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I’m scared I won’t get home. These first six days I’ve been working my arse off. I’m in the best condition of my life, and I’ve never been so tired. Yesterday we saw the Pyrenees
in the distance. I can’t think about them, I won’t think about them. Each day it’s five, six, seven hours in the saddle, then eat, then fall asleep, then team meeting then another seven, eight, nine hours in the saddle. In this heat. And after the Pyrenees, the Alps. I’ll have to see the soigneur to get up some of those hills, I know that. He’ll give me something. He’d better.

It’s not like when I was starting. Then everyone had his little briefcase, like going to the office. Full of goodies. Tried this? Had this one? Here’s something you need to take a bit earlier, and so on. Everyone needing a
whoosh
at the same time. You only get about three hours on amphets, so you’d need to take them before the big hills started. It was a good giggle, everyone taking them at the same time, then all these bits of silver paper thrown away like milk-bottle tops or something, and all at once you could feel the pace pick up, and everyone was laughing and hollering and
whoosh
we all went up the hill. It’s not like that now. Not so many laughs. It’s get me some water, take this message, give me your wheel, lead me out now. I thought the first few days would be easy, they might even let me go to the front if I felt good. But I’ve felt knackered since the Prologue, that’s the truth.

We’re pedalling across this flat plain for bloody hours, just staring at them. I’ve never seen mountains that high. I’m scared. It’s downhill then uphill, isn’t it? That’s the truth, that’s how it goes. Downhill, then uphill. I’m scared I won’t get home.

I don’t usually get back from the club till three, so by the time I’m awake he’s already in the saddle. It’s so frustrating,
I turn on the television but most of the jerseys look alike to me and in six days I don’t think I’ve had a sight of him. Sometimes I’m almost sure I’ve spotted him and then the television cuts to a helicopter-shot and all you see is this great big snake of riders going through a village. And by the time his day’s over, mine’s already started. Andy is not the world’s greatest postcard-writer either. I buy
L’Equipe
every day and read where he’s been and what’s ahead and run my finger down the classification lists for his name. He’s 152nd at the moment out of 178.

Andy’s inclined to bang on about how tough riding a bike is. I tell him I’m probably as fit as he is. Betty and I do six nights out of seven, thirteen shows a week. He has
steak and a salad at seven says Sean
and is in bed by nine, so by the time he’s tucked up I’ve got two shows to do. Andy says riding a bike is all about character, as if other things weren’t as well. Monsieur Thalabert says he never chooses any girl without a personality and it’s true. We’re all personalities in our different ways. When I want to needle Andy, I tell him anyone can ride a bike. Meaning you don’t have to be a perfect 34 up top and the rest in proportion. You don’t have to be five foot seven to the nearest centimetre. Neither do you have a rule saying you can’t change your appearance in any way without the management’s permission.

There are a lot of rules, but they’re for our own protection. You aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, you aren’t allowed to meet any men within two hundred metres of the club, you have to stay the same weight, you have to turn up on time, you get your holidays when they tell you, and so on. That’s why they like English girls. We’ve got good discipline as well as being the right shape. Of course, anyone caught with drugs gets sent straight home.

Sometimes I think it’s strange when I look back. The girls are all very supportive, it’s like one big family, and I think of the club as my home. But I ran away from home because my mum took my wages and gave me pocket-money while my dad laid down all these rules about how late I could stay out, how short my skirt could be and what sort of boys I could meet when and where. Now Monsieur Thalabert puts our money into a savings scheme and protects us from the wrong sort of men, while Madame Yvonne fusses all over us like a mother hen. Chreesteen, not that skirt. Chreesteen, be careful of that boy. And so on. But I don’t mind a bit. I suppose it’s the difference between the home you grow up in and the home you choose.

Some people wonder how you can take your clothes off in public. Well, I’m not ashamed of what nature’s given me. And it’s not exactly taking your clothes off when they’re mostly off to begin with. As Betty puts it, everything’s always covered with something, even if it’s only nail-varnish. Everything’s covered with something. You probably see as much of Andy when he’s on his bike as you do of me when I’m on stage. My nan came over without telling Mum and Dad. She really enjoyed the show. She said it was tasteful, and she was proud of me.

This rider, it was a few years ago, he was going to be tested that day. It’s meant to be random but, well, it wasn’t like it is now, come in here and stick your prodder in a test-tube while a man in a white coat watches you do it. You could sometimes find out before, that morning anyway, and so you knew you’d have to be a bit more careful what sweeties
you took. Anyway, this rider knows he’s going to be tested at the end of the day and he’s shitting himself. He’s been overdoing it a bit lately, fellow with the briefcase been calling round a lot. So this is what he does. He tells his girlfriend to wait beside the road at a certain point, somewhere in the woods where there aren’t too many people around. And then, as the peloton arrives, he says he’s dropping back, stopping for a piss or something, maybe he said he’d spotted his girl and was going to give her a kiss. Anyway, he stops, and he’s asked her to have a sample ready for him, you know, one of hers, in a placcy bag or something, so she does, and he gives her a kiss and slips it down his jersey. So at the end of the day they tell him to give a sample, and he takes the tube and goes into the toilet and comes back and hands it over, easy as pie. Next morning he’s called back by the doctors and he’s really surprised because he knows he must have tested clean. He can’t think what to expect. And you know what they say to him? ‘François,’ or whatever his name is, ‘François, the good news is you’re clean. The bad news is you’re pregnant.’

Another of Andy’s stories is about Linda and Sean Kelly waiting for Stephen Roche to take a dope test. This was during the 1984 Amstel Gold Classic. In Meersten. That’s in Holland. You see, I know all the details by now. So while they were waiting, Linda was sitting on their car, and when she got up she left a mark where her hand had been. Sean Kelly, according to Andy, is a very particular man. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away the mark. Didn’t say a word, just wiped away the mark. Linda said something to him like, I can see what your priorities are,
first the car, then the bike and then the wife. Sean Kelly looks at her, completely serious, and do you know what he says? He says, ‘The bike comes first.’

We get on well enough. The worst row we had was early on. I’d been looking in the French papers for his name and when I found it I saw they called him
un domestique
. That’s French for a servant. And since he’d been coming on a bit macho about how the French really respected British riders because they were so tough, I said, so you’re just a servant then? He said it was only his second year on the team so of course he had to fetch other people’s water-bottles and pass messages and give up a wheel or sometimes his whole bike if someone more important needed it, for instance if they had a puncture. He said he was part of a team, one for all and all for one. I thought he was being a bit pompous, so instead of biting my tongue I said it sounded more like all for one and not much one for all. He said what the eff did I know, except that I should because I was just the same when I danced, one of a team, and I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking anyone had come to see me. I remember exactly what he said next. He said I was just a tiny bit of topping on a pizza and I should remember that next time I was waggling my fanny, only he didn’t say fanny. And how we were two of a kind. Only he didn’t say it nicely, as if we were well matched, two against the world, like it had been when we started out. It was more as if I wasn’t much better than a mess on the pavement and he wasn’t much better either. Everything just went wrong in seconds. Do you know that feeling? It always makes me think of the seagulls. They never turned round and went back. He waved his arms at them and swore but they took no notice. They followed us here, all the way.

You can imagine how miserable I felt. He was still angry but after a bit we went to bed and … well, he didn’t have a bike race in the immediate future. Except that it never quite works, like that, does it? There’s always a bit of you thinking, I know why we’re doing it, and is it the same for you. Afterwards he said, you never know when you’re going to lose your back wheel, do you? You just feel it slide and then you wait for the road to rip the skin from your body. He didn’t just mean me. He meant everything.

When Sean Kelly and Linda got married, guess what his mates did? You know how, outside the church, if it’s a soldier or something gets married, they all hold their swords over their heads as the couple comes out? Well Sean Kelly’s mates held up a couple of racing-bikes to make an arch, then he and Linda walked out beneath it. Don’t you like that?

The priest who married them gave this speech, he said marriage was like the Tour de France, how it went over different sorts of terrain, and different roads, and how sometimes the going was easy and sometimes it was difficult, and so on and all that sort of thing. And Sean Kelly gets up and this is what he says. ‘One thing about Father Butler’s speech. I don’t think marriage and the Tour de France are exactly the same. If things are going bad in a bike race, you can simply climb off.’

Except that’s not easy either. We get a rest day before the Pyrenees. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Everyone’s scared of the high mountains. You know what the riders say about the mountains: they strip you and leave you naked, that’s what they say. The climbing, the thin air, the crazy
descents. Those birds in the air, hovering. Big birds, the sort that eat rabbits and stuff. You just have to remember everyone else is scared. And you never get used to it, that’s what they say. Have you heard of Alpe d’Huez? That’s in the Alps. There was one top rider who was shit-scared of it, so one year he took his training partner and went there for his holidays. They climbed it twenty times until he lost his fear of it. Twenty times. Next year, when the Tour came to Alpe d’Huez, he wasn’t frightened. That was a mistake. The mountain blew him away.