Part IV
"Should I follow you?"
Checks paid and we're outside the cafe, helmets in hand.
"The Bonneville. Nice choice." He crouches down to look at the engine.
"Not quite as nice as the Manx."
He looks back over his shoulder at the silver machine, practically gleaming with pride as much as it does. "The frame, the featherweight puts the center of gravity lower to the road so it handles better. But for engines, this…" He turns back to my Triumph and runs his finger along the airfoils. "…is a thing of beauty. Tell you what." He stands and swings his leg over the seat, flashing that boyishly cocky smile. "Why waste the petrol?"
That he did not suggest his bike does not bother me, the Norton does not seat two. That I am about to head off into the wilds of Northumberland with a rather large, strange man with no individual means of escape? Well, what's life without a little adventure? I deposit the saddlebags with the cafe owner and come back out to climb on behind the A.M.
Alpha Male. I'm considering calling him "C.A.M." Consummate Alpha Male. But it seems to be a natural part of him rather than a show put on for others, so it doesn't bother me as it normally does in other men.
As I have ridden as a passenger before, I know to put my hands on his hips. Honestly that's why I do it. Really. He is a much more experienced and confident rider than I am who obviously knows these roads intimately. After a few shake down miles in which he gets the feel of the bike and realizes I'm an experienced passenger that trusts him enough to follow his movements, he opens another gear up and lets the Triumph engine sing. We are flying up the hills and down the small gullies. I follow his shifting weight so that we are hugging the asphalt through smooth swift turns, just enjoying the feel and flow the road. Watching the cliff of the coastline as it sweeps in and out, a dance between the road and the sea.
He slows the bike to a stop at top of a cliff face overlooking a small secluded beach of white sand, the waves of the North Sea breaking in last of the sunlight behind us.
"It's beautiful." I say as we take off our helmets.
He only looks over his shoulder with a soft smile and pats my thigh to tell me dismount. I follow him to a narrow trail switch-backing down a ravine, taking the hand he holds out to guide me down the rather treacherous path.
I am not a slight woman, so when a man's hand is big enough to encompass mine, I notice.
And shiver a little bit in delight.
He does not release my hand when we get to the bottom and we walk in silence, savoring the rugged austere beauty of this little untouched place.
Eventually the suns set far enough and the bay is cast in shadow, the waves losing their dancing glints.
"You should see this place at sunrise, when the sun rises and brings the waves to life with light, the kiss of her warmth in the cold, damp spray." He says.
I murmur an assent. It is truly lovely, but I have no illusions about being the first woman he's brought down here and it's going to take more than a romantic view to sway me. I want to know who I'm dealing with. I can't figure out a way to tactfully guide the current un-conversation to it, so I ask outright.
"Why are you so angry?"
He looks at me quizzically with an edge of annoyance. "I thought I explained that." The unspoken accusation, I thought you understood.
"Oh, you explained the intellectual reasons, but your anger is more than a philosophical difference of opinion. It's personal. Why?"
He drops my hand to consider me for a moment, weighing options, weighing me.
He leans up against the rocks, shifting uncomfortably. I lean next to him.
"I was in Bristol a few years back, well, several years back now. I found a group of mates that had some of the same ideas. And...you know with that lot, drugs are around. I tried some. It was o.k. if you couldn't get out to the open road, but nothing compared to riding, the real kick. Just wasn't a big deal for me, and it wasn't a big deal for me mate Paul. Paul, he wasn't just the best laugh, he was the kind of person you could call from a phone box in the middle of nowhere at 3:30 am because you broken down and he'd be there to pick you up by sunrise. Just the best kind of person. But more than that, the way he saw the world, from the sunrise over the spires of Radcliffe to the oil slicks on the river, was glorious. He could see the entirety of human existence, its beauty and its depravity, in a single alley and put it into the most amazing words." There a pause as he clears his throat before his voice drops back into a grounded quality I have not quite heard from him yet. "I knew Paul never got up before noon, and I knew he did not spend his time in the dole queue, and yet he always seemed to be in cash. Not a lot, just enough to get by with. Have a bit of fun. With all the visitors and the drugs around, despite the fact that he didn't use them, it didn't take me long to figure out what he did for a living."
"What are you doing?" He has been toying with my braid for the last couple minutes, and has started working at the elastic.
"Nothin', just...seeing what you really look like."
He's nervous, and he can't roll a cigarette so he's fidgeting with my hair.
"So there's me and Paul, in the moment. Kerouac and Cassady in the U.K.. Not doing anyone any harm, really. A couple joy rides here and there, a couple brawls. Mostly with a gang of the dock workers who also rode. They saw it as a turf war; we saw it as fun way to spend a Saturday night stirring up a hornet's nest. Until one night I don't look at who I'm swinging at."
"Oh no."
"My solicitor was able to convince the jury that he had not identified himself as a police officer, which if he did I hadn't heard it. So I only got six months for battery...That's better...Wow."
He worked my hair loose from the braid and as fine as it is, it's blowing about my face in the sea breeze which I suppose must look alluring, but honestly trying to see through an ever moving strawberry-blonde cloud, which also gets in your mouth, is annoying. It doesn't help when he plucks the glasses of my face and tucks them into his jacket.
"I can't see two feet in front of me without those."
"Well, you'll have to stick close then." he replies cheekily, leaning in.
"So," I lean back instead, bringing him back from his flirtatious derailment of topic, "Prison..."
There's a frustrated frown that I'm not letting him get away with it, before he looks out to sea. "So, prison. You want to talk about the system, man. That is its ultimate expression, the most honest, un-hypocritical reality of it. Everything you do, every movement, every breath is controlled. Everyone kept in neat rows. Everyone the same and if you aren't the same you get beat back into shape so you are. The whole point is to put the entire weight of society on you, like some domineering parent putting the lean on a kid based on the idea that human being can't think for himself."
"How did you handle it?"
"Read a lot, wrote some. It got me through."
That's part of it, but not all. "What happened to Paul?"
"I heard from him the first couple months, even came up to visit me a few times. And then...nothing. No word, he was just gone…" I wait out his little internal struggle quietly. "Our other friends, they weren't the type for letters, so I waited until I was released I came back to Bristol and tracked one of them down."
I have bad feeling about what's coming and place my hand over one of arms, which are now folded over his chest in tension.
"He'd been found face down in the river three months before."
"What happened?"
"Dunno. Probably someone he worked with or a competitor. I never knew that much about what Paul did. Hadn't wanted to know really."
"And the cops didn't..."
"The cops didn't even fucking try!" He jerks out of my grasp. His voice has dropped to a taught growl, filled with rage. "As far as they were concerned, it was another drug dealer off the street. Just made their life easier. Some stupid idiot hits a police officer and "Quick, protect the peace and lock him up!" But some poor guy, a good man of poetry and honor, dies and "Hey-ho, another file to be put in storage, my desk is a little cleaner." And what choice did Paul have really? Coming from the poor underbelly of the social order. He could have slaved his whole life away in the vain hopes of dying in debt to a bank mortgage, or he could have taken a route to easy money. Money that left him with time and energy to express himself, that let him be himself. You force a kid into choice like that and of course they are going to go outside the law, which they are then punished for. Second class citizen on one hand or deviant criminal on the other. The quintessential rock and a hard place. It showed me what the structure really was. It's not about protecting the peace. It's not about making the streets safe. It's about protecting their cars and their homes and their jobs and their perfectly ordered little worlds so their little lives can keep rolling on, safe and unchanging."
"I'm sorry."
"...I never get why people say that." He snaps sullenly, "You didn't do anything, why are you sorry?"
"I'm sorry you are hurting. I wish you weren't. I'm sorry I can't do anything about it. It sounds like you and Paul were really close."
"Yeah." He breathes deeply a few moments calming himself, "Yeah. Old scars."
"...Can I ask, how close?" I make the implication as gently as I can and get a guarded glare in response. "Look it doesn't matter to me. That's your business and hey, love is love no matter who it's between. I just want to know who I'm talking to...And if I've been lured here under false pretenses." I wink slyly.
The gear change throws him and he starts to laugh, releasing the built up tension in a deep baritone chortle that is...the most adorable thing I've ever heard. It subsides into a chuckle as looks at me in mock wariness. "You're a handful."
I nod formally in agreement, "That has been the general consensus."
"I like people. I like souls." He takes me in his arms, brushing the stray locks of my hair back, "I like you."
"You don't know me."
"I know there's a lot you aren't telling, keeping the spotlight on me, but I know enough. I know you don't even think about how different you are to be out here, riding alone. You just do what you do and what people think, good or bad, just rolls off you. I know you see the world in vibrant splashes of colour. I know you see things, little things, that other people don't. Your mind is constantly going, ticking off those little things. I bet you've counted every single sea gull that's flown by since we got here."
11. Damn. It's my turn to squirm, but his hands and his eyes hold me in place.
"You can enjoy the moment, but you are not fully in it. You're outside it, observing it. Those little clockwork gears in your head ticking away at a mile a minute."
"Nothing so sophisticated. It's a hamster on a wheel with an espresso IV drip."
"What are you afraid of, I wonder, that you can't just be?"
"I'm not af..."
Later, I would wonder how lips that chiseled and narrow could be that soft and sensual. But in that moment, I just. Stopped. Thinking.
...