CAT McCABE AND THE TOUR DE FRANCE

      ‘I know that your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Django McCabe reasoned with his niece, ‘but you chasing through France after a bunch of boys on bikes – well, isn’t that taking the family tradition to new extremes?’

      Cat McCabe, sunbathing, eyes closed, in her uncle’s Derbyshire garden, smiled.

       It feels funny smiling with closed eyes; like you can’t really do both.

      So she opened her eyes, stretched leisurely, sat up cross-legged, and picked blades of grass from her body, fingering the satisfying striations they had left on her skin.

      ‘Lashings of lycra!’ her elder sister Fen offered from her position under the pear tree.

      ‘Oily limbs a-plenty,’ connived her eldest sister Pip, suddenly cartwheeling into view.

      Cat tried to look indignant but then grinned. ‘The Tour de France is the world’s most gruelling sporting event,’ she said defensively, hands on hips, to her audience. ‘It demands that its participants cycle 4,000 k in three weeks. At full speed. Up and over mountains most normal folk ski down. Day after day after day.’

      ‘And?’ said Django, rubbing his knees, bemoaning that the sun wasn’t doing for his arthritis what it did last year.

      ‘And?’ said Fen, an art historian who was much more turned on by bronze or marble renditions of Adonis than their pedal-turning doppelgangers her sister seemed so to admire.

      ‘And?’ said Pip courteously, more interested in perfecting her flikflaks across the lawn for her new act.

      Cat McCabe regarded them sternly.

      ‘A Tour de France cyclist can have a lung capacity of around eight litres, a heart that can beat almost 200 times a minute at full pelt and then rest at a rate at which most people ought to be dead. They can climb five mountains in a row, descending them at up to 100 k per hour.’

      ‘Wow,’ said Fen with sisterly sarcasm, ‘I bet they’re really interesting people.’

      ‘Greg LeMond,’ countered Cat, ‘won the Tour de France in 1989 by eight seconds on the final day.’

      ‘Bully for him,’ Pip laughed, doing a handstand and wanting to practise her routine right the way through.

      ‘And that was two years after coming back from the brink of death when he was accidentally shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident.’

       Now you’re impressed!

      Fen nodded and looked impressed.

      Pip executed a single-handed cartwheel and said, ‘Mister LeMond, I salute you.’

      Django said, ‘Bet the bugger’s American.’

      Cat confirmed that indeed he was.

      ‘In what other sport would you have participants called Eros? Or Bo? Or teams called BigMat or OilMe or Chicky World?’

      ‘Topless darts?’ Pip proposed.

      ‘They can also pee whilst freewheeling,’ Cat slipped in before anyone could change the subject.

      ‘In their shorts?’ Pip asked, quite flabbergasted.

      ‘Nope,’ Cat replied in a most matter-of-fact way. ‘They just whip it out, twist their pelvis, and pee as they go.’

      ‘So,’ said Django, ‘you’re off to France to experience a great sporting spectacle performed by superhuman athletes with great bike skills but no sense of urinary decorum?’

      ‘Partly,’ said Cat with dignity, ‘and because hopefully there’ll be a job at the end of it.’

      Fen raised her eyebrow.

      Pip regarded her youngest sister sternly.

      Well aware that her sisters continued to stare at her, Cat looked out over Darley Dale and wished she had her mountain bike with her.

      ‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped whilst laughing and covering her face, ‘I’m not just pursuing the peloton because there’s a job at the end of it if my freelance work is good enough.’

       I wish I had my bike.