The Accidental Cyclist (18 page)

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.”

“But I’ve never even seen you
drink alcohol.”

“Exactly. That’s why I don’t
usually drink. It’s just that sometimes there’s a trigger,
something inside me that clicks,” the Grey Man’s voice had been
growing quieter, and now it was less than a whisper, so that Icarus
could hardly hear what he was saying, “something deep inside me,
something that I’m so afraid of, that I have to obliterate it. And
the only way to obliterate it is through alcohol.”

Icarus nodded. In his sheltered
life there had been no awareness of fears or phobias. Only his
mother’s fear of losing him, but that had not been his fear, just
something that happened to exist somewhere in the background of
their lives. So far his life had been free of pain, of hurt – all
that had been borne, quietly, secretly, by his mother. Now, as he
looked at the Grey Man, for the first time he saw a man who had
been broken, who had suffered all that life could throw at him. He
wanted to put an arm around him, to share his pain, but somehow he
felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Instead, he hoped, as
men do, that in his silence the Grey Man would know that he wanted
to share his load.

And so they sat in
stillness.

They did not realise that The
Leader was now awake, and it was he who finally broke the silence.
In a quiet voice, in tones that surprised both Icarus and the Grey
Man, he asked: “What is it that you’re so afraid of?”

The Grey Man looked at him
wearily, his eyes dull, the earlier sparkle gone. “Commitment,” he
said.

After a few moments of thinking
The Leader said: “That’s just like my mum. She never wanted a kid.
She never wanted me. I grew up with her always saying that I was
just a bloody accident. The sooner that I grew up and left home,
the better. Well, now I’ve left, and she can party all she
wants.”

Icarus felt the need to add
something to the conversation, and racked his brain to think of
something. The first thing that popped into his head was: “I think
that my mother’s only fear is of losing me. But of course, that
will never happen. But now she has a new fear – that we’re going to
be kicked out of our flat and have to live on the street.”

“What?” exclaimed the Grey Man
and The Leader almost in unison.

Icarus told them about the
letter, and what his mother believed would happen to them. “Well,”
said the Grey Man, “this should prove to be an exciting and
uplifting lunch.”

Sunday lunch with Mrs Smith was
always pretty much the same. The roast potatoes this week were no
worse than the previous crop, and the roast chicken was replaced by
a leg from the smallest lamb that was ever sent to slaughter. The
other big difference from the previous lunch – apart from the
weather – was the fact that Mrs Smith offered the Grey Man a glass
of dry sherry as they sat down to eat. The Grey Man refused
politely, and Mrs Smith hoped that he wouldn’t mind if she partook.
From a very slight slur in Mrs Smith’s speech, and her unusually
relaxed manner, the Grey Man suspected that a small quantity of dry
sherry had already been used in the process of preparing dinner
that day. Icarus, on the other hand, did not, as usual, notice
anything out of the ordinary.

As Mrs Smith served, she
addressed the Grey Man. “I have a confession. I don’t actually know
your name. What should I call you?”

“You can call me, um, George,”
the Grey Man responded.

“Well, um, George, we haven’t
seen you at all for a few weeks. Where have you been? Do you want
some cabbage?”

“Yes please. Oh, I’ve just been
– well away for a bit.”

“On business? Holiday? Gravy on
you potatoes?”

“Yes please. I suppose I have
had a kind of holiday. You could call it R&R”

“Are and are? What’s that?” Mrs
Smith asked.

“Rest and recuperation,” Icarus
interjected, proudly showing off his new-found knowledge of the
world of acronyms.

“Haven’t you been well then? Can
I pass you the salt?” asked Mrs Smith, pursuing her dual lines of
interrogation.

“Yes, please. I was a little bit
under the weather,” the Grey Man replied, “and I was sent away for
a while.”

“Did you go far?”

“Oh no, just a small, quiet
place near by.”

“Well, I do hope you are better
now, dear.”

“Much better, thank you,” said
the Grey Man, stuffing his mouth full of boiled cabbage in the hope
that such an action might prevent further interrogation.

As Mrs Smith was serving the
dessert – a sherry trifle with glace cherries and whipped cream,
the Grey Man decided to broach the subject of the possible
eviction. “Icarus has told me about the letter you received from
your landlord,” he said. “Is there no way that you can buy the flat
yourselves? Because you have lived here so long, you should have
the first option to buy.”

Maybe it was just the sherry
talking, or maybe it was because Mrs Smith had become resigned to
losing the flat, and she now felt that she could do nothing about
it. So she had just stopped worrying about it and was awaiting the
inevitable. “It would be too expensive,” she said. “We couldn’t
afford it, so we’ll just have to go and live on the streets.”

“But there might be a way,” said
the Grey Man. “Don’t you have anything of value that you could
sell?”

“Anything of value? Don’t be
daft. We haven’t got anything that would raise more than a few bob.
We’ve never had anything but this flat. And each other.”

“You have your Persian carpet,”
the Grey Man said, “the one in the front room.”

“Persian carpet?” exclaimed Mrs
Smith. “That’s no Persian carpet. It’s just some Greek tat that
Icarus’s father left here before he ran off and left me in the
lurch, abandoned, alone. It can’t be worth much. And he was too
much of a cheapskate to have anything of worth.”

“Well, I saw one very much like
that one go on sale at one of the big auction houses not long ago.
And it sold for as much as this flat is probably worth. It could be
the answer to all your problems.”

“That can’t be so. Solutions
don’t just fall out of the sky like that. Besides, I don’t think
Dedalus ever had anything worth much. And if he did, he would have
never left it behind, surely.”

“I’m pretty sure that I’m right
about this, Mrs Smith,” said the Grey Man. “If you like, I can ask
an auctioneer to come and look at it. What can you lose?”

“But I love that carpet,” Icarus
intervened. “I think that it’s a magical carpet. Every time you
look at it there are different birds, all sorts of birds, and they
come and go with the seasons. And if you really listen carefully,
you can sometimes hear them singing.”

“Yes,” said the Grey Man, “it is
quite a special carpet.”

“I just think that it’s creepy,”
said Mrs Smith. “I’ve never liked it, to tell the truth. Ever since
Dedalus left us I’ve been thinking of getting rid of it, but I
never had anything to replace it with. But if you think it’s worth
something, George, then I’m happy to get rid of it.”

“Well, I’m not happy about it,”
said Icarus. “But I suppose if it’s a choice between losing the
carpet and losing our home, I suppose I’m going to have to say
goodbye to the carpet.”

After lunch the Grey Man
insisted that Mrs Smith sit down quietly in the front room while he
and Icarus did the washing up. The two men squeezed into the tiny
kitchen. The Grey Man got on with the dishes while Icarus made his
mother a cup of tea. He gathered up the leftovers and put them to
one side. As the Grey Man washed, Icarus dried the pots and pans
and plates, and put them in their appointed place.

When finally they were done they
looked into the front room. Mrs Smith was dozing quietly, her cup
of tea untouched on the occasional table beside her, her sherry
glass empty.

Icarus went back to the kitchen
and collected the plate of leftovers. The two went down to the
basement where they found The Leader reading a thick volume and
eating a piece of cold pizza left over from the night before. Every
time that Icarus went down to the basement the piles of books
seemed to have grown.

“We brought you some lunch,”
said Icarus, offering him the plate.