By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
22) Cycling
In the shade the air is cool and tender on his blue bruises. Sunlight scorches the expanded skin.
Lowering his face he watches the pale knees of his jeans go up and down, up and down. As he crosses the bridge a white gull skates on wing tip over the grey gully of the writhing river. Paul's jowls are weighty with bruises and booze. He lifts the heavy mask of his face, lets the skin lie more closely against the bones of his skull.
This is his most vulnerable part of the ride. Not that the police will have found the body yet. His not yet having been arrested means that the man has taken himself off, with a drunk's cunning, to die hidden. In a twilit room somewhere, his body is curled comforting around its once pains. Paul's freedom will last until someone notices that the man's curtains haven't been pulled, that he hasn't come in to work, that his rent hasn't been paid....
On his red bike, on Broadway's narrow dual carriageway, Paul is tall and conspicuous. The road winds tediously up between wooden fences and anonymous walls. Cars in speeding pairs squeeze together past him.
A white van has pulled in close to the kerb before the lights at Penel Orlieu. Paul stops, holds his pulse-ticking head bowed. The leg supporting him has the toxic ache and lightness of hangover. His swollen knuckles throb.
The stationary traffic burbles carbon monoxide. Like feathered rats, fat sparrows rustle about in a corner drift of paper rubbish. A piece of white paper flies up and becomes a pigeon. A whirligig of dry rasping leaves and brown dust comes towards him. He is inside it. The wind, despite the circling leaves, does not feel as if it is going around him. Rather it is one single direct gust that sends dust particles stinging against his stretched skin, and then is gone.
An air-filled plastic bag is left hanging above a clean brick wall.
The traffic moves.
Paul turns left at the lights; and, dropping his head, he pedals hard down through Durleigh. With speed his legs gain power. The road swoops down and up. Soon the houses are hiding from the road behind gardens. In one small garden a thin old man is smiling back at his flowers.
True Stories
In April 1986, after being in collision with a car near her Somerville Way home, six year old Louise Perry was treated for bruises in Bridgwater hospital. The driver of the car was 24 year old Andrew Webber of St Thomas Court, Bridgwater.
19 year old Sharon Jane Hambridge was fined £50 in October 1989 for assaulting another woman outside the shops on the Sydenham Estate. Prior to the assault the two women had been shouting at one another.
In October 1989 Brian David Gent, of St John Street, Bridgwater, was fined £350 and was banned from driving for 18 months. 24 year old Brian David Gent, a machine operator at Gerbers, had registered a reading of 76 on the Intoximeter. The legal limit is 35.
