The Road.

The Road 1

The Road 1

Ricky’s earliest memory was of being held by his Auntie Pip. Not just cradled, but held out, as if being offered to someone or something. Then there was the smell, thick, bitter, oily. It filled his young lungs, but he didn’t cough or choke, he breathed it in, it charged him.

Of course, Auntie Pip wasn't really offering him to the Gods of the Road. It was an old wives tale, if the child breathed in the  potent fumes of boiling tar would prevent him getting Whooping Cough. It was a popular myth, and Auntie Pip liked to try these things out. Well you never knew, it might work.

But to Ricky, it was one of the defining moment of his life; he was offered to the gods of The Road, and it took him as its disciple. From his earliest conscious acknowledgement of the outside world, The Road was his church, his home, his love. And to ride was to be at one with The Road. To ride his machine at speed was to touch the darkness in his soul. A darkness he felt acutely; it separated him from others, his mother, his aunt, lovers, friends. Ricky was alone, he liked it.
Maybe his mother dying when he was young did it. Maybe his aunt’s detachment. Maybe it was just in his soul, a gift from those gods.

Others seemed to need him, but he never needed them. Oh he liked people well enough, he laughed, ate, drank, had sex, was kind to those he thought needed kindness. But he saw them as frail, faulty, incomplete.
He knew the only true thing was The Road.

###

Watching her move about the room was pure pleasure. Laying back against the pillows he took a drag on his cigarette.
She must know what she was doing. Putting on his shirt and walking around like that was so bloody sexy. He inclined his head to one side, improving the view being afforded him of her small neat arse as she leaned forward over the sink.

Yea, she knew.

“My, but, that’s a fine little backside ya got there, pet.”

She turned to face him, delicately bit her lip and smiled. The shirt was unbuttoned, allowing the very pleasant sight of her dainty breasts and pale v of her sex.

“For heavens sake, stop looking at me.” She giggled. “It’s unnerving.”

“Come back ta bed an I won’t have ta watch ya so close.” He let the ciggie droop in the corner of his mouth and pulled back the sheet, inviting her in.

“You just want to fuck again.”

He loved the debby types, loved hearing them use language that mummy and daddy would shudder at. Loved how little it took for them to forsake the ‘nice’ world of gymkhanas and finishing school to crawl into bed with him, the big, greasy, Geordie biker.

“Dinna have ta, pet, there’s uther things ya can do.” His eyes crinkled at the rising smoke.

Catlike, she crawled up the bed. “And what would that be? A little fallatio perhaps?”

“I dinna ken aboot that, but ya can suck ma cock if ya like, bonnie lass?” He thickened his accent, and settled back. Fallatio! Posh word from a posh bird. Maybe he'd ask if she felt like a little cunnilingus.

Oh, he did like the debby ones.

###

Auntie Pip’s was the only real home Ricky had ever known. In '37, his mother had returned to England from her 'Madrid Adventure', with her was the baby, Ricky.

As he grew he was an oddity, a local boy, but alien. His mother’s insistence that he learned to speak Russian, he'd assumed, was because his father was Russian, but frankly, with Amilia, you never knew. She left no clue as to the man’s identity. Occasionally, she had smiled to herself when Rick asked pertinent questions. But gradually, as she never gave him pertinent answers, the thoughtful child stopped asking.

On their return, Amilia had left him with his aunt, and gone off to university, then into ‘war work’ as it was euphemistically known. So that actually he saw very little of her. To him, she was enigmatic. A beautiful, brave heroine of the battle to free the world of the horrors of the Jackboot. Two days after his eighth birthday, Auntie Pip told him his mother wasn't coming home, that she had died under the Jackboot she had fought.

Auntie Pip was kind, but an artist, caught up in her own world, she did the things she needed to for him, but…

To Rick, women were comforters. You wanted one, you found one, used it, and then moved on. His ambiguity about his sexuality stemmed only from one relationship when he was doing National Service and a couple of hours with the young, adoring, Billy three years previously.
For years there were those who assumed he was queer. His friendship with his English master at school, hadn’t helped. Writing poetry hadn’t helped. Being bloody minded hadn’t helped! But Ricky Deeming would rather walk on hot coals than do what others expected him to.

His own most recent brush with death, a nasty encounter with Billy's violent father and the blow torch the mad man had taken to his face, sent Ricky back to the refuge of his aunt’s. And his wounds, real and figurative, healed.

Her house was large, comfortable. She was in her late 50’s and had a full life of her own, so they met only on occasions, in the kitchen, on the stairs, rarely for formal meals, or even chats. She would have friends over for dinner and he might crash and eat with them. But to him they were as bad as the rest of the establishment. They had their cosy views about the evils of capitalism, how socialism would save the world.

Magda had shown him all about free love when he was 17. And he learned those lessons well. Women liked him, and when he wanted to be, he was a good lover.

When he wanted to be and when he got what he wanted.

Trouble was, he didn’t always know what he wanted. Sometimes, when the darkness was on him, he hurt people. Magda said it was his Russian soul, but as he had no idea if his father was actually Russian, he just laughed.

She liked that darkness all the same.

But Magda was long gone, off liberating the sexuality of the young male students at Kent State, Ohio. She was a professor of chemistry and he vaguely remembered something about a twisted cell. Their conversations had not really risen much above sex. Which was OK with him. She hadn’t been interested in motorbikes.

His bike was his life.

He’d bought her when he was 21. The money was just sitting in the bank. Aunt Pip wasn’t happy, but frankly when he came back from Malaya at the end of his National Service, he was a man. His experiences had darkened the darkness. There were things from that time that hung about his conscience.

The gods of The Road and Speed freed him.

He got the bike. And he loved her.

She was a 1958 Norton Manx 500cc racer, she was a dream. He lavished time and a lot of elbow grease on her. Every inch of her beautiful body work gleamed. He wasn’t obsessive, well not by his lights. He just liked to treat her with the respect due an exquisitely turned out, magnificent piece of powered mystical art. The machine gave him what people couldn’t, what he couldn’t give himself.

Ricky Deemings was rarely what anyone expected.