by Jo Baker
The injury had put him off form for the tail end of that season, when he should have been at his peak. He’d trailed; he knew he had. But he didn’t care. Butler’s didn’t care. Because.
Tomorrow. Good Friday. First meet of the season. Billy’s chest tightens at the thought.
The first leg is bald as India rubber. He unsticks his foot from the end of the bath, lets the leg sink down, only registering now the remaining warmth in the water. He heaves up his right leg, crooking it against the end of the bath. He soaps up again, shaves again.
In other sculleries, in bathrooms and in front of kitchen fires, other men will be shaving their legs. In Hoxton, for example, Vittorio Cinelli will be slathering his shaved legs in olive oil: he swears by it. In Canning Town, Patrick Hooley will be in his sister’s bath, nieces crowded at the door, listening in on the splashes and shifts of their famous uncle, the track cyclist, over all the way from Dublin for the Good Friday meet. These are the men Billy has to measure himself against. He got close to Cinelli last Whit, but that was before he crashed out and messed up his shoulder. He rode against them both in the final meet last year, when his neck was cricked and his elbow still weeping and the scab on his knee cracked open. He held on well in the Miss and Out, but not conspicuously well, not noticeably well. Didn’t make himself a threat. If they remember him at all, it’ll be as nothing to worry about. They’ll be matching themselves against each other, not him.
So.
So.
So.
He mustn’t jinx it.
But he knows it’s different now. He’s changed. In training he just loosens his jaw and drops his head and breathes himself through the pain, breathes into the rhythm of the bike, breathes himself into the beauty of its perfect union; bike and body; muscle and metal; the peel of the rubber on the track, the swell and squeeze of his chest; the perfect circle of the pedal’s orbit, the contraction and release of the calf and thigh. The other lads fall back, drop away. Head low, elbows in tight, eyes wet with speed, he is not Billy Hastings any more. He is out beyond himself.
He’s got the new bike tomorrow. Mr. Butler said he should have it. So he must stand a chance, a good chance. Mr. Butler must think that he will make the gear look good.
He can’t let himself imagine what it will mean if he does win tomorrow, what opportunities will begin to open out for him. Trials for the Olympic squad that summer. Then next year, Berlin. Berlin. But he mustn’t start to think like that.
He dips the blade into the bath, moves it underwater and casts adrift clots of hair-speckled foam. The water is cool, grey with soap, filmed with his body’s oils.
Berlin.
You’re not supposed to blame the Germans. It was the Kaiser, that’s who you’re to blame. A mad bully.
And afterwards. Turn professional. Frank Southall got eighty pounds for appearing at that Coventry meet last year. Eighty pounds.
He rinses the razor for the final time and reaches out over the side of the bath, dripping water, leaving a trail of wet across the cold scullery tiles. He lays it down damp on the chair. When he rubs himself dry with the small stripy towel from the nail, he finds a stray hair curving back against the skin of his right ankle. He pinches it hard between his fingernail and thumb, and plucks it out.
He tucks the towel around his waist. “Ma!”
The door knob turns almost instantly; she’d been listening out for him. She pushes against the door just enough to let a wedge of firelight and a gust of hot, fire-dried air into the scullery, making its cold blue seem even deeper. She reaches round; his warmed pyjamas are draped over her arm, his slippers hooked onto her long fingers. He takes them off her.
“All right, my lovely boy?” she asks, as he knew she would.
“Yes,” he says. “Thanks, Ma.”
The hand falls away, the firelight giving a flash to the gold wire on her finger. He drops his slippers on the floor, shakes out his night-clothes.
Tomorrow is the start of everything.
He steps into his pyjama bottoms, treads his feet into his slippers, lifts each foot in turn to hook the leather up over the heel. The prize tomorrow, it’s a clock. No cash prizes in the amateur game, but the clock’s worth ten pounds, Mr. Butler said. Mr. Butler had had them stop work yesterday to tell them about it, standing there in the workshop in his dark suit and his coat thick and tan-coloured, looking sharp and every inch the success he is. Billy’d been finishing a wheel, smoothing the edges of the bamboo veneers. He’d had the dust from that in his nose, making his throat dry, and the smooth feel of the sanded bamboo in his hands, listening to the boss talking about the rose-and-cream marble clock. The sound of it had started to make him feel hungry, and he was thinking he’d ask his ma to make a custard or a shape that night, and he was thinking of taking that clock down to Leibmann’s, the bell dingling as he went in, and the warm yellow light through the bow windows, and the smell of leather, dust and polish. Mr. Leibmann would unwrap it, eye the clock through his pince-nez, and realise its quality and worth. And then he’d look up and eye Billy, and he’d realise he was someone to be reckoned with. He’d unlock the cash box, and count out ten pound notes, and put them in Billy’s hand.
Ten flippin pounds.
But he can’t let himself think like that.
He tugs his pyjama cord tight around his narrow waist. For supper, bread and jam or bread and scrape. It’ll do; it’ll fill his belly. He won’t be hungry, but he needs more than this.
Lightheaded, Amelia steps up into the omnibus. It is warm inside, and dark and airless after the bright, blowy April morning. And the noise! Loud voices and the crush of bodies and the smell too, of mothballs and old sweat and damp. The lower deck is very full, but then it would be, with the cycling on. She peers from side to side as she moves up the aisle, looking for a seat. Spring hats and cigarettes, and a young man leaning out to talk to the fellow on the other side. He has his knee stuck out into the aisle, his hat pushed back, an elbow resting on his offending knee. He leans back slightly to let Amelia pass, but he doesn’t break off, just ducks his head to look round her as she steps through his conversation. What if she just announced it, calm as you like, I’m Billy Hastings’ mother, I’m on my way to see him race. They’d be up on their feet and shaking her hand and offering her their seats.
There’s a space. She brightens, quickens her step—two together, in fact, an unexpected joy—her soft face tightens as she makes her way towards it.
She’s reaching out for the backrest when the driver heaves the engine into gear, and the bus surges forward. Amelia sways. Just a cup of black tea in her stomach since she got up, and it’s swilling around now queasily. These mechanical buses are nothing like the old horse ones. The bus jolts again as the driver changes gear, and she staggers. Someone catches her elbow, steadying her. She stiffens, looks round.
The young woman is beautiful. Dark, waved hair. Her face chalky with powder, smoke streaming out through pillarbox-red lips, eyebrows plucked to nothing and drawn back on.
“Steady,” she says.
The accent, the looks—a Jewess, Amelia’s certain of it. So many of them nowadays, in this part of town. She can’t imagine where they’re all coming from.
“Thank you,” Amelia says, detaching herself from the woman’s grip.
“Watch how you go now,” says the woman, and gives Amelia a long, assessing look that travels up to her hat and down to her shoes. Amelia flushes, touches her hat back into place. The girl’s own hat is very much the dernier cri. A neat, nape-skimming cloche, mulberry-coloured, with a natty duck-egg-blue flower. Which means the girl is a milliner or has a good friend who is one, because it might look like the Paris fashion but that’s not where she got it. Not a girl like her.
“Thank you,” Amelia says again, and turns away, and slips into the empty seat.
Her cheeks burn hot and she feels almost tearful. She expects the girl to burst into laughter at her any minute. Which is not, she thinks with a burst of passio
n, fair. Amelia is well turned out, all things considered. Her hat may have done her seven years but cloches are still in, aren’t they, even if the style of them has changed a bit? She tugs her fawn-coloured jersey skirt down over her knees. Fashion’s got so little to do with style these days, anyway: all these long wet droopy lines like you’ve been left out in the rain. She folds her gloved hands on her lap, over her bag.
The men in the seat in front of her are talking about the cycling. She finds herself looking at a neck, a line of white skin above the collar. It is fuzzed with fine pale hair. It looks warm, and soft, like silk jersey left to air above the range.
She fixes her gaze out the window and away.
She wishes she had been kinder to William. She just hadn’t known quite how.
The men continue to talk; the one in front of her gets out his cigarette case and lights up. She watches the vague impression of the Common through the dirty glass—the green openness, the regular dark swipe of a tree as they pass by.
Still, it is good to be out, and amongst people. She can’t get used to the emptiness of the house nowadays, the quiet when Billy’s off training. She half expects to hear Grandpa’s cough of an evening, through the thin bedroom wall. Sometimes she half thinks the quiet is just the old man’s breath caught before a fit. The ache he’s left, the absence, still lingers. This was an unforeseeable love, bringing unexpected grief.
The bus turns off the Common, and rounds the corner onto the High Street, and she feels the slow in momentum, the change in the engine’s pitch. They are stopping. There are no noticeable rustlings of coats or searches for packages or farewells made: it looks like no-one is getting off. They’ll all be heading to the cycle track at Herne Hill, like she is. The bus halts and the suspension sinks slightly, and Amelia’s heart sinks with it. The new passenger lumbers up the aisle towards the only empty seat, beside Amelia.
A large, dark-clothed woman sinks onto the bench, giving out a huff, making the wood flex and creak and lift up ever so slightly beneath Amelia. The woman’s breath smells of onions. Her body is too much for her half of the bench, making Amelia shift away and press up against the window. She settles a large shopping basket on her lap, squashes a brown paper package between her corseted stomach and the basket’s keel, then leans right across Amelia’s lap as she reaches down to arrange the rest of her boxes and packages at her feet. The woman’s hat, directly in front of Amelia’s face, is an old toque, not at all becoming, her hair is a fluff of greying mouse, and her cheek is thread-veined and innocent of powder. The woman straightens up, then smiles at Amelia. Amelia is trapped.
“I hope I’m not crowding you,” the woman says. She has bright small eyes and a flustered smile.
Amelia graciously inclines her head.
“Busy morning,” the woman says.
Amelia smiles uncomfortably. Her gaze dips to the shopping basket. It is very full. There is a cake box from Patterson’s, and a number of small but weighty packages of folded paper, stained here and there with patches of grease and blood. Meat. Beef, Amelia thinks, and her mouth floods. She squeezes her hands between her knees and turns away, but she can’t turn away from the smell: bloody, rich, raw. There had been meat on Sunday, a piece of mutton cut up for a casserole, but she’d let Billy have the most of it, and had potatoes and a little gravy herself. The hunger is easier to bear when she is with him. There’s satisfaction in watching him eat.
Her eyes stray back towards the basket, fixing on the spreading stain of blood on the brown paper.
The woman has her plump gloved hands on the basket’s rim, steadying. She’s looking straight ahead, rocking as the bus rocks, her mouth set in a benign upward curve. Her thigh and shoulder touch Amelia’s shoulder and thigh. This woman has a man at home; that much is clear: you don’t get fat like that, you don’t get beefsteaks on a woman’s pay. Amelia studies the side of her face, the curve of the flesh from neck to chin, the soft round cheeks, the faint down of fur on her upper lip. The plump sheen to her skin. Then she turns away. Her stomach clenches like a fist.
If he wins, they’ll go straight from the cycle track to the pawn shop and from there to the butcher’s. They’ll buy the biggest, fattest, finest beefsteaks they can find. She’ll fry them up with some onions, and cut some bread, and butter it thick, and she’ll make enough so that they’re both full to bursting and not able to eat another thing, and still there’ll be leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch. And a box of cakes, cream cakes from Patterson’s. They will eat in silence, smiling full-mouthed at each other, eyes dreamy at the taste of cream and jam. It’ll be the start of things, of things getting better. When he’s winning races, winning prizes, doing her proud, they will eat meat every day. Bacon for breakfast and maybe a lamb kidney now and then; ham in his bait box, fried liver with onions for their tea; she will make steak and kidney puddings, boil tongue and serve it cold and sliced with piccalilli. There won’t be this endless stretching thin of things, the constant worry that even when she can appease his hunger she can’t quite give him what he needs. Because he won’t win, no matter how talented or hard working, if he isn’t properly fed.
They just have to clear this first hurdle. Once he has started winning, he will keep on winning, and all good things will come. She will have a new suit in the longer line, and a new hat.
Mr. Rudd wheels the bike; Billy rolls along in his thin-soled heelless cycling shoes. The cycle track hides in a pool of secret green, surrounded by lawns, trees, the gardens of houses standing with their backs turned, looking out into the streets. Spectators flow in through the entrance lane like ants through a crack.
He’s very aware of Rudd, his weathered beaky face and bristling white tache, the bike ticking along beautifully under his hand. Mr. Rudd’s put himself between Billy and the new bike, and is keeping a determined profile. No chat.
He shouldn’t let his coach’s moods bother him. All that matters is the race.
Up in the stands, the crowds are a dark mass, already noisy with excitement. Ahead of them Cinelli and Hooley roll along beside their coaches, ahead of them in turn march a knot of track officials; at the very front, Mr. Wilson carries the starting pistol and holds himself sergeant-major straight. They crunch across the cinder athletics track, then step up onto the crook of the pitched cycle track. There’s a burst of applause. The light dazzles; the sky is bright and pale. He looks down, watches his feet swing out in his oiled and supple chamois shoes. He doesn’t look up at the stands: she is out there, somewhere, in the crowds.
Cinelli and his party peel off to the left and head towards their mark. Billy watches the hard, angled muscles of the Italian’s calves, the meat of his thighs. And then he notices the skin. It creases into folds, is soft over the muscle. Cinelli’s getting old.
The sound bounces strangely in the shallow bowl of the track: Billy moves through a patch of quiet where the crowd is just a hum, and then back into the roaring noise. They reach their own mark. The official stands aside; Rudd clicks the bike into the gate, then moves away to let Billy swing himself over the crossbar. He watches as, ahead, Hooley rolls on to his starting point.
He can’t do this.
Billy stands astride the bike to make his final checks. Rudd’s breathing is loud and whistles through his teeth. He’s tugging at Billy’s toeclips, then moving round to check the gate, while Billy adjusts the fastenings on his mitts, flexes his hands.
Good.
He reaches up to touch the padded leather strips of his crash-hat, runs a finger round inside his chinstrap. No distractions, no irritations; there must be no pain other than that of the cycling itself.
He doesn’t want to do this.
He settles himself back onto the saddle. He wraps his mitted hands around the handlebars and glances down to tuck his toes into the clips, and lets the gate take the balance of the bike. He stretches out his back, eases out his neck and shoulders. Then he leans forward from the hips, angling himself down along the crossbar, his hips higher than his s
houlders, only inches between his concave belly and the steel tube. He tucks himself in. His nose almost touches the handlebar. Billy breathes. Mineral oil, leather, wood varnish: the smell is wonderful. And this bike is beautiful, a perfect thing. He fits it. It is right.
He keeps heaving in the breaths, flooding his lungs and blood with oxygen. Behind him, Mr. Rudd gets into the starting position, poised, alert.
Billy lifts his head.
Up ahead, Hooley is ready at the hundred and fifty mark. Mr. Wilson makes his way across the pitch. Behind Billy, another hundred and fifty yards behind, Cinelli waits. He might be getting old, but he brings a weight of muscle, tactics, experience. The thought of the Italian creeping up behind him, ready to pounce, makes the hair stand on the back of Billy’s neck.
So the answer is—his thoughts shift and slot into place—he has to think it differently: there’s no-one behind him, there are just two men ahead. First Hooley, then Cinelli. Simple. Clear. Perfect. Two men ahead. Two men to catch. No-one creeping up behind.
And a hundred and fifty, three hundred yards—they’re too far away to think about for now. So don’t look beyond the next ten yards.
Wilson is almost at the centre of the pitch, and it’s only moments off, the crack of the pistol shot and the heave into speed. Billy closes down. He blinkers himself. There is no periphery. There is no crowd. Just the man ahead, and the man ahead of him, the handlebars in his grip, the pedals under his feet. Soon there will be only the pull and press of tension between these points, and the breath heaving into his body and flooding out again. The breath. Concentrate on the breath.