Cat, write like that and Taverner will come out to France to sack you in public.

Fuck off. Luca deserves an epitaph.

He’s not dead, he’s just broken a collar bone – he’ll be fine. He’ll be racing again. He’ll probably hoover up a Stage or two in the Vuelta.

His heart will be broken. He should have finished. He deserved Paris. It’s what he wanted. I’m going to phone Taverner.

And?

He said I have to write about Sassetta taking the green jersey after a stray and empty can of Coke interfered with the wheels of the sprinting riders, bringing down Luca and Jesper and two others. He says I have to write about the race being in Charolais country; he wants a little vignette about the great fluffy creamy bovines. And the local Burgundy. He wants me to wax lyrical about the colourful tiled tessellations on the roofs in Beaune. He can piss off.

So?

I’m going to phone Andy at Maillot.

And?

He said he’s already asked Josh to pen a piece because I wasn’t answering my mobile phone. That’s because I was at the hospital, I said. As pressé, he asked. I wasn’t there as presse, I was there as Luca’s friend. But did I get to speak to him, he asked. He was about to have a fucking operation, I retorted. No go, said Andy. Fuck him.

So?

I’m going to phone Jeremy Whittle, who I met this morning.

And?

He said to call him Jez. He wants a profile of Luca Jones’s Tour de France for next month’s Pedal Power magazine. Two thousand words. I’m going to rattle off my race report for Taverner and then get cracking for Whittle. It’s odd. I should be thrilled, I should be brimming with ambition. I don’t even know how much he’ll pay me. However, my main drive, my only motivation, is to honour the valorous Luca Jones. I’m going to write my heart out for that boy, just as he rode his heart out for all of us.

REPOS
Transfer by road and rail. Lautrec-Disneyland-Paris

Pain woke Luca, but more than that which affected his shoulder was the deep wrenching hurt in his heart coupled with a searing headache. He wanted his Mama. He wanted his bike. He would gladly die young, gruesomely even, if he could only be given the gift of reliving the day before, of doing yesterday again. The pain in his heart was caused by his desperate desire for Paris, to finish the Tour de France. In the top fifty. With a Stage win under his belt.

His headache was caused by fear that perhaps he’d blown his career; that Jules Le Grand would no longer want him for Système Vipère. He was a broken machine, one in need of repair, one that might perform somewhat crankily until all the moving parts were well oiled and functioning well once more. What perplexed him most was that, riding along with Hunter yesterday, he’d all but decided to stay with Megapac. This morning, the possibility that he had blown his chance to be a Viper Boy was devastating. Lying now in his hospital bed, he craved Le Grand’s advances, he needed the affirmation that, no matter how battered and broken his body, he was still a rider with great potential to be nurtured, a champion in the making.