God Bicycle

­­­­GOD ON A BICYCLE

Ian O’Malley has lived in Ireland, Spain, Italy and Switzerland. He has an MA in Literature and has worked in education for twenty years. He has represented Ireland in sport at international level.

By the same author

Non-fiction

THE IRISH CULTURE BOOK 1 & 2

Short stories

‘Speech! Speech!’ in A PINT AND A HAIRCUT

Children’s Book

THE DRAGON WHO SNEEZED (with Cian Rae)

Fiction

GOD ON A BICYCLE – SIMPLIFIED (Graded Readers)

GOD ON A BICYCLE

Ian O’Malley

© 201­­5 Ian O’Malley

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

978-1-326-39512-4

First published by Malleyman Publications, Dublin, 2015.

Malleyman Publications

2, 98 Street, Graiguecullen, Carlow, Ireland

www.malleyman.com

Printed in the United States of America by lulu.com

CONTENTS

PART ONE

1 THE CRAB AND THE HORSES

2 DUST

3 RUST AND SOUNDTRACKS

4 COLD FIREPLACES

5 THE HEAD AND THE HEART

6 OLÉ EIRE

7 THE BURN

8 THE DANCE

9 EVAN’S SPORTS DIARY

10 DOWN THE COUNTRY

11 THE BANK

12 THE CHAMPS

PART TWO

13 BARCELONA

14 THE BODY

15 THE SCHOOL

16 THE OLD MAN AND THE BICYCLE

17 ANGST AND HUMIDITY

18 SHOTGUNS AND RAIN

19 THE TINGLE OF CAVA

20 POETRY AND CRAIC

21 THE FLIGHT

22 THE VILLAGE

PART THREE

23 MEN IN PINK AND THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM

24 TWO TESTS AND A BREAKDOWN

25 A CANVAS, A SMOKE AND A CAPPUCCINO

26 THE PAIR

PART FOUR

27 THE LAKE

28 THE RACE

29 THE BEACH

­­Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the people who supported and assisted in making this book possible.

A huge thank you to all those who read and commented on different versions of the book, going back many years, and who suggested amendments or gave advice. Thank you to Aaron Camps, Dara Clear, Richard Corden, John Oliver, Terry Farrell, Patrick Downey, Conor Begley, Judy Hamilton, Eibhlin Cassidy, Colm Maguire, Paddy Kelly, Montse Thomas Riu, Yolanda Segura and Veronica Giorgetti. Thanks also to Shaun, Vera, Dervla and Lisa O’Malley. Thank you to Ania Tomaszewska.

Thanks and love to all my family who encouraged and supported – to all the O’Malleys, to Keelan and Evan and all the Finns, and to Leah, Cameron, Cian and all the Raes.

For Andrew

Carlow, January 1994. Saturday night, 10 p.m.

I sat at the plastic table of ‘New York, New York’ fast food restaurant where I worked. I was on a twenty-minute break from a shift that wouldn’t finish till 5 a.m. I sipped tea from a polystyrene cup and struggled to eat a greasy chicken nugget. My throat was sore, my nose was blocked and I felt crap. I wanted to go home. It was bleak outside, the wind drove the rain hard against the window, and I was miserable.

Andrew threw a large, hardback book on the table in front of me. Have a look at that, lad. For twenty minutes, my mind travelled among exotic countries and cultures, bright colours and landscape, carnival and dark-eyed women. As I looked up from the book again and came back from my break, the fumes of burning chip oil filled my lungs again. Andrew smiled, So, let’s make a plan to go somewhere, lad. In his shining eyes, the world seemed so much bigger. It still does.

PART ONE

REMO ERGO SUM.

I row therefore I am.

1 THE CRAB AND THE HORSES

In the darkness, the man picked his way along the riverbank. He stopped, turned his head sideways and listened. Then he heard a low, breathy whinnying ahead of him. The moonlight glinted for a moment off the water and he shook himself against the cold.

As he moved forward to the iron fence, he sensed the mare on the other side easing towards him. He reached through the fence and felt her twist her head up against him, her strength as she rubbed and wet his hand with her lips and nose. He opened his hand and offered her the pieces of chopped-up apple.

As he fed her, he gazed for a moment up into the dark waste of Memorial Gardens above him. He felt the mare’s hot eager breath on his face and he looked back into the vivid, black orb of her eye so close in front of him now.

The man took hold of the mare’s head collar. There was a cheek-piece on either side down to the muzzle around her nose. Using a clip at one end, he attached a length of rope to the brass ring on the head collar under her chin. He tied the other end of the rope to the fence. Talking to her soothingly, he climbed over the fence.

From his pocket he took more pieces of apple and waited as the mare fed from his hand. He felt under the muzzle for the jugular groove on the right side where her carotid artery lay. He rubbed the artery up and down softly with his fingers getting her used to the sensation.

His breath slow, he slowly drew a long Stanley knife from his belt, gently pressing it against her neck and holding it there as he whispered to her. He closed his eyes and heard her sturdy breathing, felt that physical closeness and connection to another life.

With a swift stabbing action, he drove the knife deep and downwards.

The mare screamed, thrashed her head and flung the man sideways, full-length across the ground. She threw the force of her body against the tether that held her to the iron fence. Thick blood thumped from her neck and she was panicking in its smell. Her back legs gave way beneath her and she sat for a moment on her rear.

The man crawled away and sat observing with his back propped against the fence. Her blood gave an iron tang to the air. He licked the tip of his index finger.

The mare staggered back on her feet like a newborn. Her head went this way and that, pulling on the rope. She squealed, screeched, stumbled forward on her face, then sideways and lay with her legs straight out. For a long while she lay there twitching and there were gurgling and sniffling sounds. Finally, she was still.

The man looked around. There was a sound of water lapping against the riverbank. The moon was just reappearing from behind some clouds. He sighed.

As dawn broke by the river, the wind was beginning to rise. The nine men sat into the narrow boat and went through the familiar routine – locking oars in the gates, tightening foot-stretchers and closing bung-holes. From the bow of the boat forward, they called out their numbers one-by-one.

Five ready, said Evan.

Light was spreading slowly across the sky and pale spider-webbing was becoming visible, laid out across the hedges that separated their club, Fianna, from their neighbours. Dark clouds huddled over Phoenix Park. There was the sound of the flagpole above the boathouse clattering in the rising wind.

Evan stretched forward in the boat until his forehead was almost touching his shins and felt the pain through his hamstrings, lower back and into his neck. In his rush to get here, he’d put on odd socks again.

Good pain, said Evan to himself and there was the promise of more.

He released the stretch and yawned nervously as a freezing gust of wind slapped suddenly off the river. This was another little step on his road to rowing at an Olympics for Ireland. That goal was the first and last thing he thought about every day.

With sleep in his eyes, he glanced again towards the car by the side of the boathouse where the girl who’d said hello to him was sitting in the passenger seat. He shook his head. He didn’t need distractions.

The men pushed their oars through the headless winter weeds close to the bank and levered themselves out into the river. The wind from down-river carried whispers of Dublin’s city centre and the sea beyond.

Evan looked to the far bank, where the Memorial Gardens sloped upwards, dotted and scarred with rubbish and debris. On the crest of the hill, barely distinguishable against the lighter colour of the sky, Evan imagined as much as saw the statuesque shapes of three horses because they always stood there at this time. He didn’t register that there were only two horses today.

Cold spray leapt up into his face and the flow sucked the boat out towards the middle of the river.

The rowers started slowly, firstly in pairs, then fours and then all eight.

SQUARE BLADES. HOLDING IN THE FINISHES.

The Cox’s instructions through the boat’s speaker system echoed weirdly across the water.

LOOKING FOR THE CONTROL. EVERY STROKE,

In the middle of the boat, Evan’s movements mirrored the easy rhythm of Six-man in front of him and his eyes were fixed ahead on a point just above Six-man’s head.

During a rowing stroke the blade must be covered as quickly as possible and power applied to it as it bites the water. The blade is driven horizontally, just covered all the way, before a quick and clean release at back-stops that neither allows water to strike the back of the blade nor throws water sternwards. During the recovery, the blade is first horizontal and then squares again, so that it is just above the water surface at front-stops in order to minimise the vertical movement required for the catch.

ALL EIGHT. STRAIGHT IN AT FRONT-STOPS.

Evan confronted every single stroke, seeking to eliminate flaws and maximise power application. He felt for the correct hand-height to balance the boat, listened for the sharp coordinated whoosh and bang of the blade in and out of the water and glanced at the quality of the puddles left in their wake.

Practice makes permanent. With repeated training the body adapts and movement patterns become easy, smooth and automatic. The best teacher is the boat itself.

Evan wondered how many oar strokes he’d pulled already this season in a boat together with this crew of men. Four months training since early October. Nearly one hundred hour-and-a-half sessions, thirty strokes per minute by ninety minutes. Maybe more than two hundred and fifty thousand strokes already this season.

How many oar strokes in his whole rowing career since his father first lifted him into a boat as an eight-year-old? Less than two months after his mother was killed. It had to be millions of oar strokes.

For year after year since that time, Evan’s calloused hands had wrapped around an oar and driven boats through lake and river, floodwater and waves, through heat, cold, rain and wind, aches and exhaustion, through puberty and adolescence into manhood. Backwards, focusing on each stroke and edging towards that Olympic dream that was always out of sight. Evan relished the bitter aftertaste of all those strokes that lingered in the muscle memory of his body. 

It was impossible for him to realise that in a few moments, as subtle as famous butterfly wings causing hurricanes, one single sweep of his oar through the water out of all those millions would shake everything. Afterwards, looking back, he would ask himself if things would really have been so different if that one stroke didn’t happen. His answer to himself was always the same – yes, it would’ve been different.

The men rowed as far as the green fence just short of the dilapidated blocks of flats on the south bank and stopped there. Gossamer hung over tree branches and the river smelled of weeds and decay.

Evan looked to the bank. All the men in the boat looked. That’s where their coach Rocky O’Gorman, Evan’s father, would normally be. They all had the same mental image. He would throw down his bicycle and stand there, legs planted, glaring at them. He’d take off his hat and discard it on the grass beside him, rub his bald head and then his voice would boom across the water at them.

Instead, there was just the waves hitting against the boat and the buffeting of the bare trees. Traceries of branches stripped of their leaves stood out against the morning sky like veins. A blackened circle in the grass near the green fence was strewn with beer cans and bottles. Behind the trees and scrubland, an early bus spluttered on Chapelizod Road. A shopping trolley was in the shallows near the bank, half of it sticking up out of the water like some statement of anarchy to come.

‘Something has happened to my Da,’ Evan thought suddenly and the unstable boat wobbled beneath him.

He felt anxiety rise in his stomach. Everything along the river seemed a biding stillness, a watchfulness, like animals in a forest scrutinising and scanning. As tightly as everything was wound into a caricature of attention and quietness, soon it would shatter noisily free.

FIVE FIVE-MINUTE PIECES, said the Cox and they rowed away.

The eight oars propelled the boat forwards, squeezing the first strokes.

BUILDING… breathed the Cox. NEXT STROKE…

The oars quickened.

THERE!

The blades smacked into the River Liffey.

DRIVING AWAY WITH THE LEGS. THERE!

Past the yellow house at Boo House Bend, down the centre of the river.

POWER THROUGH THE WATER. CATCHING THE WATER. THERE!

They passed Temple boathouse on the north bank.

ONE MINUTE GONE. AND AGAIN… THERE!

The eight blades entered the water in unison, like the sound of a lock clicking. Then the watery doors were flung open as the blades resounded out at back-stops with eight straining athletes exhaling their lungs together.

Tch- aaaarrrgh. Vrum. Tch- aaaarrrgh. Vrum.

Beads of water broke and fell in a silvery string from the tips of the oars.

Two minutes gone.

The north bank curved away from the road and the trees closed around the river on both sides at the Concrete Wall. Evan’s heart and breathing rates increased, more blood was flowing to his lungs and torso.

Three minutes gone.

A young swan was sheltering under a tree between the boathouses of Rock and Municipal. A lone plastic bag was caught in the leafless branches of a tree that hung out over the river.

Four minutes gone.

SOLID AT THE FINISH. DRIIIIVING THROUGH THE WATER. THERE!

In a tiny part of his mind detached from the pain and everything else, Evan thought of the girl back in the boathouse car park, wondering how she knew his name and blithely unaware of the sound of lips being licked somewhere, the moment was so close.

Hello Evan, she’d smiled at him through the car window before, as he walked towards the boat.

She was not the type of girl Evan ever expected to smile in his direction. The unexpectedness of it had made him stub his toes on the stones underfoot and he stopped by the car. Her straight black hair, streaked with red, was pushed behind her ears and her dark eyes seemed large through the glass window. He mumbled, raised his eyebrows and indicated vaguely towards the river with a circular motion of his thumb. Aware of her eyes on him, he turned away feeling as if he was walking like the ducks that spent the winter between the slips of the boat clubs. Evan’s walking style lacked fluidity. He bounced. The muscles in his hips and buttocks, so used to rowing, tightened and rebelled against the ‘unnatural’ movements of walking.

LAST TWENTY STROKES.

‘Focus,’ Evan berated himself.

Evan’s attention snapped back. In a boat, with his buttocks placed evenly in the hollows of the hard wooden seat and the texture of a worn oar handle in his hands, grace entered his body. The water glided below him with a speed that belied the fluidity of his effort.

The boat surged as eight pairs of knuckles whitened and eight pairs of legs drove powerfully against the foot-stretchers. The boat sliced through the water, leaving a narrow v-shaped trail behind.

DO IT NOW! howled the Cox.

The ducks and the swan turned.

SEE IT IN THE WATER. THERE! CONTROL ON THE SLIDE. THERE!

Evan reached out his aching arms. His lips were dragged back from his teeth.

Although in theory it makes no difference where one’s eyes are looking during the rowing stroke, in practice it is generally true that head position and therefore much else depends on where one looks. It is best to look straight ahead. One’s body tends to follow one’s line of sight.

A solitary ray of early morning sunshine escaped through the cloud cover and angled across the river into Evan’s eyes and he moved his head towards the north bank. There he saw the girl, standing alone watching. In his overexcited mind she seemed some vision from another world with her slim body and her black hair with red streaks swirling in the wind. Evan felt a tiny melting sensation inside, so different from the harshness of the pain enveloping him.

Zuriñe, the girl herself, didn’t feel at all like a vision from another world, more someone from a country warmer than this one who was cursing herself for leaving her coat back in the car. She shook out her numb fingers.

Por Dios, she frowned, feeling the puffy tiredness under her eyes.

Yet, she had her little pad in her hand and she was determinedly sketching at the passing boat. She wanted to start capturing this new experience, impressions flooding in which she would otherwise miss and so, in turn, she didn’t notice the man approaching behind her.

Through the cold, she held the lid of the pen against the pad with her thumb and drew quickly against it to create straight lines of the boat and oars.

She had no idea how important this drawing would later become to her.

When finally she turned and saw the man, it was that abrupt moment dread when you realise a dream has slipped irrevocably into a nightmare.

Above the anaerobic threshold, extreme effort brings about a fall in blood pH and it becomes more acidic. First carbon dioxide and then lactic acid diffuse into the blood from the muscles. There is a marked increase in subjective feelings of distress. How you view the world is affected.

Evan felt a tiny jerk in the boat’s equilibrium and eight pairs of hands made tiny simultaneous adjustments of oar handle heights.

COURSE COX! he heard someone bellow.

Evan snapped his head towards the voice on the south bank and saw his father Rocky there standing up on the pedals of his bicycle. In the suspended moment, the ducks seemed to quack more furiously in the rushes near the bank as Rocky’s next words reached the boat.

WATCH YOUR COURSE!

Evan’s stroke slowed. It seemed as if a shadow passed through his oxygen-starved brain and images were distorting. Everything was silent and grainy now like an old black-and-white film, and all happening at once. Evan saw a horse that came running towards his father from out of the trees along the bank. It tossed its head and reared. Rocky was watching the boat and turned too late as the hooves of the horse’s front legs clawed for his head. For a moment, Rocky struggled to hold his balance on his bicycle. Then his mouth opened and his body fell sidewards beneath the bicycle frame.

BOW-SIDE! shouted the Cox. WATCH YOUR OARS!

Evan ripped his oar out of the water at back-stops.

It is essential that the correct sequence be followed in the rowing stroke. If your hands go up for any reason, the blade drops and hits the water. This can lead to the blade burying itself, forcing the handle to fly back. This is known as catching a crab.

CLUD!

Evan’s oar hit something hard and the button clattered in its gate. The whole boat shuddered and the impact ran through the keel, a sound of metal and fibreglass tearing.

The oar handle whacked violently back into Evan’s ribcage. The boat leered over on bow-side and the oar handle wedged into his right armpit and lifted him. His buttocks lost contact with his wooden seat, his feet twisted inside the foot-stretcher and came loose. The backs of his legs scraped along the gunnels of the hull as his body rose up and left the boat.

Evan was airborne and twisted in the air like a fish. For a moment everything slowed and everything was visible. The stern of the boat glided past a dark shape in the water. Rocky was on his back on the south bank beneath the iron hooves of the frenzied horse. Higher up, on the ridge, another horse was bolting and two men were coming down after it towards the river. On the north bank, the girl wasn’t looking anymore. She was in a man’s arms turned towards him.

Zuriñe could faintly detect something of the acidy smell of horse’s blood from Aiert as he put his arms around her. Her shock and dismay at finding herself once more in his embrace equalled Evan’s as he fell hard upon the surface of the freezing water and its arms closed around him.

2 DUST

9.49 a.m.

This one with the logo down the front is awfully popular at the moment, sir. Yes, a lot of people are buying this one recently, sir. A lot of people. Very popular.

Is it good?

Oh, an awful lot of people are buying it.

Grand, I’ll take it so. You’re very helpful. Thanks.

Absolutely no problem at all, sir. I’m here to help. €29.99, if you please.

She’s not cheap.

What is these days, says you sir? Thanking you.

Evan sighed and sat back down with his elbows on the counter in front of him. To ease his boredom he sometimes affected different accents when serving customers in the small sports shop where he worked. Occasionally they noticed but mostly not.

9.53 a.m.

Stylish sports shoes completely inappropriate for sport. Overpriced replica football jerseys that would be out-of-date within a few months. Tight-fitting lycra tops for which most customers possessed none of the physical attributes required to look good in. It was Evan’s sole purpose while inside these four walls to deliver all of these and more.  The shop was quiet today though, people were obviously not in acute need of sports fashion items on this particular Monday morning.

Evan tapped his index finger on the space bar of the computer in front of him.

9.55 a.m.

‘What the hell am I doing here?’

Less than one hour of his working day gone and already Evan was asking himself that. This was at least half an hour earlier than most days.

Every weekday for nearly two years he’d come here and watched shelves of sports clothes empty and be filled again and again. The clothes hardly changed, an extra stripe was added or a brand name was made bigger or written backwards or tilted to one side. Yet, he found that convincing people to keep buying this stuff was depressingly easy. The main reason Evan worked here was that it generally didn’t interfere with his rowing training.

9.58 a.m.

For five full minutes, Evan stared at his elbows.

10.03 a.m.

‘First hour over,’ he thought. ‘Already more than one-eighth of my shift over. It’s three, now four minutes past ten. Four into sixty equals fifteen so I’ve already used up one-fifteenth of the second hour. First-fifteenth of the second eighth, sixty-four minutes gone of a total of four hundred and eighty minutes, so sixty-four over four hundred and eighty is… eight over sixty, four over thirty, two over fifteen… I’m already two-fifteenths of the way there. And more now because although I’m not going to look at my watch again yet, I know that working this out must have used up at least a couple of minutes.’

Evan rubbed his eyes roughly with his thumbs until they began to water.

‘In monetary terms, I’ve earned more than €8 already, maybe about €8.60. So, €8 for the first hour, seven hours more to go. €56 more to be earned today, €64 altogether. Translating that into confectionery products, I can already buy twelve packets of seventy-cent Tayto crisps, if that’s what they cost, I’ve no idea. By the end of the day, I’ll also be able to buy about fifty-five €1 Mars bars, if that’s what they cost… and still have a few cents left over to buy jelly babies.’

10.11 a.m.

A female customer pointed out to Evan once, as she purchased two pairs of white ‘sports’ socks, how boring his life seemed.

Screw you, ya silly cow with your big permed head on you and your stupid dangly earrings, replied Evan in his head.

Ah shur, was what he actually said as he shrugged benignly.

The woman’s observation may have been accurate but was it an endemic mistake in certain types of human beings such as gossipmongers, white-sports-socks wearers and writers, to believe that by naming something, we’re somehow above it? Silly cow.

Evan O’Gorman, do you ever think about anything but rowing? Mr. Kenny, Evan’s secondary school Maths teacher, said to him once.

No I don’t, sir.

You are one of the most perverse-headed little wastes of space I’ve ever had the misfortune to teach, O’Gorman.

Conversely, I’ve nothing but the utmost respect for you as an educationalist, returned Evan.

Right, you smart little fecker…

Evan got detention for that.

It would have taken a whole army of Maths teachers or white-socked critics to come up to the level of severity with which Evan judged himself. How could he be any different? Battering himself mentally and physically  on a daily basis had made him one of the best rowers in Ireland. Or at least it had until he crabbed a couple of days ago.

Evan looked down at his body, his oversized thighs inside the shiny black trousers, his lean muscular arms and flat stomach beneath the cheap material of his white shirt, one of two from Guiney’s that he owned and alternated for work.

Evan ran a hand through the shaved brown hair on his head, then pressed his hand as hard as he could into the bones above the bridge of his nose and breathed heavily. Heat was almost radiating from his brain, it was working so hard thinking about a couple of days ago.

‘Never been your strength thinking, O’Gorman,’ he mocked himself.

‘Evan don’t,’ he heard a whisper inside him. The barely-remembered voice of his mother.

He banged the heel of his hand hard against his forehead.

‘Learn.’ The resounding voice of his father.

How could he talk to his father after what happened?

Evan knew, or thought he knew, everything his father was doing to try get Irish crews to compete at world level.

Evan closed his eyes and his thoughts went back two days.

By the time he felt the cold shock of the water, he was already blaming himself for being thrown from the boat. Downwards he sank, down and down into the murk and emptiness of the river as instant anger in himself rose, down until he could feel the slime of weeds around him. Currents of the river tugged at him. This was his fault because he was distracted by that girl.

His lungs were already sucking in on themselves and he felt the violent impulse to inhale below his throat. He swam up but above him, a floating lumpen shape was visible against the light of the surface and a dark thick cloud spread outwards around it. Evan swam helplessly until the cloud was all around him. He was aware of legs dangling down around him and the shape somehow identified itself in his head as that of a horse. An iron-clad hoof grazed against Evan’s cheekbone and he lashed out. Bubbles rose as he thrashed away and downwards. Weeds licked his face and tangled around his arms and legs. He grabbed at the water and a panic was rising up from the vacuum in his lungs. He was becoming disorientated.

In his agitated state, Evan’s mind imagined fish all around him nudging each other and frowning, wagging their fins in disapproval at him. ‘He doesn’t belong down here,’ they’d be tutting. ‘He’s a mammal out of air’ one of them would say or whatever equivalent expression they used here for ‘a fish out of water.’

Evan’s stockinged feet touched the bottom of the riverbed and sank into the mud. He bent his knees and using the riverbed like the footrest in the boat, he kicked upwards. His feet sank further and the weeds held on to him like snakes.

Those fish would be clustering in groups above him now to sneer.

‘Good enough for him,’ one might remark with a dismissive gesture of her fin.

Evan kicked again. Clouds of mud rose and he broke free, upwards from the weeds. Three frantic strokes and the surface was so close after all.

‘In your face fish.’

Two more strokes.

‘Bye-bye fish-fucks.’

Eyes bulging, Evan thrust his head above the surface back into the light and the noise and his head, mouth open to the sky, became the centre of the whirlpool of a scene, the vanishing point on which everything converged. He gulped three, four times and oxygen rushed in like mother’s love.

He turned in the water until he saw the white pointed stern of the boat, only a few centimetres of the fibreglass shell visible above the water. The wind blew stinging spray into his eyes. He’d never seen a boat from this angle before and it looked beautiful, sleek as an arrow. He swam towards it, cramping and ribcage heaving.

Hands from the boat grabbed his shoulders and guided him along the hull. He ducked his head to avoid the rigger and as he came up again hands took hold of him. He clutched the gunnels of the boat, which leered to one side under his weight and as his muscles struggled to work, he swung his legs and body awkwardly into the boat. The angular tension of his strength was spent for a few moments as he yielded to his exhaustion and lay there.

You alright bud? asked Four.

Yeah, he said as he regained his breathing,