“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.”
He glanced in Tam’s direction, but she knew he didn’t really see her. She had become a vessel into which he was pouring this canticle, she thought, and a flicker of resentment lit a portion of the gratitude she had felt when he had begun to actually talk to her. And then his face opened and anger came into it. “This was not ordinary competitiveness,” he said, curling one hand into a fist and encircling it with the other. “This was something I had never felt before, a complete change of climate … to be defeated by him. I was the wondrous Niall, the brilliant, accomplished older brother.” He scrubbed his face as if attempting to remove all expression. “In the life that I had lived until that moment, this was the way it was. I had no familiarity with the alternative.”
That night he had danced again with Siobhan but had drunk no alcohol, wanting nothing to interfere with the following day’s performance. Even this girl in his arms was alive with rumours concerning the Independent: how he had trained with the best coach in Ireland, how he had fed himself on cow’s blood and sheep’s milk, and had lifted weights in travelling circuses. Niall had laughed hearing these things, and then he had kissed her, wanting to distract her from the subject. But even so, she went on. It was said that he had no home, was a wild boy who had grown up among the last standing oaks of Glencar. He had climbed, they said, Carrantuohill Mountain three times each week from the time he could walk, even in the wildest winds. In fact, as an infant he had learned how to walk on the slopes of that mountain. There was much speculation about how this wonder would ride on the following day, the fourth stage, when the cyclists would head into the hard hills of Kerry, and finish in Tralee.
“I knew I couldn’t let him defeat me there,” Niall said, “so I left the night stage early, determined to sleep profoundly in preparation.” The girl had wanted him to stay, but he wouldn’t do it. “There would be my father, watching when we went through Killorglin, you see, and my fiancée. Yes, Susan would be watching. I couldn’t let her see me losing. Whoever prevailed in the mountains would be called the King of the Hills and would be given the corresponding jersey.”
“And your brother,” Tam asked. “You hadn’t seen him again?”
Niall had not yet seen him, and did not want to see him, he said. He wanted to stay out of his way.
“The next day dawned fair,” Niall said. “The roads were dry and I made a good start.” Staying with the bunch as far as Bantry, he barely felt the effort, even on the inclines, and he was confident that he had a sizable reserve of strength for the mountains and gaps of his home county. He was a meteorologist. He could read the skies and be prepared for the upcoming weather in a way that no one else would be prepared. There would be a kind of choreography about his attacks and breakaways in his home county. He could take the King of the Hills, he believed, with strength and pleasure. All year, training in Dublin, he had been looking forward to this stage.
Then he saw his brother. The yellow jersey he now wore was a blaze of colour on his back, a flame. “It was like a bog fire, that jersey,” he said. “Just when you thought you had quenched it, it flared up again, somewhere in your line of vision. And Kieran would be wearing that jersey when we passed through the Gap of Dunloe, and not much later my father would see that.” He paused. “And Susan,” he added.
“He crashed on a bridge near Glengarriff, Kieran did,” he said. “I saw him there with the ruined purple bicycle and I could see the pain coming out of him, feel it, as I sped by, though I was unsure whether or not the pain was physical.” Niall stood now and walked across the room, where he sat down on a chair facing the bed. “There was nothing in me,” he admitted to her, looking at the floor, “that wanted to stop for him. I hadn’t even the charity for that. Relief is what I felt. Whatever the outcome of the day, I was certain that my brother would never catch up
now, on the unfamiliar spare machine that would be given to him.”
“The pack left the main road after Kenmare and cycled into the mountains of Kerry. I remember feeling a kind of wild joy at the sight of these mountains, knowing I was ready for them and equal to any rise in elevation. Every kind of weather you could imagine was in those skies above,” he said. “I tried to tell myself it was like I was chasing cloud formations, trying to outdistance bursts of rain, or keeping up with one particular shaft of sun. It was a powerful experience, as though the mountains themselves were giving me everything they had. The wind was at my back, and I plunged into blade after blade of piercing light. I remember whispering over and over, I am home, I am home.” His face darkened. “And I remember trying to stop myself from thinking, these mountains aren’t mine, they are Kieran’s.”
Kieran had passed him after what had been, for Niall, an ecstatic ride through the Gap of Dunloe. “Quite near here,” he said, gesturing toward the window and everything outside of it, “just before we got to Beaufort. He gave me a look that I believed was filled with contempt, having manoeuvred the spare bike so that he was right beside me for at least thirty seconds. By then I couldn’t bear the look of that jersey on him. I was damned if I was going to give him the King of the Hills as well.”
He told her how he had intentionally summoned mental images of every victory he had won, gaining strength from the memory of these blazing precedents. He recalled the beaming confidence with which he had posed for photographs with trophies in his hands, the entitlement of being carried through the streets on the shoulders of teammates, glories in the sports fields of the university. Imagining them as platoons of an army bent on his defence, he revisited triumph after triumph, working back through time until he reached the games of his teen years, and then the games of his early youth, where his mother and younger brother would be standing on the edge of the field, watching him win. He revised the way his mother’s hand had rested on his brother’s shoulder in these pictures and replaced it with her raised arm pointing in his direction. The Dublin team sheltered him when they could keep up and shouted encouragement from behind him when they could not. By the time he reached Killorglin, he was well in the lead and could recognize his father’s cheer in the crowd, having heard it in his mind over and over on the approach. Kieran had fallen behind him, but not so far behind him that when Niall looked for his father in the gathering he couldn’t see that the older man was gazing in astonishment, not at him, but at his younger brother and the jersey on his younger brother’s back. And beside his father, he glimpsed Susan, her eyes on Kieran, an unreadable look on her beautiful face.
“It was fury that drove me into Tralee,” Niall said, “with Kieran and the Kerry team, which had now moved close to him, on me like a pack of hounds.”
“Did you get what you wanted then?” Tam asked. She felt she was with him in this race.
“Yes,” Niall admitted. “Yes I did. I was King of the Hills. But it meant nothing to me.”
“But you were the victor in Tralee.” She believed this was what he wanted her to say.
Niall fell silent. Then he spoke. “The victor, that’s me all right,” he said. “I swept him out of the way. I didn’t even give him his one small moment.” He turned away in the chair, hiding his face in one hand. Tam quickly wrapped a sheet around her body, slid out of the bed, and crossed the room to him.
“It’s all right,” he said, barely responding to her embrace. “I’m sorry.” He rose from the chair then and, with his back to her, walked to the window, and she returned to her place on the bed.
He had gone to the Munster Tavern in Tralee minutes after his arrival in that town, and had to be tracked down by the organizers for the King of the Hills presentation, which then took place alongside the bar with drinks in hand. He had not gone back to his billet for dinner but had eaten fish and chips instead in this establishment, with Siobhan across the table from him, smoking cigarettes and leaning forward now and then to run her fingers down the front of his King of the Hills polka-dot jersey. “It was a ridiculous garment,” he said to Tam, “something a child might have worn … or a clown … but I was happy enough to have it on me then. Ah, the night stages … you could be sure there was plenty of drama in those as well after the circus of the day, lots of talk. I was told that the Independent had dislocated his shoulder in the crash but had ridden like a goddamned miracle nonetheless, having been told that he was still in the overall lead. He was seeing the doctor, they said. Siobhan was mightily impressed with this information. But how relaxed I was once I heard this, figuring Kieran wouldn’t be in the running the following day.”
He danced again that night with Siobhan, he said, the competitiveness in him and his blood up because of the alcohol. At one point he pushed her into a booth where he tried to get his hands under her sweater and up her skirt. Tam could see him leaning forward, his advances toward the girl: Siobhan would allow this for a few minutes, then shove him away, lighting a cigarette, and telling him not to be an animal. He would bend toward her then, and gently remove the cigarette from her lips, placing it in an ashtray on the table. Then he would kiss her long and slow, waiting for several seconds before slipping his tongue between her teeth.
Niall, seated once again in the chair, shifted his weight from one hip to the other, then looked directly at Tam. “I didn’t even know he was in the bar until he shoved me up against the wall. ‘Susan,’ he was shouting, ‘you’ve nothing at all in your heart for her!’ And all this with a dislocated shoulder, mind you! It occurred to me a few years ago that he might have been persuaded not to finish the race because of his injury if it hadn’t been for that night stage and him seeing me kissing that girl. Rage in the midst of sport, as I’d come to know, is a narcotic. It deadens pain. Or at least the physical pain.”
Kieran had spat in Niall’s face before letting him go. He then slammed out of the silenced bar, everything happening so quickly there was no time for Niall to respond. Niall wiped his face with his polka-dotted sleeve, his fierce energy of the earlier evening settling into a cold fury. Gradually he registered the stunned puzzlement on his teammates’ faces. “Was that your fiancée’s brother?” one of them had asked him. That was the moment when he finally confessed. “No,” he had said, “that was my brother.”
This revelation did nothing to abate the rumours concerning the Independent. It was said that there was a dark blood feud between the brothers of each generation of the Cahersiveen Riordans going back to Norman times, when one member of the tribe had betrayed another in battle. It was also said that there was traveller blood in the family, and it was this that caused the youngest boy in each generation to “go wild,” to run away to the mountains as soon as he could walk to be suckled by feral goats. It was said that the blood feud would, in each generation, be played out by a test of skills, a fiddling or piping contest during famine times when the men would have been weak from hunger, but most often by a sporting event; foot races, hurling, or Gaelic football. It was hinted that the feral boy was the one destined to win and that nothing, not even physical injury, could stop that destiny from running its course.
Niall, who in the past would have been amused by such nonsense, was instead fully enflamed by what was related to him, with a smirking expression, by the girl who now had heard he was “promised” and was showing disdain for him and other “cheaters” of his ilk. She told him it was also being said that, generation after generation, the two brothers would love the same woman, and only one of them, therefore, would marry. Often, she added, one brother killed the other brother in a terrible barroom brawl concerning the woman in question.
The following day during the fifth stage, with panorama after panorama of the lush fertile landscapes of County Limerick opening before him, Niall rode like some kind of madman, pushing his limits beyond what he thought he could bear, relishing the awareness of pain in the face of the immunity to pain brought about by his rage. He recalled his brother’s tantrums, thos
e terrible explosions that tore apart his early domestic life, and in full knowledge of the real story, he began to blame his brother for his mother’s death. It could only have been the chaos caused by this difficult child that had led her into the arms of adultery and drugs, he decided. He allowed everything about the horrors of his brother’s birth to present itself to his mind, the memory as sharp and blinding as a knife in the sun. He broke her in half, he broke her in half, he chanted through clenched teeth while climbing the long, subtle, yet exhausting slopes of the region. He was determined never to look back, not even once, during the stage. Still, there were times he believed he could smell Kieran’s breath and could feel the heat of it on the back of his polka-dot jersey. Once or twice he thought he could hear his brother shouting Susan’s name, even her middle name, Ann. How did he know this? What had the two of them plotted while he was in Dublin? The memory surfaced of the night Kieran had interrupted him just when he had managed to remove Susan’s blouse. How long had he been standing there? How many times had he stood there before? And the panting of him now at his back! Had this disturbed bastard been following him all along, clocking his every move? And all the time keeping such distance from him.
There were crowds lining the grimy streets of Limerick City as the pack tore through that town, a colourful mass of hair, eyes, and cloth smeared against dark factory walls, making an infernal noise and gesturing wildly. The shouting and clapping sounded like jeering to Niall, and he found himself wondering how they knew that he, a champion, had been defeated by his faulty little brother. Keeping his head down, not wanting to show his face, he watched raindrops from a sudden cloudburst shudder along his crossbar, one following another, two colliding then fusing, and the unnerving thought came into his mind that were he and his brother to crash together in this race, they might actually become one. A twofaced monster, he whispered, and, having taken such a notion out of his brain and into speech, he thought he might be going mad. He had forgotten to drink, he then realized, was becoming dehydrated and confused. After that he paid close attention to his water bottle, through the gentle Silvermine Mountains, and into Nenagh, though even the act of swallowing was difficult, and the cylindrical bottle strange and foreign in his hand.
The Night Stages Page 28
