Gurriers (2 page)

I decided to take the second left turn off the main road instead of the first, allowing for her training to predict my plan of action. The second left turn was little more than a dirt track. I had never driven on it before and had no idea where it went to, but hoped that it would aid me in getting away from her.

My back wheel stepped out on me as I flung my machine low and hard onto the poor surface, demanding some astute correctional moves to stop me from losing it altogether. Another surge of adrenalin erupted within me as I straightened up the bike, eased off the throttle and dropped down two gears to a speed more appropriate for this surface while all the time with one
eye searching the mirrors for the reappearance of that cursed blue light.

And there it was! It was just the merest wink of one flash barely noticeable through the cloud of dust raised by my bike, but it definitely did pass the turn off that I had taken. She had carried on straight where I had turned. The garda fell for it!

“Yeehaw!!” I exclaimed as I stood on my footrests and jubilantly punched the air with my left hand. “Who’s the daddy? Who’s the man? I am!”

I replaced my left hand on the handlebars but remained in a standing position as I rolled along doing about 45 mph.

“What a man, what a man, what a mighty fine maa-an.” I sang, while victoriously swaying my bike in rhythm with my “sexy song”.

At this stage I was giving my hips a wiggle, still standing on my pegs, rolling along on this little track with the machine swaying in perfect rhythm with me. I must have looked like a right nutcase, but I didn’t care. I was so busy throwing bouquets at myself that I was slow to notice the dust being raised by an oncoming vehicle approaching from around the right hand bend ahead.

“Steady on, hot shot,” I muttered, calming down from the elation of being me at that moment to sit on my machine and slow down a little more before meeting whatever was coming, easing myself over to the left as safely possible as one should on
small country roads. I was happy to see that the approaching vehicle was also a bike.

I was just about to wave, as all bikes did to each other in these parts (not like Dublin!) when I realised to my horror that it was a Garda bike.

“No way, it couldn’t be....how could...?”

It could and it was her! I found out later that the road I had taken was horseshoe-shaped; unknown to me, but not to her. She had seen me turn left and used her superior knowledge of the area to trap me. I never stood a chance!

As my muddled brain tried to comprehend how somebody I had left behind had ended up in front of me, she used the couple of valuable seconds gained to act magnificently.

She threw her machine hard to the right, wrenching her handlebars to her left and slamming on her back brake at the same time. The net effect of all this was that she ended up sliding towards me sideways, blocking most of the narrow road in a way that chilled me to the bone. By the time I managed to react it was too late.

I slammed on both brakes, making both wheels skid, and swung my bike hard to the right, hoping to then swing left and squeeze between the back of her bike and the ditch. There was too much momentum towards a collision for my efforts to be fruitful. My front wheel managed to miss the back of her machine, but when I swung left to avoid running into the ditch, my frame collided with her exhaust pipe.

I was lucky that the part of my frame that hit her bike was just behind my left foot.

If my foot had become trapped between the two colliding bikes, I would surely have picked up a nasty injury, despite my feet being clad in high quality motorbike boots.

There was no damage to my bike, but the flimsier metal of her exhaust pipe was dented where it hit the sturdier metal of my frame.

The effect of the collision was to straighten up my machine
and for a split second I thought that I was going to scrape along the top of the ditch and save my bike from falling into it, but my front wheel ran over a patch where there was just air under the grass, slipped downwards and all hope of saving it was lost.

As the bike fell into the ditch, I managed to get my left foot onto the grass at road level and push myself upwards with as much force as I could, resulting in me remaining at road level while the bike fell out from under me.

This left me with most of my weight in mid air over the ditch, but with forward momentum to help me rectify things. I twisted my body towards the road, still pushing as hard as possible on my now aching left foot. The left foot slipped under the forces
acting on it and went into the ditch, but by then the right was in a position to find purchase at the edge, but only briefly due to me still moving forward.

By the time the right foot slipped, however, most of my body weight had been manoeuvred to be over terra firma in such a way as to save me from falling into the ditch. The only problem was that both of my feet were over the ditch, condemning me to land arse first on the edge - hard!

So there I am, sitting on a sore arse on the edge of the ditch looking down at my poor bike (which managed to stay upright, leaning against the bank of the ditch), cursing her to high heavens, when her first scream hit my ears.

“What sort of a fucking eejit are you?”

“Don’t you talk to me; look at what you did to my bike!”

“I’ll do more than talk to you, you shithead. I’ll fucking arrest you for: dangerous driving; driving without due care and attention; speeding- and that one’s a fucking understatement; crossing a continuous white line-”

“Where?”

“Where you tried to commit suicide at that tractor back there!”

“I didn’t cross the line, I stayed on the wrong side of it all the way!”

At this stage, she’s over to me with her helmet off and I’m on my feet at the edge of the ditch with my helmet off looking straight into her eyes; her beautiful green eyes that lit up so much when she was
impassioned.

She gave me a hard slap across the face and it stung like hell! Mesmerised as I was, I failed to see her right hand lash out at me. The trajectory she opted for meant that I would have had to look to my side to see the slap coming, and I was too busy gazing into her eyes.

“You, smart arsed bastard, you think you can mock the law just because we-”

She stopped short, looking almost confused. The end of her sentence did not fit her mood and her anger ground to a halt. Her whole visage softened as what we were did a few laps around her head.

Her glare changed to a gaze, her eyebrows raised themselves gently and her voluptuous lips parted ever so slightly as the anger tension seemed distinctly to drain out of her.

My instincts kicked in immediately. The slightest of upward twitches for the left side of my mouth combined with a little voluntary closure of my left eye while my left hand touched my cheek much more gingerly than necessary accompanied by an over dramatic “ouch!” turned the woman into putty.

“Oh, Sean, I’m sorry. It’s just that you have me all angry. It’s as if you have no respect for the job I do. You have to remember that when I’m wearing this uniform I’m a Garda first and your girlfriend second.”

“So take off the uniform.”

“Sean!”

I decided to put her on the spot. “Tell me that you didn’t get a hell of a thrill out of that chase.”

“I’m not paid to get thrills; my job is to protect the public and goddamit that’s what I’m going to do, even if it means protecting them from you!”

“I was never a danger to anybody except myself.”

“Speed is a danger for all road users! What if somebody carrying children swerved to avoid you? What if some old person was in the middle of the road on the blind side of one of those bends you sped around? What if...”

“Look, Saoirse, I would have taken steps to avoid hitting
anyone on the road. The unexpected happens all the time and I always react accordingly. I am always in control of my bike. Look at that incident back in the town for example.”

“That was only an incident because you were going too fast.”

“Bollocks! She pulled out when there was traffic coming. A lot of the time that would have led to a collision, but I was in control of my machine and reacted appropriately. In fact, the incident made the road a safer place because hopefully she learned from her mistake and won’t do it again.”

“You were going too fast and nearly hit another motorist, Sean, and it’s my job, do you understand that, my job, to apprehend you and see that you’re brought to justice!”

“You didn’t have to chase me if you didn’t want to. It’s not as if you don’t know where I live or anything.”

“I did have to chase you. What do you expect me to do, stand there like a gobshite in front of the whole town - on duty, remember - while you come tearing in like a bat out of hell, nearly causing an accident, terrorising the poor woman in the process and then piss off, ignoring my signal to pull over?”

“I thought you were just waving at me.”

“Don’t fucking insult me!”

“Alright, Okay, I’m sorry, honey. Will you give me a hand getting my bike out of the ditch?”

“I’ll give you a hand when I’m finished with you. Do you know what speed you were doing back there on the main road? You were driving like a total madman! How do you think it makes me feel to see you risking your life like that?”

“As a Garda or as my girlfriend?” I asked smartly.

“As both, dickhead!” She threw an angry punch at me, which caught me square and hard on the right shoulder, sending me spinning backwards. I had to shift my right foot back and crouch to keep my balance because of the force of the blow.

“Jesus Christ! Have you not bloody well injured me enough?”

“Imagine how injured you’d be if you came off the bike at the speed you were doing back there, you gobshite!” She was very angry again, but this time fuelled by her concern for me.

Her next token of affection was a left foot sidekick to my right thigh, followed by an attempted grab at the collar of my jacket, possibly aiming for some restraining procedure that she had learned in the academy. It was an attempted grab because I got a hold of her wrist before she had a chance to complete her move. I side-stepped quickly, despite the pain involved in doing so on a recently deadened leg, and wrenched her wrist in such a way as to add to the momentum of her move, but diverted past me and towards the ditch, spinning her also. The movement
turned me also, as I followed through the force exerted on her arm, and I was facing the ditch just as she toppled into it.

That’ll teach her to...aarrgh!

Somehow, with amazing agility, she had managed to twist herself and grab a hold of my lower legs as she fell into the ditch, and had wrenched with enough force to take me off my feet, condemning me to the same disagreement with gravity that I had inflicted upon her.

The pain of my already sore arse crashing onto the edge of the ditch once more got me just as fired up as she already was and before we knew it, we were grappling with full intensity in the ditch beside my bike.

Her training and agility stood to her, but I was physically stronger and had longer arms, which proved to be too much for Saoirse.

After much exertion we ended up lying on our sides facing each other, but with her lying on her right arm at a huge disadvantage, since both of my arms were free. I held her left arm in my right and pushed her face against my back tyre with my left while dodging the many kicks that she threw at me and pressing my body weight against her to make sure that her flustered wriggling didn’t succeed in freeing her.

Then, after one of her left foot kicks came really close to connecting with my jaw, I managed to wrap my right leg around her left and it was game over. She still struggled but to no avail.

“I’m only asking your help,” I managed to force the words despite her furious efforts. “To undo the damage that you caused!”

As her convulsions eased, so did my grip. Before long she was totally free to move, but just lay there breathless, returning my gaze as I also gulped air to repay the deficit owed to my body due to the exertion. I had never seen a more desirable woman in my life.

Of course, we melted into a passionate embrace. The embrace became more passionate and I started undressing her.

“No, wait, Sean, stop!”

“What’s wrong?”

“This isn’t right. I’m a garda on duty!”

“Saoirse, we’re in a ditch in the middle of nowhere with an opportunity for the most passionate sex of our lives. Look at me, I’m shaking like a leaf! I never wanted any one as much in my life as I want you now, and I know that you’re turned on too. C’mon, baby, it’d only be a quickie too. I am way too turned on to last very long.”

“I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be great-”

“So let’s go!”

“It’s a question of respect for my profession and the oath that I swore to this uniform.”

“Aww, Saoirse,” I replied, utterly disappointed.

“Besides, if we got caught you’d be arrested and I’d be fired, and even if we didn’t I would feel as if I betrayed my duty. You know how important my job is to me, sweetheart.”

“Yeah, I s’pose,” I said like a sulking child.