Authors: Kevin Brennan
“Office - main street, Business - further in, that’s how you remember. Giz a hand up.”
“Are you sure? I thought you weren’t supposed to move people after accidents. Sometimes people don’t know how badly they’re hurt because of shock and it’s dangerous to move them.”
“I’m not in shock. I know how much I’m hurt and it’s not very bad now, help me up and let me have a look at the bike so I’ll know whether or not to tell my base controller about this.”
“All right, man, here ye go, as long as you’re sure!”
As soon as I got to my feet I became aware of the pain along the side of my left foot where it had hit the van but, again thanks to my boots, it was little more than an ache. I hobbled my way over to inspect the bike, which had been rolled over to the footpath by the helping pedestrians, while the van driver moved the van to allow the considerable build up of traffic to abate. I knew that it was advised to leave the vehicles where they were until the gards arrived but I trusted this driver enough for there not to be a need for gardaí to get involved and, besides, I had plenty of witnesses and a mark left on the van that highlighted him as being in the wrong, as long as the witnesses concurred that he hadn’t indicated. I made a mental note to verify that with my witnesses as soon as I had the bike checked out.
The bike itself had escaped pretty lightly. The left mirror was
smashed and my clutch lever was snapped, although there was still enough of it left for me to get two fingers worth of grip on, which was more than enough for me to keep working until I got around to replacing it. I could even put a piece of hollow pipe over it and drill and screw it into place later in the workshop if I wanted to be cheap about it and give other couriers something to comment on at traffic lights. My reply would be, “Well, six quid is six quid. This cost me nothing and does the job just as well!”
There were no leaks coming from the bike; spillages of oil, petrol or coolant could well have been caused by damage that would have me off the road, and the front end passed a few rudimentary after-collision checks.
The best thing to do was to get the witness and driver’s details and get moving again before I missed out on any work. I got all the witnesses’ details, checked that we all agreed on what had happened and then brought my signature book over to his windshield. I was copying his insurance details when he approached me timidly but questioningly.
“There isn’t a lot of damage done to the bike, I’m not properly injured and there won’t be any loss of earnings if I get cracking quickly, so I probably won’t have to go through your insurance company, but experience has taught me to take the details every time. Okay?”
The fact that it was someone else’s experience that taught me what to do was immaterial. As with most couriers, I had been regularly drilled on proper procedure for a wide variety of crash situations as a part of the daily process of listening to what couriers did and/or should have done in a situation like this.
Couriers tend to be experts on all aspects of collision procedures, making them generally the worst type of two-wheeled motorist to collide with. I wasn’t going to maximise my claim from this driver. He was a decent, ordinary worker who genuinely regretted the mistake that he had made. He was only going to pay for what had to be replaced.
“Okay, we’re looking at a new mirror, clutch lever and may
be handlebars. See the way the side of the bars is bent? I’m goin’ to have a bash at straightening them myself, If I’m not happy with the outcome I’ll have to get new bars off ye. Even if that’s the case it shouldn’t be more than 100 quid, possibly a lot less. Could you write your name, address and phone number there, please?...Yeah, go ahead… I had a bit of a delay in Dundrum but I’m moving again. I’ll tell ye about it in the base, an’in else on the way in?...Tell them two minutes, they’re my next stop...Is that a five or an eight there, man? Grand. I’ll ring ye later. And in future, remember to look, indicate and move. Okay?
Good luck to ye.”
I was in a strange mood as I worked my way into town after that, as though a variety of emotions were pulling me in different directions. The anger at the van driver’s mistake had dissipated quickly but had left a trace of general anger at motorists in its wake, condemning anybody who crossed me to be treated less than fairly in return.
The after effect of the adrenalin rush involved, the now almost familiar giddy sense of well being, was clearly discernable to me. The overwhelming sense of regret that follows a knock caused by your own mistake wasn’t evident in this case because I didn’t have a chance, although the shadow of a “what if” centered about the way I was overtaking had to be quelled by the fact that that was how I always drove.
Damaging your bike, and indeed yourself, always brings a depression with it.
The bike had taken plenty of knocks at this stage and was far from the pristine machine that I had originally bought.
I wasn’t properly hurt so that depression was nowhere near as bad as the ones previously experienced but it did somehow bring on a severe bout of grief over the loss of my best friend.
Going past the flat on this route didn’t help a bit. A wave of memories washed over me even though I drove way too fast through Windy Arbour, as if trying to outrun the crushing reality that those times were gone forever. That is the thing about death - the crushing reality. In other situations of loss there is
always some miniscule remnant of hope to be clung to, consciously or subconsciously, about what the future might hold, but when somebody dies they’re dead and that’s that. There can be no greater loss.
The worst moment of all was having Vinno’s ghost pass me as I decelerated to make a right turn to drop off my Milltown. There was nothing supernatural about this. Couriers go for the most reliable bikes possible, which means that lots of them buy certain models. Vinno’s working bike, the XBR, was one of the more popular models at the time. His was black, the most popular colour among couriers, so when the courier on the black XBR with the plain black Arai (a very popular helmet) and Givi top-box passed me on my left, I jumped and for one tiny fraction of a second the sheer will for Vinno not to be dead almost convinced me that that was him.
One of the disadvantages of couriers looking so similar is that when one dies, his friends see his “ghost” a lot. The aftereffect of this was that I felt like a gobshite for thinking, even for the tiniest amount of time, that my dead friend, buried three weeks previously, could somehow have driven past me in Mill-town. I also missed him more than ever and the image of him dying on that cursed roundabout had me blinking back tears as the Milltown package was being signed for. Then it started raining.
Between the after crash turmoil of emotion, the pain, the grief of Vinno’s death being multiplied by seeing his ghost and the magnification of all bad things that rain brings to everybody in this job, something that I am not proud of happened to me that day. I lost all tolerance with other road users.
The first to feel my wrath was a middle-aged business type pulling away from the AIB in Clonskeagh, just at the entrance to UCD that I was aiming for. My left indicator was on, he knew damn well where I was going but he still insisted on nudging his car - a big Rover - into my desired path. It was typical asshole bullying tactics towards motorbikes.
It might make some bikes stop and wave the car out - and more fool them - but couriers won’t be pushed around like that.
And if you happen to try it on a raging courier, that has had a crash within the past hour, who is still grieving over the death of his landlord, mentor and best friend, you’re going to get it.
I braked, beeped and swerved to miss him, swerving in front of him, blocking him in. Despite the intensifying rain, he rolled down his window, as I was angrily stomping my way towards him.
“Look, I’m just trying to-”
“What the fuck do you think you’re playin’ at, you prick? Do you think you can bully me like that? Do ye? D’ye want to get out of yer fuckin’ car an’ try to bully me, you fuckin’ arse-hole?”
“Look there’s no need for that.”
“There’s no need for this!” A full force toe–bogger boot in the middle of his driver’s door hurt my already injured toe, despite the metal protector on my boot. He almost instantly had his mobile phone up to his right ear while making a you’re-infor-it-now face at me. He should have either used his left hand or rolled up his window first because I had no problem snatching the phone out of his right hand just as he was saying hello, presumably to the emergency operator.
With me in road rage situations, the guilt normally kicked in as soon as I had done any damage to the offending vehicle, dissipating the anger and clearing the red mist enough for me to logically assess that my best course of action was to make good my exit. This was not the normal me though and the phone was smashed to pieces with a slam dunk to the tarmac and the now terrified motorist had a helmeted head inside his car screaming at him before my temper even began to ease off.
“You’re not so fuckin’ smart now, are ye? What are you going to do about it now, give my reg’ details to the cops? Good luck readin’ it from here, dickhead!”
“I was just trying to get out before the lights changed!”
“You thought you could bully me into stopping, even though I’m under a lot more pressure than you. Didn’t ye? Admit it!”
“Okay, why don’t we leave it at that?”
“You fuckin’ remember this the next time you want to bully
someone on a bike!”
“I will, I promise.”
As I stomped my way back to the bike I noticed that my reg was nowhere near as dirty as I thought it was, so I grabbed the bottom of it and bent it upwards to be doubly sure that the aggressor turned victim wouldn’t be able to make it out. It’s just as well that I did that, because that was only my first episode of antagonism that day.
Any other road rage explosions that I had had vented all of my anger and left me feeling calm, though usually experiencing some level of guilt also, varying according to whatever atrocities I had committed on the motorist involved. Previously, if I vented my fury on a motorist, that was me done with anger for a while and being more than tolerant to my fellow human beings at least for the rest of the day.
Today was different. I sped away from the dented Rover through the now red light and into UCD like a demon. By the time I exited the campus I had been involved in three separate rage incidents, including one where I mounted a footpath in pursuit of a cheeky old ex-hippie looking lecturer type who had been under the impression that people were always going to get away with sticking two fingers up to a courier who was moving away from them. I told him, “We do look in our mirrors and we will fuckin’ U-turn and come after you if we’re fuckin’ pissed off enough.”
“Three episodes is way too many going through UCD, Sean. Calm down.
Breathe,” I told myself again and again, good and deep.
My efforts to calm myself down at the exit lights of the campus were impeded by the now torrential downfall of the rain and the gradual approach in my mirrors of the cyclist that I had mimed a boot at when I eventually got past her fat arse, thanks to the exaggerated uphill weave that took up the whole road and committed the mortal sin of delaying my overtake.
I held stern and focussed eye contact with her every inch of her approach to the red light. She looked as if she had a comment to make about me lashing out a figurative boot after I had
passed her. I was just aggression personified and was itching to angrily deliver the abusive rhetoric about the fat and slow delaying the lean and fast and how wrong that was. It is therefore probably better for both of us that the light went green before she got to me. Any abuse that she might have shouted after me would have been drowned out by the sound of my engine being nailed as hard as possible to make sure that cycle troll was committed to my past as quickly as possible.
I had three deliveries to three different buildings in the RTE complex: one for TV, one for radio and one for the sports and leisure club at the back. I was desperately trying to calm myself down as I went through the revolving doors of the TV building. I was so tense with rage that I could almost feel every nerve tingle. It wouldn’t even take as much as a cross word for me to angrily explode in a torrent of abuse or even break things. I had never known anything even close to the fear of myself that I felt walking towards that reception desk.
There were two receptionists on duty, both of whom were on the phone.
This was not good. There was no telling how bad my reaction to a delay would be. I decided to drop the envelope in front of the one I knew to be called Liz and get myself and my temper out of there without even attempting to get a signature, writing her name in my book later. Thankfully, there was no crap out of either of them and I made good my exit without incident.
I stomped my way into the radio reception, harrumphing to myself that there should be one post room for everything in RTE so that we wouldn’t have to spend so much valuable time on this shite, when the receptionist - on the phone - took her life into her own hands by turning away from me as I approached. I reached the reception desk, wielding a weighty enough A4 envelope in my right hand with nothing else on my mind but punishing this bitch.
Punishing motorists is one thing, as long as you are not stupid enough to have the logo of the company you work for emblazoned all over your bag or box and the reg is dirty enough
to be hard to make out as you speed away after whatever action (or reaction as is more often the case) that you take.