On a warm, still afternoon
in May of millennium year, a bike rider - his name is Jeremy - pedals the road
that keeps close to the west bank of the River Wharfe in the Yorkshire Dales
National Park. He is nineteen. He is nearing the end of his first year at
University. He has biked this road
times lost count of, and not always as alone as he is today. In the previous August when he last
biked here, he was not alone.
“Listen!” A girl – eighteen, his age at the time
– is calling over her shoulder from the front of a tandem bike. Her name is Shirley. She pilots the
tandem like a pro. He’s content sitting in back – it’s his turn to anchor
the bike. The bike is a thoroughbred.
They love it, love riding it. The
rhythm connects them. On their solos they can test each other, race each
other. On the tandem they must
work with and for each other.
“What?” he shouts back.
“Listen to what?”
“The names, Oaf! Burnsall. Grassington. Kilnsey.
Kettlewell.” He’s “Oaf” except when she’s upset.
Then he’s Jeremy. And when he’s
Jeremy he knows she’s cross. Or crying. Or moved by something in the beauty of
the world.
“So? You know where we are. That’s a relief.”
“It proves it!”
“Proves what?” Shirley can exasperate.
“What Ma Perigo says.” She
can exasperate alright. Perigo – Old Ma Perigo - is Head of
English at the Sixth Form College they attend.
From the front of the tandem
Shirley imitates Ma Perigo’s fluting tones.
“English falls naturally
into pentameters, girls. Listen! Gargrave.
Giggleswick. Stainforth. Long Preston. The lowing herd wades slowly o’er the Wharfe.”
“Lost! Lost, after all!” he
wails. “They’re all the other side of the county.”
He loves her sharp,
inventive mind. He loves the way
her short fair hair peeps through the slots in her helmet. He loves the summer
smell of her, Blue Grass and sweat coming at him when he leans close to her
back. He lets go the rear
handlebar and puts his hands either side of her neck and draws them across her
blue lycra top to her shoulders.
“No fondling on voyage!” she
yells without turning her head. “Get back on the treadmill. I can’t hump this bike along
all on my own.”
Up ahead now they see
Kilnsey Crag, called the Lion Rock, looking out across Wharfedale. “Lovely
beyond any singing of it,” she once said. They had stopped, straddling the
bike. Stopped just to look, at the green and gold land, the white stone walls
going pink as the sun set, white dots of sheep on the fells across the dale,
while from the other side of the river – campfire singing or a choir
practicing, clear on the quiet evening.
“Listen Jeremy. That lovely,
or what?” She reaches round from the front of the bike, presses her hand on his
where it rests on the handlebar.
He remembers these things as
he leaves Kilnsey behind and follows the grass road called Mastiles Lane that
rises and falls between dry-stone walls, heading west.
He is looking for a spot not
easily seen by walkers or mountain bikers making for Gordale Scar and Malham
Cove along these unmade roads. And
today he is riding a solo which is not his own. The bike is a bit small for him. In fact it is Shirley’s bike. He does not ride the tandem with Shirley now,
because Shirley is dead, and before she died she said he was to have her
bike. He has not ridden her bike
before today and after today he will not ride it again and perhaps no one will,
though he cannot be sure of this.
On the first day of their
last year at the College she was made Head Girl, which everyone had been
expecting. At First Break on that
first day she signed to him to stay behind when the other students went for
their coffees.
In the empty classroom she
commanded - “Kneel, Oaf!” He played along, knelt. You never knew with Shirley.
She laid her hands flat on his head. “I appoint you Head Churl to the Head
Girl. Henceforth you are to defend
me from my enemies. Now hear this.”
She knelt in front of him and put her arms round him and said “Jeremy
Stopes, I think I love you.” She
held his face between her hands then, and when they drew apart from this first
experimental kiss, said “But maybe stand closer to your razor tomorrow, eh? Or
maybe I mean next week?”
To classmates they were now
an item. They both came to College
on bikes, and one morning early in December as they stowed their helmets in
their lockers she said, “You’ll never believe this. Tell it not in Gath
etcetera but I’ve come into a pile of cash. My Gran gave me a ten pound Ernie bond on my first
birthday. It just won me five K.”
“Mint!” he said. “Lucky
you.” He heard envy in his
congratulation. “What’ll you blow
it on? I’d like a flat screen telly, please. Like, window size.”
“Got a wicked idea,” she
said.
They christened the tandem
Ernestine. “Ernie” she said, “would be appropriate but bikes are always
female. Well known fact.”
“Eh?”
She sighed. “Dear Oaf, one
day the penny will drop.”
Ernestine became their bike
of choice, the Dales their velodrome. Weekdays they studied for the year-end exams that
would get them into University. This was serious business. Weekends they biked on the tandem,
“Growing closer”, Shirley said, “by talking to the back of each other’s necks.
You can’t really have a row with the back end of a bike helmet.”
She won the Physics prize.
As she left the dais she high-fived their physics teacher to cheers. In July she heard she had won a
scholarship to Cambridge. She
would go up in September.
“I’ll lose you,” he said.
They had stopped in Kettlewell, in a late summer heat wave. They sat outside the Blue Bell, helmets
laid aside, legs stretched out, leaning against the bench back, comfortable in
each other’s company. They had
booked into the Youth Hostel in the village for the night.
“I’ll lose you to some
physics genius from Ghana or Birmingham or somewhere.”
“Stop moping! Too hot for moping. Just stay there a
sec.,” she said and got up and went into the hotel to return minutes later with
lager glasses and two bottles.
“We’re in luck,” she said.
“They’ve a room.”
“But – the Youth Hostel?”
“Close your mouth,
Jeremy! You’ve got to stop being a
virgin sometime. And I think I’ll be an old soul going about on a mobility
scooter if I wait for you to do something about it.”
The weather broke, turned
blustery and wet. She went up to Cambridge and he took his place at Leeds to
study control engineering. He would live at home. He envied her freedom, living
in a shared room, in Hall. They
phoned, swapped emails. They looked forward to Christmas and each other. On a mid-October evening she called him
at home. His mother picked up,
listened but said nothing, handed him the phone.
“That Shirley. Again,” she
said and left the room.
Shirley’s voice, sounding
edgy. “There’s no easy way to say this, Jeremy.” This was it then. The physics genius had displaced him after all. Or – he dropped the handset, snatched
it up again – he’d got her pregnant! Not that not that not that! He waited. But it was neither.
“I’m diagnosed with
leukemia.”
He couldn’t help
himself. “That’s ridiculous,
Shirl!”
“Sadly not.” He could hear her fighting tears. “I
didn’t want to tell anyone till they were sure.” She went through the symptoms; sudden weight loss, fatigue,
nose bleeds. The visits to the Student Health Centre, then the University
Hospital, the oncology lab, blood tests, bone marrow tests. He hardly heard.
How could this be happening to Shirley, to such a young woman – to this, this athlete?
She was saying there was no
match in her family close enough.
“For what?’
“Bone marrow transplant . .”
“Hold on, Shirl. I’m coming to Cambridge.”
He was not a match. Six of their classmates volunteered
when they heard the news. None
were close enough. “Told you I was
a one-off,” she said. To the end he could not believe she was dying.
She was brought home. Her parents, as much in denial as he,
asked him if they had talked about - “You know, Jeremy. What she wanted. At the end?”
She wanted him to have her
bike. She wanted him to look after Ernestine. She wanted one more run at the unforgiving climb out of
Kettlewell over to Aysgarth. He did not know what she wanted because
who talks about the end of life at the beginning? She wanted just to live. In the haze of their grief her parents opted for cremation.
Most of the students and
teachers attended. Ma Perigo dreadful in black. Their physics teacher, Ozzy Hampton, looking drained of his
usual bonhomie. The Head of
College gave a brief eulogy.
Irreplaceable loss.
Talented young woman.
Bright future shorn away.
The Head Boy - her final year oppo - got half way with his memories of
her, broke down. He wasn’t alone
among her former classmates to cry.
Jeremy fell in beside Ozzy
Hampton as they left the chapel.
“My dear boy. My poor, dear boy.” Ozzy’s big hand on
his shoulder. Ozzy, too wise to
say that he didn’t know what to say.
Old enough to know that grief is the price we pay for love, that his
student, too young for this, was in an abyss there seemed no climbing out of.
There was to be a wake in
the college Assembly Hall. On the way, in Ozzy’s car, he said, “I
can’t get my head round burning her, sir.
Her parents . . why did they burn her?”
“Is a burial any less final,
Jeremy?”
He could not tell the older
man that he imagined the process, the consuming heat, her compact, mobile body
oozing, shriveling and cracking.
It sickened and frightened him.
Would a burial have been less final? He thought about this, and knew what one day he would do.
Afterwards, at home he told
his parents as little of the service and the wake as he could get away
with. Even so, his mother had
plenty to say.
“All that money she won! I don’t know. Spending so much on that tandem when you both
had bicycles anyway. I don’t know
what her parents thought.
That money would have paid for the funeral.”
He heard himself yelling.
“The College paid. They had a collection. And the Governors have some sort of
Trust Fund. The school paid
because everybody loved her. Except you.
You didn’t love her because I did.”
As he slammed out of the
house he heard his father, fury in his voice, arguing with his mother and his mother, plaintive, wondering
what she had said now.
Ozzy Hampton persuaded him
to stick with his University course, without saying he would adjust, would get
over it, would come to forget in time.
Shirley’s parents made no
objection when he wanted to sell the tandem. He gave the money to the College. Ozzy and the Governors would look after the use of it; a
memorial plaque perhaps, or a carrel in the Library.
Her bike hung in the back of
the garage. He could scarcely bear
to look at it and when he did he saw Shirley, sitting upright, freewheeling down
to the river, or maybe stretched out, low, her forearms on the tri-bars,
her face shining with exertion, or again, standing on the pedals, her body
rocking side to side as she punched the bike along dale lanes where steep,
short climbs seemed suddenly to stand the road on end.
On
a warm May afternoon he feels ready. He lifts her bike down, wheels it out of
the garage. He raises the narrow
seat and the handlebar a couple or three inches to suit his height. He
straddles the bike, settles into his riding position. But these are surely
Shirley’s hands on the brake hoods, not his? Shirley’s feet twisting to lock
her shoe cleats to the pedals and Shirley’s voice as he settles onto the seat
and pushes off, saying, “Tell you what I think, Oaf, – there’s only one thing
in this world better than the feeling of riding a bike.”
He makes Kilnsey in two hours where he
leaves the tarmac road and follows the grass road called Mastiles Lane that
rises and falls between dry stone walls, west into the National Park. It is a weekday, and quiet, and he
meets no one. He follows the lane
for five miles. The way is mainly
across sheep pasture but as he gets further from the dale it skirts the edges
of limestone slabs known locally as pavements. In places these are cut by deep
fissures – pitfalls for the unwary walker. The lane fords one beck, then another. The becks are
full after winter rains. He comes to a third ford where the lane crosses
Gordale Beck, a bigger stream that meanders before plunging into the steep
sided valley of Gordale Scar. Here he dismounts. Now he must wheel her
bike cautiously, following the beck till he comes to the gloomy cleft, loud
with the roar of water. In places
he has to shoulder the bike and carry it, scrambling over limestone scree,
loose stuff dislodged from the crags by frost and thaw. There are stretches where the scarps to
his right cast shadow, cutting out the sun. A hundred yards or so into the gorge he finds what he needs – two limestone slabs separated by a fissure a little wider than
the handlebars, and deep enough.
He lowers Shirley’s bike into it. The bike stands upright, very nearly,
wedged between the slabs. He
collects chunks of limestone and drops them into the gap, carefully, to avoid
damage to the machine, first on one side then the other until the fissure is
full and nothing of her bike shows. It is the best a Head Girl’s churl can do, the nearest he can give her to a burial. This done, he finds the
biggest pieces of stone he can manage and heaves them onto the grave that will
need no tending and will have only his memories for flowers.
He does not linger. He has brought trainers and a track
suit in a back-pack. He puts these
on, stows his cycling shoes, and heads back to the grass lane. He will walk
back to Kilnsey, get the bus to Skipton, the train to Leeds.
In the May evening with
shadows lengthening, the bus passes by Conistone, Grassington, Threshfield and
Linton and Cracoe. These small,
lovely places are the road-map of his times with Shirley and he will never see
them again, never come here again and knows he will not want to.
