Gurriers (67 page)

At the Caen 10km sign I had to put my worries aside and open my bike up to the max to get with the pack for the tricky peripherique ring road that the lads had warned us about.

It wasn’t that tricky when there was an experienced pilot at the front of the pack. Shay gave us plenty of warning before leading us off the road at the correct exit.

Then there was a mile or so on the motorway to Paris and then east for Le Mans, with the meeting point hardly half a mile beyond that.

“You dropped back a bit, Shy Boy. Did ye have a problem?”

“Just slowed down to work out the maths of the situation, Paddy. Vinno and the boys should have caught up with us ages ago at the speed they intended to drive at.”

“Yeah, I was wonderin’ when they were goin’ to appear in the mirrors meself but there’s so many things that can delay ye over a hundred odd miles that I wouldn’t start worryin’ yet. They coulda got done for speedin’ or sum’in’. Ye know we passed a cop van at a hundred miles an hour back there.”

“Us?”

“Yep. A big white van wi’ a dark blue diagonal stripe. There was a crest under the middle o’ the stripe sayin’ ‘Gendarmes’ – that’s French for pigs.”

“You copped the pork wagon too, Paddy? Not bad for a virgin!”

“Sharp as, Shay. Sharp as!”

“Wonder what’s keepin’ the fast bikes.”

“So are we, Shay. Paddy thinks they might have been done for speeding.”

“Could be, but the French go easy on the speed issues over here this week.

We were all speeding when we passed the cop van.”

“There’s a big difference between doing a ton and the speed the lads intended to go at.”

“That’s another thing. There are no speed traps or checkpoints on the road; what do the cops have that can catch those three at top speed? Nothing. Something else must have happened.”

“To the lads?” Dave and Kevin joined the conversation from the fringe of the group.

“Well, obviously somethin’ has delayed them.”

Eamonnn, Joe and Steve clamoured around the group also, all of us looking to Shay for answers.

“Think one a them musta broke down?’

“Could be.”

“Or a puncture?”

“Maybe.”

“Or ran outa petrol?”

“We all filled up in Rosslare, the only way one of them woulda ran owa juice would be if the petrol was siphoned out of the tank on the boat.”

“Or leaked out.”

“We woulda smelled it.”

“Here’s Gerry and the boys! Yeehaw the Gerry, good to see ya, man!”

Gerry pulled in right beside the group of us and spoke his concerns before he even took his helmet off. “Where are the fast bikes?”

“We’re not sure, they never caught up with us.”

Again some theories were kicked around as to the non appearance of our comrades. Some, but not all. Nobody mentioned the one possibility that was foremost in our worries: the possibility of a high speed crash.

By the time we went in to get our food we were a pretty sombre bunch. I was quite snappy about telling James that quarter pounders were called royales over here because of the metric system.

The beeping at the deep fat fryer stopped as the assistant took the fries out of it. The absence of the shrieking demonic noise left our senses free to hear three big motorbike engines pulling up outside. The cashier was left standing there, as all of us turned in unison to see Vinno, Leo and the Gizzard dismount beside our bikes.

“YES!” About four of us roared in unison, the others - being too cool to let on that they really had been worried - just smiled. Shay made a face as if to say he was expecting nothing but the arrival of the others but his body language betrayed that a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders, such was the absence of the tension of five minutes previously.

“Messieurs?”

“Pardon. Une grand menu de Big Mac S’il vous plais avec orange et aussi six des chicken nugget et une torte de pommes.” All of sudden my appetite had returned.

As it turned out it had been a puncture that had delayed the lads. Just before departure Vinno gave the back tyre of his blade a kick only to discover that it was soft. After much pumping and listening and rubbing spit on the tyre on the air hose at the petrol station, they eventually discovered a tiny pin lodged in
between the grooves of the tyre that he must have run over getting off the boat. The pin was removed, the tyre was plugged, the wheel was inflated and they set off 25 minutes behind us instead of ten.

They still had a fabulous rip, of course, and between them buzzing from the extreme speed and us buzzing from being so glad to see them, the atmosphere was electric.

Before I was even finished my food, Ollie placed a bottle of beer on the table in front of me. Himself, Steve and Macker had chipped in and bought 19 beers, giggling like schoolgirls all the way - such was the novelty of purchasing alcohol in McDonalds.

Then the joints started coming, a designated team doing a “‘relay race” on each joint – two going outside to light up with the passer of the joint coming back in to be replaced by the next one out. Then Seamus, Kevin and Dave got a round in.

More joints followed.

Soon Vinno, Leo and Gizzard went up to get a round, but instead got spoken to in French by a worried looking manager. I was called on to speak to him. Eventually he got the message across to tell me that he was very sorry, but beer was only to be purchased with food.

“Pas de probleme, monsieur,” I stated in my undoubtedly awful attempt at an accent. “Les grand frites s’il vous plais, et dix neuf des biers!” I requested a bag of chips and 19 beers.

He looked stunned and was almost definitely going to refuse us until I reassured him that we would go after these and that everybody in Ireland would be told that this was The best Mc-Donalds in France. The lads didn’t know what I had told him but were well impressed when the bottles were put on the counter in front of them.

Back at the tables the debate had started about where we were going to spend the night. We were almost half way to Le Mans. The 24 hour race started at 3 pm on Saturday. There was a feature race before that; this year it was a Hornet 600 race, with all of the racers on Hondas new mid-range flyer. The lads assured us that races where all of the riders were on the same
bike were the best; with the race being won solely on rider ability the riders tended to go at it that bit harder. But that was still three days away. Apparently, the Friday night session at the race track was something special and we had agreed that we would get there on Thursday night this year, as the lads had done in the past when the boat was on Tuesday. Some weeks the boat was on Tuesday and some on Thursday. That way we got an extra night camping for the same money, prime real estate in our favoured area of the site and a gentler, warm up session to socalise with all around us. Looking at the 19 of us on our third round in McDonalds at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I had real difficulty in imagining anything gentle about any session we were going to have!

The three different options for that night were to find a cheap hotel in Caen: apparently there was a clump of them a couple of miles outside the city; go half way to Le Mans to a smaller town called Alencon where the lads were known to get a cheap hotel or to go to Le Mans today and stay the night there in a cheap hotel.

The experienced members of the group had had mighty sessions in both Caen and Alencon and each seemed to have his own special preference. Le Mans was discounted as not being as lively as either of the other two towns, not that anywhere in France was particularly lively on a Wednesday night, with the general populace seeming to stay at home drinking wine that cost very little instead of going out and drinking beer that was, by comparison, very expensive.

The debate got so heated that it was decided to toss a coin between the two towns before the – by now – really nervous manger called the Gendarmes. The coin was tossed and Caen won. It was agreed that we would fill up the bikes in the petrol station beside us, buying some carryout beer in the process, follow Shay to the “Formula One” that he reckoned he could find his way to from here, get rooms, have beers and smokes and then taxi into the city later.

The lads had an unusual way of filling up in France. Based on the premise that the service everywhere in France was shite, a premise I had to agree with, instead of individually resetting the pump for each bike we split into two groups - a nine and a ten - and filled the whole group’s tanks in one go without replacing the nozzle and sorted out the money between us. It was done with impressive efficiency, almost military, with the bemused assistant not knowing what the hell was going on.

I was third in line of the ten bike group that had the Gizzard on the pump. He had filled his own tank before pushing his bike forward and to the right, in front of the concrete island that the pumps were on, without replacing the nozzle. Dave was next in line. I was so close behind that my front tyre barely missed his back one as I pulled up.

Gizzard filled me up and roared, “Yours is seventy five francs; give the money to Dave an’ get some beers in. Go, go, go!”

I thought that Shay had gone wrong when he pulled up outside what looked like a tyre factory in a pretty industrial looking area a couple of miles from the petrol station. He got off his bike and signalled us all to park up on the path. He waited until all the engines had been killed before shouting to us all,

“Okay, the hotel is just behind that building there. We’re noh all goin’ in together. Me, Vinno and Shy Boy are goin’ to go ahead an’ get the rooms in. Yous all stay here for ten an’ follow us around, yeah? Okay, Shy Boy, come on, you’ll be doin’ the talking!”

I was briefed outside the hotel that these rooms had three beds each in them. We were going to try and get six of them. Somebody could sleep on a pile of our ground sheets stacked on top of each other for free. What I wasn’t told until later was that the lads had stayed in this very hotel three years ago and had kept the whole place awake until five in the morning with a rip-roaring session that did very little for Franco-Irish relations in these parts.

“Bonjour Monsier,” the petite old receptionist said.

“Bonjour Madame, nous cherchons des chambers, s’il vous plais.”

“Trois Personnes?

“Non, six des chambers s’il vous plais.”

“Pour six personnes?”

“Non, pour dix huit personnes.”

“Etes vous Inglais Monsier?”

“Non, nous sommes Irlandais.”

“Oh, monsieur, beaucoup du bier?”

“Non Madame, beaucoup du coucher. Nous sommes tres fatigues. Nous sommes en route a Le Mans et ce soir c’est nos dernier nuit dans les lits. Beacoup du coucher.”

She gave me a stern look and disappeared.

“What’s the story, Shy Boy?”

“I’m not sure. They get a bit friendlier when you say you’re Irish and not English but she didn’t.” I caught the look that passed between the other two and knew immediately that something was up. “Do youse fuckers have history here?”

“Ancient history, but nothing bad - just noise really. What did you say to her?”

“She asked if we were going to drink a lot and I said we were that we were going to sleep a lot, that this was our last night in a bed for a while.”

“Do you think that…oh, you fucking beauty!”

There she was on the way back with a handful of keys and a registration book.

“Shy Boy Sean. Master bullshiter in two languages.”

The next time I saw the poor lady was at half three in the morning. Well, technically, I didn’t see her - I just heard her giving out in angry French spoken so rapidly that I could only pick up the occasional word. All I could see was the contents of my stomach splashing into the toilet with each heave.

It was all the fault of “Le Mariner”, a cool pub that had a special offer on metres of beer. This was a wooden box a metre long that was wide enough to hold a half litre glass and deep enough so that just the top half of each glass showed above it.

At one end of this metre long box extended a cricket bat style handle to facilitate carrying it. The box contained ten glass
es. Every time somebody ordered a metre of beer the barman flashed the lights and rang a bell and the whole pub cheered. Between us - ordering two at a time - we went through 14 metres of beer.

I felt bashful the next morning approaching the receptionist with my keys. A voice in my hugely hung over head was imploring me to fling the keys at her and run, as I neared the glaring scowl that was aimed at me. It was over ruled by a still drunk element within my head coining a phrase that had been parried around an awful lot the previous evening “ambassadors of our wonderful country.”

I straightened myself up to as close to my full height as the baggage would allow and forced my face muscles into some semblance of a smile.

“Bonjour madame, comment allez vous?”

She mumbled something to herself that I wasn’t supposed to hear as she made sure all the keys were present. Then at me angrily

“Beaucoup du coucher, oui?” She seemed hurt at being lied to that we were going to get a lot of sleep.

I blinked a few times and widened my eyes as wide as I could to impose innocence on my demeanour for the next bit, “Mais madame, quatre heures - C’est beaucoup du coucher pour nous!” Four hours is a lot of sleep for us.