The Accidental Cyclist (20 page)

Mrs Smith brought Icarus his
dinner, gave him a cold compact for his bruised leg, attended to
his grazed elbows. The only thing that she could not attend to was
his aching heart – but then, she did not know that it was in such a
desperate state, and even if she had known, she had no clue as to
the remedy, because deep inside she still nursed a similar
injury.

“The man from the auction house
came today,” she told Icarus, “and it’s seems that your friend
George was right. The man said that he sold a carpet just like it a
couple of months ago, and that we would get more than enough to buy
the flat.”

“Oh,” said Icarus. He could not
raise any enthusiasm for this conversation.

“Well, that’s good news, isn’t
it?”

“I suppose so.”

“But the strange thing was that
the man said this is a very rare and unusual carpet. When he saw it
he thought it was the one he sold recently – but he knew that it
couldn’t be, because he had sent the other one to somewhere in
South America. ‘It can’t possibly have got back to North London in
that time,’ he said.”

“Uh huh,” said Icarus.

When he went to bed, Icarus
insisted on undressing on his own, in spite of his mother’s
protestations. In his small bedroom he stripped down and stood
naked in the middle of the floor. He looked down at his legs: his
right leg, he noticed, had lost it chubbiness and was lean,
muscled, and a little hairy. Those are new, he thought. Will I have
to shave them. He had noticed the smooth legs of Justin and Jason.
And Jo. Did you have to shave your legs to be a good courier, he
wondered.

Then he shifted his gaze to his
left leg. It was swollen to almost double the size of the right,
and was bruised almost black, with angry purple welts where the car
grille had hit him. It was not a pretty sight.

The nurse at the emergency room
had given him a set of crutches, which leant up against the wall in
the corner of the room. He had used them so far only with
difficulty to get up the stairs to the flat after they had taken a
taxi home from the hospital – an extravagance his mother had
insisted on.

It struck him that perhaps he
should have contacted the International Cycle Courier Company
(Hackney Branch) to let them know what had happened. It was too
late now – they would be closed. Then he wondered what had happened
to his courier’s bag. His bike, he knew, was at a police station –
probably the one where he had had the unfortunate encounter with
Helmet Two and the very large police seargeant.

He climbed gingerly into bed. He
lay there, staring at the moulded ceiling. The painkillers that the
nurse had given him seemed to ease the aching in his leg, but not
the hurt in his chest. He stared at the moulded ceiling. Light from
the street outside created new patterns in the moulding. When he
was young he used to imagine that the moving patterns were really
alive, they that had to remain in constant motion in order to stay
attached to the ceiling. If they stopped, they would fall off the
ceiling, and onto him, tangling him up in their eternal struggle.
Icarus wished that the night was totally black, that the patterns
would disappear. He could not turn over and shut his eyes. He
seemed to see Jo’s face emerge from the patterns. But she did not
see him.. Eventually, with the help of the painkillers, darkness
came to him, and the pain in his leg eased, although his heart
still throb-throb-throbbed in the dark.

Icarus and The Leader stood in
the basement of Icarus’s flat, regarding the buckled front wheel
and bent forks of his bike. The Leader had reluctantly agreed to
collect the mangled bike from the police station. “I try to stay
away from police stations these days,” he told Icarus. He had
carried the bike all the way back to the flat, and now they were
trying to decide whether they could salvage it.

“I could fix that front wheel,”
The Leader said, “but I wouldn’t be sure of the integrity of the
rim.”

“Integrity?” Icarus was
quizzical.

“I can read, you know. I’m not
totally stoopid.”

Indeed, The Leader appeared to
have adopted self-help with a similar alacrity to the way he had
tackled making and mending bicycles. Icarus looked around the
basement. A number of open books littered the sofa, and in one
corner there was a newly installed bookshelf with an array of
neatly arranged cycle maintenance books, alphabetically catalogued
from Ballantyne to Zinn. Around it the piles of books seemed to
proliferate.

“What you need,” The Leader went
on, “is a new front wheel, new fork and new tape for the
handlebars.”

“That’s great. How long will it
take?”

“Well, it might take a while to
source the right parts, so I reckon a week or so. When are you due
back at work?”

“I don’t think I’ll be back for
a good few weeks. Well, as long as I need, Helen said, but I really
felt that the sooner I get back the better.”

“I’m surprised they’ll even take
you back. You managed to lose your courier’s bag and got knocked
down. What kind of courier are you anyway?”

Icarus began to feel defensive,
and a little hurt. “It was a proper accident – I was distracted. I
was thinking of, um …” He couldn’t tell The Leader what he had been
thinking of.

“I was just winding you up,”
said The Leader lightly.

“Oh,” said Icarus, slightly
relieved. “To tell the truth …”

“I always do that.”

“…to tell the truth, I thought
they might not want me back, but Helen the Despatcher was really
nice when she came round to see me. She said I could take sick
leave for as long as I needed.”

They stood in silence for a
while, looking at the offending wheel.

“Of course,” The Leader broke
the silence, “I’ll give you mates’ rates for the parts and
labour.”

“Mates’ rates? What’s that?”

“Special discount, you know,
just for friends.”

“You mean like the discount that
we give you for living in our basement?”

The Leader shrugged. “You drive
a hard bargain, you know. How am I meant to run a successful
business if I keep having to give you freebies like this?”

“How about you come for lunch on
Sunday? I’ll organise it with my mum.”

“Your mum doesn’t like me. And
I’m a bit scared of her, to tell the truth.”

“And you always tell the truth,”
said Icarus. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it with her..”

“Okay then, you’ve got a
deal.”

After work that evening the
Grey Man stopped by in the basement. He found Icarus and The Leader
there, sitting in silence, reading. After inspecting Icarus’s war
wound he looked at the wrecked bike, then asked: “How on earth did
you let that happen? Didn’t you remember everything that I told
you?” He was more concerned than angry.

Icarus explained the chain of
events that had led to his accident, again omitting any reference
to Jo. When he finished, the Grey Man said: “Hmmm. I’m surprised
that Helen the Despatcher let you do that route so soon. Usually
it’s only done by very experienced riders. Normally I’m the only
one to do it …”

“But Helen said that Con usually
…” Icarus did not finish his sentence. The chain that turned his
brain seemed to slip a gear, and for a moment he floundered, before
re-engaging brain and mouth. “Oh,” he said, as a flashbulb lit up
above his head, “you must be Con.”

The Grey Man was silent for a
moment, then said: “At work you can call me Con.”

“But you said your name was
George,” said Icarus.

“In front of your mother,” said
the Grey Man, “you can call me George. And at work you can call me
Con.”

“I don’t understand,” said
Icarus. “What do I call you when you’re not at work and not with my
mother?”

“Then you can call me whatever
you like, as long as it’s not too rude.”

“But George isn’t your name, is
it?” asked The Leader.

“Let’s just say that it’s my
middle name.”

“So what is your real name
then?” Icarus and The Leader asked together.

The Grey Man paused for a while,
then said: “My name is Lazarus Georgiou Constantinou.”

“Aah,” said Icarus, “so that’s
why they call you Con.”

“Lazarus Constantinou,” said The
Leader. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s Greek. Like mine,” said
Icarus.

“Smith? That’s not a Greek
name,” said The Leader.

“No, but Icarus is. My father
was Greek.”

“Oh, I thought that Icarus was
just some kind of crazy made-up name.”

The Grey Man said: “It’s from a
Greek legend, so it is kind-of made up. But it was made up
thousands of years ago.”

The Leader asked: “So is there a
book where I can read all about it?”

“There are many, many books
about it. Probably hundreds of them. If you’re good, I’ll get you
some,” said the Grey Man.

“If I’m good,” said The Leader
with a harrumph. “You sound just like my mother.”

“Well, do you want the books or
not?” asked the Grey Man.

“What do you think?” said The
Leader, then: “Oh boy, how many more books do I have to read? I’m
busy trying to get through all of these – and they’re mostly just
about bikes. Now I find that there is other stuff that I have to
find out about.”

Icarus brought the conversation
back to its original course: “So why don’t we just call you
Lazarus?”

“Because my name is the story of
my life,” said the Grey Man.

“Yes, I get it,” said Icarus,
remembering the Grey Man’s tale. “I can see why you wouldn’t want
to be called Lazarus.”

But The Leader didn’t get it:
“Sorry, I just don’t know what you’re talking about?”

“It’s the story of Lazarus, from
the Bible,” said Icarus.

“Another story?” said The
Leader. “What’s this one about then?”

“It’s about a man called
Lazarus, who was brought back from the dead by Jesus.”

“From the Bible. So you mean
it’s another myth?”

“No, it’s not a myth – it’s from
the Bible.” Icarus turned to the Grey Man, looking for some
support.

The Grey Man said: “Some people
would argue that it’s true, and some would say that it’s a myth. It
depends on your point of view, really, on what you believe, and
what you don’t believe.”

The Leader asked: “Anyhow, what
do you mean when you say it’s the story of your life? Did you die,
or something?

The Grey Man sighed, and said:
“Well, in a manner of speaking. But it’s not something that I want
to talk about right now.” He turned to Icarus’s buckled bike, which
lay on the basement floor. “That front wheel’s going to need some
love and attention. It might be worth getting a specialist to look
at it.”

“I’m going to fix it,” said The
Leader defensively. “I’ll get a new rim, a few spokes, perhaps
change the bearings.”

“I know you’re keen to help,”
said the Grey Man. “No offence, but I think there are times when
you need someone who really knows what they’re doing. And I think
that would be best in this case.”

The Leader harrumphed again, and
sat down heavily on the sofa. “If you say so,” he said.

It is always the physical
wounds that heal quickest. Long after the outward bruises are gone
and the scars have faded, the hidden injuries continue to bleed and
weep. Mrs Smith knew this, because the wounds she had suffered 17
years ago when Dedalus left her had never healed. Now she hoped to
turn this knowledge to her advantage: she would use it to exploit
Icarus’s vulnerable state and undermine his desire to return to his
life on a bicycle. Surely, she thought, he must be having a crisis
of faith, an uncertainty about cycling. He had, after all,
first-hand experience of the damage that it could cause. She was
resolute. She would use his enforced confinement to convert him
once and for all.

The Grey Man, on the other hand,
surmised that Mrs Smith was in possession of such knowledge, and he
was determined to do all within his power to counter her actions.
Now that Icarus had discovered himself, he could not be allowed to
relapse just because of one small setback. He must be discouraged
from falling back under the malignant influence of his mother. The
Grey Man would have to be subtle as he countered her every move, so
that Mrs Smith would never realised that it was he who was
sabotaging her objective.

Throughout his recuperation
Icarus was unaware of the continual fight for his soul. The battle
raged between two contestants, who would drop in on him at unusual
moments, bring him little gifts, drop hints about his welfare and
well-being, steer conversations towards their way of thinking. Both
were totally unable to see that their battle was all in vain.
Icarus, you see, had never once wavered from his belief that when
he was well again – and when his bicycle was mended – he would once
again mount said machine and venture out along the highways and
byways, travelling wherever the road of life would take him.

Instead of responding to the
cold war that was raging around him, Icarus used his convalescence
to broaden his knowledge. He read avidly, no longer his mother’s
Encyclopaedia Britannica and the purloined bicycle magazines, but
books borrowed from the The Leader’s library in the basement, books
whose provenance was so unclear that even their current owner could
not remember where they had come from. There were borrowed books,
unreturned library books, bargain-basement books, second-hand
books, discarded books – no matter where they came from, all found
a welcome home on The Leader’s bookshelves. And of all the books
that Icarus so avidly consumed, a handful had a profound influence
on him. Icarus tackled the volumes in no particular order. He
started by rereading Tommy Simpson’s autobiography,
Cycling is
My Life
, and thought he should follow that by another
autobiography, so he picked up Lance Armstrong’s book,
It’s Not
About the Bike.
Disillusioned by fiction, he switched to
something more sedate, and closer to home, and at a canter he paged
through
The Beautiful Machine
, by Graeme Fife. For a bit of
lighter relief he turned to
French Revolutions
, by Tim
Moore, although he didn’t really get the bit about the drugs and
Mont Ventoux until he had finished William Fotheringham’s
Put Me
Back on my Bike
, which presented the other side of the story
about Tommy Simpson.