The Accidental Cyclist (3 page)

But at the instant when gravity
appeared about to draw Icarus sideways, The Leader, the last of the
group to make his escape, gave the bike an ever-so-gentle shove, a
mere nudge, that was enough to set Icarus rolling gently down the
grassy slope. Eyes shut tight again, Icarus waited for the fall,
the crunching contact with concrete, but it did not come.

Slowly he opened his eyes.

I’m flying, he thought. I’m
flying, I’m moving, I’m riding a bicycle. Such a feeling of awe, of
wonderment, of pure joy ran through his veins that he was unable to
stop himself from releasing a whoop of delight. Icarus was pumped
up on adrenaline, a drug that he had never experienced before. And
he liked it. He liked it very much.

And that is how, quite by
accident, Icarus Smith, pursued by two portly, panting policemen,
found himself riding a bicycle for the first time in his life.

As Icarus became aware of what
was happening, he wondered if he was in a dream – or perhaps even a
nightmare? After all, he had spent most of his childhood listening
to his mother’s warnings about the dangers of cycling. Now he found
himself on a bicycle, and he didn’t know what to feel. His brain
was spinning faster than the bicycle’s wheels, and with every
rotation his emotion switched between fear and elation.

As we already know, Icarus had
studied his pile of pilfered magazines and books. He knew just
about everything that there is to know about bicycles. He could
discuss at length the merits of certain gear ratios, talk about the
advantages of tubular tyres, the development of the derailleur
gear-changing system. He knew how Marco Pantani had conquered Alp
d’Huez, how for nearly a decade Lance Armstrong had virtually owned
the Tour de France. He knew of Big Mig Indurain’s remarkable
eight-litre lung capacity that gave him his incredible
time-trialling ability, enabling him to win the Tour five times in
a row. The only thing that Icarus could truly not understand was
the ingestion of illicit substances – by cyclists or anyone else.
He had despaired as he read about Armstrong’s confession of doping.
He could not imagine taking any kind of drug, allowing it to take
hold of the body or mind. He wondered if the adrenalin that coursed
through his veins at this moment constituted an illicit substance.
He thought about it, and realised that he didn’t really care.

But all of that reading, all his
knowledge of the mechanics of cycling, his study of the mores and
the lore of the road, could not prepare Icarus for this moment.
Icarus was suddenly flying – well, he was riding a bicycle, but to
him it was as if he had grown a set of wings and was flying. He
shuddered momentarily at the thought, but quickly let it go as he
allowed the experience to take over, envelop him, cocoon him from
the rest of the world, which was flying by rapidly.

And so Icarus moved slowly,
almost regally, down the gentle grassy slope, rolling at probably
no more than seven or eight miles an hour. Behind him, and
unbeknown to him, the two policemen puffed and heaved, slowly
catching up to him. But then, just as they were close enough to
catch his proverbial coattails – had he been wearing such an
unusual garment, suitable only for the riding of a penny-farthing –
the gradient of the slope increased, and Icarus slowly picked up
speed, swiftly stretching beyond the reach of the law, whose long
arm appeared to be not quite long enough.

At the bottom of the hill was a
thick mass of rhododendrons. Icarus was aware that they were
approaching rapidly. He opened his eyes as the big, red blooms
loomed into view, closer and closer. He knew that the bike had
brakes, but how do you use them? He realised that he didn’t have a
clue. The magazines told you how to fix your brakes, how to replace
the component parts, but never did they explain how to use them.
What to most cyclists would be pure instinct, to Icarus became an
matter of blind terror. To add to his alarm, Icarus had been told
by his mother never to go near the bushes at the bottom of the
park. “Many small children have gone missing there,” she had
scolded him when he attempted to retrieve a missing tennis ball.
“If you go in there, you may never come out again.”

His mothers’ words were
remembered and forgotten in the moments that the red flowers became
so close that they went out of focus. Icarus shut his eyes again
and, inside his head, he let out a piercing scream.

The two policemen had given up
the chase the moment that Icarus had appeared to accelerate away
from them. They stood bent double, hands on knees, wheezing. They
had forgotten about Icarus, and the only thing they were trying to
catch now was their breath. The first policeman, glancing up, saw
the young fool on the bicycle sailing into the distance. It hadn’t
crossed their cloddish minds that Icarus had not been trying to
evade them. So they watched, breathless and open-mouthed, as Icarus
sailed down the hill and was slowly swallowed up by the
rhododendrons. A terrible shriek then burst forth from the
greenery, followed by several small rodents and a pair of mating
pigeons, all a’flutter. The policemen looked at one another, looked
back down the hill, then chased off, panting, to see what had
become of the missing miscreant.

Icarus, meanwhile, was unable to
move. His arms were pinned to his sides by sinuous tentacles. He
opened his eyes, but all he could see was a green blur. I have been
bad, he thought, and now I must be in hell. Although he did
consider that it looked rather green, from what he had read about
hell.

After the telling-off when he
had tried to retrieve the lost tennis ball, Icarus had looked up
the meaning of rhododendron – it came from
rhodos
, the Greek
for rose, and
dendron
, meaning tree. As he remained there,
trapped in the shrubbery, he remembered looking at the
encyclopaedia, and thought: a rose tree, but not a rose, and not a
tree. Thank goodness this one does not have any thorns, he
thought.

The rhododendron had seen the
boy careening down the hill, out of control. To save itself, and
the boy, the shrubbery had stretched out its branches to cushion
the impact, using its supple young shoots to absorb the blow. As
boy and bicycle nestled into its depths, the rhododendron wrapped
its branches round him, leaves licking the tender young flesh.

Nice, thought the rhododendron,
but then its tendrils tasted the bits of metal and rubber that
seemed to be attached to the boy. Yuck, it thought, and spat out
the whole lot.

Icarus found himself ejected
from the bush, dumped unceremoniously on the grass, his feet still
trapped, strapped tightly to the pedals. He lay back at an awkward
angle, and looked up at the sky. For a few moments he could see
clouds scurrying by, but soon the light was eclipsed by two dark
blue police helmets.

“Gotcha,” said the first
helmet.

“What he means to say,” said the
second helmet, slightly more grizzled than the first, “is that
you’re nicked. C’mon, on your feet.”

Icarus found that he could not
move – his feet were still held tight in the pedals, and the more
that he struggled, the more the straps tightened.

“Looks like we got him
red-handed,” said Helmet One.

“More like red-footed,” said
Helmet Two, laughing at his own cleverness.

“Come on, get up,” said Helmet
One again, “or we’ll have to charge you with resisting arrest, on
top of everything else we’ll have to charge you with.”

Icarus struggled, but could not
move. “I’m stuck,” he said, “I can’t move.”

“He’s stuck,” said Helmet Two.
“He can’t move. I suppose we’d better give him a hand.”

The two policemen took Icarus by
the arms and lifted him, bicycle and all, so that he was suspended
between the two of them, and began wheeling him down to the police
station.

“Sarge will be pleased,” said
Helmet One. “This one comes with the evidence attached.” Helmet Two
laughed at his colleague’s humour. “Good one,” he said.

Icarus’s mind was still in
confusion – he could still feel the rush of wind past his face, the
embrace of the rhododendron, and his sudden ejection, to find
himself deposited on the grass.

“Did you rescue me?” he asked
the two helmets.

“Er, I suppose so, in a manner
of speaking,” said Helmet One.

“Most of your lot who disappear
into those bushes never comes out again,” said Helmet Two.

Icarus shuddered. He knew why.
He remembered the warning about lost tennis balls (he had never
been allowed the rough and tumble of football).

Icarus turned to Helmet One and
said: “Well, I thank you, sir, for saving me and,” turning to
Helmet Two, “I thank you too. Are you taking me home?”

The two helmets were puzzled.
Most of the young criminals that they dealt with were rude, violent
and abusive, and used every trick in the book to try to escape.
This young felon was polite, compliant, even, er, quite pleasant.
He clearly had never even seen the book, let alone tried any tricks
from it. Unless …

“’Ere, boy, what’s your game?”
Helmet One asked.

“Tennis, sir,” said Icarus.
“Mother won’t allow me to play football, and I find a cricket ball
rather hard. So she and I play tennis every Saturday
afternoon.”

“Is ’e being funny?” Helmet One
asked Helmet Two.

“This’ll clear things up,” said
Helmet Two, and with a sweep of the arm he gave Icarus a thump on
the side of the head. Icarus slumped forward, senseless. The two
helmets simply tightened their grip on his arms and continued
wheeling him down to the police station.

When Icarus came to he found
that he had been detached from the Condor Paris Galibier. He was
lying on the top of a bunk bed in a room with dark green walls. He
wondered if he was in hospital. He had never been in hospital, only
to the dentist’s, and the walls there had been of a similar drab
shade.

Icarus lay still. His head and
neck ached from Helmet Two’s blow. He looked about, moving only his
eyes. Above his head, high up, was a naked light bulb; on one wall,
just behind his head, was a barred window; and down there, beyond
his feet, was a large metal door, apparently shut tight. To his
right he could make out another bunk bed against the opposite
wall.

Icarus was parched, and his head
throbbed terribly. He had never been ill, nor known such pain, and
in these unfamiliar surroundings he did not know what to do.
Finally he decided to call for a nurse, because surely he was in
hospital, and it was what he had seen done on the television, on
one of the rare occasions when his mother had allowed him to
watch.

“Nurse,” he called out, quite
softly. He waited for some response, but none came, so he called
out again, slightly louder.

A few moments later he heard a
noise. A small flap in the metal door slid open and, even from his
lying position, he recognised Helmet Two’s eyes. “You being funny?”
the voice thundered through the flap. “Do I look like a bleeding
nurse?”

Icarus decided that he did not,
so said nothing. The flap snapped shut.

“Wait,” cried Icarus.

The eyes appeared again. “Wait?
Well, what?”

“I’m thirsty,” said Icarus,
almost in a whimper.

“In the corner,” said the voice,
the curtness punctuated by the snap of the flap.

Slowly Icarus rolled over. In
the corner was a basin with a single tap, and a low-level
stainless-steel lavatory.

Icarus sat up slowly. His spine
seemed to be trying to hammer its way into the back of his skull.
He shook his head, trying to clear it, and stood up. His legs were
unsteady, but he managed to make his way to the basin. He looked at
the single tap for a moment, wondering whether it was hot or cold,
then drank anyway, deeply. For a few moments longer he stood over
the basin, before he cupped his hands and filled them with water,
and washed his face. The coolness eased the throbbing. Carefully he
felt his face. The right side was swollen and very tender to the
touch. He could not remember why.

He returned to the bed and sat
down, staring at his feet. He noticed that the laces from his shoes
were missing. He wondered, absent-mindedly, what he might have done
with them, and what his mother might say about that.

Icarus sat there for a while in
a vague trance, staring vacantly at his feet. Time, and the
quantity of water that he had consumed, worked their course and
Icarus became aware of the pressure on his bladder.

He looked at the lavatory in the
corner – it was dirty and cold, like those he had seen in public
places, and which his mother had told him never to use. “They’re
full of germs and diseases,” she would tell him. “If you need to
go, go home, where you know it is always clean.”

There must be a clean one
somewhere, he thought, so he stood up and walked across the room to
the metal door. At first touch it seemed shut tight, but Icarus
realised how thick and heavy it was, a bit like a policeman, so he
leant his shoulder against it and pushed. Slowly the heavy door
opened, moving silently on well-oiled hinges, and Icarus went out
into a dark corridor lined with similar iron doors. At one end was
a wall with a small barred window like the one in his room, and at
the other there was a barred gate.

He walked up to it, pushed it
open quite easily, and went through, to find himself in a reception
area. Behind a counter to one side was the biggest man that Icarus
had ever seen. He had a round smooth head placed firmly onto a
round, wobbly body, with no neck in between. Somehow his blue tie
and the ends of his off-white collar found their way out into the
light. He looked up and saw Icarus.

“What the hell,” said Mr
Wobbly.

“I was just looking for the
lavatory,” said Icarus.