The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Joe Mungo Reed 2018
Cover design by Sim Greenaway © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Jean Catuffe/Getty Images
Joe Mungo Reed asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008298159
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008298173
Version: 2018-11-26
For Jenny
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
We come from our rooms and stand in front of the elevator. We assemble quietly, treading slowly over the thick hotel carpet in our flip-flops. We breathe lightly. We do not talk. We watch the progress of the elevator in the illuminated runes above the door. We do not consider the stairs. Do not walk unnecessarily. This mantra is not merely practical but ideological. Energy is to be expended in only one way. “Sleep and cycle,” our directeur sportif, Rafael, likes to say. “Sleep and cycle.”
We enter the lighted, mirrored cabin when the doors slide back. We take our places, facing forward, a loose formation, which cannot help but bring to mind the grouping we will make on the road. We think about racing of course, finding life in cycling, cycling in life. We are preoccupied with thoughts of the day ahead. The fear is always worse than the thing itself: another mantra, its truth debatable, its usefulness clear.
When the doors of the elevator open, we step out and turn a slow left toward the private dining room of the hotel. We are in a lobby, the floor under our feet tiled now. Other guests notice us. We are grown men in matching sports clothes. Mostly, people know our business. It is the middle of the Tour. Roads are closed, press vans are on the streets, messages of encouragement adorn local shops. Perhaps these guests recognize us as individuals; more likely they know us merely as participants in something larger. The Tour is the real star of these days.
I have done speeches at sporting events, even opened a few bike shops. Whenever I do, whoever introduces me always says that the Tour is the hardest sporting contest in the world. I am just an artifact, proof that it is done by men. I am something which it has happened to, like a bolt fallen from a disintegrating spacecraft and recovered from a cornfield after the event, to prove that all that motion and brutality really existed. I accept this perspective, because this ennobles the activity, dignifies the fact that I am aging and breaking myself in doing it.
We eat our porridge, our omelettes, and our pasta quickly. We are, if nothing else, men of good appetite. I sit next to our team leader, Fabrice: a sort of privilege. He is a neat man. He has good table manners.
“How did you sleep?” he says.
“Normally,” I say.
“Did you dream?” he says.
“No,” I say. “You?”
“Oh yes,” he says, “very richly.”
Fabrice is crazy for Freud and Jung. He analyzes the products of his many hours of sleep. He has built an interest on the routine of his days.
“I dreamed of fathers,” he says.
“Yes?” I say.
“They loomed.”
“Loomed?”
“The fathers.”
“What does that suggest?”
“In short, that I was anxious.”
“Yes?”
“There are, of course, undertones, overtones, histories.”
Fabrice’s specialty is going uphill. He’s a climber. Tours are most often decided in the mountains, where a small number of men are able to kick away from the rest of us. Fabrice is one of these men, or aspires to be. He has little weight to carry. He, more than anyone, is a creature connected to his bicycle. His proportions are three-quarters of those of a normal human being. He has a thin, bony face. His hair is dark, shaved on the sides and back in military style. His chest is large though, and his eyes painfully big. There are hopes for him in this tour, grand enough to be seldom vocalized: a place on the podium, a shot at first place, even.
“Any premonitions?” I ask.
He has peeled a banana. He carefully slices it, laid out on its turned-open skin. “You misunderstand,” he says. “I’m not in the business of premonitions.”
After we have eaten, Rafael rises to speak. He, like Fabrice, is a short man. He wears built-up shoes to increase his