The Accidental Cyclist (5 page)

“We have a few questions,
ma’am,” said the sergeant, clearing his throat again.

“Of course,” the tearful woman
responded. Then to her son: “Oh Icky,” (the boy winced) “Icky, I’m
just so relieved that you’re alright. I came home and you weren‘t
there. I was so worried – you were gone hours.”

“Hours, madam?” asked the
sergeant. “I thought you said he was missing for days.”

“Hours, days, I don’t know
sergeant,” Mrs Smith fluttered tearful eyelashes at the big man.
“He was missing for so long that I was all confused and upset. I
truly don’t know how long it was, or what I said.”

The sergeant led Icarus and Mrs
Smith back to the interview room, where Mr Bono was still sitting,
sprawled in front of his papers. The moment he saw Mrs Smith he
leapt to his feet and doffed the hat that he wasn’t wearing. He
then tussled with the big sergeant as the two of them tried to help
Mrs Smith into a chair. The sergeant won, being larger by far than
the squat lawyer. After a few general questions, all addressed to
and answered by the simpering Mrs Smith, the sergeant raised the
delicate question about the name of the boy’s father, and his
whereabouts.

Icarus, who was starting to feel
a bit left out of the proceedings, interjected: “My father is Ded
…”

At which moment Mrs Smith shot
the boy an unusually steely glance that seemed to silence him, and
interjected: “The boy’s father … (sniff) he’s, well, he’s no longer
with us, he’s gone, departed.” Mrs Smith was an avid crossword
puzzler, and every time she wished to emphasise a point, she would
find an approximate word for the one she wanted, then add a
sprinkling of synonyms as if homing in on the right one.

Mrs Smith, in spite of her
unassuming, unprepossessing appearance, had learnt to live by her
wits, and she was determined not to lose the sympathy of these two
pillars of the justice system by being recognised as an unmarried
mother who had been jilted, deserted, abandoned by the father of
her child.

“Oh,” frowned the sergeant,
smiling inwardly, “oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” (No, he wasn’t.)
“Has he been … gone long?”

“He, um, he left us a few months
before the boy was born,” Mrs Smith said, choosing her words
carefully.

“Oh dear,” Mr Bono added, keen
to get in on the sympathy act, “that must have been very
painful.”

“Oh, he just slipped away from
us quietly,” said Mrs Smith, “I don’t believe that he felt a thing
…”

“I mean, it must have been
painful for the two of you.”

“Well, the boy, poor, poor
Icky,” (poor Icky winced again, and felt a bit sicky) “poor Icky
never knew him. I have been heart-broken ever since. At least I’ve
had you” – she looked at Icarus – “for comfort. What a blessing you
have been.”

The sergeant squirmed in his
seat. As much as he admired the delicacy of the gentle Mrs Smith,
there was business to be done and this conversation was not heading
in the right direction. He cleared his throat again: “Now, about
this bicycle …”

“Oh Icarus,” gasped Mrs Smith,
“you haven’t been riding a bicycle, have you?” She laid particular
emphasis on the words riding, and bicycle, as if they were dirty
words. “Just what have I told you …”

“He wasn’t just riding the
bicycle, ma’am, he appears to have stolen it. And a very expensive
bicycle it was, too.”

“Oh Icarus, can this be true? No
sergeant, I refuse to believe that. Not my Icky, he would never,
not after all that I told him about bicycles.” Her voice trailed
away.

“I’m afraid, ma’am, that the
evidence is incontrovertible. Your son was caught red-handed,
attached, in fact, to the object in question. We got him banged to
rights, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

Mrs Smith did not pardon the
expression, because she had never been privy to daytime television
repeats. “Well, then, what is to be done?”

“I’m afraid he’ll have to appear
before the, er, magistrate” – the sergeant managed to refrain from
saying go up before the beak – “and it will be for the court to
decide.”

Icarus was allowed to go home
with his mother on her assurance that she would keep him out of the
park. Oh, and on the added condition that the sergeant could call
on them at any time to check up on Icarus, and see that he was
behaving. Mr Bono felt compelled to say that, as Icarus’s attorney,
he too should be able to visit should further briefing become
necessary. Mrs Smith smiled and said she would be delighted if they
should choose to call, although in truth she wasn’t. And so Icarus
was released into his mother’s custody – a place, he believed, he
had never left. As they walked out of the police station Icarus
looked up at the sky, studying it as would a man who had been
incarcerated for many a year. He saw that the sky had clouded over
and a summer thunderstorm was threatening.

“Why did you tell them that my
father is dead?” Icarus asked of his mother.

“I didn’t say that he was dead,”
she replied. “I simply said that he had departed, left us ...”

“You implied that he was dead. I
don’t think that was right.”

“You’ll understand when you’re
older.”

“You always say that. Well, I am
older – old enough to be arrested.”

The meek and mild Mrs Smith gave
Icarus a sudden dark look and lightning seemed to flash in her
eyes, making Icarus decide that he should argue no further. The
flash seemed to be followed by a rumble of thunder, which certainly
didn’t come from Mrs Smith. Indeed, the rumble came from the
heavens above. Icarus and his mother were still three blocks from
home when the clouds spilled over and by the time they reached home
they were totally drenched from the sudden shower.

At this juncture we find
ourselves standing in another shower, this time with a strange man.
This shower is not a shower of rain. Rather, we are in the bathroom
in a small flat in Sheffield. The man has just finished shampooing
his hair – a thick, curly mop, basalt black with just a few flecks
of grey at the temples – and as the shower rinses the suds away,
his eyes follow the soapy rivulets that course down his
still-supple body. (Please, madam, avert your eyes.)

We have not yet met this man,
but we have heard something about him, so let me introduce him.
Please meet Dedalus Christodoulou, long-absent but very-much-alive
father of Icarus.

Why, you may well wonder, are we
in the shower with him? Why have we travelled so far from our young
hero and his small, insular world. Well, we are here because Fate
has played a trick on all concerned – on Icarus, on Dedalus, and on
you, the reader. And even on the author, because he certainly did
not plan on coming to this place. But here we are, all cramped
together into this tiny shower cubicle, so let’s just get on with
it.

Fate, you must understand, is a
fickle mistress. She plays games with us, she toys with us, tosses
us about just as a child throws around its playthings. In such an
apparently haphazard process it is difficult for us to see how Fate
has such a hold on our lives. But she does, leading us where she
thinks we should go, taking us to places that we had not planned on
visiting (especially not this cramped bathroom). That is true even
for Icarus – in fact, especially for Icarus. You see, it was not
Chance that put Icarus on that Condor, the giant bird whose wings
would fly him to freedom (even though at this point it might seem
to him like anything but freedom), it was Fate that put him there.
Contrary to our earlier supposition that Icarus would never be
inspired to fly because of the absence of a father, it was, in
fact, a direct result of Dedalus’s actions that Icarus made his
first, fundamental flight.

We can’t blame Fate alone for
that. Fate was simply acting on the instructions of Predestination.
You see, when each one of us is given our name, we are given the
responsibility of living up to that name. That is what
predetermines our lives. Some names, like John or Jill or Jeremiah,
are easy to live up to. Others, like Absalom or Michelangelo or
Zachariah, can be very difficult. And if you want a problem child,
just call it Napoleon, or Caligula, or Boadicea. That way, you’re
just asking for trouble, I can assure you.

When two people have been named
in association with one another, the responsibility of living up to
those coupled names multiplies exponentially – just think of Antony
and Cleopatra, Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, Tom and Jerry.
So for Dedalus and Icarus, there is no escaping the historical
responsibility of their famous names, mythical though they might
be, because Fate, History and Predestination have all ordained that
their lives are to have some interaction, however distant, however
seemingly coincidental, and Fate knows this. And that is why Fate
has taken us back in time, just a few months, and a few hundred
miles north of Icarus’s home, to this very moment, in this cramped
shower, where Dedalus is soon to have a eureka moment. Yes, yes,
yes, I know, Archimedes had his eureka moment in a bathtub, but
this small flat doesn’t have a bath, so let’s just get back to the
shower, and to Dedalus as he begins to formulate the momentous
decision that will precipitate Icarus’s very first bicycle
ride.

So where are we? Oh, yes, the
suds. Dedalus watches the suds running down his naked, olive,
muscled torso (oh, madam, look if you must) and thinks: “Not a bad
body for a man who’s almost 50.” He is feeling quite pleased with
himself, until suddenly his mind becomes stuck not on his physical
figure, but on the numerical figure that soon he will be: 50. No,
he thinks, not 50? I’m not ready to be 50. That’s old, and I’m not
yet ready to be old. For a few moments his mind goes blank, unable
to picture himself in old age. The shower continues to beat down on
his scalp, gently massaging his brain back into action.

What am I to do? he thinks.
Dedalus, you see, is not a man that we would call accomplished. He
is dexterous, certainly, he has certain skills, especially where
women are concerned. Unlike his son he does not have any, what did
we call them, oh yes, talents. And unlike Icarus and the Grey Man,
he cannot simply disappear at will (although I believe that Mrs
Smith wouldn’t agree), otherwise I’m sure that he would fade from
our sight right now, should he know that we were here with him in
the shower. He has not that knowledge, nor that talent, so he
continues to wash himself as he wonders: what am I to do?

His life in Sheffield isn’t bad.
He is single – again – and has no dependents that he would lay
claim to – or, more importantly, any who would lay claim to him. He
has a couple of girlfriends, nothing too serious, nothing too
casual. His employment at the steelworks is much what he expected
it to be, hard and grim, but it pays good money, and he has managed
to set aside a small sum. The biggest perk of his job as a welder
is that he has been able to use what skill he has to embark on a
private project, to make something that he would not otherwise have
the wherewithal to achieve – he constructed his own perfect copy of
the beloved Condor Paris Galibier that he had bought 16 years ago,
and which was stolen soon after he bought it.

Aaah, he remembers, that Condor
was such a beauty. What a bike. It’s a pity that Wanda never saw
it. She would have both loved it and hated it. And so Dedalus finds
himself thinking about Wanda Smith, the young woman that he had
persuaded to allow him to take for a ride on his bike. She would
never have been able to sit on the Condor’s crossbar, he thinks
now, because it has no crossbar.

A shiver runs through him –
perhaps his shower has gone cold for a moment – and he realises
that he has not thought of Wanda Smith for some time. He feels bad
about that, because once she was the love of his life, and he had
expected that he would always be thinking of her, longing for her.
I gave her my heart, he used to tell himself, even though she may
not know it. And that, he believes, is why he has never been able
to remain faithful to any woman ever since.

He muses. I wonder what the baby
was: boy or girl? I hope it was a girl. I love girls, they grow up
into such beautiful creatures. His feelings of guilt, although no
longer as strong as they were, just don’t seem to pass. I suppose I
shouldn’t have left her like that. But I just felt so bad. I
promised her a washing machine, and instead I bought a bicycle,
another bicycle, a beautiful bicycle that I didn’t really need. And
I just felt so guilty that I couldn’t face her right then. And then
I went to buy her flowers to say sorry, and I left the bike
unlocked outside the florists, and the bike was stolen. And the
longer I stayed away, the harder it was to return. I suppose I’m
really a cad, Dedalus muses. Then he wonders, is there a word in
Greek for “cad”? Although he seldom uses the language these days,
even when visiting the Greek cafe near the steelworks, it is still
ingrained in his consciousness. “Cad”, he wonders, that’s a
strange, English word, I’m sure that no other nation uses such a
foppish word. In Greek the nearest word that he can think of is
Παλιοτόμαρο, which really means villain, or scallywag, or something
like that. No, he decides, the Greeks certainly have no word for
“cad”. But then, maybe they don’t need it. Perhaps they are all
cads, because they are all so fickle and they all love women so
much, so there is no reason to differentiate one Greek man from
another.

He laughs softly, more at
himself than at his joke, and as he laughs he watches the water
pouring down his body, and he notices his belly wobbling slightly.
He rubs his hand across his stomach, up and down, then sideways,
and he feels the beginnings of love handles at his waist. I need
more exercise, he thinks. Less beer, less fish and chips, more
exercise. If I can get back to a lovely Greek diet I’ll lose this
extra weight and I’ll never get old.