by Dennis Rink
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.
5. DEDALUS, ALIVE
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 ar
e 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.
At this point we will leave Dedalus to complete his ablutions in privacy, knowing that he is reaching his eureka moment. He will not shout it out to all the world, or go running naked down the street, but the seed has been planted. All Dedalus has to do is formulate his plan of action. He does not yet realise that he has made a momentous decision that will precipitate the series of events that unfolded in earlier chapters. But he will, be assured of that.
Now that Dedalus is all dressed and respectable, we will rejoin him. He is cycling slowly to his night shift at the steelworks in downtown Sheffield, pondering on the night ahead, and allowing his brain to sift through the thoughts that accosted him in the shower. Dedalus’s approach to pedalling is not poetic, but pragmatic. For him, cycling is a means of getting from A to B, from home to work, from the shops to the pub, or to wherever it is that he wishes to go. He was brought up surrounded by bicycles, he has ridden bicycles wherever and whenever he could. He was born into the lore of cycling, whereas Icarus was a late convert to the cause – what we would call (for reasons that escape me) a born-again cyclist. I would have guessed that a “born-again cyclist” would first have to have been a born cyclist, given up cycling, only to return later as a “born again” ... Oh, forget it, because we digress. Dedalus, as we were saying, may be a pragmatic, even a pedantic pedaller, but bicycles do give him a form of escape – not a metaphoric escape, where his mind can roam some inner unknown realm, rather a more literal escape, where he can leave a situation that does not please him. Dedalus is not given to conscious introspection, he does not examine his inner thoughts and feelings, he doesn’t even daydream about what might be, but his time on the bike does enable his brain unconsciously to switch off, giving time for his thoughts to filter through his brain, formulating new ideas, discarding bad ones, and crystallising a plan of action, even if he does not realise that this is what he is doing.
So it is only the following afternoon, when once again standing in the shower while getting ready for work (and we’ll leave the poor man to make his ablutions in private today, if you don’t mind, madam) that Dedalus comes to realise that he has already made a decision, that the way forward has become clear: he is going to leave his job, leave Sheffield, and cycle across Europe to Greece. He knows, in the back of his mind, that Greece may not be the final destination – he might just continue riding, around Europe, around the world.
Now, cycling from Sheffield to Greece is no small enterprise, it requires some planning and preparation, plus a small pot of capital. Much to his surprise, Dedalus already knows how he is going to accomplish this feat: he has his tidy sum in a savings account, probably enough to keep him going for a year or three, if he is frugal. The question is what does he do at the end of the ride, should the ride ever come to an end? What does he do in an emergency? He will need something set aside to set him up should he decide to resume his old life once again. This bit puzzles him for a moment – he knows that he has a solution, but what is it? Then he remembers: he will sell his Persian carpet – one of a matching pair left to him by his parents. His family left Greece when he was just a small boy. They arrived in England with little money, and few possessions, however, among those meagre chattels were two magnificent carpets that had passed through the family over many generations. “I will never sell those,” Dedalus remembers his father telling his mother one day when there was no food in the house, “my great-great-grandfather captured them during the Persian War.” (It was only years later that Dedalus realised that the Persian Wars had taken place more than two thousand years before his great-great-grandfather could have been born. When he mentioned that to his mother, she shrugged and said that his father was probably referring to the war with the Turks.)
Dedalus guessed that these Persian carpets may well have come from anywhere, but he knew that his father had valued them highly, and now, it occurs to him, the remaining carpet is probably worth a great deal of money. He knows that it had been one of a pair, but for the life of him he cannot remember what happened to the other one. Oh well, he thinks, if I sell it and put the money away, I will have more than enough for my travels, and I probably won’t need to work when I finally decide to settle down.
Just a few short weeks later Dedalus finds himself back in London for the first time in sixteen years. He is standing at the door of an Islington auction house with a big cheque in his pocket – he
is sure they added too many zeros, but he’s not complaining. For the first time in his life he thanks his parents for not selling that blessed rug which, the man in a pin-stripe suit with three hyphenated surnames assures him, is Persian, and quite unique. And very valuable, as the size of the cheque confirms. So Dedalus is happy, and smiling. He shakes, a bit too vigorously, the hand of the three hyphenated surnames, when suddenly his smile slips down his face and disappears.
“Is something amiss, sir,” asks the man with all the surnames. He calls Dedalus “sir” because he dare not attempt to pronounce Mr Christodoulou, in spite of having studied Classical Greek at Cambridge.
“My bike’s been stolen,” says Dedalus.
“Your bike, sir?”
“Yes, I locked it to this lamppost right outside your door, and it’s gone. Look, the lock is still there, but not the bike.”
“Well, sir, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. You can rather afford to buy any number of bicycles that you want, now. Unless you would rather invest in a Rolls-Royce. Ha ha.”
“You don’t understand,” said Dedalus. “That bike was special, one of a kind.”
“One of a kind, sir? I didn’t know that they made bikes like that.”
“They don’t make bikes like that, but I do. You see, I made that bike all by myself.”
“Oh dear, oh dear. Now I see the problem, sir. Well, would sir like me to inform the local constabulary?”
“No, don’t bother,” replied Dedalus. “I’ll just go down to the police station and report it there.” And he turned on his heel and headed down the High Street muttering to himself: “I knew that I should have bought a better lock, especially in London. I’ll probably never see that bike again.”