The Last Bike Ride - Chapter 8/15

Chapter 8

Steve now had to negotiate that long link road from the M3 onto the M27. The hard shoulder gave him plenty of room but there were a few blind spots, so he was still nervous being on the wrong side and exposed to anything speeding towards him. There were no embankments along here for safety.
Once clear of the junction he headed down towards Rownhams services. The earlier chaos at Fleet and Winchester services had now given way to an eerie deserted atmosphere. Across the motorway he could see a few abandoned cars whose owners had hoped they could find fuel. Some had decided to try their luck on foot.
Another big hill ahead, and then down to the Romsey junction. They had got to know this junction well, especially Juliette who had made the regular trips with Michelle for her cancer treatment at Southampton hospital. She had been diagnosed with the disease just before her third birthday but had been successfully operated on but had continued to be monitored over the years. The first trip to the cancer specialist had followed a harrowing weekend after she had been seen at Poole hospital. Juliette had remained positive throughout but Steve had thought the worst and had even written a new verse to ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ asking, ‘if there is a God, what is he playing at then?’ That time just vindicated his lack of belief.
Just after the junction he stopped and looked over the bridge at the River Test. This was one of the UK’s great chalk streams and a river he had read so much about, but had never got round to fishing, and was unlikely to get a chance to now. He had bought a rod called a ‘Test’, named after the river, from a tackle shop in London when he was about twelve. His pocket money had gone each week as a payment on the rod and he was so thrilled to collect it when he had paid the final instalment. The split-cane classic would be laughed at now, but it was everything to Steve at the time, and he still had it and cherished it. Things that don’t come easily or immediately are cherished in that way and he wondered if any of his daughters would come to cherish anything in the same way.
The bright moonlight was rippling slightly on the surface as he looked down at the dark water. Another of his favourite film moments came to mind – Audrey Hepburn’s character, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sitting on her apartment window-ledge, plucking her guitar as she sang Moon River.
That great actress had been a genuine A-list celebrity, a true film legend, and such a beautiful and classy woman. Who knows what she would make of current ‘celebs’ who are able to make a film, ghost a book, and have a clothing range made in their name just for eating a spider in the jungle, or demonstrating their complete lack of talent in front of huge, gullible, TV audiences.
Steve needed to carry on before he froze to the bridge railings. He knew there were some big climbs ahead so he scrabbled around in his rucksack and found his last bit of food, an energy bar. He ate that and cycled off singing Moon River and still no wiser, even after all these years, of what exactly a ‘Huckleberry friend’ is. He could have done with another ‘drifter’- something else he had thought of from the song - with him right then, even though there probably wasn’t much of a world to go off to see.
After this long, flat stretch of road there was the first big hill to come just after the M27 became the A31 and entered the New Forest.
Steve needed to concentrate now on the road because the clear lines and hard shoulders of the motorways had given way to the tree-lined darkness of this A-road. Even though nothing had come his way on this side of the road for quite a while, it only needed one panicking reckless driver to take him out. And there were plenty of reckless drivers on the road tonight.
Meanwhile, on the other side, he could hear the never-ending drone of the traffic racing towards Bournemouth and beyond. Before he reached the summit he heard screeching tyres and yet another sickening crash. He had lost count of how many smashes he had heard over the last few hours but it’s not something that anyone can get used to. He knew exactly where this latest accident was - on the sharp right-hander at the top of the hill. Even from a hundred yards away he could hear screams, but he wasn’t going to stop. There was nothing he could do, and he could easily have put himself in another dangerous situation. But it was still hard to cycle on past, knowing that, through the bushes between the carriageways, there was at least one person a few moments from death.
As the central reservation narrowed at the top of the hill, Steve realised that the cars that had just crashed had ran into the back of a queue of traffic which had been concealed by the bend in the road.
He also realised that there was going to be a tricky section just ahead, as the only escape route for drivers was the U-turn on to his side of the road, leading off to Rufus Stone, which would bring cars directly towards him for a few yards. He got off his bike when he got to the junction and waited for the briefest of gaps before sprinting across, remounting, and pedalling away.
‘How weapons had changed’, he thought, as he saw the sign for Rufus Stone, a memorial to where Rufus, William II, had been accidentally killed by a stray arrow in the forest a thousand years earlier.
Just ahead, across the road, the petrol station, although clearly closed, was seething with desperate humanity seeking refuge and hope now that their escape had been blocked. Steve soon came to the source of the blockage – another huge smash, this time at the Stoney Cross junction which had not only jammed the main road but also stopped anything from leaving along the narrow forest road off to the left, or from joining the main road from it.
While some had walked back to the petrol station to what they thought would be safety, others decided to start a fire and a party in the field next to the junction. Music was pounding from some very powerful car sound systems and some equally powerful narcotics were having the desired effect.
Steve cycled on, not wanting to become a target again, as he had been for the stoners back near Winchester, even though this crowd seemed more consigned to their fates and happy for everyone to join them. Now though, he saw a new group of travellers, those on foot, families mainly, who had abandoned their cars and realised that they might actually be able to walk to one of the bigger towns a few miles on.
Ahead were the two big dips of the main road; big enough for phone signals to be lost in. The only compensation, if that’s what it could be called, was that he would have a good view of any approaching traffic. His eyes had become a bit more used to the forest darkness and he now felt confident enough to really go for it on the downhill side of the dip and hoped for the best. He gained some momentum but only enough to take him a little way up the other side, and then had to dig deep to get to the top.
That had been not just a physical struggle, but a nervous one as well, feeling that any second would bring him into contact with something coming his way. The ‘correct’ side of the road was clear of traffic, and it would remain so until the Burley exit, but he hadn’t crossed over when he first had the chance because of the number of people who had started walking. He didn’t want a repeat of what had happened near Winchester. His bike would have been even more desirable here for those getting increasingly desperate.
With no traffic on the road there was an eerie silence, but through the shrubbery of the central reservation he could hear the crying and whimpering of the small children struggling to walk along with their parents.
As the bushes between the carriageways thinned out, he was able to look across and see that not only had the number of walking families thinned out into a single line of what looked like refugees, but they had become zombie-like and seemed unaware of a cyclist crossing to travel past them.
‘These are refugees, but where is their home going to be now?’ he wondered as he cycled past them.
Indeed, it was mainly families walking now. Most others had stopped to join the party back at Stoney Cross, an apt party destination. Some mums were carrying babies as they hadn’t had time earlier to pack their prams or buggies, and dads were now struggling with the larger children. A few had started to sit together for a rest, some had fallen asleep, and in these conditions would freeze with just themselves for warmth if they slept for too long.
Steve had been kept warm, especially by the exertions of the last big dip, and the next one loomed ahead, but at least he didn’t have to worry about oncoming traffic. This was a much tougher struggle, the previous hours had taken their toll, but his legs shouldn’t have felt this heavy.
He could now enjoy the slight downhill slope, but soon realised why it had been so much of an effort. His back tyre, which had been slowly deflating going up the hill, was now completely flat.
“F… F… F…!” he stammeringly shouted, as the bike weaved around as he tried to slow it down.
He went off the road and into a ditch, bizarrely thinking,
‘That was close, I nearly said fuck!’
Apart from a gash on his face, he had avoided any major injury, and his bike was all right, apart from the puncture.
‘This should be interesting,’ he thought, as he started to get the tools and spare tube from his saddle pack.
But, aware that he might soon be confronted with walkers who might not necessarily have the welfare of a strange cyclist at the top of their priorities, and even less willing to help fix his puncture, he decided instead to carry his bike back over the central reservation and find somewhere out of sight to work.
The cold temperature had helped clot the blood from the cut on his face, but a new leak of his claret emerged when he found the cause of the puncture. Although his eyes had been adapted to the darkness for some time, he had to feel around the inside of the tyre to check if anything was still poking through it. There was; a sharp nail.
He went to unclip his pump but, to his horror, it wasn’t there. It had unclipped itself as he crashed into the ditch. He took his torch and began scrabbling around where he had fallen, but it was like searching for a bicycle pump in a dark ditch, by the side of a road, in a forest.
At last, a glimpse of the silvery metal of the pump shone in the moonlight. As he bent down to pick it up he became aware of a rustling in the bushes behind him. He thought about just getting away from there but instead decided to investigate. His torch soon picked out the mangled body of a deer twitching in the throes of dying. It must have been thrown here after being hit by a vehicle.
There had hardly been a night when Steve had returned from London along this Forest road that he hadn’t thought about a deer running out in front of his van. He had often run through different scenarios of what would happen if he had hit one. The image which had disturbed him the most was of one of the girls being with him and a deer coming through the windscreen on impact. The thought of it landing on them and wildly thrashing about, adding blood to their already glass-covered laps, causing him to lose control and crash, was one he tried, usually unsuccessfully, not to dwell on too much.
Steve was now freezing, and the nervous search in the bushes hadn’t helped. After a few minutes of vigorous pumping though, he had warmed up a bit, the tyre was ready, and he carried the bike back over the central reservation, and was on his way again.
Within a few minutes he saw a welcoming sight ahead, something that had always let him know he wasn’t far from home – the ‘Shell’ sign of the Picket Post services.
‘They must have left it on just for me!’ he thought.
This flattish part of the forest road, before it dropped down to Ringwood, had given Steve some great sunsets to watch as he came back from London in mid-summer, but not tonight, of course. Instead, the darkness allowed the lights of the Bournemouth conurbation to glow off to the left.
Steve’s thoughts turned in the direction of the Burley Golf Club, a couple of miles away to the south. He had found this lovely little Club when they had first moved down to Dorset, and had joined it because it was very similar to his old Club in Kent. There weren’t the same number of deer as in Kent, just a few, but plenty of other wildlife, mainly horses and cattle, roaming the fairways. Both Clubs’ Greens had a reputation for being fast and true, and that would have been enough to convince Steve to join, but what really settled it was Burley’s setting, deep in the New Forest, with such great views across the valleys of the forest.
However, the Course had frustrated him in recent years until he eventually gave the game up. The ‘Burley bounce’, as it was generally known, turned well-executed shots into unplayable situations, while the older, much more sensible players, had just knocked it steadily around, not hitting it very far, but a lot less.
Steve now wondered what would happen to the Course. The Greens would soon grow over, but the animals of the Course, the cattle, deer and horses, if they weren’t affected by the radiation, would probably carry on being the Club’s ‘lawn-mowers’.
‘Would they be affected?’ Steve pondered.
He had read about the cows around Chernobyl in Russia, the scene of a massive nuclear power plant explosion in the 80s, which were producing radiation-free milk soon after the disaster.
As he approached the ‘Shell’ sign he started to look for somewhere to cross back over. Now, safely back on he wrong side of the road, he looked across to the petrol station and could see what had become the usual garage site tonight, more abandoned vehicles on the forecourt but with now, no people around. The ‘refugee’ line from a few miles back had soon become thinned out and now there was just the occasional family, utterly exhausted by their efforts and the cold.
He had seen some huddles on the roadside as he cycled past which, by now, would be lifeless if they hadn’t been able to find the strength to move on again. Some would now be regretting making this journey, perhaps wishing they had stayed at home to take their chances.
‘What would I have tried to do for us?’ he wondered, as he had cycled by these forlorn groups, ‘probably the same, as every dad would have done.’
He headed down the hill to Ringwood, but this time a lot more carefully than he had done through the forest dips, because there were a few junctions on the way down offering access to his side of the road, even though he had only come across one car coming towards him in the previous ten miles.
The traffic was roaring again now, as it had found a way through the forest to join the A31 again at the Burley junction.
At the bottom of the hill he stopped opposite the Fish Inn. Over the years he had always called out “The Fish Inn!” as they approached it; something the girls laughed about at first, then became embarrassed about as they grew older, but now joined in with him.
He looked down into the dark Hampshire Avon, probably the best fishing river in the South, and another that Steve had read about a lot in the Angling Times, a paper which he strangely couldn’t get from the Daily Record vendor when she came into Motherwell’s Fir Park Club when he was there once with Juliette. It’s possible that she hadn’t been asked for it before then, or since!
But his main source of knowledge for the Avon was Bernard Venables’ Fishing with Mr Crabtree, a classic in Steve’s eyes. It’s likely that, in these safety-conscious days, the antics of the pipe-smoking Mr Crabtree and his son, Peter, wouldn’t be allowed, but they weren’t dangerous times.
‘Where has our innocence gone? If anyone survives let’s hope they find the children’s enjoyment before they find the rules.’
What had always been regarded as the ultimate fishing classic, though, was Izaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler, but to Steve, that book had never made any sense. When it was written in the 17th century, no doubt it equipped people to take up fishing, but is as relevant for today as an instruction book for the Spinning Susan.
To say that about The Compleat Angler though would be regarded as heresy, just like rubbishing the heavy bands of the ‘70s that droned on endlessly, and everyone was supposed to marvel at how great it was to sit through seventeen minutes of endless dirge. However, Steve preferred his music with a bit of soul.
It was also regarded as the height of philistinism to say anything against modern art. The precious Bright Young Artists of Britain had made a fortune out of people trying to be cool and saying just how great Tracey Emin’s My Bed was.
‘If an unkempt bedroom can be considered a work of art, then courtesy of our girls, we have four masterpieces at home,’ Steve thought.
He had the job, some years earlier, of transporting a number of bricks around to galleries where exhibitions were made of them by another ‘gifted’ artist. Steve had deliberately kept two of the bricks in the van for one exhibition which, as he expected, wasn’t discovered until one of the critics, not the artist, had compared photos of the pile with the same from an earlier exhibition.
Again, Steve felt himself seizing up with the cold after staring at the river wondering how long it would be before anyone fished this great water again. He got on his bike and pedalled away, thinking about his girls and their rooms. Tonight, they could stay as messy as the girls wanted!
The climb up to the roundabout was steeper than he had expected but, by now, he wasn’t bothered, as he knew he was on the last leg of the journey.