The Invisible Mile by David Coventry

Author:David Coventry [Coventry, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509822928
Publisher: Picador

18

Celia asks that I stay in her room, a hotel above the town. She’d found me walking in my shorts blinking at the sun. My goggles still on my head, my mind laid out somewhere between Marseille and Nice. She took me to a room in the Hotel de Rue. Now she has me lie on the bed. I lie and study what I can of the surrounds and the roof, of all her conversation.

The day was a brute. I rode us up the mountains in unshaded heat and we fell back further. There was an argument at lunchtime, we stood about waiting for the issue to resolve itself as others got back on their machines. Eventually we were involved in a crash. The five of us along with 20 others. Clothes fell off and blood and skin decorated the dirt. I ignored the team in the hours after. If Opperman and Bruce wish to talk of our incompetence they are welcome. Celia found me walking and touched my wounds then took me up the stairs on which I sat under a fan for a time, the marble cool. The sun was almost gone by the time we lay on her bed.

The room is full of brimming luggage, things dragged up from her car by porters in caps and buttoned-to-the-neck blue jackets. Matching Goyard pieces: more heraldic craft than mere suitcases. They seem to distract her. She moves past them as if they’re owned by someone else and left on the floor long ago uncollected. They’re foreign but familiar, heavy and never left on their own; if she leaves the room it’s for the road. She takes her meals in here, each drink ordered via the horn of the telephone, each item of food and beverage delivered on a cart. Her calm voice thanking them.

Her bags are open and have many compartments into which she dives with thin arms.

It is difficult to know what she wants with me. But having found my prone body vomiting in the roses outside Hendaye, skin black from dust and sun and tar, I seem a part of her schedule. She follows in her Citroën, yellow like the flowers and the sun they are named for. I went to her when the day was done and she took me into her room in Perpignan and now again in Nice. But my purpose, I can’t say. It would be obvious if we removed our clothes, but we don’t. I have the feeling she is alone, or forced to be alone by others. As we speak I get the sense her youth was once laced with unfortunate things, that she knew the contents of adulthood before it came. Watching her I imagine alliances drawn up between her anxieties battling for superiority against black days. A guess.

I lie down and she cradles me.

She lights the pipe and soon I am dreaming with her. Leaning across the bed closing my eyes and hearing the world outside like a shower of present rain drifting up from the street.

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