By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
7) Paul Cycling
The cherry red bike has white-taped drop handlebars. Paul has on a blue shirt and baggy grey trousers. The sun is hot, the air fills out his shirt. He rides leaning stiff-armed on the white-taped handlebars. He looks relaxed; but it is only when the motorway bridge is behind him that he feels free of the town.
The road bends into a clump of willows and pale poplars. Beyond that is the level horizon and the sky. Tall poplars, singly and in groups, stand up like exclamation marks surprised to find themselves in that flat soft landscape of rounded willows. A self-conscious church steeple knows itself to be a landmark. The farmers' silos are thoughtless erections. While the gaunt pylons and looping cables are so obtrusive that they are no longer seen.
This flat land under his tyres, though, is but a manifestation of gravity, is merely Earth's silted crust. Because this is principally a place of skies; and the sky this day is blue — save for the dotted and disjointed cream lines left by criss-crossing jets. The black abandoned roads of an old airdrome seem a negative mirror. Except that the old wartime runways are sectioned off by sandbags and builders' rubble, plastic sacks and single strands of electric wire. Paul has many a time been tempted to dismount, lift his bike over the roadside barbed wire and go pedalling off down Runway 6 — among the fat fresians.
Paul self-consciously regards himself as privileged in this proximity of his to the countryside. Already this day he has seen a yellowhammer, its blunt head as bright as a canary's. That's the beauty of a bike, he likes to tell Michael, coming along so quick and quiet before the wild animals know it.
"....In a car you're going so fast that so much is missed. And, caught up in the traffic, it's not always possible to stop...." On his bike Paul can pull up wherever he wants, and can take time to look about him as he goes along.
Paul has chanced upon great crested grebes on the old claypit ponds. And these exotic creatures were alert to his sudden presence as no animal in a zoo or a wildlife park could ever be. Try explaining that to Michael, though. Michael is impressed by cars and comfort, wants only names and places to lord over his schoolfriends.
What need riches, Paul now asks of Michael, when he can be witness to such small beauties for free? What need riches anyhow? If he were a man as rich and as short as Onassis, a man with riches beyond even his dreams, would he end up, like Imelda Marcos, with thousands upon thousands of shoes? When he could only ever wear one pair at a time..?
Paul loves those days, when Julie is at work or at home, when someone else is taking care of the children, and he has time unlimited to wander where he will; when he can surrender to impulse, give himself to the mood and, making himself passive to his own whims, let them take him where they will. Today, though, he has a definite destination.
Slowing he turns off the Westonzoyland road and goes coasting along the smaller road between the rines. He is looking for a turning, in this uneventful countryside, that will take him along to the canal.
He passes some newly pollarded willows, all in a knobkerry row, and he checks his watch. He has to collect Michael later. Julie's Mum doesn't like going to the school. She says it makes her feel withered and lined among all those plump young mothers.
Another turning takes him along to and beside the concrete reinforced banks of the Parrett. The salty tide is on the slow ebb. No wildlife livens the dark slimy sides of the river's shallow ravine.
Paul presses on, crosses the river, takes a left, a right, and another right. The air is dry in his mouth and his nose; and he worries now that he has taken a wrong turning. To get his bearings, still wheeling along, he sits up straight with the fingertips of one hand on the handlebars. He thinks he can make out the lump of Burrow Mump over to his left. Over to his right is one of Bridgwater's tall chimneys.
To pedal up to the bridge over the railway he rises out of his saddle, and makes a mental note that the backwheel (or could be a pedal?) is grinding slightly. (Tied with an oily shoelace to the chrome saddle stem is a rust-stained carrierbag of tools.)
Stopping on the bridge he looks down on the orange and iron tracks and thinks of Michael standing behind the train driver, going under low bridges like this.
Away from the rusty lines the land recedes in line after line of disordered willows and sedge-bladed rines. A squared, paralleled, rectangulated flat land. Except for the brown tit, with its nipple pierced, that is Burrow Mump.
A heron, wary neck erect, is by a nearby green rine. A red and white helicopter is rattling away above Burrow Mump. A line of spiky pollarded willows look like punks' heads all in a row. Paul waits. The heron doesn't move.
Looking over to Burrow Mump he rotates his usual thought on seeing it — how his mind can be in two places at once. How he can see from this red-black bridge today's distant ochre ruin. How he can also see, while remaining here, the pale mallows growing in and around the roofless ruins of the Mump, as well as the views of the blue hills framed through its rounded windows and underlined by cattle bars; with Michael and Alice taking turns to swing noisily on those smoothed iron bars, while he and Julie speculated in murmurs on cosmic connections between the tor under their feet and that other tor at Glastonbury, thinking that over on that dark nippled pimple were minds imagining themselves over on this dark nippled pimple .... Paul's mind has its own maps of the Levels.
Pushing off from the railway bridge Paul drops down; and there's the wide green road of the canal, with oblongs of clear water like upside-down puddles.
A gateway leads off from the road. Be easy from here to get onto the towpath. Be in Taunton in no time. This is the place to start. Here between greenery. He'll have to put Alice's seat back on this bike. Which means that he won't be able to sell this bike this week. Which decision, a change postponed, makes him feel easier.
To test the towpath he opens the gate and freewheels down to the canal. Satisfied that Julie will tolerate the path's bumps, he stops and turns the bike. In the clear water here is the dark curving reflection of the bridge's arch. The mirrored sky makes of it a blue hole in the planet Earth.
True Stories
Michael Horsington's dairy herd of 100 cows, at Moorland Farm, were slaughtered in July 1985, after becoming infected with brucellosis.
On Good Friday 1986 hundreds of women tried to block the arrival of heavy plant at the site of Hinkley C power station. A dozen women had to be dragged clear. No arrests were made.
In October 1989 David Smith, of Pinetree Close, Bridgwater, was walking across Town Bridge with his girlfriend when a man passed them and was abusive towards David Smith's girlfriend, who took offence. 29 year old David Smith then went after the man and they had a fight. When the police tried to break up the fight David Smith kicked and swore at them. He was arrested.
In April 1990 Peter Alexander Tottle, of Withygrove Close, Bridgwater, was given a conditional discharge after admitting an indecent assault on a 13 year old girl. 21 year old Peter Alexander Tottle was ordered to pay £21 costs.
