We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ