Rachel shook her hands as if they were wet and, despite fingers glistening with massage oil, scrunched her wavy hair into a haphazard pile on top of her head. She returned her hands to the rider’s inner thigh and then moved her fingers as if she was playing the piano.
‘You know,’ said Massimo, ‘when they said we were to have a female soigneur – well, I almost went on strike, I could have left the team, to and fro.’
Rachel laughed. ‘You mean there and then, Mass. I thought you’d have been delighted, being the Casanova that you are.’
Massimo grimaced as Rachel worked at a particularly tight knot near his knee, as if she was making pastry. ‘Well, girl, if they had said we were going to have a, how do you say, female doll?’
‘Mascot?’ Rachel suggested.
‘Si! Mascot – that would have been different. But I never thought the words female and soigneur could really be – how do you say? Married?’
‘What you mean, you nasty man,’ Rachel retorted with no malice, ‘is that you didn’t think a female soigneur would be any good.’
‘Si,’ said Massimo, his eyes still closed, ‘paint and pasta.’
‘Chalk and cheese,’ Rachel corrected. ‘You thought that she’d be too weak to give a good massage.’
‘Si,’ Massimo smiled, looking at the ceiling of Rachel’s office at the team’s Cambiago headquarters while she continued to untie his muscles and unravel his ligaments.
‘That she’d worry more about her fingernails than your welfare?’
‘Si!’ Massimo laughed, remembering how Rachel had stayed up with him during the Giro, the prestigious Tour of Italy, last month, so that he could repeat over and over his anxieties for the next day’s Stage.
‘And that she might shrink all your gear in the wash?’
‘Ha!’ said Massimo, suddenly realizing he didn’t even know what happened to his dirty gear once he had stripped after a race.
‘Moaning about boyfriends the whole time?’
‘That too,’ Massimo agreed, having no idea if Rachel even had a boyfriend, current or past.
‘So,’ said Rachel, lifting Massimo’s leg over her shoulder, pushing against it for the stretch whilst doing something extraordinary to a point just below the buttock, ‘all in all, I suppose I’ve completely let you down then? Utterly destroyed your preconceptions of a female soigneur?’
‘Rachel,’ said Massimo, turning to lie on his front and inadvertently presenting her with a sizeable portion of hairy bottom from behind the slipped towel, ‘you are my soigneur. You are the best soigneur for Massimo. I don’t think of you as a girl at all.’
Well, I suppose that was the definitive compliment, Rachel muses as she washes her hands of oil and changes the towel on the massage table in preparation for the next rider. But odd too. Out of all the soigneurs on the Tour – three or four for each of the twenty-one teams – I’ll be one of only two females. And though it’s nice that Emma and I, in this hugely male-dominated world, are not hassled, it’s a bit bizarre that everyone completely denies us our gender. It’s like, in life there are men, women and soigneurs. I mean, I know I’m a woman, but it is a fact of negligible interest to the cycling fraternity.
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she says out loud, allowing herself a fleeting glance in the mirror and thinking her hair really does need a cut. ‘This is my job. It’s appallingly paid but I love it.’
Rachel McEwen is twenty-seven years old and looks far too slight to be hoiking the heavy limbs of exhausted men and dispelling the lactic acid in their tense, brutalized muscles. But that is what she does and she does it very well.
‘But what the fuck is a signor?’ her best friends had enquired when she told them she was leaving Edinburgh for Italy to be one two years ago.
‘Soigneur,’ she stressed. ‘It means “one who looks after” – the riders’ needs are my responsibility.’
This was greeted, much to her consternation, by a rapid chorus of wink-wink, nudge-nudging.
‘I’ll be doing their laundry, for Christ’s sake!’ she retorted, twisting her hair around and around in frustration before pinning it to her head precariously. ‘And preparing their race food each day. And going on ahead to the hotels to check out the rooms and the menus. And giving massage and minor medical assistance. And counselling – many riders look on their soigneur as their confidante.’
‘Back track, back track,’ they had implored, ‘to the “massage” bit.’
‘Yes?’ Rachel had replied ingenuously. ‘It’ll be good to put it to some practical use after two years of training.’
‘They’ll devour you,’ one friend said. ‘You’re such a wee lass and all that friction against the chamois lining of their shorts must make ’em horny bastards.’
‘Numb, more like,’ Rachel had said, ‘and anyway, I can’t be doing with love at my age.’
I haven’t the time, Rachel reasons, remembering that conversation well and realizing with horror that she hasn’t been back to Scotland for almost a year. She prepares the table for Stefano Sassetta’s arrival and skims through the sheaves of lists for the Tour that she started compiling during the Giro.
Shit! Frangipane.
Is that an expletive?
No, I really do mean the cake. It is a fantastic energy burst for the boys and it keeps moist and fresh for ages. I’m in cahoots with a local baker – he has broken an age-old family custom to make the cake square just for Zucca MV, because it’s much more practical to cut and divide.
So, a soigneur is a masseuse and a patisserie expert?
And a rally driver too – watch me bomb along the Stage route to the feed station or the arrivée where often I have to rescue my riders from the media scrum.
It is my job to be the first person my rider sees on finishing a Stage.
‘Shit,’ says Rachel, running fingers still rather oily through her long-suffering locks, ‘I must check on disposable flannels. Stefano is due in ten minutes and I’m a little concerned about that shoulder of his.’
Stefano Sassetta, who should have been on Rachel’s massage table ten minutes ago, was parading around his apartment in his Zucca MV team strip.
‘God, this blue and yellow suits me,’ he commented to his current girlfriend. ‘If I had taken up Team Mapei’s offer, I wouldn’t look half as good. It was reason enough to stay with Zucca MV.’
While Stefano gazed at his opulent if vulgar kitchen extension, a gift from the team’s sponsors and designed by Stefano himself, his girlfriend could barely keep her eyes from the semicircle of stitching around the reinforced groin area. It was like a magnificent sunburst and she was hot for what was behind it.
‘You want to work up an appetite, baby?’ she said coyly, fingering the spaghetti straps of her negligible sundress. Everything about the man was big – his baritone voice, his legendary thighs, his hands, his nose; they all complemented the biggest treat of all, currently concealed but far from hidden behind his shorts.
‘I just did a good ride,’ Stefano countered as if his appetite were indeed her exclusive concern.
For