It was difficult to get anyone to come out and play on a Sunday. His friends, his gang, whatever their church, were locked into the rule of a joyless, house-bound Sabbath. Shops were tight shut, games forbidden, communal pleasure confined to special zones - Silloth in summer - even the pubs were different, better-behaved, careful not to antagonise the gods of the day.
Joe had been at the altar for Holy Communion, made two mistakes, and later much more happily sung in the comfort of the choir for the Eucharist. Ellen had made his dinner before she went down to the pub. The quiz occupied Sam and she was needed to run the other rooms. Joe ate alone and quickly, got out his bike, stuffed his yellow polo-neck in the saddle-bag and set off the eight miles west for the mining town of Aspatria.
Annie Fleming lived there.
After that day in 3L she had been friendly to him, she had even sought him out once or twice and lolled against the railings while he tried to unnumb his tongue. And earlier in the week, in a mixed swimming lesson, she had let herself be life-saved by him when they were practising and his hands had slithered across the bubbled bathing costume on to breasts, real breasts, his first, so strangely soft, stirring excitement in a body otherwise jellified with the sin and the giddiness of the encounter. It had made him feel bold for the first time for months and he towed her backwards and forwards across the pool until he could no longer disobey the whistle. He climbed out quivering from the contact and amok with further expectation as Annie gave him a sly complicit knee-trembling smile.
He wanted more.
It was a bleak northern early-autumn day and the wind was in his face on the way there. He counted seven cars, all black. There were two cyclists, together, going in the opposite direction. The best bit was the swoop down the hill beyond Waverton and the hard pedal up the hill that faced it. The worst was the stretch alongside Brayton woods In which a man had recently been found hanged. He had used his army belt. He went past it as fast as he could, in third gear, mouthing ‘Be My Love’ to keep up his spirits.
She had told him she lived in a village a mile or so from the main town and he soon spotted the sign. On the way he took off his green school jersey and arrayed himself in the yellow polo-neck.
He had not told her, not even hinted, that he was coming.
The village was eight short terraces of small houses built for miners. It stood beside an extinct pit. Joe circled it like a lone Indian scout warñy spying on an encampment of covered wagons. There were some boys playing on a slag heap but they were too young to approach.
He knew neither the street nor the number.
If he willed it enough, she would appear. That was his conviction. He did not pray. Prayer helped elsewhere, but not for this, which was a bad feeling. But he let loose his longing for Annie, particularly her soft as snow breasts underneath the bubbled costume. She would pick up his signal, he thought. She would stroll out, just as he was passing her house, just like that.
He entered the settlement and cycled up and down the bare, narrow streets. Occasionally a small boy raced from house to house. Twice he saw women walking, huddled around folded arms, heads bent.
It took some time before hopelessness set in. He circled and then swung into the streets, wove patterns between the terraces, slowed down to peer into windows, became convinced that next time, next time, if he sped up or went around three times quickly without looking into windows, or shut his eyes while free-wheeling down a street then - she would appear.
A boy in black drainpipe trousers walked in front of him forcing him to stop. The boy was some years older than Joe. His hair was well greased in a wave of a quiff. Despite the chill day he wore an open-necked shirt, sleeves rolled up, right forearm tattooed with an anchor. He nodded to Joe but the nod was not friendly. ‘Can I help you, pal?’
Joe shook his head. He was straddled over the cross-bar, both feet on the ground. He felt that he had been captured for a crime.
‘What you after?’
'I’m looking for somebody.’
‘I’ll do.’
The boy was clearly encouraged by Joe’s confusion and in no doubt of his physical superiority. He enjoyed the silence.
‘You could get off that bike for a start, pal’
Joe gripped the handlebars tightly. Why was this happening?
'I came to meet somebody,’ he said. ‘But they don’t seem to be here.’
This time it was the older boy who nodded, unwillingly convinced. 'I don’t know you, do I?’
‘I’m from Wigton.’
‘You’d better set off back there, then, hadn’t you, pal?’ He gave a last hard look and gestured a dismissal. Joe felt grateful. ‘Canary!’ the boy yelled, and the word bulleted after him.
Joe did not look back until he was well away and when he did the previously seductive settlement of terraced cottages seemed a hostile encampment stuck sullenly on the bare landscape hugged into its own.
Thoughts of Annie Fleming had gone: fear had driven out the pricklings of juvenile lust.
There was no song in his head as he pedalled with the wind behind him, heavy rainclouds coming in from the sea to the west, the road past the hanged man’s wood entirely forsaken. The clouds seemed to be pursuing him.
The swoop down the hill and the impetus up the matching hill lifted him a little bit but the pressure on his spirits was growing heavy.
He got a puncture on the back wheel. He took out his kit and turned the bike upside down then realised he needed a spoon to lever off the tyre. And a bowl of water. The clouds darkened the fields all around him.
Wigton was about four miles away. He got on the bike and began to pedal but the grind of the back wheel told him that he was doing damage. You did not ride on a flat tyre, it ruined the bike. He dismounted and began to push it, standing on the pedal now and then in his urgency, using it like a scooter.
It was as if the big clouds were closing in, bearing down on him, isolating him. He heard his panting breath and heard the sound of his own fear. The road ahead was flat and straight and empty. He was cold.
He mounted the bike once again and felt relief in the flow of speed but the grind of the back wheel, the damage being done, too much. Once again he dismounted. Once again he used it as a scooter between times of running.
The heavy rainclouds blotted out sound. A silence encircled him. Silence and cold. As if there were no one else alive, anywhere in the world. This cold silence threatened to make him stop stiff still but if he did he did not know what would happen. He heard his breath, that was all, his breath panting in panic panicking him more. One foot on the pedal. Back on to the bike. Never mind. The cold silence wrapped round him so tightly now and what was he? What was this thing that was him, that was solid with fear and the strangeness of this pressure of isolation?
There was a cottage. A yellow light through the curtains. He could stop and ask for a spoon. Even for a basin of water. But what would happen if he stopped? What was this thing? He dare not stop. He wanted to knock on the door. He wanted somebody to break this spell. He dare not stop.
Now he rode the bike.
The wind pushed at his back.
Big spots of rain. He could not cry.
It was so strange. It was so frightening and strange. He would not get back. Even when he entered Wigton it was different. He peered at the houses as if checking they were really there. He got home, he changed, he went to Evensong and in the concord of the choir the fragment of himself was eased, began to grow back but fearful still as he walked the long way, down the lighted main streets, fearful of what he knew could be waiting for him when he went to his bed.
‘Is Alan in?’
‘What for?’
Joe avoided her eyes. 'I just want to ask him something.’
‘We’re having our dinner.’
The door was a quarter open. The stairs behind beckoned him to run away.
'I’ll wait then.’
‘He’s got an invitation for this afternoon.’
Joe smarted at the kick. ‘I’ll wait at the bottom of the stairs.’
Alan’s mother shut the door.
Ellen’s background, that queer brother of hers, the common pub, the boy’s too obvious longing to be with Alan, not right.
He waited.
He sat on the bottom stair, which looked into the narrow twist of the ancient Church Street which fissured the middle of the town they said, proudly, 'like a dog’s hind leg’. She could have invited him in. He delivered papers for no pay, most Saturdays now, the pink sports edition, at the end of the afternoon, winging around the town with Alan, bike to bike, seeing how much time they could clip off their record. Joe felt stabbed by her dislike. It was unfair. It was unfathomable to him. He was always on his best behaviour. But Alan’s mother could never wait to see the back of him. He sat in a huddle, unjustly unhappy.
But Alan came down and for a moment the misery evaporated. Alan was almost precisely Joe’s height, his hair fair to Joe’s sandy, his face high cheekboned, defined, to Joe’s round endeavour, both of them fit, Alan the runner, Joe the swimmer, Joe doing Alan’s homework, close even within the gang.
‘I can’t come,’ Alan said, apology in his tone.
They had agreed to go on a long bike ride together on this first day of half-term.
‘You’ve had an invitation.’
‘Who told you?’
'It’s Malcolm, isn’t it?’
‘How do you know?’
‘He’s asked you to go out with him in his dad’s new car.’
‘Yes.’ Alan gave in, used to Joe divining his moods or plans.
‘But you promised.’
Alan nodded. His mother had told him to go with Malcolm. It was a real treat, she said, not given to just anybody.
‘You promised.’
The plangency of the repeated word. Joe lashed out, punched Alan hard on the arm, punched him again, turned away, grabbed his bike from the wall, ran with it before slinging himself on to the saddle.
He headed for home, for the loft, to be with the budgerigars.
They were disturbed by his arrival and shifted from perch to perch. The boy stood still, looked intensely on them as if trying to extract the secret of their lightness, their appearance, even in agitation, of joy. They were so free, no guilt. So light. Colin had given him two blues but he could not make out which they were. They could be any of those dapper little coloured pet birds, painted sparrows, ordinary little things made extraordinary through the flash of high soft colour. Joe watched them for some minutes but even that troupe of innocence and colour did not uncramp the tightness in his chest.
In the corner on a stool were the boxing gloves. Colin had declared that he would turn the stables downstairs into a gym and really train up Joe for the job. He would get a heavy punchbag and a speed ball, he would get weights and a skipping rope, he would clear out the two stalls still remaining from the old days for the horses and Wigton’s first gym would be set up. You never knew, he could train others besides Joe. Wigton lads could fight as well as anybody else. Better.
His enthusiasm had overcome Joe’s deep reservations, seemed to go some way to repairing the fracture in him. The neglected gloves had come out of the bottom of his wardrobe and there they sat, in the corner, on the stool like a boxer waiting for the bell to go.
Joe pulled on a pair. He shadow-boxed but even that made the budgies tremulous so he went down the ladder into the stable, the fusty, aimlessly cluttered place, always cold, the stalls for the long-lost horses littered with empty crates.
The boy began to box. On his own he was full of style. The thorn of Alan pricked him on. His shoulders moved, rolled, easily, he ducked, he threw a couple of jabs with his left and then a right cross, step back, he came nearer the mottled wall, stone protuberant, unyielding. He hit the wall. Once, twice, then again, the old one-two, into the body, work it, work it, beginning to sweat, hearing his. breath but not afraid, not with the gloves on, not when he was hitting the wall, hit, hit, hit the wall, stand close, he had the little black boy screaming in his head, in his sights, slip that punch, sidestep, left, left, and then into the stomach, that slowed them down, that took it out of them, his breath sounded harsh and good, bang, bang, bang, screaming from the horse’s hoofs, slam, slam against the wall, his feet apart, his eyes feeling the sweat flow from his brow, hitting the wall, hitting it, slamming, frenziedly, the obdurate wall.
When he stopped he was heaving in breath. He looked at the gloves. They were cut and battered from the wall. The surface leather had split in some places and the sponginess beneath was revealed, little nicks, little wounds, you could not fight any more with gloves like this, they would cut, it would not be allowed. He took them back up the ladder and returned them to the stool. He sat and watched the beautiful birds, exhausted, waiting.
Colin had been told by Ellen never to take Joe on his motorbike so they met down Burnfoot beside the convent. He had found the boy staring at the budgies and had offered him the treat on the spot. Colin had only had the bike for two weeks. It was an ancient Norton, bought, Colin boasted, for ‘next to nothing’, and he was enraptured by it.
Ellen’s fear was susceptible to no entreaty. It was unlike her to be so openly adamant about risk. Joe must not go on the motorbike. He’s too young. Promise? Colin had nodded solemnly at the injunction, feeling that he was thus marked out as a daredevil, and yet addressed as a responsible grown-up. He was pleased with that.
He had found a pair of old flying goggles in a rummage sale. His trousers were tucked into black Wellingtons. Grace had loaned him a pair of Leonard’s black leather gloves. Joe had been instructed to smuggle out his yellow polo neck to wear over his school jumper. Cold, Colin explained, when it met speed, just sliced through you.
‘Best to put your arms around me,’ Colin said. 'The real pros use those grips but safer if you put your arms round me. And you’ll be able to feel my rhythm. This is an open-air jet. Don’t give me the jet set! They should try a Norton. Nobody’ll ever beat this bike, Joe, best in the world. Ready?’
Joe got on the pillion rather gingerly. His mind was still submerged in the stables: the boy’s screaming was still in his head; he could see Alan and Malcolm in the back seat of the new car; he had surely ruined one pair of his gloves.
‘Tighter.’
The boy pulled himself closer to the man who twisted around, his face monstered by the goggles, a grin wiping out the lower half of his face.
‘TT!’ he yelled above the explosions of the engine. ‘Wall of Death!’
The bike jerked forward, abruptly, clumsily, and Joe almost fell off. His face bumped into the goggle straps and his nose whiffed the larded Brylcreem. Colin drove cautiously, only beginning to open up when well clear of the town.
Carlisle Bridge was in his sights. Carlisle Bridge was a narrow low-walled railway bridge, which went off the Wigton road at a right angle, and immediately threw another right angle into the Carlisle road. Carlisle Bridge collected more accidents than anywhere else in the county. The approach from both sides was calm and open and then before you knew it, this savage Z-bend was on top of you. Lorries, cars, motorbikes, especially motorbikes, had taken the bridge too fast or had a spot of oil on the road, a slither of rain, a sudden fear of an oncoming vehicle on such a narrow bridge - a young local soldier on leave had crashed his motorbike there less than a month before, thrown over the parapet on to the rails. They spoke of a ‘mangled body’. They spoke yet again of widening the bridge. This bridge was at the quick of Ellen’s anxiety.
Joe knew the bridge from the upstairs of a bus, when sometimes everyone went ‘Whoa!’ as the bus swayed around, just making it. And he knew it from his bike when he and Alan and some of the others would get up as much speed as they could and swing their bikes to an angle like the motorbike champions in the TT on the Isle of Man, the trick being to make the angle as acute as possible without hitting the deck. He felt Colin open up the throttle as they approached it and a wild mixture of fear and exhilaration whipped through his mind as sharp as the wind in his face.
‘Hold tight!’
Colin opened up yet more as the narrow little bridge came into view. The bushes on either side of the road were still in good leaf and thickly green, the cattle and sheep rushed by, standing still, indifferent and calm.
‘Lean to the left! Then switch to the right! Blast off!’
They beat into the first turn at some speed and Joe felt all that was inside him swoop to the left as he followed Colin’s body and then the near instantaneous switch a little too late, to the right, but they skimmed the far wall, shot across the road into the lush verge, twisted out of that and proceeded at a subdued pace towards Carlisle.
Joe knew how close they had been. Colin did not turn round. He pulled up in Thursby, a village half-way between the town and the city. He parked the bike against the wall of the school, which stood on a village green of a handsome size. He took off his goggles and walked a few paces, finding a spot isolated enough from the road.
‘You’ll have to practise that leaning business, Joe,’ he said. ‘Thing is you lean into the bend, see, lean into the bend, but you have to follow my body to perfection otherwise kaput.’
Joe nodded, suddenly weak, glad to sit on solid ground. Colin lit up a cigarette and a dreamy look came into his eyes. ‘This has come just too late for me.’ The barest gesture indicated the Norton. ‘I’ve a knack for this, Joe, I can feel it, dead certain. I’ve got the touch. But it’s all money. You have to have the money or know the money men. That’s my flaw.’
He looked nostalgically at the smoke that came from the cigarette burning between his fingers, as if in that lazy curl of smoke lay the proof of a destiny denied.
‘Know what I think?’ He looked at Joe intently. 'I think I’m just going to wait for you to grow up. So we can be real pals. Man to man. You and me. I’m picky, see, and I’ve made up my mind. You and me’s not just related, we could be best pals.’
Joe smiled but the smile was forced. What about Alan? And the others. But still he smiled and when they stood up and Colin slung his arm around his shoulder as they sauntered back to the bike - a gesture Joe himself so often made freely with Alan - he repressed the tremor it caused.
On the way back Colin took the bridge steadily, so that Joe could get used to it, he explained when he let him off back at the convent and made him swear not to tell Ellen.
Although still a touch shaky when he walked from the convent, it was the trace of exhilaration that was imprinted more firmly on Joe’s mind. He went past the pub, into the town. He might bump into someone he knew. There was still light, the clocks had not gone back.
But the evening town was quiet, even in the yards where gangs collected there was nothing for him. But he did not mind. He went from Church Street to Water Street by way of the pens in the pig market, which supplied a mild frisson of illegality to top up the exhilaration. He ran down the ramp in Harry Moore’s garage, which was not quite as chancy but there were stories of boys being caught.
Colin was already in the pub. Sam paid him partly in kind: a pint of bitter a day which Colin took as two halves or saved up for a spree. It was an effective way for Sam to defray the unnecessary expense of Colin. Ellen approved because it meant that she could keep an eye on him most nights. When Joe looked into the bar, Colin’s exaggerated ‘Joe! Now where have you been?’ alerted his mam, he could see that, and he blushed and she saw that and she knew, he knew that.
‘Joe and me,’ Colin announced to Sam and Ellen, both behind the bar, she ready to take orders for the Darts Room and the kitchen, ‘we’re going to be best pals when he grows up. That right?’
Joe tried to nod without it being fully confirmed as a nod. This time it was Sam who looked at him. But where Ellen had frowned, his dad only smiled and said, ‘Joe won’t be lost for pals, will you?’ The boy did not know how to receive that: it seemed to mean so much more than the words.
He went into the back yard to get his bike. This would be a good moment.
It was still not dark but the few street lamps were lit. He tacked up King Street, into High Street, past the church in which he was a failure at the altar, down Proctor’s Row, and into the narrow lane that wended by the small stream and led to the baths.
He had not come principally to swim.
He went into the chlorinated water and the thought of Annie Fleming being life-saved was more vivid than any race. He forced himself to stay until the whistle called them out. He forced himself to wait until he was the last to leave.
Then he went out and, already feeling a small distant sensation of fear at the back of his throat, he pointed his bike the short way back, the unlit way.
He followed the riverside path and turned into the hill. Fine for the first bit until he caught the sound of his breath and he stood on the pedals, pressing them harder, even speeding up as he reached the crest of the hill and seemed to pause for a second, looking through the darkening twilight at the gasometer, at the few speckled lights of the town, which seemed so distant and yet were but a couple of minutes away as he kicked down the pedals and shot down the hill, hearing his breath louder now though he was trying not to breathe, past the gasometer and the Tenters cottages, the strangeness beginning to clamp on him again, making for the narrow bridge, which switched across another of the rivers threading through Wigton, too fast, overshot, thudded his leg sickeningly into the wall, managed to twist the handlebars and balance and keep upright, a bad knock, lucky to be wearing long trousers.