The Bicycle

Music: O Fair Enough Are Sky and Plain-  Butterworth, lyrics Housman

Transcript

The Bicycle

Ashley and his younger sister were walking home from town to the little riverside village where they lived. Ashley was twenty-two and his sister, Frances, was seventeen. Fearing that she was too vulnerable to do so safely, she wasn’t permitted to get around on foot or to use public transport without being escorted. That day, the task of shepherding her home from the special education unit of the sixth-form college to their parents’ slim, red-coated, terraced house fell to Ashley. Whenever he performed this task, he did it dutifully and with love- according to his lights at least. Sometimes they took the train, sometimes the bus, and sometimes they walked. It was a walk of about three miles, not huge, but still significant enough to wear down shoes, to chafe the inside of legs on trousers, and to make the soles of feet complain and ache. Each time Ashley met Frances at the college gates, and she was waved off by her teacher- flanked more often than not by some subordinate or other- Ashley would ask his sister how she would like to get home. He’d state the three options, adding some unintentional emphasis to the one he favoured, and she would listen to him as though she did not speak the language he was speaking. She’d raise a thoughtful finger to her lip and look upwards as though she’d just seen something alarming in the sky over her head. There was very rarely a reply. So, Ashley would usually make a selection on her behalf and she would cooly concur with it.

            Ashley and Frances walked briskly and wordlessly. The arms of Frances’ rucksack squeaked as she walked, and something, zipped inside, rattled metallically. The river was sparkling with an immense and almost harmful brilliance. A cormorant- perched on a bollard, drying his dark, unfolded wings, disappeared into the intense hail of light-points. An oystercatcher ambling aimlessly along the muddy margin of the river moved like a ghost, like a posthumous figure in a burning building. The bullrushes were as fat as saveloys: in the heat and light, both of which were intense, one half-believed that they too were sizzling. The train-tracks ran parallel to the path, the path ran parallel to the river. Every so often a train would rush by, overtaking Ashley and Frances with an impudent blast of its horn. You caught sight of the driver, still and cold in the left-hand window of the train’s wasp-like face, and you saw the giant, hurrying slug of the train’s shadow on the bordering grasses. 

They both liked the walk. It had, however, one drawback. And that was the cyclists. One was regularly having to stand aside and let bicycles past. With some frequency, the bird-sung quiet would be pricked by a sudden bike bell, and Frances would be frightened into life, darting off to the side to let the bike pass. Ashley had a mean and petty streak in him. As a walker on what he thought was a foot-path, he resented having to defer to bicycles.      

            Ashley had taken the train into town to collect his sister. On the way, he’d encountered something which fascinated him. He was reminded of it by the train-horn. While he was waiting on the platform, a mother had appeared with three children, two young twins, (one of each), and a baby in a pushchair. As soon as the rails began to hiss with the train’s approach, the boy went taut and focused with the service’s imminence. The train rounded a bend and sailed efficiently towards the station, passing under a bridge. The twins tried to make the driver engage the horn, miming the action at the stern-faced cab of the train in a toot-toot rhythm. It seemed as though it wasn’t going to happen. The train crept closer and closer, not uttering a peep. Any moment now, Ashley thought, the train will be in the station and the dream will be gone. The two twins refused to give up, gesturing more frantically as the train drew in. Their mother barked something in Polish about keeping back from the edge. But then, at the very last moment before it passed them, a quiet, old-fashioned toot-toot sounded from the whistle. It was soft, and quaint, and breathy, just as though it issued from a very long, single-noted fife. Anyway, the driver summoned the brief sound, Ashley couldn’t tell how reluctantly, and the twins were over the moon.      

When they arrived into town, pulling into platform two of the four available, Ashley got out and so did the mother with her three children. A polite stranger helped safely lower the pram onto the platform. At that moment, another train was arriving into platform three from the other direction. The sleepers rumbled, the tracks hissed with this imminence. The twins repeated what they had done before, miming the toot-toot as forcefully and beseechingly as they were able. Without a peep, the train barrelled past them, car after car, and stopped. The cab loomed close enough for Ashley to make out the face of the driver, just for an instant. He gleaned a kind of congealed disgruntlement, a grimace of a man locked away inside himself, unable to play. Ashley wondered, then as now, what stories lurked behind these drivers. He wondered what it meant. He wondered why, why one driver reacts to the overtures of two children and toots, and why another driver doesn’t.

Ashley and Frances were just leaving behind a section of the trail which had an eerie quality about it, a sense of dereliction. On the other side of the river, there were old, rusting barges lined up like a chain-gang of prisoners. The boats were moored or anchored in the quay. They looked abandoned; they looked haunted, as though the years of cavity had beckoned strange spectres within. In the mud there were rotten vessels, centuries old, green and mud-faced with decay. On one such ruin, forlorn and barely recognisable, a cloud of lapwings settled. Still the cormorant stood on his stake, his hanging wings unfolded not spread, the blackest thing in the world against the spanking river and the sunny sky. 

Ashley and Frances passed a strange, brick-work structure. It offered a merciful patch of shade and they both allowed it to cooly eclipse them for a minute. Ashley had no idea what it was doing by the river, the building looked perfectly incongruous. He hazarded that it was some kind of defunct look-out, or maybe a boat-house, the keeper of something small like a dingy or a canoe. Ashley and Frances leaned against the cool-bricked face of the building, the shadow long and square on the path before them. Then they stood and carried on walking, Frances leading the way, Ashley following behind. 

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a bicycle burst into view at breakneck speed. Only at the very last second was Ashley able to hear the whizz of the wheels and the crackle of the tyres on the path. For Frances, it was too late. The bicycle, which seemed possessed of a cold, furious intention quite independent of its rider, hit her head on. For an instant, their disparate paths violently intersected. The force and speed of the bicycle knocked Frances down. Ashley watched the collision in incredulous, uncomprehending horror, unable to precisely discern what occurred. His sister was thrown sharply backwards. She tumbled down the little incline towards the marsh and lay there in a terrible, hurt heap. The handlebar had made a bloody wound in her chest. 

Ashley stood, paralysed with panic and indecision and fury. He watched as the bicycle came to as swift a halt as it was able. From about ten metres away, the figure stood, watching. Ashley tried to speak to it: he couldn’t. He tried to make out its features: he couldn’t. All he could tell of the cyclist was the unhelmeted head, and that it was a man, and it had on shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Time moved with the oddest, slowest emphasis, as Ashley saw the cyclist mount his bicycle and carry on, hurrying off, achieving- as soon as he was able- the same breakneck speed, maintaining it until he disappeared out of sight completely.

Ashley realised he could do nothing, nothing about this injustice which his entire being was now registering like the most powerful, displeasing drug. He stood, slighted, paralysed, held. And then he was abruptly freed. His sister needed him. He went to her, stumbling down the little slope.    

The force of the sight he was confronting, the situation he was confronting, pushed all anger aside. He approached, terrified and appalled. His sister lay there, staring up at the bright sky, a wounded animal, unable to speak. She was on her back, bruised and bleeding, the straps of her rucksack still on her arms. She panted, shuddered, she groaned absent-mindedly. Ashley’s shadow fell across her, across her pale skin and her soft clothes. He stooped down and tried to touch her, but worried that any attempt at pacification would cause her pain. He focused upon the confused, twitching face, its intimidating martyrdom, and he palpably felt his sister’s fright at the gradual crescendo of sensation within her body, a horrible newness. Unforced, reactive tears rained from Ashley’s eyes, and garbled words poured from his mouth. He tried to refine them, tried to make them helpful, at least calm. But he couldn’t. He took out his mobile phone, too invaded by panic and a fumbling, scrabbling sense of responsibility to feel any relief that he had it with him and that it was well charged. On the screen, the three nines leapt into frightening being as he dialled them. He put the mobile to his ear and heeded the terrible, wheezing rings. A clear, efficient voice quickly answered.

Ashley spoke to the voice, crouching beside his sister all the while. He felt like a conductor of some terrible, trembling electricity; the agony of his sister passed through him to the dispatcher. His voice tremored and he struggled to describe where he was. There was a Chinese takeaway not very far away and he was able to look up its name and post-code on Google Maps. He described the abandoned boats and the structure in which they had taken shade. In his delirium of shock, he even said that there was a pillar with a cormorant standing on it. He looked. The cormorant was gone from his perch. The crowd of lapwings on the rotten barge in the mud were gone also. They had been startled, and spooked into flight. When the operator asked what happened, Ashley just kept saying “He rode off…he rode off…”. The operator didn’t seem to believe his words; but she believed his tone. She said that the ambulance was on its way. 

A couple walking a dog soon came by. The dog, an elegant, untethered dalmatian, went on with his doggy life, showing no interest. The couple looked down from the path and asked what had happened, with horrified, wary looks upon their faces. Ashley told them, in tearful, staccato bursts. They seemed not to believe him when he said, again, and with the same crushed mystification “He rode off…he rode off”. Gradually, a distant sound of sirens began to whine, and come closer, and closer, like some spectre, demented and incensed. 

Frances recovered. Ashley could never quite remember what the doctors had told him and his parents. He couldn’t keep the science of his sister’s injuries in his head. Many parts of her were maimed, not just those the bike had penetrated and upset, both also those which received the weight of her body when she fell back. In any case, Frances couldn’t make technical sense of something so emotionally traumatising. He sometimes saw himself, crouching by that wounded body in the dried marsh, and he pitied himself, the helplessness, the panic. But, of course, it was his sister he pitied most of all. He would picture, without meaning to, the flinging force of the collision, the tumble down the little grassy gradient towards the hardened marsh, the pained catatonic sprawl, the groggy movements of the head, and soft groggier groans. He truly believed that, if such a thing were possible, he would have taken her place in a heartbeat. 

When she was up and moving again, she reacted with fright to everything. Approaching footsteps behind her, the creak of a door. On a local walk in the village one particular day, she was thrown into a paroxysm of confusion and anxiety by a car-horn which the driver had honked in anger at another driver. She shook her fist and beat her skull, as though it were the rump of a misbehaving horse.

For quite a while, a limp lingered in her way of walking. Ashley would trudge behind her, like a condemned man, as though he were following her to some dreadful scaffold, and he would fill with hatred and ire as he watched that limp, with a sense of injustice so burning that he too was crippled.

It began to obsess him, just as the two train-drivers had obsessed him: why one had tooted his whistle for the children while the other did not. Questions asked themselves to the ether, they resounded unanswered in booming, cavernous darkness, they tugged at Ashley’s very soul. Why had the cyclist been going so fast? Where exactly was he going? Why did he not come over, help, show contrition? Why did he ride off? Really, the question hanging over the whole affair could be summed up in a single word: Why.

On the two week anniversary of the accident, Ashley resolved, each further day that passed, to write down a different possible answer to this question. He would record his estimates in a little journal. He bought one from a bookshop that very day. It had a leather cover of deep green. He surmised, variously, that the cyclist had been a drug addict, a crack-head on his way to score. From what Ashley was able to remember, the man’s appearance had been haggard, squalid. It wasn’t impossible that he was a drug addict. Perhaps he just enjoyed cycling like a madman. Maybe he’d already scored and was as high as a kite, a fool to himself, insulated from any sense of consequence or responsibility. Ashley thought of his sister’s limp; he pictured the way the bike had burst from nowhere, from behind the strange, abandoned structure by the river; he remembered the way the cyclist stopped and even dismounted from the bicycle; he remembered seeing him make the choice to re-mount and cycle away. He remembered other things, some of which he had not consciously noticed or registered at the time but which had entered his memory without him realising it. He saw a flock of spooked lapwings; he heard the rising whizz of wheels and the grumble of their tyres on the stony path; he saw the long, lingering cloud of dust the bicycle had raised from the path, stretching all the way to the place where he’d collided with Frances, and beyond, into the blue distance, towards the town; he remembered the pedals of the bicycle, how haywire their revolutions. Ashley spent entire afternoons hating the man, hating him with an ugly hatred that seemed to know no bounds, that voiced itself in diatribes of the most extreme and hateful hyperbole. Ashley’s mother and father grew concerned about him. More and more his anger at the cyclist became a preoccupation. He had expected his parents, his father at least, to share his rage, to some extent. He felt so lonely discovering that they did not. 

            Maybe the man was a fugitive; or fleeing some pursuer. A gang, perhaps? 

What if there was a more complex, more sympathetic, more understandable explanation. Maybe he’d a friend who he needed to get to, who had promised to take his own life. Maybe the man on the bicycle had been trying to save his friend. Maybe his mother had collapsed in the apartment where she lived alone; maybe she had called him at the last moment before she lost consciousness to say that she needed help. The buses were unreliable; the trains one an hour; a taxi could take fifteen minutes to materialise. Maybe to cycle was his only option. Maybe he was a man suffering, warring; maybe the only haste he could count on was that he could produce himself. 

The more Ashley thought about it, the more it seemed to him that the man had been going somewhere. He wasn’t fleeing from something, he wasn’t moving without a destination in mind. He had somewhere he was trying to get to in a hurry, getting there was an immense priority, a necessity above all, all else. Maybe, for whatever reason, he didn’t have time to spare; perhaps he had something to hide. 

What good would his intervention, his contrition, actually have done? And Ashley realised that it would have achieved nothing except the pacification of this anger inside him, this muttering, spasming, self-referential, self-aggrandising wrath, within which he felt trapped. Yes, Ashley would have appreciated the relief it would have afforded him, he was growing insane with the circular obsessions of his rage. But, he asked himself, how could he do this? How could he put his own inner life, tempestuous as it was, before his sister, before her welfare, before the fortunate fact that she wasn’t more badly injured, that she had made such a speedy recovery? 

Ashley imagined that the man on the bicycle was a good man, that he was in some sort of trouble or had made some kind of mistake. He imagined him tortured by cognizance of what he had done, by his choice to ride off; he imagined him at night, sleepless, sweating, shuddering; he imagined him at prayer, praying for his own forgiveness, for the safety and health of the girl he had collided with; he imagined him desperately seeking out the identity of the girl he had hit, so he could offer the family heartfelt apologies and financial recompense. Of course, Ashley had his doubts that any of this was the case.

And Ashley always found himself returning to the idea that this man was a shit, that he was irresponsible, thoughtless, and sociopathic. That, for him, it was convenient to be irresponsible, and he felt unmoved by the damage his irresponsibility had caused. Often, this conclusion seemed the most correct to Ashley. How he hated this man, this man he had hardly seen, of whom he hadn’t even caught a decent look, whom he wouldn’t even be able to recognise in a lineup. 

But sometimes Ashley would revisit what little he had glimpsed of that man. He remembered him, standing there in the afternoon light, beside his bicycle. He remembered it well. How he had registered the collision, how he had slowed as efficiently as possible, how he had dismounted and stood beside the vehicle that had done this harm. He and the bicycle were perfect partners; they were joined at the hip; they had done this together; each party was powerless without the other. Together they had proved clinically destructive. The man had stood there, silently, statically, regarding the result of his actions, supine and shocked in the dried marsh. And if Ashley thought about it very hard, if the powers of his memory and his imagination grandly and unrestingly and unhesitatingly joined their forces, he was able to sense sorrow in the mind and in the soul and in the face of that man. Somehow he sensed it. Unable to see or detect it with any kind of certainty, it had reached him and rescued him time after time from the dark depth of hatred.

Ashley envisaged the bicycle. He had not caught a good look at it. He wondered what kind of bike it was, what make. Trying to supplement his imaginings with knowledge, he realised how little knowledge he had when it came to bikes. He did not find the bicycle a guilty party. He found it blameless, though its had been the body that had touched and bruised his sister’s. He imagined it, chained up outside some house or flat-block, in a bike shed or in a bike rack, unremarkable among all the other bikes. Secret between the bicycle and its rider, hidden from the world, (though not from Ashley and Frances), was this moment of brutality they had co-created.  

Ashley forgave the man who had hit Frances with his bicycle. He forgave him for riding off. It wasn’t easy. Frances was very attentive to her own suffering. She hoped fiercely for her aches and her pains to go away. At last the stubborn limp let up its clasp and was gone from her walk. In all the time since she and the bike had crossed paths, she had never once felt any hatred, any sense of combat, moral or otherwise, and certainly never the need to forgive. She never thought of the bicycle, nor the man steering it. A month and three weeks after the accident, a man in a MacDonald’s queue stood too close to her, and she was furious for the entire afternoon. 

A year after the accident, though he had forgotten the exact date and therefore couldn’t mark any anniversaries, Ashley was standing on a train platform. He was on his way to London for a job interview: the role was part-time teaching assistant. He had no idea if he was ready, nor what the job would have in store for him if he got it. He was, he admonished himself, thinking too far ahead. He found himself thinking about those children he had seen, persuading the driver in the cab of the train with their little arms to toot the train-whistle as the train approached. Ashley found himself wondering if those children still did that, if other children did it in their place. If they gestured at approaching trains, if their mimed toot-toot was still received by train-drivers like some sweetly-proffered, sacred signal. Below, the rails hissed and the sleepers rumbled with the imminence of that punctual London service. 

            The train arrived and Ashley got on. He remembered the children and the train and the toot-toot, and he remembered remembering it all not long after it had happened for real. Of course, he remembered the accident, and his sister lying there on the dry marsh, and calling the ambulance, and the cloud of dust the bike had raised, and the belated whisk and whirr and crackle of the tyred wheels, and the lapwings, and the way the man had stopped and then, without a helmet, rode swiftly off. He remembered the wail of ambulance sirens creeping closer, closer. 

The doors of the train closed behind him and he sat down. He looked out at the very landscape he was so often a part of, of which he and his sister had been a part that terrible day. Parallel to the train-tracks, for a mile or so before their flat, traversing leap farther afield, ran the local marshes and the mudbanks where oystercatchers ambled and egrets craned their long white necks, and the sparkling river where swan and shelduck sailed in slow horizontals, and the bullrushes, plump and dark as saveloys against the sky. There was even a man, in a helmet and Lycra, cycling at speed along the path, raising a cloud of bluish dust. In a few seconds the train had overtaken him; the last carriage of the joined eight left him pitilessly behind.    

Ashley believed in karma. He closed his eyes. He breathed demonstratively, and allowed his mind to rest contentedly, his eyes to light in peace and love upon the world outside the windows. He believed in karma, that the world was on the way, if not at the destination, of Karmic correction. Somewhere a man with a bicycle was looking at a landscape just like this and was in agony.