He came across the wet tarmac at a dead run with no SHOES on, into the one lamp still burning at the tire place, and the man inside had the roller door already half down.
“We are closed.”
The boy did not stop when he heard it.
He came in under the door and got about four feet from the man.
Then he ran out of everything at once, the running and the air and whatever he had been holding together on the way over.
He was nine, maybe, and soaked to the KNEE.
He put his arm out straight behind him, back at the ROAD, and he held it there.
The man looked past him, out into the DARK.
Out on the road, on its side in the wet, there was a small BICYCLE with its front wheel still going round.
Nothing else. No CAR, nobody standing, no shouting.
Just a bike still turning, which means it had not been down very long.
The man put the JACK handle down on the floor.
Then he went down on one knee in front of the boy, in the wet, and he did the thing you do when a child cannot get a word out.
“Look at me.”
The boy looked at him. His MOUTH was open and nothing was coming.
“Who was on it with you.”
That is the question. Not what happened. Not are you hurt.
Because a bike out in the road on its own with a boy running away from it is a bike that had two on it.
The boy could not answer him.
He tried twice. The man stood up and put his body between the boy and the road, the way you do without deciding to.
“Stay right here.”
Then he went out into the dark to find the other one.
The far side of the road
He took the torch off the bench on his way past and did not stop for a coat.
The bike was where he had seen it, lying across the white line with the wheel slowing. He went round it without touching it and put the light on the far verge, and the far verge was where it was.
Two shoe marks in the mud at the top of the bank, side by side, and then a long smear where the grass had been flattened by something going down it.
He went down after it on his heels.
At the bottom there was a concrete pipe running under the field gate, and a foot of brown water going into it, and sitting in that water with her back against the pipe was a girl of about six.
She had a school coat on with the hood down. She had one rubber boot on and one foot bare. She was not crying and she was not calling out, because she had no air in her yet to do either, and she was holding the front lamp that had come off the bike, holding it the way you hold something you have been told not to lose.
He got her under the arms and she made a sound then, a small one.
“All right. I’ve got you. All right.”
Her hair was soaked at the back. Her face was dry.
Eight days before, a free pump
He knew that bike. He had pumped that same bike’s tires eight days before, for nothing, and written it in the book.
He had known it lying on the road and had not let himself say so until he was carrying her up the bank with her arms round his neck.
Eight days before, a Thursday, a woman had wheeled it onto his forecourt at ten past five with two kids behind her and asked what he would charge to put air in the tires. He told her he did not charge for air. She said she meant properly, with the machine, because the back one went down every night.
It was a green bike with a cushion cable-tied over the rear rack for the little one to sit on, and one pedal missing off the left crank, just the spindle left. He put a valve in it and did the back tire and told her the pedal would take the boy’s foot off if it caught him, and she said she knew, and that she would get one.
He had looked at the boy while she said it. Nine, tall for it, standing with his hand on the saddle. He had said something friendly to him, he could not remember what, and the boy had looked back at him and not answered, and he had thought nothing about it except that the child was shy.
His name was Ronnie Pryce. He was sixty-three. He had had the one bay on the Ash Bank road for thirty-one years and he had a van on the jack behind him that night with the offside wheel off, promised for six in the morning, and he had been ten minutes from finishing it when the door came down to the halfway point.
He carried the girl up the bank in the wet with her one bare foot against his hip.
The bike was still lying across the line. The wheel had stopped.
Twenty past six
He put her on the bench under the lamp and turned the heater round to face her and got the good blanket out of the cupboard, the one he kept for the recovery jobs.
The boy came off the wall the moment he saw her.
He got in front of her and put both hands on her knees and looked into her face, and then he looked up at Ronnie, and his mouth opened again and again nothing came.
“She’s all right. She’s breathing. Sit down.”
He would not sit down.
Ronnie went over her the way you go over a car. Both arms up, both arms down. He asked her to press her feet against his hands and she pressed. He asked her where it hurt and she said her elbow, in a voice like a thread, and it was her elbow, gravel in it, no worse than a fall in a yard. There was a lump coming up on the side of her head and he did not like it.
“Did you go to sleep out there, love. Even a bit.”
She shook her head. She was more bothered about the lamp. She had it against her chest under the blanket and she told him twice that it screwed on and that it was not broken, only wet, and he said he would dry it out on the heater, and she let him take it.
He put it on the ledge above the compressor where he put customers’ keys, and the second it left her hands she started to shake, so he gave her his hands to hold instead.
“What’s your name, sweetheart.”
“Nia.”
“And him?”
She looked at her brother and then at Ronnie, and she said, “That’s Danny,” in a way that had a whole argument packed inside it, and he did not know yet what the argument was.
The boy was standing over her with his left hand shut. He had been holding it shut since he came in under the door. Ronnie had taken it for a stone or a wrapper, something a child grabs and keeps.
Now the water was running out of the bottom of the fist onto the concrete.
“What have you got in your hand.”
The number on the pump card
The boy would not open it, and Ronnie let him alone, because a lump on a six-year-old’s head is worth more than a closed hand.
He kept the card on a nail by the compressor, the docket book where he wrote down the jobs he did for nothing so he would know how many there were. Thursday the twenty-eighth. Green kids bike, valve + back tire, no charge. And under it a mobile number, because the woman had made him take one in case the tire went again.
She answered on the second ring and he could hear a television.
“It’s Ronnie Pryce, the tire place on Ash Bank. I’ve got your two here. There’s been a spill off the bike.”
He heard the television go off. He heard a chair.
She was there in under five minutes, in slippers, and she went past him and got hold of Nia and put her face in the child’s hair, and then she pulled back and looked at the elbow and the lump and said the thing that people say, which is not thank you and is not what happened, but “Where were you,” to a six-year-old.
Then she turned round on the boy.
“You were supposed to come straight back.”
The boy stood there.
“Danny. Look at me. Why didn’t you come and get me.”
Ronnie said, “He came and got me. He ran here.”
Shelley stood up with the blanket in her fist.
“He’s not allowed on that road,” she said, to nobody. “They go the field way. Gate to gate, and I can see the gate from the step.”
Ronnie said, “He didn’t come from the field.”
“I know he didn’t.”
She sat down on the bench next to the girl, which is a thing people do when their legs have finished. She said the pedal had never got put on, that she had priced one in two places and it was eleven pounds for a plastic thing, and that the boy rode it with his left foot flat on the spindle and had done for a year, and that the little one liked to be taken because she had nothing else in the day that was hers.
Then she looked at the boy’s bare feet, and at the wet halfway up his jeans, and something moved across her face and did not stay.
“He had the card, then,” she said. “Did he show you the card.”
“What card.”
She did not answer, because a car came onto the forecourt too fast.
One square worn white
The woman said, “That’s my sister,” and it was not said the way you say it when your sister is coming.
Ronnie had two minutes before that door opened, and he used them, because he had just been asked a question he could not answer.
He went and crouched in front of the boy again, in the wet, same as at the start.
“Danny. I’m not going to take it off you. I want to see it.”
The fist came up an inch and stopped.
“You showed me the road,” Ronnie said. “You did that right. Now show me this.”
The hand opened.
What was in it was a strip of card, about the size of a bus ticket, laminated once and gone soft at the corners, folded in half and folded again until it was down to a thumb’s width. It had been through the wash and through a coat pocket and through the run-off ditch and it came apart in the middle when Ronnie opened it out on the bench.
Six little squares of pictures with a word printed under each one.
A house. A toilet. A bottle of water. A red cross in a circle. A telephone. And a stick drawing of two figures, a big one and a small one, hand in hand, with WITH ME under it.
The two figures were worn white. You could see the word underneath and nothing else, the way a coin goes.
Ronnie put his finger on the card and did not say anything, and the boy leaned over the bench and put his finger on the red cross, and then on the two figures, and then he lifted his arm and pointed out through the half-open door at the road.
Straight arm. Held there. Exactly as he had done it the first time.
And Ronnie, watching the arm from the side this time instead of from in front of it, saw that it did not point at the bike at all. It went past the bike. It went past the white line and over to the far verge, to the gate and the pipe and the foot of brown water.
He had been standing in the wrong place to read it.
The boy had answered him at the door.
Jean in the doorway
The sister came in under the roller door without ducking enough and swore about it, and she was the only person who spoke for the next two minutes.
“Right. Where is she. Nia, come here to me. Look at the state of you. Shelley, has anybody rung anybody, because she wants looking at, that’s a head, that. Whose bike was it on the road, is it still out there, it’ll get someone killed.”
She got Nia off the bench and onto her hip and turned round with her.
“And you.” At the boy. “I’ve said. I have said it in that kitchen a hundred times. He can’t be trusted with her, Shelley, and it’s not his fault, it’s yours for letting him, because he can’t shout, can he. He can’t run in a shop and say my sister’s in a ditch. What was he going to do, stand there? He can’t tell anybody anything.”
“Jean,” the mother said.
“I’m not being cruel. I’m being the only one that says it. Two years I’ve been saying it. Every time it’s the same, and every time you tell me he’s fine, and one of these days it’s going to be worse than an elbow.”
Ronnie was wiping the bench down with a rag because his hands wanted something. He put the rag on the bench.
“He told me,” he said.
“He what?”
“He told me. He came under that door and he put his arm out at the ditch and he held it there till I looked.”
“He points,” Jean said. “That’s not telling. That’s pointing.”
“Then tell me how her face is dry.”
Nobody said anything. The heater ticked.
“She went off the far side, down about eight foot of bank, and she was sat in the water with her back against the pipe. There’s a good inch of water coming through there tonight. Her hair’s wet through at the back of her head.”
He turned to the mother, because he had worked out by then which of the two of them he was talking to.
“Her face is dry. Somebody had her head up out of it before she got her wind back. That’s why he’s wet to the knee and that’s why he’s got no shoes on, because one of them’s still down there in the mud with her rubber boot.”
The boy was looking at the floor.
“He was down there with her,” Ronnie said. “Then he came out and left her, which is the worst thing a nine-year-old ever has to do, and he ran a quarter of a mile on that road in the wet to a shed with the door coming down and a bloke shouting we’re closed. And when I asked him who was on it with him, he opened his hand and he had that ready.”
He turned the card round on the bench so it faced them, soft and coming apart in the middle, with the two figures worn through to white.
Jean looked at it for a long time.
“Where’s he had that,” she said.
“In his fist,” Ronnie said. “Since before I met him.”
“That’s the old one,” the mother said. “That’s the one from the reception year. He’s had a proper folder since, only they don’t — ” She stopped. “It stays in his bag. The bag stops in the classroom.”
“So he carries that,” Ronnie said.
“He carries that.”
Jean put Nia down on her feet.
She stood there with her hands loose and she did not have anything to be sensible about, and what she said in the end she said to the boy, not to the room, and not very well.
“Danny. Show me the one with the two on it.”
The overall that never came back
The van never got finished. The haulage firm rang at half six in the morning and rang again at eight, and by nine they had put their work somewhere in town, four vans and a flatbed, which was a week of his money every month for eleven years.
He did not tell anybody that, and he did not get the overall back either. He had put it round Nia in the car park because she was shaking, and Shelley had said she would wash it, and it never came, and he did not ask.
Two weeks later, a Tuesday, he had the door at the halfway point again with one lamp on and a wheel off, and he heard feet on the forecourt.
The boy came in under the door. He had shoes on this time, and he walked.
He had the green bike with him with a pedal on the left crank, a black one, not matching. He leaned it against the pillar and came over to the bench and put a card down on it in front of Ronnie, a new one, hard and shiny at the edges, with the squares printed sharp.
Bottom right, on its own, there was a photograph square. A grey-haired bloke in a dark overall standing in front of a roller door, taken from too low, with half a compressor in the shot.
Under it, printed, was RONNIE.
He looked at it for a while.
“That’s me,” he said.
The boy tapped it twice, and then tapped the red cross beside it, and then looked up at him and waited.
“Aye,” Ronnie said. “Any time. Same door.”
If you know somebody who gets talked about in the third person while they are standing right there, send this to whoever else keeps doing it. Then go and stand where you can see what they are telling you.
If you’re interested in more stories about quick decisions and desperate moments, you might like to read about how I lent my brother $2,800 for a van he never bought, or the time I was fourth in line with only eleven dollars in my pocket. We also have the story of the boy who counted to three before he ran, because somebody had taught him to.
