Box Hill

by Adam Mars-Jones

  And then while he was still hammering away, and we were both getting into a rhythm, would you believe it, a car pulled up to ask directions. I didn’t want to get into the rhythm, but the rhythm was there. The man was driving and the woman was frowning as she held the map up in front of her. Car drivers seem to think bikers know every destination, or maybe it’s just that there aren’t windows to give bikers a bit of privacy. It must be even worse now that every other biker’s a despatch rider, and all the others are supposed to know where every little alleyway is, by magic.

  Ray didn’t pull out of me, but he stopped pushing long enough to set them on the right road, and they moved off. But then they only went a few yards, either because the lady had done a double take and realised what had been in front of her eyes, or because the gentleman put two and two together. From where the car is now we aren’t screened, and Ray twists me round so there can be no doubt, and he starts in on me again, and he shouts, ‘Do you want to be after me with him, madam?’ Always polite. Most polite when being outrageous. And this time they don’t hang around. Normally Ray didn’t come inside me, but that time he did. Before the Aids, nobody worried about where come went or didn’t go, but there was usually a special reason for Ray to come inside me. He’d be making a point of some kind. Mischief or angry glee. Coming with a shout.

  So I don’t know what Ray would have done when the Aids came along. Anyone who told him what to do was taking their life in their hands, and yet safety was almost an obsession with him. For all the good it did him on the bike. Anything he cared about was an obsession with him. I’m sure he’d have called it the Aids, though, like I do. He cared about details, and it’s logical. The S in Aids stands for syndrome, and you wouldn’t say Freddie Mercury died of syndrome, would you? The syndrome. Therefore, the Aids.

  The fact is, I can’t see Ray changing his ways and using condoms, and I can’t see him carrying on as before. I dare say he’d never bought a condom in his life, but maybe he would have started. Men who went with men didn’t buy condoms in those days, but there’s always a first time, for anyone. I try so hard to see it happening, and still I can’t.

  I feel guilty that I can’t follow him along either of those paths to the present day. It’s as if by not being able to imagine him dealing with the next set of changes, somehow I consent to his being dead, and he falls back into the past forever. It’s not quite that May 1981 was the right time for him to die. More that it was nearly the last time he could live the life he’d chosen, the one he shared with me.

  I don’t even know whether the club carried on in some form. Some much muted form. I planned never to be on a motorcycle again, and after that day Box Hill was the last place on earth that I wanted to visit. My sense of it was that Ray was indispensable, that for all practical purposes he was the club, but the surviving members may have decided to try and make a go of it. If they did, it will have been Kevin who missed me most. If anyone missed me at all. After I stopped calling the Steves, naturally enough I lost touch. And then I had my preoccupations: Mum and Dad, and how things were going with them. How to give Mum some time off, now that Dad had stopped seeing his children as any sort of substitute for her, however temporary.

  Sometimes there was something infuriating about the way Mum coped. She wouldn’t allow herself to go to a film on her own (Dad wouldn’t go), or even go shopping except when there was nothing in the house and I wasn’t free, but she would run next door, which was just as far away in Dad’s eyes, to do things for Marjorie.

  Typical Mum. Her husband turns into a complete dependant and what does she do? She finds someone else who needs looking after. Marjorie next door is housebound by now and not far from blind, so Mum decides to take care of her too. Which would be fine, except that Marjorie is very ‘particular’, and if you’re trying to help her out you have to do it her way.

  She’d rap on her kitchen window with her stick, and Mum would go round to see what it was she wanted. It was worse if Mum wasn’t in earshot, or couldn’t come right away. First Marjorie would rap softly with the rubber tip, then she’d make a bit more noise. And after five minutes she’d turn the cane round and rap sharply on the glass with its handle.

  It was absurd. Mum ended up cooking separate meals for Marjorie because she was so fussy — or meals just different enough to take trouble. Same dish, different recipe. Marjorie couldn’t or wouldn’t eat onions (couldn’t was her version), so Mum would make a separate little dish of stew for her. I like plain food myself, but stew without onions isn’t worth the eating.

  Marjorie wouldn’t eat trifle, not as a finished thing. She liked everything that went into it, but something about trifle all mixed together turned her stomach. The oozing into each other of cream and juice. So Mum laid everything out side by side for Marjorie on little dishes: sponge, fruit, custard and cream. It was like a diagram of trifle. An exploded drawing of trifle. And Mum took it all next door on a tray.

  It offended me that Mum let herself be used like that, but that was how she wanted it. I suppose some of my annoyance was selfish, on days when Marjorie kept banging on her kitchen window and I was trying to catch up on kip after a late turn.

  At least I had that to think of. My new job. My career as a driver.

  Big Steve got in touch a couple of years back. He’d kept Mum and Dad’s number, and he didn’t seem too surprised that I was still there. I didn’t tell him then that more had changed than he might think: my little Dad had died, and so a few months later had Marjorie the neighbour. In her will she left her little house to Mum, for looking after her so well and so long. Only fair. It’s more of a cottage than a house, really.

  So Mum moved next door, and she sold the old house to me. To be exact: me and Simon, a mate from work. We went half and half on the mortgage. That way Mum had a bit of a nest egg, and can take holidays more or less when she wants to. The sun does her arthritis a lot of good. If she goes somewhere like Portugal she can forget to bring her cane with her from the hotel and not even notice.

  So it was the same Isleworth number that Big Steve called — only the prefix had changed — but I was now the subscriber. Co-subscriber. I try to make Simon feel that our shares are really equal, even if my memories of the house go all the way back.

  Once I’d got over my surprise, of course, I started pestering him all over again. I couldn’t help wondering if a time period for keeping Ray’s secret had passed, fifteen years or so, or if someone who was being protected had died, if that was what it was all about, so secrecy no longer mattered. Big Steve made me promise not to ask again, or he wouldn’t call round the next weekend, which was what he was planning. I gave it one last try. ‘How can it possibly matter after all this time?’ I asked, but the answer was the same one it always was. A promise is a promise.

  I gave my word that I’d control myself and not bother him with pointless questions, just to be sure he’d come.

  Since the last time I’d seen him, Big Steve had gained weight and lost hair. Frankly, he was bloated and bald, but that’s just what happens. He rolled up on a Honda Gold Wing. Ray wouldn’t have been quite so forgiving about that.

  Big Steve gave me news of the group that had been. Mark had died, but in a bike crash. It’s funny, when Steve told me that, I thought ‘natural causes’. Though there’s nothing natural about a motorcycle crash. A motorcycle crash is an artificial death, but diseases are part of nature. Still, up to that time at least, the Aids hadn’t touched them.

  Before he left, he was keen to show off the Gold Wing. He had one of those cushions made of wooden beads — the taxi driver’s friend — fastened to the saddle. The bike had heated hand-grips and a reverse gear. It was embarrassing. I mean, it wasn’t that he had some great obligation to stick with British iron, though that much-loved make Triumph has made a bit of a comeback. Thanks to Japanese technology and a sophisticated computerised assembly line you can get custom features at a standard price.r />
  I haven’t climbed on a bike since 1981, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to read the magazines once in a while.

  But if Big Steve wanted to stay on two wheels, he had to have been able to do better than a Gold Wing. It’s a fat smug novelty bike — all it needs to top it off is a dog in the top box wearing a scarf, sunglasses and its own little helmet. I mean, if you want to retire from biking while still technically riding a motorcycle, you get yourself a BMW. That’s something everybody knows.

  All very rich, I know, coming from someone like me. Someone who’s never driven anything larger than a bicycle, unless you count Tube trains.

  People seem to think it’s preposterous that I should be in charge of an Underground train on a daily basis when I don’t have a driving licence. To which I say: It’s a completely different set of skills. No-one ever needed to put a Tube train through a three-point turn. And in fact one of my workmates, mentioning no names, lost his licence for drinking, but he’s still legal driving a train. It tickles me to talk about my years ‘on the road’, which is what we always call it, but I enjoy being a little misleading. Every trade has its quirky way of describing things.

  First question I ask, if I meet another driver, is ‘Which line?’ Which line does he drive. And it’s the first thing he wants to know about me. It sounds a neutral thing to be asking, but it’s as loaded as questions get. There’s a tribal thing involved. All tunnels aren’t alike, in fact some of them aren’t exactly tunnels. So if I meet another driver away from work, he asks me which line and I say, ‘Circle’, he knows I don’t go down deep. And if I ask him and he says ‘District’, then we can both relax and consider the possibility of a real conversation. Even Stevens. But if he says, ‘Central’, then we’re just going to circle around each other endlessly, bristling. Because I know the dismissive phrase that’s on the tip of his tongue.

  Okay, the Circle Line isn’t like a coal mine, but we don’t just scratch the surface. The gauge of the track is the same, but the bodies of our coaches are actually wider. They’re serious trains.

  Still, what he’s thinking, and I know he’s thinking it, is: that’s not a Tube, that’s a cut-and-cover. Where they just sank in a rail bed and clapped a roof on it. Not exactly a great technical achievement. Deep-tunnel drivers can be mean-spirited little snobs.

  So I’m thinking: We’re on what was the world’s first underground railway. Dug by hand, just think of that, before the invention of the Greathead Shield took the terrible risk and labour out of it. And he’s thinking: That’s not a tunnel. That’s a trench with a lid.

  It would be much easier for me to strike up a friendship with a bus driver, or conductor, or a ticket office worker, than with a deep-tunnel driver. We could discuss conditions of work, depots, the dreaded public, even the weather. It’s not that there aren’t rivalries between bus drivers and so on. I’m sure there are. It’s just they wouldn’t come into play. For all I know, two-man bus crews spit at single operators, and the number 11 has it in for the number 37. But I wouldn’t know that, and the two of us could have a cup of tea and just chat.

  So now I have a work life — not a vocation, maybe not what everyone would call a career, but more than a bare job, a work life that gives you something back. And it’s only since I’ve had a work life of my own that I’ve wondered at all seriously about Ray’s.

  What did he do with the days? What did he do between the time he walked me downstairs before nine — sometimes a lot before nine — and the time he let me in again at six? Of course, earning their living is the main reason people have to set those hours aside. Going to work. But I’m not so sure.

  Suppose that every weekday morning, after I left, Ray put on one of the dark suits I never saw him wear, walked a few hundred yards and worked in an office. Say he was a solicitor.

  Of course I’ve run through all the books on Ray’s shelves in my mind, to see if they would fit in with his being a solicitor or anything else. But then I realise that nothing on my shelves would tell you what I do for a living. And if Ray was a solicitor, wouldn’t he keep his law books in a chambers or somewhere?

  But say he worked all day making people’s wills and conveyancing. When did he do his wrestling and his martial arts? When was there time for that? Ray wasn’t an amateur — well of course he was an amateur, but he wasn’t a dabbler.

  Three times a week I put on the washing machine in the kitchen, and his kit was in it either once or twice. When I lifted it from the laundry basket, it held the smell of his sweat, the unmistakeable savoury tang with its underwhiff of honey. If there’s one smell in the world I’m qualified to authenticate, it’s Ray’s sweat. Once I asked him, ‘Did you have a good session?’ and he answered, ‘It’s called a workout’ so coldly that I never asked again.

  But if you go at it the other way round, the picture makes no more sense. If Ray didn’t need to work, if Ray had money, then how did he spend his time? Did he sit around in a dressing-gown, make a phone call to his banker, then take a cab into the West End for lunch? It’s a chilling idea to me that he might have had a world of friends who knew nothing of the bike club, just as we knew nothing of them. Perhaps there was a bridge session, on a Wednesday afternoon, as well as poker night on a Saturday. It’s enough to give you nightmares.

  In theory it would have been possible for him to work three or four days, and still have a serious martial arts workout a couple of times a week, but that sort of balance doesn’t seem to tell the truth about the man. His life wasn’t about either responsibility or leisure. What I saw of his life was about excitement, about magic. About casting a spell.

  If I’d dared to spy on him, all those years ago, I wouldn’t be living with so much uncertainty now. It wouldn’t have been an elaborate surveillance project, as such things go, to watch Cardinals Paddock from four o’clock if only one afternoon, to see if he came back after that time, and if so what he was wearing, before he came clattering down the stairs at six in his leathers to let me in. True, Hampton isn’t a bustling place; it would have been quite a feat to lie low. But I never even thought about it. If Ray could know I was looking down at him while he washed the bike without needing to use his eyes, I could be sure he would detect any ruse of mine, and would certainly punish it — not the sort of punishment that’s like a reward in reverse, but an absolute cutting off, leaving me to regret my curiosity for the rest of my life. Leaving me to curse myself for not leaving things alone. It would only have taken a little initiative to find out more about Ray, but that wasn’t my department. Initiative was Ray’s department.

  I wonder how much time he spent wondering what was going on in my head, in the six years we had together, compared to the amount of time I’ve spent since then wondering what was going on in his. I freely admit I have no idea what it was like for him to lead the bike club on a run in its convoy of menace and glitter. Knowing that everyone was too impressed by him even to feel jealous. I was right behind in the formation. Breathing down his neck. But I know as little as any.

  So I tell myself that Ray couldn’t imagine what it’s like for me to take a train into a station. A driver is there in the cab for the public to see, and be reassured. It could all be automated, like the Docklands Light Railway, but even there the public wants to see a face. And if they can see us, we can see them.

  I had someone on the track my first day on the road. He didn’t jump, but then he didn’t need to jump to get my attention. He slipped down from the platform onto the track like someone slipping into the deep end of a swimming pool. Then he seemed to abase himself on the railbed. He grovelled there in front of the death that was rushing slowly towards him. Of course I’d put all the anchors on, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop in the time I had, the space I had. It had already happened. My first day on the road.

  And then he swam up again, scrambled up to the platform surface, and was gone. I of course was in shock, and wandered blankly o
ut of my cab and down the platform. All I could think of was that a suicide had changed his mind or some pranny had done it for a bet. So I was trying to hold both reactions in my mind at the same time, relief and anger, until I could find out which was the one to suppress and which the one to let loose. When a couple of people told me what had happened, I still didn’t know what the right reaction was. What to hold in, what to let out.

  It was only a commuter who’d dropped his ticket and nipped down by the live rail to pick it up. That’s the sort of thing we’re dealing with. Then he ran off, to avoid getting a piece of my mind, but perhaps he was lurking just out of sight, waiting for me to get back in my cab so he could sneak back onto the platform, with the smuts on his suit and the rat droppings on his shoes, to resume his interrupted journey. The journey he’d interrupted because his pea brain couldn’t tell him what was important and what was not.

  That was my first customer on the line. I’ve been lucky. We drivers don’t deal direct with the public, so in fact we haven’t been trained to use the new words that we hear on the tannoy: ‘customers’ until they’re actually on the track, and then for some reason they’re ‘passengers’. A passenger incident at Marble Arch. I was joking about it with a mate at work, saying that it was mad that they became passengers just when they weren’t going anywhere, and he said with a straight face that he thought it was the right word. Anybody else, you don’t know where they’re going really, but the ones on the track have arrived. They’ve gone as far as they’re going to go.

  So far there’s only been one more in front of my cab, and I haven’t seen a death. I’ve been lucky. Still, after the first one, you look out of your grimy window a little differently. If my own little Mum was on the platform waving at me I wouldn’t really take it in. I’m braced for whatever the track has to show me. I’m not moving at any speed, but then nor was Ray. Speed isn’t the only factor.