"Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I do this."
Caitlin telephoned me.
"Come to supper," she said.
"No," I said.
"Mick, why?"
"Because I’m sick of it."
"Sick of what?"
"You. Me. Him. Everything."
"Look," she said, "he’s sorry about what happened last time."
"Oh, he’s sorry."
"We’re both sorry, Mick."
"All right, then: I’m sorry, too."
There was a gentle laugh at the other end.
"So you should be."
I went along all the deserted roads and got there at about eight, to find a brand-new motorcycle parked on the pavement outside the house. It was a Kawasaki Ninja. Its fairing had been removed, to give it the look of a ’60s cafe racer, but no one was fooled. Even at a glance it appeared too hunched, too short-coupled: too knowing. The remaining plastics shone with their own harsh inner light.
Caitlin met me on the doorstep. She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. "Mm," she said. She was wearing white tennis shorts and a soft dark blue sweatshirt.
"We’ve got to stop meeting like this," I said.
She smiled and pushed me away.
"My hands smell of garlic," she said.
Just as we were going inside, she turned back and nodded at the Kawa.
"That thing," she said.
"It’s a motorcycle, Caitlin."
"It’s his."
I stared at her.
"Be enthusiastic," she said. "Please."
"But—"
"Please?"
The main course was penne with mushrooms in an olive and tomato sauce. Ed had cooked it, Caitlin said, but she served. Ed pushed his chair over to the table and rubbed his hands. He picked his plate up and passed it under his nose. "Wow!" he said. As we ate, we talked about this and that. The Kawa was behind everything we said, but Ed wouldn’t mention it until I did. Caitlin smiled at us both. She shook her head as if to say: "Children! You children!" It was like Christmas, and she was the parent. The three of us could feel Ed’s excitement and impatience. He grinned secretively. He glanced up from his food at one or both of us; quickly back down again. Finally, he couldn’t hold back any longer.
"What do you think, then?" he said. "What do you think, Mick?"
"I think this is good pasta," I said. "For a cripple."
He grinned and wiped his mouth.
"It’s not bad," he said, "is it?"
"I think what I like best is the way you’ve let the mushrooms take up a touch of sesame oil."
"Have some more. There’s plenty."
"That’s new to me in Italian food," I said. "Sesame oil."
Ed drank some more beer.
"It was just an idea," he said.
"You children," said Caitlin. She shook her head. She got up and took the plates away. "There’s ice cream for pudding," she said over her shoulder just before she disappeared. When I was sure she was occupied in the kitchen I said:
"Nice idea, Ed: a motorcycle. What are you going to do with it? Hang it on the wall with the Klein?"
He drank the rest of his beer, opened a new one and poured it thoughtfully into his glass. He watched the bubbles rising through it, then grinned at me as if he had made a decision. He had. In that moment I saw that he was lost, but not what I could do about it.
"Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it just a fucker, that bike? I haven’t had a bike since I was seventeen. There’s a story attached to that."
"Ed—"
"Do you want to hear it or not?"
Caitlin came back in with the ice cream and served it out to us and sat down.
"Tell us, Ed," she said tiredly. "Tell us the story about that."
Ed held on to his glass hard with both hands and stared into it for a long time as if he was trying to see the past there. "I had some ace times on bikes when I was a kid," he said finally: "but they were always someone else’s. My old dear—She really hated bikes, my old dear. You know: they were dirty, they were dangerous, she wasn’t going to have one in the house. Did that stop me? It did not. I bought one of the first good Ducatti 125s in Britain, but I had to keep it in a coal cellar down the road."
"That’s really funny, Ed."
"Fuck off, Mick. I’m seventeen, I’m still at school, and I’ve got this fucking projectile stashed in someone’s coal cellar. The whole time I had it, the old dear never knew. I’m walking three miles in the piss-wet rain every night, dressed to go to the library, then unlocking this thing and stuffing it round the back lanes with my best white shortie raincoat ballooning up like a fucking tent."
He looked puzzledly down at his plate.
"What’s this? Oh. Ice cream. Ever ridden a bike in a raincoat?" he asked Caitlin.
Caitlin shook her head. She was staring at him with a hypnotized expression; she was breaking wafers into her ice cream.
"Well they were all the rage then," he said.
He added: "The drag’s enormous."
"Eat your pudding, Ed," I said. "And stop boasting. How fast would a 125 go in those days? Eighty miles an hour? Eighty-five?"
"They went faster if you ground your teeth, Mick," Ed said. "Do you want to hear the rest?"
"Of course I want to hear it, Ed."
"Walk three miles in the piss-wet rain," said Ed, "to go for a ride on a motorbike, what a joke. But the real joke is this: the fucker had an alloy crankcase. That was a big deal in those days, an alloy crankcase. The first time I dropped it on a bend, it cracked. Oil everywhere. I pushed it back to the coal-house and left it there. You couldn’t weld an alloy crankcase worth shit in those days. I had three years’ payments left to make on a bunch of scrap."
He grinned at us triumphantly.
"Ask me how long I’d had it," he ordered.
"How long, Mick?"
"Three weeks. I’d had the fucker three weeks."
He began to laugh. Suddenly, his face went so white it looked green. He looked rapidly from side to side, like someone who can’t understand where he is. At the same time, he pushed himself up out of the wheelchair until his arms wouldn’t straighten any further and he was almost standing up. He tilted his head back until the tendons in his neck stood out. He shouted, "I want to get out of here! Caitlin, I want to get out!" Then his arms buckled and he let his weight go onto his feet and his legs folded up like putty and he fell forward with a gasp, his face in the ice cream and his hands smashing and clutching and scraping at anything they touched on the dinner table until he had bunched the cloth up under him and everything was a sodden mess of food and broken dishes, and he had slipped out of the chair and onto the floor. Then he let himself slump and go quite still.
"Help me," said Caitlin.
We couldn’t get him back into the chair. As we tried, his head flopped forward, and I could see quite clearly the bruises and deep, half-healed scabs at the base of his skull, where they had cored his cervical spine for the computer connection. When he initialized Out There now the graphics came up live in his head. No more screen. Only the endless V of the perspective. The endless, effortless dip-and-bank of the viewpoint. What did be see out there? Did he see himself, hunched up on the Kawasaki Ninja? Did he see highways, bridges, tunnels, weird motorcycle flights through endless space?
Halfway along the passage, he woke up.
"Caitlin!" he shouted.
"I’m here."