Yawping Stance

Published by Shorts Magazine: https://madmagz.com/magazine/1802430#/page/73

The conveyor belt motor started and potatoes rolled dreadfully toward me. My breath made fog, my hands clapped together in tough gloves for warmth. Christmas time in a freezing barn. Potato dressing. 

They’re picked in October. The belt machine is attached to the harvester. The plough rips the earth and dredges up rocks, clods of earth, potatoes and straw. The job: identify anything which is not a healthy potato and grab it. Your hands work fast. Throw the rubbish back.

This is roguing. You get another turn in winter: the dressing. The principle is the same but this time no detritus may pass. If you leave stones and rotten tubers in the harvest they will go to market. This is not acceptable. 

In the spring I was sometimes allowed to run germination experiments. The farmer bought seeds from the wholesaler. We had to make sure they would grow. You take a random sample of seed from each numbered sack, roll them into lengths of damp paper and record the percentage which germinate. If the seeds are no good, they have to go back. 

I was given a hollow cylindrical spike to collect samples. This was somewhere between a harpoon and a hypodermic needle. The bags were stacked high in the barn. The trick was to climb from sack to sack, stab with the sharp point and collect a fistful of seeds from each one. Then use the point to score the bag and scar over the hole you’d made. Once, leaping from a high point in the barn, I landed in a mouse’s nest. Tiny mice ran over my feet and escaped squealing. I nearly fell.

A more congenial role was my job in the Culross Pottery and Gallery. The red-tiled building had been a granary in the seventeenth century and was hidden down a cobbled street. I swept the floor, weeded the garden, recorded company expenses, sold pots and occasionally painted ceramic sheep. I wasn’t allowed near the wheel or kiln. 

Through the summer the gallery did good business with French, Spanish, American and Japanese tourists who totter through the village admiring the palace and the colourful houses. In the winter though, the place was deserted. There were weekend days when no-one came in at all. On these sleepy Saturdays I could file the expenses and tidy the shop and garden in an hour or two then spend the rest of the day reading (surreptitiously, with my book concealed under the counter top in case Camilla came to check on me). I listened to Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, The News Quiz, Any Questions? I drank mugs of tea and took my lunch upstairs in the cafe. 

For two summers I worked in a nursing home. The unit cared for patients with Korsakoff syndrome. This is a form of alcohol-related brain damage. Patients at first become disorientated with confusion, jerking eye movements and poor balance. Lack of thiamine leads to irreversible brain damage if the acute stage passes untreated. Once this carnage has been wrought, what remains is a person incapable of laying down new memories. These gaps in biography and chronology are made up for by confabulation - making things up. Often patients fabricated pasts have some tangential basis in reality. One man spoke proudly of his career as an engineer. Later, I learned he had worked as a cleaner for a shipbuilding firm. 

The daily experience on the floor was monotonous. Routines revolved around cigarettes. These were kept at the nurses station and could only be accessed hourly. Patients approached the desk. 
“Can I have a fag?”
“You had one five minutes ago.”
Five minutes would elapse.
“Can I have a fag?”
“You had one ten minutes ago.”
The cycle repeated abysmally day after day. 

My Grandmother was a resident on the floor downstairs. A determined, fierce woman, she had raised her two sons alone after her husband died suddenly. By the time she moved into the nursing home dementia had hollowed her out and her ability to recognise her family was variable. Though some things remained almost to the end - a sharp tongue, gleaming eyes, a love of being outside. So at lunchtime I wheeled her out to the walled garden overlooking woodland and field and we listened to birdsong and made polite, necessarily vague conversation. 

These jobs meant that when summer came in the year I finished high school I could afford to take a trip. Sitting in chemistry class one day flicking through pages of a homework diary, I settled upon a map of Europe.
“Jonno, how would you feel about cycling from Paris to Venice?”
“I’d be keen.” 

Tall, with dark hair and a harsh manner toward those around him, Jonathan often got into fights. It was rare for a month to pass without him getting punched in the mouth. These attacks were often provoked (he was quite rude) but not always. He always seemed to be the one who got mugged on his way home, whose nose was burst playing football. He was also smart, funny, and inclined to say yes to things.

We enlisted our friend Rachael Pack and started planning. We met in Rachael’s garden and pored over old road atlases, jotting down the names of potential waypoints on a scrap of paper. We booked cheap flights and packed our bikes into cardboard boxes.

We arrived in Paris one evening in mid-July. In the airport I could not for some time figure out how to inflate my tyres and Jonno broke his pedal trying to assemble his bicycle. He’d cross-threaded the right crank. Fortunately a helpful Frenchman stopped to lend a hand, using a torn up coke can to scrape a new thread into the crank arm so the pedal could be screwed in place. We told him why we had come to Paris. He shook his head.

On the second day, Rachael became ill. While repairing a puncture by the side of the road her skin had come into contact with some plant which had reacted with her skin under the effect of sunlight to cause a nasty dermatological condition, phytophotodermatitis. Her arms and legs turned red and started to itch and burn. Large blisters formed and she stayed in the hotel room to recover while Jonno and I explored the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gardens. We decided that Jonno and I should set off and Rachael would join us by train when she was feeling better.

Rain fell heavily through much of our first day on the road. We spent hours negotiating side streets and back alleys on the way out of Paris. When we eventually escaped into farm land, we both punctured and were held up fixing those. Stopping for a drink, I opened my pannier and somehow flicked the compass onto the road where it was run over by a large truck.

By late afternoon the downpour had intensified and we reached a small town where we agreed to camp. Riding over cobbles in the middle of town I sustained another puncture. I crouched in my shorts outside a florist running the inner tube through a pail of water looking for the fine stream of bubbles which indicate the site of the leak. The tall, long-nosed proprietor peered down at us. 

As we pitched the tent Jonno got a call from Rachael.
“Guys I’m sorry. I’m feeling really sick and have decided to fly home.”
We sat inside the tent, sodden and miserable. We heard the rain fall on the tarpaulin. We moped.
Then we realised Rachael had the stove, the first-aid kit and the Allen key.

The shambles continued through much of the first week. We broke two wheels and sustained thirteen punctures. A routine emerged.
“Jonno, I’ve got another one.”
We’d sit on the verge and open a packet of biscuits. Have a few of these. Then get to work. Wheel off, tyre off, inspect the rim. Pump up the tube, spot the puncture, put a patch on. Reassemble. Inflate. Eat another biscuit. Set off.

My bicycle was called Nigel Dean. It was steel, leaf green and had been welded together at some point in the late 1980’s. It had been bought at a racecourse auction by a friend of my mum when I was an infant. For most of my life it had sat in the garage. When it came time for Nigel to see action, he was unprepared. The components were worn and the rubber of the tyres was petrified. Hence the punctures.

We found our way through farmland from Paris to Dijon to the Jura. We crossed our first range of hills into Switzerland and arrived in Geneva, where at last we could wash our clothes and eat something which wasn’t a pain au chocolat or a kebab. We had arranged to stay with Rosemary Sudan, the aunt of our schoolfriend Andrew Ratomski, and her husband Alain. Crossing the threshold of their apartment we were bedraggled, filthy and malodorous. Jonno knocked over his pannier and oil oozed onto a Persian rug. I took a hot shower, changed into clean clothes, and felt like a king. 

Alain made spaghetti bolognese and offered us glass after glass of red wine. As the evening wore into a haze, we heard tales of Alain riding horseback through Afghanistan. Now in his fifties, comfortable in his slippers and surrounded by wine and jazz music, he worked as a cameraman for French television. We conversed in broken French with considerable assistance from Rosemary, who grew up in Scotland but had met Alain and moved to work as an editor of medical manuscripts at the World Health Organisation. After dinner we made our way into Carouge with Victoria Sudan, their whirlwind daughter. An atlas of tattoos, piercings and open smiles, Victoria showed us an exciting side of a city which at first seems only cold, rich and austere. In the morning we swam in the lake at the Bains des Pâquis and slowly recovered from an appalling brace of hangovers. 

The day we left Geneva descended into farce. By ten o’clock we were lost and had crossed the Swiss border three times. By noon we were sitting by the side of the road attempting to repair a broken pannier rack. By four in the afternoon I was cycling up an Alpine valley on a flat tyre while Jonno carried four bags and a tent on the back of his bike. By eleven at night we had arrived in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere without a place to stay. Trudging up a street after being turned away from another hotel, we heard a shuffling sound followed by a shout.
“Messieurs! Messieurs!”
It was the owner of the hotel. He had taken pity on us and said we could stay in a storage room in his staff quarters. He gave us a set of sheets which we laid out on a stack of spare mattresses in a small windowless room.

After a rest day in Chamonix to celebrate my eighteenth birthday we crossed the border into the pot-holed, poorly-signposted roads of Northern Italy. We streamed down the Aosta valley and listened to ‘Us Late Travellers’ by James Yorkston as we walked that night from our campsite to find pizza.

We cycled through rush hour traffic leaving Milan, weaving madly between cars and motorcycles. By now we were fast and felt strong at the wheel. We rode to Verona and watched a production of Verdi’s Aida from the cheapest seats at the top of the Roman amphitheatre. In Monza we raced around the grand prix circuit and crashed into each other while momentarily distracted by a crane. In Brescia, running low on funds, we spent the night in a cheap hotel which turned out to be a brothel.

The day before the end, we ran out of map. We had relied on a single sheet map of Western Europe to guide our journey east. This made route selection simpler as we only knew of the existence of major roads. But before we quite reached Padua we slipped beyond the edge of the chart.

It was a Sunday. The town we stopped in for lunch was mostly closed. I locked the bikes together and we went off to find a kebab. Returning afterward, full of pitta and grease, I made an unwelcome discovery: I had lost the key.   

Jonno’s face flushed with fury and disbelief. We’d cycled over a thousand kilometres without a harsh word but they came tumbling now. Weathering these and acknowledging my fault was one thing. Fixing the problem was another. We had two bikes joined at the front wheel by a cable lock. The shops were all closed. In the centre of town though there was a market. Benches heaved with cured meat, olive oil, books. Beneath an archway was a stall of antiques. On the floor, with some other knick-knackery, was a collection of old axe heads. I hauled the bikes across to the stall and explained our difficulty. This drew a large crowd of aged Italian men who grimaced and poked at the trapped wheels. Then the throng of bodies parted and a woman appeared wearing an apron. She immediately took charge, showing Jonno and I how she wanted us to hold the bikes apart to put tension on the cable. She picked up an axe head and set about it. Jonno scowled across at me.
“If she smashes my bike I’m never going to forgive you.”
I kept quiet.

She pounded at the lock. Sparks scattered across the pavement. Sharp intakes of breath were drawn from the huddled onlookers. At last there was a crack and snap as the cable gave way. A cheer went out. I thanked the strong-armed lady and grinned sheepishly at Jonno. We were free.  

The next day we pedalled over the Ponta della Liberta into Venice. Our journey was ended.

By then it felt more natural to be cycling than anything else. Only the road winding ahead of us. All we needed to live in a couple of bags on the back of the saddle. Time took another form. Each day waking not knowing where we would sleep. By evening the morning a distant memory.

Sitting at the side of the road smirched, tired, peaceful. Sensing the fill and fall of land beneath us. Hurtling down mountainsides at sixty, seventy, eighty kilometres an hour. Sounding a yawp, a whistle, a cry of delight.