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  I was into the final ranks of shabby tenements when a Fiat Punto shot out of a side road 6 feet from my front wheel, its driver gazing at me with placid curiosity. ‘Hmm, it seems I may be about to cause this cyclist serious injury,’ his expression said. ‘Honestly, what am I like?’ I emptied my lungs at him and careered onto the pavement. At this stage I was pretty much resigned to ending up as a dusty plastic bouquet cable-tied to a lamp-post, but please God: not a La Spezia lamp-post.

  With the city at last behind me I trundled for hours through sombre, under-peopled beach resorts. This was summer’s end game: the sands were annexed by battalions of private-hire sunloungers, but not one sagged under a mahogany fatso. Plenty of cyclists, though, most of them high-end amateurs with flash bikes and peloton-issue wraparound shades. An especially smug pair rolled by me in a manner that somehow seemed appallingly dismissive; I suppose some men would have risen to this bait and taken them on – men like me, twelve years ago on a proper bike. Ferocious battles with rival strangers were now off the agenda, unless I fancied blowing away some granddad on a shopping bike, which I did.

  After the regal old villas and hotels of Forte dei Marmi, the road turned inland; shedding panino crumbs over the map outside a bar, I realised I wouldn’t be seeing the Med again. I spent the rest of the afternoon in marble country, dumbstruck by the extraordinary mountainside quarries twinkling in the sun off to my left. They’ve been hewing Carrara marble out of the Apuan Alps for over two thousand years, and these days are doing so at the rate of a million tons a year. When it runs out there’s going to be approximately 100 per cent unemployment in this area. Every single town seemed entirely beholden to the stuff: cutting it up, polishing it and fashioning it into tombstones, floor tiles and abysmal representations of dolly birds getting their kit off.

  Rather unnecessarily, I felt, my route then swung right at the Apuan foothills, vaulting them with a pocket bastard of a climb. I freely confess to having every intention of tackling much of this on foot, but it was not to be. A van driver took a shine to me at the first hairpin, overtaking with a volley of supportive toots, and as I crawled up to the second ready to throw in the towel there he was again, pulled over by the side of the bend with a Borat smile and a raised thumb. ‘Forza l’eroica!’ he bellowed, and though my legs were already quivering I did my best to appear nonchalant, a poker face as hopeless as the one my neighbour’s cat pulls when he tries to look like he isn’t curling one out in our flowerbed. My new friend wasn’t there at the summit, which at least saved me a dilemma: give him a tearful hug or punch his friendly lights out?

  The stress of this effort punished both man and machine. As the descent flattened out I became aware that the ‘missing link’ in each pedal revolution – previously no more than a modestly jarring ba-tunk – had grown to a yawning dead spot that occupied almost a full quadrant. Having paid close attention while Fabio addressed this problem, I now knew exactly what to do: find someone to fix it.

  Almost at once a large bike shop appeared by the roadside. I pulled over, walked the Hirondelle in and found myself presented with a most promising spectacle: a bald man in overalls at a loose end by a wall-mounted display of semi-vintage road bicycles. Lady Luck was at my side, and when this man interrupted my idiot mumblings in competent English, she tore her top off. Then put it back on and punted me deftly in the nuts. ‘Old bicycle is for collezione, for museo, for like this,’ he said flatly, nodding at the Hirondelle while jabbing a thumb at the machines on the wall behind him. ‘For touring? No.’

  ‘For touring yes,’ I insisted, explaining that I’d already covered the thick end of a thousand kilometres on this particular museum piece, and appealing to his sense of the eroica by wedging in some inspirationally colourful details from 1914. ‘I am following the most difficult race in history,’ I said imploringly. ‘Eighty-one men started that race and only eight of them finished.’

  He considered this for a moment. ‘On such bicycle you are not number nine.’

  After the storm-lashed, carpet-tacked horrors of the opening leg, the stage from Cuneo to Lucca was a picnic. One of those steal-your-own-salami picnics, held in a rolling downpour over 340 non-stop kilometres. It claimed ten further riders, whittling down the field to twenty-seven. These days, Giro riders don’t always need much encouragement to pull out: in the 2013 race, Lord Wiggo and a number of other competitors retired citing ‘head colds’, ‘flu-type symptoms’ and similar conditions of the sort that I wrote in my mum’s handwriting when I didn’t fancy PE. Contrast this with 1914 race leader Angelo Gremo, who fainted at La Spezia due to ‘unbearable pain in the legs and kidneys’, yet still tried to climb back on his bike when he came round. ‘I can make it to Lucca if I pace myself,’ he croaked to the gathered reporters. But his two surviving teammates had just abandoned, ‘weeping like children’, in Paolo’s preferred manner, and the driver of the team car told Gremo to forget about pacing himself: he had no intention of accompanying him in darkness through the Apuan foothills, an area then notorious for murderous bandits. Gremo, yet another tough old bugger who rode the 1926 Giro at the age of thirty-nine and finished eighth, dropped his head, then shook it. Now that’s a retirement.

  I last passed through Lucca as a student interrailer, and remember the city as a gem of walled Renaissance gorgeousness, where I bought a two-litre bottle of Lambrusco that shattered inside my rucksack. This time I was viewing the place through a different tourist prism, but what I saw thrilled me no less. I’d always planned to stay in Lucca, which as the stage-two finish marked my quarter-way point, and the shop I chanced upon just outside the city walls sealed the deal.

  It’s hard to think of any single way that Ciclidea could have excited me more, though I suppose a bag full of complimentary sweets and money slung from the door handle might have done the job. A bustling little concern in a bustling little street, the place was like B & L Accessories of Ealing run by hyperactive Fabios, dashing about fixing bikes behind a window full of dusty spare parts and racing trophies. Two things seeped out of the door: the smell of oil and new rubber, and a queue of old people holding variously stricken bicycles. A drop-in surgery! In a state of quiet wonder I took my place at the back, behind a tiny chap in a trilby with a one-pedalled sit-up-and-begger.

  The action inside was breathless: when you got to the front of the queue, one of the Fabios grabbed your bike and lashed a steel rope round the crossbar, before another hoisted it up on a ratchet to eye-level. At once a third got to work with the spanners and screwdrivers, a new chain here, a set of pads there, a tweak, a squirt, back down to the ground and off you go. Most were processed in under three minutes, with a purposeful lack of ceremony that called to mind carcasses in an abattoir. Sod the cossetting, overblown romance of all that eroica cobblers – this no-nonsense bike-betterment was just what I wanted.

  I was on the shop’s threshold, second in line, when the youngest Fabio walked up and raised his eyebrows enquiringly. ‘I have a problem with my central movement,’ I said, which sounded like a prim euphemism for constipation, and was delivered in an aptly strained tone. No rope-hoist for me: he leaned down and brusquely appraised my undercarriage where I stood. Diagnosis was crushing and instant: ‘Non ne abbiamo cosi in Italia.’ We don’t have those ones in Italy.

  I’d learned from Fabio, my One True Fabio, the original and best, that this was indeed so – he’d never seen a Thompson before – but I also knew that to any experienced bicycle mechanic, the almost shockingly basic workings of a Thompson bottom bracket should hold no fear.

  ‘Chiavelle?’ I wheedled, in a semi whimper. The native word for ‘cotter pins’ was now a conversational cornerstone, the ‘two beers please’ of my weird holiday vocab.

  ‘Chiavelle?’

  His rather challenging look added the unspoken words, ‘I’ll give you chiavelle.’ Then he went inside and came back with a club hammer and a nasty smile.

  Why was this happening? Standing at the window I’d seen a couple of the
Fabios sharing a me-directed snicker, but that was no more than par for the course given the goggle-faced retro-twit whose reflection lay between us.

  ‘Chiavelle,’ he said again, then knelt down by the Hirondelle and as I grabbed the bars belted it smack in the cotters. CHONK! KRINK! A lusty hammer blow on the end of each pin. My hands were still vibrating when he stood up and said, actually almost spat, a single-word command: ‘Vai!’ Go. Just go. Go on, go.

  I’d covered a sorry 82km since breakfast, and in the last hour Number 7 had first been deemed unfit for purpose, then beaten up. With no gain for its pain: I pedalled listlessly away from Ciclidea to find the pa-donk merely retuned to a ker-snick. How dare they treat my proud old steed like that? This was personal: that was my bike that I’d built, that I’d suffered with and slept with. Hit my bike and I bleed. Diss him and you diss me. After so many shared travails I sometimes felt we were evolving into one of Alfred Jarry’s half-man, half-bike supermales, welded together, mechanically married for better or worse.

  A thoroughly dispiriting day segued inevitably into a miserable evening. Or at least should have. Instead, six hours later I was feeling so much better about my lot that I rounded off the night with a beer from the minibar – in my book, an Elton-grade indulgence. Reasons to be cheerful: Lucca had proved even lovelier than I recalled, my guesthouse was liberally adorned with goblins, and over the course of a well-fed night out, defeatism had been steadily overpowered by defiance.

  Was I an F. H. Grubb, who let the native nasties get into his head and bully him out of the race? Or was I an Alfonso Calzolari, shrugging off the snow and punctures, the pain that pulsed through his injured knee with every turn of the pedals, the dirty tricks that as race leader would henceforth be his daily due? Yeah, OK, well obviously I wasn’t even slightly him. But I still clicked off my goblin-helmet bedside light with flinty resolve, thinking: Know this, oh snide and sceptical bike-fixers of Tuscany – wobbly wheels, dicky cotters and all, I shall get this job done.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 2

  (Cuneo–Lucca, 340km)

  Alfonso CALZOLARI 31:54:15 (including a 10 minute penalty)

  Costante GIRARDENGO +1:05:07

  Enrico SALA +1:30:01

  Timothy MOORE +16:09:30

  Stage starters: 37

  Stage finishers: 27

  CHAPTER 10

  BEDROOM GOBLINS COUNTED (a.m.): 19

  Minutes in post office arranging repatriation of redundant maps and cold-weather clothing: 195

  Minutes savouring heart-stopping piazzas, vaulted colonnades, august ecclesiastical splendour, Shakespearian ambience, etc.: 560

  Carafes: 1.5

  Bedroom goblins counted (p.m.): 38

  Kilometres cycled: 0

  CHAPTER 11

  THE KNIVES WERE out for Fonso as soon as the enormity of his lead became clear. Professional road-racing was routinely rigged back then, a carve-up between the larger, wealthier sponsors brokered by organisers who knew which side their bread was buttered. On the rest day in Lucca, Calzolari was slapped with a ten-minute penalty, following a belated complaint from person or persons unknown. His offence? A trumped-up charge of ‘unauthorised assistance’ during the previous stage: his team car had been sent on ahead to La Spezia to source sugar tablets and a dry pair of shorts.

  I read Paolo’s jaded account of this episode under the sinister, degenerate caricatures of Snap, Crackle and Pop grinning down horribly from the breakfast-room walls and ceiling. (When I’d broached the goblin issue with the receptionist the night before, I was hoping he’d grab me wildly by the lapels and blurt, ‘You see them? You see them too?’ But in disappointing truth, the art was no more than a tribute to local folklore.)

  ‘For me, cycling is today not an honest sport.’

  It was the proprietor, a twinkly-eyed fellow who spoke excellent English and served even better coffee. Moments earlier he had made the mistake of not lapsing into a coma when I started to explain what I was up to, and had consequently been forced to suffer the unedited highlights of my adventure to date. Now it was my turn: as I tinkered with the Hirondelle’s brake springs on the guesthouse patio, he leaned against his French windows and held forth on the commercial cynicism of modern professional cycling, its chicaneries and tedious predictability, and – a particular bugbear – ‘these idiot helmets everybody wear in the chrono, sitting in that stupid not normal position’.

  It was difficult to keep silent about 1914’s grubby plotting: bar the idiot helmets, every one of his gripes had blighted pro cycling since its birth. But I’m glad I managed to, because as I saddled up he told me that I should think of myself as the ambassador for an epoch of romance and excitement.

  It was a cool, grey day, my goggles-off entrée into the world of peripheral vision. The roads were busy with Sunday club cyclists; the undulating landscape around grew ever more Tuscan, full of spindly, noble cypress avenues and farmers burning stuff in olive groves. Even the uglier towns were blessed with vintage wonders: I passed a hypermarket set in its own Renaissance moat. I also nearly died.

  Since leaving Milan I had escaped perhaps half a dozen speculative assassination attempts by the Fiat-driving granny hit-squads, but in the latter part of that morning they upped their game: this was The Day of the Panda. The red one that shot straight across my bows at a village mini-roundabout was no more than a nerve-shredding softener, the white one that clipped my saddlebag in a traffic-light queue just a range-finding sighter. On the outskirts of Castelfranco di Sotto, a rearward grinding of gears and a volley of angry horns alerted me to the imminent master assault.

  Intuitively I bumped off the road and up onto the pavement, a manoeuvre that would save me having to dig out my E1–11 European Health Insurance Card with one hand and half a face. At once a flash of mint-green metal and curly white hair hurtled waywardly through my hastily vacated portion of tarmac, kissing the kerb hard with its front tyre, then slaloming crazily up the road for a hundred yards before planting itself into a stone gate post. The impact, preceded by none of the usual sounds of emergency deceleration, was a tremendous whoompfing crunch that filled the sullen air with milky steam. I pedalled into this cloud and straight out. Perhaps I should have stopped to check if the driver was all right. Then done something to make sure she wasn’t.

  Number 7 wheezed and groaned eastwards, its orchestra of woe now supplemented with a frail, high-pitched bleat from the bottom bracket, as if I had a newborn animal welded up in there. All the same, it was music to my ears. Strange but true: I’d been suffering withdrawal symptoms after just one day of not pushing myself and my geriatric bike to the brink. It had become my duty to do so. In a funny way, every new creak and judder spurred my determination to get this ailing crock over the line and stick it to those nay-sayers. Old bicycle is for museo. The words were lodged in my head, like a dismissive headline pinned up by a football manager on the dressing-room wall to spur his players on.

  The 1914 survivors rolled out of Lucca at midnight, seen off by a huge crowd of spectators waving multicoloured lanterns under the first clear skies since Milan. A memorable start to what would be the longest day in Giro history: the stage finish lay 430.3 non-stop, gravelly kilometres away in Rome, the equivalent of London to Newcastle. Today’s pros, riding multi-geared bikes that weigh less than a kitten, are rarely asked to cover even half that, on smooth tarmac. Mario Marangoni, who had trailed home a distant last in both the previous stages, told reporters he wasn’t expecting to finish this monster in under twenty-four hours. (He actually did it in twenty-two, but would be last again, over four hours behind the winner.)

  Professional cycling’s longest-ever solo breakaway began at a level crossing 15km outside Lucca. While the rest of the field waited at the closed barrier, Bianchi’s Lauro Bordin sneaked away from the clanking bells and red lanterns, then ghosted through a gap in the fence under cover of darkness, carrying his bike over the track just in front of a lumbering goods locomo
tive. It was a standard ruse, rendered a disqualifiable offence some years later when riders began scuttling under slow-moving trains in the deathly pursuit of advantage. (This being pro cycling, laws are there to be broken: three of the top four finishers in the 2006 Paris–Roubaix were disqualified for nipping under a closed level-crossing barrier.)

  The train took four long minutes to trundle by, and because no one had noticed Bordin slip away, no one gave chase. By Fucecchio, where I ate a takeaway kebab in a cemetery, he had built up a handy lead. Here the rest of the field learned of Bordin’s escape – but still did nothing about it: with 400km to go, it was dismissed as a nutjob’s folly. When Bordin sped into Florence, his advantage had stretched to twenty-five minutes.

  ‘The crowded riverbanks were gaily bedecked with acetylene illuminations’: even at 2 a.m., the Florentines knew how to welcome a cyclist. Under a slightly leaky sky I discovered they still do. It seemed a nutjob’s folly to pass through without having a peek at the city’s astounding cathedral – my entire adult life had elapsed since I last stood unworthily before it – but with its mighty terracotta dome just a piazza away, I found myself mobbed by camera-toting well-wishers.

  Rain-resistant crowds clustered around a giant inflatable arch, a grandstand full of trophy-toting dignitaries: I had blundered up to the finish line of a bicycle race that to judge from the increasingly excitable Tannoyed commentary was imminently due to cross it. As I nosed the Hirondelle through the spectators, they parted before me; heads swivelled and compact zooms came out. Larger lenses turned to face me when the tabard-clad professionals, gathered inside the crowd-control barriers, noted my approach. A barrier was unhitched and by some unstoppable process I was semi-ushered, semi-shoved through the gap, and onto the finish line itself. The snappers formed themselves into an arc before me, and got to work. Amongst their ranks was a freckled woman who raised her voice and said, ‘Now this guy has got to be a Brit.’ With an uncertain smile I looked out from the celebrity pinnacle of my life to date: a paparazzi photo-call at the 2012 Women’s Tour of Tuscany.