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

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.