Back then, though, I didn’t understand that what Ray was doing was admirably safety-conscious. In my uncertain state I worried that he had particular reasons for fearing a punctured tyre or disabled brakes. For the first time it struck me that he might be special in the world, not just special to me, special because I’d never met anyone remotely like him. I wondered if he was someone famous I hadn’t recognised, someone who was at risk of sabotage if he mixed with ordinary people. Ordinary people at a bikers’ meeting place near Leatherhead on the Sunday of a Bank Holiday weekend.
I must have looked pitiful to him when he finished with his checks and turned round. I’d struggled into my jacket again, and I finally had the helmet on. I was hearing my own breathing even with the visor up, sweating so that my glasses started to fog, and I was afraid beer was condensing in my squashed hair. I was numbly convinced that he would choose the most painful possible moment to say that he’d changed his mind, and that I’d have to struggle in humiliation with the strap all over again. Instead he handed his own jacket to me, saying I might be warm now, but I’d need it later on.
Perhaps he was embarrassed by the naffness of my attempt at a leather jacket — naff was a word then in its prime. Princess Anne must take a lot of the credit for popularising it, at least as a verb. She used it as a swear-word that didn’t offend reporters too much if they overheard it. ‘Naff off’, she’d tell them. A disappointing horse at a gymkhana might be naffing hopeless. It was like the posh tea that the Queen drinks, the tea with the Royal Warrant. By appointment. Princess Anne gave ‘naff off’ and ‘naffing’ the Royal Warrant.
I saw for the first time how truly naff my jacket was. The hide was like animal cardboard, not like skin at all. And perhaps Ray was ashamed of me and wanted to cover up my mistake, but that doesn’t really ring true. He couldn’t be dragged down by other people’s choices, however poor they were. It didn’t work that way. Ray had image and to spare. The tendency was all in the other direction — for him to pull other people up, somehow.
Ray hadn’t been wearing the jacket he handed me, just using it as a pillow, so it didn’t smell intensely of him. I pulled it on with a sort of reverence all the same, not minding that it was much too long and wouldn’t close properly round my tummy. The weight of the thing was astounding. I felt as if I was wearing an old-fashioned diving-suit, the sort in the Tintin books.
Ray helped me to turn back the sleeves so that my hands struggled back into the light again, but he accepted the inevitable when it came to the zip. It wasn’t going to close. His breath was minty. He met my eyes and said again, ‘What am I going to do with you?’ This time, though, there wasn’t a flicker of uncertainty in his voice. It sounded as if knew perfectly well what he was going to do. He said it in the way that people say, ‘Have I got news for you.’ Not really a question.
I was tempted to make a run for it then, before I disappointed him the way I knew I was bound to do. Of course he’d come after me and grab the jacket back, but maybe I’d be able to sneak the dress gloves out of its pocket, the gloves with the warmth still lingering from his fingers. The ones he was wearing when he let me try to please him.
He started the bike, springing up and bearing smoothly down on its kick-start in a single economical motion. You could hardly even call it a kick. The engine roared into throaty life. If everyone could kick-start a bike as smoothly as Ray, electric start would never have caught on.
I couldn’t believe how noisy the Norton was. It wasn’t yet dark, not by a long way, it was only late afternoon, but he turned the headlight on. He must have been one of the first people to do that, to ride with his beam on night and day. Of course not every machine back then had electrics powerful enough to sustain a permanent beam. The Norton did. His helmet was open-faced, unlike mine, and I could see the set of his mouth as well as his eyes when he nodded me to get on behind him.
Short legs aren’t well suited to being slung over high objects, but I managed to lever myself into the saddle eventually. As I tried to get comfortable, I saw my knees for the first time since I’d met Ray. Of course the trousers were bagged and deeply marked with grass stains, and I understood why Ted hadn’t been able to take his eyes off me long enough to notice Ray’s unorthodox zip. My knees had already given him the gist of the story.
There were more adjustments to be made to the bike. With my weight on it the mirrors were misaligned, and Ray spent a few seconds while the engine warmed up setting them properly for the new load. The new load being me. Even so the bike vibrated so much that the mirrors trembled, and the information they passed to Ray must have shimmered.
I’d only travelled a few dozen miles on motorcycles in my life, and I found it hard to relax the way a good pillion should. Ray’s height meant I couldn’t see the road over his shoulders. He kept on turning his head round, which I found disconcerting, particularly as thanks to my full-face helmet I prodded his back with my chin every time he braked. Crazily, I kept thinking, every time he turned round, that he must just have noticed me stowing away on his bike where I so obviously didn’t belong, and would pull over to push me off. If he even bothered to stop.
Later I learned that he practised the Police Motorcycle Method of riding, and these were his ‘observations’. He was no boy racer, no kind of speed merchant. He really cared about safety. Once again he was ahead of his time. In those days the motorcycle riding test was pretty rudimentary, from what people told me, a very basic assessment of skills. I mean, Ted passed first time, didn’t he? That’s evidence enough. A chap would come out of the test office, ask you to ride round the block a few times, then lunge at you for you to do your emergency stop. If you were still upright and you hadn’t run over him, then you had passed. There was none of the modern stuff, an examiner following you on his own machine, giving instructions to you through a headset that links your helmets.
I’m not convinced that Ray would have talked, even if there had been a radio connecting us. At one point he shouted to me that I should hold onto him, instead of trying to grip the back of the saddle. I must have been dragging on the bike every time he accelerated. I’m bulky. I can’t help it. I’m bulky. I wouldn’t have dared to hold onto him unless he’d told me to.
The roughness of the ride, despite Ray’s scrupulous handling, unsettled my stomach and made me burp up memories of the hamburger and glass of lemonade I’d had before I’d even known there was a Ray. I also burped up taste-memories of him, the taste of Ray’s body in the only place I’d touched it. As if I was proving to myself what I’d thought when I first set eyes on him. Ray was tasty.
For a while, as we headed north from Box Hill, I thought he was taking me home to Isleworth after all, past Chessington and Surbiton, on the A243. Chessington was only a zoo in those days, it wasn’t a World of Adventures. I even wondered if the whole afternoon was some sort of outlandish birthday present. But who knew me well enough to lay on a combination bike-taxi and charismatic male prostitute package? Particularly if I didn’t know those were things I might want myself.