FREYA NORTH
Cat

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Heinemann 1999

Copyright © Freya North 1999

Afterword © Freya North 2012

Freya North asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9780007462230

Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007462247

Version: 2017-11-28

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

For Emma O’Reilly

Honest and true.

And a great friend.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Cat McCabe and the Tour De France

Jules Le Grand and Team Systeme Vipere

Rachel McEwen and Team Zucca Mv

Ben York and Team Megapac

Setting the Wheels in Motion

Prologue Time Trial: Delaunay Le Beau, Saturday 3 July

Stage 1: Delaunay Le Beau-Rouen. 195 kilometres

Stage 2: Rouen-Vuillard. 260 kilometres

Stage 3: Vuillard-Plumelec. 225 kilometres

Stage 4: Plouay-Chardin. 248 kilometres

Stage 5: Nantes-Pradier. 210 kilometres

Stage 6: Pradier-Bordeaux. 215 kilometres

Stage 7: Computaparc - Individual Time Trial. 54.5 kilometres

Stage 8: Sauternes-Pau. 162 kilometres

Stage 9: Pau-Luchon. 196.5 kilometres

Stage 10: Luchon-Plateau de Boudin. 170 kilometres

Stage 11: Tarascon sur Ariège-Le Cap D’Arp. 221 kilometres

Repos

Stage 12: Frontignan La Peyrade-Daumier. 196 kilometres

Stage 13: Valadon-Grenoble. 186.5 kilometres

Stage 14: Grenoble-L’Alpe D’Huez. 189 kilometres

Stage 15: Vizille-Gilbertville. 204 kilometres

Stage 16: Gilbertville-Aix-les-Bains. 149 kilometres

Stage 17: Aix-les-Bains-Neuchâtel. 218.5 kilometres

Stage 18: La Chaux de Fonds-Lautrec. 242 kilometres

Repos: Transfer by road and rail. Lautrec-Disneyland-Paris

Stage 19: Disneyland Paris, Individual Time Trial: 63 kilometres

Stage 20: Disneyland-Paris. 149.5 kilometres

Day 27. Monday

October: Paris. The launch of next year’s Tour de France

Acknowledgements

Afterword

About the Author

Acclaim for Freya

Also by Freya North

About the Publisher

CAT McCABE AND THE TOUR DE FRANCE

‘I know that your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Django McCabe reasoned with his niece, ‘but you chasing through France after a bunch of boys on bikes – well, isn’t that taking the family tradition to new extremes?’

Cat McCabe, sunbathing, eyes closed, in her uncle’s Derbyshire garden, smiled.

It feels funny smiling with closed eyes; like you can’t really do both.

So she opened her eyes, stretched leisurely, sat up cross-legged, and picked blades of grass from her body, fingering the satisfying striations they had left on her skin.

‘Lashings of lycra!’ her elder sister Fen offered from her position under the pear tree.

‘Oily limbs a-plenty,’ connived her eldest sister Pip, suddenly cartwheeling into view.

Cat tried to look indignant but then grinned. ‘The Tour de France is the world’s most gruelling sporting event,’ she said defensively, hands on hips, to her audience. ‘It demands that its participants cycle 4,000 k in three weeks. At full speed. Up and over mountains most normal folk ski down. Day after day after day.’

‘And?’ said Django, rubbing his knees, bemoaning that the sun wasn’t doing for his arthritis what it did last year.

‘And?’ said Fen, an art historian who was much more turned on by bronze or marble renditions of Adonis than their pedal-turning doppelgangers her sister seemed so to admire.

‘And?’ said Pip courteously, more interested in perfecting her flikflaks across the lawn for her new act.

Cat McCabe regarded them sternly.

‘A Tour de France cyclist can have a lung capacity of around eight litres, a heart that can beat almost 200 times a minute at full pelt and then rest at a rate at which most people ought to be dead. They can climb five mountains in a row, descending them at up to 100 k per hour.’

‘Wow,’ said Fen with sisterly sarcasm, ‘I bet they’re really interesting people.’

‘Greg LeMond,’ countered Cat, ‘won the Tour de France in 1989 by eight seconds on the final day.’

‘Bully for him,’ Pip laughed, doing a handstand and wanting to practise her routine right the way through.

‘And that was two years after coming back from the brink of death when he was accidentally shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident.’

Now you’re impressed!

Fen nodded and looked impressed.

Pip executed a single-handed cartwheel and said, ‘Mister LeMond, I salute you.’

Django said, ‘Bet the bugger’s American.’

Cat confirmed that indeed he was.

‘In what other sport would you have participants called Eros? Or Bo? Or teams called BigMat or OilMe or Chicky World?’

‘Topless darts?’ Pip proposed.

‘They can also pee whilst freewheeling,’ Cat slipped in before anyone could change the subject.

‘In their shorts?’ Pip asked, quite flabbergasted.

‘Nope,’ Cat replied in a most matter-of-fact way. ‘They just whip it out, twist their pelvis, and pee as they go.’

‘So,’ said Django, ‘you’re off to France to experience a great sporting spectacle performed by superhuman athletes with great bike skills but no sense of urinary decorum?’

‘Partly,’ said Cat with dignity, ‘and because hopefully there’ll be a job at the end of it.’

Fen raised her eyebrow.

Pip regarded her youngest sister sternly.

Well aware that her sisters continued to stare at her, Cat looked out over Darley Dale and wished she had her mountain bike with her.

‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped whilst laughing and covering her face, ‘I’m not just pursuing the peloton because there’s a job at the end of it if my freelance work is good enough.’

I wish I had my bike. I could just ride and ride and be on my own.

‘You are pursuing the peloton—’ started Fen.

‘Because there’s a—’ continued Pip.

‘Hope of adventure?’ Cat tried contemplatively, still covering her face.

‘Lashings of lycra,’ Fen shrugged as if resting her case.

‘Silky smooth shaven thighs,’ Pip said in utter agreement. ‘Big ones.’

‘Over the sea and far away,’ Django mused. Everyone mused.

Cat nodded. ‘It’s time to move on,’ she said thoughtfully. Everyone agreed. No one had to say anything more.

‘I am Catriona McCabe,’ Cat muses to herself, sitting under a cedar in the grounds of Chatsworth House, not two miles from where her uncle lives and from where she was brought up when her mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver, ‘and I’m twenty-eight years old.’

And?

And I’m going to the Tour de France, with full press accreditation, to report on the race for the Guardian newspaper.

And?

If my reportage wins favour, I might land the job of Features Editor for the magazine Maillot.

Jersey?

Maillot.

And?

I’ll be sorted. And happy.

OK. But all things on two wheels aside, what else?

I’m twenty-eight.

We know.

I live in London. In Camden. In a tiny, rented one-bedroom flat with gay neighbours, a tapas bar opposite, and my two sisters near by.

We met them.

Fenella is a year older than me, Philippa two. Fen’s an art historian. Pip’s a clown. We’re close but different.

Certainly. And you’re into journalism?

Actually, I’m into cycling. The journalism part just enables me to indulge my passion.

Isn’t a passion for pedal sport rather unusual for a British female? Wouldn’t it be more common for you to be into three-day eventing? Or tennis? Or soccer, even?

Cycling is my thing. It is the most beautiful, hypnotic sport to watch. The riders are consummate athletes; so brave, so focused, so committed. My heart is in my mouth as they ride and I watch.

But how and why?

Because I.

That’s a fine sentence, Cat.

Because I was … with … a man who kindled my interest. He left. The interest didn’t.

When did he leave?

Three months ago.

A time trial indeed.

Indeed.

So France will be good.

France is my dream. France can mark a new me. France can help me heal. Can’t it?

I’m sure.

Cat was helping Django prepare supper. Though the McCabe girls visited their uncle monthly, it was rare for them all to be there at the same time. June was turning into July but with his three girls with him, Christmas had come early for Django.

‘I’m going to do a Spread,’ Django announced. For three girls whose mother had run off with a cowboy from Denver and who were brought up by a man called Django in the wilds of Derbyshire, the Spread was nothing to raise eyebrows at. For normal folk of a conventional upbringing and traditional meal times using regular foodstuffs, a Spread by Django McCabe would cause eyebrows to leave the forehead altogether.

Django McCabe is sixty-seven and, in his jeans with big buckled belts, faded Liberty shirts and trademark neckerchiefs, he looks like he should be an artist, or a jazz musician. In fact, during his lifetime, he’s dabbled in both. Twenty-five years ago, in Montmartre, he combined the two rather successfully and sparked a certain trend for neckerchiefs. But then his sister-in-law ran away with a cowboy from Denver and he had to forsake Parisian prestige for the sake of his bereft brother and three small daughters and an old draughty house in Derbyshire. The two men and the three girls lived harmoniously until their father died of a heart attack when Pip was ten years old.

The house is still draughty but Django’s warmth, and his insistence on multilayered clothing and his obsession with hot thick soup at every meal during the winter months, ensured that the McCabe girls’ childhoods were warm and healthy. They have also developed palates that are robust and tolerant. Soup at every meal throughout the winter months is one thing; that the varieties should include Chicken and Apple, Celery and Baked Beans, and Tuna Chunks with Pea and Stilton, is quite another. Luckily, it is June and there is no call for soup today.

Pip is having a rest in the back bedroom following further exertion on the lawn. Fen is sitting quietly on the window seat in the room whose name changes according to time of day and current season. On winter mornings and evenings, it is the Snug. On spring afternoons it is the Library. On weekday evenings, if the television is on, it is the Family Room. On weekday evenings if the television is off, it’s the Drawing-room. On summer afternoons, it is the Quiet Room. In mornings, it is the Morning Room. When the girls were young and naughty, it was Downstairs. Fen is in the Quiet Room which, after supper, will no doubt be the Drawing-room. Cat is in the kitchen, peeling, scrubbing, grating and chopping and being as diplomatic as possible in dissuading Django from adding Tabasco to the trout, or to the mashed potato, or to the mint and cranberry sauce.

‘It’s best in Bloody Mary,’ Cat informs him. So Django finds vodka but no tomato juice and just mixes the Tabasco in anyway.

‘Cheers!’ he says, knocking his drink back.

‘Cheers!’ Cat responds with a hearty sip only to fight back choking and tears.

‘I think I’d better name this drink, Bloody Hell, Mary,’ Django wheezes, but takes another glug regardless.

Cat nods and wonders if chopped apricots will really add much of consequence – good or bad – to the trout.

They’ll counteract the olives, I suppose.

‘So, Cat, you’ll be a good girl? You’ll be careful in France? I know all about Alain Delon and Roger Vadim.’

‘I don’t,’ Cat laughs.

‘You watch yourself,’ Django cautions, absent-mindedly pointing a knife at her and then apologizing profusely.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Cat assures him, ‘I’m in the press corps. There’ll be 900 journalists. The Tour is a movable town, a veritable community. I’m in it for the ride, for the duration.’

I’ll be safe.

‘You look after yourself,’ Django repeats, thinking a dash of stout might be welcomed by the mashed potato.

‘That’s precisely what I’m doing,’ Cat says pensively.

The Spread ready, the four McCabes assemble. They stand by their places and look from one to the other in silence. Django gives the nod and they sit. And eat. He’s all for picking and dipping and having a taste of this, a soupçon of that. So arms stretch amiably and serving spoons chink and dollop. There’s much too much food but whatever’s left will be blended together tomorrow, liquidized the next day and then frozen, to reappear as soup in some not-too-distant colder time.

In the Drawing-room, over coffee and some dusty but undamaged After Eights which Pip discovered in her bedside table, Django looked to his three nieces. Fen looked wistful as ever, her blonde hair scrunched into a wispy pony-tail which made her look young and vulnerable and like she should be living at home. Django noticed that she was visibly thinner than when he saw her at Easter and knew that this could be attributed to one of two things.

‘Love or money, Fen?’ he asked.

She jolted and looked at each of her palms as if assessing the merits of telling him one thing or another.

‘Both,’ she said, folding her hands in her lap.

‘Has he too much or too little?’ Django enquired.

‘It depends,’ said Fen.

Django looked puzzled. Cat couldn’t resist. ‘One is loaded and the other is broke.’

‘Good God, girl!’ Django exclaimed in honest horror, much to Cat and Pip’s delight. ‘Two of them?’

‘Who is it to be?’ Cat asked Fen. ‘Have you decided yet? The old or the young?’

‘Who’s the one?’ Pip pushed. ‘The rich or the poor? Did you toss for it or did they have a duel?’

‘Neither,’ Fen wailed. ‘Both.’ She looked out of the window, unable to decipher the night from the moor, or the merits of one love from the other. Django, Cat and Pip gazed at her for a moment.

‘Pip,’ Django said sternly, ‘love or money?’

‘I can live most comfortably without either,’ said Pip, secretly wishing she had just a little of each.

‘Well, a pink afro wig, copious amounts of face paint and an alter ego called Martha the Clown can’t help,’ Django reasoned.

‘I.e., get a proper job,’ Pip groaned to Fen whilst ignoring Django. Django turned to Cat who was staring out of the window and way into the night. Her green-grey eyes glinting with the effort of uninvited memories, her sand-blonde hair suddenly framing her face and dripping down over drooping shoulders, her lips parted as if preparing for words she’d never said and wished she had. She looked distant. And sad.

‘She’s in France already,’ Fen whispered to Django, secretly worried that Cat should not be going on her own.

‘Best place for her,’ Pip colluded, secretly pleased that Cat was guaranteed time alone and away.

‘Cat?’ Django called softly. Cat blinked, yawned and smiled, hoping it would deflect attention from the obvious effort of pulling on a brave face at that time of night.

‘Mario Cipollini’s thighs have a circumference of 80 centimetres,’ she told them.

I could hear them, my sisters. And they’re right – I am in France, sort of. And I wonder if I shouldn’t go. I mean, if I stay, maybe He will pop round some time over the next three weeks. Say he wants to change his mind but I’m not here? Might he come back? And say sorry?

As if.

No no.

That’s over. Move on, Cat.

But he might.

No, I don’t think he will.

How can he love me and then not? And in the same day too?

‘I love you,’ he said in a rare phone call from work that morning. ‘I’m leaving,’ he said, as so often he did, later that night. ‘So go then,’ I said, thinking if I stood up to him it would give him the reality check he needed. ‘Go then,’ I said, presuming he’d stand stock still in horror, sweep me off my feet and cry, ‘Never never never.’

Instead?

He went. He ran.

Three months since.

And I cannot bring him back. Yet I left the door metaphorically wide open, hoping he’d come back and bang on it, proclaiming, ‘I want to be here with you. Always. What can I do, sweet love?’

So now I think I regret what I did. But they all tell me not to.

The door’s still ajar. Soon I’m going to have to shut it. For my safety and my sanity. Let go.

I don’t want to. Won’t letting go be just that – letting go?

Giving up? Admitting failure? Admitting that it is really, truly over?

And if I let go, am I not saying that I relinquish my hope? Because who am I, Cat McCabe, without my hope?

France. Le Tour de France. La Grande Boucle. A dream I’ve had for five years. He was a dream I had for five years – at least this is one I can make come true, all the way to the Paris finale. I will follow the Tour de France, become a part of this fantastic travelling family. From start to finish. All the way, over the flat lands, over the Pyrenees and Alps, through the vineyards and home to the Champs-Elysées. Me and my heroes. Fabian Ducasse. Vasily Jawlensky. Luca Jones.

You can keep your Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises. You can even keep your George Clooneys. If you want a hero, choose anyone from the Système Vipère or Zucca MV teams. Brad and Tom couldn’t do a fraction of the twenty-one hairpin bends on L’Alpe D’Huez. Mr Clooney wouldn’t dare descend a mountain with the grace and speed of a peregrine falcon in full plummet.

Bollocks! What on earth has got into me? I mean, I know I have to move on now – but fantasizing about professional cyclists is not only unrealistic, it’s daft and it could be detrimental. Exactly. I’m a professional journalist about to infiltrate a male-dominated world. Not a groupie. Even if I was a groupie, why would they look at me? Put me next to a podium girl with their lips and their legs and their kisses and mini skirts, and I rest my case.

Exactly.

Anyway, the riders are mostly in bed by nine.

And I read something somewhere that hours in the saddle means impotence in the sack.

Only one way to verify that, I suppose.

Cat McCabe!

I meant, talking to the riders’ wives and girlfriends.

When Cat arrived home from Derbyshire, her neighbours had left a note inviting her upstairs for a snack and a chat. Eric and Jim (whose fifth anniversary that weekend Cat had missed for Django’s Spread) saw Cat’s emotional and physical welfare as their responsibility. They were positively parental though they were, in fact, but a year or two older than her. When she had food poisoning, they brought her tonic water and the bucket. When her flat was broken in to, they insisted she slept on their sofabed. When He left, they brought her ice-cream and comfort. They were almost as excited by France and the notion that an adventure and a change of scenery would work wonders for Cat, as they were by the thought of one hundred and eighty-nine amply muscled men in lycra shorts.

‘We have a present for you,’ Eric said. ‘We wanted to give it to you before you leave on Wednesday – by the way, if it doesn’t start till Saturday, why are you going so early?’

‘Because I have to organize my accreditation and then during Thursday and Friday there are press conferences, team by team,’ Cat explained, ‘and stuff.’

‘Are you excited?’ Jim asked, because he was. ‘Aren’t you nervous?’

‘I’m very both,’ said Cat. ‘If that’s a sentence.’

‘You’re vulnerable,’ Jim warned her. ‘Don’t expect too much from France. I know it’s a goal that’s kept you going, but don’t expect too much.’

‘And don’t go on the rebound,’ Eric added, wagging his finger. ‘I mean, those riders are considered gods, rock stars, over there, aren’t they?’

‘I think what he’s trying to say,’ said Jim, ‘is that if you’re to go on the rebound – which we sincerely hope you will – a professional cyclist might not be the most suitable participant.’

‘I mean,’ said Eric, ‘just imagine the effect of a night of non-stop debauchery – the poor sod will be too knackered to turn the pedals the next day.’

They all imagined it quietly for a moment and then burst out laughing.

‘Which somewhat makes a mockery of our gift,’ Eric then continued. ‘Here. It’s your survival kit.’

They handed Cat a shoebox. She lifted the lid, twitched her brow and then laughed as she fingered through the contents.

‘Condoms?’ she exclaimed, while Jim shrugged and Eric looked out the window.

‘Bic razors?’ she asked, counting four.

‘We weren’t sure if they use Immac on their legs,’ said Jim.

‘And there’s nothing quite like being shaved by someone you fancy,’ Eric furthered.

‘And there’s a lot of leg on some of those boys,’ Jim reasoned.

‘So am I to suppose that this bumper-sized bottle of baby oil is for after shave and not for me?’ Cat asked to meek smiles apiece from the two men.

‘Why do they shave their legs?’ Eric asked.

‘To show off their tans and muscles,’ Jim cooed.

‘Aerodynamics?’ Eric pressed.

‘Or just a tradition that I, for one, sincerely hope will continue,’ Jim said breathlessly.

‘Road rash,’ said Cat, most matter-of-fact.

‘Eh?’ said Eric.

‘If they crash or fall,’ Cat explained, ‘it’s easier to clean cuts and grazes on smooth skin.’

Jim looked most disappointed with this information. Cat returned her attention to the shoebox. ‘Vaseline?’

‘We read somewhere that it gives them a, um, more comfortable ride,’ Jim said ingenuously.

‘Not that we’re suggesting you offer to apply it,’ Eric rushed. Cat raised her eyebrows and held up a wildly patterned bandanna.

‘They all wear them,’ Eric said, ‘we saw them on the TV last year.’

‘Extra strong mints,’ Cat said, taking the packet to her nose.

‘For any, er, passing horses,’ Eric said.

‘I’m frightened of horses,’ Cat said.

‘You can befriend them with the mints,’ Jim said.

‘And that’s why you’ve included them?’ Cat pressed with a wry smile. ‘Not because I’m going to a country where you have meals with your garlic?’ They smiled back at her. Wryly.

Plasters. Antiseptic. A hundred-franc note. A packet of energy bars.

‘We’ll follow your progress in the Guardian,’ Eric said.

‘It’ll be good,’ Jim assured her with a squeeze, ‘you’ll be fine.’

I wonder who’ll end up in the yellow jersey? Cat ponders, sitting up in bed with current copies of Marie Claire and Procycling to hand. It’ll either be Fabian Ducasse or Vasily Jawlensky and I love them both equally but for different reasons. Fabian is stunning in looks and riding, his arrogance is compelling. He exudes testosterone – hopefully in doses that are natural and not administered. Vasily is fantastically handsome too but he really is inscrutable – an enigma. Who do I want to see in the maillot jaune? I don’t know. May the best man win.

And the polka dot jersey for King of the Mountains? I’d put my money on Vasily’s team-mate, the personable and rather gorgeous Massimo Lipari; the media’s dream and a million housewives’ darling. I’d like him to make it his hat trick though he’ll have to watch out for his Système Vipère rival, the diminutive but charismatic Carlos Jesu Velasquez.

And the green jersey? For points? Can Stefano Sassetta take it back from Jesper Lomers this year?

Then there’s the American team, Megapac – Tour virgins, just like me. Maybe I’ll try for some exclusives. I’d love to meet Luca Jones – he seems to typify the international camaraderie of the peloton, living in Italy, riding for Great Britain and racing for an American pro team. He’s meant to be something of a character – but when you’re that pleasing on the eye, it would be a disappointment not to be.

God, I wish I could speak Spanish or Italian. My French is crap. I should have studied harder for Mamzelle at school instead of – how did she phrase it? ‘Day-dreaming won’t get you a job, O levels will.’

But actually, I’ve day-dreamt about following the Tour de France for years. And now it’s my job to do it.

JULES LE GRAND AND TEAM SYSTEME VIPERE

Swarthy, handsome, smelling of Calvin Klein scent and looking very much like someone who might well advertise their wares if he weren’t a professional cyclist, Fabian Ducasse strolled through his luxurious Brittany apartment and put a George Michael CD into his Système Vipère mega micro hi-fi station.

‘If I rode for the Casino team, ha! I would have only a discount in the sponsor’s supermarket chain!’ he laughed out loud. ‘Or a new vacuum cleaner if I was with Team Polti. If I was with Riso Scotti, I could have all the rice I could eat – so, Système Vipère suits me.’ He turned up the volume, reclined his six-foot and twenty-nine-year-old frame on to a leather sofa and listened to George Michael singing about Faith.

Faith. That’s what I got to have. Got to win the race or no more super hi-fi for Fabian. Must win. Must conquer. Must blast away any challenge. The maillot jaune must be mine.

‘Hey, but if I ride for O.N.C.E. or Banesto, I could open accounts with the banks themselves and they could invest all my money and make it even bigger!’ He slipped his hand down his tracksuit trousers and grabbed his cock. ‘Jawlensky? What can Zucca MV give him but building materials? He has a house, so what can he do with more bricks? You can’t listen to a brick. A brick doesn’t look cool in the lounge.’

With his hand coaxing and rewarding his erection, Fabian walked over to the window and gazed down on the women sipping coffee in the terrace cafés below.

‘In four days, the Tour starts. I must win it this year. I should not have let it go last year. I do not like it that this year I am to be categorized “The Pretender”. In four days, my future starts again.’

Jawlensky? He took yellow last year only because I wasn’t at 100 per cent after that bug. This year is pay back. No one has the maillot jaune but Fabian.

One of the women looked up from her café au lait. She was blonde and beautiful and he’d seen her before.

‘Four days until the Tour. Bien. I need coffee. Caffeine is good. And it tastes better when sipped alongside a beautiful woman.’

He made a phone call. ‘Hélène? You can get away? Coffee?’ His girlfriend of three weeks reminded him that she was at work, in the next town, so he would have to be content that she was having to be content with coffee from the vending machine. Fabian shrugged as he hung up. He went down in to the square and had coffee and an ego-massage by the blonde woman whose name he asked but forgot immediately. He felt incredibly horny. But he forgot that too because he wanted to do 80 kilometres on his bike. Fast.

‘Fabian?’ Jules Le Grand, Système Vipère’s directeur sportif, phones his team leader from his mobile phone whilst walking across town from appointment to appointment. A suave man of forty-seven, with an impressive shock of well-styled grey hair, a pair of fabulously expensive gold-rimmed spectacles, a discerning penchant for meticulously designed suits and an almost uncontrollable fondness for exquisite calf-skin loafers, Jules Le Grand would almost look more at home in the offices of a Parisian couturier than amongst the chain grease, muscle embrocation and general blood and sweat that accompanies his job on a daily basis.

Cyclisme is my life, my passion – but why compromise on style? It is not necessary. Only lazy. Laziness is anathema, the enemy, in all to do with cycling, in all to do with life. In that order – compris?

With a phenomenal amount to organize, check and double-check in the rapidly diminishing days, hours, prior to the Tour, the mobile phone, in Jules’s mind, is as great an invention of the modern age as the carbon-fibre bicycle frame.

‘Fabian?’ Jules checks his watch and allows himself the rare luxury of making the call at a standstill.

With a white towel, shorter than necessary (but that was the point entirely) wrapped around his waist, Fabian crooks the phone under his neck whilst trying to figure out the lesser of two evils – to drip on his cream rug or on his fine wood floor. He is going to have to do one or the other because he couldn’t possibly tell his directeur that now isn’t a convenient time.

The Tour de France is not just about cycling your way to Paris, but to the next season also. It’s where contracts are confirmed. I must behave on and off my bike, before and during the race.

‘Jules,’ Fabian says warmly, ‘ça va? I have just done a good ride. I have pasta boiling.’

Shit! I made it sound like he is inconveniencing me.

‘I wanted to talk to you before team dinner tonight,’ Jules continues. ‘About next year. About you and Système Vipère. How is your stereo?’

As head of this company, negotiation is my forte. Or one of my many. As directeur sportif, it is my business to know what makes my riders click.

Fabian hops lightly from rug to floorboard, grins at his stereo and grimaces at the two damp indentations of his feet that appear to be indelibly imprinted on his luxurious rug.

‘My stereo is great – I hardly ever have it off. Listen.’ Fabian holds the telephone receiver out into the centre of the room, presuming his directeur can hear Prince. Jules can’t but he holds his receiver patiently, checking the battery level and signal strength, until Fabian decides to return to his. ‘Did you hear?’ Fabian asks. ‘Système Vipère is my life – on the bike and off. At all times, I am a Viper Boy.’

That’s good – yeah! Jules will like that – a strong commitment that is far more than just a job for me.

‘If you like,’ Jules says, ‘you can have a new stereo. That is, if you stay with us next year.’

The stereo was tempting enough, but Fabian knows it is worthless without a salary to echo, in his mind anyway, his value for the team.

I’ll stay silent.

‘Plus, of course,’ Jules furthers with elaborate sincerity, Fabian’s unsophisticated business strategy making him smile, ‘a substantial increase in salary. How would it feel to be the highest paid rider in the peloton?’

How does it feel? Fabian pondered moments later, staring at the replaced handset, glowering at his footprints on wood, glaring at the marks still defiant on the rug. It feels fucking great. I feel like fucking. See, it has made me hard.

But the Tour de France starts in four days. Shouldn’t you save your energy? Celibacy is team policy. Jules is fairly firm on where he stands on sex.

Fairly firm – ha! From where I stand, I am downright hard. I know my body. In bed. On a bike. No problem.

‘Fabian, Fabian,’ Jules cooed triumphantly, checking his messages and finding four were left during the call to his key rider. Before responding to any of them, he phoned the team’s sponsors.

‘Bien,’ Jules told them, ‘no problem with Fabian – unless Zucca MV try to sabotage him with a hundred blow jobs.’

‘And Jesper Lomers?’ they demanded to know. ‘Has he signed?’

‘Jesper will not be a problem,’ Jules assured them.

It’s his bloody wife who will cause trouble, Jules hissed to himself as he listened to yet another message left during his call. All wives are bloody – I’ve had three, I should know. Maybe Jesper would function better with a mistress – I certainly do.

I can focus all my attention on the team, Jules mused, and yet have a woman, at my behest, focus all her attention on me. Perfect!

His phone rang. It was one of the team mechanics. Jules listened, said, ‘Spinergy wheels of course – imbécile,’ and hung up. The phone rang again. It was the French sports newspaper L’Equipe. ‘Système Vipère are supreme at the moment,’ Jules quoted with bravado, ‘Ducasse, Lomers and Velasquez – they will be beautiful to watch. On paper, it is the toughest Tour for a long time, but the Vipers’ strength will be like venom to all other riders. You can quote me.’ He hung up.

Jules tried Jesper Lomers. No reply.

But no reply is good – it means he is training. And no reply is better than Anya answering the phone. Irritating female – she sees Système Vipère as the ‘other woman’. Would Jesper be happy if he was not racing? Would he be a good husband then? She thinks it is she who makes him happy, fulfilled, loved. I know it is Système Vipère. Luckily, I don’t think Jesper gives the theory much thought at all. I’ll try him again. No reply. Good. Later.

The phone rang again. It was a young rider. ‘If you have diarrhoea,’ Jules said patiently, ‘what must you eat? That’s right, hard-boiled eggs, rice and live yoghurt. How much water did you take? That’s not enough. We’ll put you on electrolytes tonight.’ He hung up and laughed.

Directeur sportif? Call me père des coureurs – am I a trainer, a manager or papa?

‘That is why I am strict, a bastard,’ Jules muttered, temporarily changing his pace to a stroll. ‘I can shout at a rider in the morning, yell at him from the car during a race, yet by the evening, when he has finished, he is desperate for my embrace. I have to be a father figure to my racers for it is essential that they trust me and crave my approval through their excellence. Why else would they ride? Fabian only for money? Jesper only for his wife’s love? Get real.’

Jules marched purposefully across the place to the restaurant he had granted the accolade of hosting that year’s pre-Tour team dinner. In the town of Eustace St Pierre, it was an honour that all restaurants strove for each year. The proprietors wanted to pamper Jules with complimentary drinks, some fish soup, tarte tatin. Jules refused. He was there to check on the menu and arrange the seating plan. Busy. Too busy to eat or socialize, no time for pleasantries at all really.

The Tour de France is on Jules’s mind 365 days a year. And because of this, his popularity never suffers. The Tour defines a Frenchman’s calendar – for Jules Le Grand to be so unwaveringly committed to it sets him up as a hero amongst his countrymen. The Tour de France preoccupies Jules throughout the season, even when it is still months away. Paris–Nice, Tirreno–Adriatico, Catalan Week, Criterium International, Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the Dauphiné Libéré. Though each race, revered enough in its own right, is given focused dedication, Jules thinks of them all as but preparation for the great one. The Tour de France is always on the tip of his tongue, behind the sparkle in his eye, ever simmering in his mind. The Tour commands his every thought, awake or asleep. Strategy becomes all-consuming.

Directeur sportif? I am a brilliant tactician.

Tonight’s strategy was for no strategy to be discussed and yet the very purpose of the evening was utterly strategic – team bonding and last mouthfuls of haute cuisine before all vestiges of normal life were relinquished to the clutch and drive of the Tour, to pasta at every single meal, to conversation, dream, thought, breath, devoted exclusively to the race.

More than father to the riders, more than director of a small company whose location changes on almost a daily basis, more than diplomat, or supreme strategist – ultimately I am an army general. The Tour de France is not just about teams of riders going to war against each other; frequently the most severe battle for a rider is an individual one with his own self-belief. I must try Jesper again. That is why I must get to Jesper.

‘Hey!’ Fabian drawls when he arrives at the restaurant and sits himself down, ‘it’s our Super Sprinter, the Blond Bomb, the Rotterdam Rocket – you’re looking good!’

The compliment, laced with sarcasm, is directed at Jesper Lomers. The Dutchman regards Fabian with a smile and a shake of his head to conceal any hint of embarrassment. Fabian lifts a lock of Jesper’s hair. It is very blond, like straw, but soft, a little spiky here, charmingly floppy there.

‘That crazy magazine,’ Fabian remarks, referring to a recent adulatory article in Italian Vogue in which he and Jesper were featured, ‘they’ll be mourning when your hair is shorn within an inch of your scalp for the Tour. What was it that they wrote about your legs?’

Jesper waves his hand dismissively and busies himself tearing open a bread roll, buttering it well, yet not eating it.

This is good, Jules thinks, humour, laughter, the team is reacting well.

He answers on Jesper’s behalf. ‘The article said – team, listen up – Jesper Lomers has the most beautiful thighs in the peloton.’

The team fell about laughing.

Jesper shrugs. ‘They’re the tools of my trade, guys, the tools of my trade. I’m a good rider – not a sex symbol.’

‘Where’s the problem in being both,’ Fabian comments, knowing his own blend is consummate.

‘Anya would beg to differ, I’m sure,’ chips in a team member.

‘Anya wants to go back to Holland,’ Jesper says to everyone but looking steadily at Jules.

‘And we want the green jersey,’ Jules responds, holding the eye contact whilst aware and pleased that the restaurant saw fit to serve him first, ‘and we want you, Jesper, to win it for us again this year.’ He regards his rider, one of the most consistent he has ever known. ‘The maillot vert is yours. You can take it again, your riding warrants it.’ Jules knows he can keep Fabian – a little flattery, a lot of money. Jesper he is not so sure about and it unnerves him.

I’ve never known a rider who can win so spectacularly but with such good grace. Nor have I known a rider so keen to kiss his wife whenever she’s at the start or the finish. Increasingly, though, she’s been at neither. It unnerves Jesper, I know. She wants to go home. And that unnerves me. Jesper must stay. She has plans. But so do I.

‘That’s why no wives,’ Jules, musing to himself over the three he’d regrettably suffered, proclaims. Luckily, Jesper is preoccupied dunking his bread into the soup like a tea bag and appears not to have heard, let alone taken offence. A couple of the other riders, however, shoot blade-sharp looks at their directeur. When they are sure he isn’t looking.

‘I ride better if I sleep better and I sleep well when I share with my wife,’ says one under his breath.

‘Vraiment,’ agrees the other. ‘I need a bed-mate on the Tour, not a room-mate. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ his team-mate confirms. ‘So, are we rooming again, this Tour?’

‘I would think so,’ the other shrugs. ‘I’ve requested it.’

‘So have I.’

‘You nervous?’ his team-mate asks, despite knowing it is a question that will never be answered directly.

‘You?’

Clever but fairly standard answer.

‘No Weakness,’ the rider proclaims as if it is some mantra.

‘Précisément!’ The team-mates, soon to be room-mates in lieu of their female bed- and soul-mates, chink glasses and drink the red wine as if it is nectar.

‘Jules, where’s Carlos?’

‘A Spaniard riding for a French team is a coup enough,’ Fabian interjects, touching his nose as if it is out of joint. ‘Can we really expect him to turn up any earlier than the last minute, for something as trivial as a team meal?’

Before Jules can answer on Carlos’s behalf, the waiters arrive with miniature portions of sorbet which everyone samples but, being tomato and basil sorbet (of which, undoubtedly, Django McCabe would have been proud), no one much likes.

Jules raises his glass of Burgundy. ‘Here’s to the jerseys. And they are most definitely plural. The yellow. The green. The polka dot. Fabian. Jesper. Carlos. Here’s to Système Vipère. Salut.’

‘Vive le Tour,’ says Fabian, gulping wine and then tucking into duck.

‘Vive le Tour,’ says Jesper, thinking of Anya, wishing she were here and apprehensive about a certain coldness that will greet him at home that night.

Carlos Jesu Velasquez had no compunction at being absent from the team dinner in France.

‘I am to spend over three weeks in your country so that night I will dine with my wife,’ he had said to Jules previously by telephone.

He must feel special, Jules had reasoned to himself, so I will make it seem a gesture of my respect that he needn’t be present for the dinner. Realistically, he would not add much in the way of scintillating conversation to the evening. In truth, it is not important to the team or the Tour whether he eats escargots with us or paella with his family.

Carlos Jesu Velasquez is nicknamed the Pocket Rocket, like the energy bars of that name which the riders carry with them, on account of his small stature but enormous potency. Carlos Jesu is also known as the Cicada for he speaks little. He speaks no other language than Spanish but even amongst the Spanish riders he is frugal with communication. He uses his tongue and his lips to address the peloton, hissing or clicking at riders to move away, to work with him, to get out of his line. Carlos is also known as the Little Lion, for when the little climber wins at a mountain finish he lets out a guttural roar utterly inconsistent with his diminutive size and quiet mien. His wife, Marie-Christina, however, calls him Jesu with a throatily pronounced ‘h’. His three children call him Papa.

This evening, he walked his three children across the street to his mother-in-law’s. He then went back to his house, closed the door and made love to Marie-Christina. Then he sang to her. Tomorrow, he will travel to Eustace St Pierre.

‘Away on business,’ he whispers soothingly to his wife, ‘but home again soon.’

If I were to meet the inimitable Fabian Ducasse, what exactly would I say? Cat wondered, on her way in to the Guardian office to discuss their requirements and other practicalities.

He’s famed as a womanizer, so should I concede that he might be more willing to talk, to grant me an audience, if I wore a skirt? I’d have to think of a slant – not just ‘Are you going to win the Tour de France, Monsieur Ducasse?’ Perhaps I could ask him about sport and adulation – would he do it if he didn’t get it? I want to tap in to that arrogance to see if it’s a front or genuine. Not that I care which – it has the desired effect on me for one.

Is there time to learn a little Spanish? Mind you, just a grunt from Carlos Jesu Velasquez would suffice. And how about Jesper? Is there anything that comes close to hearing English spoken with a Dutch accent?

I can’t believe I’m soon to be there. In France. With them. What’ll I say?

RACHEL McEWEN AND TEAM ZUCCA MV

‘Jesus!’ cried Massimo Lipari, grasping his left leg and stroking his hamstring tenderly. ‘Holy Mother Mary – you are in one fuck of a bad mood.’

Rachel McEwen looked down on the rider’s prostrate nakedness, his nether regions covered only by a towel, nappy-style; his lanky, lithe frame the colour of mocha ice-cream, which enabled him to skip up mountains like a gazelle, his huge brown eyes regarding her dolefully, full lips puckered into a somewhat theatrical pout. She looked at her hands, bit her lip and apologized.

‘I’m sorry, Mass,’ she said, using her hands more gently and reminding herself that his thighs were flesh and not meat, ‘I have a lot on my mind.’

Shit, poor Vasily – I must have pummelled him to hell and back half an hour ago. And yet I never heard even a wince – just a ‘thank you, Rachel, thank you’. Vasily Jawlensky, the committed and consummate sportsman for whom, no doubt, ‘pain is gain’, a man frugal with words but abundant in his triumphs. And now Massimo, Italy’s heartthrob, the team’s key personality, one who loves to make drama out of the ordinary, let alone a crisis. Was I rough? Did I hurt you? Sorry.

Rachel shook her hands as if they were wet and, despite fingers glistening with massage oil, scrunched her wavy hair into a haphazard pile on top of her head. She returned her hands to the rider’s inner thigh and then moved her fingers as if she was playing the piano.

‘You know,’ said Massimo, ‘when they said we were to have a female soigneur – well, I almost went on strike, I could have left the team, to and fro.’

Rachel laughed. ‘You mean there and then, Mass. I thought you’d have been delighted, being the Casanova that you are.’

Massimo grimaced as Rachel worked at a particularly tight knot near his knee, as if she was making pastry. ‘Well, girl, if they had said we were going to have a, how do you say, female doll?’

‘Mascot?’ Rachel suggested.

‘Si! Mascot – that would have been different. But I never thought the words female and soigneur could really be – how do you say? Married?’

‘What you mean, you nasty man,’ Rachel retorted with no malice, ‘is that you didn’t think a female soigneur would be any good.’

‘Si,’ said Massimo, his eyes still closed, ‘paint and pasta.’

‘Chalk and cheese,’ Rachel corrected. ‘You thought that she’d be too weak to give a good massage.’

‘Si,’ Massimo smiled, looking at the ceiling of Rachel’s office at the team’s Cambiago headquarters while she continued to untie his muscles and unravel his ligaments.

‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’

‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.

‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’

‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.

‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’

‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.

‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’

‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’

Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are men, women and soigneurs. I mean, I know I’m a woman, but it is a fact of negligible interest to the cycling fraternity.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says out loud, allowing herself a fleeting glance in the mirror and thinking her hair really does need a cut. ‘This is my job. It’s appallingly paid but I love it.’

Rachel McEwen is twenty-seven years old and looks far too slight to be hoiking the heavy limbs of exhausted men and dispelling the lactic acid in their tense, brutalized muscles. But that is what she does and she does it very well.

‘But what the fuck is a signor?’ her best friends had enquired when she told them she was leaving Edinburgh for Italy to be one two years ago.

‘Soigneur,’ she stressed. ‘It means “one who looks after” – the riders’ needs are my responsibility.’

This was greeted, much to her consternation, by a rapid chorus of wink-wink, nudge-nudging.

‘I’ll be doing their laundry, for Christ’s sake!’ she retorted, twisting her hair around and around in frustration before pinning it to her head precariously. ‘And preparing their race food each day. And going on ahead to the hotels to check out the rooms and the menus. And giving massage and minor medical assistance. And counselling – many riders look on their soigneur as their confidante.’

‘Back track, back track,’ they had implored, ‘to the “massage” bit.’

‘Yes?’ Rachel had replied ingenuously. ‘It’ll be good to put it to some practical use after two years of training.’

‘They’ll devour you,’ one friend said. ‘You’re such a wee lass and all that friction against the chamois lining of their shorts must make ’em horny bastards.’

‘Numb, more like,’ Rachel had said, ‘and anyway, I can’t be doing with love at my age.’

I haven’t the time, Rachel reasons, remembering that conversation well and realizing with horror that she hasn’t been back to Scotland for almost a year. She prepares the table for Stefano Sassetta’s arrival and skims through the sheaves of lists for the Tour that she started compiling during the Giro.

Shit! Frangipane.

Is that an expletive?

No, I really do mean the cake. It is a fantastic energy burst for the boys and it keeps moist and fresh for ages. I’m in cahoots with a local baker – he has broken an age-old family custom to make the cake square just for Zucca MV, because it’s much more practical to cut and divide.

So, a soigneur is a masseuse and a patisserie expert?

And a rally driver too – watch me bomb along the Stage route to the feed station or the arrivée where often I have to rescue my riders from the media scrum.

It is my job to be the first person my rider sees on finishing a Stage.

‘Shit,’ says Rachel, running fingers still rather oily through her long-suffering locks, ‘I must check on disposable flannels. Stefano is due in ten minutes and I’m a little concerned about that shoulder of his.’

Stefano Sassetta, who should have been on Rachel’s massage table ten minutes ago, was parading around his apartment in his Zucca MV team strip.

‘God, this blue and yellow suits me,’ he commented to his current girlfriend. ‘If I had taken up Team Mapei’s offer, I wouldn’t look half as good. It was reason enough to stay with Zucca MV.’

While Stefano gazed at his opulent if vulgar kitchen extension, a gift from the team’s sponsors and designed by Stefano himself, his girlfriend could barely keep her eyes from the semicircle of stitching around the reinforced groin area. It was like a magnificent sunburst and she was hot for what was behind it.

‘You want to work up an appetite, baby?’ she said coyly, fingering the spaghetti straps of her negligible sundress. Everything about the man was big – his baritone voice, his legendary thighs, his hands, his nose; they all complemented the biggest treat of all, currently concealed but far from hidden behind his shorts.

‘I just did a good ride,’ Stefano countered as if his appetite were indeed her exclusive concern.

For Zucca MV’s Stefano Sassetta, Système Vipère’s Jesper Lomers was his nemesis. Jesper was undoubtedly a better rider technically; Stefano knew it and loathed the Dutchman for it; loathed, too, the way Jesper was always so courteous and affable towards him. Jesper might be the better rider but the crowds loved Stefano’s flamboyance. However, though the fans might adore Stefano, the peloton had more respect for Jesper.

Whereas Jesper regarded his physique merely as a by-product of his career, at this point in the season Stefano was increasingly obsessed with his own beauty. Specifically, his thighs. Measurements, dimensions and cross-comparisons with last year, and with the thighs in the peloton in general, had become a fixation. Stefano was almost more preoccupied with having his thighs praised over Jesper’s than he was with taking the green jersey off him. He thus presented his body to his girlfriend as if it were a statue. You can look but you cannot touch. He has told her to expect no sex until September.

Consequently, it is also around this time of year that a change of girlfriend is imminent. They leave him. It’s an occupational hazard. He would never ask them to stay. For Stefano, riding slowly is boring. It’s nice to have a change of strip.

‘Did you read that thing?’ Stefano asks Rachel who is trying to loosen his right shoulder.

‘God, you’re tight,’ Rachel murmurs.

‘Hey,’ Stefano jests, ‘that’s my line.’ Rachel does not react. ‘Did you?’ he repeats, his contrived nonchalance failing to mask his unease.

‘Did I what?’ Rachel asks, feeling something give high in his neck, and glancing at the flicker of subconscious relief across Stefano’s face.

‘Read that thing?’

‘What thing?’

Stefano, you’re such a dick. It’s the bloody Jesper issue, isn’t it?

‘That thing. About Lomers. In Vogue.’

‘Stef,’ Rachel chides in a very grave way, ‘would you give up? The look of a thigh is utterly superficial. It’s what they can do that’s the issue.’

She rubs his hard for emphasis.

He looks like a sulky schoolboy. And he won’t race well. OK, Stef, for the millionth time, I’ll say it again.

‘Don’t your women go wild for both the look and the feel of you?’ Rachel asks in a totally fresh way, despite it being an enquiry Stefano likes to hear on a weekly basis at least. Nevertheless, Stefano squints at Rachel as if she has just posed a really taxing question.

‘Who does the crowd love?’ she presses kindly and with convincing ingenuousness.

Stefano pulls a face as if assessing every member of the peloton. ‘Stefano Sassetta,’ he declares, as if it was a most considered answer.

‘How many Stages did Lomers win in the Giro?’ Rachel asks. Stefano holds up one finger.

‘And how many did you win?’ she furthers. He holds up three fingers and then starts laughing.

That’s better, thinks Rachel, laughing at him and not with him.

‘And how many are you going to win in the Tour?’ she pushes, taking his foot in her hand to work on.

‘It is not the Stages of the Tour,’ Stefano says, his eyes dark and glinting, ‘but the colour of the jersey. You know, I think green on your back completely alters the impression of the thigh. If they see me in green, they’ll think of my physique as supreme within the peloton. I want it to be written that Stefano Sassetta, this year’s winner of the green jersey, has the thighs of a Greek god.’

‘Och, you’re so full of crap, Sassetta,’ laughs Rachel, for whom it is impossible to look on Stefano’s thighs as anything other than pistons for which she is caretaker. ‘What was that saying you taught me?’

‘More shit than in the backside of a donkey.’

‘Aye, that’s you,’ Rachel laughs again. ‘Now turn over. I need to do your glutes. By the way, how are your haemorrhoids? I think that new cream is probably better – yes?’

‘Oh la la, chica chica la la. Le Tour, oh yeah, le Tour. Yeah. Yeah. Le Tour. La!’

Massimo Lipari, pleasantly rejuvenated from his session with Rachel, is singing in his apartment, gyrating his way from bathroom to bedroom, giving a good shimmy by the cupboard door and then delving around his quite extensive wardrobe. Never mind the imminence of the Tour de France, it is the team supper itself tonight that requires greatest application from Massimo. He repeats his song and sings it fortissimo.

If I were not a professional cyclist, I would be a pop star. He regards his handsome reflection and gives himself a wink. His cheekbones are as sharp as his eye reflexes when he’s descending mountains at 100 kilometres an hour. His smile is as dazzling as the way he can dance up the ascents of the most unforgiving climbs. He sings his pop song again. The tune is the one he recorded as the official song of the Giro D’Italia last year which made it into the top ten.

It was almost as thrilling as finishing third overall in the race itself Almost – but not quite. Cycling defines me. A cyclist could, conceivably, become a celebrity. But a pop star could not decide to become a pro racer.

Off his bike, Massimo lives as a star and loves it. He’s on adverts on television and billboards, he’s been in the hit parade, his face is on a particular brand of chocolate-hazelnut spread and his local bar is bedecked with Massimo memorabilia. And yet astride his bike, he is utterly focused, racing brilliantly and seemingly independent of crowd adulation. The transformation to superstar occurs the moment he crosses the finish line. He always wipes his mouth and zips up; there are thousands of cameras, press and TV, fans staring everywhere – he believes it his duty to delight them both in and out of racing conditions. He wants to take the King of the Mountains jersey this year, to make his hat trick.

He goes to the vast gilt mirror above the flamboyant paved fireplace that his sponsors built for him. He gazes at himself and nods.

‘I am Donna magazine’s “Sexiest Man on Two Wheels”,’ he remarks. ‘Nice! But if I can take the polka dot jersey for a third time – well! National hero comes home to party time!’

Looking like a healthy composite of mafioso, pop star and Milanese advertising executive, Massimo Lipari leaves his apartment for the team dinner. He could drive. He could take a cab. He could have taken up Rachel’s offer to taxi him there as she is doing for other members of the team. But Massimo decides to walk. He likes to hear the calls of ‘Ciao, Massimo!’ He likes to feel people looking, he likes to sense the recognition, he likes to imagine what they say to each other when he has passed by. He is a local hero, all the Zucca MV boys are, living in close proximity just north of Verona and in the shadow of the foothills of the Dolomites.

With his hair gelled and tweaked, his goatee beard clipped to perfection, his jet-black eyes hidden from view behind Oakley sunglasses despite it being dusk, Massimo Lipari cuts a dashing figure, slicing into the fantasies of the women he passes on his way to the restaurant with much the same force as when he slices through the pack on a mountain climb.

Rachel is wearing a skirt, not that anyone has noticed and not that she’s noticed that it’s gone unnoticed. It is pale blue linen, straight, and to the mid-calf. She has teamed it with a white linen shirt and white lace-up pumps. It suits her. Her hair is down but scooped away at the sides. She is wearing perfume but no make-up, her fresh complexion giving a radiance to her already pretty features.

It’s the last bloody time for over three weeks that I’ll be able to wear light colours and not smell of embrocation. The Tour de France, and the perils of being a soigneur, mean dark plain clothes are not just practical but a necessity. Anyway, I still haven’t had the chance to do my own laundry. Poor Paolo has had a very bad stomach which he is playing down because this will be his first Tour and he doesn’t want to miss it. However, his shorts have really taken the brunt. Terrible mess. It’s taken me most of the afternoon. Poor boy.

Rachel, you’re a saint.

Bollocks. I’m a soigneur. It’s my job.

She looks around the table at the team and realizes she is on tenterhooks on their behalf.

Look at you all, seemingly so relaxed. My God, when I think what’s in store for you.

And for you, Rachel. It’s your first Tour de France.

Me? Oh, I’ll be fine. The Tour, the Giro, the Vuelta – surely just the scenery is different. But the boys have the Col du Galibier, the Madeleine, L’Alpe D’Huez – not to mention the fucking Pyrenees beforehand. Shit, I must remember cashmere socks.

‘I must remember cashmere socks,’ Rachel all but shouts. The table falls silent, pieces of pizza halt half-way to mouths; spaghetti unravels itself from motionless forks.

‘Huh?’ says Massimo shooting glances to his team-mates.

‘In case it becomes cold, in case you develop sore throats. If Benylin is a banned substance, a cashmere sock worn round the neck at night surely is not.’

‘Rachel,’ said Stefano very seriously, stretching his arm across the table and laying his hand on her wrist for emphasis, ‘we finished work for the day. Shut the fuck up, relax, eat. Please.’

The team cheered and raised their glasses in support. Rachel twitched her lip and then raised her glass too.

‘Here’s to you lot,’ she said with immense feeling. ‘Have a good race.’

Rachel knows that she is to be one of only two female soigneurs on the Tour de France and the thought doesn’t worry her in the least. Cat has no idea that, in the salle de pressé of 1,000 journalists, she will be one of only twelve women.

If I were to meet Vasily Jawlensky, Cat muses, coming home from the Guardian office, what on earth would I say to him? Ought I to bow? Curtsey? In his presence, surely major genuflection is highly appropriate. I wish I could speak bloody Russian.

I can’t wait to meet Massimo Lipari, he always kisses everyone three times, regardless of their sex or relationship to him. Remember how last year, Phil Liggett from Channel 4 was given the Lipari smackers live on TV after Massimo won at L’Alpe D’Huez? Liggett looked lovestruck and told the viewers he’d never wash his face again. I’d like some Massimo kisses. But how would I go about getting them? What exactly would I ask him?

I’d love to set Stefano Sassetta off against the inimitable Mario Cipollini. They’re both the most extravagant, over-the-top personalities in the peloton. Stefano tall, dark and handsome; Cipo with blond highlights, a pony-tail and a great line in outrageous one-liners. There’s Stefano banging on about the aesthetic excellence of his thighs, and there’s Cipo saying if he wasn’t a cyclist he’d like to be a porn star. Italian stallions, both.

But.

I suppose it’s not so much what I’d say to them, but whether or not they’d talk to me.

Oh.

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