of the five-storeyed buildings I can see beneath. I walk slowly then feel myself rushing uphill; I fear the cathedral is about to shut out its lights and close its doors. I can hear singing, the shuddering harmony of a massed choir. It diminishes and rises up. It seems to float, so much glass lifting it, and it seems floating in the air out over the river. Each wall constructed by the spectral array of stained-glass windows spilling out the light of how many thousand candles. I try to hurry as I come to the lane that puts you at its doors.

  I run my hand along the surface of the exterior of stone, almost a millennium since it was put down here, a thousand years after the man it honours walked about the desert land of Palestine and Judea. I have no concept of history, I have no means to consider its depth. Nothing this old touches the earth in our land, nothing we have made. Only mountains and trees reach this far back, and even those we have turned into other things, ships to take us away from the island, buildings to lift us up. No man had set foot on our shores when this was put in place. This stone upon stone. I touch the doors, I enter the cathedral.

  Hundreds standing in the mass. Somehow I have no problem hearing the words coming from the far end at the apse. I look up in the nave and feel a giddy rush. The roof is impossibly high. I walk softly to the aisle on the gospel side where the congregation is sparse, I have my hands out, feeling for the pews. I sit as the congregation sits in a rumble of shifting wood and shoes.

  I watch proceedings, th
e priests at the front distributing incense and the smell of it is quickly everywhere and I wonder where it originally came from, what part of the world gifted that particular technology to this ritual. The liturgy begins, the tone of rich words so many times spoken. No one looks around, all eyes to the front, though some seem not to focus, faces limp, others smiling and others still frowning, the deep lines of concentration, the moods of many as we heed the word.