The Accidental Cyclist

by Dennis Rink

  Icarus noted that all the couriers had cycle helmets dangling from their handlebars. Icarus pointed to Justin’s helmet and said: “Your mother make you bring that today?”

  Justin did not seem to appreciate the little joke and snarled: “They’re compulsory on track.”

  Icarus followed the riders into the stadium, where they were issued with their hire bikes. Icarus duly wheeled his out onto the track and mounted. He sat perched on the saddle, hugging the side railings. He winced inwardly as the assistant strapped his feet into the pedals – it was the first time he had used toeclips since the incident in the park.

  “Your first time?” the assistant asked. Icarus nodded. “Just keep hold of the railings until you get going, then take it slowly until you get the rhythm. After that, you’re on your own.”

  Icarus clutched the railings as if he was trying to avoid being swept away by a storm. A storm, he thought, no chance of that now. He looked along the track, along the straight where he was, and studied the steeply banked curve ahead of him. The others couriers were setting off, slowly, casually, to warm up. Icarus was not comfortable – the saddle was too high. He asked his helper to unstrap the toeclips so that they could lower the saddle. At the same time, in some desperate silent prayer, Icarus cried out in his head: Please, Lord, do something – make it rain or something.

  Icarus jiggled the saddle to adjust the height when, behind him, he heard a loud noise and a shout. He turned to see a plume of water shoot fifty feet into the air, arc elegantly over the velodrome wall, and splash down onto the curve of the track just where the banking was steepest. The group of couriers were already on the gradient and, without brakes, they could not avoid the shower, which sent them sliding down the track in a tangle of frames and arms and legs and wheels. Icarus tried his hardest not to smile as the velodrome manager hurried out of his office. “Track closed,” he cried. “Sorry, but we’re going to have to close the track. They’ve hit a water main on the roadworks. Track closed. Track closed.”

  Justin, Jason and the others untangled their grazed limbs and scratched bicycles, gathered up their bruised pride and returned to the main straight, where Icarus was waiting, trying his best not to look smug. Icarus didn’t know what to say. The others simply glowered at him silently, so Icarus said: “I say, that was rather unlucky.”

  “It was lucky for you,” Justin responded.

  “I suppose it was,” said Icarus.

  “Yeah, lucky for you,” said Jason. “You were about to get humiliated.”

  “How come you weren’t in the bunch with us when that happened?” asked Justin.

  “Yeah,” echoed Jason. “Where were you?”

  “You sure you didn’t have something to do with that burst water main?” asked Justin.

  “I had to get my saddle adjusted,” said Icarus.

  Justin was beginning to get hot under his collar-less shirt: “I’m starting to wonder if you set us up.”

  “Yeah,” said Jason, a finger close to Icarus’s face, “did you set us up? How did you do it?”

  “Do what?” Icarus countered. He was determined to stand his ground. “You don’t really think that I could be responsible for those workmen hitting a water main?”

  “Well,” said Justin, “whatever it was, you were just so lucky because you were about to get a pasting.”

  “Yeah, lucky, lucky, lucky,” Jason did a little Kylie impersonation, wiggling his hips. “You were going to get pasted.”

  “We’ll get you another time,” said Justin, hoping to end the dialogue.

  But Icarus wasn’t quite ready. “If you like, I’ll race you from here back to Hackney.” Icarus had not intended to make the challenge, but the words just seemed to rush out of his mouth on their own, as if someone else was speaking for him.

  Justin looked around at his dejected, defeated crew. The fight seemed to have gone out of them, and they were shaking their heads at him. “Another time,” he said to Icarus. “We’ve all got stuff to do, so we aren’t heading back across town just yet.”

  “Okay,” said Icarus, perhaps a bit too brightly, “another time.”

  “You can count on that,” said Justin.

  “Yeah,” echoed Jason, “you can count on that.”

  As Icarus left the velodrome he cycled past the roadworks where the workmen were scuttling around like demented ants. He smiled at them as if to say thank you. With their help, he had just pulled of the great escape, and he felt as if he had got clean away from the threat that had been hanging over him. He had no fear of retribution. If they challenged him to another race, he would face that obstacle when it appeared.

  A movement to his right caught Icarus’s eye. A flicker, another cyclist on the periphery of his vision. Was Justin coming after him?

  “Don’t think that it’s over,” said the cyclist, who was quickly catching him. Icarus looked to his right. It was Jo. Icarus felt his chest tighten, and he wondered if he had set off too quickly. No, he thought, I feel fine, and yet the tightness remained. He had no words to say, so he just smiled more broadly at Jo.

  “They probably won’t challenge you to another track race,” she said, slowing to match his pace. “They’ve lost the element of surprise. But they won’t forget this. They’ll find some new way to humiliate you, and when they’ve done that, they’ll just forget about you. Ignore you. Pretend you don’t exist.”

  Icarus’s smile slackened. He shrugged his shoulders, but it wasn’t as pretty as Jo’s shrug the previous day.

  “Until they bring you down, they’ll make your life a misery,” Jo continued. “Believe me, I know, because they tried to do it to me. In fact, it’s still happening, because they haven’t beaten me yet.”

  Icarus was listening to Jo, but he realised that he was not listening to what she was saying. He noticed that her voice had a singsong lilt, an alien accent. He realised that she was probably foreign, French perhaps. But he did not ask her.

  They stopped at the junction to wait for the traffic to clear. Icarus put his left foot down to support himself. He glanced across at Jo. She had stopped, perfectly still, but both feet were still on the pedals, her front wheel angled slightly to the right. She was performing a perfect track stand, something he had read about, but never seen. He stared at her, and noticed that she wasn’t weary her usual baggy shorts. Instead, she was wearing very short black shorts over sheer black tights, with a thin gold belt around her waist. And, Icarus noted, she had the most perfect, petite bum. The track stand served only to emphasise its perfect proportions. Jo glanced across at Icarus. “What’s up?” she asked.

  Icarus, who had yet to utter a word since Jo had caught up with him outside the velodrome, had to search for his voice, and he managed to find it in a break in the traffic, as they set off again. “Umm,” he said. Then “Errm.” He ignored the growing tickle in his throat and managed to say: “I was watching you do your track stand and trying to work out how you do it. I’d love to be able to do one.”

  “Of course you would,” said Jo.

  “Could you teach me?” asked Icarus. The tickle was growing.

  “Sure, I suppose so. No problem. For a moment then I thought that you were looking at my backside, and that I was going to have to slap your face.”

  Jo’s remark changed the tickle into a full-blown cough, forcing Icarus to a halt again. Jo offered him her water bottle. “This seems to be becoming a habit,” she said, slapping him on the back.

  Icarus and Jo stopped along the South Bank for a coffee – her treat, she insisted. They sat on a bench facing the river Thames outside the old County Hall. For a moment Icarus wondered if this was his first date. It was, to be sure, his first coffee. A latté. He didn’t know what to ask for, so he just said that he’d have the same as Jo. And now they were sitting on a bench, their bikes leaning side by side against the stone wall in front of them. Icarus slowly tasted this new experience, savouring it. He noticed that, unusually, his heart rate had not slowed when they stopped r
iding. And now, as they sat side by side, not quite touching, not quite apart, that still his heart was thump, thump, thumping away. It wasn’t a bad thumping, like when he had been reprimanded by the headmaster. It was more like the thumping of an exciting ride downhill, than the pain in the chest when climbing a steep hill. Perhaps it was the coffee. He thought of his mother. He wouldn’t tell her about the coffee, but maybe he would tell her something about Jo, the new friend that he had made. That would be okay. He would tell her about Jo, but not about the coffee. And maybe about how she taught him to do a track stand. Perhaps it would help to get his mother to forget about the threat of losing their home.

  16. OUT FOR LUNCH

  On Sunday morning it was grey and wet. The rain that Icarus had prayed for had arrived a day late. Doesn’t matter, he thought, it all worked out fine. He remembered Jo, and his heart jumped in his chest. It worked out more than fine, he thought. Then he remembered his mission for the morning: he had to find the Grey Man, and get him to the flat by lunchtime.

  Icarus had an inkling of where he might be, and soon he found himself cycling along slippery, rain-swept streets to the one place that he had hoped he would never again visit. He did hesitate, but only for a moment – as he cycled past the baker’s shop on the High Street he stopped to buy half a dozen sugar-coated Chelsea buns. Then he was back on his bike. At first he thought it had been just a wild guess, but as he got closer to the police station Icarus became ever more certain that he would find the Grey Man there.

  Icarus chained his bike to the railings opposite the police station. He crossed the road and stopped, dripping wet, under the canopy outside the police station entrance. He stood there, unmoving, for about fifteen minutes as several police officers and some members of the public, citizens of Hackney and Islington, came and went. All ignored the sodden, motionless Icarus, hurrying past, heads down, going about their business or, in the case of the police, going about other people’s business. When finally he had stopped dripping, Icarus quietly pushed open the door and entered. Across the charge room, behind his desk on the pedestal, sat the large sergeant, studiously evacuating the contents of his left nostril with a chubby finger.. He did not appear to see Icarus, who paused, just to make sure that he remained unnoticed. He clutched the buns tightly to his chest, trying his hardest to prevent the paper bag from rustling.

  The sergeant continued his excavations. Icarus quietly crossed the room and pulled open the barred gate that led to the cells. There were eight doors, all closed and apparently locked. Icarus checked the shutter of each door: the first seven were occupied by men sleeping off the excesses of the previous night, or still suffering the consequences of their inebriation. The last cell appeared to be empty. Icarus reached down to pull the door open, but there was no handle, only a gaping keyhole.

  “Psst,” Icarus whispered through the observation hole. Nothing. No reply.

  “Psst,” again. There was a grunt, then the Grey Man materialised from the gloom.

  “What the … What the hell are you doing here?” he asked Icarus.

  “I came to get you out. My mother wants you to come to lunch.”

  “You’re springing me from prison for a lunch date?”

  “Shh,” said Icarus. He pushed the paper bag full of Chelsea buns through the flap.

  “What’s this?” asked the Grey Man, “the lunch that you’re inviting me to?”

  “Just open the bag and put it in the far corner, then come and stand by the door.”

  Icarus flattened himself against the corridor wall and waited. A few minutes later they heard a bellow: “Are those Chelsea buns that I can smell? Which of you miserable lot has got Chelsea buns in his cell, and how did they get there?” The voice was lumbering closer. It was Helmet Two, and he was quite literally sniffing out the culprit, following his huge bulbous nose. Even the hairs protruding from his nose seemed to quiver in anticipation of the freshly baked Chelsea buns.

  Helmet Two narrowed his search to the last cell. He peered through the inspection flap and saw the paper bag on the bunk. He fiddled with the keys, flung open the door, took two long paces across the cell and apprehended the offending Chelsea buns. The Grey Man, meanwhile, quietly slipped out of the cell and took up his post alongside Icarus.

  Inside the cell Helmet Two opened the bag, reached in and took out a bun and stuffed it whole into his mouth. It was then that he realised that the cell, apart from the bag of buns, was empty. “Shaarge,” he shouted in a shower of crumbs, “Shaarge, come quickly.”

  The sergeant, of course, was incapable of doing anything quickly, but as rapidly as he was able, he removed the diamond-digging digit from his left nostril, lifted his ample rear from the chair, which seemed to sigh with relief, and waddled off down the corridor and into the cell, where he confiscated the suspicious package from Helmet Two and said: “What seems to be the problem here?” at the same time stuffing two Chelsea buns into his gaping cakehole.

  Before Helmet Two could respond, the cell door seemed to slam shut of its own accord, and the key turned in the lock.

  The last thing that Icarus saw, as he slid the peephole shut, was Helmet Two standing open-mouthed, crumbs tumbling down, staring quizzically at the door. A dollop of half-chewed Chelsea bun was visible through the gap where his two front teeth should have been.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” the Grey Man said as Icarus liberated his bicycle from the railing opposite the police station. “I was due to be released tomorrow.”

  “But my mother wants you to come for lunch today,” said Icarus. “I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

  “Anything special?”

  “I don’t think so. Just a regular Sunday lunch. Except that she’s cooking lamb, not chicken. So I suppose she thinks that it’s something special.”

  The Grey Man sighed. His eyes were bright and clear, and he looked at his reflection in the shop windows along the High Street as if he was seeing the himself for the first time. He sucked the fresh air deep into his lungs, like a miner after a long shift down a dusty, dirty pit. “How did you know where to find me?” he asked Icarus.

  “It was just a guess. But rather a good guess, wouldn’t you say?”

  The Grey Man studied Icarus. He seemed a littler taller than before, and leaner. And there was a slight swagger to his walk as he pushed his bicycle.

  “Just how long have I been away?” the Grey Man asked.

  “Oh, a few weeks,” said Icarus.

  “Much happen in that time?”

  “Oh, quite a bit, I would say.”

  Icarus recounted how he had started work, the jobs he had been sent on, the other couriers and their challenge of a race, and how that was ended by the burst water main. He finished up by telling the Grey Man about his newest friend, Jo, and how nice she was. He noticed that, as he spoke about her, his heart began to bob along quicker than their walking pace demanded, and he was becoming slightly flushed, forgetting his words and what he wanted to say.

  The Grey Man listened quietly, nodding his head now and then. When Icarus ran out of words, they walked in silence for a few minutes until the Grey Man said: “And so, the trouble begins.”

  Icarus looked at him, quizzically. “Trouble?”

  “It always begins with a woman. On their own, men can be stupid, but they just bumble along in their own stupid way. They might jostle and josh each other, but it doesn’t mean anything. But put a woman in the mix and, boom, suddenly there is trouble. The men start to argue, and show off, and fall out among themselves. As soon as the company took on Jo as a courier I said there would be trouble. I told Helen the Despatcher that.”

  “But Helen the Despatcher is a woman. Shouldn’t there have been trouble with her?”

  “Helen is the boss there. Jo is a courier, she’s just like one of the boys. And the boys don’t like a girl who can beat them. So they bitch and bicker among themselves, try to be better that one another, because they can’t be better than her. And they do all of this
in front of Jo. They might not even fancy her. That doesn’t matter. She’s a girl, and they have to try to impress her.”

  Icarus wondered if maybe he fancied Jo. Certainly he liked her, but did he fancy her? That hadn’t crossed his mind before. What did it mean, to fancy someone? Was it that feeling that stirred your insides when you thought about them? Did it make your heart race simply to be with them? Did it make you ask silly questions about yourself, just like I’m asking now? Icarus quickly decided that it was time to change the subject – even if he was talking only to himself.

  Icarus and the Grey Man were too early for lunch, so they sat in the basement of Icarus’s flat. They spoke quietly because The Leader was still asleep in his corner.

  “Why were you back in prison?” Icarus finally asked the older man.

  “Same as before.”

  “But I don’t know why you were in there the previous time.”

  “Booze.”

  Icarus waited for an explanation. The Grey Man appeared reluctant to elaborate, but Icarus’s silence seemed to force from him an explanation. Somehow the Grey Man felt like a sinner kneeling before his confessor who is silently waiting for him to admit all his misdeeds, who knew what he had done, but was simply waiting to hear it all from his own lips. Except that Icarus knew nothing.

  “I have a problem,” the Grey Man began, “with drink, and with women.” The Leader snorted in his sleep, rolled over. The Grey Man waited until he had settled back to sleep, then continued quietly. “I’m not an alcoholic – at least I don’t think I am – but when I drink too much I get a bit, well, loud, and abusive. Not violent, but I’m just not a very nice person to be with.”