Ah, the rush of the wind in his face, the throb of the engine between his thighs, and in the corners of his vision the blur of trees lined up like an audience of old gods to applaud his passage!
I feel his joy, share in his mirth. Indeed, I’m so full of it I almost miss my cue.
But the old gods are talking to me also, and with no conscious command from my mind, my foot stamps down on the accelerator and my hand flicks on full headlights.
For a fraction of a second we are heading straight for each other. Then his muscles like mine obey commands too quick for his mind, and he swerves, skids, wrestles for control.
For a second I think he has it.
I am disappointed and relieved.
All right, I know, but I have to be honest. What a weight-and a wait-it would be off my soul if this turned out not to be my path after all.
But now the boy begins to feel it go. Yet still, even at this moment of ultimate danger, his heart must be singing with the thrill, the thrust, of it. Then the bike slides away from under him, they part company, and man and machine hurtle along the road in parallel, close but no longer touching.
I come to a halt and turn my head to watch. In time it takes probably a few seconds. In my no-time I can register every detail. I see that it is the bike which hits a tree first, disintegrating in a burst of flame, not much-his tank must have been low-but enough to throw a brief lurid light on his last moment.
He hits a broad-boled beech tree, seems to embrace it with his whole body, wrapping himself around it as if he longs to penetrate its smooth bark and flow into its rising sap. Then he slides off it and lies across its roots, like a root himself, face up, completely still.
I reverse back to him and get out of the car. The impact has shattered his visor but, wonderfully, done no damage to his gentle brown eyes. I notice that his bazouki case has been ripped off the pillion of the bike and lies quite close. The case itself has burst open but the instrument looks hardly damaged. I take it out and lay it close to his outstretched hand.
Now the musician is part of the night’s dark music and I am out of place here. I drive slowly away, leaving him there with the trees and the foxes and owls, his eyes wide open, and seeing very soon, I hope, not the cold stars of our English night but the rich warm blue of a Mediterranean sky.
That’s where he’d rather be. I know it. Ask him. I know it.
I’m too exhausted to talk any more now.
Soon.
5
On Thursday morning with only one day to go before the short story competition closed, Rye Pomona was beginning to hope there might be life after deathless prose.
This didn’t stop her shovelling scripts into the reject bin with wild abandon, but halfway through the morning she went very still, sighed perplexedly, re-read the pages in front of her and said, “Oh hell.”
“Yes?” said Dick Dee.
“We’ve got a Second Dialogue.”
“Let me see.”
He read through it quickly then said, “Oh dear. I wonder if this one too is related to a real incident.”
“It is. That’s what hit me straight off. I noticed it in yesterday’s Gazette. Here, take a look.”
She went to the Journal Rack and picked up the Gazette.
“Here it is. ‘Police have released details of the fatal accident on Roman Way reported in our weekend edition. David Pitman, 19, a music student, of Pool Terrace, Carker, was returning home from his part-time job as an entertainer at the Taverna Restaurant in Cradle Street when he came off his motorbike in the early hours of Saturday morning. He sustained multiple injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. No other vehicle was involved.’ Poor sod.”
Dee looked at the paragraph then read the Dialogue again.
“How very macabre,” he said. “Still, it’s not without some nice touches. If only our friend would attempt a more conventional story, he might do quite well.”
“That’s all you think it is, then?” said Rye rather aggressively. “Some plonker using news stories to fantasize upon?”
Dee raised his eyebrows high and smiled at her.
“We seem to have swapped lines,” he said. “Last week it was me feeling uneasy and you pouring cold water. What’s changed?”
“I could ask the same.”
“Well, let me see,” he said with that judicious solemnity she sometimes found irritating. “It could be I set my fanciful suspicions alongside the cool rational response of my smart young assistant and realized I was making a real ass of myself.”
Then his face split in a decade-dumping grin and he added, “Or some such tosh. And you?”
She responded to the grin, then said, “There’s something else I noticed in the Gazette. Hold on …here it is. It says that AA man’s inquest was adjourned to allow the police to make further enquiries. That can only mean they’re treating it as a suspicious death, can’t it?”
“Yes, but there’s suspicious and suspicious,” said Dee. “Any sudden death has to be thoroughly investigated. If it’s an accident, the causes have to be established to see whether there’s any question of neglect. But even if there’s a suspicion of criminality, for something like this to have any significance …”
He held up the Dialogue and paused expectantly.
A test, she thought. Dick Dee liked to give tests. At first when she came new to the job she’d felt herself patronized, then come to realize it was part of his teaching technique and much to be preferred to either being told something she already knew or not being told something she didn’t.
“It doesn’t really signify anything,” she said. “Not if the guy’s just feeding off news items. To be significant, or even to strain coincidence, he’d have to be writing before the event.”
“Before the reporting of the event,” corrected Dee.
She nodded. It was a small distinction but not nitpicking. That was another of Dee’s qualities. The details he was fussy about were usually important rather than just ego-exercising.
“What about all this stuff about the student’s grandfather and the bazouki?” she asked. “None of that’s in the paper.”
“No. But if it’s true, which we don’t know, all it might mean is that the story-teller did have a chat with David Pitman at some time. I dare say it’s a story the young man told any number of customers at the restaurant.”
“And if it turns out the AA man had been on holiday in Corfu?”
“I can devise possible explanations till the cows come home,” he said dismissively. “But where’s the point? The key question is, when did this last Dialogue actually turn up at the Gazette? I doubt if they’re systematic enough to be able to pinpoint it, but someone might remember something. Why don’t I have a word while you …”
“… get on with reading these sodding stories,” interrupted Rye. “Well, you’re the boss.”
“So I am. And what I was going to say was, while you might do worse than have a friendly word with your ornithological admirer.”
He glanced towards the desk where a slim young man with an open boyish face and a sharp black suit was standing patiently.
His name was Bowler, initial E. Rye knew this because he’d flashed his library card the first time he appeared at the desk to ask for assistance in operating the CD-ROM drive of one of the Reference PCs. Both she and Dee had been on duty, but Rye had discovered early on that in matters of IT, she was the department’s designated expert. Not that her boss wasn’t technologically competent-in fact she suspected he was much more clued up than herself-but when she felt she knew him well enough to probe, he had smiled that sweetly sad smile of his and pointed to the computer, saying, “That is the grey squirrel,” then to the book-lined shelves: “These are the red.”