Striking the Sun: The Monster
Striking the Sun was a collaborative novel and audiobook project. This chapter took place around three-quarters of the way through the book.
There’s a floral chatter like the sound of birdsong in the morning before you’re fully awake. Children’s voices form chords in the air, notes of curiosity and of excitement and also, somewhere in there, of boredom. The range of adult voices is more or less the same. From here it’s hard to tell the specifics of any one conversation, each an instrument in a vast orchestra. They’re stood two deep along this straight, though most of that is children in front at the barriers and their parents behind, or girlfriends in front and boyfriends behind, some of the girlfriends looking tired as if they wonder what the appeal is. You have to hope these aren’t first dates, because it’s a weird world to introduce to a perfect stranger. Men in cycling jerseys and casquettes laugh together, their bikes nowhere to be seen—did they ride, or are they committing the faux pas of attending in their jerseys? Further down the strip, toward the finish line, the fans bunch up deeper, as deep as it’ll go, a body of coloured shirts and caps pressed from the barrier to the brick wall a couple of metres behind.
From this distance, the crowd is one mass, cells in a larger body, a clew of worms acting as one, rippling and waving, growing quiet and then loud, parting and reforming. A flag raised high and waving; the flag of Bretagne, the Gwenn-ha-du, with its ten ermine spots maybe no longer crying out for separatism but still speaking of regional pride, a love for Hinault and for a country that produces the type of riders who will grit their teeth and fight their bikes no matter what. The winter coat of the stoat, whatever that might mean anymore, flying above the swarm, spearing it through its spine, whichever hands supporting it invisible from this distance.
One end of the creature reaches over the barriers and bangs on the advertising boards—a loud, fast drumming—and soon the rest of the creature follows in unison, pausing in its tracks and rippling to seep over the barriers, before, having detected no approaching cyclists, returning to its previous shape.
There’s no great writhing creature on the other side of the road. This space has been given over to dignitaries, the friends of the race organiser, the people who have money burning holes in their pockets, the spouses and children. There’s no brick wall to be pressed against here, and the, what, forty, or maybe fifty at a push, people have ample space to move, seats to use, unobscured views. It’s as great a place to be bored as it is to watch cycling. One corner is given to journalists, where they can see the finish and take photographs and squat on the floor to use their laptops. The paradox is the people crushed in terrible conditions, pressed into a great earthworm stretched along the road, who woke up early to be here and will stand for hours, these people are the ones desperately watching for the race. Across the road, the jaded or the late have a perfect view, and maybe they’ll glance up from their plates to enjoy it when the race arrives. A bike race like this is a B to B operation. The punters don’t matter compared to the television access and the sponsors and the council representatives. They sell the race to the people in the VIP area, but what they’re really selling is the people across the road, who’ll vote, or buy, or make up an audience to sell adverts around. The bike race is secondary.
In his youth, working at Cahiers and bearded to give himself a self-image of adulthood and dignity, Henri Giroud resisted this area, chose instead to experience the race with the proletariat, so to speak, cramped and uncomfortable, suffering for the sport he loved. But things change. You gradually get worn down until you take the clearer viewpoint, and then the comfortable seat, and then the sandwich. Soon you’re across the road, looking out over the great monster and remarking only how wonderful it is for the sport that said creature has grown so large, swelled in recent years. You can converse quietly. No elbow ever graces your ribcage.
Out there in the mass, the discomfort and the weather and everything else, surely to experience the sport this way must blunt the passion? But no, not really. And in here, in the cage designed to keep the creature at bay, where no such passion is exercised, exercised in the sense of muscles, that is, where no such passion sustains and stretches, does the passion then grow weak, unstimulated? A less resounding no this time. The dialectic shifts. Not only how you consume, but what you consume. Consume not meaning sandwiches but discourse. A bike race becomes a different thing, and you become of a different caste to the monster at the gates.
Conversation pauses on both sides of the road for a motorbike driving through the finish straight. And then another, and then a car. The sound resumes first from the sandwich eaters, now drinking white wine while kids messily pick at tiramisu with short spoons.
Minutes pass. Anxiety fills the air, or maybe expectation. Giroud pictures a historical feast, where kings and noblemen would dine while starving paupers looked on. As a young man on the final day of a stage race, Giroud had taken off the branded clothes he’d been made to wear and handed them to passing fans, an old couple, though they were probably younger then than he and Maude are now. Of course, they were delighted to accept a keepsake very few people would ever own. Giroud had made a habit of this since then, gifting to the fans the things he’d otherwise throw away. Let them eat brioche. Good King Wenceslas. It felt patronising to think of now, but his little gifts had made a lot of people happy.
If it wasn’t for the fans there’d be no sport. But what would possibly change as long as they’d keep coming back for more despite being treated with such contempt? Maybe that’s just how it had to be. His own races hadn’t done it on this scale, but they’d done it, and… But another motorbike came through now, and the expectation rose again.
Silence all around. Nobody even banging on the barriers. Nothing. And then another motorbike and a car and another car. And then nothing for a while. The monster overflows again, and the banging resumes and the cheering and further down the road the monster ripples to get a glimpse, and then finally the lone rider comes into Giroud’s view as well, Giroud not raising himself from his chair but watching. The crowd erupts. On this side, applause. Men in suits smile and nod to each other and Giroud imagines they’re saying things to each other like, “I know who that is because I understand cycling.” He’s paraphrasing, of course.
The next pause doesn’t burn in the air like the last one, but everybody knows more riders are approaching. Silence doesn’t quite get a hold of the street before the crowd makes more noise. Giroud wonders if any bike race has finished with these little spurting gaps in the same ratio as the Fibonacci sequence.
He doesn’t know who the first placed finisher was; he heard the name announced and neither recognised it nor stored it to his memory. More riders. A peloton. A gap. Some stragglers. A gap. More stragglers. A gap. The laughing group. A gap. One lone rider, shorts ripped and blood on his thigh. A gap. A car. A motorbike. A car. A car. A car. And the crowd disperses.
Some have gone home, but others have moved to where the team buses are parked. The riders are already inside. The mechanics working surrounded by crowds vary in their dispositions; some appear delighted with their audience, or else ambivalent, or else exhausted by it all. The creature has been carved up now, sliced into a series of pustules, each welling and throbbing. One of these smaller creatures begins a cacophony outside a team bus, a dissonant chant in all types of voices. The creature is trying to entice the winner out, to see him up close in person, to perhaps grab an autograph or pat him on the shoulder or congratulate him some other way. They chant his name.
“Larcque! Larcque! Larcque!”
What a powerful drug that must be to somebody so young. Mustn’t something like that do something to break a young man, one way or the other?
Beyond, a team sponsor has set up a gazebo near their bus. It attracts more fans, but also deflects them out of the way into a designated area. The fans gravitating there are being gifted branded trinkets, things like balloons and temporary tattoos and pictures of the riders. The types of tchotchkes that children cherish and adults briefly strive to get their hands on, before discarding once the drug of the event has worn off.
Giroud didn’t know why he decided to walk this direction. He had no interviews to conduct and no meetings to attend, and anyway had the means to achieve such goals without entering into the maelstrom. Maude was to meet him nearby around now, and the car to take them both home would be arriving there any moment. Still, he’d walked this way, the opposite direction, just for a look, to be surrounded by the fans, part of the ebb and flow of the race. Some of the fans were matey with the crew or the riders or whoever else, which you’d expect in a sport this small. Others were entirely starstruck, would even ask a mechanic for an autograph. Plenty of people he knew would be out here too.
Cameras and tripods pointed out from the creature, the scrubby lower tiers of the cycling media who couldn’t get into the VIP area, who had to troll the streets for content. Ex-domestic pros wandered the streets, and would occasionally be recognised and have to shake a guy’s hand. People in the industry who weren’t spending the type of money that would earn them the free meal at the race organisers’ expense shook hands and smiled.
He wandered, but didn’t have the energy to stand in the crowd, what, four or five deep here, to wait for riders to leave a bus. Maybe once upon a time, maybe never, but definitely not today. It was funny, being here, in this state of limbo. No longer having anything to do in one caste, no recollection of how to exist in the other. Is that really all it took to be a fan, to endure like your heroes in order to meet them? Hadn’t he endured enough for this sport?
It was draining trying to be in the crowd without becoming a part of it, and he was starting to draw anxious. He wanted to see the winner, this Larcque chap, but couldn’t bear to stand and wait for a glimpse, and for some reason felt like a fraud in the press area, awkward and uncomfortable, knowing this was a world on which he no longer stood. That life looked more beautiful from a distance, like standing on the moon and staring back at the Earth.
He turned back through the crowd the way he came. Everybody was walking in the opposite direction. A salmon swimming upstream. Larcque was probably out of the bus and on his way to the press centre.
It took a long time. He’d slow his pace when the paths grew blocked, walk slowly and patiently until he could lift the pace again. It was exhausting. Was it always this exhausting?
He could see Maude through a gap in the crowds and tried to look apologetic, but she didn’t seem concerned. He drew closer so slowly, catching glimpses of her through the bobbing heads. That was where he felt happy, he realised, and comfortable and with purpose, or at least without anxiety over his lack of purpose. Not here in the crowd or there in the cage.
Sometime during this realisation he noticed the attention of the crowd pointing elsewhere, heads turned to his left. A rider. But no, something else. The rider looked unhappy. Some people were around him, causing trouble. The film crew, that film crew, who’d set up Liam Greene, were here. The film crew that had caused him to be detained by the police, that great debate with Officer Kalb, wasting time that should’ve been spent finding the book. The crew that invited him up to their dirty building to record his voice and mocked him when they thought he couldn’t hear them, not knowing their talkback didn’t mute properly, though maybe they should’ve presumed, given the state of the rest of their equipment. And then they’d sailed him up the river.
“Leave him alone,” he said. The words came out of his mouth and he heard them as fresh as any stranger. It caught him by surprise. “Have some dignity, you buffoons.”
There was confusion on their behalf. The camera pointing one way on the short one’s shoulders, the tall one absently holding the microphone and looking back and forth, and then the producer pointing at Giroud. The camera turned and the microphone lifted and Giroud was in full shot. But he wasn’t young or inexperienced enough to be starstruck here, wouldn’t pause like a rabbit in the headlights. He didn’t freeze, but stepped in toward the producer. The camera turned but there was confusion again at the prospect of showing behind the mirror. The producer shouldn’t be in the shot, shouldn’t ever be the one engaging the subject.
“Grow up, Henri. We’re journalists,” the producer said. “You were one once, remember?”
“You’re making a mockery of this sport. Why would you waste your time this way?”
“Maybe you’re fine with crawling into bed with this scum, taking the easy money and the dirty conscience. You can defend your opinion in an interview if—”
Giroud pushed his fist straight through the target. He didn’t know what he was doing; it had happened in a moment when some synapse had fired before he’d had time to think. He’d never thrown a punch before in all his years, but that didn’t matter. The weight behind the punch made up for its lack of speed, and its recipient wasn’t expecting it. The producer fell down and made no effort to stand back up. In movies people seem to be knocked out for hours or minutes, but after a few anxious seconds, the producer began to move, then climbed up off the ground like he was scaling a wall, and walked a disjointed walk out of the crowd, no fight left in him.
The taxi’s engine rumbled quietly in the background. After what he had deemed a sufficient period of solemnity in respect of his passengers, the driver turned on his radio up front, which chattered and played catchy music, but was quiet enough with only speakers in the front of the car that it still felt distant and otherworldly to Henri and Maude.
“You shouldn’t have hit him so hard.”
The words punctured the silence and lingered in the air. They’d fallen out of Maude’s mouth before her brain had realised that part of her was working. Giroud said nothing. Maude’s eyes trained themselves on him, waiting for a reply, for what can be a more devastating response than silence, even to stupidity that should never have left your mouth?
Sometimes the light would flicker through the trees and streetlights and the metal of the car, like viewing through the filter of a zoetrope. Photons traveling all the way from the sun at speeds where time didn’t exist, finally stopped and broken up by simple urban planning. Maude remembered this effect used to make her feel sick in the back seat of the car when she was a girl, though cars were different back then and anyway her family never owned a car this upmarket, so the sickness may not have been entirely down to the movement of the light.
“Look, that lovely cafe closed down.”
“Oh, why would that have happened?”
Maude hadn’t expected Giroud to respond.
“What was it called? Something green.”
“The Green Room.”
“That’s it. I supposed we didn’t stop there often enough. We only went there once or twice, didn’t we?”
“Marvellous clam.”
The taxi driver sighed and mumbled when the car’s suspension began to creak and bounce on the farm lane. The few times Maude had taken a taxi home before, she’d told the driver to let her out at the start of the lane to save his car, or else before the really rough parts and where he could still turn around, and anyway she enjoyed the stroll, but today wasn’t a day for that and the taxi driver would have to suck up his protestations.
When the car finally stopped, Giroud fled from the seat of the taxi to his seat in the living room. By the time she’d paid and the driver had finished fumbling around for her receipt, Giroud was already there in the armchair beside the bookshelf, that one spot in the bookshelf left empty as though the book would never have existed if its place was occupied now.
He seemed in better spirits a short while later, but didn’t eat, and went to bed early and quietly.
“Can I join you?” Maude said, sticking her head around the bedroom door.
“If you like.”
“I don’t want to sit on my own. I’d rather get in bed next to you and read, but I don’t mind if you need some time alone.”
“Come and get in next to me.”
The next morning Maude brought him breakfast in bed. He hadn’t slept this late in years. It was 10am.
“What would you like to do today?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
“You don’t have any appointments?”
“No. Not today.”
“You could come with me to the village.”
“I’d like to take that alone time now, please.”
She could cut across the field and on to a footpath and be in the village in the same time it’d take to make the more circuitous route by car, a means of transport she rarely used. Since they’d moved in to the farm, Maude had been harbouring thoughts of buying a bicycle to make this trip. A nice one, with a basket on the front and panniers on the back. She had visions of transporting the vegetables she’d grow on the farm by bicycle—courgettes and leeks and whatever else poking out of the panniers—but as yet had failed to make the leap, had done little more than playfully mention the idea to Giroud over a glass of wine, expecting him to pull some strings and make the bicycle appear.
Stopped at the tabac for a smoke and a newspaper, she pondered how little Giroud knew of her routine. He’d always respected her, she felt, but since they moved into the farm he’d been out every day, more now than when he still had the job. He knew nothing of her daily life, simply came home when she was in the kitchen, then ate and slept. The next morning he would enjoy a breakfast and coffee, and then leave again. She wondered if he thought of her as some kind of housekeeper, which isn’t how she thought of herself at all.
The sports pages didn’t mention Henri’s flying fists, and why would they? But still, she’d expected the story to be front page news, to have shocked the world like it shocked her. They both had reason to despise that man, but the way he fell, and how he twisted as he landed, and the way he limped away, it was so unpleasant to watch and it was hard to imagine Henri being able to cause that to happen to another human being. Giroud was still relevant, wasn’t he? He’d taken up so many column inches and caused such offence by doing something as simple as talking about regional delicacies, so it stood to reason that a public act of physical violence would cause some commotion.
Maude didn’t miss living in the city. The village felt more French to her, somehow, with its church the lynchpin of the town, a cultural centre, and with its narrow rural streets. The sandstone buildings didn’t rise so high here, which meant she could enjoy the sun hanging lower in the sky when she’d occasionally drop by for dinner with Henri in tow.
She hadn’t yet begun to use the farmland. This was another guilt she had, an urge currently unfulfilled. There were other urges too, for the young men in lycra shorts she’d been watching on the television, clean shaven on the legs in a way she never expected to find attractive, so clean and perfect, carrying no excess weight. That was another good reason for Giroud to put some distance between himself and cycling. The reasons were stacking up.
If she grew all their food she wouldn’t have to come down to the village as often, which would be a shame. Her bags were heavy, but this obligation brought a structure to her day, and some moment of zen, a quiet stability from which she could think clearly. That must come with the farming too, though, that structure and the peace. A daily obligation outdoors.
When she got home, the kitchen was cold the where draughts blew in through gaps in the windows and walls. Down the hallway, the bedroom door was still closed.
Damp grass poked out from underneath the sides of her boots, and so she took them off and walked barefoot through the rest of the house. At the coffee table in the living room she opened up her laptop. She’d taken computer courses with her work twenty years ago, and was well acquainted with computers in daily life, but it was only since she’d retired that she’d bought one for home. Most days she didn’t use it. Giroud had his own computer for his writing, a large desktop PC that was much less elegant than the ancient typewriter it had replaced. Even when he’d been around, he’d been absent, locked away writing his columns and replying to letters. It’s funny how having someone home can make you feel so lonely.
Giroud never emailed, but he had an address and Maude would check on her laptop for messages from the increasing number people who refused to use outdated communications technology. Today she was doing it out of worry. The emails rolled in, one by one. She could see by their subject headers she wasn’t going to like what they contained, and needed to occupy herself to remain calm while they downloaded.
She made a pot of coffee and wiped the surfaces in the kitchen. In the hallway she paused by the bedroom door to try to hear Henri on the other side and then returned to the emails. She had the responses ready in her head, and just needed to decide what she’d tell Henri. Maybe she’d say nothing and simply take him on a holiday away from all of this. Her coffee cup left a warm ring on the table when she lifted it. Her heart was beating faster now, anxious with what she knew was coming next.
The mouse clicked heavily under her finger. Her eyes moved across the screen. Another click. Another lap of the screen. Click. Click. Click.
The chair sliding backward loudly across the wooden floor with a screech. Her feet heavy and slow. Mind not coordinated quite right. Potentially in shock.
The door felt heavy against her palm and then she was in the room. Giroud was there in the bed, motionless.
“Henri?”
The flicker of colour on the walls through the curtains, where the waving branches of trees outside had reduced the speed of light to the frame rate of an old movie.
“Henri. They love you.”
“What?” Giroud said. He sat up slowly, pushed the open book off his chest.
“That’s what they say,” Maude said.
“The fans?”
“No. But the industry and the teams,” Maude said. “They say you’re the man who’ll do anything to protect the riders. They all hated that guy.”
“That’s not why I did it.”
“Let them think it was.”
Giroud didn’t stir. He sat in bed a while longer. Maude made more coffee and sat in front of the computer again to read the words a second time. From the other room she could hear a weighted, fast shuffling. A clothed Henri Giroud emerged, and then returned with a mug of coffee.
“Do you want to read them?”
“No, it’s fine.”
But Giroud had played his hand. He was in better spirits already.
“Shall we go out?”
“Where?” Said Maude.
“Out. To a public house. A glass of brandy and some lunch?”
The phone rang and Maude rushed to answer it. With Maude out of the room, Giroud glanced at the email on the screen. When he was done, he wanted to click on the next one, from a current team manager he’d worked with many years ago, back when the team manager was an aging racing cyclist and trying his hands at different post-career jobs. If he clicked, Maude might know that he’d done so. His hand hovered over the mouse, and then Maude came back into the room.
“It’s Liam Greene,” she said. “He wants to speak to you.”