We Begin Our Ascent

by Joe Mungo Reed

  “The specifics changed a little,” Rafael says. “I talked to Liz. I realized she was capable.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I say to Liz. I am talking quietly for the sake of my son, my voice hoarse.

  “I made the calculations,” she says. “I made a judgment.”

  “Oh love!” says Rafael. “The trials and tribulations of true love!” He lifts his watch hand in a firm gesture and takes a sightless glance at it. “How nice it would be to stay, but really we must be getting on.”

  A toilet flushes in an adjacent room. A clattering of tortured plumbing reverberates through the wall space.

  “You said only hormones,” I say again.

  “We needed the blood,” says Rafael. “You don’t want the blood?”

  “Blood was not what we talked about,” I say.

  “I agreed to it,” says Liz. “I’m a person. I make decisions. I’ve looked into this stuff. I’ve read how it works. I’ve been through the research papers.”

  “You’re not pleased to work with your wife?” Rafael pretends to look shocked. “It has seemed to me such a happy marriage.”

  “I’m perfectly glad to work with her,” I say. “I just don’t want her involved in all this.”

  “You don’t want her working with me?” says Rafael. “I did not expect to hear this.”

  I look at Liz. “Why would you do this?”

  “I made a decision,” she says. “I did it meticulously. I did everything he instructed to the letter.”

  “This is true,” says Rafael.

  “He paid well,” says Liz.

  “She speaks the truth,” says Rafael. He points at B. “She is thinking about his future.”

  Liz takes care to catch my eye. “I was on your side,” she says. “I was doing it right. I was watching out for you.”

  “It’s done, anyway,” says Rafael. He pats the suitcase. “It went well. All is fine. Why such a fuss about a cake that is already baked? It’s done and now your beautiful wife and charming baby are here. Everyone can relax, no?”

  B splutters in my arms. I take a tissue from the box on the bedside table and wipe at his face. He giggles. “That’s the correct spirit,” says Rafael. “What a lovely family.” He smiles at Liz. “Stay here. Have fun. I will book you a hotel for after tomorrow’s stage.” He looks around. “A nicer place.”

  * *

  The room Fabrice and I share is full of bodies. Rafael and the Butcher are here, as well as Tsutomo, Fabrice, and myself. Rafael repeats his routine of looking behind the curtains and under the bed. This time he goes into the bathroom and taps at the air vent; he breathily sings “A Little Help from My Friends.” My awareness of him is sharpened by my anger over the way he has drawn my wife further into our circle.

  We drove back from Liz’s hotel in silence. Rafael occasionally gave himself driving directions, responding too, murmuring, “That’s right” or “I remember this.” I do not think that in a million years I could change his mind about the smallest thing. Now he turns the television on and then off again. He presses a button on the room’s smoke alarm and it emits a sharp beep. In the corner of the room the small freezer stands, unplugged and empty. The Butcher has long ago commenced defrosting the blood bags. He squirts in another liquid and then closes them again. He massages each bag. He lays them out on the table beside him.

  “What a day for reunions,” says Rafael. He looks at me. “First your wife, and now some of your blood.”

  I only nod. The blood is that extracted months ago by the beleaguered dope doctor. It was harvested at the height of our training and is rich in red cells. The blood in our veins, meanwhile, is ever more dilute, its capacity to carry oxygen diminished by the attrition of racing.

  Fabrice lies back on his bed. Tsutomo sits next to him. Others on the team will be attended to later, in different ways.

  I sit on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  “Ready?” says Rafael.

  We roll up our sleeves and lie back. Rafael takes a pillow from the bed and passes it down to me on the floor. I tuck it behind my head.

  The Butcher locates a vein just beneath my armpit. He cleans the skin with a small piece of alcohol-soaked cotton wool. He inserts an IV needle into the vein. I incline my head to see my blood chasing up the needle into the head of the catheter.

  “Keep still,” says the Butcher. He goes back to the table on which the blood bags have been placed. Each bag of blood is numbered, and each number refers to a key Rafael has written in a small notebook he now holds. “Five hundred and forty-nine,” says the Butcher.

  Rafael nods.

  “Give me some of Fabrice’s blood,” says Tsutomo. “I want to be really strong.”

  Rafael, unlike the others in the room, doesn’t laugh. He takes Tsutomo to be sincere. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says. “You’re a different blood type.”

  The Butcher connects a tube to the bottom of my blood bag. He palpates the bag, working steadily to get it to the end of the line. This tube is then attached to the top of the catheter. I feel a slight ache where this new blood flows into my arm. He affixes the bag to the wall above me with a piece of medical tape. “Now you just wait,” he says. “Okay?”

  When we are each connected to our bags, the Butcher takes off his latex gloves. He turns off the overhead light. He opens the door and slips out. Rafael stays sitting in an armchair, still as usual. There is a minibar refrigerator beside the bed. Tsutomo reaches down, opens it. “I can have a Diet Coke?” he says.

  “You are joking?” says Rafael. “Those things are four times the price they should be.” He snorts, points up at the bag taped to the wall above Tsutomo. “Is that not enough?”

  We are silent then. I hear a phone ring in another room, the elevator arriving and departing, the patter of a child running down the corridor.

  The annoying thing is that Rafael is not wrong about how welcome the treatment is. Though I usually prefer to look away from needles and blood, this time I keep looking at the tube and the bag connected to it. The blood coming in is still cool; it spreads a numbness through me, making the hairs of my arm stand on end. This discomfort makes me feel the efficacy of the treatment, just as bitter medicine feels more potent than sweet. The ritual of all of this is a comfort. It tells me that things will be better tomorrow. The therapy will work almost imperceptibly until I am on the point of collapsing, then I will feel that extra level within me. I will remember then that I am supported, that things have been invested in me. I am no fan of the danger of the process, but when I consider the way the team has got into me—altered my chemistry to my own advantage—I am grateful. Rafael and the Butcher understand, I think, and they act on this understanding. They try to help because truly, unlike the men with microphones, replica kits, or drug-testing paraphernalia, they know how much is asked of us.

  I think of Liz in the slightly grubby hotel room, among the disarray of unpacked things. She has come all this way. She is here. It is done, as Rafael said. Perhaps she even saw more clearly than I that she could manage her task, that I would be glad of what she brought.

  * *

  I didn’t plan to end up near London. I had spent my early twenties living in northern France, racing there, chasing down a career. Just after I got a contract with Rafael, however, my father got sick. I went back to the South East to be with him. I wanted to get my fill of him. My mother was living up in Liverpool. She hadn’t seen him for years. He was older than my mum, already middle-aged when I was born, and now he was an elderly man who regretted smoking. He wasn’t fierce. He wasn’t interested in my career.

  Previously I had found myself wanting to orient him to the precise context of my achievements—that I was one rider in so many thousand, and so forth—as I am so reluctant to do at other times. But going back, I tried to let him be. He’d simply have preferred that I’d played football.

  I read him stories about West Ham United from the sports pages of the newspaper. I rea
d him one of those thick histories about the battle of Stalingrad. He did not have specific preferences as to the manner of his death. He just wanted to get through it. I went to him often, but I also kept training and racing. My days were stripped back. His body was slowly wasting, my own strengthening. Perhaps I was glad of this contrast, this chance to delude myself that in this divergence lay a chance to escape the fate he was suffering.

  I stayed in my father’s house. I cleared out a room at the back. I had clothes for cycling and clothes for going to the hospital in. Though it would be nice to roll out onto perfect roads each day, you can train almost anywhere. We may race in teams, but training is a private thing. You just need clear asphalt ahead of you or, failing that, a room in which to put a trainer, and a few hours to yourself.

  I met Liz in the airport a month after my father had died. She was a reason to stay, her appearance an unbidden blessing.

  * *

  Rafael walks around the room looking at the draining blood bags emptying into our veins, each of us our own sort of timer. “Not long,” he says. He looks at Fabrice. “This will help us in the mountains.”

  “Yes,” says Fabrice. His voice is hoarse, quiet.

  “One flat day,” says Rafael, “and then the big hills, the time when the race really gets shaken up.” He massages one hand with the other.

  Fabrice nods.

  “You’ll make time on the inclines,” says Rafael. “No one can climb like you on the steeps.”

  “On my day,” says Fabrice.

  “We’ll make it your day,” says Rafael.

  When the bags are utterly drained, Rafael makes one last circuit, flicking at them. “Every last drop,” he says, “every single percent.”

  The Butcher returns to the room. He takes the needles out of our arms, stemming the leak of blood with a cotton pad we are to hold to our skin. He peels the blood bags from the wall. The medical tape, I notice, leaves the slightest glossy mark on the paintwork. The Butcher and Rafael bundle the equipment away, careful not to leave anything even minutely incriminating.

  We file out of the room quietly. I feel chilled from within. We go out into the hotel’s small courtyard, like hospital patients on a walk. We sit on a bench in the evening sun.

  After some time, Marc comes into the courtyard. He asks if we are well, how our joints are bearing up. We give vague, clipped answers. We decline Ping-Pong. Eventually, he goes back inside.

  I stay on the bench when the others leave. I think of Marc stalking the corridors of the hotel. I get a text from Liz. “We’re unpacked,” it says. “Shall we come over after dinner?”

  * *

  In the bike room at home I have a calendar of Yorkshire landscapes: windswept trees, old cottages in green valleys, meandering stone walls, the sun always fighting its way through the clouds. I mark things on the calendar in code, partly for secrecy, mostly to save time.

  Liz and I have discussed Yorkshire. We took a holiday there before B arrived. I have a dream of buying an old farmhouse there. Setting up a country life. It is a joy to just say the names of the famous road climbs: Shibden Wall, Fleet Moss, Thixendale, the Stang.

  I have considered woodwork. I am good with my hands; I have spent so many hours working on bicycles. I have the temperament. Liz is not sure. “Who makes money through carpentry?” she said, when I first brought the idea to her.

  “I could do specialist jobs,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Restoration.”

  “And pay the bills?”

  “Artisanal crafts are coming back.”

  “You’re an artisan now?” She laughed.

  “I could be.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but it takes time to get that kind of expertise. Have you thought this through?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Have you?”

  We could have the city and also space, I said, the chance for B to grow up as a country boy. Liz is suspicious of small villages though. “We’d be so isolated,” she said. “Stuck out there, driving each other mad.” I suggested that she could try for university positions in York or Leeds. “It’s not that simple,” she told me. “I have specific skills. There are only certain projects I could work on.”

  “You couldn’t get a job at one of these places?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure it would be right for me.”

  “Because your work now is such a success?”

  She looked at me, waited. We were sitting at the kitchen table. She stood, left the room.

  This criticism was too close to hand, too clumsy. It was brutal but not smart. We each talked plenty about failures in our careers, yet each knew the seriousness with which the other approached their work. Between us we seemed to have agreed to never doubt the other’s dedication, never to second-guess their commitment.

  I was not sure about the carpentry plan, of course. I had wanted her to play along though, eager to toy with the idea that there were other options for us, different lives we could be living. The fantasy of the early days of our relationship—the sense that she could draw me out of myself—still turned over inside me, and though I had no right to hold her to the dreams I had conjured up in those days, I felt wounded when she pushed against the very thing I had thought she could facilitate.

  Yet she had her expectations of our relationship too, I suppose. I thought of her favorable comparison of me with her friends: as a doer, as a taciturn, driven man; not the kind of person to give up on his prospects in favor of vain schemes, half-considered images of other lives.

  * *

  In the early evening Liz comes to visit me at the hotel. I am sitting on a bench in front of the hotel when she arrives. I see her walking up the long street and know her—one tiny figure among others—without understanding how. She wears a blouse, white jeans. She looks elegant, happy, like a woman on holiday (as she is, I must remind myself). She carries B on her front. We go to the hotel café. Because of Rafael’s fear that sex should destroy our racing form, he forbids private meetings with spouses during tours. “I do not want you to feel the temptation,” he has said.

  “We have to stay down here,” I say to Liz.

  “Why?”

  “Rafael is scared we’ll rip each other’s clothes off in privacy.”

  “Of course,” she says. She smiles as if in recognition of a proclivity of Rafael’s that she knows.

  Liz jogs B on her knee. His face shakes and his eyes widen.

  A waiter brings us cups of herbal tea. Liz stirs her bag. The spoon tings against the cup. “It was crazy doing all that stuff for Rafael,” she says quietly. “I’d make a good spy.”

  “I’m sure you would,” I say.

  There are a couple of journalists in the café. They watch us, recognizing me as a rider. I feel compelled by this to play a role, to be jollier than I feel inclined to be. Though I would like to retread the argument from the hotel, instead I take my time miming my pleasure, leaning forward, laughing. I let Liz’s casual mention of Rafael’s plan pass. I find myself loosening as we talk, no longer acting pleased but becoming so. I catch this slippage momentarily, tell myself to hold on to my grievance, and yet why? Liz tells the story of the fraught drive down the country with B. He was sick on her as she stood refueling the car. It is awful, vivid, funny as she recounts it. I chuckle and cough warm camomile tea back into my cup. I had forgotten this feeling, somehow. She watches me, smiles, shakes her head.

  I am no longer considering the audience of journalists when a hotel guest, a tall man with gray hair and glasses, appears beside me to ask whether I could autograph a napkin. “Are you sure you haven’t mistaken me for someone else?” I say. “A better rider?” He snorts at my joke.

  This is new to Liz, I realize: this respectable man with his unlikely admiration for what I do. The gravity that the Tour affords is unknown to her. She has watched the grind of my training, the small races I do at home, but she has not seen this before. She is noticing the attention of others in
the room behind me, and I feel this attention illuminates me, causes her to attend more closely to my gestures and speech. The waiter brings us more tea. For the first period of this long race I do not monitor my watch but allow myself to lose track of the time. It is B’s tiredness that ends the evening: he is restless and must be taken back to their hotel. Liz and I hug. I kiss my son on the forehead. She walks with him out into the twilight, and I turn toward the elevator, taken with the gratifying thought that there are still new things I can show her.

  Chapter 9

  We drive to the start line through rain. I do not like rain: the sodden shorts, the up spray of dirty water against my face. It uses up much-needed reserves of forbearance as soon as we begin to race. Fabrice has told me before that he feels differently. He enjoys the weather, drawing his pleasure from the knowledge that it bothers others more than it does him. This is a difference between Fabrice and me. He cannot just endure but knows that his endurance is reliable and unique.

  When we arrive, the Butcher and his assistants set up gazebos branded with our sponsor’s logos. We hurry to them from the bus, seeking the middle of the shelters where the gusty wind will not blow sheets of rain toward us.

  Shinichi stands by a barrier watching us. He wears our team jersey as usual, but over it a large see-through poncho. He looks cold. He appears so miserable that, though I must stand in the rain to do so, I go over to talk to him.

  “Hello, Shinichi,” I say.

  “Hello,” he says.

  “Bad weather, isn’t it?” I say.

  Shinichi shakes his head. “No. Good weather. This weather is good for us. Tsutomo will show you today.”

  “We’re a team,” I say. “Tsutomo, Fabrice, me . . .”

  Shinichi looks at me. “You say he can’t?”

  “No,” I say. “Well, maybe. We have priorities. Tsutomo will not try to win.”

  Shinichi shakes his head more vigorously now, loosening the raindrops that cling to the hood of his poncho, sending them running down the surface in rivulets.

  “Maybe,” he says, unwillingly. “Who says?”