I think I may have been born to be wild, but it’s worn off a bit, Em Roberts thought.
She watched her husband shambling across to the tower blocks. His body, tall but stooped, seemed to have a demolition notice on it. ‘I’ve burnt the candle at both ends, and now I’m paying for it,’ he’d whine to his lady listeners. ‘Had a motorbike when I was younger, chased after the ladies, partied till I dropped, lived for the day.’ A life of being on the razzle, and motor bike crashes, had left him as a crumbling exterior. His inside, Em believed, had been similarly gutted.
All he did was sit at home and mope, or limp about the estate, both legs stiff like their bones had motorcycle steel embedded in them. In the summer he’d be outside a tower block, trying to impress this man’s wife, or that man’s woman, with recollections of his glorious past. He still liked the ladies, and if you scrutinised his shambling body, and his unkempt grey hair, you might find a trace of former good looks, like a tint of blood at a road-crash decades after the event. Em had long stopped such scrutinising.
Em was fifty, nearly two decades younger than him. Maybe she’d been impressed when a teenager by an older man with an oil-slick smile, oily hair combed back, and the suggestion of excitement in the effusion of oil from him and his Harley. Now she frequently chided Bri when he got under her feet in the house, asking why didn’t he get out of it to his tower block tarts while she cleaned up after him. Humiliated, he’d trudge across to the towers. They’d listen to him.
One day, outside one of the towers, a fellow he knew roared up on a motorbike. Bri limped over. ‘Got a beautiful engine on her, hasn’t she?’ he said. ‘Gorgeous bodywork too; bet she goes like the clappers.’ ‘Sit aboard,’ the guy said. He did, revved the engine, remembered happy days on the open road, his heart beat quicker with the increased revs. Next thing he’d collapsed of heart-failure.
In the hospital Em eyed the wires coming out of machines, going into his broken body.
‘He’s brain-dead,’ she was told. ‘Lack of oxygen when his heart stopped.’ Did she want to keep him artificially alive? She thought of a motorcycle, an engine, an ignition key. ‘Turn off the engine,’ she said.
A year later she sold the house, moved to the Derbyshire Dales, bought her own machine. It was male, assuredly a ‘he’, which she treated well, and liked the feeling of control over. Every Sunday she joined the dozens of bikers thronging Matlock Bath, before they roared off down the A6. She ate chips with them, chatted with them, was proud when they admired the bike. ‘He’s got some poke in him,’ she’d say. ‘Not like his predecessor. The predecessor died on me. But I’m wedded to this boy for ever.’
