Cat

‘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.’