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They fuck because they have no reason not to. It’s expected of them, and they have a history of it, a history that goes back two years, and everyone knows it. One must always give the audience what it wants, even if the performance is behind closed doors, even if the only ones who know for sure are the two participants themselves, because then they become an audience for one another, and that pushes them further, and further, because sex, like racing, is a competition.
They measure their love in terms of breakages, physical and mental.
Michael takes the first chequered flag of the season. Australia, the race that sets the tone for the rest of the year but which also still feels like a holiday. Everyone arrives in Melbourne smiling. The smiles may slip as sidelong glances are cast at competitors’ cars, as top speeds are measured and pole challenges dissected, but as with the last race of the season, there’s a party spirit to Australia, and team principals, crews, and drivers can all pretend to be one big, happy family united in motorsport.
Mika goes to Michael’s hotel room. He already tendered his congratulations at the track. This isn’t about that. It has nothing to do with presenting the victor with his spoils, although he doesn’t mind if Michael believes otherwise.
Michael opens the door and stands aside to let him in. They don’t talk. Speech is a luxury neither of them wants in this moment.
They fuck, hard and brutal and unrelenting. No tenderness. No gentle touches or sweet caresses or whispered affections. They train for endurance and stamina, they train to withstand the violent pull of g-force, they train to blot out the thought of failure. With their bodies thus prepared, what is the point in gentleness, sweetness, tenderness? These are things that make no mark and leave no trace.
They’re rough with one another. Physical. They bite and bruise and scratch and slap and choke, and in it there’s a wild pleasure second only to driving on the limit. They push at boundaries, sometimes cross them, and it’s like losing control at two hundred miles an hour, like feeling the back end step out as the grip goes, the front sliding, sliding, and the freefall sensation in the stomach and the split-second blankness of the mind as the car spins, goes sideways, and slams into the wall.
“We should stop this,” Michael says, his breaths panting, body glazed with sweat.
“Yes,” says Mika. “We really should.”
*
Red becomes him. Ferrari is scarlet, the colour of passion, the colour of fire, the colour of sex. To Mika, it is also the colour of irony. Michael is not Latin-passionate, not Ferrari-passionate, and the tifosi resent him and laud him with equal fervour. Mika doesn’t envy him. The weight of expectation is a terrible thing, but in the right environment it can bolster a man. Mika knows this from experience.
Adelaide. The crash, massive and deadly, shockwaves of destruction and the kind of steel-grey certainty that this was it. Except when he thinks about it now, he’s not sure what to make of that certainty. Did he expect to die—this is it—or did he expect to black out—this is it—and wake up with his reality rearranged? There is a difference, after all, but whenever he thinks about it, he can’t ever find a satisfactory answer.
He remembers the crash. Remembers everything. When people ask—and they still do, from time to time, despite how short memories can be in F1—when people ask, he lies. Gives that lop-sided smile and says, “I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
A season is a long time in F1. A race is a long time. Five years is an eternity.
But he remembers the crimson wash of blood and the frantic bang-bang-bang of his heart, so like the stutter-snap of an engine under braking, and he wanted to stop his heart because with every beat he was losing blood, he was losing consciousness, and survival depends on staying awake, staying lucid, but if he stopped his heart he’d die. The dichotomy puzzled him, went round and round until he drifted away from the world. Even then it still puzzled him, right up until the moment he snapped back into wakefulness and there was nothing to puzzle over any more, there was only pain, brutal and honest.
He’ll never tell anyone that he remembers. Not Ron, not Erja, not anyone.
Ron saved him just as surely as Sid Watkins did. Not Ron himself, but his expectations. Erja’s expectations were different, of course; she just wanted him to live and be whole again. Ron wanted more than that. Not so much a return on investment as a return on hope. Then there were those who said he’d never race again, and, well, sometimes it’s nothing to do with sisu and everything to do with stubbornness.
After Michael broke his leg at Silverstone, Mika visited him in hospital. Corinna was there, pale and shaken and almost beautiful with relief. They sat for a while, he and she, and they spoke of commonplace things, discussed breaks and fractures and recovery times and plans for rehabilitation as if Michael wasn’t present, and when these subjects had been exhausted, Corinna stood and shook off her weariness as she straightened her clothes, and she smiled at her husband and said she was popping out to get a drink of coffee. Then she paused, corrected herself: tea, she said, a drink of tea. This is England, and she’d laughed then, even though it wasn’t funny, and Mika recognised in her laughter a distant echo of Erja’s panic.
She left, and Mika sat there, studying Michael’s narrow features, eyes dulled with opiates, skin the colour of old parchment written over and erased time and again.
“Do you remember any of it?” Mika asked.
Michael looked at him, a spark in those eyes, a long, long silence. “No.”
Mika nodded.
“Do you remember Adelaide?” Michael asked then for the first time.
Mika held his gaze. “No.”
Michael glanced down. Smoothed a hand over the bed sheets. It seemed for a moment as if he wanted to say something else, but the words never came, and they sat in a silence slow and intimate and almost companionable until Corinna returned and Mika made his goodbyes and left.
He’d lied to Michael, and Michael had lied to him. It was better than talking about the choking slide of blood and the terror and the knowledge that no matter how much rehabilitation, how many races contested and won, no matter how often you tell yourself that you’ve faced the fear and emerged triumphant, there’s always going to be a moment—in dreams, perhaps, or else in idleness—when the memories smash through the facade of indifference and forgetfulness, and those memories are always painted crimson.
Mika remembers all this now as Michael buckles under the weight of scarlet expectation. It’s San Marino, and Michael has won. His third victory in a row, and though the season is still in its infancy, the pundits are already discussing the potential inevitability of both WDCs going to Ferrari this year. The tifosi swarm around the circuit, rippling flags aloft and air horns blatting. Jean and Luca smile and smile. The church bells are ringing at Maranello.
In his motorhome, Michael lies naked and face down on the floor. Mika is still wearing his coveralls, McLaren silver-white.
“Please,” Michael says.
Mika puts his foot in the small of Michael’s back. His race shoes are red.
*
“I love you,” Michael says one day. Just like that, the words dropped through the air, casual and almost careless. As if it’s that simple.
Mika considers this statement. They’re in a park in Barcelona, high up on a hill with the city indolent before them in the swimming heat. It’s just past two in the afternoon and the sun is at its fiercest. They sit in the shadow of a tree that’s been trained to creep along the ground like a vine, or perhaps it really is a vine, though its trunk is thick and gnarled like an olive and its leaves are wide and glossy, like something tropical. The leaves are dusty. There’s no wind to flutter them, but at least they provide shade, and with it, the suggestion of intimacy.
“Why?” he asks at last. It’s not a challenge or a demand. It’s just a question.
Michael turns. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses and a cap—not a team cap but something plain and unremarkable—and though his eyes are hidden, the shape of his mouth speaks for him before he ever replies. “Why does there need to be a reason?”
“There doesn’t.” Mika looks away, gazing through the smoked tint of his own sunglasses at the serpentine concrete-and-mosaic bench that wriggles around the contours of the hill to provide a frame for the view of the city. “But I would still like to know.”
“Because,” Michael says, and he pauses, the silence filled with the shrill of insects and the achingly slow trickle of sweat.
“Because,” Mika echoes, not to mock or hurry but because it seems like an answer in itself.
Michael exhales. Leans back a little on the bench, shoulders tight, voice tighter. “Because of all of them, you’re the only one that can understand. You’re the only man I consider my rival. ‘Keep your enemies close’, isn’t that what they say?”
“Are we enemies?” Mika’s tone is mild.
“No. But...” Michael falls silent. Rubs a hand over the back of his neck, then wipes his palm on his beige shorts. The sweat leaves a mark, quickly absorbed. “If racing is a drug, then so is my need for you. So I will dress it up and call it love.”
“Drugs are bad,” Mika says.
“But sometimes necessary,” Michael argues.
“True.”
They sit in silence and feel the heat intensify around them.
“I love you, too,” Mika says at last.
The words drop through the air. They leave nothing in their wake.
*
There’s a trend amongst the drivers at the moment, a silly little rebellion against the unwritten rules that sportsmen should look like gentlemen even if they aren’t. F1 is perhaps the last bastion of gentlemanly presentation, even though no one really behaves like Graham Hill these days. No one behaves like James Hunt, either, and although there are plenty of cads in the paddock, they’re more likely to be corporate sponsors than drivers. It’s these same sponsors that like their sponsored trophies to appear neat and clean, if not clean-shaven, and they expect them to wear suits or expensive casual wear, and most of all, they expect all visible flesh to be free of tattoos.
Gentlemen do not go under the needle and scrawl their bodies with inked messages and symbols of love or gratitude or victory. Footballers may do that sort of thing, but then everyone knows footballers are low class and of below average intelligence. F1 drivers, by contrast, often come from wealth—inherited or accumulated; often have a pedigree—Hill, Villeneuve, Andretti; and though few of them are academically gifted, the melding of man with machine imparts the appearance of great intelligence, as does the fact that they risk their lives every time they step into a car. Calculated risks are taken as signs of acumen rather than idiocy or desperation.
F1 drivers are gentlemen. Gentlemen do not get tattoos. And yet along the pit and around the paddock there’s a trend, one that grows with each race, for drivers to flirt with the possibility of a tattoo. Only henna, of course, the type that fades after a few weeks, but even so, the media goes mad and sponsors fret and fans squeal or frown.
Michael gets a henna tattoo, a narrow band around his bicep that draws vast amounts of media interest.
Mika finds it funny. “You don’t have enough attention already?” he asks, stroking a finger over the tattoo. It doesn’t feel anything like a real one. The surface has a grain to it, but not the raised grain of scarred flesh. It’s opaque rather than holding the full gloss of fresh ink. It doesn’t bruise, doesn’t leave the skin around it tender and yielding.
“This isn’t about attention,” Michael says. “It’s about permanence. It’s a statement.”
The blatant ridiculousness of that remark only deepens Mika’s amusement. “And what are you trying to say?”
Michael flashes him an irritated look. “What do you think it means?”
“I think when you win the title, Luca will brand you with the mark of the Scuderia, and then you will regret this.” Mika digs his finger hard into Michael’s bicep, over the henna tattoo. “Nothing is permanent. Not even fame.”
*
They walk the circuit on the Thursday before the race. They go out early, just as dawn breaks, and the air is damp and the land smells green. Each track has its own particular scent. Spa smells of rain and wet earth, even when the day is dry.
They walk slowly, not quite together. They don’t keep pace or talk; they go their own way, making their own mental notes on the state of the track, on any changes in the tarmac, familiar bumps flattened or extended. They sniff the air and try to determine what the weather will do on Sunday, but they don’t share their thoughts.
At the bottom of Eau Rouge they pause and look up. It’s mighty, Eau Rouge: fast and demanding. It deserves the respect of the highest speeds a car can give.
They climb the hill.
“Here,” Mika says, sweeping his arms up ahead of him. “I’ll take you here.”
Michael smiles. “Try it,” he says. “Just you try it.”
“I will.” Mika returns the smile. “And I’ll win.”
He remembers that promise when he’s seated deep within the fragile shelter of the McLaren on Sunday. His car is set up for a dry race. A mistake, or so it seemed at first, especially when Michael took the lead. But nothing lasts forever, particularly at Spa, where the weather changes on a whim, and a dry line emerged from the wet track and made it all possible. A moment of madness, a calculated risk—the Ferrari and the pursuing McLaren coming up to Zonta’s BAR. They split around it, Michael going left, Mika going right, up, up, up, along the straight and into Les Combes, and that’s it. That’s it.
It’s not the victory. It’s not the sex. It’s not love or fame or anything else. This is the only thing that matters, and it’s the one thing he truly shares with Michael, that he shares with every other driver on the grid, past, present, future. Nothing else is important; nothing else matters. That moment when the track disappears, when the crest of the hill vanishes, when the gradient is sensed rather than seen, and the only thing visible through the tint of the helmet is the sky, blue-grey-blue, rainclouds rolling away to let in the sunlight, and anything is possible. Anything. Everything.
Eternity waits, going flat out up the hill. Eau Rouge at two hundred miles an hour.