We Begin Our Ascent by Joe Mungo Reed

Author:Joe Mungo Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 8

I am jolted out of sleep. There is someone in our room, standing between the beds. “Fabrice,” he hisses. I recognize Rafael’s voice. I sit up. Rafael nods at me in the half dark.

“What?” says Fabrice. He lifts his head from the pillow.

“You have to get up,” says Rafael. He looks at me. “You too, Solomon.” His voice is different so early: fragile and husky. “The dope man is coming in twenty minutes,” he says.

Fabrice sits fully up now. “We’re good?” he says.

Sometimes, if we are surprised just after a treatment, we may be forced to drink glass after glass of water so that traces of what we have taken are flushed through our systems. “You’re as clean as the pope’s pajamas,” says Rafael.

He leaves the room. We climb from our mattresses and pull on tracksuits. Fabrice looks at his watch and then at me. “Ten minutes,” he says. I nod. We return to the warmth of our respective beds. “The rest day,” Fabrice says. He exhales heavily. “It’s the rest day and they give us a six a.m. drug test.”

In ten minutes’ time I hear voices outside the room. Rafael is out there, and the Butcher. A phone rings briefly, then is silenced. There are footsteps down the hall. “Rafa,” says a voice I do not recognize, that I take to be the tester. “How are you?”

“Henri,” says Rafael. “I am working very hard. You know how it is.”

“Yes, of course. You are very industrious. Your riders are ready, do you think?”

“Who knows?” says Rafael. There is something in his tone I know: a need to play, a compulsion to press his advantages for the sake of doing so. “They have just woken up. I think they might need to get themselves ready. I think they might need to drink a little before they can pee.”

“By the rules, they should be giving their samples now,” says the tester.

“Of course,” says Rafael. “But they are in a stressful situation. We should wait for a little time.”

“Hydration is very important, Rafa.” The tester speaks primly, in jest. “Dehydration will impair your boys’ performances. I would have thought you knew this.”

“I do not know everything,” says Rafael.

“This I cannot believe,” says the tester. Both men laugh.

Rafael comes into the room alone. “Drink,” he says.

“I thought we didn’t need to,” says Fabrice.

“No,” says Rafael. “But we cannot give away everything so easily. We need to keep these men flexible.” He goes out again.

The door to our room is opened five minutes later. We sit up in our beds. The tester is of average height, middle-aged, with brown hair and a side parting. To him, I think, already up and around this morning, the room must be stuffy, close, sour with sleep. He places his bag on a chest of drawers which sits between Fabrice’s bed and my own. “I am sorry to wake you up, gentlemen,” he says. Rafael and the Butcher stand in the doorway, watching. The tester squats between our beds, looks each of us in the eye.

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