We Begin Our Ascent

by Joe Mungo Reed

  I had been ready to overstate myself, to humor those attending to us, but I did not need to. I remember holding him and feeling scared by how much I wanted to give him, as if he were a hole hundreds of miles deep that I must somehow fill by hand.

  I called Rafael three days after we had returned home to catch up on the team meeting. I told him B had been born, that all had gone well. “Did you ride that day?” he said.

  “What?” I said. “No. My boy was being born.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Just know you’ll be racing men who would have.”

  * *

  There is something about our injections that makes us lonesome, as if we fear our association after the event should make our activities suspicious, as if our contemplation of what we have done might resonate between us, become detectable in the air. Fabrice and Tsutomo retreat to their beds. I sit down in the lobby of the hotel, reading a newspaper, watching people coming and going, keeping an eye on a cat that parades through the flowerbeds outside the front of the hotel. I go to the café and drink a mint tea. The sun sets. I pad back along hotel corridors when it is finally dark.

  In the room, Tsutomo is already asleep. I lie on the bed. The curtains are slightly open and light leaks from a streetlight outside. My eyes adjust slowly to the gloom. There is a small piece of string hanging from a tack pushed into the ceiling. Something was hung from it once, I think: a balloon, likely. Someone celebrated an event of consequence in this little hotel room.

  From his bed, Tsutomo makes a strangled cough. Covers rustle. He turns, seeming not to wake fully. I am restless. I go into the cramped bathroom. I decide that I will have a bath in the small plastic tub. I set the water running and begin unwrapping the tiny soaps from their hotel-branded packaging. I squeeze a couple of the mini tubes of shampoo into the water, hoping to make bubbles. This is my life on tour, this hotel life, furnished with small things intended for single uses. There are those who like the hotel rooms—the neatness, the fresh sheets and towels—and those who do not, who still miss home. Rafael and Fabrice are towel people and always will be. I have found a comfort in the regularity, the frictionlessness of these days. Yet I have also begun to identify a sadness in them, gained a guilty sense that I should not be so easily pleased.

  Chapter 6

  I wake and put on my tracksuit in the dim room. Tsutomo is gone. I slept for hours without dreaming.

  Liz and I joke that races are where I go to rest. There is no wailing child to disturb me, only the smallest sound of Tsutomo’s breathing, the tiny creaks of his bed frame as he shifts in his sleep.

  We read the books about infant sleep patterns. They are piled at home in the living room, torn strips of paper marking pertinent pages. We decided on a CIO method of helping B sleep. “Cry it out” is what the initials stand for. When he first wakes, we comfort him after five minutes of crying. If he wakes again, we go to him after ten minutes, then fifteen after that. The idea is that he should learn to sleep alone. There is some flexibility in the theory. We worked together to choose those precise numbers. We made endless cups of tea and talked about it. We read blogs. There was so much literature, and yet there was not consensus. When B arrived, though, in those first months he never seemed to stop crying. When we tried to put our plan into practice, it was impossible. We wondered whether it was because we hadn’t been more consistent or whether our assumptions were wrong. We read more. We did not want to credit chance, to throw up our hands so early in this process. We wanted only a right way to do things, a sense of control.

  I remember looking into his eyes when he was crying and feeling a vacancy there. He was uncomfortable, and all else of him had fled behind that fact. I felt shatteringly unable to protect him, though I held him right there in my hands.

  We were more rattled, more concerned, of course, than we had thought that we would be before becoming parents. Friends told us that couples were either lucky or unlucky in these things, that some children just struggled to sleep. I could accept this logically, but it was hard to hear B cry and believe it. Liz and I spent hours on the Internet, pouring our concerns into search engines: rashes and drowsiness and splutters he made when he awoke. I remember that in this period Liz read in a magazine that web searches used a significant amount of electricity because servers somewhere had to rev up each time one typed out a query. “We must be burning whole forests,” she said. “Whole seams of coal.”

  Katherine was eager to be involved. She came down to London just after we had brought B home. She slept on our sofa, saying that she wanted to be near, to be of use. She watched us as we went about our tasks. She walked about the house, picking things up and inspecting them: books and ornaments and toys. She was quiet, but there was an acuity to her gaze. I felt Liz eyeing her mother whenever Katherine came into the room. On the third day of Katherine’s visit, the tension came to a head.

  “I appreciate it,” Liz said. “It’s nice to have you here.”

  “What?” said Katherine. She could hear the but coming and wanted to cut to it.

  “We can do this ourselves,” Liz said. “Or we’ll learn.”

  “I brought you up pretty much alone,” said Katherine. “I have a lot to pass on.”

  “It’s important for me to do this myself.”

  “There are limits,” Katherine said. “You do not have endless energy. You need to choose what to focus on. You have to establish your priorities.”

  “I know,” said Liz.

  “You do not act like you do.”

  “They’re my priorities,” said Liz, “not yours.” She shook her head, said nothing more. The two of them looked at each other for some time. They stopped there though. It was as if they had waded too far into a swamp and wanted to go no further.

  Later Liz said, “I feel like I’m a model soldier, and she’s a general pushing me around a large map.” I felt for her, yet I also wondered whether she would truly have it any other way. I had never had such an advocate as Katherine. My mother was kind. She drove me to races when I was younger, stood on verges to the edge of suburban lanes smoking Lambert and Butler menthols and waiting for me to race by, but there was not that sense of fierce calculation that Katherine gave off, the feeling that each action was so critically important. To be pushed around the map, to have some sense of the campaign one was supposed to wage, did not seem to me such a burden but instead something that I would have liked, that I might wish for our own son.

  * *

  I hear a noise in the corridor. I open the door of the room.

  “Oh,” says Rafael. “What a coincidence. Just the man I was looking for.” He is into his stride already. “Breakfast is under way,” he says. “I am supposing that you will be making your way down.”

  “Of course.”

  “Perhaps we could take a walk before.”

  “A walk?”

  “Get some of the fresh air of the garden.”

  Out of the back of the hotel is a small lawn, littered with cigarette butts and dog shit. Rafael walks across it, placing his feet with care. We stop at the hedge. He peers through a gap in the foliage to the adjacent car park. “Yes,” he says. “A nice day. A good time to talk.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You are well?”

  “Yes. Tired, but okay.”

  “Good,” says Rafael. “Your wife is coming for a visit on the rest day.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “How nice.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a little news,” Rafael says.

  “Yes?”

  “Things are, as they say, totally fucked.”

  “Oh,” I say. “The break? Us losing time yesterday?”

  He shakes his head. “Not that,” he says. “Not only that. This is more to do with strategy. The doctor . . .”

  “Marc?”

  “The other one. He has run into some difficulty. He is in trouble.”

  “They found him out?” I say.

  “Not in relation to us,
thanks to God.”

  “How? Other teams?”

  “Other needs.” Rafael shakes his head. “Housewives. Prescription drugs for housewives. The problem was that they were skinny. He was making deliveries in his van. Why, the neighbors asked themselves, can these women eat so much ice cream and stay so thin? The neighbors became very envious and looked into the situation. Everything unraveled. Female envy is very dangerous. I am glad, when I consider this, that I have not married.”

  “I’m sorry to hear this,” I say.

  “He has, because of all this, just been put out of commission. We were due to resupply tomorrow. We were due to give you some of your blood back on the rest day.”

  “Yes.”

  “There are more mountains coming up. We need to recover a little time.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Why are you telling me?”

  “The supply chain is broken,” says Rafael. “I thought you could help.”

  “I’m racing.”

  “Of course.” Rafael throws out his hands, laughs. “I was not talking about you doing it yourself.”

  “No?”

  “Your wife will be driving along the E17?”

  “No,” I say.

  “She will not be taking this route?”

  “No,” I say. “She will. She will not do what you are suggesting.”

  “I have suggested nothing,” says Rafael. “I am only asking a few innocuous questions.”

  “You are preparing to suggest something.”

  “Of course,” says Rafael. “She makes a stop on her trip down the motorway, meets a contact of mine, picks up the shipment. It is very easy.”

  “No,” I say again.

  “Think about it.”

  “She is coming with my son,” I say.

  “Perfect,” says Rafael. “That will be a good cover for the operation.”

  “He is not a cover,” I say. “What are you saying?”

  Rafael looks at me with a surprise that suggests I have spoken more forcefully than I usually do. “That was a poor way of phrasing,” he says. “Of course, your son is a small human being.”

  “Yes,” I say. I shake my head.

  Rafael holds his hands in a position of prayer. “I was making my point with force,” he says, “because I am so eager for you to have a little talk with your wife.” He gives an unsteady laugh, a laugh that suggests he is on the edge of some other emotion.

  “She is not part of this,” I say.

  “Come,” he says. “I am not making her team doctor.”

  “That is my life. My real life. My home life.”

  He laughs again, bitterly. “Everything is your life. You have one life,” he says. “Be honest. You are not a cat.”

  There is the sound of voices from the car park. We both look through the hedge. It is the mechanics, beginning to load the bikes onto the trailer behind the bus. Rafael watches in silence for a minute, alert to any errors of protocol. He turns back to face me, reluctantly satisfied. “You know,” he says, “you are genuinely good at something—world class—and yet now you act like this is nothing, like this is something to throw away.”

  “There are limits,” I say.

  “Sure,” he says.

  “You want her to carry bags of our blood?” I say.

  “That would be very useful,” he says.

  “It would be crazy. How would she hide it? How would she keep it cool in the car? What would she say if she were caught?”

  “What about hormones?” he says. “Some little vials? Not so hard to hide inside the spare tire space. That is better, no?”

  “No.”

  “No? You will be substantially remunerated.”

  “That is not the point.”

  “No. But it is still something. With a child. With things you must buy. The big chairs people push their children in. The balloons shaped like the cartoon sponge. Your wife might like the money.”

  “For doing this?” I say. “No.”

  “You are so sure,” he says. He looks at me as if curious. “Do one thing for me: make sure. Only that.”

  “No,” I say.

  “I am persistent,” he says. “Remember.”

  “Yes,” I say. He is not wrong.

  “Where’s your phone?” he says.

  “In my room.”

  “Go and get it,” he says. “Just some vials. Put the proposal to her. Is that so dangerous?”

  I nod. I move away across the lawn. He watches me as I retreat.

  I take the elevator back up to my room. The phone nearly rings through before it is picked up. “Hello?” says Liz, a hard question mark at the end.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I could say nothing of my recent conversation, but I am a poor liar, and so I do what Rafael asks: just enough to have discharged my duty and to be able to tell him so. I explain what Rafael wants. Liz listens. I hear some screeches and croaks from B, but he does not cry.

  “That’s crazy,” she says. Something falls to the floor. I hear her sigh, put down the phone, pick the thing up again. There is a croak from B. She lifts the receiver. “What will he pay?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I didn’t ask.”

  “He’s a strange one.”

  “You don’t want to do it, do you?”

  “Ask me.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’s not ideal. I suppose I could do it well. Who else is he going to get in a hurry?”

  “But you’d be involved, and with Barry.”

  “Yes. You think I’d mess it up?”

  “No. You’re thorough. I think you’d do it as well as anyone could.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But there are risks.”

  “You said it was safe, undetectable.”

  “It is,” I say. “In the blood. In the body. But in the world . . .”

  “You don’t have to let me help you,” she says. “But if you decide not to, do it for the right reasons.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Don’t be squeamish,” she says. “Don’t underestimate me.”

  Rafael is waiting in a chair by the elevator. He sits back, taps his fingers on a small table beside him.

  “It is arranged?” he says quietly.

  “No,” I say.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “She says it?”

  “I say it.”

  Rafael’s lips flinch in displeasure. “You have been on this program and now you want to,” he says, “make a, how you say, U-turn?”

  “No,” I say. “I never agreed to this. It’s a different thing.”

  “Everything is a different thing,” Rafael says. His tone has acquired a bitter hiss. He spits into a bowl of potpourri on the ornamental table. “You won’t get your treatment.”

  “I’ll go without.”

  He snorts. “You know where I grew up?”

  I try to preempt him, to judge the narrative: “In a tiny shack?” I say. “In a dirty barn?”

  He looks at me with distaste. “No. I grew up in a perfectly acceptable house, but that is not the issue. I grew up on the beach.”

  I concede the point.

  “I grew up ten meters from the sea, and do you know what I dreamed of every day? I dreamed of the mountains. I wanted to go to the mountains, to see films about the mountains, to read about the mountains, to simply sit alone and think about the mountains. I was, to use your idiom, head above heels about the mountains. Why was that?”

  “Why?” I say. He has his momentum and I resolve to endure.

  “I was not in the mountains. I had the sea. I could go any day I wanted to the sea, but that was too easy. I wanted the mountains. There was probably some boy in the mountains dreaming about the sea, and why was that? Because he could not have the sea. Who likes to read about money more than the poor? Who likes to read about beauty more than the ugly? What are our favorite stories about? Flying, magic, living forever: th
e things we cannot do. There might be some planet where people fly around and never die and what would their favorite stories be about? Walking and death.” He looks at me, one thick eyebrow arched. “And do you know what our most popular fantasy is? Do you know what is the core of every human story?”

  I shake my head.

  “Somebody changes,” he says. “Somebody always changes. And you come to me and you say you’ve made a decision, as if that will make some difference to anything at all.”

  * *

  Katherine and Thomas came to lunch for Christmas when B was two months old. They arrived with boxes of pristine, tiny clothes that he would almost instantly outgrow. I went out riding between frosty fields and returned to the smell of turkey. We were doing the meal properly, with all the trimmings. I ate a lot, which I seldom do. We had glasses for water and wine out. There was an ironed white tablecloth. We had provided different pieces of cutlery for each course. There was some polite conversation, the sense that we must all go about eating properly, tucking in elbows, chewing politely, as if we were all being watched. B was restful that afternoon.

  I was pleased by it all. It was no real achievement, I suppose. Thousands of people were sitting down to comparable Christmas dinners, and yet this fact was one reason for my feeling of fulfillment: the sense of having done this ordinary thing well enough and finding pleasure in this doing.

  The satisfaction of it stayed with me long after Katherine and Thomas had departed, through those muted days between Christmas and the arrival of the new year. I liked this time. I went out training on my winter bike, wearing my gloves and thermal tights. When I passed through the populated sections of my route, the streets were busy with those shopping, jogging, walking dogs. Most people were on holiday, and though I was still, in a sense, working, I felt a companionship with them. We were, all of us, sharing these dim, chilly afternoons.