One Man and His Bike by Mike Carter

Author:Mike Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446406045
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Chapter 12

‘I never want to abandon my bike. I see my grandfather, now in his seventies and riding around everywhere. To me that is beautiful. And the bike must always remain a part of my life.’

Stephen Roche, Irish winner of the 1987 Tour de France and Giro d’Italia

The dark mood had passed next day as I flew along the roof of Britain with a brisk easterly tailwind, past the Castle of Mey and the dome of Dounreay nuclear power station, and then into Sutherland, where the land passed from flat to seriously buckled once more, all magnificently bleak moorland with barely a house or car to be seen.

The road ran right next to the sea, the coastline staggering in its wild beauty, with fabulous rock arches and golden sand beaches in sheltered bays with not a soul on them.

In Bettyhill, high above Torrisdale Bay, with a wide deserted beach pounded by breakers that was so beautiful it defied belief, I went into a pub for some food. It was 11 a.m., and the only other two occupants of the room were an old man swaying on a stool at the bar, spectacularly drunk and talking to himself, about what I had no idea, and a middle-aged woman sitting at one of the tables, eating egg and chips.

I picked up a menu. There was chips, egg and chips, and double egg and chips. I ordered double egg and chips, and extra chips, naturally.

‘Hello,’ I said to the woman.

‘Hello,’ she said back, in a strong Midlands accent.

‘Long way from home?’

‘As far as possible.’

‘Oh?’

She was straight into it. ‘Gave him a second chance. But it was a mistake.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Had to get away.’

‘Right.’

‘It was hard giving away all my furniture, everything, but it’s so expensive to store and I didn’t need it. People here have been very kind. Given me all kinds of stuff.’

My food arrived. I tucked in. The woman carried on talking in staccato bursts. ‘He’ was alluded to a few times, but she always held back from going into details, as if the hard-won physical distance, the hundreds of miles and the mountains that separated her from ‘him’, might be breached if she brought ‘him’ into the room.

She’d travelled in the US – ‘Walked everywhere. People thought I was mad’ – and she’d recently done a TEFL course, in Edinburgh. She was thinking of going to Africa to teach, or the Far East, for a fresh start.

‘I like to keep moving,’ she said. ‘I always feel alive when I’m moving, you know.’ There was something in her narrative that seemed very familiar.

‘You’ve certainly got as far away as you can in this country,’ I said.

‘I’d go to the moon if I could.’

I left the pub and followed the single-track road, up and down the Sutherland hills, glimpsing, occasionally, in the far distance, the silver track threading its serpentine way between the peaks and across the carpet of green and purple, the scudding clouds dragging ever-changing shapes across the ground. And, still, there was barely a sign that humans ever came here: no buildings, no power lines, no vapour trails.

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