The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘You filth, you fucking come on,’ I say to no one. I feel pornography in my voice, a shout of base terms. ‘Fucken, fucken, fucken,’ like a bad train. Elbows slam at my kidneys and the roar is everywhere, it does not stop. Flags.

  Frantz shouts. ‘Look at me. Look at my bike.’ I thrust a hand backwards, once, twice into de Lannoy’s mouth and I momentarily feel the hard white of his teeth and the flesh of his gums. ‘Fuckers,’ I shout. I feel a fingernail against my eyeball and someone grabs at me. I close my eyes. I close my eyes and I don’t care how hard I have to ride. I turn and spit and see the glob land in Louesse’s ear and I note how he winces and I am standing on my pedals and Frantz is at my side. ‘Ride, you fucker,’ I say. The crowd standing, the entire expanse of people standing, the ebbing rumble of their voice that stands too, as if summoned by some drunk priest to their feet. Flags. Australian flags. The sound of how many thousand, the way they hear the man next to them, the way breath is voice and the way it cracks the air when you hit the line and my wheel is in front of a man who can’t be beaten.

  We coast together, Frantz and I, we let the momentum of the sprint flow us back around the track. To brake would be to dismiss the effort that took us here. We let gravity and the air in our faces slow us. Our speed slowly unwinding, the din sustained on a plateau, its pitch somehow deeper. Australian flags, hundreds of them. I wave as Hubert must have a few minutes earlier. My name, my city: these are shouted at me and I laugh and wave and nod. Frantz claps my back and I feel at ease to smile for him. I turn and I look. I finally see, I see what he wants me to see and I suddenly know what he was pointing at and I hear the crowd burst and rain clapping hands upon us and the way it slowly falls away and the way time slows as they say it slows and the way the stomach goes empty, the way the mind seems empty and I believe I know the hollow, the pit men go to when they are utterly alone.

  Finally he dismounts and I too step from my machine and I go to him and stand beside him. We both look at his bike, it is not an Alcyon bike. It is not a man’s bike. It seems half-sized, though it’s not. It is a woman’s bike with small cogs made for the village, its handlebars a simple set for riding upright, its seat sprung for comfort and its frame angled so a lady might not undo her honour as she dismounts. A hollow there, and a hollow in my body and I know not how to fill it until I remember to breathe and what the man in Colombo had said. Breathe, be mindful of breathing.

  I stammer my name at control and sign after a long pause thinking what else I could do with my time. All this time I have wasted turning muscle into air, turning time itself into speed, turning it into long dreams and prayers to no one but myself and the dead. The gap I closed merely an illusion of distance passed. Perhaps I could holiday now, perhaps in the places I have passed but not been able to describe. Provence and Nice la Belle and Mouton, Bordeaux I have barely mentioned. Places I promised Marya in the hours before she went. Perhaps England, perhaps home on a trip through to North Africa. I sign and turn and the Spanish boy leans behind me. He reaches for my hand at my side and I wince, I squeeze one eye shut and realise I have no words for him. I breathe hard through the back of my sinuses and my mouth fills with mucus. The people around me keep smiling though they should really turn away.

  That night I walk in the town. The bridges across the river double back and back again before heading off into the Ardennes. I walk in what I believe to be circles as I keep crossing a bridge. I convince myself I am lost, but I’m not. I convince myself that I will soon walk into a café and look someone in the eye and they will stab me and I will turn and fall out the door and I’ll cry out, arms flailing, and someone will come to me and I will not have to race anymore. But I am not lost and there is no man waiting with a knife, no man waiting anywhere. I walk the site of the old town hall which is a field of rocks and masonry. I’m not sure what I am looking for, perhaps the idea of the building. I was told what used to be here, how impressive it was, but now is wasteland. I pick up a piece of rock and look close and see part of the edge of a letter. I rub it clean and put it in my pocket.

  He hit the level crossing at pace did Frantz, snapped his frame. East of Longuyon is where he went down. Things happened quickly. Arguments with his support, with management, with marshals. In the end he saw a woman with a bicycle and persuaded her to give him the machine with the promise of money. The bastard rode the last hundred kilometres, two-thirds of the stage, on this undersized bicycle. His lead dropped by 30 minutes, but he is still leading the race. I barely beat him in the sprint.

  I find myself welcomed back into old thoughts, old events: the day my brother knocked my tooth out on the banks of a river flowing out to the sea. The day of the Classic out of Timaru. I recall how I was caught by the wind as I struggled north towards Christchurch and the aerodrome. Somehow I found it easier riding into the face of the gale. I was able to find an even pace that I suspected others would struggle to match. But then the bridge and the sight of metal raging towards us.

  The bridge was a dual apparatus for both rail and road. Cars, horses and trains shared the one lane. And so it was that it served us on our two wheels racing north in the heated wind. The truck that came at us was headed for a local farm, coming from another such station just a little further north. The race officials hadn’t a chance to see it or halt it, nor warn it of our presence, nor had they the chance to tell us of its approach. It came down upon us. Riders in front leapt from their machines as they hit the bridge. They dived into the shallow river and their bikes were crushed. The noise, the rupture of metal. I veered off into the gravel at the river’s side barely in time before the truck took me into its radiator and swallowed me and spat me like a pip. Goats who had fallen from the truck and landed only moments before I’d come off the bank writhed in the grass. I heard no noise. I saw blood, I saw bone and the way it went through their hides. They were newly shorn. They moved in a slow, slow animation, as if something had grabbed time by the scruff of its neck and yanked it backwards. Everything slowed, time winding down. I felt the air become thick and my body become light. I could make out extraordinary detail in the air beside me, the mites of dust, the insects which fought their way through such air. Everything about me seemed simultaneous. Everything seemed linked to a time in the future. I veered and shut my eyes so the goats stopped bleeding for a moment and leant my bike so I passed into the river’s bed beside the rush of its real waters and rode until I came to a narrow patch. I jumped from my seat and ran into the stream with my bike over my head. I hardly noticed the torrent, I found a path made by stock and went across the breadth of the waterway until I was back on the other side and I rode on at a deadly pace, my body weightless, my head clear like the chime of a bell undiminishing.

  My pace remained solid and consistent. As riders went behind me, I realised I had been counting. That all the riders who had overtaken me in the early parts of the race – O’Shea, McNamara, Gerry Aintree, the dozen or so scratch riders – fewer than eight remained. I had overtaken them once more, swallowed them up. I found myself in a zone of strange gratitude for something. It wasn’t possible that I was this fast, but I suddenly, unexpectedly, was.

  The whole way I spoke, the whole way I mumbled out loud to my sister. I mumbled her name over and over. Inch by inch, syllable by syllable I said her name. It raced with me out of that strange blue air as if she was going to come and walk alongside me. When everything went still, as it all slowed down, as those poor animals broke themselves on the rocks, all memory seemed present and ever ready.

  And I try to remember that now: the detail, the way all slowed and all became light and power. I try to recall and feel I need another voice to explain it to me, another voice to remember for me. I think this because the only way I can imagine ever winning this race, ever placing higher than a loser battling against a champion on a borrowed machine is through the memory of another. Another in another time recalling this time; this time ever present in my time.

  At the hotel Harry is on his bed a
nd I tell him Ernie might return to the race. He doesn’t say anything. He shakes his head.

  ‘What do you think about that?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m thinking we should sleep.’

  ‘I’m going to find Louvière and tell him to join our team. We’ll be a force.’

  ‘Invalids and old men,’ he says, barely audible.

  ‘After Paris they’re going to be handing out a pension,’ I say. ‘You won’t have to worry about your wife and kids. Everything is in hand.’

  He laughs, but it is a laugh without purpose unless its purpose is to shut me up. There are souls I can’t resent, can’t despise, no matter how much I love them. An hour later it is dark and I lift him off the bed. I tell him he needs to come with me. That he needs to see what we are going to see.

  Part 3

  27

  Hours before dawn. We drive. On the cobblestones the tyres struggle for grip. We skid and the vehicle goes looking for traction and resists our slide. Celia handles the wheel. Farmland, villages and the smell of animals. The threat of being lost under the dark sky and the faith I put in her memory to get us there and return us before we ride out. This is the way we move westward, slipping, gripping, speeding.

  I lie back staring at the stars between the clouds wrestling with one another for space in the strata. She speaks and I listen and sometimes I respond. Her usual soft voice replaced with a shout against the wind. A nervousness: despite never having exhibited nerves in my company, she is now nervous. She admits it: ‘Some things are certain to make you edgy,’ she says. She has to shout over the ruinous sound of the Citroën’s engine. Her accent becomes stronger, forced out. ‘I watch kids get on the tram and I get nervous for something. They shout and sing and the way they seem so certain. Which is probably it, certainty. I am fearful around certainty. Isn’t that the thing about childhood, certainty? Adulthood is one long comedown from utter faith. We’re always trying to get it back, somehow get it back. Search out for fates in odd places, but no. Poof, it is gone.’

  ‘This makes you angry?’

  ‘Nothing makes me angry. I just am. It’s the French way.’

  ‘You’re not French, Celia.’

  ‘No matter,’ she says and she doesn’t pause to laugh. ‘You say the Spanish boy, that he has rejoined the race.’

  ‘Did you see him? He’s quite refreshed.’

  ‘And that is upsetting. I find it upsetting. I don’t race. I have no idea what this is like. But I find it upsetting.’

  ‘If you’re out. Plain and simple, you are out.’

  ‘So that makes me angry,’ she says. She thumps the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. It seems to shudder on longer than expected and she grasps it as if the car were out of control. ‘There should be a rule. One rule. Just one. Either you’re in or you’re out. Fair? Yes?’ She looks at me for agreement; she finishes her smile with a scowl. I have nothing in the way of argument, so I nod. ‘He deserves a spanking. If men like Louvière. If he can’t ride – well, your Spaniard deserves a spanking.’

  We have been driving for an hour, and now she drives hard with this thought tapping away in her mind. She has barely stopped talking. Unusual for her to go on like this, but it doesn’t seem out of place. Which is precisely the oddity I accused my brother of beside the Waimakariri those years ago. I accused him of talking. What a thing. He had always been sullen before Marya went, always unwilling to share before the war. But after it all, after we buried her he became something else. He slowly began to talk and gesticulate, he became easy with those around him. Perhaps after his marriage, perhaps then he had started to talk, perhaps he eased into it. None of it is easy to grasp: the dates, times, the moments when he moved from one person into another. But it happened and it was only after our night in Fox that I began to notice. He learnt to speak comfortably and without end. At the river I used the word ‘normal’. I said: ‘You talk. You talk and you sound, you sound out. I don’t know. People talk. People say things and I think they’re trying to make things, they’re normalising. That’s what I’m saying. People repeat things, over and over and, and you make incredible things orderly, ordinary. Say nothing. When you say nothing and it doesn’t feel so simple. None of it is simple. None of it.’ And such was his response. Such was his response I bled and staggered forth and swung my own fists like a rag doll held in the fist of a fool. Now Celia speaks and I wonder why I don’t feel the same urge to sacrifice my adoration by asking her to be quiet. Especially with the thought of her and Louvière walking together through Belgium. That he makes the ‘we’ in her narrative. There is a truth hidden in there somewhere. I tune back into her, looking at her face then back at the approaching land. Her voice fading in and out with the hit of engine and wind.

  ‘There was a time when I was a teacher,’ she is saying. ‘You know this? I taught in a public school, young women. I taught mathematics and history. My résumé is impressive if you want me to list it. The years were part horror and part joy. You know that too by now, what I have told you. It is possible, and I think I proved it, to earn the love of girls of that age, believe it or not. When I was 15, 16, 17, I believed love was some cruel pledge, that it was something to prod us into adulthood, that threatened thing at the end of those years. That thing at the end of certainty. I went looking for men to prove me wrong, I suppose, do you know that, that I did that? To wrong me, just so I could point at them and laugh. I wanted to stand over them, but it didn’t end well for me. I was at university when I met Louvière. A group of us were travelling through the south by train and boat.’

  Harry murmurs from the back seat, a blanket pulled up to his neck, and what rank sleep he must be having. I lean back and pat his leg. I turn back to Celia, I watch her, her mouth, her eyes. I think of her standing at the window in Nice, her body and gestures, the way they combined so completely to create an impression of an adult so distant from her childhood that there had to have been something which tore those worlds apart. I think of the desperate need we have to be other people, to become them so to become ourselves.

  ‘And these girls I taught,’ she says. ‘I was so afraid for them, that the things I taught them, that they would leave and they’d have hearts and bodies and minds full of facts for the mechanics of the world, for the map of its construction, a manual of some kind, a book, I guess, for its operations. And I would cry for the only real fact that I could tell them: none of it matched up. The futility of all that precision I had taught hundreds of girls to keep keen, all it equated to was a broken heart for the true reality of things. That was all they’d find and I’d cry about it.’

  ‘He was the source of your broken heart?’

  ‘Louvière?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says and taps the steering wheel as if summoning a thought. ‘But I am lying. What I am saying is an old lie. I now think of all the things I taught, all of it, how they match the world perfectly. Everything about it is as beautiful as the world. Now I resent the lost tears.’ She made a noise, a half-laugh. ‘Huh. Maybe I do, I’m not sure. But knowledge, it is as beautiful as the world.’ I touch her arm leading to the steering wheel, she glances at me, a smile full of a laughter she hadn’t quite let out and I smile back at her. I manage to get myself into a position to glance back at Harry and wonder if in his half-hearing state he is able to process any of her words into sense, into memory and comprehension. In each moment she contradicts the last – in each moment she seems to come closer to the whole every person promises when they start to speak. He looks almost dead as his form bounces with the road.

  ‘And what a thing, beauty,’ she says. ‘What a thing it is. You know what it is? You want to know? This is what it is, it’s the rearrangement of the world, of the energies of the world, of loves and hopes, all these things, into another new and unthought-of –’ she stops, paused in effort to recall what she believes she has previously defined. ‘Energy. An energy one hasn’t before comprehended or allowed for. That’s what I thought, and
now I think it again. That’s beauty, if you want to know. A new bloom for old roses.’

  I slump into my seat and I struggle to move for the next few minutes. She talks on. Part of it I hear, the rest drifts past. Everything wet as dew touches down. I dream on and off. Celia accelerates down a long, narrow straight. The darkness curves away from the headlamps’ beam. Fences blur and night animals scurry and time has its face torn from all clocks. She is taking us west, deep into the downlands of Picardy.

  ‘We became friends 14 years ago in Aix-en-Provence,’ she says. ‘Louvière. François and I. It took a month and then we were in love. Simple. We went north together to Belgium where I was due to begin teaching.’

  ‘Love.’

  ‘But he is married. He has been married since 1910. He was 19, that was when he moved to Luchon. To be with her. He came back from the war quite surprised to find he was still married. She is five years younger, 15 when they married, can you imagine? And he comes back from the war and she is used to being alone. She is used to being with her family, who she left only for a few months anyway. Going back to them, it seemed to her, was going back home and there was never going to be any other home. But he came home and that was their life. He started cycling, serious cycling in the mountains. You’ve seen the mountains, you know what they are. I met him during the Spring of ’14. I met him again six years later and on and on. It goes on.’