French Revolutions

them and everything.
Elsewhere there was a sort of Hansel and Gretel cathedral, some
uncharacteristically grubby nineteenth-century streets and a muted atmosphere
that was Sunday afternoon rather than Saturday evening. The centre had
presumably been flattened in the war, but it looked as though they’d only just
remembered to start rebuilding it. Bronzed-glass office blocks were
interspersed with huge empty lots, and above the heavily scaffolded station
shot a high-rise hotel so new that the lift-call buttons were still sheathed in
plastic. I know this because I checked in — fifty quid a night but I couldn’t
be arsed to find an alternative — and because the buttons in question were
marked not with the usual up and down arrows, but the words ‘Ab’ and ‘Auf’, which
meant as little to me as they did to the many dispirited refugees I accompanied
from the basement to the eighth floor and back, and back.
    I showered and changed and wandered
off into an evening that stank of brewing thunder. An American-themed restaurant
promised ‘Live Euro Fussball und Great Beer’ but delivered neither, though I
didn’t really care. I was tired, and tomorrow was a big day: the time trial,
against the clock, contre le montre, when for 58.5 flat-out kilometres I’d see
what I was made of, how the mountains had built up my physical and mental
strength. With my family and Paul around I’d occasionally found myself diverted
from the job in hand, but now I was focused. The lullaby that night was not the
rush of glacial meltwater but freight trains and ding-dong station
announcements and the tortured shouts of madmen. I didn’t mind a bit. No
mosquitoes, no rosé wine, none of those holiday-style distractions. And I was
in Germany. That alone concentrated the mind wonderfully. You can’t be on
holiday in Germany.
     
    If the Tour hadn’t been decided
already, it would be after the time trial. The race of truth, they call it — no
tactics, no teammates to fetch and carry and hide behind, just a special
lightweight bike and a silly aerodynamic body condom and an hour and a bit of
hammering on the pain barrier.
    I slept for thirteen hours and then
at breakfast, elbow to shellsuited elbow with a throng of face-stuffing
Germans, I shovelled in a mountain of meat and eggs. I was taking this
seriously. I’d traced the route on to the map: straight back down the Rhine,
across it into France, down into Mulhouse. I retrieved ZR from the luggage
store, flexed and twitched and slapped my legs, then went straight up to the
check-out desk and smashed a brass reading light. As well as being
embarrassing, this rather broke my concentration. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to the
receptionist as she swept pieces of low-energy bulb into a pile using a
postcard of the cathedral, ‘I really don’t know how that happened.’ With an
open face and a slow-motion sweep of the elbow she showed me. ‘Thank you,’ I
said. ‘Now I see.’
    I’d been hoping the previous day’s
wind would have held, blowing me down the floodplain, but along with the sun it
was gone. It was one of those flotation-tank days, still and humid, the air so
stale it felt second-hand and so thick that it soaked up the noise, filtering
the roar of nearby traffic into a muted, earplugged hiss. I rolled slowly along
the pavement cycle lane, occasionally glancing around for a strip of bunting or
a sheaf of flags that might announce I had reached the Leopoldring, the stage’s
start line, until while crossing a junction I looked up and saw that
Leopoldring was the name of a road, and that I was already on this road.
Buttocks! It was like turning up late for an exam. Adrenalin hosed into my
heart and I shot off far too fast, almost immediately having to shriek to a
stop at the next traffic lights. Waiting at traffic lights — this wasn’t very
professional. I’ll be sticking my bloody arm out to indicate in a minute, I
thought, although actually it was less than that.
    Bursting with frustration I slalomed
on to the cycle path. There’d hardly been a single cycle path in France, though by according cyclists equal road rights they didn’t really need any. But
they were everywhere in Germany and Switzerland and they hated it if you didn’t
use them. Usually I did, but they had a habit of whistling away into the woods
or skirting even minor intersections with a seven-sides-of-an-octagon detour,
and with my average speed down at a risible 22.9 the last thing I needed