I’d bought it for his sixth birthday, second-hand from Gregg’s in Darvington. I had been going in there since I was a boy, inhaling the smell of rubber, listening to the bright ringing sound of new bicycle bells. They had whole drawers of bells at Gregg’s.
I saw Robert’s first bike straight away. It was a red second-hand Raleigh Spider, with white mudguards, red rubber handlebar grips and reflectors included. It was too big for him, but I could lower the saddle and handlebars right down, and that way he’d have it for a few years, at least. It had a little pouch beneath the saddle for a spanner and a puncture-repair kit. The only thing it didn’t have was a bell.
I asked to see the selection.
‘Is it for a boy?’ the man behind the counter asked. His ginger moustache twitched. I had already selected a boy’s bike, so I thought the answer was obvious.
‘That’s a shame. I’ve only got Minnies left.’ He handed me a bell with a Minnie Mouse transfer on the top. That red bow was in her hair (how could mice have hair? I was sure that Mickey didn’t have any hair), and those eyelashes curled up towards her ears. I weighed the bell in my palm.
‘But it’s for my son.’
‘I might have some Mickeys in next month.’
Robert’s birthday was the next week, and I wanted him to have the bell, to be able to warn people he was coming, to make some noise, to announce his presence. I wanted him to be able to do that.
‘Perhaps I’ll just take a plain bell.’
The man behind the counter frowned. ‘All the kids have these ones. How old is your son?’
‘He’ll be six.’
‘He won’t mind, then, will he?’
I hesitated.
‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw it in for free, with the bike.’ So he had the bike with the Minnie Mouse bell. The thing that puzzled me was, he didn’t seem to notice the fact that it was Minnie, not Mickey. He just loved ringing the bell as hard as he could. ‘I tried to get Mickey,’ I explained, but he ignored me and rang the bell again. ‘We can get you another bell. Later on.’
‘Don’t go on about it, Howard,’ said Kathryn.
He rode the bike every day to school. He got on well with his lessons from the first, especially English and Art. When he came home with gold stars stuck in his spelling book, Kathryn ran out to the garden to show me. ‘Look, Howard,’ she said, thrusting the book between me and the dahlias, ‘Robert came first.’ We held the book out in front of us.
‘He’s going to get on,’ she said. ‘Really get on.’ She kissed my cheek and laughed.
‘It’s early days,’ I said, thinking that we shouldn’t feel too proud. But I couldn’t stop the smile that was spreading across my face.
Kathryn gave the book a shake. ‘Gold stars. We should reward him.’
‘We’ve only just bought him a bike.’
She gave my upper arm a playful pinch. ‘Don’t be such an old stick-in-the-mud. He deserves a little something. As encouragement.’
After a moment I thought of a suggestion. ‘How about taking him to the power station?’
She frowned.
‘As a reward,’ I continued. ‘I think he’d like it.’
‘Would he?’
‘Power. Cables and engines and trains – it’s what boys like, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I can show him what I do.’
‘Do you think he’ll enjoy it?’
‘We’ll go tomorrow.’
It’s always breezier on the site. The wind cuts past the towers like a blade in the winter. But that Saturday it seemed to be warmer than it had been for weeks, and I let Robert unzip his anorak. His cheeks glowed. His thick hair, which his mother had allowed to grow too long, hardly moved in the wind.
I guided him around the bottom of the first cooling tower. Water roared as it poured down the concrete sides. We stopped for a moment while I explained how it worked. Every time he looked up at me, I thought he must be listening, but he didn’t ask any questions until we were back on the road towards the turbine hall. Then he said, ‘Why is there dust everywhere?’
I didn’t notice that any more, the piles of soot that gathered along the kerbsides and made the puddles black. I didn’t notice the way it caught in the back of your throat. I’d forgotten that when I first came to the power station I’d wondered why the snot was black when I blew my nose.
‘It’s from the coal.’ I pointed to the black hill of coal dust. ‘That,’ I said, ‘is what heats the water.’
He looked at it and frowned, but when I asked him if he’d like to go closer, he shook his head and reached for my hand.
‘Are we going to see the fire?’ he asked.
‘Fire?’
‘The fire the coal makes.’
I laughed. ‘We’re going to see where I work. I don’t work with the fire.’
His fingers were moist as they tugged at my hand. ‘I want to see the fire.’
Of course. He wanted to see the engine of the place. He was a young boy. He wasn’t interested in buttons and levers. He wanted pumps and pipes and generators. He wanted noise and power, the hot centre of the place.
I decided I would impress him: I’d take him into the turbine hall.
‘We’ll go and see the fire,’ I said, leading him into a side entrance and up the stairs to the viewing gallery door, ‘but it’ll be noisy. OK?’
He beamed.
Even on the stairs, there was a loud roar. I’ve never liked the noise of the turbine hall, the way it travels through you, making speech impossible. The men on the turbine floor seem to have developed some sort of sign language that I’ve never mastered.
Before we went in, I strapped him into a hard hat, making sure the visor wasn’t too low on his forehead, and I handed him a pair of plastic safety goggles, which he let dangle from his fingers.
‘You have to wear them, Robert. And earplugs. There’s up to ninety decibels of noise in there.’ I showed him how to pinch the foam earplugs between his finger and thumb until they were small enough to be jammed in his ears. Then I put on my own ear protectors and opened the door.
I could feel the noise through the metal grate of the walkway. It came up through my shoes, vibrated along the hairs on my legs. Robert reached for my fingers, his face turned to mine. His green eyes were wide open, unblinking. I squeezed his hand and smiled.
It was thunderous in there. The power station was never silent – there was always a hum or a whirr or a bell somewhere – but the turbine hall breathed noise. I felt a thrill, as I always did, at the size and power of the generator in that great hall: 2,000 milliwatts of electricity were being created here, at this very moment. I often thought of the hall’s long windows and elevated viewing platform as something like a huge theatre, with the generator as the star attraction.
But as we walked together along the viewing grid that ran along the top of the turbine hall, the sound swelling around us, I realised that I couldn’t explain to my son what any of the tin boxes and lagged pipes and bright cables did; even if I’d have shouted at the top of my voice, he wouldn’t have been able to hear a word. We had only sign language, and I wasn’t sure what signs to use to explain the workings of the turbine. So we walked together dumbly while the generator roared around us and the men worked below.
When we were almost at the end, Robert let go of my hand and pointed frantically towards the roof. Following the line of his finger, I saw a pigeon flying upwards. Its wings were spread wide as it glided in front of the long window that stretched from floor to ceiling in that massive hall. Robert kept jabbing his finger in the pigeon’s direction, grinning. I knelt beside him and we watched it together as it flew above the noise of the turbine, way beyond the heads of the men working below.
When we were out of the turbine hall, Robert pulled out his earplugs and said, ‘Does the bird live in there?’
‘Probably. They nest up there sometimes.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s warm and sheltered, I suppose. No one can touch them up there.’
‘But can he get out?’
I thought for a minute. ‘Yes. The windows open at the top. Yes, he can get out.’
‘He won’t get burned, by the fire?’
‘No. He’s perfectly safe.’
But the truth was, I wasn’t sure. Once it was in, would a bird be able to find that crack in the window again? Or would it spend the whole of its pigeon-life in the roof of the turbine hall, disorientated, deafened by the power of the place?