French Revolutions Page 9

  I’m slightly aware that this is sounding rather unedifying, maybe just two steps away from a solvent-fuelled knock-down-Ginger session at the sheltered-housing estate, but at the time I felt only a rich glow of exultation. And there was more to come – just up the road another team-jersey johnny was out for a spin; younger, this one, perhaps in his early forties, and though he was clearly giving it some I left him for dead without even turning round.

  Green-lined scenic stretches; valleys of death where cement factories covered every abandoned butcher’s and baker’s in a layer of beige powder – it was all the same to me. I had the bit between my teeth and I didn’t want to spit it out. Then, speeding into Fumel – a decaying industrial town about as nice as it sounds – I almost collided with a group of green-and-white Crédit Agricole jerseys pedalling silkily towards me. Crédit Agricole was Chris Boardman’s team, and hang on, didn’t that guy at the front have a big nose …

  ‘Hey, Chris!’

  No one turned round, which was just as well as afterwards I wondered what I would have said.

  ‘Hey, Chris! I just want to say that … that I really love your stretching exercises – you know, the ones I forget to do every morning and evening. Yeah, those old cat stretches, eh? Yeah. Hang on, don’t go – my gears are a bit fucked up and I wondered if …’

  Still, it was an omen of sorts, even though I subsequently learnt that as he’d already withdrawn from the Tour it almost certainly wasn’t him. I’d been planning to stop at Villeneuve, but feeling good (and having read that it was a dump) I decided to plough on the extra 30 kilometres to Agen, where the stage would start the next day. Two Mars Bars at Saint-Sylvestre-sur-Lot, a litre of grape juice just over the river at Penne and I was off again, up a horrendous incline out of town and over the warm fields.

  I knew by now that any place with haut in its name was to be avoided on gradient grounds, but there was no getting round Hautefage and during its ascent I did hit a patch of rather poor form. But it was nothing that couldn’t be undone by lying flat out in an orchard for half an hour, helmet still on, flies crawling over my face unimpeded by even the most half-hearted swat. When the road sloped down to the Tarn and Garonne, the pair of fluvial fatties that run through Agen, things picked up again. I was topping 40 k.p.h. when I weaved perilously through a snapshot of chaotic distress: a teenage girl watching in frenzied grief as a farmer boot-prodded a roadside cat that hadn’t looked both ways when his tractor went by.

  Naturally it all caught up with me as I creaked into Agen’s unpromising wino-ridden suburbs, jelly-legged and suddenly irritable. Motorists were dawdling up a slightly Harlem-esque main drag, on a loud and messy, hot Saturday night, and only after a lot of weaving and tutting and manual obscenity did I manage to pilot my way to an Ibis hotel. There are times when you want a hotel to be an experience, when you want to play a glittering cameo role in the proprietor’s life and vice versa, and there are times when you really don’t want any of that. All I wanted was a lavatory that didn’t look like it might disembowel me, a basin that didn’t fill up with next door’s old bathwater, and a breakfast buffet I could empty into my pockets without the worry that in doing so I’d be sending the boss’s kids off to school on empty stomachs.

  Having said that, the Agen Ibis was located in an uncharacteristically active quarter, all garbage stench, mopeds ridden down the pavement and 7-year-olds on the fourth floor throwing down front-door keys to their barefooted friends in the street. The New Zealand couple I met while locking up my bike in the basement car park seemed rather shell-shocked.

  ‘Aren’t you worried, cycling about on your own around here?’ asked the concerned wife as I hoisted my belongings towards the stair door leading up to reception.

  ‘I think I can look after myself,’ I said, fatigue stretching my words out into a vainglorious drawl, one whose effect was compromised when I pushed against the door and was completely unable to shift it. ‘Bloody panniers,’ I mumbled cravenly as the husband came over and levered it open with one hairy hand.

  Refuelling outside a studenty bar-restaurant while a middle-aged blues band entertained an audience comprised largely of their own small children, I could feel the day’s 151 kilometres wafting slowly out of my body like a heat haze. As the shopkeeper who’d Mars-Barred me up in Saint-Sylvestre had said, the cycling conditions that afternoon had been perfect: not too hot, not too wet, a tailwind and generally benign gradients. It was slightly deflating to think that despite all this I hadn’t quite managed 100 miles, though I felt better when I looked through the Rough Guide travel section and worked out that the equivalent train journey took 105 minutes. Overlooking the dilatory nature of French local railways, I was sure I could make this man-against-locomotive showdown sound impressive when I got home, particularly once I’d rounded it up to two and a half hours.

  Five

  Leaving Agen’s listless, jerry-built skyline in my dusty wake, I headed west across the rivers and motorways and into a slightly scorched landscape that bore little relation to the damp, tossed-salad lushness I’d been accustomed to. Yesterday the fields had been lined with tentative seedlings; today it was all wizened-looking crops ready for harvest, the rippled air thick with the smell of onions and dried slurry.

  It was a Sunday, and for the first time I found myself moving among big groups of club cyclists, though not in anger. That morning offered the first suggestions that the malaise blighting French cycling may be traced to the neglect of competitive training in favour of poncing about in new-season jerseys affecting a look of extravagant ennui. Much has been made of the ability of top riders to shield their pain and fatigue beneath poker faces (and wraparound shades); the club-class poseurs had borrowed the expression (and the shades) while cutting out the irksome physical labour it was intended to conceal. And they were so snotty: having sneeringly assessed my outmoded jersey in a way that made me feel I’d turned up at a school disco wearing my aunt’s gardening smock, they turned their heads with a dismissive tut.

  I’d tried the Tour de France press office again that morning, and after an exchange of sighs and, no doubt, beastly gurns and hand-over-mouthpiece imprecations I had extruded the reluctant concession that the complete and precise itinerary would be made available to tiresome foreign irrelevances in two days’ time. Looking again at the procycling map, I saw that the stage from Agen to Dax shifted west across France in a series of down-left steps; transposing these on to the Michelin directed me towards an enormous vacant slab of green, nothing but marshes, forested hunting reserves and firing ranges. As well as being wonderfully flat, this provisional route had the additional benefit of avoiding the nearby town of Condom, where I would be certain to encounter the sorriest sort of sniggering Britons.

  You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll definitely be in Paris afore ye, I thought as the poppies and abandoned hotels petered out and the D665 plumb-lined through the parallel pines. Breathing in hot Badedas vapour, and trying not to notice that the wind was turning to face me, I ground on, bored as Belgium. Increasingly abstract speculations wandered into my mind. How long would it take me to cut down one of those pines with a screwdriver? Would I kill that blackbird and eat it raw for £20,000? A deer leapt out in front of a deer-warning sign, somehow arranging its spindly limbs into a precise replication of the complicated prance depicted, and for some considerable time I found myself internally debating how it was that these animals managed to survive for even twenty-four hours without snapping at least one of their silly legs off.

  The forest thinned, but not the sense of isolation. I didn’t know whether the Tour would pass this way, but if it did it was going to be too late for most of the towns. A tree grew from a church roof, a Monsieur Hulot Renault Dauphine crouched in a state of advanced decomposition on a forecourt, waiting for a fill-up that the oxidised-skeleton pumps weren’t about to deliver. In some villages, two-thirds of the houses were roofless wrecks. Even the cartographers had given up: Bousses was do
wn as Boussé, gradient chevrons and scenic-route green borders were bandied about at random.

  The road began to blend seamlessly into the undergrowth, its surface defiled with horrid, scabrous pockmarks that were uncomfortable to both arse and eye. ‘Chaussée déformée’ warned the road signs superfluously. The French were good at this. If they spent even 2 per cent of their budget for warning you about carriageway deterioration on actually doing something about it, France would have the best roads in Europe. And it wasn’t just the infuriating frequency with which they stuck up the triangled exclamation marks, it was the wilful obscurities they enamelled beneath them. The bandes rugueuses and accotements dénivellés, the affaissements and aspersions – all spawned more fears than they laid to rest. Even the few I managed to translate conjured improbable scenarios, the ‘impractical surface’ that suggested whimsical experimentation with brass or feathers, the dark conspiracies implied by ‘holes in formation’.

  I stayed in a town called Mont-de-Marsan. It wasn’t very nice. I ate chips in the street. I found a room in a big hotel with long corridors and no people and a fat man on the front desk who licked his lips a lot and wrote my name in a big empty book. There were no shops but lots of bars with men who stared when you walked past, and lots more men standing on bridges over big rivers looking like they wanted to jump in. I got a bit scared and went back to my hotel. In the middle of the night I woke up and realised I was in Room 101 and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  Six

  Eurosport was on in the breakfast room and there was Axel Merckx, Eddy junior, winning a stage of the Tour of Italy. This was the first time I’d seen real cyclists since I’d been doing some real cycling, and I found myself intently scanning the peloton for tips on technique. But there was no secret. They just pedalled really fast, and the man who pedalled the fastest won. Merckx senior, congratulating Axel on the line, was clearly still on race rations, eating for eight hours in the saddle – Fast Eddy had lost an ‘s’. The man they once called Cannibal looked about as man-eating as the owner of a small but prosperous chain of carpet warehouses.

  I could talk. I was regularly sticking away enough fuel for 250 kilometres but doing only half that: I might be the fittest I’d ever been in my life, but I was also the fattest. The Pyrenees loomed and no amount of liberal toothpaste use would offer gravitational compensation for the nascent spare inner-tube ruching up above my shorts.

  Mont-de-Marsan had been a profoundly horrid place, and I was so eager to leave it that I didn’t notice until it was too late that the N124 marked on my – oh, seventeen-year-old – map had been supplanted by a 110 k.p.h. expressway. Parped reproaches informed me that my presence on this many-laned drag strip was inappropriate; lorries took especial pleasure in buffeting me into the calf-slashing tall grass that lined the hard shoulder. It was a long way to the next turn-off, and by the time I got there an already keen connoisseurship of roadside debris had been broadened still further.

  We’re all familiar with the bits of glass, rubber and animals that line major thoroughfares, and I could have contributed a thoughtful foreword to Chrome Alone: The Lost Hubcaps of France, but it was intriguing to note the range of objects that motorists discard voluntarily. Why all these hundred-yard lengths of cassette tape?

  ‘Gérard, we love Johnny Halliday, right?’

  ‘Everyone loves Johnny. Go, Johnny!’

  ‘Yeah. Go! But I was thinking – why is that?’

  ‘Well, because he’s a global pop-rock legend who just happens to be French, that’s why.’

  ‘Even though no one else in the world has heard of him.’

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘And even though he looks like a chain-smoking old tramp in mascara.’

  ‘Yeah. But you know: go, Johnny!’

  ‘Right. I mean, I really love Johnny too, but the thing is, all of his music is just so utterly, utterly abysmal, that I was wondering if we could carry on doing the whole love bit while at the same time throwing all his tapes out of the window.’

  ‘Fair enough. We’ll do it when we stop to crap in the next lay-by.’

  I cut down to Dax on stretches of the old N124, through moribund villages that must have cheered the day the expressway took the traffic away but now looked like they were missing the noise and excitement. For much of the way I kept pace with a postwoman in a little yellow van: the dogs always gave her a welcoming pant as she ambled up their front paths, then flung themselves in spittled rage at their chain-link fences when they saw me.

  The journey to Dax was a mere 60 kilometres – I should warn you that I’m about to start saying ‘k’ instead of kilometres – and I got there before lunch. Though by most standards unassuming, it was considerably less dead than Mont-de-Marsan, a place I’d erased from my mind so successfully that when the shopkeeper I asked for directions enquired where I’d come from that day I had to get the map out to remind myself.

  Dax had a slightly flyblown, Mexican air, with plenty of scabby whitewash and hot dust, but there were a couple of breezy, palm-lined squares, a well-tended maze of pedestrianised shopping streets and the inevitable big river, this time bordered by a bank of enormously flash spa hotels. The most enormous and flashest was a dazzling art-deco palace unashamedly labelled SPLENDIDE, which was good news for me because, as I appear not to have mentioned I had booked myself in here before leaving England. This was the first of my stops under Simon’s reward scheme, and though I’d arrived a couple of days early, due to the now-notorious excision of the Brittany Loop, the room I’d reserved was free.

  Can’t say the receptionist seemed overjoyed, however. Wheeling ZR across the Splendide’s lobby, an echoingly regal Grand Central Station job, I’d felt somewhat out of place amongst the old men in dressing gowns perusing brass-and-glass cases full of expensive leather accessories and hampers of foie gras. The garage was ‘not correct’ for bicycles, she said, flashing tell-me-about-it peripheral smiles at passing guests as if to say: Don’t worry, we’ll have this sweaty buffoon out of your way soon.

  ‘That’s OK. I’ll just take it up to my room,’ I said, raising the stakes with a wide-eyed beam.

  ‘Non! No – I …’

  ‘This bicycle,’ I said, patting ZR’s sweaty saddle with exaggerated respect, ‘is worth 24,000 US dollars.’

  The receptionist glanced down at the muddy panniers, then looked me straight in the eye and smiled with marked coldness. But she said nothing, perhaps knowing that the spectacle of laboriously levering my bike upright to fit it alongside me in the tiny lift would offer ample recompense.

  My room was intensely exciting, a symphony of restored art-deco glass and mahogany, everything authentic except the whopping great telly and the groin-soaking turbo tap in the bathroom basin. And it was also immense, big enough to cycle round, though this didn’t stop it feeling very odd to have the bike in there with me. Propped up against the mirrored wardrobe, it stared accusingly from every angle, even glinting in the dark when I went to the loo in the night. And, because the Tour de France press office fucked up and/or lied – difficult to accept, I know, but bear with me – there would be two nights for it to glint through before I could get my faxed itinerary and be off.

  Still, it could have been worse. The room was just £40 a night – an absurd bargain – and a rest day before the (eeeek!) Pyrenees could only be good. After a pleasant interlude making alien faces in the wide-angled make-up mirror, I walked out into a lethargically hot afternoon and somehow ended up talking Tour at the town hall.

  Turning up unannounced at a public office in France and requesting an instant meeting must be right up there with alchemy in the long-shot stakes, and I was still in shock when Eric, a nice young man in the service de communication, tapped a Marlboro Light on his desk and asked what he could do for me. Well! After five minutes I had learned that Dax had paid the Société du Tour de France one million francs to be a ville d’étape; that doing so was considered an important investment for the town’s national and
international profile in terms of both commerce and tourism; that the civic celebrations would include music, dancing and bicycle-shaped flower-beds.

  If my French or Eric’s English had been better I might have learned more, but it was a start. In fact, as I was bundled into the office of his boss Isobel, I was rather wishing it had been an end. Isobel spoke no English, wore Heinrich Himmler glasses and had a Mini-Me secretary sitting beside her. ‘Cinq petites secondes,’ she barked, glancing flamboyantly at her watch, but it seemed like vingt grandes minutes before I managed to think of something to say, and that was asking if she liked bicycles.

  Wisely ignoring this imbecility, Isobel slickly engaged human press-release mode. I tried my best to keep up. Dax had last been a ville d’étape in 1959 (possibly), was only a small town of 20,000 (possibly), and the arrival of the Tour would be a night for citizens to resemble each other and shoot cat-skins (possibly not). She also gave me rather a start by insisting that one of the main objectives was to lure old people here for ‘termalisme’. This sounded uncommonly like a frank synonym for euthanasia, and my concerns for all those old dears playing bridge in the Splendide lobby were only laid to rest the next day when I saw the word, complete with silent ‘H’, emblazoned outside a health spa.

  Eric rescued me with a slightly apologetic smile and saw me off with a ‘Bon courage’. That was good, but what I really craved was a ‘chapeau’. Chapeau! – hats off! – was the traditional roadside hosanna for those who had achieved the memorable: Merckx on a 130-kilometre solo attack in the mountains during his first Tour, Roche coming up through the mist at la Plagne. Wandering the soporific early-evening streets in search of food I withdrew my odometer, which I’d unclipped from ZR in order to gloat over. In seven days in the saddle I’d gone from wet north to banana-palm south, covering 808.4 kilometres; risible by Tour standards, but more than many pros aim to do in a week’s training. And my top speed, 61 k.p.h., was the fastest I had ever travelled under my own steam, probably even including that youthful encounter with the 577 Crew on Ealing Common. Beginning to feel quite important, I strode into a pizzeria.