Leaving Agen’s listless, jerry-built skyline in my dusty wake, I headed west across the rivers and motorways and into a slightly scorched landscape that bore little relation to the damp, tossed-salad lushness I’d been accustomed to. Yesterday the fields had been lined with tentative seedlings; today it was all wizened-looking crops ready for harvest, the rippled air thick with the smell of onions and dried slurry.
It was a Sunday, and for the first time I found myself moving among big groups of club cyclists, though not in anger. That morning offered the first suggestions that the malaise blighting French cycling may be traced to the neglect of competitive training in favour of poncing about in new-season jerseys affecting a look of extravagant ennui. Much has been made of the ability of top riders to shield their pain and fatigue beneath poker faces (and wraparound shades); the club-class poseurs had borrowed the expression (and the shades) while cutting out the irksome physical labour it was intended to conceal. And they were so snotty: having sneeringly assessed my outmoded jersey in a way that made me feel I’d turned up at a school disco wearing my aunt’s gardening smock, they turned their heads with a dismissive tut.
I’d tried the Tour de France press office again that morning, and after an exchange of sighs and, no doubt, beastly gurns and hand-over-mouthpiece imprecations I had extruded the reluctant concession that the complete and precise itinerary would be made available to tiresome foreign irrelevances in two days’ time. Looking again at the procycling map, I saw that the stage from Agen to Dax shifted west across France in a series of down-left steps; transposing these on to the Michelin directed me towards an enormous vacant slab of green, nothing but marshes, forested hunting reserves and firing ranges. As well as being wonderfully flat, this provisional route had the additional benefit of avoiding the nearby town of Condom, where I would be certain to encounter the sorriest sort of sniggering Britons.
You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll definitely be in Paris afore ye, I thought as the poppies and abandoned hotels petered out and the D665 plumb-lined through the parallel pines. Breathing in hot Badedas vapour, and trying not to notice that the wind was turning to face me, I ground on, bored as Belgium. Increasingly abstract speculations wandered into my mind. How long would it take me to cut down one of those pines with a screwdriver? Would I kill that blackbird and eat it raw for £20,000? A deer leapt out in front of a deer-warning sign, somehow arranging its spindly limbs into a precise replication of the complicated prance depicted, and for some considerable time I found myself internally debating how it was that these animals managed to survive for even twenty-four hours without snapping at least one of their silly legs off.
The forest thinned, but not the sense of isolation. I didn’t know whether the Tour would pass this way, but if it did it was going to be too late for most of the towns. A tree grew from a church roof, a Monsieur Hulot Renault Dauphine crouched in a state of advanced decomposition on a forecourt, waiting for a fill-up that the oxidised-skeleton pumps weren’t about to deliver. In some villages, two-thirds of the houses were roofless wrecks. Even the cartographers had given up: Bousses was down as Boussé, gradient chevrons and scenic-route green borders were bandied about at random.
The road began to blend seamlessly into the undergrowth, its surface defiled with horrid, scabrous pockmarks that were uncomfortable to both arse and eye. ‘Chaussée déformée’ warned the road signs superfluously. The French were good at this. If they spent even 2 per cent of their budget for warning you about carriageway deterioration on actually doing something about it, France would have the best roads in Europe. And it wasn’t just the infuriating frequency with which they stuck up the triangled exclamation marks, it was the wilful obscurities they enamelled beneath them. The bandes rugueuses and accotements dénivellés, the affaissements and aspersions – all spawned more fears than they laid to rest. Even the few I managed to translate conjured improbable scenarios, the ‘impractical surface’ that suggested whimsical experimentation with brass or feathers, the dark conspiracies implied by ‘holes in formation’.
I stayed in a town called Mont-de-Marsan. It wasn’t very nice. I ate chips in the street. I found a room in a big hotel with long corridors and no people and a fat man on the front desk who licked his lips a lot and wrote my name in a big empty book. There were no shops but lots of bars with men who stared when you walked past, and lots more men standing on bridges over big rivers looking like they wanted to jump in. I got a bit scared and went back to my hotel. In the middle of the night I woke up and realised I was in Room 101 and couldn’t get back to sleep.