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* *
We end the call, and I leave the hotel room and walk down the corridor. Pictures of sailing boats alternate with sconces along the hallways. I round a corner to see Fabrice sitting on the carpet, his back against the wall. He fidgets, jogs his knees. He is thinking of the end of today’s stage, I am sure. He and I are the same age—nearly thirty—and yet I am younger to it all. He has been racing since he was thirteen. There is still some of that teenager in him—his bounce, his fidgeting, his Kafka ears. One gets the sense that the real world has had little chance to make its mark upon him. He has had some good results in his past: one-day victories, stage wins, and a top-ten finish in this race two years ago. He has struggled for consistency, though. His promise is thought yet unfulfilled. There have been fewer comparisons to past champions in the last year, more mentions of those who flared and were forgotten. This tour is a chance to reinvent his potential, to bounce his story back into its former groove. I lean against the wall, slide down until I am seated beside him.
“Seeing the Butcher?” I say. He nods.
The Butcher is what we call the chiropractor. If he were really a butcher, however, he might be compelled to clean his equipment. The massage table holds a history in its complicated odor of sweat. “What’s the difference between a chiropractor and an osteopath?” says Fabrice.
“Is this a joke?” I say.
“No no,” he says. “It’s a what you call it … an inquiry.”
“I think that it’s something to do with the intensity.”
“Right,” he says. “That sounds correct.”
Fabrice goes before me, and when I see the Butcher, he is weary himself.
“You guys wear me out,” he says. He is Norwegian. In mannerism and personality, he is more of a carpenter. He presses into my back. Parts of me crunch and readjust. He takes my neck and he cracks it left and then right. I don’t like people cracking my neck. My impulse is to resist it. However, I am extremely good, and I do not joke here, at submitting to things which I do not like.
* *
Outside the Butcher’s room, Rafael is waiting for me. “Solomon,” he says. He uses my full name always, he and my mother only. “How did the Butcher do?” He stands close, furrows his heavy brow. He sucks aniseed drops constantly, and his breath is thick with the smell.
“Well enough,” I say.
“Good,” he says.
Rafael has been distant since the race finished. The result of each stage, for him, is always material from which something can be built. Sometimes he is triumphant, sometimes self-justifying, sometimes incensed. Never, though, is he resigned. Rafael’s success is based upon a fierce blindness to chance, an ignorance of the limits of his influence. He closes one eye and rubs at the lid. He looks tired, dangerously so.
“There were issues today,” he says.
I nod.
“You.” He nods back. “You were not totally shit.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“Other people were totally shit. Other people let you down.”
“Maybe.”
“Yes. They let you down. Aren’t you angry?” He looks at me expectantly.
“Raging,” I say, feeling a need to placate him.
He raises his eyebrows.
“Inside,” I say.
He shuts his eyes now; he resets himself. “A flat day, a flat day, a hilly day, the rest day,” he says. “Then the last week, the mountain stages and a time trial.” He does not need to spell out the plan for coming stages. The days with gradients are days on which Fabrice will seek to make time, the flat days are days to be endured. Each night Rafael pores over route maps, makes tallies of where gains may be made and losses limited. He inputs the data of the past day and works with it until he sees a path to the results he desires. I think of a shopkeeper recounting his takings again and again in the hope that his next calculation should make the cash and the receipts match.
“We’ll do our best,” I say.
He nods, cautiously satisfied, and moves away. I walk slowly down the nautical corridor. My muscles are loose, my vision clear. The light seems to flicker. The boats shift on lapping seas.
* *
Liz is close to her mother, Katherine. Katherine is clever, slightly spiky, grand in her manners. Liz’s father, a professor of political economy, died in a car accident when Liz was very young, and Katherine is remarried to a man called Thomas, who owns a building supply warehouse in East Anglia. The two of them traveled down to London on the train four months after I had first met Liz, and we greeted them at Kings Cross. Katherine was tall like her daughter, with a straight nose, dark hair subtly dyed and held implausibly in place. Thomas was a broad, neat man with a mustache that I sensed he had worn for years. “So this is him?” Katherine said, and looked at her daughter for a steady second. We went to a grubby Chinese restaurant, which surprised me then but would not now. Katherine’s terror is not dirtiness but mediocrity or inauthenticity, and the place was better on those terms than all the nearby Italian restaurants with columns around the doorways and tall pepper mills. She asked me questions about cycle racing that were pointed, as if the racing could not possibly be an end in itself but merely a way of attaining some other higher thing, which she expected me to articulate. “People like to watch this?” she said. “They understand it? They concern themselves with the details?”
All I could say was that people did watch my sport. It was Liz who came to my defense. She talked about tactics and psychology and the vicarious desires of the fans. Katherine nodded like she appreciated her daughter’s effort.
“She’s not keen on my career?” I asked Liz on the train home that night.
Liz exhaled in a way that signaled disagreement. “She just wants to be told why it consumes you. She wants to be sold on it.”
“Yes?”
“A meaning,” she said. “A sense of the story you tell yourself.”
* *
After our team dinner, I am not in the mood to sit and read or watch TV, and it is not yet late enough to sleep. I risk Rafael’s wrath, then, by walking slowly around the hotel.
In the lounge, I find some of our team sitting between the plastic plants. The lounge is unpleasant—badly decorated and with a view of the hotel car park—and thus a perfect place to congregate. No self-respecting holidaymakers would spend a minute of their vacation here, so it is ours. Johan lies on a pleather sofa. Sebastian sits upright in an armchair leafing through a magazine.
Johan is our sprinter. His job is to compete for wins in flat stages, those in which riders finish en masse. He pulls from the wind shadow of the peloton and thrashes for the line at the last minute. He is trained to ride in others’ tailwinds until the final meters. While the rest of the team work for Fabrice, Johan competes to win individual stages in the sprints, seeking prizes, publicity, and acclaim for the team in this way.
Sebastian is Johan’s minder. As we domestiques tend to Fabrice, he tends to Johan. He offers him shade from the elements and leads him into position for the finish. On days like the one just past, in which Johan has no chance of victory and must simply make it up and down the mountains within the elimination time, Sebastian paces Johan all day. I have seen neither of them much in the past twenty-four hours. While I was trying to help Fabrice, they were grinding along far behind.
“How’s the boss man?” says Johan, meaning Fabrice. Some other teams concentrate fully on their sprinters, ignoring the overall race. Johan would, of course, rather be on such a team.
“Okay,” I say.
“Didn’t quite get the finish he wanted?” says Johan, the pleasure with which he says this ill-disguised.
“Uh-uh,” I say.
“Flat tomorrow,” says Sebastian.
Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.
“It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”
“His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.
“You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”
I take a seat next to Sebastian.
“In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”
“You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.
“What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”
“He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.
Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”
“Too true,” says Sebastian.
Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls …”
“Really?” I say.
“The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”
As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”
I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.
“I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”
* *
I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.
I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.
“I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy many more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cots-wolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable polymath.
In the first weeks of knowing her, I became eager to be able to stay with her and her friends in conversation. I read more widely, picked up books and newspapers and worked through them wondering how I would discuss them with Liz. It was hard to learn the dynamics of her group, the popular books they didn’t like, the unpopular ones they did. When I got a handle on this, Liz met my competence with suspicion, however. “That’s what Peter would say,” she told me, when I described the drawbacks of a popular literary novel. She wanted something different from me. Sometimes one of her friends would say something high-flown and impenetrable and she’d laugh and look at me for a reaction, as if sure that it should naturally repulse me. I was awed by her friends though, by the breadth of what they knew, how they could talk.
“They are impressive, at first,” she said. “They want to give you that sense. They think they can do anything, but none of them do.”
“No?”
“Or they would be actually doing it,” she said. She nodded at me, as if to prove her point, as if I embodied this doing.
* *
When I return to the room I am sharing with Tsutomo, he is already in his bed, facing the wall, apparently asleep, his side moving with the rhythm of his breathing. The room is illuminated only by light coming from the half-open bathroom door.
I quietly try to prepare for the night, stumbling in the dimness. When I make it into bed, I take time to think. I do not intend to sleep for these moments but merely to feel my body, to have some sense of my aches and pains. I am not always hopeful, but in this time I try to be. There are other men recovering in other rooms all over the city, thinking as I now am that tomorrow will be a better day than the one just past. The reality for most of us is that this will not be the case, and yet we will be on the start line tomorrow, and so we must disregard this fact. I stare at the ceiling. I try to think of what has gone well since I finished the day’s stage, of the ways in which I feel prepared. I look up, visualizing these points of strength, trying to draw them into a constellation.
Chapter 3 (#u1eab151c-2692-5e03-a6c6-52aeefaefc65)
The new day is sheathed in cloud. The light outside is dim, but the air is warm. This muted weather suits the care with which we leave the hotel. We load our bags onto the bus slowly and silently.
The day’s stage will take us out of the mountains. It begins tending lightly downhill and then runs flat across the plains. None of the other team leaders will be able to make time against the fierce efficiency of the peloton in such circumstances, and so the game is to keep Fabrice within the mass of riders, trying to work against the contingencies—the falls, punctures, and miscommunications—which could see him caught out.
On the drive to the start, Rafael stands in the aisle and speaks, working hard for our attention. He does something with eye contact. There are rules, and he is as brazen in the breaking of these as any New Ager: holding gazes longer than should be bearable, really staring into us. “Be ready,” he says. He indicates Fabrice. “Keep him with the other leaders. Be ready every moment.” As he is finishing up, he looks at Johan. “Other than Sebastian,” Rafael says, “we won’t dedicate anyone else to lead you out in the sprint. Fabrice’s place is too precarious. Do what you can. Follow one of the sprint teams’ lead-outs. Get in their space.”
Johan nods reluctantly.
* *
Shinichi is once more waiting when we disembark at the start line. He waves a Japanese flag, part-bundled in his fist, when Tsutomo walks past. “Good luck,” he says to me. I nod appreciatively but choose not to stop.
We wear running shoes when not in our cycling cleats: brilliantly colored, with reflective piping and technical flourishes rendered in different polymers. Provided by a sponsor, they’re clumpy and incongruous beneath our tight shorts and shaven legs. We have no need for them, we who do not run or walk any great distance. Like the sneakers of the elderly, of young children, of Americans holidaying abroad, they accentuate our immobility. We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.
I have pictured my inflexibility when B will be bigger, when he will play in our back garden and seek companions in this play: the awkward, loping stride, the hunched way in which I will kick a ball.
Today’s stage begins on cobbled streets, and our rubber soles squeak across the polished bellies of the cobblestones as we congregate outside the bus. The mechanics do final checks on our bikes, working in order. Fabrice’s is looked over first, my own fifth. The Butcher comes by, pressed into another role: exhorting us to drink a concoction of electrolytes and syrup. Stationary cycle-trainers are assembled and we’re summoned one by one to begin warming up. Fabrice and Tsutomo stamp into their cycling shoes and start to pedal. The increasing fluidity of their movements, and the rising zip of the electromagnetic resistance wheels, makes me think of something taking off.
Later, as I stand by the bus inventorying my kit, Fabrice wheels over on his bike. “Two men are in a bar watching the Tour,” he says.
“Right.”
“It’s raining, and the riders are going up a mountain.” Fabrice rubs at his hair and smiles. “Really filthy weather.”
“I know the kind,” I say.
“‘Why do they do that?’ says the first man. He does not understand. He shakes his head. ‘The winner gets half a million euros,’ says the second man.” Fabrice waits. Watches me with a faint smile. “ ‘I know that,’ says the first man, ‘but why do the others do it?’ ”
I laugh. “It’s good,” I say.
“Yes,” he says, chuckling. “It has truth in it.”
“Yes.”
He winks. “Luckily I am the winner.”
Rafael has been chatting with the directeur of the German banking team, over by their bus. He turns, laughing, finishing his own joke. He points at his colleague, smiles. “Be good,” he says. He walks toward Fabrice and me. “Steady,” he says. “No fuck-ups today.” He stands over the front wheel of Fabrice’s bike, slaps Fabrice’s cheek playfully. Rafael has more faith in his team leader than anyone. Rafael discovered Fabrice, so the story goes, on a holiday to Corsica, coming across a skinny twelve-year-old coaxing a rusty mountain bike up a pass as he himself drove to a hunting lodge. He had his mentor, an ancient Italian, visit Fabrice to examine the boy and feel his legs. The mentor sucked his dentures, it is said, and declared Fabrice a future great. On Fabrice rests not just Rafael’s hopes for the Tour, but the validity of Rafael’s judgment and an uncharacteristic sentimentality: his belief in a lineage of talent conferred upon small boys in remote towns, as sure and unpredictable as the rebirth of the Lama.
Riders are making their way toward the start now. Fabrice clicks into his pedals, rolls off toward the line with a little push of encouragement from Rafael. I put on my glasses. I climb onto my bike, and ride off in pursuit of Fabrice, offering my apologies as I cut through the crowds, past vehicles. I stop behind the line among the tight press of other racers. I smell sunscreen, saddle ointment, washing powder. Riders ratchet closed cycling shoes, do up helmet straps, adjust the placement of cycle computers.
It is the period before the starting horn goes when to be still is harder than anything. We shift and fidget: energy spilling over into action, like water from a brimful glass.
* *
When Liz and I had been together for a couple of months, she brought her mother and stepfather to watch a race of mine. It was an evening racing series in London: laps of a small urban circuit on the streets of Bermondsey. Sebastian and I did it without team support. It was nothing, a training session, but I felt as I rode a desire to do well. It was dusk, and there had been rain in the day. The air smelled of wet concrete, and the streets were slick. I pushed hard around the last laps. There were semipros who wanted the victory, for whom beating Sebastian or me would have been a great coup, and they were testing us, taking risks. On the penultimate corner, I went into the bend in first place yet skidded over as my front wheel lost traction. I lay in a crumple under a barrier as riders zipped past me.
I remounted and came home in the middle of the pack. I wheeled my bike over to where Liz, Thomas, and Katherine stood. I felt the burn of having wanted that small race too much. “You were close,” said Katherine.
“It was just a silly thing,” I said.
