Leaks, Currents and Towels
A short break from sin.
We’re having a little break from sin for something more immediate.
Last night, water started pouring into one of our bathrooms.1 From the ceiling. Every light fitting was weeping. We turned off the power.
I donned my wet-weather gear and, in the pouring rain, went out onto the roof terrace to find the leak. Earlier, I'd been out removing a piece of rotten trellis. I'd noticed how gunked up the terrace gutter was: I'd thought, I must clear that out soon. Now I was clearing it out, in the rain. Shovelling wet mud and leaves into a bucket, with a headtorch on.
I found the crack in the terrace surface (at the edge of the gutter, where I knew it would be; we've had them before). I set up a temporary fix.
Muddy roof repairs hadn’t been the plan. The plan had been to wait for the rain to stop so I could try out my new e-bike. From 4.30 to 5, I’d waited at the open front door, staring out at the stair-rods of water. A message had assured me the delivery van would be with me in “11 minutes”. I was there for forty. Also there: towels. Two large grey towels, sopping wet, abandoned in the driveway. A smaller (brown) towel was by our front door last week. That had vanished after a couple of days. Maybe someone was missing these from a line and would collect them?
Eventually, I got the call: the van was parked on the parallel road. I directed them around. They unloaded: wheeled my e-bike through the downpour. My son and I lifted it up the steps to the kitchen. I unwrapped the front forks and crossbar and sat looking at it, surprised by my own tears.
My whole life, I’ve never had my own bike. I was one of four. Bikes were second-hand or handed down. A surprise new bike from Mum for my 14th birthday wasn’t my choice and was heavy with the weight of her expectations; though purple (top choice!) it had a wicker front basket "for carrying books when you're at Cambridge".
That decided me on not applying for Cambridge. Yes, I feared rejection; my “Comprehensive” education was unlikely to equip me for the entrance exam.2 But I had my own dreams, and no intention of living out hers: of completing the scientific career she’d abandoned for my father. After I left home, she disposed of the bike that was never really mine.
In my twenties, my boyfriend Bob gave me the bike he didn’t need anymore. For three years I whizzed around town on vital free transport as a student, writer-on-the-dole, then temp. But again, it wasn’t mine. Not my choice of colour or style. Though I liked that it was a racer, the frame was grey and the male-friendly crossbar a little too high. When I bought my dream car, a convertible MG Roadster, the ex-boyfriend’s bike turned to rust.
Mum cycled. For the last 20 years of her life, she whizzed around on a Dawes, snapping up bargain out-of-date foods from “Pete’s Treats” and distributing leaflets for the Colchester Lib Dems, dressed head to toe in yellow.3 Her bike makes a brief appearance in the second stanza of my poem “Twelfth Man”.4
“You’re sixty at the family reunion, still playing tennis weekly with ‘The Girls’, still cycling on a bike with racing handles, and swimming once a day in outdoor pools.”
After she was knocked down and killed by a truck, my sister offered me her bike. This has been my transportation to the swimming pool (and sometimes to the station, or a night out) for 22 years. But it has always been "Mum's bike." I still call it that. I have never had a bike of my own.
So yesterday I sat with my new e-bike in the kitchen, tears pricking my eyes, a feeling like a fresh-baked bun in my heart. This Danish e-bike (massively on sale at the end of the summer) isn’t the colour I’d choose if I wasn’t on a budget. They come in green or white. Across the whole country, the greens had gone.5
But it will get me to the pool through all the winter headwinds that usually stop me from going at all. And suddenly I saw that my white bicycle was beautiful. Because, friend, it was mine. My first ever bike, at the grand old age of [Don’t Tell The Publishers, They’re Ageist As Fuck].
I charged it. Desperate to take it out, but it was still raining. And though it wasn’t (I effing hope) on a par with the cheap Chinese e-bike I was researching last week that said Warning: Do Not Ride In A Thunderstorm, stairrods isn’t “new bike” conditions. Paul checked the rain radar app and said the downpour was due to stop after dinner. I turned the bike’s lights on and off to test them. All was good.
When evening fell, I turned out the house lights and tested again. Just to see how bright it might be on a dark winter morning. When I turned them off, the rear light stayed on. I googled it. A common e-bike glitch.6 It was a sign of things to come.
