‘That’s not an option,’ Percy says. ‘Look at Ernie here. He’s desperate to get back in but he’s too old. We won’t let him in if he begs.’
I look at Harry and put my hand on the table towards him. I fall silent. I feel the table shape and move, my eyes unable to make contact with its surface and focus.
‘How?’ I hear Percy ask. ‘Or if not how, why?’
‘I’m not well. I have become unwell. Everything. I have become unwell.’
‘How’s that?’ Percy asks. ‘You ride fitter than me. I’m still here. You’re what – some nancy now?’
‘Let him be,’ Harry put in on my side. He doesn’t look at me, only at Hubert.
‘Something is going to happen,’ I say. ‘Something –’
‘Tell us,’ Percy says. ‘It’s just 200 miles for God’s sake. Tell us.’
‘Something is going to happen and I have to leave.’
‘We ride 10,000 miles and then there’s just 200 left and you make a decision that it’s no longer your cup of tea. Is that it? No longer your cuppa? Jesus weeping shit.’
I have nothing to say. For once in my life there is nothing. Harry looks at me. I feel my mouth open. The thing I have to say sits in my chest, reedy, waiting for a thin breath to ride to the surface. The Spaniard and the rough certainty that it is Celia’s doing, that she planned for those maddened Walloon riders to take their fists and make his body soft and bled. Her will. That it is her will for my eyes to shrink and blister before the sun as if their lids have been removed with a butcher’s fine blade. My fear is that the cost of saying your fears out loud is that speech makes them true. God, keep me quiet. And I keep calm. I remain quiet until I say: ‘I have to be nobody. For a day. A week. I have to be nobody. Ordinary. Some bloke. A few days. I’ll get drunk and convince myself I was never here. For a few days.’
‘Why?’ Percy asks.
‘If he has to leave,’ Harry says.
‘Where’s he gunna go? This is madness. A kinda dog lunacy.’
‘He’s going,’ Harry says. ‘Everyone has the right to be mad. To go mad. To tend to madness.’ He laughs, cocks his arm and drinks.
‘I can’t feel my arm,’ I say. ‘I’m not mad. There is nothing in my arm.’ I find myself once more looking at Oppy, trying to see what he might understand about this. But he is silent and I am harangued by Percy once more. I look through the noise of his voice and see Hubert’s mouth move and slowly his voice comes out. He speaks and I notice the way he can’t make eye contact. He’s facing towards me but his pupils are pointing like pins at the far wall of the tavern where paintings of dells and cottages look old, older than they likely are. ‘There’s no such thing as ordinary,’ he says. ‘That’s the fact you learn. What we learn. There’s no such thing.’ He doesn’t seem to take any pleasure from informing me of this. I suddenly admire him deeply. And not for the fact he has pointed out my lack of awareness, nor for the lack of pleasure he seems to get from the moment, rather I’m fond of the fact he knows it is important not to let me leave the café thinking ordinary men even exist. I watch him and wait until his eyes slowly give in and look, because they must look, eventually.
And then Percy says, once all has been eaten, all has been said: ‘Ah, yer a fucker and a fool. Put him out on the street. Put him out with the beggars.’
31
I collect my clothes together into the rucksack I rescued from Bruce Small’s vehicle. I cram in what I can and pause in front of the window as Harry moves about the room. The curtains flutter, a breeze in the morning sun coming from the North Sea to help all on the road to Paris. The crowds are gathering, the slow meander to farewell the remains of the race. 42 riders where once there were 162. Such is the toll.
Thousands will cram into the streets to watch my adversaries pass, they will cry, as they have in each town we have gatecrashed with our oily music, then abandoned with the smell of us deep in the clothes of those we kissed, or held, or fucked. Men with pot bellies who run after Oppy and shout his name. Women who want Frantz. Men who want Frantz, who want proximity and something they can’t name. The three of our team who remain will ride to the end. Flowers will be thrown in front of tyres. Then, in the last hours before Paris, the sky will crack and the rains will come. Such things. I won’t be among them.
Opperman remains in 17th place, Harry 28th. Me, I don’t know, and nor does it matter. I will not be counted, just as Ernie will not be counted. I watch Harry organise himself. In the end he is standing by the door.
‘You ready to leave?’ I ask.
‘This is the end,’ he says.
‘The end. Things of the end.’
‘The things we say at the end,’ he says. ‘You heading back north? Is that your plan? Is that the idea?’
‘Do you want me to say something?’ I ask. We remain still, the beat of the room counting off until the next man speaks. Sounds from the exterior intrude, a cart running over the cobblestones, his horse’s shoes making such a clutter but then is gone. Then a man laughing on the street. A dull dumb laughter that reaches up, that extends our silence so we find ourselves thinking things we don’t wish to think. The dullard stops and I say about the pain in my neck, ‘My arm is gone. My grip. I can hardly hold the handlebars. Not to race.’
‘This is the end,’ he says. ‘Say what you want to say.’
‘What do you want?’
‘You have no troubles with speaking. It’s not one of your problems; it’s not a struggle for you to speak your mind, no matter the lunacy. Anything.’ The man in the street coughs and laughs. A poor laugh, the laugh of a man without capacity, such is the dull, repetitive nature of his work. ‘Listen. I don’t care who you need to be to finish this. Just finish it.’
‘Lunacy? That’s a word.’
‘I’m having a go at you. I just need you to finish. Next I’m going to ask whose idea it was to quit. That woman? Her idea? Then I’m gunna ask if you’ve thought this through. I’m not going to expect answers. I just want you to contemplate what if any answers you have, what they might mean. That’s it. And I’m gunna watch you do it, watch you try to say one thing without falling into a pit of some mindless – down some path, on and on. I’m gunna watch you try to close the gap.’
I watch him, a long waiting stare. His eyes switch from my mouth to the window to the basin where my razor sits in foam, looking for time, for an excuse to leave because time has run out. Then the laughter again, a kind of crude interruption, the kind you’d expect from a dog eager for your attention, even if that attention amounted to the back of your fist against its rump. I spit into my hand. ‘One thing?’
‘One thing,’ he says and he looks tired, too tired for the day’s ride to Paris. But I know he will do it, I know how far he can ride if he has to. How many more miles he could ride. How many more countries he could cross. ‘I am so – God. What? I am so near nothing. I’m skin and bone and tiredness. I want you to tell me one thing. I want you to say how deep it goes, how deep tiredness goes. All this. How far it reaches in. That would be useful. To me it would be useful. Let’s end on that. If you can tell me that, if you can explain that, you might be of some use to me. But right now, right now, you’re an empty rag.’ He sniffs, drags mucus off the back of his throat, the early morning mix of phlegm and dust, the stuff he has lugged with him since Paris and before. He squints at the window. The man is still laughing, a cackle full of tripe and spit. Harry flinches, the sum of energy he is willing to offer against the annoyance. ‘Shut up,’ he whispers.
I shake my head. I shake it and turn at the window. I feel Harry’s stare against my neck, the edge of it: a rod heated and lying down across my skin. I push the window so a brace of air hits and I see the man laughing. I see him and I shout. My voice breaks, it cracks and echoes off the walls and buildings up and down the street. A hard crack of noise like a skidded horse hoof, not human, not speech. Ten, twenty people look up: all bend their necks trying to spot from where the noise could have come, searching t
he sky for something other than me.
There is cloud rotating slowly above our heads, white bulbs that will burn off as the day becomes hot, slowly reducing down as separate air pressures shift skyloads of air to other parts of the continent. I ride east. I ride into the wake of those who’ve come before, namely myself and others. Despite my neck the bike moves freely without the weight of the race, though I can’t tell you what speed I manage as I break from the coast and stream beside a river in a shallow valley. The stiller the body the better one’s momentum. I am not in a sprint. I am gliding north-east, uncertain of the true direction I should be taking, I am not racing. And I am not following yesterday’s roads. I am riding inland for a new sense of this country. I am in no peloton, nor is time kept for me. I ride through the long shadows of tall leaning trees who watch the river flow in the opposite direction. It’s a gradual rise, an eventual gain of altitude, no more than a few feet every 50 metres. Kilometres seem to disappear.
I glide, though my legs rush beneath me. I find there are bananas in my backpack and I eat them and they feel like gathered silk melting in my mouth. I count the gaps between the trees. Each one, I believe, is 10 metres from the next. 10 is 100 metres. 100 is 1,000. A kilometre. One more kilometre further away from Celia. One more kilometre she would have to travel to find me.
I find myself running over what I told Harry as he stood at the door and the man below finally drifted away, taking his laughter and making it smaller and smaller till it was only the two of us watching the space outside the window. Harry and everything I owe him. I told him I would go north to where my brother went down, where he lay. I told him I had no choice, that I had to see. I did not speak about Celia, he did not read fear in me. He wanted to know about tiredness. As if on our return from the Somme I had learned something I hadn’t known previously.
‘The night before she died, my sister, she sat up in bed,’ I told him. ‘Perhaps for the first time. I’m not certain, it was two in the morning and she sat up and I watched her yawn and stretch muscles that had been dormant for the week of her fever. She sat up and her face, it was sagged with slowness. With tiredness. If you want to know about tiredness, her face was dragged down by its full weight. She had no expression. A face without expression hangs off your bones until something comes to wake it. I asked her if she had anything she wanted to eat. It was the first thing that popped into my head, food. I asked if she’d like a cuppa. A sweet cup of tea with creamy milk straight out of the cow. She took a long time to say anything, to wake up out of it all. She stretched her arms over her head. She did this several times. Her voice was weak, but she asked for a cuppa. I brought it to her. She asked for food, for a sandwich of honey and butter. I went to the kitchen and brought it back for her. Thick white bread I cut with a big knife and I watched her eat, watched her face become Marya’s face. We were there for an hour. Watching her chew, watching the tiredness leave. I asked her where she went. She chewed and eventually she started nodding. “I went somewhere white,” she said. “Somewhere where I wasn’t expecting to leave. But what choices do we have, dear brother? What are they?” She told me she went deep, right into the pit of tiredness, she said she went so close to exhaustion she couldn’t see how to wake. It was no place but everywhere. “It’s still here,” she told me. “It is still inside me, but look, my arms move. Just, but they move. My toes move. How perfect my toes. I can’t tell you,” she said. “I can’t tell you where it lives, what it’s made out of. I can’t say much except that it is here. Tiredness: it’s still here.”
‘So I asked her how I could help it go. She just looked at me and said, “What makes you think I want it to go?” I laughed until I realised I was shaking the bed and she put her hand out and I took her hand and held it. I then asked what she wanted to do. She raised her eyebrows at me and nodded. “The mountain,” she said slowly. “Show me the mountain.”’
Harry interrupted. He leaned against the doorframe. ‘What did you do?’
‘I put blankets around her and picked her up as if she were a rug and carried her out to the porch. I put her on the love seat and asked if she could see it. It was four by then, so dawn was coming. She said she couldn’t. She told me to drive her, so I drove her. We drove into hills, how the undulations before the road went up in a steady climb so we were on the rise on the volcano. We wound through native forest, heavy forest. We went as high as the road could take us. She asked what we’d look like from below. I told her we looked like a car. A car and some idiots in the morning. And then, Harry, she asked that I have better answers; she asked that I give better answers to her questions. So I go looking for better answers.’
‘That’s fair,’ Harry said. ‘It’s a fair request.’
I nodded. The thing was I wish I’d had Percy’s imagination, then; I wish I’d known to say how we looked like lanterns in the hanging night. Instead I was silent as if watching her in the dawn, the dawn and the sounds we make when shown the dawn.
‘We were coming off the hill,’ I said. ‘Marya and I. I was being careful. The lights of the car were weak, barely up to pushing back the darkness, let alone showing us the way. So I was being careful. But have you ever driven one of those cars? Model T? They have two speeds: slow and fast. Little in between. A jerk of acceleration, which is terrifying, or those brakes that slammed you into the windscreen. We were coming off the hill. We weren’t high up. The road didn’t go very far, but I’d taken it to the end where it was really just a track. But I went up and now I was coming down again. Marya hadn’t said a lot. She was pretty quiet the whole journey. Just made the appropriate sounds at the sight of the sun rising. The colours and everything. And I was coming off the mountain and she was very quiet. Quieter than before. I couldn’t hear her breathing, not with the sound of the engine. But I couldn’t sense her breathing. It was cold, colder than it was when we set out. I don’t know how, but it was colder. I started to panic. Firstly I said her name. I said her name over a few times and I heard nothing. So I started to drive faster. I started putting that machine into corners at speed. And that wasn’t pleasant. It was okay doing that when it was just me: I loved the exhilaration of driving like that on my own. You know that, right? You love speed as much I do. But with a passenger I became uncertain. And a passenger. Was she still a passenger? That was what I didn’t know. I was saying her name over and over. I should have stopped. I should have stopped and felt her, put a hand on her, but I was terrified that I would feel cold skin. Terrified I would only touch wintry skin. So I went quicker, trying to get her back, back to the house where someone else would be able to tell me if she were cold or not. Whether she was still breathing. I hit the corners hard and accelerated out of them, wheels spinning in the mud and dragging us through at speed. Speed is a thing, Harry. It’s malleable, you know? Hard, like rubber or cork. I thought speed would wake her up. I thought speed made things real and quick. Jesus.
‘And then a fence, Harry. I hit a fence. I hit it. Everything slowed and I hit it at such speed. Everything slowed. Everything became easy, my movements on the wheel, my feet, my hands on the controls, my vision. I could see everything. I could feel the light on the horizon rising, I could see a cow in the paddock look up from the grass, I could see the flies rise off the palings where a lamb’s hide was hung, I could see my sister lurch this way and that as I sought control. The car hit. I was in control of everything, every mite that was in the air, everything, every muscle in my body and the movement of the car and the way my sister lurched. I was in control of everything until we hit. The fence exploded over us and the car went on its side. A blur of white and the palings flew over us and we rolled and my sister was thrown up and over the seats so, as the car righted itself, she was sitting in the rear seat, slowly rocking as the momentum of the ride ran through her until it stopped and she stopped and everything stopped.’
And I told Harry, I told him that I didn’t know how many minutes she lasted after the car hit the fence. I explained how I’d flipped it, tor
n the roof off and how we sat in the machine rocking on its suspension. Her neck was bent all out of shape, eyes looking at me in a strange way. I told him that I sat there for an hour, half an hour, and I touched her cheek finally before trying the engine and felt it kick back in, how we rode back to the house. She was certainly cold by the time I got her there. Despite the warming morning she was cold and no longer capable of shivering. We were like that for how many hours. The two of our bodies getting colder. And then sun heating the farmland and the air and the bonnet of the car and then me getting warmer and her getting colder. There was no coming back from that.
And I told Harry I didn’t know what was said in the afterwards, what words came from what mouths. At least not until I was with Thomas at the river. ‘But I know one thing,’ I said. ‘I know that as my father took her from the car, carried her to the house in all those blankets, that it was about then that I started to hate, that it was about then my anger found a measure by which to guide itself.’
Harry nodded then, and he took up his bag and held it against his chest and stood paused.
‘So I blamed Thomas for that. I blamed him for her. Of all things, I blamed him for her, for trying to disguise the fact of her. That she died and it was his fault. I sat in that car and I looked at her and knew she was gone and I blamed him. I said that, years later. I said it and he hit me. He took out my tooth. And I went at him. I went at him with fast hands. Jesus. He clobbered me and stood over me and he said I was the one who drove her into a fence and I yelled at him. I blamed him for whispering to her in the hall. Talking to her in the hall. He stood beside her and whispered whatever he whispered into her ear and whatever else. Whatever else was in his breath. Passing that thing on. Then we went at it again. It never stops.’
‘Never does.’
‘But the thing is, Harry. The thing is. I can’t remember. I can’t remember the thing I should remember. I can’t tell you what it was like when she died. I can’t say. It’s not there. I try to remember and all I see is the mountain and the signs of us driving upwards. That’s all. Mountain and light.’
The Invisible Mile Page 26