by Freya North
‘This is great!’ Mitch exclaimed, as if it were a display put on for his benefit. ‘Fucking awesome.’
Momentarily, the car was deeply ensconced within the peloton itself and Cat felt a rush of excitement and emotion. There was too much to see and absorb. It was a blur of colour within a capsule of pure energy. She wanted the directeur to slow down, the riders as well, so she could take stock thoroughly, preserve it all and commit it to memory. Every detail, every rider, every expression of effort, pain, exhaustion, focus. Then they were behind her and she was being driven onwards towards the breakaway. For a few seconds, she gazed backwards until the peloton had become a single bolt of colour before disappearing from sight. Her eyes were scouring ahead for the thirteen breakaway riders.
There they are!
Here they are! Tiny amidst the cars, the motorbikes, yet seemingly unaware of our presence. Move over, Viper and Zucca team cars, can’t we come through?
‘Seven minutes, Luca,’ the directeur said into the walkie-talkie. ‘6 k distance.’
‘’Kay,’ the breathless answer crackled back.
‘You OK?’ the directeur asked him.
‘Yeah,’ came the reply after a fuzzy delay.
‘Hunter too?’
‘Yeah,’ Luca said.
‘Will they do it, Cat?’ Mitch asked, not testing her but actively seeking her opinion as the directeur was obviously utterly absorbed with the driving.
Before she could reply, ‘Megapac, please’ came through over the radio, ‘US Megapac.’
The carload fell silent. The directeur, swerving the car in between the others, headed towards the thirteen riders themselves. Cat was speechless with anticipation and delight.
See the boys, tiny on their bikes from afar? Look, now we’re here; so strong and powerful. Their effort is so tangible. See the focus on their faces.
She gazed too at the neat bottoms clad in aesthetically panelled black lycra, the beautiful legs ever working; bronzed and glistening, the musculature long, lithe and delineated, calf muscles tapering like inverted teardrops, tendons taut, sculpted thighs exuding power, shoulders broad, tanned arms with wonderful definition. Breathtaking. Cat was holding hers.
‘Open your window, Cat,’ the directeur commanded her, ‘Luca needs something.’
Wow, just listen! We’re absolutely in the pack now. It’s incredible. The noise – men breathing, wheels whishing, someone spitting, another shouting. Tension is a taste, a smell, I can reach out and touch it. My senses are utterly seduced. What does he want me to do? I can hardly think straight. I want to touch.
‘Luca wants to hand his jacket in,’ the directeur told her, ‘take it from him. Pass him a power bar. Pass him two – one for Hunter as well.’
Luca! Luca? It’s me, it’s Cat. Gatto. The Babe McCabe. Hey!
See? He doesn’t clock me at all. I take his jacket. I pass him the food. I have touched his hand but I am invisible. And I am not offended. This is Luca Jones, doing his job. The focus, the commitment, the mastery. Jesus.
The break was not caught though the peloton were hot on their heels, swallowing up the intervening minutes and kilometres. Cat, in the Megapac team car, followed the boys to within 500 metres of the finish where the vehicles were directed off.
Ultimately she was glad not to have seen the finish live. She would not have been accountable for her behaviour in the salle de pressé had she done so.
‘Fen! It’s on, come on!’ Pip yelled, opening two packets of crisps in preparation. ‘Salt and Vinegar or Beef and Mustard?’
‘S.A.V.,’ whispered Fen, taking a seat on her settee next to her sister and passing her a bottle of Seize – a daily tradition since their return from France. They watched in informed silence and phoned Django during the adverts.
‘That’s Cat boyfriend’s young rider,’ Pip informed her uncle of Luca.
‘So is Hunter,’ Fen added.
‘Hunter is her boyfriend too?’ Django asked, a little disconcerted, wondering whether yet another of his nieces was hopelessly bigamous.
‘No!’ Pip laughed.
‘Same team,’ Fen explained.
‘Well,’ said Django, clearing his voice and taking a glug of gin and tonic, ‘you can’t blame me for asking – she may have taken a leaf out of your book, Fenella.’
Fenella bit her lip.
‘Fen still can’t make her mind up, Django,’ Pip informed him.
‘Can’t she palm one off on to you?’ Django reasoned very earnestly. ‘Am I going to meet this boyfriend doctor of Cat’s?’
‘Not unless you jet out to Colorado,’ Fen said glumly.
‘Quick! It’s on again!’ Pip exclaimed, ordering her uncle to phone them when the programme finished.
The Stage was fast and furious and in the 350 metre finishing straight, the unthinkable, the terrible, the desperately unfair happened.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Fen gasped.
‘Luca’s down.’
‘So’s Jesper.’
‘Sassetta’s won the Stage.’
‘That means he’s taken the green jersey.’
‘Jesper’s up.’
‘Luca isn’t.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’
Luca regained consciousness in the ambulance and was in absolute agony.
‘You’ve broken your collar bone. You have concussion,’ someone was telling him.
‘I’m fine,’ said Luca valiantly, ‘I need to get back on my bike.’
‘You need to get X-ray,’ the paramedic told him.
‘But my bike!’ Luca cried. He tried to sit up but searing pain prevented him. This could not be happening. He had to finish the Stage. There were less than 100 metres to go. He knew just how he was going to ride them. ‘Let me out!’ he yelled, the paramedic’s shrug of pity serving only to aggravate Luca’s emotional pain and physical frustration. ‘I have to finish the Stage – you don’t understand.’
‘Sure I understand,’ said the paramedic with typical Gallic defensiveness that his judgement should be so questioned, ‘you need to finish the Stage or you are out of the Tour de France.’
‘Exactly,’ Luca said croakily, ‘so fucking let me out – please.’
‘You are out of the Tour de France,’ the paramedic said excruciatingly slowly, a matter of fact, a subject closed, a dream denied, before giving Luca a shot of sedative.
The information filtered through on Radio Tour before Cat had left the team car which then turned on a sixpence and roared off, under police escort, to the hospital. Ben was already there. He walked briskly to converse with the directeur, hardly acknowledging Cat’s presence, indeed turning his back on her as the Megapac personnel discussed the situation.
‘The press are starting to turn up,’ Mitch said and hospital staff ushered them through corridors to a small ante room. The doctor came in, took Ben to one side and spoke in medical terms that transcended language barriers.
‘His collar bone will need pinning,’ Ben explained, ‘they want to do it tonight. I say we give them the go ahead – he’ll be ready for Spain and the Vuelta next month.’
‘Can we see him?’ Cat pleaded.
‘They need to operate now,’ Ben said, tension tangible in his voice, signing forms with the directeur.
‘But he’s all on his own,’ Cat said, her voice trailing off when the directeur regarded her with a certain exasperation.
‘You may see him for a moment,’ the hospital doctor decreed, putting out a hand to prevent Cat from advancing with Ben and Mitch.
‘No presse,’ the doctor said.
‘But I’m Gatto,’ Cat protested. Her distress was of no interest to the Megapac doctor, directeur and chairman who were led through to see Luca.
Ben appeared a few minutes later and put his hand to the back of Cat’s neck. ‘Luca’s devastated, he needs to rest. You can see him tomorrow.’
Ben rubbed the back of his own neck hard. There was a greyness to his skin. He looked exhausted. Cat did not protest though she felt exclu
ded, a little hurt and still desperate to see Luca, to comfort and commiserate. It was a little disconcerting to have Ben as a doctor foremost, rather than her beau. To see him work, suffer, his attention directed elsewhere than on her. Her status was vague.
I feel both flimsy and in the way. I’m not part of the Megapac team. I’m not here to represent the press. My thoughts are for Luca Jones – yet on the face of it, I’m not entitled to feel the same concern as Megapac – and my distress is disproportionate for a member of the press corps.
‘Pardon me, Cat,’ Mitch said, still wearing his mirror sunglasses but not the wide smile. ‘Ben, we need you to give us his condition in normal folk’s language, we have a press conference to prepare.’
‘Sure,’ said Ben.
‘You OK to make your own way back to the salle de pressé?’ the directeur asked Cat. She nodded. Ben and Mitch were too deep in conversation to notice her go.
Feeling a little forsaken for herself, and devastated for Luca, Cat returned to the salle de pressé, today a voluminous tarpaulin on the edge of a serene lake with a McDonalds obviously sent from heaven to be in such close proximity. Not that she was hungry. Neither Josh nor Alex were around. Not that she wanted company. Zucca MV, Système Vipère and US Megapac press conferences were happening one after the other. Not that she was interested.
Cat contemplated her workload.
I have to write 700 words on today’s Stage but I want to devote them entirely to one Luca Jones, noble soldier, brave boy, who fought valiantly for almost three weeks and is currently under the surgeon’s knife.
Cat, write like that and Taverner will come out to France to sack you in public.
Fuck off. Luca deserves an epitaph.
He’s not dead, he’s just broken a collar bone – he’ll be fine. He’ll be racing again. He’ll probably hoover up a Stage or two in the Vuelta.
His heart will be broken. He should have finished. He deserved Paris. It’s what he wanted. I’m going to phone Taverner.
And?
He said I have to write about Sassetta taking the green jersey after a stray and empty can of Coke interfered with the wheels of the sprinting riders, bringing down Luca and Jesper and two others. He says I have to write about the race being in Charolais country; he wants a little vignette about the great fluffy creamy bovines. And the local Burgundy. He wants me to wax lyrical about the colourful tiled tessellations on the roofs in Beaune. He can piss off.
So?
I’m going to phone Andy at Maillot.
And?
He said he’s already asked Josh to pen a piece because I wasn’t answering my mobile phone. That’s because I was at the hospital, I said. As pressé, he asked. I wasn’t there as presse, I was there as Luca’s friend. But did I get to speak to him, he asked. He was about to have a fucking operation, I retorted. No go, said Andy. Fuck him.
So?
I’m going to phone Jeremy Whittle, who I met this morning.
And?
He said to call him Jez. He wants a profile of Luca Jones’s Tour de France for next month’s Pedal Power magazine. Two thousand words. I’m going to rattle off my race report for Taverner and then get cracking for Whittle. It’s odd. I should be thrilled, I should be brimming with ambition. I don’t even know how much he’ll pay me. However, my main drive, my only motivation, is to honour the valorous Luca Jones. I’m going to write my heart out for that boy, just as he rode his heart out for all of us.
REPOS
Transfer by road and rail. Lautrec-Disneyland-Paris
Pain woke Luca, but more than that which affected his shoulder was the deep wrenching hurt in his heart coupled with a searing headache. He wanted his Mama. He wanted his bike. He would gladly die young, gruesomely even, if he could only be given the gift of reliving the day before, of doing yesterday again. The pain in his heart was caused by his desperate desire for Paris, to finish the Tour de France. In the top fifty. With a Stage win under his belt.
His headache was caused by fear that perhaps he’d blown his career; that Jules Le Grand would no longer want him for Système Vipère. He was a broken machine, one in need of repair, one that might perform somewhat crankily until all the moving parts were well oiled and functioning well once more. What perplexed him most was that, riding along with Hunter yesterday, he’d all but decided to stay with Megapac. This morning, the possibility that he had blown his chance to be a Viper Boy was devastating. Lying now in his hospital bed, he craved Le Grand’s advances, he needed the affirmation that, no matter how battered and broken his body, he was still a rider with great potential to be nurtured, a champion in the making.
But could he do it without those who had brought him this far? Could he ride without Hunter? Could he cope with a multi-day Stage Race without Didier as a room-mate? Could he function physically and mentally without his friend, his mentor, his physician Ben? Sleep soothed him for an hour but when the knock on the door awoke him, the pain in his head and in his heart had not abated, and that around his collar bone had intensified.
‘Hey soldier,’ said Ben, taking a seat next to Luca’s bedside, ‘did you sleep?’
Having mostly seen Luca in colourful lycra, out in the fresh air, riding in the sun, it was bizarre to see him now in a hospital gown, stationary in bed in a small little room. His golden curls were in disarray, his cherub-soft cheeks were invaded by bristles, the sparkle from his eyes had gone. His lips looked dry, but most worryingly, his voice was silent. Without the bike, his health, his vitality, this might not have been Luca at all, just someone who looked vaguely like him.
‘Are you hurting?’ Ben asked. Luca gazed at him, experienced enormous pain on trying to shrug and let a fat, solitary tear seep out of his eye to slither forlornly down his nose and evanesce over his lips in reply. Just as at L’Alpe D’Huez, Ben knew instinctively what medical attention he needed to dispense. He knew there was nothing he could administer to take away Luca’s pain, nothing he could say to make him feel remotely better, nothing he could do to expedite healing, the only option (and flimsy tonic though it was) was to sit beside his charge and just be there. He looked at Luca attentively when Luca regarded him. He puckered his brow in unison with Luca. He gazed out of the window when his rider decided to do so, and he sighed the same sigh. And felt the same pain.
When Cat turned up at the hospital an hour later just after breakfast, she found Luca’s door closed with the blind pulled down and entry barred. Cat of course respected this and perched herself on the window-sill, sniffing thoughtfully into the clutch of cornflowers she’d bought for him and wondering whether she’d written too much or said not enough in her card. Nurses bustled about in staunchly starched aprons and extraordinary wimples. Cat felt utterly flimsy, not merely in her insubstantial and rather creased sundress, but in her lack of ability to do anything constructive for Luca. Of course she’d tell him of her profile of him for Pedal Power but, just then, it seemed that the purpose of the piece was more for her own greater glory than it was a testimonial for Luca.
I’ve never been in hospital, she mused, remembering the numerous occasions she’d visited Pip when some acrobatic endeavour had ended in tears and a plaster cast.
Perhaps I have never needed looking after.
That people care about you is you being looked after.
I’m fine. Right as rain.
But you weren’t.
Well, I am now. Don’t dwell.
And here’s Ben, walking up the corridor, handsomely dishevelled in the face having not shaved, attractively crumpled in attire, wearing yesterday’s khakis and soft polo shirt.
‘Hey you,’ he says to Cat, going to the window-sill and kissing her bare knees.
‘Hullo,’ Cat says to him, placing her hand on his cheek and letting herself become lost in his eyes.
‘Seen the patient?’ Ben asks, glancing at his watch and noting that it’s half an hour since he left Luca in search of breakfast in lieu of last night’s supper.
‘No,’ s
ays Cat, nodding towards the door, ‘there’s someone in with him.’
‘A nurse?’ Ben asks.
‘A male voice,’ Cat defines, ‘been in there for ages.’
‘Probably the surgeon,’ Ben reasons, looking out of the window and feeling enormously tired and still hungry.
Luca’s door opened. No surgeon came out. No doctor either, nor a male nurse. The man who emerged from Luca’s bedside, who nodded most courteously at Ben and brandished a suave smile at Cat, was Jules Le Grand. In a cream silk suit, he swished away along the corridor not registering the dropped jaws and bulging eyes of the journaliste and doctor.
‘How nice that Jules Le Grand came to see how Luca’s doing,’ Cat said feebly, persuading neither herself nor Ben in the process. They entered Luca’s room and Ben swiped away his gobsmacked, brooding silence.
‘Honestly, fuckwit,’ he laughed jovially, ‘I leave your bedside for a piss-awful cup of coffee and I return to find you in cahoots with slithery King Viper!’
Luca said nothing but stared at Ben very measuredly. Cat couldn’t bear the loaded silence so she broke it.
‘Hullo, Luca,’ she said, all but tiptoeing to his bedside, ‘how are you? I brought you flowers and a silly card. I couldn’t sleep on your behalf and now I have a stiff neck in sympathy.’
‘The Babe,’ said Luca, a smile briefly lighting otherwise pain-dulled eyes, ‘you’re the Babe.’
Cat proffered the flowers for Luca to sniff and then she tore open the envelope and presented the front of the card for his perusal before unfolding it and holding it for him to read. It was the only card in the room.
‘And Le Grand brought you his best wishes too?’ Ben all but demanded.
‘No,’ said Luca soberly, ‘he made me an offer I’d be a madman to refuse.’
Ben went over to the window and hated himself for hating Luca for loving Jules Le Grand and his ostentatious offer to join his fucking brilliant pro cycling team. Cat took a seat by Luca and fixed him with an expression of enthusiasm and support.
‘Will you take it?’ she asked. ‘The offer, the opportunity?’