The Accidental Cyclist (10 page)

The Grey Man ate the bacon
sandwich as if he’d had nothing to eat for a week. Icarus watched
him intently. Never had he seen a man eat a bacon sandwich with
such relish. Truth be told, he had probably never watched a man
eating a bacon sandwich before, with or without relish, but he was
struck by the Grey Man’s earnestness in devouring his breakfast.
When the Grey Man wiped the last crumbs from his lips, Icarus said:
“You spent the whole night here, sitting on this bench?”

The Grey Man said nothing for a
few moments, then realised that it was a question, and nodded
slowly.

“Why?” Icarus asked.

“Well, after our long
conversation last night I realised that I still had some issues to
think about. I’ve been avoiding some things that I have to put to
rest.”

“What things?”

“Personal things.”

Icarus was about to press on in
his questioning, but realised that the Grey Man did not want to be
pressed, so he held his tongue.

Almost as if in reply, the Grey
Man said: “Maybe I’ll tell you what I was thinking about when I’m
good and ready … and when you too are ready.”

At nine o’clock Icarus and the
Grey Man, pushing his bicycle, walked down the high street to the
public library. From his rider’s satchel the Grey Man hauled a
link-chain that looked heavy enough to secure a bulldozer. He
chained his bicycle to the railings outside the library with a
padlock the size of his fist.

“One can never be too careful,”
he said, with a wink.

They climbed the library steps
and Icarus pushed open the large wooden doors. Inside, all was
dark, but as they walked along, lights flickered and flashed on
above them.

“They must be late opening up,”
said Icarus.

“Actually, I think that the
library is closed,” the Grey Man replied. He turned round and
consulted the sign on the door. “Yep, not open on Saturdays. You
really do have to be careful with that talent of yours. It could
get you into trouble some time.”

“It already has,” said
Icarus.

The pair surveyed the rows of
books, and in the distance made out a bank of computers. The
screens were flickering blankly in the dark.

“Well,” said the Grey Man,
“we’re here, so we might as well get on with it.”

The sat down at a terminal at
the end of the row. The Grey Man touched the space bar and the
terminal came to life. It flashed at them and read:

LOGIN: ADMIN.

The word PASSWORD blinked at
them.

And then a blank space.

Icarus looked at the Grey Man,
and said: “We don’t have a password.”

“Just type ADMIN,” said the Grey
Man.

Icarus typed the word, and they
were into the system. “How did you know that?” asked Icarus.

“Just a trick I learnt from a
web-savvy friend,” said the Grey Man. He then showed Icarus how to
register and log on to Freecycle, search for his local area and
then trawl through the postings.

“You can put up a posting saying
that you are looking for a bike, but it is probably better just to
look through the list for whatever you want.”

Icarus was scrolling through the
postings and reading them aloud: “Audi alloys … brass stair rods …
funny bones skeleton model … wanted: baby’s cot. Look, there’s a
television and remote.” Icarus looked up at the Grey Man. “You mean
to say that they are giving all of this away?”

“It’s better than throwing it
away,” said the Grey Man. “And that is just what most people still
do. Not enough people use this website..”

“But there aren’t any
bikes.”

“Put ‘bikes’ into the search and
see what happens.”

Icarus typed BIKE. The list
transformed itself, and Icarus began reading again. “Child’s
battery-powered quad bike … cool … Wanted: bike, pump and front
light … boy’s BMX bike …wanted: exercise bike … so many of these
say wanted. There must be a lot of people out there who want bikes
then.”

“Don’t worry,” said the Grey
Man, “just keep looking. It will be there somewhere.”

Icarus and the Grey Man had
been at the computer for about half an hour when they heard the
clatter of a plastic bucket on the floor. It was a cleaning woman,
overalled and hair tied up, mopping the lino floors. “Quiet,” said
the Grey Man, and the two sat still, fading into the furniture
around them. For about twenty minutes they remained still as the
woman cleaned around them, occasionally muttering to herself about
muddy boots, or something like that. When she had finished, they
turned back to the compute and continued with their search. It was
the Grey Man who spotted what they needed: “Men’s broken bikes: we
have three broken bikes and one frame. Need work, good for parts
but could make one decent bike.”

“But that’s all bits,” said
Icarus. “I want a proper bike.”

“This is exactly what you want –
it’ll help you to make whatever bike you like.”

They responded to the message
and minutes later an address flashed up. It was just on the other
side of the park from Icarus’s flat.

“Bingo, said the Grey Man, “I
think we have a result.”

Icarus and the Grey Man left
the library as silently as they had entered. Icarus pulled the door
quietly closed behind him, and the pair went out of the portico to
the railing where the Grey Man’s bike was padlocked. There, much to
their horror, inspecting the bike, were Helmets One and Two. Our
friends froze. As long as they did so, they remained unnoticed by
the two pillars of the law that stood before them. But Icarus’s
mind was flashing with a multitude of thoughts – he was not one to
hold back on whatever entered his mind, but on this occasion he
managed to keep his thoughts to himself. “Tweedledum and
Tweedledee,” he said, inwardly.

The Grey Man, on the other hand,
was usually the one to keep his thoughts to himself, but now he
found himself muttering, under his breath but loud enough for
Icarus to hear, something along similar lines to what his companion
had thought. “Tweedledum and Tweedledumber,” he muttered.

Icarus felt a snigger rise to
his throat and nose. The Grey Man, recognising the danger, clasped
his hand over Icarus’s nose and mouth, but the snigger, which was
followed by a second, much bigger snigger, managed to squeeze
through his fingers and escape.

Helmet Two looked up and saw
Icarus. “What? You again?” he asked. “This your bike?” he went on,
before Icarus had time to answer the first questions, if they were
intended us such.

Helmet One, meanwhile, who was
examining the hefty lock and chain on the bike, felt his headgear
lift slowly off his head. That’s strange, he thought, rather
slowly, but there’s no wind today, and he set off in pursuit of the
fleeing helmet.

Icarus nodded to Helmet Two.
“Yes, it’s my bike.”

“Well, it’s illegal to lock it
to these railings,” said Helmet Two. “Anyway, what are you doing
here?”

“I came to return some
books.”

“But the library’s closed on
Saturdays. So where are your books?”

Icarus looked up, alarmed. Then
he saw the letter box of the library, and next to it a larger box
that read RETURNED BOOKS. “I put them in the box up there,” he
said.

Helmet Two looked up to the
door, and sighed. “Okay then, but I’m still going to have to nick
you for locking your bike to the railings.”

Icarus then did something he had
never done before, never thought of before. He remembered the
magistrate who had reprimanded Helmet Two just days before, and of
the withering look she had given him. Icarus, for that moment,
imagined himself as the magistrate, and his face was transformed.
Helmet Two looked at him and shuddered, as if his mother’s ghost
had appeared before him. The look on Icarus’s face reminded him how
vulnerable he had felt before the magistrate. He, a brick in the
foundation of the legal system, had never felt vulnerable or weak.
But at that moment he was as weak as a baby, and he could do
nothing.

“Just don’t do it again,” he
told Icarus, and turned away to help Helmet One to arrest his
errant headgear.

“What did you do there?” the
Grey Man asked when the policemen were gone. “He jumped like a
scalded cat.”

“I don’t know,” said Icarus. But
he did know.

The Leader was sitting on a
bench in the park studying his feet intently when Icarus and the
Grey Man passed him, pushing an array of bicycles in various stages
of decay. He wanted to make a sarcastic remark about collecting
junk, or crashing bikes, but he was afraid that the Grey Man might
stop and teach him his lesson. So he kept his sarcasm and his other
thoughts to himself, although a snorted snigger did manage to sneak
through his defences.

“You could lend us a hand if you
wanted to,” the Grey Man said as they went by.

The Leader was not sure whether
that was an invitation or an instruction, but he decided that
offering his services would, in the circumstances, help to mitigate
the attempted offence that he had caused the Grey Man. He stood up
and took a rusty, rickety bike with buckled wheels that Icarus had
been carrying, and trudged along behind, pushing the bike, trying
unsuccessfully to keep it in a straight line. The back wheel went
left, while the front went right, and in no time The Leader found
himself following Icarus and the Grey Man at a tangent across the
grass.

“Oi,” said the Grey Man, a sly
smile in his eyes, “where do you think you’re going with that?”

“Sorry,” said The Leader meekly,
as he picked up the bike, slung it over his shoulder and tracked
back on to the path to follow them.

Icarus led the way to a room in
the basement of his flat that housed nothing more than the boiler,
a few abandoned refrigerators and washing machines.

“It’s not exactly the Ritz, but
it will do,” said the Grey Man.

The Leader, all the while, was
dying to ask where they had obtained such a pile of junk, but he
resisted. Once he had dumped all the cycling detritus on the
basement floor he turned to leave. “You can stay and help us, if
you want.” this time he noted a different tone in the Grey Man’s
voice. He was inviting The Leader to join them. It was his choice,
and The Leader chose to stay. As Icarus went upstairs to fetch tea
for them, The Leader brought himself to ask the Grey Man where all
this junk – umm, stuff – came from, and what were they going to do
with it. The Grey Man noticed that the swagger, the sneering, the
defiance were seeping out of The Leader’s voice. He was becoming
just another teenage boy, confused, bewildered at the prospect of
becoming a man.

The Grey Man explained about
Freecycle, about Icarus wanting to get a job, and how they were
going to build a bicycle for him.

“Out of that junk heap?” The
Leader said, the scepticism creeping back into his voice. “Look how
buckled those wheels are. You can’t do nothing with them but chuck
’em away.”

“On the contrary,” said the Grey
Man, “there is nothing wrong with them whatsoever.”

“Whatsoever,” The Leader echoed,
involuntarily. “Sorry, I didn’t really mean to say that. I don’t
know what came over me.”

“I know you didn’t,” said the
Grey Man.

The two of them sat there
surveying the rusting, twisted bits of metal. Then The Leader said:
“Look, I’m sorry about this morning, you know, that thing with your
bike. I sometimes just can’t help myself.”

The Grey Man calmly put up his
hand to stop The Leader: “I know, it was really meant to happen
…”

Before the Grey Man could finish
what he had started saying, Icarus returned with three large mugs
of tea and a packet of biscuits. The Leader was confused.

When biscuits had been dunked
and tea drunk, the Grey Man said that he had to go away for a few
hours. He left the two boys with instructions to strip the bikes as
far as they were able, cleaning all the parts as they did so. The
task looked insurmountable. They did not know where, or how, to
begin.

“I’ve no idea even where to
start,” said Icarus.

“We’ll never get through all
that,” said The Leader.

Icarus looked at The Leader, and
said: “Well, you don’t have to stay, you know. You can just leave
it, if you want.”

“I wasn’t doin’ anyfin’, anyhow,
so I might as well stay,” said The Leader. He picked up a spanner
and set about removing the wheels from all of the battered bikes
and putting them in a pile to one side. Icarus picked up a
screwdriver and pliers, looked at them as if he had never seen such
tools before, then attempted to remove the brake levers from the
handlebars. His movements were clumsy because he was using these
tools for the first time. The Leader, meanwhile, was a natural, and
went about his task as if he had a mechanical strand in his DNA.
The pair laboured silently, working things out as they went. The
Leader, after struggling for some time to remove a particularly
stubborn set of pedals from one machine, struck the spanner in
fury, only to discover that the left-hand pedal had a reverse
thread.

Icarus laughed at him. The
Leader grew annoyed, and said that if that was his attitude to
help, then he was leaving.

Icarus stopped him. “I’m sorry,”
he said, “it’s just that I realised that I should have known that.
I remember reading somewhere that pedals always thread in a forward
direction, so that they remain tight. That means a left-side pedal
has to be taken off counter-clockwise. It’s something that the
Wright brothers invented – they noticed that if the left pedal had
a normal thread, it would fall off after a while.”

“Who the hell were the Wright
brothers? You don’t mean the guys who invented flying?”

“Yes, them, except they didn’t
invent flying – the simply built the first flying machine. They
started out running a bicycle shop.”