French Revolutions Read online

  Bed was one thing; sleep was another. The sackcloth sheets were too short for the mattress and against my shaven shins the horsehair blanket felt like the rough grope of a lust-fogged drunk. That was how it started. The night before I had fallen immediately into a fatigued coma; only now, as the bedding rasped against my silken skin, did I notice how peculiar it felt to have hairless legs. Suddenly I couldn’t keep my hands off them. Wobbling the firm, smooth bulk of those enormously bulked-up calves, as meaty and sculpted as granite chicken breasts; prodding and tracing the outlines of the entirely new front-thigh muscles that spilt over my kneecaps like double chins; stroking the thick and toughened tendons, still sore from the (how could it only have been yesterday?) massage.

  It was like a variant of that joke about the reason men didn’t have breasts: because if they did they’d just stay in and play with them all night. I kept expecting to be slapped in the face. Even after I finally stopped fondling myself and dropped off it wasn’t over – twice that night (and there’d be many more such nights in the weeks ahead) I awoke with a start: what the bloody hell was this knobbly-kneed woman doing in my bed?

  When it happened the third time I couldn’t get back to sleep. My legs were now twitching spasmodically, wondering why they weren’t pedalling – the legacy of a day spent cycling 279.7 kilometres followed by one sitting in traffic jams and getting drunk. With daylight sneaking in through the filthy curtains I creaked stiffly out of bed and stood before the wardrobe mirror. Even at this time of day, even with a slight hangover, it was a spectacle so frankly ludicrous that I barked out a single, mad guffaw.

  Those legs, still blotched from their therapeutic ordeals, looked like champagne flutes: wrist-thin at the ankles, they progressively flared out on their way up to a set of mighty hams, thunder thighs indeed. Halfway up these the smooth, red-brown pint-of-best tan abruptly gave way to varicose magnolia and Puckish wire wool, as if I was wearing hairy white shorts. My similarly bleached torso, graced with its new – and hideous – stomach hairs, was topped by a zip-scarred neck and a gaunt, broiled head with singed and flaking extremities; from its sides dangled two thin arms whose tan-line apartheid had been brutally enforced. I might never leave my mark on the Tour, but that didn’t matter. It had left its mark on me.

  The final chlorinated bidon, the final night-dried Lycra taken down from the final hotel curtain rail, the final fistful of vitamins, the final slathering of the arse. Du pain, du vin, du Savlon – as silly and vile as they might be, I knew I would miss my routines. At 5.30 a.m. I clacked down four flights of dark stairs, dropped my key on the empty reception desk, bullied free several recalcitrant bolts and locks and stepped out into what I could already see, with a sort of mournful glee, was going to be a gorgeous day.

  Any European city where a man can walk down a major thoroughfare at dawn wearing a string vest with his head held high is OK in my book. He walked past with a brisk nod as I leant against the car finishing my breakfast – three cellophane packets of biscuit crumbs stolen in rather better condition from the Holiday Inn. ZR stood ready beside me, assembled with practised hands; I chucked the panniers in the boot, cocked a leg and rolled off down an empty boulevard.

  I never expected to do the whole stage – the route before those laps of the Champs-Elysées was monstrously complex, its details still a mystery after prolonged, albeit fizz-fuddled, consultation of a detailed map of the capital. Forty-eight kilometres would do me fine: that would probably be enough to experience the trademark sensations – heat, fatigue and fear – and, rather more importantly, certainly enough to bring up the momentous 3,000k. Gathering speed among the occasional taxis and police vans, I barrelled up the boulevards towards the Eiffel Tower, starting point of the 2000 Tour de France’s twenty-first and final stage. I swished past a bus with three people on, washed-out ravers silently wondering how it had all come to this; someone was playing a synthesiser four floors up; from a side street came a ragged, drunken roar: ‘Jean! Jean!’

  I got to the Eiffel Tower as an enormous sun took shape behind it. The Eiffel Tower is one of the world’s best things, and rolling to a halt in the centre of its four iron feet I had it all to myself. I remembered that picture of Hitler standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe, grinning with disbelief that all this was his, and grinned with disbelief. I had made it to Paris. With my gleaming exoskeleton legs I looked the part, and now I felt it. Giant of the Road might be pushing it a bit, but cycling off across the Pont d’Iena I felt a twinge in my joints that could only have been growing pains.

  The sky went from cream to blue as I rolled along the Seine, past houseboats with a view to die for, past joggers, past hot-dog vendors already warming up their Westlers at 6.15. At the fourth bridge down I turned left and headed out across the vast, cobbled no-man’s-land of the Place de la Concorde. A plumb-lined kilometre to my right stood the scaffolded bulk of the Louvre; to the right, the same vista eased up to the tiny, sunlit keyhole that was the Arc de Triomphe, over two kilometres up the Champs-Elysées.

  ‘There are no tired legs on the Champs-Elysées,’ they say, and though Paul Kimmage rather took the romance out of this by pointing out the absence of random dope controls on the final stage, I could see why they said it. Feeling exhilarated and tireless, up the mile-wide pavement I slalomed breezily between waiters putting out the first chairs and tables. On the way back down – the Tour riders would turn in front of the Arc de Triomphe ten times – I picked up speed with alarming ease. Thirty-five k.p.h. felt like 25; as I swished past the gendarmes questioning a van driver whose forlorn vehicle sat, front wheels splayed out, across the central reservation I gave Eddy Merckx an inner wink and hit 50.

  I did a couple more Champs-Elysées laps, then arced off back to the Seine, bumping over the grilles that blasted weird wafts of hot Metro air up my legs. Past Notre-Dame, all the way back up to the Eiffel Tower, and all the way back. For another hour it was wonderful, but by 7.30 the magic had gone. Commuters were Henri Pauling it into the underpasses; van drivers parped and revved, and when I took refuge in the cycle lane they followed me. Hot, hounded and hungry, I glanced down at the computer and did a quick perimeter tour of the Jardin des Plantes, and another, and another. It was enough. The 3,000 came up as I turned off the Boulevard Vincent Auriol, exchanged curt abuse with a jaywalking businessman and eased up to the car.

  That was it. It was 15 June: I’d done nearly 1,900 miles in a month to the day. There should have been bunting and blondes and big bottles of bubbly, but I really didn’t mind that there weren’t. Eddy and Tom and my support crew had helped me up the Alps, and Paul Ruddle had helped me down them, but at heart mine had been a solo achievement, a 3,000-kilometre lone breakaway, and I was happy to celebrate its climax in an appropriate fashion.

  In the final analysis, you see, because of what I had done I was simply a lot better than almost everyone else. With others around there would have been churlishness and jealousy; who knows, maybe even a couple of tiresome fans. Stalkers couldn’t be ruled out. I took off my hot, wet gloves, opened the hatchback and, with a suitably epic commentary turning slowly through my mind, Moore’s respectful hands began to strip down the machine that had been his slave, his master, his confidant and tormentor throughout a journey where suffering and glory had stood toe to toe and … and so on.

  With my features settling into a happy, glazed reverie poorly suited to urban driving I set off into the rush hour, eventually finding myself amid the canoe-roofed British motorists piling back to Calais. The French were setting out deck-chairs on the not enormously appealing beaches south of the ferry terminal, getting ready for summer, a summer of which the Tour would as ever be the cornerstone.

  I parked in the hire-car compound, built my bike and packed her bags, then pedalled across the hot tarmac to the Avis office.

  ‘Voilà! You are return!’ It was the man who had helped me dismantle ZR a month before.

  ‘I am,’ I said, with simple dignity.

  ‘Oh, your vé
lo …’ he said, peering over his desk at ZR’s cleat-chipped crossbar and smutted tyres, ‘… your vélo ’as been doing many mileages, non?’

  ‘Three thousand kilometres.’

  This information changed the shape of his face. ‘Sree souzand? Oh, c’est bien fait! Some montagnes?’

  ‘Well, yes. I was following the Tour de France.’ I remembered telling him this before, and I remembered how he’d reacted when I’d done so. He seemed to have forgotten.

  ‘So … le Mont Ventoux?’

  ‘Yes.’ Well, near enough.

  ‘L’Aubisque?’

  I issued a sort of puff and rolled my eyes in an expression of partial conquest, hoping he wouldn’t ask about Hautacam. He didn’t.

  ‘L’Izoard? Le Galibier?’

  That was better. ‘In the same day.’

  ‘Eh bien,’ he said with a smile, then pinched the brim of an imaginary trilby and raised it. ‘Chapeau!’

  Two hats in three days – it was a good feeling. And ten minutes later I almost made it a – woo-hoo – hat trick, defying the gloomy predictions of the girl at the ticket desk by covering the vast acreage of tarmac between her office and the ferry in less than the ninety seconds she had given me to get there before the ramp was raised. After an all-hands-on-sundeck crossing I whisked through the customs at Dover, waved past by officers who clearly couldn’t imagine an earnest sportsman like that shoving a condom full of Kruggerands up his jacksy. More fool them!

  On the way out, the route from station to ferry had seemed a white-knuckled, knee-buckled roller-coaster of mountains; on the way home, I honestly didn’t even notice the change in gradient. The same Victorian guard’s van and the same rattling progress, the scenery dribbling by when the noise and commotion implied an indistinguishable blur of greens and browns. We went through Staplehurst, and as I said this name to myself I somehow knew that my former sloth was already beckoning, that my endeavour had not been a turning point in my life, just a memorable detour, and that a lot of this might be because cycling around Avignon had something about it that cycling around Staplehurst did not.

  And two hours later I was cycling up my road, oblivious to the highway hazards that had so unsettled me as I’d set off for London Bridge. Birna opened the door and smiled, then looked down at the flesh between shorts and socks and stopped.

  ‘Oh, you haven’t,’ she said.

  Epilogue

  I can’t pretend it was unpleasant to reacquaint myself with activities not focused either on doing an enormous amount of physical exercise or recovering from it, but it certainly was odd. No longer did each day begin with a wake-up gut-punch of nauseous fear at the wretchednesses ahead; no longer did it end with a dead-eyed vigil at the dinner table, wordlessly watching bits of wasp and Alp and sun-flayed nose drop into a half-eaten plate of pasta. Nevertheless, it was at meal times that I had most trouble. Breakfast had to be relearned as a time to sip tea and read the paper, rather than an industrial process centred on funnelling a kilogram of Bran Flakes down my gullet straight from the packet; at lunch and supper I searched in vain for the tureens of Coca-Cola and the side orders of chips. I no longer got drunk before reaching the fat bit of the wine bottle, and no longer avoided a hangover if I proceeded down to the dimpled bottom. The weather forecast had lost its status as the day’s most significant media event, and the nutritional information on food packets played a diminished role in my nocturnal ponderings.

  For the first few nights my legs itched and twitched from lack of exercise; once I’d had to get up and run on the spot in the bathroom for ten minutes, and once I very nearly went for a bike ride. After two weeks my legs were stubbling up and those muscles beginning to waste, fruit rotting on the bough. ZR was outside the back door with the kids’ bikes, a spider’s web under the crossbar, its chain rusting in the late-June rain.

  July was twelve hours old when the Tour started, and fourteen hours after that, with Michelin maps all over the bed and a sympathetic knot of anguish in my innards, I was embarking on the first of twenty-one nightly vigils, tuning into Channel 4’s extended 2 a.m. highlights. The Futuroscope prologue was won by an incredulous 22-year-old Scotsman, David Millar, riding in his first Tour, but if I’d hoped to feel a chest-swelling affinity I would be quickly disappointed. On the flat stages at least, the cameras, their focus narrowed on the leading riders’ faces, would show little that I recognised. Behind all those hoardings and gantries, the view beyond was obscured by massed ranks of picnickers waving merchandise thrown out by the advance caravan of publicity vehicles: yellow feeding bags, polka-dot caps, green cardboard hands as big as bin lids.

  The corn was stiff and yellow and as the race turned south the maize was up to the riders’ shoulders; inevitably, the sunflowers were out. The stage into Limoges was won by a Frenchman, the host nation’s first win for two years, but he had an Italian name and a face like a proboscis monkey so they couldn’t get too excited about it. An ageing Dutchman won the next after an epic breakaway and when Channel 4’s Paul Sherwen interviewed him beside the podium he cried. They were averaging almost 50 k.p.h., and it kept raining. Paul’s senior partner Phil Liggett said he’d covered thirty Tours and this was some of the worst weather he’d come across.

  The race reached Dax, which in common with all the other villes d’étapes looked a lot better with the flags out, but when it set off towards the Pyrenees I wasn’t thinking about bicycle-shaped flower-beds and the other fruits of their million-franc civic knees-up. Sitting there in the middle of the night, flanked by sleeping wife and rib-kicking infant daughter, this was what I’d been waiting for. Up until now it had all been tactical and fairly pedestrian; as the highlights zipped straight to the foot of the col de Marie-Blanque, I knew I was about to witness the extremes of human emotion. I wanted to see men soar where I had grovelled, knuckle down where I’d knuckled under; to see how it should be done. But I also wanted to see how it shouldn’t, to see terrible pain and defeat, to enjoy the company of my fellow failures.

  ‘A tough little climb, the Marie-Blanque,’ said Phil, and it was tougher that day more than most. There was cloud and driving rain; a few soggy cardboard hands waving limply by the road but plenty more wind-filled golf umbrellas. It had been a gut-cramping bellyful of chilled fountain for me; for them it was a bidon of hot tea.

  The Tour had suddenly gone into slow motion. For a week the peloton had flashed past spectators in a smudge of hissing metal and artificial colour; now fat, wet, flag-wrapped Belgians were able to waddle alongside the toiling riders, bellowing abuse or encouragement. Four men abandoned the race before the summit, and a fifth fell on the descent and was taken away in an ambulance, Lycra slashed, skin gashed. News that a rider had thrown in the towel was announced via a little on-screen graphic of a man energetically hurling his bike to the floor and storming off in disgust. None of those I saw being helped into their team cars, eyes glassing up like dying fish, looked as though they’d be up to that. Drugged-up men at the threshold of human suffering, mouthing agonised obscenities and peeing into their tight, greased gussets: an enticing image in certain circles, perhaps, but surely not the appropriate inspiration for a national romance.

  I watched the ascent of the Aubisque like a man reliving a nightmare. The towns were transformed by the crowds and banners, but with slug-tennis rain keeping all but the very drunkest spectators at home I had a clear view of every fateful hairpin, tunnel and false summit. ‘In these conditions, with the wind chill, your limbs get tetanised on the way down,’ said Paul, and I instinctively flexed my knuckles and pressed them into my hot armpits.

  ‘Blown to pieces’ was a favourite refrain in a day of violent clichés; all around people were either putting hammers down or hitting walls. Lance Armstrong started the climb to Hautacam with fifteen riders between him and the leading Spaniard; he stood up in the saddle and, without a single facial indicator of expended effort, cruised haughtily past wobbling wrecks of men, leaving his rivals to fight distantly among thems
elves. Armstrong had the yellow jersey and a four-minute lead and as a contest the Tour was over.

  David Millar winced over the line a creditable thirty-second, and with haunted eyes spoke of encountering ‘The Fear’ during his journey through ‘a world of pain’. Then, without warning, there was the round, expressionless, shop-wigged face of Eddy Merckx. ‘Deez climbs are not so hard,’ he told Paul Sherwen in a slightly robotic monotone, turning away for the next interview even as Paul said, ‘And that’s from a man who knows a bit about the Tour de France with five victories in the event.’

  Dammit all to hell, Merckx. Why did he have to say that? When the end credits began to roll it was like reading every clause and subsection of my Pyrenean surrender. Phil and Paul had explained perhaps a dozen times that the Tour was won and lost in the mountains. It was where Armstrong had won, and it was where I had lost.

  The weather got worse when they reached Ventoux. There was snow on the summit and a terrible gale that had the trees waving desperately for help as Channel 4’s Gary Imlach bellowed his report to camera. It was awful, the kind of occasion that blurs the boundaries between holidaymaker and refugee, and yet if Gary was to be believed an astonishing 300,000 people were camped out on Ventoux. Men in bobble hats and puffa jackets were out there, battling with flyaway flags and furniture; the drinks vendors had swathed tea towels over their beer taps and were instead doing a brisk trade in vin chaud. I liked professional cycling, I mused, but some people really, really liked it. Behind Gary a ramshackle peloton of plucky amateurs pedalled agonisingly through the narrow column left between placards and Peugeots and pastis-pouring pedestrians; one of the sturdy crowd-control barriers was blown over with a clatter and just in front of it a cyclist in a yellow jersey caught a gust in the chest and came to a halt, twisting a foot out of his pedal bindings just in time. It occurred to me that in all my weeks on the road this was the first yellow jersey I’d seen; that such was the hallowed, iconic status of this item only a heretic would dare to wear it; and that when he did, a divine blast of cold wind would come down from on high and smite him off his bike.