Mr Dibbs Fixes Bikes

16

Frederick had played his games to death, watched everything he had wanted to watch on streaming and had even tried to do a bit of reading, but he had come to the end of his patience. He wished he could blame his mum, that she had grounded him for having the police come around not a week after they had moved in, but she hadn't. She had simply accepted that it happened and that it would always happen.

He had imposed the isolation on himself, not wishing to go out at all. Not wanting to give anyone any reason to accuse him of anything. Not that old cow in the shop and not that boy that Frederick had seen riding the bike, the bicycle, he had accused Frederick of stealing. It was only after the coppers had gone that he remembered it. The bikes whizzing by as he and Mister Dibbs had returned from the canal.

Now, his mum at work that she had started the day before, Frederick sat in the corner of the sofa, flicking through the ordinary tv stations and wondering how people ever managed to entertain themselves when they couldn't choose what to watch, when they wanted to watch it. It was three days since the fishing trip. Three days since the coppers came round, searching the whole house as if Frederick could hide the stupid bike in his wardrobe. He hadn't set foot out of the door since coming back from shopping that day.

He turned upside down, lifting his feet onto the back of the sofa, and flicked through the channels again. If he couldn't find anything to watch soon, he was going back to the streamers. There had to be something he could watch, somewhere. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He tapped the remote control over and over again, giving himself enough time to see that he didn't want to watch what was on each channel before moving on to the next, and there was nothing. Not one single thing to watch.

His eyes opened wide and he almost broke his back, twisting from the upside down position to kneeling on the seat cushion, flicking back two channels to where he had caught a flash of something. He laughed, covering his mouth, though he didn't need to. There was no-one around to hear, after all. Of all the things he could have caught a glimpse of, he would never have expected to see this.

It was one of those cheap shows, where people go around the country, buying crap and doing it up to sell on for loads more money. The kind of thing that people would watch, thinking they could do the same, but not realising it was all made up. Frederick's dad had fallen for something similar, thinking himself a proper barrow boy, but he lost money and soon moved on to his next scheme. Frederick wasn't bothered about the show, it was rubbish, but something had caught his eye, something about the thing they had found and were about to fix up. A bicycle.

He placed his feet on the floor and sat forward on the edge of the cushion as the presenter showed the bicycle in all its ruin. It looked even worse than the one he and Mister Dibbs had pulled out of the canal. No seat, the frame bent and rusted something rotten. Only one wheel, no tire, no chain, either. Frederick didn't think it worth fixing, but he knew Mister Dibbs would. Mister Dibbs would fix it easy.

"If you look here, underneath the rust, you can see, quite clearly, the name of the manufacturer. A huge name, at one time, but now, sadly, consigned to the past. Hanson Cycles." The man on the tv took a damp cloth and rubbed at the frame, revealing more of the name. "And, if we clear away a little more of the grime, we find that this little beauty is, in fact, one of Hanson's more experimental bicycles; the Hanson Hurricane. Marvellous."

"Hanson." Frederick frowned as the name rang a bell in his mind, only for it to come to him in a flash of memory. "That bike from the canal!"

He thought about pausing the show, before remembering it was on boring, ordinary television. Trying to keep his eyes on the screen, he reached over the back of the sofa to where he had last seen his tablet. Not there, he searched behind the cushions, then flopped on the sofa seat cushions to look underneath the sofa itself, where, for some reason, he had shoved the tablet. All the while, he kept looking back at the screen.