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  ‘He moved over to let his pursuers by,’ Paul translated as I savoured my farewell experience of premium wine, ‘smiling as they went past, confiding that he was relieved to be caught: he couldn’t stand it out there on his own any more, the torture of solitude had, um, done his head in. Thank you, he said to each one. And then they all rode away and left him.’

  ‘That’s nice of them,’ I said, unfolding the map over my sautéed rosemary potatoes. With Rome barely 80km off, the four who caught Bordin might at least have let the protagonist of this historic accomplishment enjoy the long-lost succour of human company to the stage finish. But that’s cycling for you: riders stoutly uphold the chivalric code of fraternal honour right up to the point where doing so might exert the tiniest adverse impact on their chances of victory. The Bordin they rode by did a very good impression of a hollowed-out shell of a man – but he also had a bit of a rep as a sprinter, so best just leave him behind to enjoy the old torture of solitude.

  I shook my head and crumpled the map back to the start of what Paolo called ‘the impossible escape’. It seemed like days and days since I’d passed the point where Bordin set out on his own, largely because it was. Since leaving Lucca I’d been through a great compendium of tribulation: painful ascents and their terrifying follow-ups, hunger, thirst, wilting heat and clattering rainstorms. Bordin had condensed all that and more into fifteen unbroken hours of triple-distilled solo suffering. At least, as Paul noted, we both now knew what Bordin and friends had faced on the loose-surfaced mountain tracks of 1914. I nodded, mixing a manful sniff with a silent prayer that my wheels would never again darken a strada bianca.

  That would have been a fair deal, in the light of what I’ve just gleaned from a belatedly un-stupid analysis of that day’s route. When Paolo wrote of the post-Spoleto climb to ‘il passo della somma’, I had taken that to mean ‘the pass over the summit’: by default a clear reference to Monte Bibico, the only nearby peak with a road up to it. On closer examination Paolo didn’t write of that at all, but of ‘il passo della Somma’, which it transpires is but a modest pimple on the smoothly tarmacked main road from Spoleto to Terni. That’s right – we didn’t need to go up any part of that mountain, or flirt with dehydrated death in its ghostly hinterland, or tackle a single one of the ordeals that piled up in our wandering route back to earth. There’s no easy way to say this, Paul: it’s all your fault for not questioning more rigorously the judgement of a known idiot.

  In ignorance of this monolithic cock-up we drank to our achievement, a two-bottle task that would add an edge of hungover melancholy to my impending re-entry into the Paul-free world.

  How very cruel this world began to look in the morning, when we went to retrieve our bikes from the hotel’s medieval lock-up. ‘I don’t know how you’ve been putting up with all that squeaky clanking,’ said Paul, as an introduction to doing something about it. Calling upon many adolescent weekends spent working in his local bike shop, and several subsequent decades of grown-up practicality, he smote out my right-hand cotter pin with a hammer some Victorian janitor had thoughtfully left on a cobwebbed shelf. THUNG-tink, onto the lock-up tiles it dropped, still wrapped in Fabio’s tinfoil. Further shelf-rooting sourced three thin nails and a twist of copper wire; Paul bound these together around the pin and battered the ensemble home.

  ‘Shouldn’t be any play in that for a bit,’ he said as I sat beside him forlornly toting the adjustable wrench, like a kid with a set of plastic play-tools trying to help Daddy.

  ‘Can I still bang them in every morning with this?’

  ‘If you like.’

  It proved an effective running repair that ferried me in near silence up to the top of the gorge behind Narni. Beneath us lay a grander version of the prospect I’d gazed listlessly at from my hotel balcony the night before: a logjam of bell-towers and tiny-windowed old houses poised to hurl themselves down at the ant-like autostrada traffic inching across the valley floor. ‘A view always looks better when you’ve earned it,’ said Paul, though this one was principally improved by not having cycling clothes dripping diluted hotel shampoo all over it.

  We stopped for a coffee and a brioche, which allowed me to savour two imminently absent blessings: companionship, and being able to go for a pee without having to lug all my stealable belongings into the cubicle with me. Then it was a long downhill drag to Borghetto, where Paul was turning off north to get his homeward train.

  ‘You know what,’ he said, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic, ‘I’m actually really knackered.’

  Yes! I thought. Then Paul politely but firmly unclasped my hands from his ankles and pedalled out of my life.

  CHAPTER 14

  I RODE DISCONSOLATELY down the Via Flaminia, another of those ancient thoroughfares that led to where all roads did back them. It took an undulating route through increasingly warm countryside; I pushed hard, trying to keep up with a slipstream that wasn’t there any more. When a dog threw itself at a farm gate, I automatically ding-ding-dinged my bell to wind it up to a delirium of spittled barking: one of Paul’s rare weaknesses is a mild phobia of canine attack, and stimulating this fear had become an unedifying reflex.

  The world around began to curl up and fray: the road surface, the jerry-built, half-finished farmhouses, even the scabby fields, unabundantly dotted with scrawny goats and sheep nibbling brown weeds in pockets of shade. It was as if Paul had taken everything nice away with him. Repulsive wodges of tissue paper festooned every verge, and the crumbling tarmac was bejewelled with glinting shards of discarded bottle. Lorries roared by, the sun blazed pitilessly and pttth-ber-dum-ber-dum-plap-plap-plap-plap. Oh. I looked down, praying for a front-wheel puncture, though my arse was telling me otherwise.

  As ever, my arse knew best. To spare myself an audience I dragged the Hirondelle through a roadside gate and leaned it against an oak tree in the crispy wheat-stubble beyond. A little commuter train trundled past on the line behind, hailing me with an asthmatic toot of its horn. Light-headed with potent, neat dismay I effortfully removed the back wheel and yanked the tubeless flattie off it. Then I retrieved a tiny bottle of thinners and an old sock from one saddlebag side-pocket, a roll of double-sided tubular tape from another, and stood there with my last spare tyre trying to summon up the spirit of Suneil, who in a previous lifetime had shown me what to do with all this stuff.

  He came to me in the form of a small, grey cricket – an enigmatic presence who hopped into my hat, upturned on the brown bristles, and sat there twitching slowly. ‘What’s that, Suneil?’ I asked him. ‘Rub the old glue off the rim with a sock soaked in thinners? Stretch the shit out of the new tyre by standing on it and pulling up hard? Apply the tape in two sections either side of the valve, remembering to leave a bit sticking out so you have somewhere to start peeling when you roll the tyre on? Thanks, Suneil! Here’s a shiny new acorn for your trouble.’

  It took me an hour and a quarter, a delay that would have cost Alfonso Calzolari the race lead but with which I was very pleased indeed. The new tyre had gone on much straighter than its predecessor, and that rearward wobble was no more. Look, Daddy Paul, I done it all by my own! For a final flourish I got the tiny spanner out to tighten my remaining chainring bolts. One, two . . . sweeee. The last bolt span loose; I’d stripped its thread. ‘You daft cock,’ chirped Suneil, and hopped away into the hot afternoon.

  I rolled carefully on towards Rome, watching the villages coalesce into satellite towns and the roadside rubbish pile up into astonishing, waist-high drifts. It was hardly the route I’d have chosen, but I stuck with it, knowing that this age-old thoroughfare was unquestionably the road that the 1914 boys took into Rome. There were eight of them together up front by now, powering past that church, swooping under this railway bridge, narrowly missing those cypress trees.

  A tail wind picked up, and once I’d established that my knackered chain-ring bolt wasn’t about to fall out – I’d brutally cross-threaded it into its hole – I let myself be blown along at
a rare old lick. With my chin right down to the bidon lids I swept through the excitable Friday traffic, scattering bony stray cats and sun-dulled plastic detritus.

  For a long while I meandered through villas that tumbled down some of Rome’s more considerable hills; then the Tiber was at my side, the traffic unravelled into a lunatic free-for-all and vaguely familiar postcard scenes began to take shape around me. Biddle-ip! For once Paolo had supplied the precise stage finish, and a couple of miles north of the city centre the sat-nav told me I’d reached it: the viale di Tor di Quinto, where just before 6 p.m. the eight frontrunners had launched their sprint for the line.

  Girardengo, the champion of Italy, broke the tape and moved up to second overall; Calzolari finished seventh in the same time, retaining his fifty-five-minute lead in the general classification. I looked at my watch: it was just before 6 p.m. I’d finished the longest stage in Giro history in sync with the original riders, but had taken a while extra to do it. The kind of while you’d measure with a calendar rather than a stopwatch.

  Feeling much more pleased with myself than this data implied, I gaily pushed the Hirondelle through pavements massed with boisterous, sparsely clad weekend-welcomers. Make way, little people: conqueror of ultimate sporting challenge coming through!

  My legs glowed and so did my heart. I’d changed a tyre, and Number 7 was riding sweet and true; together we’d given Marathon Paul and his brand-new bike a run for their money. For a man who could do no wrong, it was no surprise to swiftly run across a cheap and friendly hotel, a little family-run job on the Via della Farnesina. ‘You have luck not to be on your bici here two days before,’ said the wife-receptionist. ‘We have some terrible rain!’

  ‘I know,’ I said, having kept up to speed with the progression of national weather fronts courtesy of the breakfast-telly generals. ‘It reached me in Siena.’

  ‘And today, so hot for Roma in settembre!’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded, picking bits of wheat-field off my jersey. ‘But not like Milan in August. It was forty-one degrees when I started there.’

  She looked at me, at the dusty wooden wheel poking through her front door, then back at me.

  ‘You start on that in Milano?’

  ‘You better believe it, sweet-cheeks,’ said my odious smile.

  I dumped the bike in the basement, my kit in the bidet and hit the streets. It was an almost tropical night out in Rome’s inner suburbs, the air thick and blood-warm and the pavement vibe muted from frisky to mellow. Bats flitted across a midnight-blue sky, every other tree was a palm, and the whole city seemed lightly infused with that equatorial miasma of ripe garbage and cannabis. I ambled along with the slow-mo flow, lazily coveting roof terraces and Lambrettas, then marked my return to a pre-Paul lifestyle by dining early at a restaurant selected on a calories-per-euro basis. Rome looked even better through chianti-tinted spectacles, but it proved a struggle to sustain the mood throughout my after-dinner mission.

  Back in Lucca, at the start of this monstrous stage, I had rather intemperately filled one of my bidons with pear nectar. Five long, hot days later it wasn’t hard to tell which one: the other didn’t stink of fizzy vomit. My son had recently told me about pruno, an intoxicant produced illicitly in prisons by leaving cartons of fruit juice mixed with tomato ketchup and milk to ferment behind a radiator. I have yet to taste this refreshing summer drink, but I do now have a good idea what it smells like.

  During my Tour ride, a related bidon-blend of folly, fruit and filth had brought on a debilitating stomach condition that laid grim waste to lay-bys right across Provence. I still have the chlorine-purifying tablets that a chemist near Avignon had sold me to tackle this issue at source, but didn’t bring them along, having vowed to never again be so very stupid as to fill a bidon with anything but water. Sadly, this vow took no account of finding pear nectar on special offer.

  Anyway, something had to be done, and it wasn’t something I’d fancied doing in Paul’s fastidious company. I wish I had, though, as the task demanded rather too much of my Italian. For an hour I flitted between North African-run cornershops, squinting cluelessly at the labels of potential sterilising agents. Could dishwasher sanitiser do the job without dissolving my innards? Might a cheeky drop of Toilet Duck be an option? I found a small pink packet decorated with a happily living baby and the word sterilizzazione, but doubted its potency: these were man-germs I needed to kill. In the end I ransacked my vocabulary, and went up to a counter.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said to the bearded grandfather behind it. ‘I have a dirty bottle.’

  As midnight approached I was in my en suite, administering Granddad’s solution: two iridescent orange litres of 90 per cent industrial alcohol, a fluid I had last employed to burn a housemate’s eyebrows off during a student-era fire-eating experiment. The faltering half-sentences with which I’d explained myself to the shopkeeper – at one point I think I offered to sterilise him – had been reciprocated with an elaborate one-man public-information mime when he handed over his recommended fluids: as far as I could tell, the cautionary tale of a desperate alcoholic who pretended he had a dirty bottle, then went blind and died. I took his point once I’d filled both bidons and every hole in my head with tramp fumes, and fled choking from the bathroom. Then I took a deep breath, burst back in and ripped the labels off those most shameful of empties.

  In the morning it still smelt like Oliver Reed’s autopsy in there, and twenty full rinses of fresh water did nothing to diminish the dreadful influence of industrial booze on my bidons’ contents. Somehow both were now infused with the gagging taint of export-strength rum and raisin: I would henceforth be refreshing myself with Pruno Gold Label.

  The breakfast room was on the top floor, and I absorbed Paolo’s 1914 update with another scorcher brewing up on the hazy skyline before me. Poor Lauro Bordin crossed the line tenth, 16 minutes 50’ back; I was suddenly certain that some improbable tragedy lay ahead for this ultimate nearly man, and darted over to the adjacent Internet terminal expecting to find that he’d copped a fatal firework in the face during the 1918 armistice celebrations, or similar. In fact, he was still riding ten years later, and in retirement made a name for himself on TV panel shows. Four hours after Bordin, the final finishers reached Rome, with our friend Mario Marangoni last once more: he was now a spectacular seventeen hours off the pace. But the longest Giro stage of all time claimed just one retirement, and twenty-six riders would turn up on the stage-four start line.

  Paolo located this at porta San Lorenzo, which required me to cycle right through the heart of old Rome. On a hot Saturday, the downtown traffic was wonderfully sparse and the pavements annexed by foreign pedestrians with better things to do than play chicken with brakeless cyclists. Other things, anyway. As a self-styled visiting sportsman, I felt entitled to nurture an ugly superiority over tourists and the inanity of their hateful ways – just as everyone always does, in fact, even while they’re waving a camera at some overseas attraction with ice cream all over their sunburnt faces.

  The principal revelation that emerged during two full laps of the Forum was just how few visitors seemed glad to be there. Not just the French: it wasn’t yet eleven and everybody looked grumpy and tired, weighed down by the overbearing entreaties of the plastic-sworded centurions, by their own distracted, foot-dragging children, by the language barrier and the dread prospect of all that hot trudging to come. How wonderful it felt not to be on holiday! In an hour-long ride around Rome’s most fabled sights I saw only a dozen foreigners who were certifiably enjoying themselves. They were gathered beneath Trajan’s Column, exuding the voluble, ruddy good cheer of people who had breakfasted on Pruno smoothies, and in loudly guttural voices that suggested some of the thicker lumps were still finding their way down. Calling on my extensive exposure to BBC4 drama, I identified them as Danes – the all-drinking, all-smoking, gabble-mouthed good-time Italians of northern Europe.

  The porta San Lorenzo lay just behind the main station, and was the
go-to bathroom destination for this area’s many tramps. As I set up my traditional stage-start self-timer shot, four stood behind me tipping drinking-fountain water down the inside of their grime-waxed jumpers and trackie bottoms, while another groomed his colossal beard in the wing mirror of a graffiti-plastered van. All around us reared monumental hunks of ancient masonry, arched remains of the three Roman aqueducts that once converged here and a mighty section of the third-century city walls, the capital’s primary defence right up to Victorian times. No doubt ancient Rome was well-stocked with homeless derelicts, but the contrast between this nation’s supreme imperial past and its scraggy, low-rent present was unavoidably compelling. It also made me feel suddenly homesick.

  My road out of town was a crazy-paved horror, full of potholes and rubbish and weekend drivers looking for two-wheeled target practice. Roman motorists are serial nudger-outers, incapable of toeing the line at any junction, taking that big red octagon to mean ‘vaguely slow down if you can be arsed’. Flouting the rules of the road chimes with the national hatred of authority: when a driver edges out a metre beyond those give-way lines, he hasn’t just scared the piss out of a cyclist – he’s stolen back a metre from The Man.

  Like most Britons, I do not ascribe sentient qualities to my fellow road users. Other drivers, all of them, are to me automatons incapable of independent, reactive response to any unfolding situation. As such I assume that if I pull out directly in front of a vehicle, it will continue along its path in a robotically mechanical fashion, thereby running me over and causing me to die. Roman driving, though, is an interactive multiplayer game for actual living people. When a Roman driver pulls straight out of a side-road, he does so on the understanding that as an adaptive and free-spirited human individual, you will take spontaneous and ideally stylish evasive action. ‘I know,’ they say, ‘it’s crazy, but it works!’ Except when it doesn’t, which the bodywork of every single car in Rome suggests is almost all the time.