French Revolutions

her.
    Anyway, there followed some
additional banter on Belfort’s own cycling hero, Christophe Moreau, whose
reputation had been tarnished somewhat during the most notorious drug scandal
of recent years, the Festina affair, but who had since (another proud grin)
‘cleaned the slate’ and was now riding well. Finally, she said, ‘Oh, but you
must be starving hungry,’ then helped me stow ZR in a laundry room and gave me
a room key. Stepping beneath a ceiling where cherubs distantly frolicked in cumulo
nimbus and into a corridor where a discarded champagne bucket lay outside every
other door, I couldn’t quite understand how this place was only eight quid a
night more expensive than Freiburg’s spartan station block. There were
chocolates on the pillow and everything.
    I put on trousers and espadrilles and
went out to perform the aforementioned kebab dance before a North African band
with large support among France’s drunken-piggyback community. Then my legs
started to concertina and in half an hour I was stumbling up to bed.
    As a public service, I would like to
advise visitors to Belfort with an interest in hydraulic equipment,
agricultural materials or mattresses to avoid room 124 of the Grand Hotel du
Tonneau d’Or. These headings all appear on page 188 of the local Yellow
Pages kept in the room, a page whose distressed remains I currently have
before me. Although in later years I may easily wish to stuff a futon with
maize husks and mount it on elevating pistons, my interest that morning was
focused more on the page overleaf, 187, and the section headed Masseurs.
    It was all part of a grand scheme
that I’d hatched with Paul during our last night, one whose detailed refinement
had filled an empty head during many subsequent hours in the saddle. This
scheme required me to complete the penultimate Belfort-Troyes stage, at 254.5
kilometres the longest in the 2000 Tour, in one day. I’d done the mountains,
but had yet to confront the Sisyphean demands of a huge, long day on the flat.
Of course, 2,673 kilometres in twenty-seven days wasn’t bad — in fact, every
time I did the maths I found it very hard not to raise at least one arm above
my head — but the most I’d managed in a single 24-hour period were the 151
wind-assisted kilometres to Agen. Farcical prologue and truncated time-trial
aside, I hadn’t ever done what the real riders did in a day, and this was a
wrong I felt a need to right.
    Setting off at 3 a.m. would of course
be the key tactic, but a physical tune-up, my 2,700-kilometre service, was also
imperative. ‘You honestly will need to have a massage,’ Simon O’Brien had said,
and though he might easily have done so in anticipation of shameful
misunderstandings involving the purveyors of executive relief, I had begun to
agree with him. Mr Boardman’s stretches could do only so much for legs with a
combined age of 72.
    Covertly examining page 187’s listed
practitioners over an expensive croissant was a deeply traumatic experience. I
could almost hear Simon sniggering as I ran a finger down the names. What would
Francis Yoder get up to when I was face down on the trolley? Did I really want
to hear Patrick Baumgartner cracking his oiled knuckles? And one only had to
say the words ‘Denis Klingelschmitt’ to conjure a hellish inventory of complex
and expensive ‘extras’. In the end, slightly depressed at my own
predictability, I went back up to room 124 and, feeling my features pucker into
a compact gurn of lust, dialled the number shared by Dominique and Delphine
Masson.
    However, the call was answered by
neither of Belfort’s sassiest twins, but a bored-sounding man. Oh. ‘Good
morning. I am on a bicycle and my legs need attention,’ I said. It was a phrase
I had honed during a sleepless dawn; not until now did I appreciate that its
only appropriate home was in a conversation on an obscure premium-rate service.
I had to say it twice more before the man answered, using a great many words
whose gist, as I understood it, was that though ‘les Massons’ had recently left
his practice, he himself would be happy to attend to me, though not until
tomorrow, today being the ‘Pentecote’.
    I wasn’t too sure about this last
part, but it didn’t sound great. The impression was of a hood-wearing cult that
forbade the rubbing of foreign flesh on the second Monday in June. Why had the
Massons left? Had they known too much? I wasn’t going to wait an extra day so
that some daubed,