The Accidental Cyclist (22 page)

Down Ludgate Hill a number 58
bus passed the riders, then cut in sharply to pick up a passenger.
Icarus and the Grey Man braked and, cursing the driver, weaved
around the red hulk and were brought to a halt by the lights at the
Farringdon Road junction. The road was too busy to jump the lights,
much to Icarus’s relief, so they waited, chests heaving, sweat
beading their brows.

The red light gave the offending
number 58 bus time to catch up with them. As the lights turned
green the bus jerked forward, but the Grey Man, with Icarus
straining every sinew to stay with him, accelerated ahead, so that
they had the racing line as they entered the chicane at the start
of Fleet Street, leaving the annoyed bus driver hooting angrily at
them. The Grey Man emitted a choice selection of invective, all of
which the driver could not hear – and which Icarus certainly had
never heard before – and then stood on the pedals for the grind up
the hill for the final half mile. Behind him Icarus was feeling the
pace. A band of steel seemed to be forcing all the air out of his
lungs, his thighs were screaming and refusing to pump any longer,
and as his head thumped a red mist appeared before his eyes. He
knew their destination was near, but he could no longer hold on to
the Grey Man’s rear wheel. Icarus was forced to give up the race,
but he did not stop until he reached the Law Courts.

He was only seconds behind the
Grey Man, and he cut across the traffic on The Strand, forcing his
way between pedestrians and onto the pavement outside the court
buildings. The Grey Man and his parcel had disappeared inside the
building, his bike abandoned in the forecourt, its front wheel
still spinning. Icarus flung his bike down next to the Grey Man’s
and sat on the court steps, gasping for air. His legs had suddenly
gone numb, and his head was throbbing, as if it was ready to burst.
The band around his chest was slowly loosening, and as he drew
oxygen deep into his lungs his head began to clear.

Five minutes later – longer than
it had taken them to complete their ride, the Grey Man reappeared
and sat down next to Icarus. He too was breathing too heavily to
speak. Instead, he put one hand on Icarus’s shoulder and held it
there, a kind of congratulation, a gesture of solidarity. And of
comfort.

Icarus tried to speak, but could
not. Three times he started before finally finding the breath to
stammer: “What … what was that … that it was so urgent? A stay of
execution, or something?”

The Grey Man burst out laughing,
which was rather difficult, not having sufficient air in his lungs.
Finally he managed to make a strangled sound that sounded to Icarus
like “pshaaaa.”

“What?” Icarus asked, more with
his eyes than his mouth.

The Grey Man was laughing so
much that Icarus thought he might be about to expire. Finally, when
he was able to speak, he spluttered: “You’ve been watching too many
American movies. It was pizza. Every Friday afternoon a couple of
lawyers there order pizza for lunch – and they’re really fussy.
They insist that they get their pizza while it’s hot.”

You have surely heard the old
adage: you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your
family. Well, that’s not strictly true. First, in this age of
fickleness, it has become almost natural to choose to reject
family. Just look at our three protagonists sitting in the basement
of Mrs Smith’s flat – one has rejected his family, the other two
have been rejected by one of their parents. Statistically that
might not be a representative breakdown of familial life in England
right now, but anecdotally it does have a bearing on the way we
live today.

Second, let us look at the bit
about choosing our friends. For some bright modern social
butterflies that flit from one beautiful clique to another,
touching the lives of so many and affecting none, that might well
be true. But that is not the norm. Let us go back to the three
disparate characters who spend their evenings together in the
basement of Icarus’s flat. What do we have?

1. The only child whose single
mother has over-protected him, hidden him from the world and never
allowed him to have friends.

2. A middle-aged man who has
rejected his wife and children, run away from his problems, dropped
out of life and spent time on the road. He hits the bottle each
time he is faced with responsibility.

3. A tearaway boy who has been
thrown out by his selfish mother, a boy who spurns all authority
and steals so that he will be accepted by his reprobate peers.

Look at them. How could three
such disparate characters, so unalike, so unsociable, choose to
become friends? The answer is: they don’t choose. They became
friends because, like so many others in this world, they have no
one else to turn to, no one to cling to. They became friends
because they find a common bond, a common need. That is not choice,
it is necessity. You see, necessity, apart from being the mother of
invention, is also the progenitor of fellowship, which is what
these three characters found in that basement. They found one
common interest – bicycles – and around that interest, that credo,
they wrapped their beliefs. At the altar of the velocipede they
laid their wishes and hopes and dreams, and by means of a common
language and belief they opened their hearts and minds to one
another, sometimes out loud but often, as men are wont to do,
simply through their shared silence. Thus a brotherhood was born,
even if they did not realise it.

It came as no surprise when,
one cold and miserable winter’s night, Icarus announced that they
needed some common purpose, some goal. What Icarus proposed was a
pilgrimage. Not just any pilgrimage but – since he was at that time
reading another version of the Tommy Simpson story – a journey to
the slopes of Mont Ventoux, where that rider had died during the
1967 Tour de France. The Grey Man and The Leader expressed no
surprise that such a suggestion had been made – it seemed, quite
simply, the natural thing to do.

“When would be a good time to
go?” Icarus asked the others.

“Summer,” said the Grey Man, who
seemed to know about these things. “It can only be in summer.
That’s when the Tour de France takes place.”

“I could fit panniers to your
bikes,” The Leader offered. It seemed accepted that only Icarus and
the Grey Man would undertake the pilgrimage. Somehow The Leader
seemed to know that he wouldn’t be taking part in such an
expedition, but still he needed to offer what he could. He was the
backroom boy, the mechanic, while Icarus and the Grey Man were the
athletes, the men of action.

At night after work the three
would troop down to the basement where they would haul out old maps
of France and chart intricate routes. Other nights they would pore
over guide books. They drew extensive lists of what they would
need, where they would stay, how much it would cost.

It was a long, hard winter and
the planning seemed to become more complicated and detailed as time
passed. By February the pilgrimage had developed into a major
assault on Europe – and Icarus realised that it would probably
never happen. The planning, the process, had become an end in
itself. It kept the three of them together. It gave them a sense of
purpose. Icarus told the others nothing of his thoughts, and he
allowed the plans to develop and inflate in their inexorable
way.

The realisation that the project
was probably no more than academic gave Icarus the confidence to
tell his mother about it. He had not exactly planned to tell her,
but one night, as he returned from the basement and was about to go
to bed, Mrs Smith asked: “What is it that you’re all conspiring
down there every night? You seem to spend hours down there
engrossed in whatever it is you’re doing.”

“We’re planning a journey,
Mother. A pilgrimage,” Icarus had replied.

“A pilgrimage,” said Mrs Smith,
visibly alarmed. “Where to? Canterbury?” Mrs Smith had never read
Chaucer, but she knew that the Canterbury Tales were all about the
pilgrims who journeyed to that place. That was the only possible
place where they could want to journey to.

“No,” said Icarus, “we’re going
to France, to the spot where Tommy Simpson died on Mont
Ventoux.”

“Who is Tommy Simpson? And what
on earth is a montvontoo?” Mrs Smith envisioned some kind of
monstrous foreign torture machine.

“Mont Ventoux is a mountain in
the middle of France. Tommy Simpson was a British cyclist who died
during the Tour de France while climbing the mountain.”

“It sounds dangerous. You could
be injured, killed, maimed.”

“No, it’s not dangerous. Not at
all.”

“But this Tommy chap died while
doing it.”

“I know, but he was racing, and
he took drugs, and he just didn’t know how to stop himself.”

“Didn’t he have brakes?”

Icarus ignored this question.
“Don’t fret so, Mother. It’s just a project – something to do to
pass the time when it’s so horrid outside. We’ll probably never get
around to it. It’s just something to think about to help us get
through the winter months.”

Mrs Smith studied her son as he
sat at the kitchen table nursing his cup of tea. Something nagged
at her as she looked at him, but she could not quite put her finger
on it. She stared harder, until she almost lost focus and her eyes
began to water. The teary eyes cast Icarus into a kind of soft
focus, so that his outline became blurred. And that was when she
realised what it was. Icarus was no longer that soft, plump,
pampered boy that she had clung to for so many years. He had
hardened, toughened up. Without her noticing, her son had become a
man. A nice-looking man, with high cheekbones, square jaw, not at
all unlike his father, she thought. And then the watery eyes
dissolved into real tears that rolled silently down her cheeks.

Mrs Smith turned to the sink and
picked up a tea towel and buried her face. A few minutes later, by
the time she regained her composure, she heard Icarus put his cup
down and push his chair back. She turned to say goodnight. Icarus
gave her a quick hug and kissed her on the top of her head, just as
his father had once done. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll probably
never get further than the bottom of the road.”

“As long as you’re sure of
that,” she said. But she did not seem too sure of that.

The next day, during his lunch
break, Icarus went to the post office to begin his application for
a passport.

Icarus welcomed the spring. In
the park across the road from the flat the snowdrops drooped and
the crocuses were thrust aside by the mightier daffodils, which
proudly, colourfully announced that winter was no more. Icarus felt
brighter than he had in months – perhaps it was because he thought
less often of Jo, perhaps it was just the weather. Whatever it was,
it alarmed Mrs Smith, who, we know, was easily alarmed. While she
was pleased to see that the sparkle had returned to Icarus’s eye,
she was also perturbed by his new-found confidence and
independence.

The Leader, on the other hand,
had not realised that it was spring. That is, the changing season
had not registered until he was rudely awakened one Sunday morning.
“Come on, get up,” Icarus said as he shook The Leader’s shoulder.
“It’s time to go.”

The Leader cast his weary clock
a sideways glance, and then tried to shut eyes again. “But it’s
only seven o’clock. We agreed to ride at eight.”

“It is eight, silly,” said
Icarus. “The clocks went forward last night, so we lost an
hour.”

“Lost an hour?” The Leader
asked. “How the hell did we do that? I’ve wasted time before now,
but I’ve never lost it.”

“It happens every year. The last
Sunday in March, when the clocks go forward.”

“I know that, it’s just that I
didn’t know that it was happening last night.”

“It’s called daylight
saving.”

“You lose an hour, and call it a
saving.”

“You know exactly what it is,”
said Icarus. “Come on, we’ve got to get going. The old man will be
waiting.”

And the “Old Man” was waiting,
although if he had heard himself referred to in such terms, he
surely would not have waited. “Hurry up,” he told his two
straggling friends. “We don’t want to waste such a beautiful day
catching up on our beauty sleep.”

“Where are we going today?”
asked Icarus.

“We’ll just take a gentle ride
out to Richmond Park,” said the Grey Man.

“Richmond Park,” said The
Leader. “Where on earth is that?”

“It’s just the other side of
London. Perfect ride for a day like today.”

“The other side of London,” said
The Leader, who was rapidly losing enthusiasm for this ride. “How
long is that gonna take us?”

“Oh, just a couple of hours, if
we don’t hang about talking.”

“What, two whole hours,” said
The Leader, exasperated.

“Well, two hours there, and two
more back.”

“And to think, I could still be
sleeping,” The Leader groaned as they pedalled off down the High
Street.

There is nothing more beautiful
than being on a bicycle when the sun is shining, and the sky is
such a wonderfully deep blue that you feel you could dive into it
and swim all the way to heaven, Icarus mused as the trio sped along
the Embankment. Today the smiling sun squinted at Icarus, seeming
to invite him to join it on its journey across the sky. So bright,
so wonderful was the day that as our three companions pedalled
alongside the sulky Thames its usual muddy brown seemed to dissolve
into more of a murky blue. Along the way they passed clutches of
cyclists, some lithely clothed in Lycra, on sleek, well-tuned
racing machines. Others were in baggy shorts and flapping T-shirts
on full-suspension mountain bicycles with enough hydraulics to
drive a steam locomotive.