Beloved Pirate

For Writers in the Rafters this week, we've been asked to write about  bicycles (with the Grand Depart looming for Leeds).  And this, while not strictly what was requested, is what I came up with...

Oh, how I loved you.

Ten years, now, and I remember the day. You are my Kennedy assassination, my Twin Towers; I remember the day the news came of your death.

I was so alone in my grief. Alone, that is, until Georgia got to work to do her half-day.

Georgia is hard-core. Every year, she and her husband Mark ride a stage of Le Tour. I have photos of her on Ventoux, stoker on their tandem.  She brings her folding bike to work with her, cycling to and from the railway station.

I can barely manage two wheels; I have an amazing canary-bird yellow 1970s Pashley tricycle which I can just about cope with, and a pre-WWI Hercules: rod brakes, Sturmey Archer shift, dynamo lantern and original Brookes saddle. My husband built his own racer, and has destroyed his knees riding too hard.

So. Ten years ago, I looked at Georgia and she looked at me.

‘Pantani,’ I said, and she nodded and came to sit on the edge of my desk.

‘Isn’t it awful?’

‘Terrible.  He was an idiot, but he was a clean idiot.  Mostly. Sort of.’

‘It broke him, that. Everyone knew he was clean…ish…’

‘It wasn’t illegal, then, haematocrit.’

‘Shocking.’

‘So sad.’

Our line manager looked at us.  ‘Are you two okay?’

‘Just someone we liked is dead. A cyclist.  He was only 34.’

‘Oh, that’s young. What was it, drugs?’

‘Yes. Depression and cocaine overdose. Such a waste.’

She wandered off to line manage someone else, at least giving us a few minutes more to look at each other and shrug and sigh.

‘I haven’t had anyone to talk to about it,’ Georgia said. ‘Mark’s away.’

‘I know. It’s just so sad.’

‘He was great.  He was crazy.’

‘Remember 1998? He got the double…’

‘Yes. Le Tour and the Giro.’

‘He deserved the yellow jumper.’

‘True. But he looked so hot in the pink. Remember him and Armstrong, eyeball to eyeball?’

‘And Pantani took him and Armstrong claimed after to have gifted him it?’ She grinned.

‘Never believed that one.’  I grinned back. ‘It’s such a loss.’

It still is such a loss, beloved pirate. The shaven head, the bandana, the earrings, the swagger… you earned the nickname and lived up to it. Il Pirata.  You were far too young and much too precious to lose, but, still, we lost you, and, even now, I watch the great races and I miss you.

And now Le Tour is coming to Leeds.  You wouldn’t still have been racing, not now; you’d have been 44 by now, just a little long in the tooth.  But I bet you’d have been watching, as I will be watching and as Georgia will be watching and, just maybe, I would have thought of us all watching the same thing together, all focussed on the same great event.

Maybe, when I go to watch the Grand Depart, I’ll wear pink.  And maybe I’ll take a bandana, beloved pirate.  And I will certainly think of you, dancing the mountains away.

Notes: The winner of the Giro wears a pink jersey.