The Night Stages (37 page)

It is only when she looks toward the mural that she realizes it is the sunlight that must have wakened her, the same sunlight that is raking across the picture. The oranges and
yellows have intensified, and the expressions on the faces of the children appear to have altered in this changed light.

When she glances out the window, she sees that there are two airliners: the one that brought her here and another, both of them gleaming and wholesome, beyond the plate glass. Healthy, she thinks. Those are healthy planes. Now she notices that the waiting room is full of fresh passengers. The employee she had spoken to yesterday had been correct in his predictions. “This fog will clear off by morning,” he had said, his pronunciation so similar to Niall’s, “I can feel it.” He had consulted a paper on the counter. “And the Shannon flight from New York is scheduled to arrive on time.” She can barely believe that she has managed to sleep through the arrival of the second Constellation, amazed that the noise of it would not have wakened her. Perhaps it taxied up to the terminal while she was talking, while she was talking with the loquacious Irish. Someone, speaking about the Easter Uprising, had used the word
penultimate
, and she had immediately thought of Niall.

It was he who had taught her the meaning of the word, using it in relation to a gale that had ripped a half-dozen slate tiles from the roof. “This is the penultimate gale of the winter,” he had said, explaining that there would in all likelihood be one more. Would
ultimate
be the correct word to describe their last moments together? she wonders now. She doubts this. The word suggests some kind of victory. “The victor, that’s me all right,” he had said, his voice filled with bitterness and loss.

She had been surprised when he had begun to speak while he was preparing to leave, having been so often silent after conflict, or after love. With his back to her and one arm in a shirt, he said, “You insist you want to know something more about me. So here it is: my brother and I were in a race together.” He turned toward her and sat down on the bed where she still lay. “We were in a race together, just before I was to be married.” He put his other arm into a sleeve but had not buttoned the shirt. “Neither of us knew the other would be there. But Susan,” he said. “Susan knew. She knew and she told neither of us. Had I known … had I known the damage.” He had stood, walked over to the mirror that hung above her chest of drawers, and raked his hands through his hair. Once, a year or so before, when he had caught her looking at her own reflection in this same mirror, he had told her that his mother had spent good deal of time studying her face in an oval mirror that had hung on her bedroom wall. “Not in a vain way,” he had said, “but more as if she was trying to come to an understanding of her own character.” That mirror had vanished shortly after her death, he told her. “My father must have taken it down.”

“What sort of race was it?” she asked him.

“The Rás Tailteann,” he told her as he walked back to her bedside. “I had been training the previous year in Dublin, was on the Dublin team, and eventually became captain. I knew Kieran was mad for his bicycle, but I never knew, never dreamt, what it could mean to him. I never thought … well … I wouldn’t have believed that he could
have entered something that organized. Who could have known it?”

He walked to the chair where his clothing lay, put his trousers on, returned, and sat again near her on the bed. His shirt remained open. Beneath it was the flannel undershirt he always wore. Because of the damp, he had told her. There was something so ordinary and touching about that garment, a leftover habit, she always thought, from his childhood. “I couldn’t believe the cut of him,” he said. “He was practically unrecognizable. The arms on him! The legs! He had increased in size – you would think that was impossible, but he had. I hadn’t laid eyes on him for months, not since Christmas, though some people had seen him here and there and had reported the sightings to my father. He’d already begun to disappear, you see, and had been gone for a couple of months in the autumn. No one, my father said, knew where he was sleeping, what he was doing. Maybe Gerry-Annie. He came back to her for the winter, you see …” He paused and bent over to pull on his socks, then straightened and gazed out the window. “His face when he saw me!” he said.

“He must just have been surprised,” Tam said.

“No, yes, of course he was surprised. There I was, captain of the Dublin team. He was surprised, but that was not the look I saw. Something dark and unidentifiable came over his face. I had lifted my hand and was about to walk over to him, and then that look. It stopped me in my tracks, though it wasn’t until much later that I knew what his face – what that look was telling me.”

Tam wanted to know what he thought the look meant, but she was afraid he would close down if she questioned him too much. “He would have been on the Kerry team,” she said instead, leading him gently forward.

“Kerry claimed him ultimately, yes, but he rode as an independent. I didn’t think a man like him would ever be in Dublin for any reason, much less for the beginning of a bicycle race. He knew nothing of cities. But he would have ridden up on his bicycle, which had, I couldn’t help but notice, new gears.”

He explained that he himself had stayed out late the night before drinking with his mates and there was the thin air of a hangover around him the morning of the start. “There were all these patriotic speeches delivered in Irish by the organizers,” he told Tam. “They were insisting that we were all riding for the unification of Ireland: something larger than ourselves to work toward, something to keep us all going. They kept saying we were the new Fiana, the new warriors – it wouldn’t be like that now, I shouldn’t think, but the Rás itself was only in its third year at the time, and there was still a lot of politics mixed up in it. It’s a cruel thing, a race like that: sometimes you
do
need something larger than the self at work; sometimes you’d be working for the team, or the county, or the glorification of Ireland or whatever. But mostly it’s personal, though at the time I believed there was nothing personal, no real personal aspiration in me. I was a natural athlete, I knew that, but that ability seemed completely neutral. I rarely even thought about it. In many ways it meant nothing to me. Nothing.”

Not nothing, Tam thought. She knew the competitive side of his nature. Often he would clock the time it took him to ride to her house, and would tell her about his speed on one occasion or another. But she would not contradict him now. “The ability or the race?”

“Either … neither.”

A silence entered the room. Niall was holding one shoe, and his expression was pensive and faraway. Outside there was the full calm that sometimes follows the cessation of rain. Drops of moisture beaded the clothesline but the glass of the window was dry. Tam wanted him to come back to her. She touched his arm. He straightened his spine, looked at her, and began talking again.

He recalled very little about the start of the Rás, he told her, beyond glimpses of his brother, hunched over his bike and, Niall said, “with a fierceness in him you could feel twenty yards away.” The city fell behind them and the roads twisted toward one horizon or another. “One hundred plus miles, Dublin to Wexford,” he told her.

There had been wind that day, and rain. The macadamized surfaces were slippery, and mud from those that were not macadamized was thrown into your eyes and nostrils. The jerseys they all wore became saturated and sagged heavily down onto their thighs. There was no hope of drying your clothes in the places … mostly private homes … where they were billeted at night, so that you knew that you would be taking the dampness of County Dublin and County Wexford with you the following day to Kilkenny. “The only hope,” said Niall, “was to wear
the wretched articles of clothing at the bar in the evenings where there might be a fire. We called the evening drinks the Night Stages and found that powerfully amusing.”

Why was that amusing, Tam wanted to know. He told her then about how the race was divided into eight stages. “A series of punishing distances,” he said. “Like stations of the cross.”

The nightly sessions in the bar were an antidote of sorts to the day’s suffering and, he added, an acknowledgement of more to come. “That first night I didn’t see my brother in any of the bars I walked into,” he said. “And the following day I didn’t see him at all.”

He had thought that Kieran might have dropped out some time early during the second stage; the going was bad and he himself was suffering, vomiting more than once from the exertion. But by the time he reached Waterford, there was talk of Kieran among the cyclists. It was said he had crashed near a bridge just the other side of Dungarvan and that the bicycle was so ruined he had thrown it in a ditch and had stolen an under-geared specimen from a local farmyard, catching up with the bunch an hour later. He was a galloper, they said, and had broken away from the pack on this ordinary bicycle, sprinting up the hill and disappearing into the distance. But, at the end of that second day, when Niall himself looked up from the chain he had been attending to in Kilkenny’s main square, he saw Kieran sail down the main street on the undamaged bicycle he had referred to as the Purple Hornet. He sensed something then about his brother that he had never suspected before. Kieran, he
realized, would be spoken of and interpreted during the course of this race, and perhaps elsewhere as well. His silences and distances would inspire fantasy. Stories would be told about him, theories would be developed. Later that night, one of his teammates told him that Kieran was billeted nowhere, had refused to be billeted. “He apparently wanted to sleep outside on the edge of town,” Niall told Tam, something about night air, a beneficial change in the ozone that he was said to have claimed would occur when sunlight absented itself from oxygen.

“That was nonsense, of course,” Niall said to Tam. “There was no science in it. But the boys were all for believing it. Some of them would have slept outside themselves were it not for the rain. They referred to Kieran as ‘the Independent,’ or ‘the Individual.’ They didn’t even know he was a Kerryman and I didn’t say he was my brother.”

Tam leaned forward and put her hand on the back of his bent neck. “Oh, Niall,” she said.

“I met a girl in Kilkenny,” he said, not looking at her, “at a dancehall in the town. Sheila, I think … No, it was Siobhan. The girls were out in force, of course, once there was a pack of young men available. She had long fair hair, and I remember thinking it was wonderful, this hair of hers. We danced a few times and we shared a couple of pints. She said her uncle was driving one of the support vehicles – the Broom Wagon, they called it – and that she would arrange to go along for the remainder of the Rás and would look out for me.” Niall shook his head, remembering. “I was flattered by her
attentions, that was all. And I was already engaged by then. Still, I didn’t discourage her.”

“The Broom Wagon.” Tam had laughed.

“It’s what they called it,” Niall explained, “this van that collected all the wrecks, swept them up, and some of the broken cyclists as well. And there were more of those than you might think, broken bicycles and their riders.” The Broom Wagon had ridden behind the vehicle carrying the spares.

“A good fifteen percent of the riders lost their bikes. But, in spite of what the boys believed, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Kieran had not lost his bike. Not yet.”

By the third stage, from Kilkenny to Clonakilty, Niall’s body had adjusted and his muscles knew what was expected of them. “And for the first time it was a day of full sun,” he said. “The hills were long and gentle, invigorating climbs followed by full pleasure on the way down.” He had stayed with the bunch, though he knew he had the strength in him for a breakaway or two. For the first time he enjoyed the countryside, even leapt off his bicycle to shake the hands of spectators at Thomastown, knowing he could easily catch up. His jersey had finally dried, and his muscles and heart and brain were synchronized to such an extent that the whole hundred-mile stage felt like an act of grace, a courtly dance. Full of benevolence, he encouraged teammates who were feeling the heat, and let one or two of them shelter in his wake.

“Normally the team shelters the captain,” he told Tam, “but I was feeling so confident I wanted to return the favour.” Without the slipstream created by those around you, the
going was hard, he said. Wind friction could slow you down considerably. “And I was not unaware that my brother, being a solitary rider and all, had no one to shelter him.” He paused, and Tam saw him redden with emotion. “And, yes, that gave me satisfaction,” he said.

Six miles out from Clonakilty he had decided to move ahead and had begun to accelerate, breaking away from the Dublin team. Breathing deeply, his body almost parallel with the crossbar, he tightened his thighs and pumped his legs furiously. Passing through the village of Ballinaskarty, he lost all sense of the machine, as if the bicycle had become an extension of his limbs, as if it had become flesh itself. The feeling was almost sexual – everything was fluid and ringing and empty of language, the body having taken over from the mind. He left the team behind, and then the bunch, leaning into corners, and jamming his feet into the pedals on inclines. The deepest, farthest cells of his body, even his hair and nails, felt as if they were ignited by oxygen and heated by blood. When he reached Clonakilty he yelled involuntarily, the noise from his throat snapping him upright and throwing his head back as he crossed the finish line of the stage.

Five minutes later, while he was sluicing the remaining water from his bottle over his head, he was told that the Independent had won the stage, and had arrived a half an hour earlier without one other cyclist anywhere near him. “I could feel the change happening in me then,” he told Tam. “I didn’t know what the change was, but I could feel something emotional, something almost primal, happening to me. I didn’t
want him to have won the stage. It was all wrong, had never been like this. He was never the one to succeed. He was somebody apart.”