We Begin Our Ascent. Joe Reed Mungo

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 he says this ill-disguised.

      “Uh-uh,” I say.

      “Flat tomorrow,” says Sebastian.

      Johan is wearing shorts and I can see him flex his quadriceps in response to mention of the coming stage. He is an abbreviated, muscular man, a different creature from the rest of us. He has longer hair, tied back in a small ponytail, and a goatee beard.

      “It’ll be your day,” says Sebastian to Johan. Sebastian is the son of a famous cycling champion. Where his father was well-proportioned, though, he is stringy and awkward. Where his father pedaled with a wonderfully smooth style, Sebastian stamps through his strokes. Where his father was handsome, he has a big caricature of a face, a large nose and heavy jaw. It is hard to carry the diluted genes of a champion, and he probably would have done better avoiding the bike overall, getting a real profession. Theories on the causes of these differences between him and his father have been discussed at length. “It’s the difference in nutrition in the modern age,” Fabrice has said in Sebastian’s absence. “It makes for larger people.”

      “His mother must be Amazonian,” Johan has said.

      “You know who else rides a bike?” Rafael likes to say. “The postman.”

      I take a seat next to Sebastian.

      “In twenty hours,” says Johan, breaking a silence, “I’ll be kissing a podium girl.”

      “You know they only kiss the winners?” says Sebastian, and then laughs at his own joke.

      “What would you know about that anyway?” says Johan. “The only time you’ve ever been on a podium is in your father’s arms.”

      “He always used to take my sister, actually,” says Sebastian.

      Johan ignores his friend. He sits up and looks at me. “Have you seen the podium girls on this tour?” he says.

      “I don’t think so,” I say. “We haven’t had much cause to hang around the podium.”

      “Too true,” says Sebastian.

      Johan kisses his bunched fingers and lifts that same hand, opening it in appreciation. “Oh,” he says. “Those girls …”

      “Really?” I say.

      “The best beauty,” says Johan, “has a certain weirdness. Each of these girls is almost ugly. One has a pronounced underbite, another has a long forehead. These things allow you to convince yourself that others see them as unattractive. You feel you are the only one who truly appreciates them, really knows them. In this way, you can imagine such an intimacy without even having exchanged a word.”

      As I have said, one must find interests to stuff around one’s days on tour. Johan is, above all, interested in chasing women. “There have been many eras,” he told me once, “in which the things we value—money, politics, war, even cycling—were nonexistent or irrelevant. In no era, though, has sex been unimportant.”

      I told him that you could say the same thing about any other aspect of human survival: breathing or eating or shitting.

      “I like those things too,” he said primly. “Just not as much.”

      * *

      I have books in my room awaiting me: a small library carried in my luggage between hotels each day. Many are recommended by Liz, who despite B, despite the busyness of her lab, reads voraciously. I do not want to read now, though, but to be with these other men, in their studied idleness, in this small room, the traffic outside, the little TV above the door whispering the news.

      I was struck when I first met Liz by the way her flat was so full of paper. There were the scientific journals she read, and the textbooks, but also piles of novels and newspapers and magazines. They spilled over the small desk in her bedroom, utterly obscuring everything. The third time I visited, I felt that I had to tidy the desk. It was too much to look at. I made four piles: textbooks, scientific papers, popular periodicals, and fiction. “You read all this?” I said. I couldn’t imagine how she had the time, the inclination.

      “I will,” said Liz. She felt compelled to keep on top of it. She would do her work, which would occupy many more hours than most people’s jobs, but she would also have an opinion on the books which had made the Booker short list, the artists who had been nominated for the Turner Prize, on contemporary political events and the quality of the coverage of them in the newspapers. She practiced the bassoon, an instrument she had learned to play to a nearly professional level in her teens. All this was certainly encouraged by Katherine, who had taken pains to send her daughter to a prestigious all-female school in the Cots-wolds (sometimes, I suspected, simply so she could have this to hold over Liz forevermore). There was also the shadow of the dead father, who in death had been mythologized as an incomparable