This murky brew is for Leo, if he’ll have it ... bottoms up!
Box Hill where the bikers go, on a Sunday. Box Hill near Leatherhead in Surrey — jewel of the North Downs, rising almost 400 feet sheer above the river (that’s the river Mole). A cliff densely covered with box and yew. It’s the steepness of the gradient means only box and yew can get a foothold. It could just as easily be called Yew Hill as Box Hill, except box trees are so much rarer.
Box is the heaviest European wood. It doesn’t float. The roots were traditionally used for knife handles. Box trees are poisonous, same as yews. Only camels will eat the leaves, not because they’re immune but because they’re stupid, they don’t know what they’re doing. Box trees are used for mazes because the foliage is so dense, and they can be trained all the way down to the ground. A maze isn’t much cop if you can lie down on your belly, see where you are and wriggle out of it.
The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green. I looked that up. It sounds like a poem you can’t quite get the sense out of.
At Box Hill there’s downland grazed by sheep. A rich chalk flora. Orchids for those who know them when they see them. It’s a beauty spot overrun one day a week by motorcyclists and their beautiful machines. Bikes that whine, bikes that roar.
The Sunday of my eighteenth birthday: 1975. I went to look at the bikes. Because life at home wasn’t much fun, just at that moment, with Mum in hospital and Dad being unlike himself. Because I was going to get a bike of my own, one day soon. Because I liked to look at the bikers. Because it was my birthday, and I didn’t need a reason.
As far as riding my own machine, the closest I’d come to date was making the pilgrimage from Isleworth to Lewis Leathers in Great Portland Street, off Oxford Circus, to pick up a catalogue. Not very close. Tucked inside the catalogue was a leaflet telling you how to take your measurements for a one-piece suit. It had an outline of a human figure with arrows going this way and that, shoulder to wrist, inside leg.
I didn’t think the one-piece suit idea was going to work. The outline didn’t look much like me. A jacket in a standard size, once I could even afford that, would be a better bet. It would cover me up, though even so I wasn’t sure. If it was big enough for me to get the zip done up over my tum, the sleeves would be much too long, and I’d be swimming inside the shoulders.
I fell over him. I tripped and fell over him. When he told people about how we met, Ray always made that clear: Colin didn’t fall for me, he fell over me. Then he would continue the story with the bit that always made me uncomfortable. Ray would say, I took one look at him, and I saw what he really wanted.
I didn’t think I knew what I wanted, and I’m still not sure why he chose me. I was never a looker. I never had a waist. But Ray was dead drop gorgeous, though people didn’t say that then. It wasn’t a phrase. I didn’t think Ray was dead drop gorgeous in 1975. I was still reading teen magazines, and in 1975 the word in my mind was the word that teenagers used then. Ray was tasty.
I fell over him, just as he said. There’s a side of Box Hill I call the shorn side, near the panorama, where the grass is short and neat, and this was the other side, where the grass is shaggy and not so tidied up. He was sitting against a tree with his eyes shut — not that I saw him — and his big feet crossed in front of him. It was the feet I fell over, the size twelves.
He was probably sleeping off a late night with a stomach full of fry-up from the café at the bottom of the hill, where everybody was wearing leather but nobody wore their leather as well as he did. He was so used to being looked at that he didn’t notice any more. It would have been just like him, the person I came to know, to sit there reading a book after he’d finished eating. Military history. Something about the ocean and its creatures. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen who could turn a page wearing leather gloves and not fumble.
For heaven’s sake, the man could shuffle and deal a pack of cards without taking his gloves off — even if that was a party trick, something done for a bet with his poker club. Supple dress gloves, not his bike gloves. When he got off his machine, he’d pull off the stiff bike gloves and fold them in his helmet, then pull out the thin dress ones from his jacket pocket. A hundred to one those dress gloves were Mayfair jobs, made to measure, for his fingers to fit them so snugly, all the way to the tips.
And in the moment between gloves, when his hands were naked, he would use the left one to sweep back the leading edge of his thick yellow hair in a single brisk gesture, much too decisive to seem like grooming. You could never think of that poised impatient movement of the hand as grooming, let alone preening. Hair that was never either lank or unruly, and never long enough at the front to count technically as a quiff.
When people stared at him, Ray ignored them, but he wasn’t used to people paying no attention in the first place. When I woke him up by tripping over him, it stands to reason that I suffered more than he did from the upset of our meeting. I went sprawling and barked my knees, while the worst thing that happened to him was that one bike boot scuffed the other. From the way he scowled, though, that was serious enough. When I dusted myself off and sat up on my haunches, Ray was glaring down at me and snarling, ‘Why don’t you look where you’re fucking going?’
I may have got the ‘fucking’ in the wrong place. He might have said, ‘Why don’t you fucking look where you’re going?’ It’s hard to be sure after all this time, but there was definitely a ‘fucking’ in it. I wasn’t used to being sworn at, and I know I flinched. I was scared but I didn’t run away — not that running has ever been a strong suit. One leg always trails behind when I try.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him, that much is true, but who could have in my place? He was like a glossy catalogue illustration from Lewis Leathers, and I expect I looked like a tired window display from the Burton’s menswear shop, when they’ve tried lots of backdrops and lighting schemes and they still can’t make people want the merchandise. My flares were timid — yes it’s possible for flares to be timid. My brown leather jacket had exaggerated rounded lapels. Its zip was plastic rather than metal and it went straight down the middle, not at the sexy angle of the ones on bike jackets. Ray was six foot five and I was what I still am, five foot six. Even if I’d been taller I would have been at quite a disadvantage, looking up at a stranger scowling down.
Except that, the way he always told it, it wasn’t his scowl I was looking at. But it was news to me when he said, ‘I get it. So this is what you’re interested in?’ His voice changed, it was menacing in a different way. Menacing in a way that promised something. As much lazy as angry, now. I hadn’t even realised I wasn’t looking at his face. Not that it wasn’t a fine face, a strong face, a chiselled face. I just wasn’t looking at it.
He was always a step ahead of me. Sometimes a whole flight of steps. Looking down on me from the top of a flight of steps, wearing no expression, just waiting to see if I had the courage to follow him. Sometimes ducking round the corner so I had to run to catch up, breathless and stumbling, afraid that if I lost sight of him it’d be for good.