French Revolutions

capturing
me as I solemnly surveyed the bleak backdrop, and we got into something
approaching conversation.
    ‘Torino?’ I panted, and as he slowly
nodded I detected an arresting resemblance, from the all-black strip to the
well-groomed moustache and stringy, gnarled physique, to Lee Van Cleef in his
role as The Bad. What made this particularly compelling was that his colleague,
all shifty, stunted mania and overripe nose, paid alarming visual homage to
whoever it was who played The Ugly.
    I nodded as The Bad explained, in
measured, baritone French that may have been worse than mine, that the Giro —
the Tour of Italy — had crossed the Izoard just the day before (like the Tour,
it regularly probes into neighbouring countries). He was here with his friend —
this prompted a weaselly wink from The Ugly — and together they’d watched the
Giro sweat slowly past. Last night they’d slept in his car, and...
‘Maintenant... maintenant...’ He turned to face the toxic slopes behind,
nodding slowly at them as he searched for a word to encompass their loathsome
bleakness, and having failed to do so sank into a low chuckle.
    ‘Fausto Coppi,’ blurted The Ugly in
an unexpectedly camp squeak. ‘Gino Bartali,’ murmured his friend, crossing his
black chest and glancing up at an azure sky now mercifully dabbed with clouds.
‘Tom Simpson,’ I said, and never having done so in earnest crossed myself with
such dramatic vigour that the undone jersey zip was snagged into the flesh of
my craw just below the Adam’s apple.
    I’ve had a pretty good run with zips
over the years, and plucking tentatively at the trapped skin I accepted it
could have been a lot worse. My brother once travelled home from Paris on a coach next to a young man wearing the ghostly mien of recent bereavement, and
whose agonised under-coat lap probings implied virological fallout from a
drunken indelicacy at the wake. Only when they stopped at Calais did he tug
bleakly at my brother’s arm and, with self-revulsion wobbling over his blanched
features, silently raise the coat to reveal a complicated enmeshment of metal
teeth and intimate flesh. A moment of complacency at the urinal was all it had
taken to bring about this grisly spectacle, but what could my brother now do to
remedy it? Following Princess Diana’s death we are all aware of France’s ‘Good Samaritan’ law that compels passers-by to assist at the scene of an
accident. This, though, was long before that, so history should not be too hard
on my brother for striding away up the aisle with a disgusted glare, having
elected to interpret the situation as an obscure act of indecency, albeit one
whose questionable erogenous dividends had left the perpetrator six budgies
short of an Oscar Plattner.
    My brother is a decent man who may
still feel a lingering burden of guilt recalling this incident, but I am here
to urge him to banish any such feelings. When he hears of the brief but intense
masculine manipulation I endured in the back seat of that Fiat, and in
particular of an exotic finale involving the carefree application of sun-melted
butter, he can only have cause to rejoice at his course of action.
    Still, when it’s only your Adam’s
apple that’s being greased up, a bond of sorts forms, and when lubricants had
been dabbed away daintily — both appliers claimed to have worked in hospitals
during their military service — we rolled off together across the orange crush,
ZR and I sandwiched between The Bad and The Ugly. Down the slope, round the
next corner — I was quite looking forward to seeing how I’d cope against them
when the road started to rise again for the last, long haul to the top.
    ‘Ecco là,’ yelped The Ugly from
behind; ‘Ici!’ boomed The Bad from in front. The Bad slowed and pulled over, I
uncleated in confusion, stopped behind him and looked about in bewilderment.
‘Here?’
    ‘Si... ’ere. Voilà.’
    I looked to the left; set high into a
rock was a modest plaque. ‘Coppi e Bobet,’ said The Bad, paraphrasing the
inscription that paid tribute to the two Fifties’ legends and a monumental
battle they had fought over here in 1951. ‘In Giro,’ piped The Ugly
mischievously, ‘no in Tour.’ There was a long silence here, during which I
began to get restless and The Bad began to cry. Out of the corner of my eye I
saw the tear lodge in a crow’s foot before running down a brown cheek, and The
Ugly must have seen it too, because he clicked up the top