“Do you still want to see my place?”
“Of course,” said Keiko, asking herself when she had said so.
He led her over the corner of the Green to the pink building, fiddled with a padlock, and then hauled open a door, rattling it right to the end of its runners.
“This is your place?” said Keiko. She tried not to let her thoughts show on her face, but he guessed anyway.
“Nothing to do with me on the outside,” he said, twinkling. “I just rent this one room from old man Byers. He owns it and the colour’s his fault.”
Inside, Murray punched numbers into the alarm panel and then flipped a row of switches.
Keiko stepped into the sudden dazzling light, taking in first size and emptiness, freshly whitewashed walls, enormous mirrors, and ranks of shelves. Then she noticed the canvas-covered hulks, six or eight of them, some on a soft green mat which covered half the floor, some resting on clean, grey-painted ground. She raised her eyes to question Murray’s in the mirror opposite them.
He had taken off his coat and now he strode to the middle of the room, lifted one of the covers by two corners, and swept it up and off with one practised, billowing crack.
“Ta-da!” he said.
It was a motorcycle, black and silver, glittering under the lights. One of the old ones that looked more like a bee or a fly than something made by man. Before she could think of what to say, Murray had swept off another of the covers. This one was yellow with a duller gleam, just as old. The third-red, more paint and less chrome-shone as though water was flowing over it.
“They’re beautiful,” said Keiko. Murray was facing away from her, pulling the canvas from one too big for his matador flick. It was blue and very heavy. So heavy that the paint and chrome bulk of it seemed almost to scrape the ground between its tyres, like an over-laden hammock.
“Harley Davidson,” said Keiko. Murray, rolling the canvas cover up in his arms, lifted his head to one-side with a slow wink and a click of his tongue. She looked towards the last of the shrouded shapes on this bare-floor half of the room, but he shook his head.
“It’s not finished, not fit to be seen.” He laughed. “Nobody’s Bantam ever gets finished. It’s traditional.”
“Not finished?” Keiko echoed. “You mean you made these?”
“Kind of. Well, yeah, I suppose so.”
“So this is what you do,” she said. “You’re really not a butcher.”
“I’m really not,” said Murray. “This is what I do. I strip them down and work out what’s wrong, get new bits, and put them together again. Or hit things with hammers when I’m really stuck.”
“No!” said Keiko. “How could you hit these beautiful things with hammers? “
“You like them, eh?”
“I love them. They’re like sculptures.” He frowned. “Don’t you think so?”
“Oh, yeah, they’re the best. Never thought of them as sculptures.” His eyes met Keiko’s in the mirror. “But I see what you mean.”
Keiko walked over to him to look at the Harley close-up. She didn’t have to be told not to touch it. “How old is it?” she asked.
“Knucklehead. Hard to say, really,” said Murray. “How long is a piece of string? I’m going for early forties. See this?” Keiko craned her head to look down at it from the same angle as Murray. “That’s a cat’s-eye dash. See? The way the lights look? That puts it between 1936 and ’46, but this tank had a two-light dash when it came, ’47 to ’54, so who knows? It’s about two and a half years old, is the short answer.”
He walked over to the black bike like a fly, Keiko following him.
“This one,” he stopped, and arched an eyebrow at her. “Sure you want to hear any of this?” Keiko nodded. “Okay, this one’s a Vincent Rapide, 1948.”
“Really?” Keiko murmured, looking between the splendour of the Harley and this ungainly creature. “That’s hard to believe. It’s so much more primitive-looking.”
Murray made a show of looking around to see if anyone had heard her. “Watch it! That’s a British bike. Postwar austerity. They were short of tubing, so the thing about the Rapide is it’s got no frame.” He crouched down and started pointing. “The rear swinging arm pivots from the gearbox and rear suspension and the steering head for the front forks is attached to the oil tank.” He looked up at her expression. “Not so keen on this one, eh?”
“No frame,” she said. “Everything just bolted to everything else. Is it safe?”
“Completely,” said Murray. “What’s probably bothering you is the front forks.” He pointed. “Brampton forks-pretty spindly compared to the rest of it.”
Keiko nodded. “Yes, you’re right. That is why it looks so peculiar-compared with the Harley.”
Murray laughed at her again. “You’d get lynched if anyone heard you. Seriously, British bikes. I got into a bit of bother when some people heard I’d got a Hog. BSA parts guy in Liverpool assumed I would be selling up and came all the way up here to get first crack at the Gold Flash. Couldn’t believe it when I said I was keeping both.” Keiko shook her head along with him. “Speaking of the Gold Flash,” Murray went on. “You haven’t been introduced.”
But Keiko held up her hands to stop him. His frown flashed down until she explained. “I’ll forget if you tell me any more,” she said. “A Harley Knucklehead and a Vincent Rapide. Cat’s-eye dash, no frame, Brampton forks. We should stop there for today.”
Murray relaxed completely into a smile again and began to replace the covers. Keiko wandered around the back of the room looking at the shelves of boxes and trays hoping that her for today hadn’t been presumptuous.
“So many tools,” she said. “And some of them seem to be exactly the same as the others.”
“Well, you need different spanners for the American and the British bikes,” Murray said. “Different everything.”
Keiko looked at the five identical trays of wrenches and raised her eyebrows.
Murray laughed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “What’s the diagnosis then?”
“Oh, you’re a very sad case,” said Keiko. “I diagnose… doing what you like with your own things in your own place and harming no one.”
Murray laughed even louder. “You totally get it, don’t you?”
“I can’t work unless my printer tray is full and there’s a block of extra paper still in its wrapper too.”
“What could be more normal than that?”
Keiko waited for him to finish tucking the covers around the wheels and straightening the folds. “Murray,” she said. “Can I ask a question?” She pointed to the canvases on the green mat. “Why do these bikes get to be on a rug?”
Murray laughed. “They’re not bikes,” he said. “Have a look.”
Keiko didn’t even try his flamboyant trick with the cover; she was too short and could never carry it off, might even fall over. She just bundled the sheet off the shape underneath, dumping it into Murray’s arms as he came up to join her.
“Ah,” she said looking at what she’d revealed. It was a weight lifting machine-multi-gym? Bench press? She knew the words but not the meanings. Next to that was something like the harness from a glider but without the wings. She frowned at them.
“Not sculptures? Not beautiful?” asked Murray. Keiko looked at him in the mirror. He was hugging the bundle of canvas and there were shadows on his arms showing the outline of the tendons between wrist and elbow. Under his rolled-up sleeves, his biceps and shoulders curved like sand dunes, separated by a dip that Keiko could have spanned with her hands. Stock pot, said her mother’s voice in her head again. Keiko turned back to the equipment and bent her head letting her hair drop forward across her face.