The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  There, off to the side, are the robed figures; I’m guessing the descendants of Oppy’s chanting monks. They blend in here, seem quite a fixture as if statues or carvings in wood. Each face hidden behind the shadow of their hoods. Gradually I realise you don’t look for faces, for eyes and features; you take them as a whole, as another mass within the mass. Sacraments themselves. They are the low hum in response to the presiding priest’s recitation.

  I listen and understand nothing. But my ignorance is trivial and extraneous, as if the invisible thing of a child’s complaint. It’s the fact the words are said. It’s not the words so much; it’s the extraordinary fact they are spoken at this moment, at this time, in this place alongside this carving under these windows in this light. This physical instant. Latin, Greek, French, rhythm and the stage. Here’s the blood, here’s the bread. I sit through the moments when the congregation are seated, I arise when they get to their feet. The choir stands and they open their mouths in harmony. Colossal, massed. There are boys singing in robes. The whole building rumbles with the sound. Nothing separates me from the voices, certainly not comprehension, that is the last thing I need to be concerned about. It is in this moment, this physical moment, that these words come the nearest they will ever be to having a relationship with the hard edge of physics. That is the effect. Germ-like, hopping from breath to mouth, breath to mouth. All a remedy for miles, for the invisible miles and the distances we make.

  Don’t believe everything you think.

  The singing gathers once more, a swelling that reaches around you, holds the small elements of yourself in the whole of the cathedral. This is the sound of hope on a scale that lurks over mountains and divides seas. The things of religion: they are the relics of the great lost love story. Hope and song and the nearness of dreams. Everyone here is hope, hope surrounded by hope. The song of a thousand-strong voices willed by the promise of victuals and drink, by the collapse of the chasm over which faith makes its bounds. Somewhere within it I hear a voice. A note whose timbre sits alone above or below, or beside the rest. I look around for a mouth, the face emptying out this familiar tone. It is so close, I look down rows, I peer over heads, over families, over young men separated from the young women and children dressed so fine. I see two riders from the Tour, I see five more and I put up my hand to wave, though I don’t wave. Faces flicker in the candlelight, men holding on to notes they can’t hear but for the mass they are within. Then something, something else. An ear, a neck, a shoulder. I hear a voice apart from the others, a breach in the side of all this sound. Slowly she turns, a book of hymns in her hands, her mouth open so I can see it is her breaking the song.

  Through the last three days I have ridden without white pills, the cocaine, without the help of the ephedrine, and my body has felt the weight of itself, the weight of its damage. My knees are weakened, the muscle weary and (as we keep saying) eaten at by our inability to make them anew. Tendons seem to sag and ache. I drink constantly to rehydrate but it seems to have no effect; the weakness expands. Celia has me lie on the bed. I do not remember how we made our way here, though I recall voices. She certainly would’ve needed help: if I did not walk, she did not carry me. I have not mentioned her size. But she is small. For her to have carried me she’d have to be part monster.

  We eat slowly a meal of fruit and nuts and berries. She orders a salmon and it arrives under a silver dome.

  I can’t decide to ask her whether she has ever been to Algiers, or whether it was a kind of lie to make me love harder.

  We speak, I’m talking. I say to her: ‘At a dance. 1919, I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I believe so. No. ’18. It was 1918.’

  ‘She’s your wife.’

  ‘She’s my wife.’

  ‘A dance, where?’

  ‘Out of the town, on the coast in a little town hall. My younger brother took me there.’

  ‘Little brother. How old?’

  ‘He sat me in the shadows and I was bleeding. Had been bleeding.’

  ‘Show me where –’ She puts her hand on my face.

  ‘An hour before he collected me from the pub where I was fighting. Outside, I was fighting. He collected me and took me home and had me bathe and change into a suit and he took me there. He must have been 16. I didn’t speak, I didn’t know how to speak, not yet. Speech was cold and not moving my mouth. Katherine was there. I saw her in the light of the dance hall and the band played and she walked around in her dress, the pleats made it seem she was walking on air, which I guess is the desired effect. I can’t say.

  ‘It was winter so the only thing keeping us warm in that hall was bodies, a hundred or so bodies in this little wooden hall with a band with a violin, a piano, a banjo, and boy with a drum and some brushes. My brother went to her first. He asked if she would dance with me. What a thing for a little brother to do. He was covered in spots, the kind that later make your face hard when the sores empty out and scar. She was sitting, I remember that. Perhaps it was out of sympathy but she agreed, I can’t say why, but he took her hand and she stood up and put her arm under his elbow and he walked her over to me. She took my hands and asked me if I would like to dance. Which I know is forward, which I know should not have happened, but she did it and we danced slow in the hall. That was the first time I met her. She let me cry in her hair. Or maybe that was the next time. Maybe that was in 1919, when I saw her next.

  ‘My brother took me home and that night I saw Marya walking in the hall, she went into the kitchen and came out again. She seemed quite awake and I tried to talk to her, but she gave nothing in reply. She was quite oblivious to my presence. Some days I want to go to her and stand with her, but that can’t happen anymore.’

  ‘Come back to England with me, when this is done,’ she says and lies back again. ‘Come back and stay for a while.’

  ‘You’re from England then,’ I say.

  ‘Thereabouts. When did you get married?’ Celia asks, and rolls so she is facing me. She’s been on her back and and I liked talking with her in that position; lying supine together seems to be the place from which stories come.

  ‘It was later. First the war ended. I heard it on the wireless. Dad and Mother and the rest of the family were in Wellington at my uncle’s house. They were there for two weeks and I walked the house alone for hours at a time. I would walk from the lounge to the dining room. From the kitchen to the lounge to the parlour, from the dining room to Marya’s room. From my room to my parents’. From the kitchen to the parlour. From the parlour to Marya’s room. From Marya’s room to my room. I made sure I covered every variation I could. It was how I passed the days. I listened to the wireless at noon until dusk as I walked, the volume dialled full in the dining room where the radio sat. Each day I made the journey about the house, making the exploration complete. I’d listen to the reports from Europe, the day-old news. I’d listen to the predicted dates of return for the infantry. I waited on those days. On the particular invasion of the town by the town’s very inhabitants who had been gone for all those months and years. I waited for men like me to return.’

  ‘Where was Katherine?’

  ‘I have no idea. Somewhere at her parents’ house I believe. We didn’t see her again until March, she wasn’t in my mind, maybe my brother’s, not mine, not yet. I was waiting on the end of the town’s empty years, that’s how it felt during those months since I had come home from Scotland. Empty and waiting. Waiting for empty men like me. My family returned and they were cautious around me. I felt it. The end had come and they were cautious around me. Finally the first men returned and I went to the train station to watch them come off the rail. Men like me. I drank with them when they arrived. Men like me. I fought with them. I hugged them, we drank all the beer in the White Hart there was to drink. I stood on the upstairs balcony and swayed with men still with their sea legs making them unsteady. Men full of illness from the front. From the ships. A lot of the men were sick, but what was I to care? I emb
raced them. We poured beer on one another, we danced to invisible music running through the crowd. If we sang, I recall no tune. It was summer then, and everything spread like a fire in scrub.’

  ‘And that, that was how Marya, that was how she died? The flu?’

  ‘Aha. That’s how she died. Or, close enough. Irresponsibility and idiocy. Two things, they always play their part. My family had returned. I came home from the White Hart and I must have stunk but I came home and I walked about the house. I started walking like I did. I was tracing my steps from the kitchen to the parlour and that’s when I saw her. She was standing in the middle of the hall looking I don’t quite know where. I went to her and stood in front of her. I watched her and put out my hand and she took it. I moved close to her and I put my arms around her and held her. It must have been for a full two minutes. I held her. I whispered in her ear and she whispered back. She opened her eyes. She was the only one. The only one I came close to killing in that whole war. They call it the Spanish flu, but really, it must have been born out here, somewhere out here.’

  ‘And she screamed?’

  ‘She screamed,’ I say. ‘She screamed and God, if the house didn’t wake up.’

  26

  She screamed. That’s what I told Celia. But that isn’t quite true. I stated it for effect, for the sound of the word, to match her story of Louvière screaming at her Mary. That’s how we make narratives: we put like with like and damn the rest. I told Celia the hours of Marya’s sickness were uncounted, as if halted, or slowed, the speed it reached deep into her body and hard chill that made tremors on her skin. She shivered like a solemn music, a minor cadence closing in on its coda, the song at the end of songs. She died so quickly I couldn’t count. But Thomas could. And whether she screamed or not, to me it sounded like a line from a music not yet written.

  I told her this and then I slept. I slept until 8:30 at which point she woke me with a hand on my back. The cool of her fingers down my spine. We spoke no more of Belgium, no more of the things that follow her. Once is enough, the topic’s absence seemed to imply, once and that is all. I walk now to my room and collect myself, feed myself. Soon I am back with my team. We are at the start, the four of us and Ernie looking tense, despite the ease of us now. There are only four stages left, no mountains they have told us of, just cobblestoned roads and the end and the remains of the end.

  Today we are last off the line and we watch the other teams prepare for their ride out under the stare of dim stained glass looking down from Saint-Étienne de Metz. I’d tried to find out the name of the mass I had entered last night, but had no luck. In this morning it seems empty, a firepit after the feast. Whatever I underwent in the nave under the voices, the ice-like robbery of my heart and thoughts, it was gone, snuffed, vanished. La Lanterne du Bon Dieu, that was all I found out about the cathedral, its nickname for the locals who must see it every day and walk past its doors and empty wings.

  A woman circulates. She has an urn of coffee and a couple of small cups from which men take in a gulp, putting their hands to their mouths as the liquid scalds their tongues. I take a hit and make a meal of it and end up spitting it out on the cobblestones. The woman bursts out laughing and says something and I nod and laugh with her and I am briefly taken back to the start of all this, the beginning at Paris, the young woman who leaned forward from the crowd and caught my and our attentions. I wonder where she is at this precise moment, I wonder if she has followed our movements around the map they publish in L’Auto, whether she looks for our names beneath the pictures they publish, whether she ever swooned at the recklessness of all this. I wonder because it is something I find myself doing. I think back at the Alps, the Pyrénées and that is all I am able to do, think. My imagination does not allow me to recreate it any more than it does my brother’s days in the pit. The woman pours me another cup and I sip it gently and smile for her and watch her become demure, an act I’m sure. One built to make a man’s knees quiver. Everything, eventually, turns to myth.

  She moves off and continues her mission with the coffee, laughing and joking with all the men. I see Discuter. I have come to understand something about the Belgians. The man Celia goes to see, who rides the blue car, a Mercedes I am now told, he manages riders and races. The Belgians come under his wing when not in this race. I haven’t been given a name, but Celia has explained he used to ride, has ridden the Tour, used to battle with Louvière as often as anyone. The Belgians stand with the rest of Discuter. I haven’t seen them on the road for a few days as we have been at the opposite end of the schedule. I have the urge to relieve myself and ask Percy to hold my bike. I run into the café from whence the woman had arrived minutes before. I find myself in the toilet and emptying everything in a horrid rush of black devilish tang. I feel light-headed and step out into the café where several men have gathered. One lifts a glass of red wine as a kind of salute as I come past. I nod and grin and he signals to the man behind the bar and soon I have a glass in my hand. The smell of a deep rich red and I gulp it down and everyone laughs and I shake the man’s hand and head back.

  I thank Percy and he looks at me and asks if I am all right. I eventually nod. My stomach is raging up but I don’t believe there is anything more to give. I dare not look around for the fear of catching someone’s eye, but that is precisely what I do. It’s the Spanish lad standing with his bike, red cheeks glowing in the fresh morning. The quick shutter of eyelids as he sees someone else in the crowd. He calls out to this person he seems to know, making a hand into a fan that waves. The boy’s back in the race and the air is cold. I say something but it is just distorted air.

  Percy is talking and I’m not listening, and then I am and he’s saying, ‘Bring us back a bottle next time, mate. I know it’s early, but for the love of Christ.’ He’s facing in the direction of the mademoiselle from the café. She is laughing, letting André Leducq tell one of his jokes, letting him stand near with his arm about her waist so her bosom is against his chest. I like Leducq. He once said through Hubert that I reminded him of a duck, a plucked duck still swimming. I had just finished my lap at Marseille and was high as an eagle stretched out on the tips of its wings glaring down at the two of us. I laughed and he laughed, a ripe rip of sound that stirred those around us. Now I look back at the Spaniard and he too is watching the Frenchman, but he isn’t smiling. He has seen me, I realise, and he knows I am not laughing.

  I stand staring from under the view of the cathedral’s great panels of dark glass. All eyes on us, all cheers for our pluck as we get on our bikes to ride. I give glances to Percy, just to see if he notices how empty a lantern can be when you put out its light.

  It’s near Charleville that I first notice the oddity. The startled colours of Alcyon-Dunlop: four riders, three domestiques and the yellow jersey, Frantz. I can see it is him, even from 200 metres back, the shape of shoulders, the aspect of his form, the shine of yellow. Over 19 stages, plus the other races run, we come to recognise the way men ride. I am used to seeing this pack, this jersey in the middle of four or five men moving away from me, but now they are slowly coming closer. I am a magnet, I am riding well, but still, this is as unlikely as a creek rising in the heat of a drought. And there, out beyond them, is Opperman. I know his lonely shape better than any rider’s now.

  Four hours ago we’d departed Metz and entered the Ardennes behind Discuter who themselves were following on from Alcyon. I am yet to see the Spaniard or any of his team members – they too must have passed by this strange sight. At the exit of every corner I seem to be gaining ground. I suspect Frantz to be ill or injured, his teammates helping him along by making a gap in the air, a pocket within which he can ride without interference. The flu has wrecked many in the peloton, made good men and great riders grotesque with vomiting and fits of coughing; you see them hunched, faces screwed up, each weeping like a baby shoehorned into a stiff boot. I make an assumption that this has taken hold in Frantz. I desire to pounce.

  I force my pace running
beside a wide river I have not yet named. I straighten my angles and pierce the air. Then cobblestones. There is no comfort in the ride, pain that vibrates until you’re numb. Despite this, against this, I find rhythm. I’m a song, ragtime running through me.

  We hit the medieval haze of Mézières, its fortifications leaning towards us across the bridge, in its centre another looming cathedral, but with thanks we do not approach but angle to the right down towards what appear to be government buildings. We are deep within occupied territory now, this is the crossroads where the Americans came and fought, this is where the last battles were hammered. I know this: I was told last night how Mézières and Charleville combine at this river. Water and steel merge here and so too did the Germans and Yankees.

  Now I too am merging with them as they come closer. We clatter over the cobblestones towards the end and I feel them near my wheel.

  The river seems to be everywhere in the town, cutting back and forth, circling mounds of land and then under bridges old and older than I can say, a canal from what I can make out on my right. And here, here we slow. The rubble of some crushed building still apparent these ten years later means we slow more than we would normally for the next corner and the next corner after that. Bombardment marks out the shape of a town and leaves little else. But they stay, the towns. So too do the streets, their borders having been wiped clear, but they remain intact on maps kept in sacred rooms locked until a city must be redrawn on burnt land. All scrolls are sacred when all else is forgotten. We are riding slowly because it is hard to race at the site of broken things.

  A bridge once more and a marshal points right a few blocks along. I am racing again, hard into a breeze. Alcyon, pushing. The invisible mile, the shift as the distance becomes nerves, tendons and blood. Pain becomes a mantra, an index running through your body. Frantz pedalling at a curiously faster rate. There the small stadium; there voices call out and shimmer about us. We break into the structure and onto the track. I’m riding on the tail of Nicolas Frantz and I hear the sound they save for him. His gravity pulls the crowd around so all eyes and voices are concentrated on us, each breath is gauged to shout outwards, each iris glints and stares. Each eye looks and we are dragged forward in a sprint, our breathing focused on pumping oxygen into our blood and rushing it into our muscles. Louis de Lannoy sways outwards, blocking the inside running on the top circle and my hand comes off the handlebars and I shove at his hip and pull on his shirt and feel myself go round him, I don’t look at him but I am aware I sound like a bull as I shunt every bit of juice down into my limbs and feel the spin of my wheels. Louesse comes at me, weaving, so I am forced into the outside of the track, but I don’t take the outside of the track, I dip into the coming turn and into their pack, five of them, hungry and near the end. We make grunts, curious noises, sharp groans only we know the meaning of.