We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

      

      

       Copyright

      The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      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.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008298159

      Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008298173

      Version: 2018-11-26

       Dedication

       For Jenny

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      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

       Chapter 1

      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