The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  He nodded slowly, waiting on his thought. ‘So, how was he disguising her? Is that something we do?’

  ‘When you start speaking, Harry, any of us – when you start speaking something happens. Something is blocked. Don’t you think? You start talking and the heart of the matter is rushed. You talk over it. It’s trying to speak, but you’re talking over it. Leaning in. It’s breath. As soon as you start to describe anything, it hides. It’s replaced by something, something that wasn’t there previously. I blamed him like this: I said all his talk, all his war talk and his intimacy with all his war talk, I said it was all to disguise the fact of her. He should have stayed silent, that’s what I said.’

  ‘That’s not a disguise. That’s life,’ Harry said. ‘The key fault of life.’

  ‘Fault. You say it’s a fault.’

  ‘Life’s faulty. But that’s not an excuse. I listened to you. I listened to your story. I listened as that woman drove and you spoke and you went on. I listened and I was, what? Revolted, that’s the word. You know that, mate? Revolted. Revulsion. That’s a word, if you want a word. At what point does it become okay to say such things? That kind of language. The talk of war, blood and how blood will out: it’s cheap, it’s penny a pound stuff, mate. Take it back and forget it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s titty pictures. A peep show.’

  ‘How do I take it back?’

  ‘Titties and leery faces. That’s what you sounded like. You don’t take it back. Mate, I shrug. I feel my shoulders shrugging. Get in a boat, get on the water, head home. You both killed her, if you want to know. If you want an answer. You both killed her. Go home.’

  And I am running on mere air. Celia had said my body would disappear. I would become the vapour through which others would ride, she said that. She was utterly right. There is little between my bones and the skin that houses them. I am the air and the water I put to my lips. I see birds squabbling in the earth. I taste the dust thrown up by living things. I’m riding away from her. Towards Thomas I ride and I ride away from her and whatever illness she has prescribed for me. I ride through long lines of fields and past gates, each endlessly repeated since the start. Pasture, animals, stock and trees. Over and over, everything green or rock.

  A car closes, a honk of horns. I swear in return, shout out. One leans from the window and stares down at me the entire length of the road until they are out of sight. I shout, ‘Fuckers!’ It’s a good word to shout, sounding out like a mis-struck nail.

  Then I ride in their wake. 10 minutes, 20. An empty road but for shadows of plane trees and oak. The physical weight of shouted words inside my head. In my mouth, in the place where things are made memory.

  ‘Give better answers,’ Marya had said.

  ‘Don’t believe everything you think,’ Harry had said.

  I fall for sentiments, not because they are true but because they seem true.

  The valley opens wider, though logic says it should contract. Hills distant and dim. The only shadows are under the trees and I feel my body lag. I rest under a tree whose roots dangle in the river where the waters part and rejoin so easily. All about me the pain draws away the ether effect and asserts itself. Pain deep against the bone.

  I gather Celia’s things together and prepare. I wash the syringe in water. The powder I boil in the spoon over a candle. The water bubbles and the powder dissolves and conjoins into a new liquid. It cools. I draw it into the syringe through the needle resting on a cotton swab torn from a pillowcase in another hotel room in another town in an era before this new time. The stand of trees is shaped as if in the reflection from doorknobs polished and round. There is a small amount of blood in the tube as I jack the plunger back. It swims a snake’s curling head before diffusing and sending the liquid to a light cherry. My teeth release and let go my belt strapped about my bicep. A taste of salty leather in my mouth. Quickly the blood dives back under my skin to the vein from which it came. Instantly, I diminish.

  The sound of water, of leaves and sky and air.

  I sleep. In my dream, cars rustle along a road made of paper, a chart thrown across a great table in the room full of maps deep in the chambers of a mountaintop fortress I dare to imagine in a granite so dense no one can state its age. I dream of faces about the table. Expressionless, concentrated. I see the shape of men’s faces pushing up from beneath the paper to make hillock and mountain in the cartography. Noses and foreheads and chins. I dream their mouths are lakes, their eyes pools of blue water populated by shark and whale. No yachts sail them for humanity hasn’t yet invented itself. I dream the places where people will congregate to make cities and civilisations, watch them come forth from the hands that appear at the verges where they try to tear the whole of the surface from the heavy oak table on which it sits. Bodies writhe, countries divide and the earth becomes filthy with the sweating limbs of fucking hills. Riders. Some are looking over the shoulders of the map room’s chiefs. Louvière is absent from the room. Of course he is. A man who was never there, not in the sense that he made any choice to be there in my dreams. In this room, it’s only me and Celia. She isn’t smiling for anyone. I brush hair away from her face and she displays the root of her corrupted temper. Her face unwilling to soften. How much of her amusement at my lies has transformed into anger? She’s younger, and she’s whispering. She tells me I must ride. I ask from what and she is yelling, her foot prodding me to rise or fall and I am up and riding once more through hanging branches and shadows and sun.

  Branches against my face and blood ripples on my skin. I’m riding hard. My head brimming with the blood of effort. I haven’t seen a car since I exchanged pleasantries with those men. I’ve seen a cart with a woman on the bench, a man walking beside the horse, the straps in his hand. Flies buzzing around the nag’s eyes and ears, pieces of leather which twitch and listen. I have seen a fisherman with his line in the water, the small ripples where it disappears on the surface. I’m riding and I can barely feel my legs. I’ve seen a boy, shirtless and singing to himself. Nobody recognises me, I am a rider in a valley.

  Here a river, once near a glacier: hear the way it all carries mountains to the sea.

  I am slowing for I have to climb the ridge rising above the valley. I have reached the point at which it narrows and the river becomes quick as it drives through two precipices of rock that were once a colossal boulder that tumbled from the mountains, dragged by glacier and placed here and split by time and water. I climb hundreds of feet. Soon the road evens and I ride above the rushing spew and it howls and pleads for the motion to stop and rest its head as it thrashes itself on the rocks. Water rises skyward. I feel it on my face, it is a face that needs the moisture and I shine momentarily. I catch flashes of yellow in my periphery as I chase tightening corners where this road has begun to wind. As if a dream has once more awakened and taken me to those fields where the sunflowers stare across a sea of themselves.

  I slip through shadows. Each a cool pool as I slip out of the sun. And as I rise out of a valley into a series of corners cut out of rock I think of the south where these nightmares began, a return to the south – but there are no moments to think because now they come at me. They have returned, an hour, 80, 90 minutes, they’ve returned. They circle around in the dust and ride alongside me. They swear, they spit at me. I do the same. If this is a race they want – I will spit, I will swear. And I stare, my top lip like a scar. I stand on my pedals and race. Soon their bumper is inches from my rear wheel. They tease it, bumping it, but I go on.

  And soon it’s the case that I am heading downhill, rapidly now, descending to the valley once more where fields of clover seem to glisten in this summer air. I pedal and get some speed but they are barely five yards from my rear wheel. I take the corners at speed, I take them so my knees barely miss the gravel as they come around and I’m in a slide I can barely control and I know a car cannot match this kind of madness because a car is not so intimately human. I hear its tyres gliding across the gravel
sending clouds to the sky and great handfuls of shingle into the valley as the machine threatens to murder its passengers, whatever madmen they be. I throw myself into corners on whichever side of the road summons me. A red Lagonda coming the other way stammers at the sight of me and seems to stall its eight pistons. My left pedal gouges the paint work and someone will be regretting the lure of this valley’s peaceful summons. I lose my pursuer as they pause to squeeze past the car with the shape of my skin almost impaled against its body. I sprint, but it’s not a sprint. I measure my speed by the blur on the side of the road, by the gasp in my lungs as I hurtle at the straight ahead. I search inside my top pocket for the phial as the road straightens. It is gone, vanished. I feel the bike slow as the pitch decreases until I am riding once more on the flat of the valley, the ancient boulders behind me, only the shallow rise of the river to the distant hills arching into a heavy blue sky where the morning clouds are slowly burning off, shrinking against the sun. My hands shake.

  They come.

  I try to imagine dodging, pulling the handlebars this way and that. It seems foolish and I look for other options in the rushes by the slow waters when the bang of the engine comes to my ears as they range up out of the hills behind me and plant a foot on the accelerator and tear more gravel from its purchase in the dust. I follow the road to the left as it circles a field where, if it were in the proximity of the city, it would surely be full of picnicking men and women eager for the sun. The car is merely feet away and I have not the nerve to try theirs as I believe they are happy to run me off the road. I head into the rough and over a patch of thick grass. I should be thrown from the bicycle, but it goes on and I find the bed of a creek dried and smooth. I glance and see their faces for the first time. I have nothing to tell me who they are, only fear. They shout things. I have no idea what language they are using for it is full of anger. One has a bottle and he attempts to throw it at me, or my bike, I can’t say which – though we are one and the same to them. It disappears into the grasses behind me.

  One of them shouts my name but I don’t believe he knows my name.

  Ahead a hundred yards the field diminishes and the road and river join once more. The car is ahead of me. Faces staring at me. A grove of trees, and I head into the grass away from the creek. I’m thrown from the ride, my feet catch in the toe clips and the machine topples with me. I feel for my limbs and I suspect one thing is broken, but I’m not sure where. It is the signals that have been sent to my head, they are rapid and dense and I don’t know what they mean. I throw the bike from my body, and stand. The car is slowing in the gravel and I see a door open. I think I see guns but perhaps not. I can’t say because I am running. I haven’t run at this speed for a long time, a rider’s legs don’t run, they ride, but now I am running and I head for the river and the dark tunnel of trees. The men are shouting. They each wear hats but discard them as they begin sprinting towards me. It’s my right arm. That’s the broken limb, the forearm. I pull it in close and hold it with my left as I try to sprint. I gallop in some strange rotation of arms and legs. Soon I find myself in the constricting light of the trees and I take a glance back behind me. They are coming closer. I look amongst them for her, for Celia, for surely she is there, surely this is her doing. I reach and stretch to see. I only see that one has a stick and I realise they aren’t armed with weapons that shoot and fire. I almost stop.

  Instead I run over old logs and they crack, a fox runs forth into the underbrush where it hides waiting for my passing. I shout. I swear because the arm’s broken bone is pushing through muscle and through the adrenaline thumping through my body with each fist of a heart beat that threatens to break ribs.

  ‘Look at me,’ I shout. ‘Look at me!’ I don’t have a reason to say these words but they come out. ‘Look at me!’ I’m running as hard as my legs let and I find myself in the shallows of the river where the water runs easy into the trees. I decide the water can take me. Take me like old memory flushed to the sea. I lunge into the rush and feel myself collapse onto my knees. The men at the shore. I push myself up and almost faint and fall into the water once more. I shout to myself and I’m up.

  One throws a stone. I look back at them. He is 30, 40 yards away. A man in a driver’s uniform, buttons picked out by light. The stone misses by some distance, making a wet clunking sound as it takes the water. I think to do the same but it’s my throwing arm which has been cracked and is now making my body shake as if it weren’t summer but the dark centre of a winter whose wind hacks at your body as if it were a woodsman’s tool thrown again and again at the trees until something snaps and timber splinters. I swear and feel the curse straighten my muscles. I run into the water and let it surround me, I think to float down river, float to the rocks below and somehow remove myself there and find help. But help from whom I don’t know. I look amongst them once more for the sight of her eyes, shaken, bloodshot. They must be from her, these men. From Discuter, from the hardest part of her mind she summoned these men to follow me here. The punishment, an inevitable recompense for my failure as a host for my brother, for Louvière and all this damaged history. I shout her name, just to hear her named. Nothing returns.

  I stumble and try to find depth in the river’s centre, but there is none, just rocks that crack on my tailbone. And then another sensation. It’s my head, something had cracked on my head. I put my hand up. I feel there and blood is in my hair. A small detonation in the water. The river splash and water rising in a strange way and then my shoulder. I look back at them. They are 15 yards away, their mouths are moving but I hear little because blood seems to have made its way into my ear. I stand but stagger. There are five of them and they are each in the motion of throwing a rock towards me or picking another from the riverbed. I look at their faces but not one pair of eyes I recognise. A rock catches my ear, tearing the cartilage. I put up an arm. It is my right arm, it falls at my side. I go down on one knee into the water and slip on the wet boulders. Another rock clacks into the back of my head, it stuns and I look back at them. My ears full of dull, muted sound. They stop and look, they see the blood now. Six eyes watching me, eight eyes. Ten eyes watching me. Two men standing still with stones in their hands, smooth rock and they seem to be weighing them as if someone is about to open their mouth, as if someone is about to open their mouth and finally say what they have been wanting to say since we arrived here, here at this river under an evaporating sky. I look, but she is nowhere. I look, and there’s only the silence of water, broken by stone.

  Author’s note

  While this novel is primarily a work of fiction, I have attempted to utilise historical data as much as possible, stepping outside or shifting the framework when need be. When it says it was raining, it was most probably raining. When the team are mown down by motor vehicles, they were indeed hit by cars or motorbikes. Where they place in the various stages, their times and so forth, are real. Historical records don’t always agree, hence I have used my imagination when information conflicts. Although the Belgians, Celia, Louvière, the Spaniard, the Discuter team, our narrator and their narratives are most definitely fictions, the other named characters (in the main) are based on real people running about in fictionalisations of – for the most part – actual events. Australians Hubert Opperman, Ernie Bainbridge, Percy Osborne and New Zealand’s Harry Watson were indeed the first English-speaking team to ride in the Tour. All the words they speak are from my mind, all voices fictions. However, for details about these men and the race itself I am indebted to numerous books, websites, documentaries and institutions.

  The Kennett Brothers’ biographies of Watson and O’Shea – Harry Watson: The Mile Eater by Jonathan Kennett, Bronwen Wall and Ian Gray, and Phil O’Shea: Wizard on Wheels by Jonathan Kennett and Bronwen Wall – were an essential starting point for this novel. The Unknown Tour de France by Les Woodland and The Yellow Jersey Companion to the Tour de France (edited by the same), Tour Climbs and A Race for Madmen by Chris Sidwells, Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s Le T
our and Ellis Bacon’s Mapping the Tour were vital for understanding the history of the race, its many heroes and anti-heroes, the geography and roads, its place in French society and its mythology. ANZACs on the Western Front (The Australian War Memorial Guide) by Peter Pedersen, Shattered Glory and Kiwi Air Power by Matthew Wright, Channel 4’s documentary series The First World War, Lyn MacDonald’s Somme and many other documents were vital to the construction of Celia’s, Thomas’s and Louvière’s narratives. In Europe by Gert Mak provided context, faces and the tale of the eagle in the Pyrenees. Leo McKern’s 1976 narration of the documentary Somme supplied a sense of the occasion for when the characters visited the battlefield. Australian newspaper archive Trove and the National Library of Australia’s collections were extremely useful in my quest to learn more about the riders themselves; indeed so were the unnamed contributors to amateur websites around the world.

  Immense thanks to Andy Kifer, Rebecca Gardener and Will Roberts at The Gernert Company; Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein; Paul Baggaley, Nuzha Nuseibeh and Kate Green at Picador UK; Fergus Barrowman, Ashleigh Young and Kirsten McDougall at VUP in NZ; Damien Wilkins at IIML; my MA class; Carl Shuker for encouragement, support, advice and attitude; my family, Simon (for some early, blunt advice), Adi, Anna, Rosalyn, Francie, Henry and Jim; my readers Cate Palmer, Hannah Uprichard, Amy Head, Patrick Fitzsimons, Laura Southgate and Hamish Clayton. I must also thank Hamish for all the priceless conversations, ideas, advice and advocacy – everything appreciated. Final gratitude is reserved for Laura. You pored through, edited, read the thing aloud when I wasn’t able, made suggestions, laughed, shook your head, and let me know when I got it right. This is for you.