Rules of the Road

by Ciara Geraghty

  Nothing happens.

  I hesitate before knocking again, a little louder this time. The banging stops. The muttering of an oath. The clanging of a tool being dropped. The doors are flung open and now there is a furious slab of a man in front of me, wearing soiled overalls over a used-to-be-white T-shirt that no amount of boiling will ever restore. I have to tilt my head to see his face. He’s holding a wrench, and the muscles in his arms bulge and clench and veins run like ropes down to his hands and his fingernails are blackened with toil. A cigarette hangs from the corner of his scowling mouth and his eyes narrow into slits as he glares at me so there is no way to know what colour they are. I would hazard a guess at brown, if pushed, given the glossy black of his hair that hangs in a sort of tangled bob to his shoulders.

  I take a step backwards. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘je croyais que vous étiez Pierre.’ His voice is quieter than I expected.

  ‘Eh, non, je ne suis pas Pierre,’ I say and he grunts at this pronouncement, which does, with the benefit of hindsight, seem unnecessary.

  ‘Qui est Pierre?’ I ask, perhaps out of relief that I am not he.

  ‘My brother-in-law.’ He switches to English with ease and not a shred of the self-consciousness I display when attempting French. ‘He wants me to fix this heap of junk, and when I do, he will haggle over the price.’ He wipes an oily hand down the front of his overalls, which has no discernible effect on his hand, and then offers it to me. I shake it. What else can I do?

  He folds his massive arms across his massive chest and inspects me, like I’m a used car he’s thinking about buying for parts. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well,’ I begin. ‘My car … sort of broke down, and I …’

  ‘Where?’

  I show him the piece of paper on which I have scribbled the name of the closed-down factory.

  He nods. ‘My wife has taken my tow truck to work. When she returns, I can go then, to your car.’

  ‘What does your wife do?’ I am not usually this nosy. He does not seem like one half of a couple.

  ‘She is a …’ Here he hesitates, taps the side of his head as if trying to dislodge the word he seeks, the way Dad does. He shakes his head. ‘Sage-femme, on dit,’ he says. He looks at me expectantly but while I can make a stab at the literal translation, I am none the wiser. Sage-femme. That means wise woman, I think. Is there such a job? Perhaps in France there is.

  ‘She brings babies,’ he says.

  ‘Ah. She’s a midwife,’ I say, and he repeats the word as if he is learning it by heart. ‘Midwife.’

  ‘Your version is better. Wise woman,’ I hitch my handbag further up my shoulder. ‘So,’ I say, ‘you will come? When your wife finishes … bringing the baby?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘Well, thank you … Sorry, what’s your name?’

  From a pocket of his oily overalls, he draws a card and hands it to me.

  On it are three words – Lucas Petit, Mécanicien – and a telephone number. He watches me reading it, and there is something resigned about him, as if he is waiting for me to comment on his surname, which of course, I do not.

  Instead, I nod and put the card into my handbag. ‘Is there a taxi service in the village?’ I ask him.

  ‘There is one taxi, but it is lunchtime,’ he says, shrugging his shoulders. You really have to admire France’s reverence when it comes to mealtimes.

  ‘Okay then, I’ll see you later.’ I turn around and walk away. I feel Lucas’s eyes on me and the sensation is more curious than awkward. I wonder what he sees.

  ‘Do you intend to walk back to your car?’ he calls after me.

  I turn around. ‘Yes. My father and my friend are there. I don’t want to leave them alone for too long.’

  He steps out of the garage, slamming the doors behind him. ‘You can borrow my bike.’ He walks – surprisingly fast for a man of his tremendous size – down the side of the workshop and disappears behind it. Despite my reservations – he is a stranger after all – I follow because it seems rude not to.

  Behind the shed there is a motorbike. A massive, gleaming, ominous motorbike.

  Lucas takes a set of keys out of his pocket. He picks up a helmet, hanging off one of the handlebars, tosses it to me. I catch it in one hand. I can only put it down to shock, perhaps horror, this display of dexterity. Motorbikes are on my list of terrors. High on the list. I’d prefer the girls to tell me they were, I don’t know, drug addicts, rather than owners of a motorbike. You can always go to rehab. But there’s no coming back from the morgue. I quoted statistics at them, listed the injuries they could sustain if they were lucky enough to survive a traffic accident on a motorbike. ‘You could end up a paraplegic,’ I told them. ‘Or a quadriplegic, even.’

  ‘I’m sorry … You’re very kind but … I really can’t …’ I take a breath and spit it out. ‘I’m not getting on that.’

  Lucas either ignores me or doesn’t hear me. He straddles the machine and turns the key in the ignition, kicking a lever on the bike with his foot. The machine roars into life. He turns one of the handlebars and the engine revs. He nods with satisfaction, then he looks at me. I have to shout to make myself heard. ‘Thank you, but there’s really no need for—’

  ‘It’s an automatic,’ Lucas says. ‘Easy.’ He does a slow loop of the yard, explaining the machinations of the enormous machine, demonstrating how easy it is, how it drives itself really, all I have to do is hold on. He comes to a stop in front of me.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t possibly …’

  Lucas shrugs, turns the engine off.

  ‘What time will your wife be back?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs again. ‘It could be five minutes. Or several hours. Or tomorrow. You know what babies are like, yes?’

  ‘I do.’ It feels good to know something with such authority. This is something I know. The unpredictability of babies. Kate’s labour took twenty hours and she was a tiny slip of a thing. Anna, a bruiser with an enormous head, shot out in forty-five minutes.

  ‘If she is not back after lunch, I will ring a friend in Épinal and ask her to tow your car.’

  I need to think.

  THINK.

  I think about what I know. I know I can walk back to the lake. Which will take me over an hour. Or I can wait for an hour until lunchtime is over and try and nab the village’s one taxi. Or I can wait for the Wise Woman to return from bringing the baby. Which could be a matter of minutes or next week.

  I look at the motorbike.

  In my mind, I see Iris. And my girls. And Brendan. All standing there, looking at me with their arms folded. None of them are in any doubt as to what I will do next.

  ‘Automatic, you say?’

  When Lucas smiles, his furious demeanour eases and a tentative boyishness settles on his face. I was right about the brown eyes. ‘It is … how do you say … kid’s play, yes?’

  I nod, for who am I to correct his mostly excellent English? Besides, his meaning is clear, if misguided. Riding a motorcycle can most certainly not be classified as child’s play.

  ‘But what about insurance?’ I ask.

  ‘Open insurance,’ he says.

  ‘I could damage it.’

  ‘Then I would repair it.’

  ‘I could get injured. Or die,’ I tell him.

  Lucas shrugs his enormous shoulders. ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ he says.

  ‘Are you not worried that I might drive away and never come back?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  I step towards the bike. Now there is another worry, which is a good distraction from the worry of the motorbike itself. This worry involves my dress and its inability to accommodate the flinging of my leg over the bike. Tentatively, I raise my leg, but the confines of the dress permit it to rise only halfway to the saddle.

  Lucas bends and grabs two enormous handfuls of his dungarees at the knees and hitches them up his legs, revealing a pair of massive, hairy ankles
that swell into sturdy calves. He glances at me to see if I get what he’s getting at. I nod, turn back towards the bike, and bend to grab the hem of the dress, hitching it above my knees. In this way, I am able to swing my leg over the seat. I grip the handlebars and my feet find the metal platforms I presume are for feet. There’s a chance my knickers are visible, but luckily, the terror overrides everything, including worry about undergarments and their visibility to the general public or otherwise.

  I turn the handlebar, as Lucas demonstrated. The engine roars into life, its vibrations charging through my body like a warning of horrors to come. I think I shriek, although if I do, the sound is lost in the throb of the machine. The sound is all around me and inside me. It is like the whole world is made up of nothing but this sound. The thrum through my body is enormous and sort of intoxicating. I have to shout to be heard. I ask Lucas to show me the important things again. He wants to know what the important things are. ‘Eh, the brake,’ I say.

  The brake seems vital.

  I prise one of my hands off the handlebar and adjust the mirror. I glimpse my reflection as I do and it takes a moment to realise it is me. I look … most unlike myself. It could be my hair, a lot of which has escaped my ponytail and crowds around my face, which, I notice, has lost its pasty pallor, despite my heavy hand with the sunscreen. I try to stop smiling, but I can’t. It’s probably a nervous thing. My jaw aches from the width of it. The blue of my eyes has darkened to black with the extent of the dilation of my pupils. Then there’s the pink flush along my cheekbones I get when I’m embarrassed. Except I’m not embarrassed. I’m terrified. But also exhilarated. My breath is high and shallow, which happens when I’m anxious. Which I most certainly am. But it’s not my usual brand of anxiety – cold and clammy. This one feels hot. Feverish almost. If I open my mouth, I think I will laugh and the laugh will bear the edge of hysteria. So I don’t open my mouth.

  I clamp the helmet on my head and manage to say, ‘I’m ready,’ and my voice doesn’t sound hysterical, but it does sound small within the confines of the helmet and my throat, constricted by the hand of terror itself.

  Lucas nods and walks back towards the workshop and everything about him is unconcerned. His loping gait, his tuneless whistle.

  Now I am a middle-aged woman, alone behind a shed in rural France with a motorbike between her thighs.

  It seems vital that something happens.

  I turn the handlebar and the bike jerks forward. I brace myself. Brake. Turn the handlebar. Jerk forward.

  In this way, I manage to get to the roadside. I indicate, look left and right as if to check for traffic even though there is no need, this being lunchtime in France.

  My terror blunts at the edges, soothed by the steady click-click-click of the indicator. The absence of traffic.

  Perhaps blood will not be spilled.

  I don’t quite gun the engine but I do enough to encourage the motorcycle away from the garage, onto the right side of the road, wobbly at first, then steadier as I speed up. Everything blurs as it whizzes past us – for the motorbike has assumed a personality of its own – and I am tempted to shut my eyes, the better to ignore it, but of course, I don’t do that.

  That would be foolhardy in the extreme.

  I cling on. The wind – which was a gentle breeze five minutes ago – seems to roar past me now, in gusts. A group of schoolboys on the pavement put their fingers in their mouths and whistle as we pass. No doubt due to the visibility of my knickers. I can’t even bring myself to care about the impropriety of this. Fear has banished my usual observance of social mores. We make it through the village.

  Now we are on a tree-lined narrow road. The branches reach and bend, meet their opposite numbers in the centre of the road, creating a tunnel effect. Through the leaves, the sunlight pokes, glinting against my bare arms and legs and casting patterns along the surface of the road that move – almost dance – as the wind ruffles the leaves. At the end of the tunnel, the countryside flows away on both sides; a calm sea of greens and golds, rushing like a tide to meet the sky.

  But there’s an oncoming car.

  Which passes us uneventfully.

  But up ahead, a lumbering tractor.

  Which I overtake with strict adherence to the indicator and mirrors. The farmer waves at me, and, while it is rude not to acknowledge the kindly gesture, lifting my hand off the handlebar is not yet in my gift.

  After a while, I allow my grip to slacken somewhat to encourage the flow of blood to my fingers.

  After a while, I stop thinking about death or paraplegia or even quadriplegia. I’m not relaxed by any means. My breath continues to come in staccato bursts, but I don’t think it’s fear. It’s a sensation that feels like an eruption of goosebumps, except it doesn’t make you shiver with cold but instead, ignites something inside you. Like a fire. One that is wild and out of control but not life-threatening so there is no worrying to be done.

  I don’t whoop. Mostly because of the constraints of the helmet. But I do think about it.

  I arrive at the lakeside much too soon. Dad is still asleep. Iris is lying beside him, reading her book. She dog-ears the page when she sees the motorbike, closes the book and sets it on the grass, her eyes trained on me. The logical part of her brain knows it’s me. She must recognise my dress, even if it is hitched around my thighs.

  But she doesn’t quite believe it.

  ‘Terry?’ She gapes at me as I swing my leg over the bike, jump off and pull the helmet off my head. My hair tumbles around my face. I appear to have lost my bobbin.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Was I ages?’

  ‘You rode a motorbike.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, kicking the stand down, like I’ve been parking motorbikes for years.

  ‘But you’re terrified of motorbikes,’ says Iris.

  I shake my head. ‘I’m actually not. I just presumed I was.’

  Dad sits up, rubs his eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ he says.

  ‘We’re getting the car fixed,’ I say, sitting down beside him. Through the fabric of my dress, the grass is warm and soft. ‘There’s a mechanic on his way,’ I tell them.

  Iris stares at me, shaking her head. ‘I can’t believe you rode a motorbike,’ she says.

  ‘It’s an automatic,’ I say, shrugging like Lucas. Adrenalin has gifted me nonchalance.

  Lucas arrives shortly afterwards. ‘He has a wife,’ I hiss at Iris, before he gets out of the tow truck. Even a man of Lucas’s gargantuan proportions would be powerless against one of Iris’s charm offensives.

  ‘A pity,’ says Iris, her eyes roaming the length and breadth of him. I jump up, make brief introductions. Lucas nods, walks towards the car, stops at the open bonnet and bends, nose-deep in the engine. Dad stands beside him. ‘I drove a taxi for years,’ he says. ‘Never had an accident.’

  This is true, not counting today.

  Mam always said that she and Dad had their best times in his taxi. He was easier to talk to when he was behind the wheel. A careful and considerate driver, she said. The best version of himself.

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask Lucas.

  ‘You need a new radiator.’ He straightens, casting me in the length of his shadow. ‘And the windscreen should be replaced too, there is a hairline crack here.’ He points to a crack in the glass, then runs his hand along the dented front panel. ‘I could beat this back into some kind of shape, I suppose. It won’t look pretty, but it’s cheaper than ordering a new one. Quicker too, if you are in a hurry.’

  ‘We are in a hurry,’ Iris says. ‘How long will it take to repair the radiator?’

  Lucas does that thing that mechanics do. He shakes his head, looking both grave and doubtful. ‘Two days,’ he says, before covering himself with a vague, ‘give or take.’

  ‘We don’t have two days,’ says Iris, struggling to stand. ‘I have to be in Zurich tomorrow,’ she says.

  Zurich. The word rises around me, like damp.

  Lucas looks inside the engi
ne again. ‘I suppose I could use an egg,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t have any eggs,’ I say.

  ‘What would you use an egg for?’ Iris asks, which is actually what I wanted to know.

  Lucas begins to attach my car to his tow truck. ‘It is only a quick fix,’ he says. ‘I pour raw egg into the radiator and it cooks, which, hopefully, seals the crack.’

  ‘Hopefully?’ I say, not loving the sound of the word in that sentence.

  ‘What about the windscreen?’ Iris says.

  Lucas shrugs. ‘I could use sticky-tape,’ he says, ‘since you are in a hurry.’

  I am also not loving the word, ‘sticky-tape’.

  ‘Great,’ says Iris, as if he hadn’t said, ‘sticky-tape’.

  ‘But the car cannot be driven until tomorrow morning at the earliest,’ he adds.

  ‘I can’t wait that long,’ says Iris.

  ‘It’s less than four hours’ drive from here to Zurich,’ Lucas says.

  ‘Not the way Terry drives,’ says Iris.

  Lucas lifts the motorbike into the back of the truck as if it is a child’s toy. We take our belongings out of my car and pile into the tow truck.

  Nobody speaks on the way back to the village. While I feel that silence is Lucas’s default setting, the same cannot normally be said for Iris. Perhaps she is tired.

  So is Dad, who is asleep again, his head bumping on my shoulder. He is sleeping more and more. I will worry about it when I get back home.

  Lucas drops us outside a house in the village and points to a sign in the garden that suggests it is a guest house and that there are vacancies. ‘It’s the only place that’s open,’ he says, and there is an apology in his voice.

  I thank him and take notes out of my wallet. ‘How much do I owe you?’ He waves the money away with his gigantic hand. ‘I will know more later,’ he says, before driving away. We stand at the side of the road surrounded by our bags.