A Bicycle Built for Sue

by Daisy Tate

  Stuart looked up from his morning paper. ‘Sorry, pet. What was that?’

  Frustration rattled through her. Of all of the golden opportunities to get Stu to light a blooming firecracker under his retiree bum …

  ‘Kath!’ she snipped.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kath! Her off the telly.’ Flo pointed at the screen. They’d just cut to some poor weather girl being buffeted by the North Winds. She was up in the Shetlands no doubt, poor thing. It always blew a gale this time of year in the Shetlands. A sudden, bone-deep urge to go to the Shetlands, stand on the beach and see how she stood up against the elements swept through Flo with such force she shuddered. It felt exhilarating. Perhaps that’s why the weather girls did it. Subjected themselves to the not altogether dignified on-air reportage. It made them feel alive.

  Stuart glanced up at her. She must’ve been glowering because he raised his hands up in the surrender position. ‘Sorry, love. I was away with my puzzles. Lost to the land of Sudoku.’

  He gave her a smile and touched a hand to his temple, his white hair still a bit damp, strands aligned in the exacting rows the comb had drawn through it. What was left of it anyway. Stu’s features had softened. Not the tiny, endless, folds of wrinkles his mother’s face had shriveled into when she hit her nineties. But they were soft enough to make cheekbones she’d once likened to Cary Grant’s appear just that little bit more vulnerable rather than virile.

  Flo felt a flicker of something she hadn’t in a while.

  Compassion.

  He was such a good man, her Stu. Proper old-fashioned. He was an excellent father. A great provider. He’d literally flown her around the world and they had the home decor to prove it. Rugs from Marrakech. Carved wooden giraffes from Vietnam. A bloody great onyx chess set from Mexico City they’d never got round to playing. She put hors d’oeuvres on it sometimes. At the holidays. If the kiddies spilt on it, it didn’t matter much as one quick wipe with a J-cloth cleared it away and the chances of them ever using it were increasingly slender.

  All of that stuff. Stuff acquired to prove they’d once led an exhilarating life.

  Her compassion flicked back to irritation as she swallowed back a recurring and unwelcome thought: a nervous, growing dread that their high-flying lifestyle had been a mask for weaknesses in their relationship. Should she have married him at all? Had he really been her soulmate? Ever so quickly their global shopping list had shifted from silk quilts in Shanghai, leather jackets in Bombay and tall, awkward-to-handle didgeridoos from Australia to over-the-counter antibiotics in Bangkok, pool cleaner from Jo’burg (for Portugal), nappies from America (first for her children and then her children’s children). If she was still flying, would she be buying adult diapers next? Would they ever take a trip to Australia outside the regulation alternate years programme? (Jamie came to the villa every other year with the children to ‘give his wife a break.’ From what exactly? The tedium of marriage? Come to think of it, her Jennifer always took a week off – usually somewhere on the continent – with her gal pals from back in uni. Loved it. Said she never felt more human than when she was away with the girls. Flo, being of a certain age and not having that close mother-daughter relationship she knew so many others shared with their offspring, had never been invited.)

  Oh lord. Flo flicked off the telly. She didn’t want to be old.

  ‘She’s already earnt forty-five thousand pounds towards a charity cycle ride she’s doing.’

  Stu made one of those interested noises that meant if she were to ask him about this later he would have zero memory of the conversation.

  Flo couldn’t help herself seeing this pointless conversation through. ‘She’s putting her money where her mouth is, Stu. She’s actually doing the ride along with the group.’

  ‘Group?’

  ‘Volunteers. Charity raisers. Whatever. People who ride their bicycles along Hadrian’s wall for charity. The point being, Stu, she’s doing it on her own. Without her husband.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ Stu was back in position, pencil tapping along the little squares of the puzzler. Taptaptap.

  ‘Yes,’ Flo said, perhaps a bit insistently. ‘It is nice. She’s doing it for her brother – the one who died after all that time in the military. She’s asking for folk to join her if they like. Kev’s off to South Africa to do some daft thing with meerkats.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Taptaptap.

  Had he even heard her? She’d just said that Kath of the utterly inseparable Kath and Kev was going on a cycle ride across the blinking country without her ever-present husband. For a charity, no less. The most she’d ever seen the pair of them do for charity was some mad ice bucket challenge and one incredibly awkward run on The Great Sport Relief Bake Off when Kev’s soufflé failed to rise on the first show and he was voted off. She’d not felt an ounce of sympathy for the man. Those teeth! Whiter than Matt Damon’s had been in that war film of his. Private Ryan Gosling, was it? Something like that anyway. She hadn’t remembered much from the film, just that the lad’s teeth had been terrifically white. Honestly. As if teeth stayed that white during a war.

  Taptaptap.

  Another surge of exasperation took hold. She yanked her coat from the hook in the corner (wrought-iron pineapples bought in Fiji). Why couldn’t Stu break away from the blinking puzzles long enough to chat with her? He was the one always complaining she wasn’t home. That they didn’t do enough together. So why, when they were together, was he such a slave to his routine? She scraped her keys out of the little lacquered bowl she’d been trying to program herself to drop them into (Japan). She could narrate the blessed thing without the benefit of witnessing it: Alarm at six. (He didn’t need it. His body was conditioned to rise.) Right arm out to turn it off. Same arm flipped off a triangle of bedding and one-two-three there we go, Stu’s sitting up in bed, stretching his arms to the ceiling to start another day of exactly the same thing as he’d done the day before unless, of course, it was a Saturday or they were in Portugal where the routine altered insofar as there’d be no dog walk (they tended to leave Captain George at home, too hot) and sometimes, and this was only an occasional sometimes, sometimes he set the alarm for 5:30 so as to catch an earlier tee-time. Bless.

  Taptaptap.

  She fought the urge to yank the pencil out of his hand, throw open the conservatory doors and shout, Look! Look at the world out there. All of the life happening around you! Don’t you miss it?

  ‘Darling?’ He looked up from his paper and gave her a warm smile. It was filled with love, that smile. Warmth and love she knew she should appreciate more than she did.

  ‘Yes, duck?’

  ‘Have you left any lunch out?’ He nodded at the coat she was pulling on, then patted his tummy. ‘Wouldn’t want me languishing away while you’re out saving lives, now, would you?’

  ‘No, love. Course not.’ She opened the cupboard, grabbed the first tin of soup she could see and put it on the counter next to a small pan, a bowl and a spoon, the movements as familiar to her as her husband’s were. She shouldered her handbag, wondering how on earth he’d survive if, say, she were hit by a bus and never came home again. He needed a project. She needed a project to stop herself from going mad. Perhaps she should take a page out of Kath’s book. Pick something to do on her own. It wasn’t as if there was a law that couples had to do everything together. She glanced back at Stu, one hand patting the dog’s head as the other returned to the puzzles.

  Taptaptap.

  Then she stepped out into the rain, relishing the sensation as it lashed her face with icy reminders that she was still alive.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘It’s a certain path to failure.’

  Raven held her sharp inhalation in her mouth, not wanting to give her mother the satisfaction of an ‘adolescent response to common sense.’ AKA – a sigh. Sighs, apparently, were now a sign of disrespect and, even more reprehensibly, immaturity. Silliness wasn’t really a thing in the Chakrabarti
household. Earnestness ruled over all.

  She pushed a stack of black tops into her duffel back and zipped it shut, thanking her lucky stars that her father had gone into the shop early. Who knew a girl could be grateful it was flu season? A two-pronged attack would’ve been unbearable. It wasn’t as if she wanted to move out. They were making her move out. Sort of. If you used her logic anyway.

  ‘A call centre,’ her mother repeated in an ominous tone.

  Raven double blinked. Seriously? Her mum was more cross about the call centre than the fact her youngest daughter had just announced she was moving out?

  Shouldn’t she be bursting into tears or something?

  Raven waited for something, anything, to flicker across her mother’s immovable features. Nope. Nothing. Fair enough. Hysterical pharmacists weren’t really a thing. ‘I can’t believe you are turning your back on a promising future in law for a call centre.’ Her mum spat out the words as if Raven had announced drug dealing was her chosen career path.

  She squelched a sting of hurt. Did her mother not care in the slightest what Raven wanted for her life?

  It wasn’t as if she was planning on making her life’s work answering 111 calls. It was a way to pay for uni. Ooo. What a crazy way to rebel against your parents. Pay for her own degree, just like thousands of other students do when their parents don’t/can’t/won’t cover her student loans. And second of all, this wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her mum knew she couldn’t bear Uncle Ravi; his ambulance-chasing mentality wasn’t even close to the type of law she wanted to practice; if she did want to practice it, which she wasn’t sure about because living here was so ruddy claustrophobic it was difficult to get a solitary thought of her own squeezed in amongst her parents’ detailed spreadsheet plans for her. In fact, the more she thought about it, moving out was definitely the right decision. Having one’s life thrown into chaos always seemed to work out in the movies. Not so much in Game of Thrones, but she was going to go with the positive angle and pray it didn’t colour her parents’ opinion of her for all eternity. Memories like elephants. The pair of them.

  ‘It helps people, Mum,’ she muttered, dragging the tote off of her bed and onto the floor. ‘Besides. It’s not like I’m taking calls about someone’s Freeview not working.’

  Her mother was so angry the barbed comment didn’t even land. Her Uncle Shonal ran a huge call centre in Calcutta and, by all reports, lived rather well off of it.

  Her mum’s hands and voice pitched upwards again. ‘Who? Who is it helping? People who aren’t clever enough to make a doctor’s appointment? People unable to find a chemist? People who want your permission to have a slice of cake?’

  Raven frowned. She knew she shouldn’t have told her parents about the cake call. Whatever. It’s not like they understood anything about real life in the real world anyway. How could they? They’d been entirely programmed from the day they were born. Her mother’s parents had endured the hardship of immigration and racism and poverty (and selling countless copies of the Daily Mail and Fruit and Nut bars) so that their children could live lives untouched by dust storms and brown outs and civil unrest. Her father’s parents hadn’t been too different. Substitute the corner shop for civil servants in the foreign office and Ghandiji was your uncle. AKA the man, the myth the legend that her parents had chosen for her to aspire to be like when she failed to live up to their expectations. (Unlike her dutiful older siblings who, in order of birth, had to live up to Alexander Fleming – why merely practice medicine when you can change it – and, for her sister, International Monetary Fund legend, Christine Lagarde – why manage other people’s money when you can oversee the world’s?) Her own ‘motivational speeches’ seemed to dig deeper into her psyche than they ever had with her brother and sister. Or maybe they’d been better at hiding it.

  Do you think Gandhiji changed India by not doing his homework?

  Would Gandhiji have eaten biscuits in his bedroom during his fast?

  Gandhiji loved the law. And look where that got him. On all of India’s legal tender!

  No pressure, then.

  Funny how any mention of Gandhiji making a roaring success of himself by living his life against the grain didn’t go down a storm. Gandhiji, apparently, could only be used to point out a child’s reluctance to do exactly what her parents told her to.

  ‘Mum,’ Raven hoinked her bags up, faced her mother, her arms straining against the weight of her belongings (books, make-up and her entire collection of black clothes). This was a make or break moment. Every fibre in her body was vibrating with fear but she knew if she didn’t say it now, she never would. ‘I love you. I want to make you proud. But I don’t want to be an ambulance chaser. It is not, nor will it ever be, anything I want to do with my life. I don’t know exactly what it is I do want to do and the whole point of this year was for me to explore options so as not to waste anyone’s money when I finally do go to university. If I go at all.’

  She swallowed. Gosh. She couldn’t believe she’d added that last part. Of course she was going to university. She wasn’t completely mental, but … crikey. She’d actually said it. To her mother. She didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up.

  It felt scary. As scary as deleting her Facebook page. Her Snapchat account. Her Insta site. Her twitter handle.

  Her whole entire cyber identity eradicated with a few taps and swipes of her index finger.

  Her mother’s face went puce. Maybe the no uni thing had been a step too far.

  ‘Your Uncle Ravi is not an ambulance chaser,’ her mother bit out. ‘He is the Vice … PRESIDENT … of The Society of Clinical Injuries Lawyers.’

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. Seriously? Hadn’t she, for one solitary second, fought becoming a pharmacist? Wanted to … she didn’t know … become a life model or a singer or food truck owner (she made uh-mazing pakoras).

  Her mother gave her the You Better Apologise Now face.

  Nope. Apparently not.

  ‘Mum.’ Raven suddenly felt very, very grown up. As if she were finally, after years of biting her tongue, delivering a long-overdue home truth. ‘Uncle Ravi isn’t a bad man.’ He wasn’t a particularly nice man either, but she wasn’t going to push it. ‘But I think you would agree, he isn’t the best of mentors. And even Gandhiji wasn’t perfect.’ Her mother’s lips thinned, but Raven continued, ‘He was forty-five when he went to India and began to do his work there. I’m nineteen. I have some elbow room to work things out.’

  Raven turned sideways, eased herself past her mother, then walked down the corridor and out of her parents’ house to an entirely uncertain future.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘It looks as though this trip of Kath’s is going to have to happen now!’ Kev wouldn’t meet Kath’s eye despite the fact she was sitting just a few inches away from him. ‘Fifteen grand to ride across the country? She’s got a lot of generous fans out there.’

  Kev was particularly rankled by this. As if the donations that had been pouring in for the LifeTime Coast to Coast ride were approval ratings for Kath alone. Which, in a way, they kind of were. Making it so much more fun to rub it in.

  ‘I’m still in shock,’ Kath gushed to camera three which she knew cut Kev out of the shot. ‘Forty-five thousand pounds for something that hasn’t even happened yet!’ She blew a kiss to camera one which was always set to a two shot. ‘Thank you all. Truly. From the very bottom of my heart. LifeTime does some amazing work. Who else out there wants to join me?’ She crooked her arm and arced it, ‘C’mon. Fit or not – we can do this. One hundred and seventy-four miles from the Lake District, all the way across Hadrian’s Wall to my home town of Newcastle. We’ve still got room for more riders. Just log onto our website for all of the details.’

  Kevin, without so much as a glance in her direction, turned to address the camera on the opposite side of the studio. He was in a right royal huff. Not only was her ‘completely boring, depressing, uninteresting charity ride’ garnering press attention, she’
d also told him point blank she wouldn’t get a facelift. People got through life perfectly fine without them. Even famous ones. Sharon Stone. Emma Thompson. Judi Dench. Proof, as if she needed any, that beauty ran so much deeper than any microdermabrasion treatment.

  The part of her that marinated in insecurity rose to the surface.

  Sharon, Emma and Dame Judi also had ‘character’ on their side. Talent. Kath had a bright smile, a sparky two-step and a willingness to be made a fool of publicly. That was about it. She forced herself to focus on what her cherished other ‘alf was saying.

  ‘… it’ll be a right laff seeing how the weatherman sees the bank holiday panning out. It’s not as if the UK exactly has a track record for sunny ones, does it? Helmet head. Rain. No access to a blow dryer.’ He shuddered. ‘I don’t fancy Kath’s chances. Ha! Anyhow – let’s get back on track with something we’re all interested in.’ He turned to the camera they both knew was on a one shot of him. ‘I hope you’ll all be tuning in tomorrow when the Prime Minister joins us to address the question on everyone’s mind: Will he be wearing a red nose at Question Time along with the rest of the Conservative party? Always nice to see a charity that truly gives back to the British public.’ Kev gave his invisible red nose a honk, smiled into the camera directly in front of him, his freshly whitened teeth sending incisor-sized flares of light up into the control booth, the dimple in his right cheek a bit deeper now that he’d gone back on the carbs.

  Idiot. He may as well wee on the camera. Mark his turf the old-fashioned way.

  This was his power move. Dominating the cameras no matter what the floor directors and, more importantly, their producer was trying to achieve. He adored talking eye to eye with ‘his audience’. They love it, Kath, he’d say whenever she, or their producer, suggested more coupley interaction. They lap it up, the one-on-one thing. Gives ’em an intimate feeling. A hint of what it’d be like to be you.

  She always let that one slide with a ‘lucky me’ smile.