Gurriers (99 page)

The second time I asked her out I convinced myself that if she did say yes I was going to show up for the date dirty and drunk on a motorbike. I’m sure that this notion was only in my head to settle my nerves, to trivialise my purpose as a defence against another refusal, a damage limitation precaution.

In that capacity it worked. Despite the nerves (does asking women out ever get less nerve wracking?), I performed confidently and bagged me a date. Good fortune was on my side also, for at the time she was two months out of her last relationship, which had only lasted five months. She was ripe for the picking and I picked her; I also sold five phones to her workmates. That was mid July.

We had a couple of fabulous weeks together leading up to her holiday in Ibiza with three friends that she had planned before I swept her off her feet. She asked me to join them but, much as
I would have loved to, I couldn’t leave the shop for two weeks while it had only been open a few months. It probably did us the power of good to separate for a couple of weeks at that stage of the relationship anyway, with the whole “absence makes the heart grow fonder” thing and all.

I am delighted to say that she had a crappy holiday because of missing me while I had terrible sleepless nights, tossing and turning while desperately struggling to convince my insecure persona that she wasn’t at that very moment being fucked by some smooth talking greasy barman with dark skin and unnaturally white teeth.

She came home on a Saturday evening and I left the shop early to go out and collect her in the van. I have to say the embrace that we shared at the arrivals gate that day has got to be the warmest I have ever experienced in my life. All of the angst and sorrow of being apart, while instantly dissipating in one another’s arms, also served to magnify the chemistry and magic of being together. I have never hugged, kissed, smelled, tasted and felt a woman so voraciously ever before in one place, let alone such a packed public place as Dublin Airport on an August Saturday afternoon.

As for what happened when we got our hands on each other in private!

We hardly left each other’s sight between then and Monday morning when I dropped her in to work.

I arrived in the shop on Monday wearing the same clothes as I had been wearing when I left on Saturday, but that was okay because they spent the whole 24 hours of Sunday on the floor of her apartment and a few hours either side of it to boot.

I have never known such sexual desire, passion or proliferation. I have never had – or believed possible – so much sex in one encounter. For the gutter-minded among you, the number is eleven, although that includes two exhaustive DNFs that I am not ashamed of or embarrassed about. I bopped ‘til I drooped and then bopped some more!

We told each other that we loved each other that Sunday
afternoon. We had just had shag number six of our epic shaga-thon and then slipped into a spooning embrace with her back nestling against my front and my nostrils aflame with that wonderful smell of her hair. There was no pillow talk this time; we had both made sure that the other knew how much they had been longed for while apart in the 20 or so hours that we had been ravaging each other. In this comfortable silence I was able to hear her breathing deepen and slow as I felt her muscles relax that little bit further. She was either asleep or doing the breathing exercises that she learned in a drama class as a teenager and still did to this day.

There was no plan, scheme or plot, the whisper was just a natural expression of the emotion that filled my life at that point in time. It just came out, free and unopposed by the usual shite that tends to abominate masculine expressions of emotion.

“I love you, Regina.”

She hadn’t been asleep. Every muscle in her body tensed and her right shoulder moved back towards me in such a way that I knew she wanted to turn to face me. I moved across, letting her lie flat and turn her head to meet my concerned gaze. The statement had come out relaxed and natural, but I was rightly shitting myself now, in that fleeting moment of terrifying uncertainty before the response. And then it came.

Those beautiful eyes held eye contact as those beautiful lips parted gently and that beautiful voice whispered, “I love you too, Sean.”

And my life was complete. The uncertainty disappeared instantly and I fell upon her affectionately, kissing her and stroking her and not letting myself say a word, because if I started to talk I would just have blurted out the same three words over and over again and once was enough. I loved her and she loved me and we both knew it.

The stroking and kissing became more heated and passionate leading to me getting a semi hard on. Spent as I was at the moment, I went at her with what I had, leading to DNF number one. No shame in that, the important part was the mutual expression of our feelings bringing our relationship beyond the point when some things are left unsaid.

So here I am a month later, still happy in love with a gorgeous woman who loves me, heading back to work along Baggot Street Lower on my beast of a bike wearing my beast of a helmet after having a wonderful lunch with the daughter of the helmet’s designer on the eve of her eighth birthday. As I smoke through the junction of Fitzwilliam the biggest worry on my mind is Aoife’s mother’s reaction to the expensive phone that I gave her for her birthday – far too advanced for a child that age; an age that a lot of people consider too young to have any mobile phone.

Even if it did mean a bollicking from her mother it was worth it to see the look on her little face when she opened the present. She knew what a high spec phone it was too – a sign of how technologically advanced the next generation is going to be. And Aoife’s Uncle Sean was going to make sure that she was always on the cutting edge.

There were a few bikes outside the shops on Baggot Street on my right as I eased off the throttle to beep and wave at the couriers. Then I’m almost at the bank and out of the corner of my eye, a little bit down James Street East, I saw the Gizzard standing beside his bike arguing with a porno faggot. The traffic cop looked as if she was going to town on the Gizzard. Her helmet was sitting on the seat of her ST1100 and she was giving out shite to Giz. I slammed right down to rubberneck, not quite level with them yet, when she turned to gesture at his front tyre and I saw that it was her.

It often crossed my mind in the two years that I had worked as a courier that she might get stationed in Dublin and that I might bump into her, but it never happened. Now, here I was six months into my new life being struck by a scene involving two of my previous lives. A surge of a whole load of mixed up emotions and intentions instantly washed over me.

That little voice in my head started spewing out advice, “You’re a respectable shop owner now, Sean. You’ve got all you need in life. You can’t jeopardise everything by being silly now.”
And other such statements were discarded in a flash.

Before I knew it, my left thumb was on the horn button and my front wheel was in the air. I only stopped beeping after she had looked up and I had to take my hand off the bar to stick up my middle finger at her. It was extremely satisfying to see the appropriate expression of shock on her face and the look on the Gizzard’s face was priceless. She shot him a questioning glance. He shrugged. She scrambled.

As my front wheel lowered to the ground I cleared my head of all the jumble by focussing hard and clear on one specific statement: the bitch is in for a lesson on how to drive a motor-bike in Dublin.

I got as far as the junction with Herbert Street when the blue lights appeared in my mirrors. Not much of a head start for 650 against an 1100. I would have to maximise my bike’s advantages if I was going to shake her off.

As adrenalin flowed through my body and focussed my mind even more, I concentrated on my advantages. I was higher up and therefore able to see further ahead in traffic. My bike was more manoeuvrable. My bike, despite having road wheels, would be better by design on bad surfaces. It had better suspension and was skinnier. My bike had me at the helm, with my knowledge of Dublin.

The disadvantages were: she had more power and a much higher top speed; lights and sirens and Saoirse had every gard in Dublin on her side. The two combined to develop a strategy; I had to drive along lanes and double back on myself lots.

The traffic lights at the west side of Baggot Bridge just went orange as I got to them, which meant that she would be delayed by going through red. I nailed it through, hitting the bridge at such speed that both wheels came off the road, landing just before the east lights as they went orange. I had to brake and beep because a car pulled out of a parking space outside Burger King. He slammed on the brakes, leaving a gap for me to proceed through right across from Shy Boy Communications. I dropped down two gears and did a wheelie away, knowing that my staff would have been looking out on hearing the commotion.

They really are privileged to work for me. How many shop workers can tell a story about the time the boss went by the shop on the back wheel being chased by the gards? Not many!

As soon as the front wheel came down I had a bit of traffic to swerve through before the lights at the bottom of Waterloo Road, which were red. I had to be careful with my gaps here, since they were all closing as the moving traffic joined the stationary traffic. The outside wasn’t an option because of traffic from Waterloo Road that was turning left onto Baggot Street where it met Baggot Street Upper at a T.

I managed to fling my machine through two narrowing gaps to get over as far as the cyclist lane outside Tescos, from where I had seen it to be a clear run along the cyclist free cycle lane to the red light. I went through the red light, beeping to inform the traffic turning right to beware and staying as close to the kerb as possible to minimise my chances of colliding with one of them. Several motorists beeped back at me but not because of imminent collision, just out of indignation. Dickheads!

My pursuer had gone for the outside lane. She didn’t have the closing gaps option that I had because she was that crucial couple of seconds behind. She also didn’t have the view over the cars that I had.

She came to a halt, caught by the turning traffic from Waterloo that I had avoided, screaming at panicky motorists to get out of the way as I swung left onto St. Mary’s Road.

My next manoeuvre was an evasive one. I swung immediately right out onto Baggot Lane, hoping that she would carry on down St. Mary’s Road. She wasn’t going to be shaken off that easily though. I was just over halfway down the narrow, poorly surfaced lane when the cursed blue lights reappeared in my mirrors because she hadn’t missed my right turn and headed straight down St. Mary’s Road. Consequently, I swung left onto Pembroke Gardens to take me back that way, again down narrow lanes with poor surfaces.

Since Baggot Lane is straight, she gained some ground by applying the extra power, despite the danger in doing so due to the many mews entrances along the lane. She well and truly had
the bit between her teeth.

A pang of concern for her occupied my mind for a fraction of a second and I almost persuaded myself to pull over and take off the helmet with an “Aha!” at her, hoping that she wouldn’t arrest me or kick the crap out of me or both. I didn’t want her to smash herself up; I just wanted to beat her in a chase.

Well, pulling over and letting her catch you isn’t exactly beating her! I thought. Onwards!

I knew that I was going left when I hit St. Mary’s Road and then right onto Haddington Lane. I also knew that I had to make time on my pursuer any way I could. At the end of Pembroke Gardens it was via a combination of late breaking, way too late to stop me in time and then slamming on the brakes full force.

As the bike was skidding onto St. Mary’s Road, I released the front brake and flung the machine hard to the left clutching and banging down two gears as I did. The front wheel accepted this but the back one, still under braking forces, stepped out to the right. I could feel the suspension compressing to the limit as the machine tried to high side me but it held, although the saddle gave me a bang in the nuts as a protest to what I was doing to the bike.

The net result was that I made a 90 degree left turn much, much faster than normal. If there had been a car heading towards Baggot Street I would have bashed sideways into the passenger side of it, but St. Mary’s Road is a quiet one and I got away with it. I was also in the correct gear for the speed I was now moving at and the machine responded instantly when I wrenched open the throttle.

“Let’s see you do that on yer fuckin’ sanitary towel 1100, bitch,” I said as I flung the XR right onto Haddington Lane.

Haddington Road is much bigger and busier than St. Mary’s Road, so I had to keep my options open at that end of Haddington Lane. If there wasn’t any traffic I intended to go right and aim for Percy Lane; if there was traffic I would swing left and bully my way through it heading up towards Baggot Street again. There was traffic but none heading for Baggot Street so I
swung right and bullied my way across the eastbound traffic in time to swing the bike left onto Percy Lane, causing some idiot in a Ford Fiesta to do a baboon impression while beeping and flashing his lights at me.

She emerged onto Haddington Road in time to see me turn and the chase continued. The logic of my route developed in such a way so that as well as doubling back on myself in case she was radioing in her movements, I wanted to pass as many places that there were couriers standing by on the off chance that one of them would be in a position to slow her down for me. Therefore, when I came onto Percy Place I turned left and then right over the bridge and past a stand by spot.