by Dennis Rink
The Grey Man, on the other hand, was usually the one to keep his thoughts to himself, but now he found himself muttering, under his breath but loud enough for Icarus to hear, something along similar lines to what his companion had thought. “Tweedledum and Tweedledumber,” he muttered.
Icarus felt a snigger rise to his throat and nose. The Grey Man, recognising the danger, clasped his hand over Icarus’s nose and mouth, but the snigger, which was followed by a second, much bigger snigger, managed to squeeze through his fingers and escape.
Helmet Two looked up and saw Icarus. “What? You again?” he asked. “This your bike?” he went on, before Icarus had time to answer the first questions, if they were intended us such.
Helmet One, meanwhile, who was examining the hefty lock and chain on the bike, felt his headgear lift slowly off his head. That’s strange, he thought, rather slowly, but there’s no wind today, and he set off in pursuit of the fleeing helmet.
Icarus nodded to Helmet Two. “Yes, it’s my bike.”
“Well, it’s illegal to lock it to these railings,” said Helmet Two. “Anyway, what are you doing here?”
“I came to return some books.”
“But the library’s closed on Saturdays. So where are your books?”
Icarus looked up, alarmed. Then he saw the letter box of the library, and next to it a larger box that read RETURNED BOOKS. “I put them in the box up there,” he said.
Helmet Two looked up to the door, and sighed. “Okay then, but I’m still going to have to nick you for locking your bike to the railings.”
Icarus then did something he had never done before, never thought of before. He remembered the magistrate who had reprimanded Helmet Two just days before, and of the withering look she had given him. Icarus, for that moment, imagined himself as the magistrate, and his face was transformed. Helmet Two looked at him and shuddered, as if his mother’s ghost had appeared before him. The look on Icarus’s face reminded him how vulnerable he had felt before the magistrate. He, a brick in the foundation of the legal system, had never felt vulnerable or weak. But at that moment he was as weak as a baby, and he could do nothing.
“Just don’t do it again,” he told Icarus, and turned away to help Helmet One to arrest his errant headgear.
“What did you do there?” the Grey Man asked when the policemen were gone. “He jumped like a scalded cat.”
“I don’t know,” said Icarus. But he did know.
The Leader was sitting on a bench in the park studying his feet intently when Icarus and the Grey Man passed him, pushing an array of bicycles in various stages of decay. He wanted to make a sarcastic remark about collecting junk, or crashing bikes, but he was afraid that the Grey Man might stop and teach him his lesson. So he kept his sarcasm and his other thoughts to himself, although a snorted snigger did manage to sneak through his defences.
“You could lend us a hand if you wanted to,” the Grey Man said as they went by.
The Leader was not sure whether that was an invitation or an instruction, but he decided that offering his services would, in the circumstances, help to mitigate the attempted offence that he had caused the Grey Man. He stood up and took a rusty, rickety bike with buckled wheels that Icarus had been carrying, and trudged along behind, pushing the bike, trying unsuccessfully to keep it in a straight line. The back wheel went left, while the front went right, and in no time The Leader found himself following Icarus and the Grey Man at a tangent across the grass.
“Oi,” said the Grey Man, a sly smile in his eyes, “where do you think you’re going with that?”
“Sorry,” said The Leader meekly, as he picked up the bike, slung it over his shoulder and tracked back on to the path to follow them.
Icarus led the way to a room in the basement of his flat that housed nothing more than the boiler, a few abandoned refrigerators and washing machines.
“It’s not exactly the Ritz, but it will do,” said the Grey Man.
The Leader, all the while, was dying to ask where they had obtained such a pile of junk, but he resisted. Once he had dumped all the cycling detritus on the basement floor he turned to leave. “You can stay and help us, if you want.” this time he noted a different tone in the Grey Man’s voice. He was inviting The Leader to join them. It was his choice, and The Leader chose to stay. As Icarus went upstairs to fetch tea for them, The Leader brought himself to ask the Grey Man where all this junk – umm, stuff – came from, and what were they going to do with it. The Grey Man noticed that the swagger, the sneering, the defiance were seeping out of The Leader’s voice. He was becoming just another teenage boy, confused, bewildered at the prospect of becoming a man.
The Grey Man explained about Freecycle, about Icarus wanting to get a job, and how they were going to build a bicycle for him.
“Out of that junk heap?” The Leader said, the scepticism creeping back into his voice. “Look how buckled those wheels are. You can’t do nothing with them but chuck ’em away.”
“On the contrary,” said the Grey Man, “there is nothing wrong with them whatsoever.”
“Whatsoever,” The Leader echoed, involuntarily. “Sorry, I didn’t really mean to say that. I don’t know what came over me.”
“I know you didn’t,” said the Grey Man.
The two of them sat there surveying the rusting, twisted bits of metal. Then The Leader said: “Look, I’m sorry about this morning, you know, that thing with your bike. I sometimes just can’t help myself.”
The Grey Man calmly put up his hand to stop The Leader: “I know, it was really meant to happen …”
Before the Grey Man could finish what he had started saying, Icarus returned with three large mugs of tea and a packet of biscuits. The Leader was confused.
When biscuits had been dunked and tea drunk, the Grey Man said that he had to go away for a few hours. He left the two boys with instructions to strip the bikes as far as they were able, cleaning all the parts as they did so. The task looked insurmountable. They did not know where, or how, to begin.
“I’ve no idea even where to start,” said Icarus.
“We’ll never get through all that,” said The Leader.
Icarus looked at The Leader, and said: “Well, you don’t have to stay, you know. You can just leave it, if you want.”
“I wasn’t doin’ anyfin’, anyhow, so I might as well stay,” said The Leader. He picked up a spanner and set about removing the wheels from all of the battered bikes and putting them in a pile to one side. Icarus picked up a screwdriver and pliers, looked at them as if he had never seen such tools before, then attempted to remove the brake levers from the handlebars. His movements were clumsy because he was using these tools for the first time. The Leader, meanwhile, was a natural, and went about his task as if he had a mechanical strand in his DNA. The pair laboured silently, working things out as they went. The Leader, after struggling for some time to remove a particularly stubborn set of pedals from one machine, struck the spanner in fury, only to discover that the left-hand pedal had a reverse thread.
Icarus laughed at him. The Leader grew annoyed, and said that if that was his attitude to help, then he was leaving.
Icarus stopped him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s just that I realised that I should have known that. I remember reading somewhere that pedals always thread in a forward direction, so that they remain tight. That means a left-side pedal has to be taken off counter-clockwise. It’s something that the Wright brothers invented – they noticed that if the left pedal had a normal thread, it would fall off after a while.”
“Who the hell were the Wright brothers? You don’t mean the guys who invented flying?”
“Yes, them, except they didn’t invent flying – the simply built the first flying machine. They started out running a bicycle shop.”
“Oh,” said The Leader, lapsing into silence. After a while he said: “So then, how do you know the old guy?”
“We met in jail,” Icarus said without even thinking. It struck h
im that perhaps he need not explain to The Leader that his time in jail was no more that a few hours in a police cell.
“What was he in for?”
“You know, I never even asked. I have absolutely no idea.”
After a while longer The Leader said: “I tried to steal his bike this morning. I don’t know why I did it, because he was right there all the time. But he caught me, first time that I’ve ever been caught. Then he said he was going to teach me a lesson.”
“So, how did he teach you a lesson?”
“He didn’t. Said he would do it later. I’m still waiting. When do you think he might do it?”
Icarus pondered for a while, before saying: “I don’t know. Maybe this is your lesson.”
10. A SPOKE IN THE WHEEL
The Grey Man returned several hours later to find several piles of dusty, rusty metal that looked as if they were ready for the scrapheap. In the time that Icarus and The Leader had spent deconstructing the bicycles they had formed a strange alliance. It was a bond formed of mutual respect, coloured by an element of mistrust and misunderstanding. Icarus proved incapable of wielding a spanner, screwdriver or tyre lever, but appeared to be a compendium of technical knowledge of the science of cycling. The Leader, on the other hand, showed a pragmatism and practicality that enabled the pair to get things done.
The Grey Man was obviously impressed. He emptied his satchel onto the floor – a selection of specialist cycle tools – and said: “Let’s make ourselves a bicycle.”
The Leader snorted loudly and said: “Out of this lot – you’ve got to be joking. There’s not one wheel there that’s not buckled. You’ll maybe get a one-wheeler if you’re lucky.”
“You mean a unicycle,” said Icarus.
“Don’t go all hoity-toity,” said The Leader. “I know what I mean.”
The Grey Man walked across to basement to the pile of rusting frames, and regarded them carefully. Finally he selected one and held it up against Icarus’s leg. “This will do nicely,” he said.
He gave the frame to Icarus, along with a sheet of water paper, and showed him how to clean up the spots of rust. He then turned to The Leader and pointed at the metallic spider’s web of wheels. “Now you,” he told The Leader, “find me the best front wheel.”
The Leader replied with his dirtiest dirty look, but did the older man’s bidding. Slowly he disentangled the pile of wheels, which clung to one another, reluctant to let go. Finally he extracted one from the tangled mass and said: “There,” handing the least buckled wheel to the Grey Man, “this is the best, but it’s all a load of crap.”
The Grey Man ignored the comment and took the wheel from him, holding it by the axle and spinning it. “Not bad,” he said, “at least no spokes are broken.”
He placed the wheel on an upturned frame and spun it a few times, watching it lurch elliptically as the frame shuddered from one side to the other. “Now watch here,” he said to The Leader, and with a spoke key he began straightening the wheel, twisting this spoke one way, and that another, spinning, watching, occasionally plonking the wires like a demented harpist, feeling the tension. Gradually the warped disc came into alignment, running true and smooth on its axis.
“Holy shit,” said The Leader in amazement, “I thought you just threw the wheel away when it was as bad as that one. I didn’t know that you could fix it.”
“With bicycles,” said the Grey Man, “you can fix almost everything – if you know how.” He took another wheel from the pile and placed it on the frame. “Now, you have a go,” he told The Leader.
For the next half hour or so Icarus scrubbed away at the frame as he watched The Leader twisting the spokes of the rickety wheel this way and that. But for each apparent improvement that The Leader made, the next adjustment made the wheel worse than before. By degrees The Leader was growing more frustrated. His face grew redder and the veins on his forehead became knotted until suddenly he hit meltdown. “I can’t do this bloody thing,” he shouted. He threw down the spoke key, which ricocheted off the concrete floor and narrowly missed Icarus, and stormed out of the basement room.
Icarus and the Grey Man looked at each other. Icarus noticed a slight smile in the Grey Man’s eyes. “Should I go after him?” Icarus asked.
“No,” said the Grey Man, “don’t you worry about him. He’ll be back soon enough.”
Icarus returned to his scrubbing and sanding, and ten minutes later The Leader sauntered back into the basement, whistling quietly to himself as if nothing had happened. He leant against the doorframe and watched Icarus and the Grey Man as they worked in silence, then eventually wandered across to the abandoned wheel, which was still swinging back and forth, quite forlorn. He looked around for the spoke key, and finally Icarus pointed to the coal pile in the corner. The Leader pushed passed Icarus and scrabbled through the coal to retrieve the key. When he returned to his place at the wheel he had a smudge of black on the tip of his nose. Icarus tried to stifle a snigger. The Leader glared at Icarus, sat down, took a deep breath and considered the wheel for a few moments, then set about it once again with the spoke key.
It quickly became apparent that he was making no progress, and once again his fragile temper was fraying. After about ten minutes of futile effort, the Grey Man crossed the room and knelt down opposite The Leader and said: “It’s not as easy as it looks. It took me years before I could true a wheel properly, so don’t expect to be able to do it in a day.
“First, you need to make sure that the spoke is firmly fixed to the nipple,” (at that point The Leader made a muffled, snorting noise into his hand, but the Grey Man ignored that) “and you need to assess each spoke’s area of influence.”
Step by step and patiently, and without patronising him, the Grey Man took The Leader through the process of truing the second wheel. When it was eventually done The Leader whistled, held up the wheel to Icarus and beamed: “Wow, just look at that. Okay, man, I’m going to get this next one done on my own, even if it takes me all day.”
It didn’t take all day for The Leader to fix the next wheel, only a couple of hours. The Grey Man and Icarus, meanwhile, got on with cleaning, repairing, oiling and spray-painting the parts that were to make up Icarus’s new bicycle. They were about to start assembling the constituent parts when Mrs Smith walked into the basement.
For a moment she stood frozen at the entrance, aghast, and then, is if in some Shakespearean tragedy she screamed: “What treachery is this? What treason? What deception?”
She stood in the doorway, quivering in anger. Icarus had seen her many moods and learnt to cope with her tantrums and tears, but this emotion of pure rage he had never seen, and it frightened him. His mother looked straight at him and said: “What have I told you about bicycles? All your life I have protected you from their evil, and here you are plotting like some underground coven. How could you go and throw all my words, all my good intentions, back in my face? I am shocked, smitten, appalled.”
She looked around at the scattered parts lying about the basement floor, bicycle bones unearthed from some devilish past, dug up for some sinister ceremony. “I’m smitten,” she repeated, “it’s like an arrow to my heart. I spend years teaching you what is right, and then here I find you, plotting evil and insurrection in this den of …” for a moment Mrs Smith appeared to be at a loss for words.
“Iniquity?” offered the Grey Man, knowing that she really did not want his assistance right then. Mrs Smith shot him down with a black look. “You,” she said, turning back to Icarus, “you go straight upstairs and get yourself cleaned up. I’ll finish with you later.”
As Icarus skulked off upstairs, Mrs Smith turned back to the Grey Man. “As for you. Is this how you repay the kindness that I showed you yesterday? You come here and corrupt my son and consort with delinquents. Take these infernal machines with you and go. I don’t want to see you near my son again.”
The Leader, who had been sitting in the corner all the while, kept his head down, staring at th
e wheel before him and waiting for the storm to pass. But it would not pass. The moment that he thought it had dissipated, he looked up, to be swept away by a torrent of words.
“Don’t think I don’t know who you are,” said Mrs Smith, the new storm front building rapidly. “You are absolutely the worst boy in the area, a bad influence on every child in the neighbourhood. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was you who got my poor Icky into trouble with the police. That nice policeman told me all about you.” But before she could finish, The Leader rose and fled the verbal downpour, afraid of drowning.
And then, as quickly as it had begun, Mrs Smith left the basement and the storm was over.
Icarus slept fitfully that night. His mother had returned to the flat and carried on as if nothing had happened. The incident of the bicycle parts, the Grey Man, and The Leader remained buried in the basement like family secrets, locked away like things that should never have come to pass. Or, Icarus wondered, had it all happened to other people in other lives in other worlds – something that he had once read in a book. It was certainly not a part of the Smith family’s world, or if it was, it was no more than a dream. Once Mrs Smith had spoken, Icarus had always obeyed, so his mother had no reason to believe that on this occasion things would be any different.
But for Icarus it was more than a dream, it was a nightmare in which spoked wheels spun endlessly in ever-diminishing orbits until they disappeared into the undergrowth at the far reaches of his mind, only to reappear instantly all around him as giant Ferris wheels. Except that when they reappeared they were no longer turning; instead, it was him that was turning slowly, while the wheels remained fixed in time and space.