Box Hill Page 8

  Of course when Big Steve and Little Steve pulled in on their machines, I tried not to see them. If they were there without Ray, then there was nothing to be hoped for. While they dismounted and started to come heavily towards me, I turned away. I couldn’t run, I was just stumbling away from the news they brought. They caught me up and they held on to me. In a way, that was the most awful moment: if their wish to comfort me was an indication of my loss then I was desolate. It wasn’t the way I was used to being handled by the bike club. It wasn’t the treatment their mascot normally received. I felt trapped. Claustrophobic, as if I was held in a suffocating space, where there was no breath to be had. I shut my eyes, and if they hadn’t been holding my arms I’d have put my hands over my ears.

  Ray lived life like no-one else I’ve ever heard of, but there was absolutely nothing distinctive about his death. A tree. A patch of oil and a tree. A hairpin bend, a patch of oil and a tree.

  The bikers in the club were always philosophical about two-wheeled risk. Spend time on a bike and you’ll spend some of that time sliding off it. But I’d taken it for granted that Ray was immune, the same way he was the only one of them who never seemed to have a plastic bag blow onto his hot exhaust pipes, melting with a stench and taking hours to clean off.

  The guidelines seemed to be, from what they said: Lose as much speed as you can. If you’re heading towards a car, aim for the lowest part, the bonnet or boot rather than the body. Relax.

  None of which would have made any difference to Ray. It made no difference, come to that, that he’d done all his checks. His tyres were inflated to the correct pressure front and rear, and his brakes bit with useless crispness as the bike slid sideways towards the tree. The bike was highly polished at the moment of his losing control of it. It made no difference that Ray had made the prescribed observations with turns of the head, not relying on his mirrors, as he approached the bend that he wouldn’t see the end of.

  He was doing less than thirty miles an hour. From what the Steves said, it might only have been twenty. Usually a bike and its master part company quite sweetly in the course of an accident, following separate trajectories, and in the first half-second after Ray lost control that’s what happened to him. The inexperienced rider clutches at the machine, the seasoned one knows to let it go. The seasoned rider waves it farewell. But the connection between the two of them was too strong to be broken so easily. Somehow the bike righted itself, the engine still running, and rammed him against the tree. Of course he didn’t look up at the last instant, to be dazzled while he died by the headlight he kept switched on day and night for safety’s sake. That was just a picture in my mind.

  When I’d absorbed the first shock, I was still a mess. I didn’t want to be with people, and I couldn’t bear to be alone. I wanted to know all the details, but when the Steves told me anything I wished they hadn’t, and I didn’t take in very much anyway. It seems silly to call them ‘the Steves’ when they were never a couple.

  It was part of the history of the club that Little Steve joined before Big Steve — and he was called Little Steve even then. It must be part of an English sense of humour to call things by their opposites, so the Surrey Downs should really be the Surrey Ups, shouldn’t they? And somebody big since Robin Hood’s time can only be called Little. Little Steve wasn’t tall, but he was certainly big. His cock was eleven inches long — we measured it one poker night — the sort every man thinks he deserves, but it didn’t bring much joy to Little Steve. It never stood properly upright. There was always a bit of a loll going on.

  It could have happened to any one of us. That was one of the things I was told that day, as Big Steve and Little Steve fumbled through the attempt to console me. And there was a speck of truth in it, just the smallest speck of truth. Anyone hitting that patch of oil was going to go the same way. But it was always going to be Ray who led the pack into the bend, nobody else. It could have happened to any one of them, but it could only have happened to him.

  I asked them very calmly to tell me when the funeral was, and they said they couldn’t do that. I wanted to go to Cardinals Paddock, and they said it wouldn’t do any good. I said I wanted to go anyway, and if they wouldn’t take me I’d get there some other way. At last they gave in, even if they weren’t happy about it.

  I don’t even remember whose back I rode behind on the way to Hampton, whether it was the bulky Steve or the wiry one inside the leather jacket in front of me. Their differences were made into nothing by the dreadful thing they shared, the fact that they were neither of them Ray. If I held on to the man in front of me, it was with no sense of human contact. In fact, though, as I remember it, I held on fiercely. I held on like grim death.

  I’d always felt safe as Ray’s chosen pillion, except for one time. We were on a run to Bristol — in 1979, was it? — when suddenly I got this shooting pain on one side of my chest. I realised at once this was a heart attack, and yet I said nothing. I didn’t call out, I didn’t try to do anything about it. It wasn’t that I wanted to die. I didn’t in the least want to die. But it was only the timing that was wrong. There would come a better time to die, but there could never be a better place.

  Somehow Ray had realised there was something wrong, and he pulled over. I could hardly get off the bike; my knees were trembling. Ray had to hold me up. He asked me what was wrong, and I couldn’t get the words out. Apparently my face was quite white. The rest of the club were pulling up and dismounting, clustering around us, half curious and half annoyed. Ray unzipped my jacket — not the horrible naff one from 1975, a proper bike jacket, a birthday present from him. I was almost collapsing, he had to support me under the arms. Then for some reason he thought of unbuttoning my shirt.

  And a dead bee fell out. It must have been trapped between my shirt and my belly, and been driven to sting me, suicidally, out of confusion and despair, if bees can feel those things.

  When we drew up at Cardinals Paddock, and I got off from behind whichever Steve it was that had given me a ride, I could see at once that the blinds were down in the big living-room window. Ray only ever had them that way on the Saturdays when he was playing host. I rang and rang at the bell, but of course there was no-one there. Then I thought to ring the bell of the downstairs flat, which was occupied by Graham, a nice architect whose girlfriend stayed over on alternate weekends. Finally he came to the door.

  Of course Graham knew something of what had happened. At this point he certainly knew more than I did. He’d always seemed to be well-disposed to us. He looked after the flower-beds which I’d noticed on that first night, even though they belonged technically to a number of flats. No-one else could be bothered. He even cleared away the pungent droppings the foxes left, on their eerily regular visits — every night at nine on the dot, or else at ten with the same punctuality.

  I remember one Sunday morning he explained to me the symbolism of the passion flower, which produced such glorious blossoms in May and such pulpy fruit in July. He tried to show me the trinity symbolised in the flower, the four evangelists, twelve apostles, fourteen stations of the Cross faithfully mapped out in the arrangement of pistils, stamen, petals, and I just smiled and moved away, thinking he was going to ask me why he hadn’t seen us in church. He can’t have known I worked as a gardener. I knew about passiflora from a gardening angle, how they like sun and shelter, though I didn’t know its meaning, if plants have a meaning.

  I suppose in this country the best sort of neighbour is the quiet predictable one, the one who doesn’t disturb you but whose movements you know, and that made Ray a good neighbour. He was usually quiet and very predictable in his movements. It didn’t matter that our ways weren’t regular, as long as we were regular in our ways. You could put it like that. On poker nights, which were only at that address every couple of months, the action was occasionally rowdy and went on late, but Ray always gave fair warning. He also kept relations sweet on those occasions by leaving a drin
kable present outside Graham’s door — a bottle of wine or Scotch, a case of beer.

  What Graham told me was that Ray’s mother had already cleared out the flat. She’d made a bonfire out the back and burned a lot of papers. Graham watched her from his back window. He had wanted to retrieve something for me, he told me, anything he could rescue from the fire, but Ray’s mother had fetched a stool from the kitchen and sat there keeping watch until everything was properly consumed. He couldn’t see her face, but for want of a poker in the flat she used the brush from the toilet to agitate the embers. So as to be sure that nothing survived. It’s the single thing I know about her, that this person could stir the ashes she had made of her son’s life with a toilet brush. Ray didn’t like me to say ‘toilet’. The word he used was ‘lavatory’.

  The next day the removal van had come. It took away my clothes and my half-shelf of books along with everything of Ray’s. Graham let me go upstairs, which was always going to be a futile exercise. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw there: a shiny new surround for the keyhole. Ray’s mother had changed the locks. Even after she’d had the flat emptied, and had burned things rather than risk throwing them away, the mother had spent good money to prevent me from using the key which the son hadn’t trusted me enough to give. And that was when I got hysterical. The Steves had to pretty much carry me downstairs, and then I refused point blank to get on a motorcycle again.

  I didn’t even think of the trouble I was causing. Graham had to call a cab to take me home to Mum and Dad’s, and when it arrived Big Steve had to travel with me, while Little Steve followed on his bike. Then from Isleworth Little Steve gave Big Steve a lift back to Hampton to pick up his own machine. A long way round for the Steves, and all because I hadn’t thought.

  It was only when Big Steve was putting his helmet on outside Mum and Dad’s that I realised there was something fishy going on. I asked when the funeral was. I knew I’d asked that before, and the answer hadn’t made any sense, so this time I made sure I caught it and kept it in my head. Again they said they couldn’t tell me. And when I asked why they couldn’t tell me, they said they couldn’t tell me because the funeral had already happened.

  It gets worse. When I asked where Ray was buried or where his ashes were, they said they couldn’t tell me that either. ‘Couldn’t tell’ not meaning didn’t know. Meaning weren’t allowed to pass on.

  Ray had sworn the whole group to silence. Sworn them not to tell me. And when had he done that? In hospital.

  My mind was working very slowly. They don’t take dead people to hospital. So what the Steves were saying was that Ray hadn’t been killed on the spot. He’d lived long enough — Big Steve said 72 hours, Little said more like 48 — while he was at death’s door, to keep me away for ever. He shut death’s door against me.

  It was bad enough when Ray’s death was like a bolt of black lightning, but now it was a sort of death smear across several days. And I couldn’t tell myself any more what I’d been telling myself since I heard: that Ray knew nothing about what had happened to him, so it didn’t make a difference, except of course to me, that I wasn’t there with him. Ray knew. And I wasn’t there.

  After that day, I fully expected my hair to go white, the way Dad’s had. Except that I was almost shaven-headed, and it would have to grow in a bit before it showed. When it grew back, it was certainly thinner than before, but that’s not the same thing. Maybe it’s a myth that shaving hair makes it grow back stronger. I can well believe that if my hair had been long enough to notice it would have been falling out in handfuls.

  It turns out that even Dad’s hair, which showed such a sudden and shocking change, didn’t exactly turn white. Shock causes accelerated hair loss, and what happened to him in 1975 was just that the hair with a bit of colour in it tended to fall out, and the white hairs tended to stay. The hairs you want fall out, and the hairs you’d be glad to see the back of stick around. Just what you’d expect.

  Mum was glad to have me back living in Isleworth full time, and not just because she liked me to have more hair than Ray had allowed. Dad was getting to be more and more of a handful, though it wasn’t any easier to work out exactly what the problem was.

  After France his difficulties with balance got more and more intense, even though no scan or EEG ever traced a cause. Dad stopped trusting his feet to carry him, unless he was coaxed and chivvied and supported, and it wasn’t too long before Mum had to stop working too.

  I’d persuaded the Steves to give me their phone numbers, and for a while I kept pestering them with pointless questions. Eventually one of them — I don’t even remember which — spoke to Mum and told her it had to stop. I felt it had to stop, too. I felt the secrecy about Ray had to stop. But no, that had to stay. I had to stop calling. That was what had to stop.

  It was hard for me to stop phoning them and asking them things, because they’d known Ray. And I hadn’t. I didn’t know what he did for a living, if he even worked. I didn’t know his birthday, and since the two Steves told slightly different stories I didn’t know for certain which of two days had been the date of his death. That’s why I had such a desperate need to see his gravestone. To be better informed.

  Wouldn’t Ray have wanted to celebrate his own birthdays, if he’d known he was going to have so few of them? Rather than borrowing mine.

  I didn’t even know his last name. Among club members we weren’t called Ray and Colin, we went by Smith and Jones. I’m Colin Smith, but I’ve no reason to think that Ray’s last name was Jones. The odds against that would have to be astronomical, like the odds that we did actually by the wildest chance share a birthday.

  Eventually I realised that Graham the downstairs neighbour was likely to know Ray’s last name, if not from his own mouth then from the post that Ray made sure I never saw, but when I went, strangely fearful, back to Hampton, Graham had moved. I was almost relieved, and I didn’t try to pursue him. There seemed to be a part of me that wanted not to know.

  Of course I should have asked Graham on that fatal Sunday, but in fact that wasn’t the great regret I had about that day. Graham could only have told me the name on Ray’s mail, the name he was living under, and why would that be the one he was born with and buried by? My true regret was that I accepted Steve’s lift from Box Hill to Hampton, and so forfeited the right to say that the last time I ever sat on a motorcycle I was sitting behind Ray. Breathing down his neck. If I’d just been a bit more on the ball at Box Hill, I could have kept that pledge for myself. It was something I could have controlled, and I let it go without even noticing.

  The Steves thought it would comfort me to realise that it was only Ray’s safety-mindedness, and the spaced-out grouping he insisted on, which ensured that no-one but him went into that oil and that skid. They weren’t well keyed in to my mood. Actually I felt that they had no business avoiding the oil. And as for me, by rights I should have been right behind Ray. Breathing down his neck as we slid together into the oil.

  Not that I had a right to die with Ray, necessarily. But if I’d only been injured and in the same hospital as him, surely the club members would have refused to swear when Ray wanted their silence? Then I would still have had a stake in what had happened. It wouldn’t have been so easy to exclude me, to separate me from what happened to him.

  The year after Ray’s death lasted much longer than the six before it. That’s a fact. And six years is a long time for most things, too long for most things, but it wasn’t a long time to spend with Ray. Then I pulled myself together somewhat, after a certain amount of feeling sorry for myself, and I got a job with London Transport. I was never meant to be a gardener, or at least a bowls-green-mowing, begonia-planting machine operated by Mikey Jarvis, a man who would happily drink the water out of flower-vases, so long as the vases belonged to Princess Margaret. From the start of my training with LT, I felt I was in the right place at last. Not home, exactly, but the right place to be.<
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  I didn’t stop thinking about Ray just because a certain amount of time went by. There were changes in the world that made me daydream. I’d wonder what he would have made of them. I couldn’t help thinking that he’d have loved CDs. He would have grumbled about the absurd expense, and then planned with suppressed gloating to replace all his treasured holdings. Or perhaps he would have gone the other way. I could just about imagine him sticking with vinyl, writing impassioned letters to specialist journals about tonal fidelity — wide-band response or whatever it is.

  But on balance I think he would have gone with CDs. He would have loved remote controls — the ability to change the music without our needing to shift position. His legs gripping my neck, my head heavy against his crotch. Perhaps he would have invested in one of those rather unwieldy CD players with a sort of carousel that can take five discs at a time.

  When the Aids came along, that was different. Somehow I couldn’t put that together with Ray in my head. He was reckless, and he was safety-conscious. There was the time on a bike run to Bristol that he took me to a pub on a collar and leash. Straight pub. And nobody turned a hair, nobody questioned his right to do as he pleased. Well, someone said ‘Good doggie’ to me, so I bit him. All right, not bit him. Snarled a bit and snapped my teeth.

  Ray was big on self-control, and he didn’t know when to stop. He loved rules, and he loved to break them, that was the thing. Once he pulled over on a busy road, angled the bike to give a little cover, told me to undo my jeans, bent me over the bike and fucked me there and then. Broad daylight. He was punishing me or rewarding me for something I’d done or hadn’t done, I can’t remember which or what. With Ray it was best to accept him the way he was and not try too hard to make everything connect up. At least I had the choice of closing my eyes, to blot out the violation of my privacy, but I couldn’t keep them shut. I don’t know why.