The McCabe Girls Complete Collection: Cat, Fen, Pip, Home Truths

Maybe it would just be better if I had no interest in cycling at all.

Cat experiences lurches of homesickness when the white cliffs start to shrink. Wafts of the panicky emotion gust through her more strongly than the buffets of sea air which, she kids herself, are the sole cause for her smarting eyes. Having enjoyed umpteen imaginary conversations with real or fictitious characters in the months leading up to this day of departure, Cat suddenly realizes she has no idea where she’ll find the confidence to approach such people in the flesh.

I haven’t the balls. Quite literally. They’ll take the piss, surely. Me – British and female – amongst all of them.

Furthermore, she’s had her hair cut yesterday and, though merely a variation on her common theme of shoulder length plus fringe, she doesn’t like it and feels self-conscious. The blasts from the sea breeze seem alternately to blow and suck her hair into configurations she cannot see but is convinced are queer and most certainly unattractive. She gazes at the white cliffs for as long as she knows she can really see them, trying very hard to ignore the fact that she now feels seasick as well as homesick, attempting to focus instead on France France Tour de Bloody France and all it is going to do for her sanity, her career and her future.

When does the English Channel become La Manche? Soon? Already?

Only a good few moments after Dover has unarguably disappeared can Cat finally turn her attention from inward and England, forward to France and, for the time being, her immediate surroundings. She turns her back on all she is leaving and faces the direction of travel, France, forwards, ever onwards. She glances around the deck, simultaneously keen for someone to recognize her yet desperate that no one will.

It’s strange. I suppose I presumed the entire ferry would be peopled by those going to the Tour – that we’d all be recognizable as a club of sorts and, of course, that there would be this wonderful familial feeling amongst everyone. And yet now I’m here, I have no idea who is who. Most of the passengers look like standard holidaymakers. But what specifically distinguishes cycling followers? I don’t even see any of the stalwart, anoraked, club cycling crowd that spend their Sundays traipsing the Trough of Bowland or struggling in Snowdonia. I mean, there’s a small group over there in tracksuit bottoms who look young and sporty – but they’re just as likely to have hired a villa in Brittany.

Though Cat half wants to be recognized – as a cycling aficionado of the non-anorak genus if not as the sports journalist she is hoping to become – the other half of her is quite content to be invisible. She ventures inside the ferry and queues for rubber sandwiches and plastic coffee, trying not to scan the tables too obviously for that elusive quiet spot, a hiding place. She spies one that might suffice and heads for it, looking at no one and trying to look nonchalant herself despite her bulky rucksack and wobbling tray.

‘The Prologue will definitely be Boardman.’

The sentence causes Cat to slow up instinctively.

Brilliant! I think it’ll be Boardman too!

‘I’d say Jawlensky,’ comments another voice.

No, I think your colleague and I have it with Boardman. And it’s Yav-lensky.

‘Yav,’ says the first voice.

‘Hey?’

‘Yavlensky.’

See!

‘I hardly think my pronunciation will make much difference to the outcome. Jawlensky is going to take the Prologue from Boardman, thus ending his reign.’

‘Bollocks.’

Yeah – bollocks!

Cat aborts her journey for a place squeezed in at a table neighbouring that of the two men discussing the Prologue Time Trial, which forms the inauguration of the Tour de France. She eavesdropped as subtly as she could, listening without looking.

‘Did you go to the Giro?’ the man au fait with Russian pronunciation asks the other.

‘Nah. Actually, I haven’t covered a race since the Tour of Britain.’

But I was there! Cat starts to herself with pleasure superseded by dread. Oh God, who are you though? I did the whole of the Tour of Britain for Cycling Weekly – up and down the UK for seven days. Did I meet you? Have you already seen me today and decided not to say hullo? Or seen me, perhaps, hut not recognized me at all because you didn’t notice me on the Prutour?

She regards her sandwich as if staring at food might nourish her nerve.

Do I dare turn around? Nonchalantly or with intent? Brazenly or with contrived innocence?

She scrunches her hands into fists, digging her nails reprimandingly into her palms.

Come on Cat, get a grip.

She grips herself hard.

Right, I’ll turn around, pretend I’m looking for a – for a clock – then I’ll shift my gaze and say, ‘Oh hi! Weren’t you on the Tour of Britain?’ Or maybe just regard him like I know I know him but can’t figure out where from, and then snap my fingers and say, ‘Tour of Britain?’ Or maybe—

‘Shall we go on deck?’

No! Wait! I haven’t turned round yet.

‘Yeah, sure – another beer?’

‘Yeah – start as we mean to carry on.’

‘You’re telling me! Come on, let’s split.’

Wait – I’m going to turn around right now and say, ‘Hi, I’m Cat McCabe, I’m reporting for the Guardian – I think I met you at the Tour of Britain.’ See – now!

But it is too late. The backs of two men are all Cat sees and she cannot deduce whether or not she has met one of them.

Tomorrow. I’ll find them tomorrow and I’ll introduce myself then. And if they ask when and how I arrived, I’ll feign surprise that ‘No way! I was on that ferry too!’

Oh God.

Me, myself and I for over three weeks in France.

Wednesday. Hôtel Splendide, Delaunay Le Beau. 2.30 p.m.

Rachel McEwen banged her clenched fist down on the concierge’s counter. Her treacle-coloured hair was loose and rather wild and her eyes were ablaze with fury and indignation.

‘Mademoiselle?’ said the clerk, with a superciliously raised eyebrow that made Rachel clench and reclench her fist as if she was about to aim a blow.

‘Look,’ Rachel said in a cold, courteous voice that served to accentuate her outrage more descriptively than any physical attack, ‘it is not my room I want changing, but room 46. I am not having one of my riders sleeping on a camp bed in a cramped room with crap curtains.’

‘Wait,’ said the clerk witheringly, dropping the one eyebrow and then twitching the other, along with a slight smirk, as he disappeared. He returned with his smirk and also a smartly dressed woman.

‘Good afternoon,’ said Rachel. ‘I was trying to explain to your colleague that I find it unacceptable that there is only one decent bed in room 46. I have two riders sharing and I will not have either one sleeping on a camp bed.’

‘Miss?’ the manageress, as she transpired to be, enquired.

‘Mc–Ewen,’ said Rachel briskly, breaking her name as she only ever did when she was deadly serious and very annoyed. ‘I am soigneur for Zucca MV.’

‘Zucca!’ the lady marvelled quietly, flushing slightly. ‘Miss McEwen, I am terribly sorry. I will of course rectify this problem immediately.’ She rustled through an index file, tapped officiously at a computer and gabbled at the clerk who scurried off, the smirk wiped from his face. She raised an eyebrow in a much more impressive way than her male junior. ‘Room 46 – Massimo Lipari? Ah, and Gianni Fugallo – a good domestique.’

Rachel smiled.