It was a terrible week for Mum as well as for me. Of course it was. She couldn’t pretend after France that life with Dad was ever going to be again what it had been. A partnership. She’d been abroad for ten days, and more than a week of that had been spent in a hotel room keeping her husband calm. Reassuring him that she wasn’t going to leave him alone — that she went on existing quite reliably even if a door happened to close between them.
But Mum knew what I was going through, too, and she asked Joyce to come round and sit with Dad for an hour on the Sunday, pregnancy or no pregnancy, so that she could give me a lift to Box Hill. Box Hill, where the bikers go to show themselves off.
In my memory, there was a huge thundercloud hanging over Box Hill, like the doom cloud after a nuclear explosion, but my diary tells me the sky was clear. The doom cloud arrived later, with Big Steve and Little Steve. Disaster rode pillion with them.
Mum let me off by the café at the bottom. That was where most people looked in. Before she left she told me to have a cup of coffee — I wouldn’t miss my friends, they’d be looking for me just as surely as I was looking for them. Which was true, but I couldn’t have kept down even a cup of coffee. And I worried that if the club arrived as a group they’d go straight up the hill and not stop by the café. Even though I knew the club would not be arriving in full force. The club’s force was spent. There was a signboard covered with advertisements for bikes and bike gear, pillions wanting rides, hard-to-find spare parts for the British bikes that you saw on the roads less and less. If I’d closed my eyes I might have been able to tell a difference in the general engine noise from the first time I’d gone there — the contribution made by the trail bikes that were coming into fashion, with their angry chainsaw revving. The aggressive names that were going to be fashionable, Dominator, Virago, Intruder. None of the quiet authority of Commando.
I knew that if no-one came I’d end up climbing the hill on foot, though there would really be no point. If Ray arrived, leading the pack, carrying the spare helmet for me, he’d pull in by the café. I’d see him, and he’d see me. He’d be quite capable of driving past me as if I was invisible, until he was good and ready to acknowledge me, but he’d see me all right.
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.