The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  He won the stage by four seconds, but knew his brother was there at the finish, in the small clutch of cyclists that had arrived at his heels. Dropping the bike, he did not turn around but staggered instead across the town square to a fountain, where he immersed his head in cold water, trying to drown out images of his brother and cool the tantrums that he could feel rising in his own heart, as if he was the one who had owned them all along.

  The Independent was, of course, still in the lead; Siobhan had told him this later that evening, he explained. Even though he himself was stage winner and King of the Hills, the Wild Wonder, as they now called him in the Broom Wagon, had gained so much time in that half-hour on the second stage that he had kept the yellow jersey, and was likely to keep it forever. His brother was said to be fully exempt from pain, she told Niall. Having been on hand when the Broom Wagon attempted to patch up Kieran’s shoulder after the crash, she could attest to this. He puts it somewhere else, she announced, or at least that’s what he said. He puts it on the tops of the mountains or in a cloud … somewhere where it won’t bother him. Some man called Michael Kirby had taught him how to do this. Rumour had it that this Kirby was a magnificent sports coach, could transform anyone into an athlete, and had been the making of Olympic runners Pat O’Callaghan and Ronnie Delany, and that while working in America in his youth, he had been in on the training of Jack Dempsey.

  “I knew Michael Kirby,” Niall said to Tam. “He was a fisherman, and full of weather lore – some of it surprisingly accurate. I knew he was friendly with my brother, but I didn’t know he was that essential teacher, and even had I known, I never could have guessed that he would coach.” He shook his head. “He is my father’s age, an older man then and almost an old man now.”

  “Did you ever think about asking him where your brother is?” Tam said. “He might just know.”

  Niall dismissed her suggestion, shaking his head again and moving his arm as if tossing her words out of the way. “Then the next stage was Nenagh to Castlebar,” he continued. Overnight it had become unusually warm and there was full sun on the riders all day. “You cursed the rain,” Niall said, “but let me tell you, you longed for it when it wasn’t there and it was the sun around you all the time. By noon you were chewing the handlebars.”

  There were a number of ways to become dehydrated, but sun turned out to be the most unpleasant of the lot. There were reflections, refractions, and sun-blindness to contend with, and shimmering mirages in the distance. At one point Niall thought the road ahead was quivering with an oil fire and had braked involuntarily, skidding into a fall, other riders missing him by fractions of inches. Both he and the bike were unharmed, and in minutes he was back in his seat, but his brother had taken the lead when he was down, or so he believed: by now he was unsure whether the yellow jersey was sun-ghost or human. The first dozen or so racers got caught up with a funeral just outside of Killimore. Taking their caps off out of respect, they pushed aggressively through the mourners only to be stopped down the road by a dozen untended cows. The herd trotted for a quarter of a mile in front of the cyclists in an infuriatingly insolent manner before decamping casually down a farm lane.

  These interruptions, frustrating though they may have been, had allowed Niall to recuperate from his hallucinatory state and had put new wind in his sails. He stopped only once more that day, to fill his water bottle, and afterwards felt the old euphoria enter his nervous system on the long stretch through the Burran and into Castlebar. In the end he had won the stage by nine seconds. He discovered his brother had kept the jersey, however, having ridden beside him into the town, just before pulling ahead. They did not speak on arrival, Kieran walking off before Niall had a chance to catch his breath. “I watched him move away,” he told Tam. “His upper body was tilted toward the right. He was nursing that shoulder, the shoulder and the pain he was supposedly unable to feel. I allowed myself to feel some sympathy for him then, but the determination had got into me and wouldn’t let go, so I pushed the feeling aside and went, instead, to look for the girl.”

  She was not to be found, however. Having relatives in Castlebar, her uncle had no doubt insisted she should spend the evening and the night with them. The billets that night were crowded, and Niall and his teammates were sleeping two and three to a bed. But no one wanted to search out a tavern; the length of the Rás was beginning to alter the notion of sleep. They all longed for it and retired early.

  Still, the talk about the Independent continued. He was out there in the dark, one of the men said sleepily, seeking out herbs for controlling pain. He had exercises he knew, taught to Dempsey by Kirby, for overcoming injury and staying the course. No dislocation, not even a fracture, could stop him, he had been that tightly wound by his coach. Wasn’t he just like a boxer, staggering back after an almost knockout, even more eager to continue the fight? Furthermore, it was said that he had dismounted his bicycle and had said five “Hail Marys” with the mourners on the road, making up the time lost with hardly any effort at all. “He’s my goddamned brother,” Niall had hissed in the dark of the room, “there’s nothing you can tell me about him. He’s not a stranger.”

  But he was a stranger. What did he know of him, really, beyond sporadic visits to Gerry-Annie’s and then those grim, tense evenings with their father? He’d had no idea that aspiration could have made an appearance in his character, no idea that he would appoint himself as a protector of Susan. Was his brother, in some cruel joke, trying to get back at him for a series of imaginary misdemeanours? Was that what this was all about?

  The seventh stage was the easiest, shorter by several miles, and covering a terrain of relative flatness. Niall flew off into the dawn of the sombre day, the spray from the previous night’s rain rising on either side of him like silken, transparent wings. The anger had dimmed somewhat and his confidence was back. He finished the one-hundred-and-twenty-mile stretch and arrived well ahead of the pack in Sligo having averaged thirty miles an hour and with plenty of time ahead of him for both recuperation and recreation. He hadn’t seen Kieran in the course of the ride, and Niall felt in his bones that the injury must be causing him to lag behind. He knew his stage victories were unearned: there was no way that Kieran could have kept up after days of pain. But he relished them nonetheless and swaggered into the tavern in the evening, certain he was the hero of the day.

  It wasn’t long, however, before he was told that the Wild Wonder had come in only six minutes after him, and was still overall race leader. This worried him, but he firmly believed that Kieran would flag on the last stage, which was to be the longest at one hundred and fifty miles. It was said that he was eating nothing at all except what he could catch or find in the nearby woods, and while Niall didn’t quite believe this, he suspected that the pain would have diminished his appetite and that, on a stage as long as the one that would present itself the following day, Kieran was bound to get the “hunger knock,” the crippling fatigue that had taken many a rider out in the past. He also knew there came a time when exhaustion or pain stopped the body from absorbing nourishment even when meals had been taken. Limited food would ensure the knock’s arrival. With this in mind, Niall had eaten two dinners that night; one at the billet and another in the tavern, with an extra bowl of local potatoes thrown into the bargain. By now he wanted to sleep with the blond Siobhan, but there was no privacy to be had, and anyway, the unsatisfied lust would cause a kind of ferocity in him the following day, as he knew well from the playing fields of the past. Susan came into his mind then, and he recalled that she would be in Dublin for the finish, standing with two fathers, her own and his.

  “I wondered,” Niall said, “why I hadn’t thought of this before.” He stood and began to walk back and forth on the carpet at the end of the bed.

  “About the two fathers?”

  “No,” he said, walking to the window and back, “not them. I wondered why” – he stopped and gave her a sidelong look – “I rarely thought of Susan at all.”


  Tam wanted him to sit down again. There was something in this pacing that suggested he was about to leave. He was developing a bit of a stoop, she realized, and for the first time was aware that he would someday become an older man. “Come here,” she said, laying her hand on the bed.

  He sat back down in the chair, however, and she was hurt by this small refusal. “It’s true, though. I never thought of her,” he continued. “There were others in the Rás who carried on about their girls. I believed I just wasn’t the type to wear my heart on my sleeve. Now I wonder if I had a heart at all.”

  “Of course you …” Tam began. She couldn’t finish the sentence. She couldn’t use the word heart with the whole room between them and the memory of their earlier words so fresh in her mind. She sat up instead and opened her arms. “Come closer, Niall,” she said. “Come over here and …”

  He was not listening, not responding to her. “You have no idea what kind of condition Kieran was in the following morning,” he said. “He came to the start with the Kerry team manager – a man I knew and still know – guiding him, practically carrying him, and it was clear he barely knew what was happening. His pallor was bad, wrong, and, though I wasn’t close enough to see, I knew his eyes would be unfocused. This manager and another fellow from the Kerry team literally lifted him onto the bicycle.” Niall shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. “Then with two others holding the bike, they placed his hands on the bars and strapped his feet to the pedals. I remember thinking, They want him now, they want him badly, and I remember feeling the unfairness of this, the appropriation. Though I never would have admitted this, I admired his stance as an independent, and some part of me wanted him to keep that. And now here were these men claiming him, as though he had always been theirs. He was nobody’s. Not mine. Not theirs. And their insistence that he continue in his condition was cruel: I wanted to believe that. They had encouraged me to join the Kerry team at one point, you know, but I was all Dublin by then, a spoiled, educated toff who wanted nothing to do with my home county. It was bloody cruel what they wanted from him, and I believed, and enjoyed believing, there was no way he could provide. Still, when they shoved him off, he rode like the wind.”

  Niall had bided his time on the first half of the stage, stopping often to fill his bottle or to gulp down a sandwich. The weather was unsettled but cooperative, raining just when you thought you couldn’t stand the sun, and shining when the rain had weighted you down, drying out the jersey you were wearing, polka dot or otherwise. Then, to his utter amazement, Kieran and his yellow jersey passed him just outside Mullingar. The crowd in that town had been howling for the Independent – by now the news of this wonder had preceded him and no doubt was part of what spurred him on. “But, in truth, it was the support of the Kerry team that did it,” Niall said, “those boys from Castleisland, or Milltown, or Glenbeigh. Only farmhands or butcher’s boys; spalpeens, some of them. They were surrounding him, cutting the force of the air around him in half, sometimes leaning toward him in order to speak … one of them even laid a steadying hand on Kieran’s shoulder. It was as if they were all in an exclusive club that no one was going to be able to break into. And all of this, mind you, in a life-threatening zone of speed.”

  The sight of his brother being so tenderly ministered to had lit a kind of fire in Niall’s mind. “I barely remember the rest of the Rás,” he said to Tam, “only that, hours later, when I gained on him, and then passed him, he was riding by the wall, not paying attention to the boys in the team who were still doing their best to protect him, but looking at the goddamned wall, as if he wanted to find a bird’s nest in the hedgerows, or a snail between the stones. Then suddenly he was up on the pedals and making a breakaway. An ignorant way to ride. But that was my last rational thought. After that I had no access to my own brain. It was like I had left my body, was watching myself on the bicycle from somewhere else, as if I were a spectator, or my own ghost, or overhead in a balloon. And then, soon, the streets of Dublin–those crowds – and after the finish I was down on my back with my father and Susan’s father pouring water over me, telling me I had won the stage.”

  “Won the stage,” he said to Tam, “but not the Rás.”

  “I was familiar with being carried on other men’s shoulders. I had won four stages in a row, they told me as they hoisted me along the street. No one had ever done that before. No one would ever do that again. But who is Rás leader? I eventually managed to blurt out. I should have known the answer. The front runners always win. And then my father, one of the men holding me, said the words. ‘Your brother,’ he said. ‘Your brother is Rás leader.’ ”

  The men had put him down at the place where his brother was lying. A double victory for the Riordans, they had said, and his father had said this with them. “And there was Susan with Kieran’s head in her lap. He was barely conscious and she was weeping, weeping and gently touching his ruined shoulder. I’m certain I heard him say four words to her. You are mine now, he said. I’m sure I heard him say this. A trite and romantic thing to say, right out of a penny novelette! And the blind innocence of the statement, and of the man who made it! The stupid sincerity! I was appalled by it – by him – felt he had no right to this ludicrous innocence and sincerity. And the Kerry team around him, and each member of it looking on and listening with tears in his eyes. The inane sentimentality of these people,” he said, gesturing toward the window as if one could see the Kerry team, gathered together in a nearby field.

  “The medics were on him then, and he was taken away, and Susan stood and squared her shoulders. I’m sure of this too. She actually braced herself. And then she came to me. As if she knew, she knew who she belonged to, she walked over to me.”

  “Of course she would have been sorry for your brother’s injury,” Tam said.

  Niall was on his feet now, fully dressed and ready to leave her cottage. “You would think that,” he said, “but it was not so. She loved him, you see, and he her. I fully understood in that moment what had driven my brother throughout the race. It wasn’t rage that deadened the pain; it was this love between them, that sincerity and innocence. He must have believed that after winning, once he was a victor, she would come to him. But she hadn’t in her the courage for that. And I claimed her, I claimed her. I had no love at all, for anyone. All I had was this insistence on winning. She asked, only once, if I thought it was the best thing, this marriage. But I insisted on it. And, afterwards, he left the country. He left the country and never came back. There’s no glory here, no quantity of newspaper stories – and there were plenty of those, you can be sure – that can save you from emigration. Not if you are a man like him, a man of the hills, a man from the mountains, a man full of sincerity and innocence. What else could he do?” Niall looked out the window for a moment and then turned back to Tam. “What else would he have wanted to do? I’d taken everything from him.”

  Tam, naked in the sheet she had wrapped around herself, felt vulnerable and exposed in the presence of this man who was dressed for other rooms, other relationships. She wanted him to cross the room, place a hand on her bare shoulder. He had opened this whole disturbing chapter of his life to her, and yet they were still somehow apart. He would not permit her to console him. “She could have refused you,” she said softly.

  Niall did not turn toward her. “What kind of a life could he have given her, this ‘Wild Wonder’? And,” he said again, “I insisted on it.”

  Tam could barely speak. “You love her then.”

  He looked at her for what seemed a long time. “Have you understood none of this?” he said. “I’m a waster, Tamara, I waste things. I waste people. I deplete them. I have never troubled myself to know the value of anyone, anything, not my own abilities, my own good fortune, my family, Susan. The small magical brother I was given was worth ten of me, and I utterly disregarded him.”

  “But for me …” she said, looking away as if ashamed by what she was about to reveal, “you transform every room you wal
k into. It’s never been like this with anyone. It is impossible for me to let it go.”

  He was silent, his face so disclosed and pained she found it difficult to hold the gaze. Then he lowered his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’ve misunderstood. This – you and me – this is the only time I’ve come close to anything like that. And I cannot replicate the kind of sentiment I saw that day in Kieran. I don’t have it in me. Nothing about this is ever going to be redeemable, Tamara. And I can tell you now I want no part of it.”

  “That can’t be true,” she began, “because we would never …”

  But he was striding out of the room, through the kitchen. The sound of his footsteps ceased for a few seconds. Then she heard the front door opening, and she knew he had walked away.

  MORNING

  The building had been finished around him as he worked. There had been a symphony of drills, hammers, electric saws, always in his ears, shrieking or staccato against the tiny brush strokes the tempera demanded. The workmen, joking with him, sometimes throwing eggs, or the shells of eggs that littered the floor beneath the scaffolding he stood on, were good men, and hard workers, as Kenneth had come to know. One of them had come up with the mock title Flight and Its Allergies, and he had joined in the hilarity that ensued among them. They had joked with him, and one or two, genuinely curious, had asked him questions while he painted one figure or another. They had also coaxed him into bars after work –had even, on occasion, invited him home for supper. As the weeks passed, Kenneth thought about his own family, his separation from them. It would be good to be back.