French Revolutions

of
Ventoux appeared fleetingly through the lavender, I’d topped this up with
another two and a couple of ProPlus. Slapping myself much too hard on the
cheek, I remounted and tried to forget all the stuff about not operating
machinery if affected.
    In every important respect I was in
another world. A sign leered over at me from a side turning: élevage des
sangliers. I’d read enough Asterix to know that sanglier was
wild boar, but if élève was school pupil, then didn’t élevage mean education? What the fuck kind of weird pig-teaching shit was going on down
there? And the next sign didn’t help: ‘Patrick Troughton’. What? Patrick
Troughton? The dead Doctor Who? This I had to see. I wobbled listlessly off
down the indicated switchback path and found myself facing a modest warehouse
emblazoned with a name that after running a finger beneath the letters and
mouthing each in turn I eventually conceded might, in fact, be Parquets
Traditionels.
    The idea had been that the drugs
would work together, turbocharging my lungs, twin-sparking my heart, hot-wiring
invincibility into my brain. But as the first painted names slipped slowly
beneath my wheels and I forced myself up in the saddle like an old man rising
from a disabled toilet there was a clashing bodily discord, a chemical
castration. My heart seemed to have filled most of my upper half, throbbing
through the forearms, flicking at the back of the throat, battering the inside
of my skull with the frenzied irregular staccato of popping corn. I was
breathing as if I’d just learned how to do it, and every time my legs pushed
down on the pedals it was like pressing a huge bruise. I dropped back to the
saddle and for the first time it started giving me grief, forcing me to shift
about from buttock to bollock in a futile quest for perineal comfort.
    Riders were now streaking down, a
sickening swish of air-billowed clothing, a speeding fragment of a ‘bonjour’ or
a ‘hiya’ caught by my hot ears. With bike and body rolling agonisingly from
side to side I came up to a fat hairpin. There was something painted on it. In
English. ‘Hey — only 11k to go!’ I’d been on the ring road of hysteria, and
this propelled me up the main drag. Eleven fucking kilometres? Eleven ?
It had been 22 at Bedoin. When he was only halfway up, he was neither up nor
down. Not just a body blow, a mighty rabbit punch in the perineum. I’ll see
your year in Provence and raise you a bloody lifetime. Why had that stupid good
Samaritan been there to fix my puncture? If I’d yelled the chorus from ‘Fame’
or eaten my watch or hissed at him like a cornered stoat he’d have legged it
straight back into his garage and I wouldn’t have to be here now.
    The revised arrangement with my
family had been to meet at the summit at 7; it was now 6.15.1 shouldn’t, I
couldn’t, let them see me like this. As a great coal-sack of fatigue settled
heavily down on the back of my neck I scrabbled a rigid claw into my bar-bag:
one last Haymine, one last ProPlus. Cry God for Tommy, England and St George. I took my helmet off and immediately felt less mad; reeling my brain back in
from the brink I taught myself to live with the jiving pine trees and
paisley-haloed tunnel vision.
    Tutting indulgently at the sundry
distortions of reality around me, I got into a rhythm and began to make better
progress, not quite redoubling my efforts perhaps but certainly requartering
them. An incentive system was established, a series of little sticks and
carrots: if I get to that next corner I’ll lower my jersey neck-zip; if I get
to the next I’ll have a sip of fluid; if I don’t get to the one after I’ll grab
a fistful of raisin slurry from my jersey pocket and cram it into my parched,
protesting gullet.
    Fascinatingly, it worked. As the road
weaved relentlessly through the thinning spruce trees, a heavily cambered
uphill slalom that just went on and on, I even caught the Americans, down to
two now, a few pounds lighter no doubt but notably redder. There was no spare
breath for gloating or greeting, but the one in front went with me as I nosed
past, and for a ridiculous minute we were shoulder to shoulder, both feigning
nonchalance. ‘Marty,’ pleaded his now distant colleague in a cracked rasp, and
with a thwarted huff Marty dropped back.
    The boarded-up café known as le
Chalet-Reynard was mankind’s final stand before the summit; a dead squirrel in
the car park did for the animal kingdom, and the plants