La Vie Claire

Over Bramble Bridge, through the Place Of Fallen Leaves to Lawrence Tower. Along the ridge of Great Haldon and then, finally, down, down, dropping like a stone to Dawlish and the coast. I have not ridden this way for so long. Not since the very early Spring at least, when the hedgerows were still bare, their tendrils of white twisting on each other at the roadside and mocking me as I struggled up the narrow lanes with legs full of lead. Well, some things never change, and today my legs still feel as though they are made of something much less than muscle and bone. In fact they feel as though they belong to a different person, as though someone else were on the bicycle and I am floating above, watching from the clouds. Or, conversely, it is almost like I am riding underwater. All sounds are muffled and distant and it is all I can do to keep my focus on staying upright and on the road. Strangely, however, I do not feel physically tired. My legs tap out a good rhythm and the computer reads a steady 31kph. Okay, so that might not sound so fast compared with a lot of people, but like Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations. And I know mine.

Maybe my body is just not ready for riding like this again. It’s been two months, after all, and I have lost a lot of weight in that time. Too much, perhaps. Certainly enough to be able to wear this old La Vie Claire jersey again. I don’t even remember the last time it fitted me. Perhaps that summer, some fifteen years ago, when I cycled over the mountain tracks of Cyprus in the suffocating heat of high summer. That day I lost a bottle of water on the downhill from the gorge and then had to ride home with only one half-full bidon. In the midday sun. In August. Over the highest point on the coastal road, up a dirt track and with a tail wind that was just strong enough to make it feel like it was taking the air away from my lungs. I wanted to climb off and die on that mountain, wanted to lie down and join the corpse of the donkey that festered in the field, covered in swarms of black flies. But what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, isn’t that what they say? Well how would they know? Did the people who say that ever die?

Karin used to ask me how she could lose weight. I said I didn’t really know, but I had a plan. We called it my Coffee Diet. Basically it meant drink as much coffee as you can handle, and don’t eat for days. I got pretty good at it. I got pretty good at dealing with the effects too. It’s not so hard really. It’s just like riding up that mountain. You just pull on blinkers and focus only on the piece of track immediately ahead. That’s all that exists in that moment. The next twenty yards, or the next twenty minutes. Worry about the rest when it comes. It’s not so difficult when you get your head around that idea. Suffer and see. Better watch your heads. A true story…

Then one day Julie told me to stop being so stupid. She always did have wisdom beyond her years. I thought I was meant to be the one with all the experience, but that was just crap of course. She said, very simply, “don’t mess with eating disorders. I’ve been there, done that. Had the therapy. It isn’t worth it. Trust me.” And I did. I always trusted Julie though I am not sure why. Maybe it was because she was a thousand miles away, in more ways than one.

Still, at the very least the Coffee Diet let me fit into this cycling jersey again. And even if I do not recall exactly when I last wore it, I do remember the day I bought it. It was the summer of 1984. Mid July, with Le Tour De France in full swing, and me trying to follow it through the pages of L’Equipe. It was a blisteringly hot Parisian afternoon and we were seeking refuge in the air-conditioned cool of a shopping mall out at La Defense. I have a photo from that day of Katrina and Debbie sitting on the roof; brilliant, blinding sunshine reflected off the windows of the IBM tower in the background. It felt like we were living inside an Internationalist daydream.

I loved everything that was remotely modernist in those days. I had an obsession with the De Stijl group and had already made a pilgrimage to the Reitveld House in Utrecht that Spring. It was obvious, therefore, that I needed to own that La Vie Claire jersey. A Mondrian painting as a cycling jersey. How could something be that cool?

It cost almost all of my holiday money. I scraped and scrounged around for the next week, but it was worth it. I guess I stopped eating then too, to save money, and I had just discovered the joys of coffee, so maybe that’s the root of everything. Maybe Paris is to blame for so much. But really, how could you not want to drink strong black coffee when you’d seen those stylish bodies sipping espresso on the sidewalk cafés, their dark sunglasses hiding intentions so perfectly? I always was so easily seduced by images.

And then, in Normandy, on the way home, we discovered that one beer and a handful of pills could give a tremendous head rush, and the pills were cheaper than the beer so that saved money too. Four of us walked along the beach arm in arm that night, singing “hey, hey, we’re The Monkees…” though if you asked me to name any of the other three I could not tell you. Perhaps Debbie was there, perhaps not. Debbie, who sat beside me on the coach and who rested her head on my shoulder, our fingers gently entwined in perfect silence for hours. We smiled at each other when we parted in the school car park, and did not say a word. I never saw her again. But that was the same week Chris rode her bike down our lane for the first time, so what did any of it really count for in the end?

Still, it’s strange the things that creep into your head as the road rolls beneath you, tubulars humming softly on the warm tarmac.

Someone used that line to start a book once. I think it was in the summer when the world stopped turning on the spiral of history, the summer we spent waiting for everything to begin again...

And now, as the road drifts up from Dawlish, around the hairpin and away towards the sea, I remember that somewhere there is a photo of me in this jersey. I’m sitting on the sofa in Chris’s house. My hair is long and bleached yellow from the sun which is shining through the window behind me, making everything glow and difficult to make out. I’m looking quizzically at a cup of tea, as though contemplating the very essence of the world. I was probably just wondering why Chris put up with a guy with shaved legs turning up at her house every Tuesday evening. Maybe she was just as lonely as I was. We never consider those things when we are that age though. Selfishness is something we do not have to learn as teenagers; it is the natural state of being and if we are not careful it can cast a dreadful shadow on the rest of our lives.

Habits are hard to break, after all.