French Revolutions

speculatively prodded my spine, and having issued a
short sound at the upper limit of a human being’s audible spectrum I frenziedly
shook my head. The legs were one thing; if I’d wanted my back done I’d have...
I don’t know, had it waxed.
    ‘Eh bien,’ he said, towelling down
his hands as he assessed my slathered bald bits, ‘c’est pas mal. Vous avez...
trente-six, trente-sept ans?’ Those were awful words to hear. I’d thought he
had been generically impressed by my achievement, but I had been wrong. I
understood that all the kind words and encouragement I’d received in recent
days had been rounded off with an unspoken coda: Not bad for an old man.
    While Birna was packing I’d bundled
most of my Tour books into her suitcase, weary of the humbling heroics of
Messrs Cannibal and Badger. All I had left now were Paul Kimmage’s brutally
poignant Rough Ride and a novel Birna had brought out with her, The
Yellow Jersey , featuring none other than the ‘legendary fictional cyclist’
Terry Davenport. An account of a slightly seedy 36-year-old Englishman making
an improbable comeback in the Tour, this had been heartwarming bedtime reading
for the last week. After the disqualification of most of the Frenchmen for doping
offences (hissss!), and having literally beaten off a mob of Belgian bullies
with his bike pump (hurrah!), Terry finds himself wearing the eponymous shirt,
to the sporting world’s astonishment, with only two days left. The night
before, still unsettled by the groping grandmothers, I had snuggled up in bed
to cheer myself with Terry’s triumphant ride up the Champs-Elysées.
    It is difficult to imagine that the
literary editor of Bicycling magazine is a busy man, but without wishing
to contest his presumably irrefutable verdict of The Yellow Jersey as
‘the greatest cycling novel ever written’, I have to say that after reading the
first page I felt I could predict with some confidence what would happen on the
last. How wrong I was. What no doubt sets The Yellow Jersey apart from
the other cycling novels weighing down the nation’s shelves are the wholly
unexpected calamities of its abrupt denouement. On page 282 Terry is within
sight of the Tour’s most famous victory; then he gets really tired, and,
eschewing the gnarled determination that has carried him through far more lurid
crises, on page 283 he suddenly gives up. He is sitting in the back of the team
car trying to come to terms with this turn of events, when someone hands him a
letter from his girlfriend’s mother. He opens it on page 284 and learns on page
285 that Bobbie has abruptly announced her engagement to a younger man who
‘looked loaded and had a big car outside’. The end.
    I was deeply shocked, but the moral
was clear: the Tour was a young man’s game, and if you tried to beat him at it
you’d get really tired and give up. Then he’d drive off with your girlfriend in
a big car. The end.
    As I shuffled brokenly outside, the
old tramp strode past me with a spring in his step. It was as though our bodies
had been swapped. Still feeling as if my legs were leaking some vital
life-force through their scooped-out, fingered pores, I was driven back to my
hotel where I got myself jerseyed and cleated and Savloned up, then grabbed ZR
and asked the receptionist to photograph rider and steed at the foot of the
sweeping staircase. It was 11.10 a.m., and I knew that one way or another I
would still be cycling long after it got dark.
    My body seemed to heal with use.
Reaching the brow of the first of the day’s many rolling hills, I was beginning
to believe that massage might after all be a beneficial treatment rather than a
punishment, and my enhanced control of the bike now permitted mobile
refuelling, the in-saddle consumption of fig roll or Mars Bar. At Ronchamp the
route left the big road and for the final time I followed the Tour back to its
rural origins, beating a track through forgotten hamlets where man made no
sound but his best friend made plenty, places with waist-high weeds in the
churchyards and dumped-car farms and mad and ancient names like Esboz and
Quers.
    Luxeuil was a market town of the old
school, the banners across its narrow streets advertising another Day of Blood
and — how I laughed — a looming Festival of Nocturnal Cycling. On any other day
I’d have stopped here for my coffee; instead, with a practised air I slyly
palmed a ProPlus from my jersey pocket and washed it down with