The Accidental Cyclist (11 page)

“Oh,” said The Leader, lapsing
into silence. After a while he said: “So then, how do you know the
old guy?”

“We met in jail,” Icarus said
without even thinking. It struck him that perhaps he need not
explain to The Leader that his time in jail was no more that a few
hours in a police cell.

“What was he in for?”

“You know, I never even asked. I
have absolutely no idea.”

After a while longer The Leader
said: “I tried to steal his bike this morning. I don’t know why I
did it, because he was right there all the time. But he caught me,
first time that I’ve ever been caught. Then he said he was going to
teach me a lesson.”

“So, how did he teach you a
lesson?”

“He didn’t. Said he would do it
later. I’m still waiting. When do you think he might do it?”

Icarus pondered for a while,
before saying: “I don’t know. Maybe this is your lesson.”

The Grey Man returned several
hours later to find several piles of dusty, rusty metal that looked
as if they were ready for the scrapheap. In the time that Icarus
and The Leader had spent deconstructing the bicycles they had
formed a strange alliance. It was a bond formed of mutual respect,
coloured by an element of mistrust and misunderstanding. Icarus
proved incapable of wielding a spanner, screwdriver or tyre lever,
but appeared to be a compendium of technical knowledge of the
science of cycling. The Leader, on the other hand, showed a
pragmatism and practicality that enabled the pair to get things
done.

The Grey Man was obviously
impressed. He emptied his satchel onto the floor – a selection of
specialist cycle tools – and said: “Let’s make ourselves a
bicycle.”

The Leader snorted loudly and
said: “Out of this lot – you’ve got to be joking. There’s not one
wheel there that’s not buckled. You’ll maybe get a one-wheeler if
you’re lucky.”

“You mean a unicycle,” said
Icarus.

“Don’t go all hoity-toity,” said
The Leader. “I know what I mean.”

The Grey Man walked across to
basement to the pile of rusting frames, and regarded them
carefully. Finally he selected one and held it up against Icarus’s
leg. “This will do nicely,” he said.

He gave the frame to Icarus,
along with a sheet of water paper, and showed him how to clean up
the spots of rust. He then turned to The Leader and pointed at the
metallic spider’s web of wheels. “Now you,” he told The Leader,
“find me the best front wheel.”

The Leader replied with his
dirtiest dirty look, but did the older man’s bidding. Slowly he
disentangled the pile of wheels, which clung to one another,
reluctant to let go. Finally he extracted one from the tangled mass
and said: “There,” handing the least buckled wheel to the Grey Man,
“this is the best, but it’s all a load of crap.”

The Grey Man ignored the comment
and took the wheel from him, holding it by the axle and spinning
it. “Not bad,” he said, “at least no spokes are broken.”

He placed the wheel on an
upturned frame and spun it a few times, watching it lurch
elliptically as the frame shuddered from one side to the other.
“Now watch here,” he said to The Leader, and with a spoke key he
began straightening the wheel, twisting this spoke one way, and
that another, spinning, watching, occasionally plonking the wires
like a demented harpist, feeling the tension. Gradually the warped
disc came into alignment, running true and smooth on its axis.

“Holy shit,” said The Leader in
amazement, “I thought you just threw the wheel away when it was as
bad as that one. I didn’t know that you could fix it.”

“With bicycles,” said the Grey
Man, “you can fix almost everything – if you know how.” He took
another wheel from the pile and placed it on the frame. “Now, you
have a go,” he told The Leader.

For the next half hour or so
Icarus scrubbed away at the frame as he watched The Leader twisting
the spokes of the rickety wheel this way and that. But for each
apparent improvement that The Leader made, the next adjustment made
the wheel worse than before. By degrees The Leader was growing more
frustrated. His face grew redder and the veins on his forehead
became knotted until suddenly he hit meltdown. “I can’t do this
bloody thing,” he shouted. He threw down the spoke key, which
ricocheted off the concrete floor and narrowly missed Icarus, and
stormed out of the basement room.

Icarus and the Grey Man looked
at each other. Icarus noticed a slight smile in the Grey Man’s
eyes. “Should I go after him?” Icarus asked.

“No,” said the Grey Man, “don’t
you worry about him. He’ll be back soon enough.”

Icarus returned to his scrubbing
and sanding, and ten minutes later The Leader sauntered back into
the basement, whistling quietly to himself as if nothing had
happened. He leant against the doorframe and watched Icarus and the
Grey Man as they worked in silence, then eventually wandered across
to the abandoned wheel, which was still swinging back and forth,
quite forlorn. He looked around for the spoke key, and finally
Icarus pointed to the coal pile in the corner. The Leader pushed
passed Icarus and scrabbled through the coal to retrieve the key.
When he returned to his place at the wheel he had a smudge of black
on the tip of his nose. Icarus tried to stifle a snigger. The
Leader glared at Icarus, sat down, took a deep breath and
considered the wheel for a few moments, then set about it once
again with the spoke key.

It quickly became apparent that
he was making no progress, and once again his fragile temper was
fraying. After about ten minutes of futile effort, the Grey Man
crossed the room and knelt down opposite The Leader and said: “It’s
not as easy as it looks. It took me years before I could true a
wheel properly, so don’t expect to be able to do it in a day.

“First, you need to make sure
that the spoke is firmly fixed to the nipple,” (at that point The
Leader made a muffled, snorting noise into his hand, but the Grey
Man ignored that) “and you need to assess each spoke’s area of
influence.”

Step by step and patiently, and
without patronising him, the Grey Man took The Leader through the
process of truing the second wheel. When it was eventually done The
Leader whistled, held up the wheel to Icarus and beamed: “Wow, just
look at that. Okay, man, I’m going to get this next one done on my
own, even if it takes me all day.”

It didn’t take all day for The
Leader to fix the next wheel, only a couple of hours. The Grey Man
and Icarus, meanwhile, got on with cleaning, repairing, oiling and
spray-painting the parts that were to make up Icarus’s new bicycle.
They were about to start assembling the constituent parts when Mrs
Smith walked into the basement.

For a moment she stood frozen at
the entrance, aghast, and then, is if in some Shakespearean tragedy
she screamed: “What treachery is this? What treason? What
deception?”

She stood in the doorway,
quivering in anger. Icarus had seen her many moods and learnt to
cope with her tantrums and tears, but this emotion of pure rage he
had never seen, and it frightened him. His mother looked straight
at him and said: “What have I told you about bicycles? All your
life I have protected you from their evil, and here you are
plotting like some underground coven. How could you go and throw
all my words, all my good intentions, back in my face? I am
shocked, smitten, appalled.”

She looked around at the
scattered parts lying about the basement floor, bicycle bones
unearthed from some devilish past, dug up for some sinister
ceremony. “I’m smitten,” she repeated, “it’s like an arrow to my
heart. I spend years teaching you what is right, and then here I
find you, plotting evil and insurrection in this den of …” for a
moment Mrs Smith appeared to be at a loss for words.

“Iniquity?” offered the Grey
Man, knowing that she really did not want his assistance right
then. Mrs Smith shot him down with a black look. “You,” she said,
turning back to Icarus, “you go straight upstairs and get yourself
cleaned up. I’ll finish with you later.”

As Icarus skulked off upstairs,
Mrs Smith turned back to the Grey Man. “As for you. Is this how you
repay the kindness that I showed you yesterday? You come here and
corrupt my son and consort with delinquents. Take these infernal
machines with you and go. I don’t want to see you near my son
again.”

The Leader, who had been sitting
in the corner all the while, kept his head down, staring at the
wheel before him and waiting for the storm to pass. But it would
not pass. The moment that he thought it had dissipated, he looked
up, to be swept away by a torrent of words.

“Don’t think I don’t know who
you are,” said Mrs Smith, the new storm front building rapidly.
“You are absolutely the worst boy in the area, a bad influence on
every child in the neighbourhood. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was
you who got my poor Icky into trouble with the police. That nice
policeman told me all about you.” But before she could finish, The
Leader rose and fled the verbal downpour, afraid of drowning.

And then, as quickly as it had
begun, Mrs Smith left the basement and the storm was over.

Icarus slept fitfully that
night. His mother had returned to the flat and carried on as if
nothing had happened. The incident of the bicycle parts, the Grey
Man, and The Leader remained buried in the basement like family
secrets, locked away like things that should never have come to
pass. Or, Icarus wondered, had it all happened to other people in
other lives in other worlds – something that he had once read in a
book. It was certainly not a part of the Smith family’s world, or
if it was, it was no more than a dream. Once Mrs Smith had spoken,
Icarus had always obeyed, so his mother had no reason to believe
that on this occasion things would be any different.

But for Icarus it was more than
a dream, it was a nightmare in which spoked wheels spun endlessly
in ever-diminishing orbits until they disappeared into the
undergrowth at the far reaches of his mind, only to reappear
instantly all around him as giant Ferris wheels. Except that when
they reappeared they were no longer turning; instead, it was him
that was turning slowly, while the wheels remained fixed in time
and space.

It was quite late by the time
Icarus got up on Sunday morning.

“Sleep well, dear?” his mother
asked brightly as she served him his breakfast. Icarus said
nothing, while his mother flitted about the tiny kitchen, unable to
settle on any single task.

“Would you like anything special
for your dinner, dear?” she asked.

Icarus looked up, looked
straight at his mother, following her quick movements. His fixed
his black eyes on her, and waited for her to settle, to take her
perch and listen. When finally she stopped moving, he said: “I
thought we were going to have the fish from Friday night.” He
paused for a moment, then went on: “I really do care for you, and
what you think, but I am determined to have that bicycle.”

Mrs Smith did not move for
several minutes. After her outburst of the previous night she
believed that she had cleared up the misunderstanding, the silly
idea that seemed to have entered Icarus’s head. How they had been
planted there, she could only guess, but she’d had to act strongly,
decisively. It had taken all of her strength, all her nerve, all
her courage to walk into that basement and say no, and shout about
what she believed. Like an athlete the day after running a
marathon, it had drained her, and now she had no outburst left in
her.

And so Mrs Smith did not reply.
She realised that her ammunition was spent, her armoury empty, she
had nothing left. Slowly the tears began to trickle down her
cheeks, and she did not know it. For the first time ever, her tears
were not intended to achieve a particular goal – to break Icarus’s
heart and bend his will to her way of thinking. These were tears of
loss, of utter dejection, of defeat. Icarus knew that. He knew they
were not a final attempt to turn the tide in this battle of wills.
He knew, for once, that he had won, but there was no joy in this
victory.

The Smith family’s Sunday lunch
was the fish stew that had not been eaten on Friday night. The
roast chicken that they had been supposed to eat had been consumed
by Icarus and the Grey Man during their night picnic on the bench
in the park.

As Icarus and his mother
digested their desultory meal, he asked her why she was so offended
by bicycles, why she hated the idea of him riding one. After some
thought, she began: “It’s not about the bike. It’s about your
father – he used to ride a bicycle. For all I know, he still does.
You never saw your father, but he was beautiful, like one of those
Greek gods.

“When I met him I thought he had
fallen out of heaven for me. I fell for him straight away – I
really loved him, and I thought that he loved me too. He said he
did, and maybe that was true, I just don’t know. But as much as he
might have loved me, he loved his wretched bicycle more. Or at
least, he loved the freedom that it gave him.

“Every weekend he would climb on
that bike and set off for hours, riding into the countryside, up
and down hills, meeting other riders. And all the time, I would sit
at home, alone, waiting for him to return, so that I could make him
his tea, cook his food, wash his clothes, do whatever I could for
him.

“And then I fell pregnant with
you,” a smile flickered across her wan face. “I thought, this will
keep him at home. He will need to stay around and care for me, and
our child.”

She paused for a while,
collecting her thoughts. “I thought that a baby would keep him at
home, but it didn’t. If anything, it drove him away.”