Striking the Sun – All Chapters
“It’s all about Dom today,” Ton said. I stared at my feet. Clarkey slapped me on the back.
It was the first race of the season and Nick Lyon was already absent. Ton had attempted to reassure us of his own credentials by claiming that he’d mainly been hired because he held a full HGV license.
The car park bristled with the sounds of bikes being reassembled from the boots of cars. Above us loomed a low grey sky that promised drizzle.
“Nick’s counting the money, is he?” Stephen said.
“Lay off Ton, he’s on our side. It’s sound. We don’t need Nick here, lads.”
“That’s a good attitude, John,” Ton said. “When I finished 9th in the Fleché Wallonne, the team car punctured and couldn’t follow me. It’s all about you, men. Nick and I are just here to supplement your ability.”
Somehow the smell of menthol heat rub being liberally applied to shaved legs overpowered the diesel from the team car. Liam was rubbing his legs with headphones in. None of us were getting anything from the pep talk, and I was already sensing Liam’s discontent with the organization, but it seemed disrespectful to a person who took good care of us and always seemed to take our concerns to heart.
By now he’d rolled up the sleeves on his azure shellsuit and was pinning a race number to the jersey of a kid who’d obviously been too coddled by ambitious parents.
If he could’ve, I think he would’ve raced with us. He couldn’t seem to pass by a chat without comment, couldn’t resist participating in anything that was going on. He’d experienced one successful year during a three season stint at a reasonably ranked continental team, and longed to be back as part of the pro peloton, not deteriorating with time and having to rub the firm legs of young people still doing what he no longer could.
Ton loved the sound of his own jokes, usually laughing explosively before the punchline had reached our ears. It became infectious, his laughter. To meet him at first was horror, the thought of this joker and fool in charge of you, to be responsible for guiding you where you need to be and easing your aches and pains on a night. He grew on you, though.
Because his friendly nature didn’t exude authority, he had already found himself the butt of many pranks throughout his short managerial career. Usually it was just wordplay, finding ways to tease him or make him seem the fool, but sometimes the pranks were more severe. One time over dinner after convincing him lychees were a type of animal, he told us about the time last year when he’d just started with LaxRelief and a couple of now suspiciously absent boys thought it would be funny to empty a bucket of water over him from a hotel balcony. He told us how angry he got, jumping from foot to foot, literally hopping mad. None of us could imagine that; it seemed like even a soaking couldn’t dampen his spirits. He marched on straight up to their room, hammered on the door, but when they answered expecting danger, he told them ‘Good one, guys,’ and smiled. That’s all.
The next morning they were racing and couldn’t turn their pedals, couldn’t stick with the other guys. They were ripping their own legs off but couldn’t make the bikes go fast enough. Ton taps his nose at this point whenever he tells this story. The reason was while they were eating breakfast that morning he’d filled their innertubes with water instead of air.
“Fair play to them,” he said, “They sweated through and finished the stage and then came up to shake my hand and offer their apologies.”
“I think we can agree launching G Magazine during these difficult times means we need to all be working extra hard and getting into the office on time. I’d like to see you coming in at 9.30 sharp in future, especially given the trust we’ve put in you to place you in such a pivotal role.”
The meeting was supposed to be about her performance, Susan suspected. At least her tardiness was something she was getting recognition for.
“I hold my hands up there,” Jonah said. “Punctuality has never been a big part of working for the Globe, but we’ve never launched a project this important before.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s only because nobody else gets in then either.” The office was the inevitable she was trying to delay each morning. Nobody mentioned that she no longer participated, which she’d never done much of, but had never retreated like this, into her headphones, her only words in a day often being morning greetings and evening goodbyes.
Nathan was dressed smarter than usual, with a stern look on his face, but underneath, somewhere in there, inadequately disguised, he was taking pleasure in this. “I know you don’t like me,” he said. This was a surprise to Susan, who had always assumed from his reliance on her that Nathan considered her an ally. Sometimes she’d get emails from him and type “Fuck off,” and hover over the send button, then press Discard. Brushing off his emails was an easier way to make it through the day, but apparently he had noticed.
“I really don’t think anybody has a problem with anybody else in this office,” Jonah said. “Now, obviously your role has changed somewhat. We appreciate that you’re working hard with limited resources, which is why we want to clarify what we feel will be the most important tasks for you to complete in the immediate future.”
“It’s about making you more accountable,” Nathan said.
“We want to be able to recognize the contribution you’re making to the magazine launch.”
The G Magazine, which was to be a glossy magazine slid into their Sunday edition, was already descending into the usual futility, with important decisions made the same old backward way by individuals picking their conclusion and then building an argument to back it up.
Jonah recited a list of duties he thought she should accomplish when she arrived on time in a morning, then asked Nathan if he’d missed anything.
“Weekly reporting. The website statistics. Let’s give her a weekly schedule.”
“Yes, of course,” Jonah said. This had been a particular bugbear. “Monday morning, first thing.”
Susan nodded.
Jonah now produced a printed copy of the goals he’d just recited. Some were repeated on that day each week, some were fortnightly, some were placeholders for a type of task that couldn’t be predicted.
Jonah stood up. “Is all of that okay?” He asked, as if there was a way she could say no. The smirk on the face of Nathan suggested he thought he’d changed her behavior.
Steve was stood by her desk when she returned.
“Excuse me,” she said, and sat down.
“How was the film show last night?”
“Fine.”
“I’m going to lunch in a minute if you want to come with me.”
“I’m too busy to chat, Steve,” she said. She didn’t know how long she stared at the screen absently. She couldn’t make herself think of what to write next. It didn’t feel real. An email notification arrived from Nathan and her heart beat faster. She stood up and fitted an escape to the bathroom.
The loud extractor fan drowned out the sounds of tired discussions from beyond the walls, isolating and detaching her from the artifice clouding her daily life. After a while, the fan took on its own sound, where the oscillation settled into a rhythm, maybe just in her head, and began to follow a more consistent track, like the drone of white noise. She turned off the harsh fluorescent light in the windowless room, and plunged herself into a deep darkness. Even in the height of summer the light crept only so far under the door.
Turning this combination of darkness and silence into a perfect idyll could be difficult to coordinate and would require a level of attention to the bowel movements of her colleagues that was above and beyond the level of attention she was already trying to escape.
Inside the bathroom, the noises from outside seemed distant and empty, not an uncommon feeling for Susan to have in respect to her colleagues, but a kind of validation from the universe that the world she was so keen to escape, like, emotionally, and through her headphones and these moments of locking herself away, a kind of validation that all of this was in some way irrelevant and incorrect and by no means as big a deal as some of the voices would pretend, and the nonsensical chatter and jokes and the overloud learnings of the office know-it-all were whispers as the world turned and the fan oscillated, and really she was just using, in her own little rebellion, her time slightly better than the people behind the door who were now so distant and didn’t even know they could be thinking about more important matters.
Even in a small, friendly community like the British pro peloton, it can be hard being new.
There’s a story going around I’ve heard three or four times now, about a rider who was riding a race right up at the front, maybe sixth in line, so in a position to take turns driving the peloton, but at this point kind of enveloped with other riders overlapping his back wheel on either side. He’s riding along and he starts to not feel that great. He’s got gas, his stomach’s making rumbling sounds. So he’s there, and he goes to push a fart out, real delicately, like, just squeeze a small one out just for a bit of relief, and suddenly his stomach feels like a brick’s just landed in it. The story goes the unnamed rider swears afterwards he felt the force pull him down toward his top tube.
The explanations for his sudden onset of sickness are varied depending who’s telling the story. They say he was lactose-intolerant and absentmindedly ate an omelette for breakfast, or he drank too much coffee, or it was the combination of energy gels he’d eaten.
Whatever caused it, what happens next is, when he’s delicately pushing this tiny pocket of air out and, recall, his stomach suddenly becomes a builder’s yard, what comes out isn’t a light puff of air at all, a fragrant deposit into the atmosphere, but instead a liquid that dribbles down his smelly bridge and onto his chamois. It’s the tiniest bit of liquid, but in his head it feels huge, like a river of sewage is in his shorts and the peloton and the TV cameras and his family are going to see. With the seal broken he knows he’s in for an explosive and frighteningly imminent case of the blacknells, and he clenches his hoop as tight as he can and he can feel the moisture against his cheeks and he tries to get out of there, out of this paceline and off the back of the group where he can take off his shorts and spray some unfortunate farmer’s field with this likely toxic human manure.
But what happens is as he moves to the outside of the peloton, the floodgates open in front of everybody, and he finishes the race wearing brown shorts.
They tell the story to you while you’re riding, and it’s told so similarly every time, like a folk tale that’s been perfected. There’s never enough detail about the final explosion. I find myself considering the position of my anus and my chamois. Would it absorb into the chamois before seeping through? Or is my position too bum-high? Would it spray through the lycra?
We all fear getting caught short in a race. And even though the man in the story isn’t real, it alarms us because he could be any one of us, with our coffees, and our diets, and our energy gels. Any time we could get caught short and have to drop off the back of the peloton, or worse, have to try to defend a jersey while clenching our cheeks and ignoring the growls from our bowels. Our digestive systems are put to great use and at any moment could decide to punish as retribution.
But there’s another thing about the vagueness of this rider’s digestive vagary, because it reminds us of the elephant in the room: we spend most of our time with our faces pointed directly into some other guy’s ass. What happened to the other guys when he exploded? Because I’m sure for those guys it wasn’t all fun and games and thinking up new nicknames to call Djamoladine Shatmepantsov. What if that ass right in front, pointing up in your face right now, is the one that goes off? Will there be spray? There’ll be a smell.
And like the emperor’s new clothes, I see the almost-naked man in front of me for what he is, a bobbing anus that at any moment could do what anuses do. That’s the glamour of pro bike racing. For the next decade I’ll be staring at men’s asses. I’ll be panting, struggling, and now, always, hoping they never have their moment directly in front of me. I have been hazed.
Hold it in your hands
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