French Revolutions Page 7

  I found a pizza restaurant, where, sitting alone in the tiny covered courtyard, I spread Michelins across the wobbly table to savour my achievements. Pedalling across fold after fold of three maps, I’d covered 234 kilometres (almost 150 miles) in two days, only six less than I’d been advised to do in three. No matter that this was 20 kilometres less than the longest single day in the Tour itself, and even less matter that my average speed to date, 21.1 k.p.h., was just under half what they’d manage. Sipping my rosé, I decided I’d settle for that. After all, I was clearly far worse than twice as bad as any other sportsmen. Could I complete a round of golf in 140 strokes? I could not. Four-hundred-metre hurdles in two minutes? Not without a ladder, and a piggyback. I’d always had a plan to wear down the world’s tennis greats by perfecting the art of dispatching an unending series of net-cord services, but that didn’t really count. No, I was good at this and I was going to get better, I thought, celebrating my future glories by raising a huge quadrant of pizza Napoletana to my mouth.

  It never made it that far. The smell, an apocalyptic marine rancidity, ensured I would not be summoning any of my other senses in dealing with the chef’s creation, save a tiny glance at the bloated, newt-like anchovies that were unequivocally responsible.

  Being British, I love complaining about foreign restaurants, but being both a hypocrite and a frightful coward I always endeavour to do so either to myself, or outside and round the corner. Looking back, I can see that electing to break this rule in a French pizzeria was an error, such establishments providing impressive scope for a counterattack pairing Gallic truculence with Italian unpredictability.

  Stifling a dry retch, I shrouded the plate with my napkin in a reflex flick. This was all very sad. It was a Tuesday night, which in this area dictated that all other restaurants I’d passed had been closed. There were no other dining options, and if I didn’t eat a great deal of food very soon parts of my body would start to fall off. By the time the bullied-looking waitress appeared, I had downed my carafe of rosé almost in one; she tentatively raised a corner of the napkin as if concerned it might conceal a dying seagull, and recoiled as if it had when the stench hit her. ‘Les anchois?’ she gagged. ‘The anchovies,’ I wanly concurred.

  In bad English and worse French we agreed upon a replacement Margherita, but no sooner had she disappeared through the kitchen doors with the offending pizza at arm’s length than out burst the chef. It was not a good time to notice his uncanny resemblance to the more experienced of the two 1950s Cuban boxers in that Bacardi ad.

  His face gave away nothing, but as he approached my table I noticed that from the fat, oily fingers of his left hand dangled a fat, oily anchovy the colour of the outside of a cold hardboiled egg yolk. When he was standing far too close, the anchovy passed from left hand to right, and thence towards my face.

  ‘Anchois!’ he barked abruptly, before slowly licking each of his oiled left fingers with pornographic relish. I found myself unavoidably recalling the night in Transylvania’s Hotel Dracula when, along one of the many dark corridors, Birna and I chanced upon the cook and two waiters exacting intricate physical retribution upon a Bulgarian lorry driver we had earlier overheard muttering a protest about his starter, which, like ours, consisted of a single beige vegetable apparently preserved in carbonated Bovril.

  Such professional pride is of course what makes eating out in most European countries such an involving experience, or so I failed to philosophise as the pizza chef’s pallid hostage began dripping on to my trousers.

  ‘You no ’ave anchois in Angleterre?’ he said, his smelly face so close to mine I could see the enormous pores on his nose expanding as the surrounding features broadened into the sort of lunatic smile that precedes the righting of gangland wrongs.

  Look, you hideous gargoyle, I’ve got half an arsing cupboard of cock-buttocked anchovies at home, or at least I did have until Birna took the kids away for a week and I ended up living off the contents of all the obscure tins emptied on to Ryvita.

  ‘Oui,’ I said, stoutly refusing to concede any linguistic quarter.

  He nodded slowly, then, bunching his fist around the hostage anchovy, began to pace the suddenly dungeon-like courtyard. There was an ancient, tack-studded door on one side propped shut with a broom and something started growling behind it.

  ‘Five year I make pizza,’ he blurted to the flagstones halfway through his second lap. ‘Five year, and nobody say zis.’ On his way back to the kitchen he stopped beside me, crammed the anchovy pulp into his glistening chops and wiped both hands on my tablecloth.

  By the time the waitress appeared with a Margherita in her hands and a desperate beam on her face, I had already sketched out contingency plans for the chef’s return. Pepper in the eyes, cruet set in the teeth – and if all else failed, levelling up the playing field by kicking over that broom to free the beast.

  I knew of course that the substitute dish would have been imaginatively adulterated, but seven breadsticks hadn’t quite bridged my 130-kilometre hunger-gap, and so, pasty-faced with disgust, I slowly ingested it all. Bleak and tired, I was preparing to pay the waitress when I noticed, with a nauseating jolt of distress, that both pizzas had made their way on to the bill. It is difficult to express the almost uncontrollable anguish this discovery caused me. In the red corner, fear and inertia; in the blue corner, justice and self-respect. The blues won after extra time.

  Struggling to conjure up the cocksure hauteur that had propelled me into le Blanc, I made my way to the till, encouraged to note that the main restaurant was now heavily populated. The waitress appeared with an I-thought-this-might-happen look, and voicelessly veered off to the kitchen. The chef started up as soon as he came out of the swing doors. ‘Something bad, you doan pay. You no like something, you pay.’

  It all got shrill very quickly. Still determined to keep the linguistic high ground, in an aggrieved adolescent quaver I pointed out in French that his pizza was both bad and naughty; he replied in English that I did not understand how an anchois is. I had counted out the exact Napoletana-less amount to the final shitty centime, and was preparing to fling this noisily on to his glass-topped counter when he raised both hands in a grotesque parody of appeasement and in a voice as greasily rancid as his ingredients said, ‘I make you a present. You no like, you must pay – but is your first time in my town, so I make present.’ Imagining a putrid gift-wrapped anchovy, I watched as he flicked a pen across the bill to delete the Napoletana. Having paid, I turned for the door; then, with two dozen sets of eyes boring into me, my brain suddenly delivered a present of its own: the French word for disgusting. ‘Degeulasse!’ I shrieked as I crossed the threshold.

  I didn’t think I’d slammed the glass door, but as I flopped up the street in my espadrilles – surely the last-choice footwear option for this type of confrontation – I heard an enraged bellow from behind. ‘You break my restaurant, I telephone to ze police! Ze police!’

  ‘Allez-y!’ I screamed back, getting into my stride, then immediately blundering out of it again with a stream of Norman-accented Anglo-Saxon abuse of the ‘wankeur’ variety.

  Back in my hotel room, I washed my shorts, socks and jersey in guilty triumph, tired but content. Was all this physical endeavour somehow causing a build-up of testosterone and adrenalin that suddenly overflowed into uncharacteristic aggression? Certainly all that virgin stomach hair paid tribute to some sort of shift in my body’s chemistry. The restaurant incident had been a bit unsightly, but reconstructing it I had cause to be grateful. Unfortified by the hormones, I’d probably still be cravenly sitting there now, a broken man paralysed and ensnared by this smelly-fingered Svengali, a freak-show curiosity for the locals: ‘Mister Anchois, le rosbif qui mange uniquement les poissons rancides.’

  Four

  There’s always a lot of weather in the Tour de France. In the space of a single day the riders can be slushing about in half-melted tarmac and half-melted snow: the two images that were my default mental encapsu
lation of the race were Tom Simpson weaving deliriously off the road as the mercury hit 131°F and the hypothermic ghost of Stephen Roche juddering up through the icy mist of la Plagne. And then there’s the rain.

  The morning Savlon ritual always seemed like the prelude to some act of obscure ghastliness, and that day it was. Heading south towards Limoges I’d soon be in the bottom half of France, but you’d never have guessed it from the weather. The proprietress waved me off into a vapoury drizzle that above walking pace imparted the sensation of being sprayed in the face by one of those houseplant water-pumps on the mist setting. I stopped to put on my rain top when the weather gods turned the nozzle to squirt mode, and as the D975 ploughed its rural furrow between wheat fields and herds of sturdy Limousin cattle they got out the fire hose.

  In seconds my helmet was pinging with the spasmodic tattoo of heavy rain; in minutes so was the inside of my skull. The scenery pulled down the shutters, and before long my blinking, slitted gaze had dropped to the wet road in front of me. It was then that I got the idea for a recreation I dubbed slug tennis, a name that adds a deceitful veneer of respectability to what I can only shamefully describe as the bisection of roadside arthropods beneath rotating rubber. In any case I soon stopped, though only after noticing that at speeds below about 15 k.p.h. my shins got splattered with orange stuff. When the rain redoubled its efforts – at la Trimouille, 20 kilometres down the road – I invoked the phrase traditionally applied to games of soldiers, flinging ZR against a bar-tabac window and running through the door.

  Inside was a Rita Heyworth barmaid with brown-pencil eyebrows, along with the usual mid-morning clutch of we’re-only-here-for-the-kir regulars. There was also a large tear-off-the-days calendar, which informed me that today was St Eric’s Day. And, in bold numerals, that it was also my birthday.

  In a way I was pleased that 18 May had crept up on me unnoticed: this was exactly the sort of important personal detail that a one-track-mind pro would have overlooked. With a little inward sigh I accepted I was now as old as the oldest Tour de France winner, and ordered a treble espresso.

  ‘Eh, Jacques – le Tour est arrivé!’

  I still have no idea how even the tiniest communities each manage to support at least one bar-tabac without some sort of regional subsidy, but I’m very glad they do. Maybe the solution to the decline of Britain’s rural pubs is to encourage more farmers to start drinking at 8.30 a.m.

  Anyway, perhaps because bar-tabacs are almost by definition the domain of lonely people looking for company, I never failed to attract a circle of admirers. I suppose it was like being chatted up. Conversations of the what’s-a-nice-boy-like-you variety were instantly struck up, and I quickly established that (a) the Tour had last passed through la Trimouille thirty-three years ago; (b) it was a pity Michel from the garage wasn’t here, because he had a load of pictures from back then; and (c) if you want to win the heart of a wet English cyclist, try combing the breakfast remnants from your moustache and smelling slightly less of sick.

  Somebody made a joke about me winning; somebody else delivered a series of hand signals that suggested the road to Limoges was either very up-and-down or menaced by the Loch Ness monster, and with the sun breaking through I left happy. Over the fields: hello there, cows; top of the morning, Mr Magpie; shut the fuck up, dog … For the first time, the problem was not fatigue or fear, but boredom. Presently I found myself moronically transfixed by my knees as they cranked out the kilometres: hairy red left knee, hairy red right knee, left knee, right knee, left, right, left … Why do cyclists shave their legs? … Aerodynamics, I suppose … Wonder at what point in their career they decide to start doing it … Does someone take you aside and say, look, son, you’ve got something special, but if you’re going to be serious let’s get the Bic out on those calves … What if you shaved them, and then realised you were actually rubbish after all? … Like Michael Hardaker on that scout-troop cross-country run when his dad rubbed all that Vaseline into his legs on the start line … In fact, what the naked arse was that all about? … Oh, there’s a leaf stuck in my spokes … there it is again … there … there … there … gone now … And … drrr-thwick … what’s that drrr-thwick noise?

  It was awful the way the brain gradually homed in on the most inane and infuriating minutiae. At least it wasn’t just me. Even proper cyclists find that when their minds start wandering they’re too tired to reel them back in. Louison Bobet, Tour winner three times on the trot from 1953, was prone to debilitating peripheral obsessions: a spot of oil on his tyre, a spare tube wrapped in the wrong colour paper. And who cannot sympathise with Paul Kimmage, his chances in a 1989 Tour time trial destroyed by Paul McCartney’s My Brave Face, played over the Tannoy on the start line and then spooled endlessly around his tortured brain for every one of the following 73 kilometres?

  Drrr-thwick … That noise – and I can hardly bear to think about it even now – was eventually traced to a slight misalignment of chain vis-à-vis front dérailleur, overlaid with a synthetic swish as my left heel grazed against the pannier during each pedal revolution. Neither should have been difficult to rectify, but fiddling randomly with hex keys and screwdrivers always made both slightly worse, though not as seriously as the wit’s-end kick that generally rounded off each roadside mechanical session.

  Drrr-thwick, drrr-thwick … I’m not sure exactly when I realised that something more grandiose was going wrong inside my head, but it might have been when I went through a village called La Grande Mothe and started scanning the bracken for giant antennae. Feeling curiously hollow, I noticed everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, most notably my progress. I stopped, and for the first time since Kew Bridge I remembered too late to twist my foot out of the cleats: the fall into the damp bracken was so gentle and painless it was like watching it happen to someone else. Exhibiting a gormless confusion that would have done Stan Laurel proud, I sat on my wet arse and wondered what was going on. Stomach funny, head light, hands … two. One, two. Two hands. Must be … must … oh yeah: the vitamins.

  Later, of course, I deduced that all the talk of ‘vitamin shots’ was either a direct euphemism for illegal performance-enhancing drugs, or a means of persuading reluctant riders to jab hypodermics into their bottoms. The big leap isn’t what you stick in the syringe, it’s the act of injecting yourself with it: once you’ve shot up B12, it’s only a small step to steroids or amphetamines. Certainly Paul Kimmage realised this, sweating with shame as he lost his hypodermic virginity to an iron and vitamins jab.

  But at the time I’d taken the apparently crucial role of vitamins at face value, filling an old sunglasses case with Sanatogen, along with extra tablets of C and B12 which someone had said the body flushed out quickly, and a handful of cod-liver oil tablets which I somehow thought might lubricate my joints. Having forgotten to take them that morning, I fuzzily withdrew the box and ferried a succession of tablets to my mouth with the wincing deliberation of someone performing long division at high altitude.

  All better now, I thought, flobbing riboflavin into the muddy verge and pedalling off. But of course it wasn’t. Passing through a hilltop copse, I turned towards the source of an attention-attracting cough: a fat man met my gaze, smiled distantly and neatly exposed himself. I’m almost certain he was a bona fide human entity, but the experience was enough to start up the bad thoughts again, and within ten minutes I’d fallen off for a second time and heard the taunting whisper, ‘Shave them, Saint Eric, shave them.’

  I was having a bonk.

  Cyclists burn up 9,000 calories a day, roughly four times what the average shiftless 36-year-old needs to sustain himself for twenty-four hours of domestic pottering. Eat, eat, eat, I’d been told, but due to the awkward logistics of in-the-saddle refuelling I’d hoped I could get away with shovelling in the kilojoules at breakfast, lunch and supper. This was an error. Pros start nibbling their Fig Newtons after the first hour, and thenceforth maintain a steady intake of nourishment to avoid bonking, the ter
m unhappily applied to the moment when the fuel reserves run out and the body starts eating itself. Sugar is sucked out of the blood, and a traumatic sense of delirious exhaustion sets in. Tunnel vision, seeing stars, Eddy Merckx up to his wheel rims in tar and not understanding why he’s being overtaken – the Tour de France is a bad trip by any definition, and never more so than when you’re bonking.

  From then on I’d know to tide myself over until lunch with the half-dozen croissants I’d smuggle into my panniers from the breakfast buffet, or the trio of pains au chocolat washed down with a Coke for elevenses outside a village boulangerie. That day, with all the shops shut for lunch, it was a question of finding a restaurant before mythical beasts started popping their heads out of my bar-bag. I remember eating some sort of cheesy vealy thing in a restaurant full of plastic flowers and sons treating their mothers, but even now, looking at the map, I can only narrow its location down to le Dorat, Bellac or somewhere in the 12 kilometres between the two.

  It is relevant to point out at this stage that I was lost. The itinerary I’d copied down at Loudun had ended at la Trimouille, and though the bar-boys there had been certain the route to Limoges (where the stage ended) was a straightforward D675/N147 job, I was sceptical. Because the Tour requires roads to be closed for hours, the organisers, where there’s an option, generally choose quiet back routes. But as I swooped insanely out of Bellac towards the foot of a long, wet hill, the road broadened into a dual carriageway and I was suddenly engulfed in camions. The countryside was almost English – crisp, green and rolling as promised – but then so was the traffic. I’d become used to having the road to myself, but now I was harried and buffeted in an uncomfortably familiar fashion. A Peugeot estate with half a dozen bikes on the roof went past with a wave and a blast of the horn, the first of many drive-by hootings that were well-meant but nerve-shredding; the N147 began to undulate alarmingly about its horizontal axis and all I had to look at was roadkill: slugs, obviously, but also the odd weasel, badger, coq au van and hedgehogs a-go-go (or rather a-gone-gone).