Bike Tracks

This short story appeared in the Emerging Possibilities Special Issue in July. As grateful as I am for the opportunity to be published and interviewed by this wonderful team, the story now only exists behind a paywall. I have therefore made the choice to publish it for free here. Though you'll still have to pay if you want to read the interview!

Enjoy.

Your father is addicted to heroin. As he gets older, you become less like what you should be. You daughter. Him father. It switches.

You keep naloxone in the house, even though you know that if he OD’ed in the bathroom, there’s no way you’d know. So, you call out to him every time he goes in there, every few minutes. You call out just to hear the frustrated response. And you rehearse in your head how you’d get the door open if he didn’t say anything. You rehearse how you’d perform chest compressions and administer the medication.

You ask him not to lock the bathroom door.

He’s not old enough to be this infirm. He’s not old enough for you to be looking after him.

You know that he doesn’t want this. He’s been on and off it for so much of his life that the glamour of it has well and truly gone. He knows there’s nothing keeping him there but the weakness he’s created in himself.

He hates heroin.

He hates it.

You are driving on an arterial road in the late afternoon. The Brian Jonestown Massacre loud on the radio. It’s the first main road on your way out of the city, not too hot yet, you have all the windows down. The wind that buffets your face, your bare arms, your hair, is warm and full of promise.

The road isn’t empty, but it’s nowhere near full. At this time on a summer Sunday afternoon, most people are already where they’re meant to be.

You merge onto the road, joining as you do, a group of three motorcyclists, all men, that are playing together between the lines. You’re with them for a while at the stop start of several traffic lights. And the way they grin at each other, gesture with their thick gloves, nodding their overlarge helmeted heads, makes you happy. Reminds you of the father you’d had when you were younger, a devoted lover of bikes. A haver of friends.

After a few stops, they notice you smiling with them. With all your windows down. They start orbiting around your car as you drive, buzzing like fairies, weaving and waving.

You laugh and you speed up to keep with them. One of them pulls in front of you and lifts his arms in the air, performing the shapes of YMCA. And it seems like him, somehow; it seems like him trying to make his little girl laugh.

At the final traffic light before the road transitions onto the parkway, they pull up beside you. One of the older men gives you twice thumbs up which you reciprocate. Then, another, a younger one, lifts his visor and shows you a face that seems so much like photos you saw when you were younger. The freckles, the red hair, the bright, grey eyes.

‘I’m not legal!’ he yells gleefully over the revving of his bike, ‘I’m a kid!’ 

The older man beside him swats at him and then rolls his eyes indulgently at you.

Some distant mother part of you kicks in outrage, but you don’t listen. You smile at this silly kid (he looks about 16), and you clap and laugh. Because he’s still him.

The light turns green, and you all take off together. Down the highway you speed, keeping up with the bikers. Being one of them. Being stupid and reckless and grinning. They weave through the sparse traffic with you. They stand up on their footpegs, they wave their arms in the air, they check you in their mirrors. They slow down until you overtake them, and then speed past you with loud, shrieking rushes of acceleration that makes you squeal and gasp.

When you finally turn to your different directions, they all wave at you and you blow them a kiss, a distant thank you for the moment of joy. Joy that was stupid and childish and reckless. Joy that was risky, not harmless, but didn’t cause harm just for this afternoon. On the first road out of the city, the first drive into summer holidays, all the windows down. All the weight of last year on your shoulders.

You hope that it might be different now. Maybe he’ll go to rehab. Maybe he’ll fall in love with someone clean. Maybe, it hurts to think of it, maybe your father will die. But maybe too, if he does, his spirit might become something like that boy on the bike again. You’ll play Nirvana for him and light a candle and you won’t have to check the bathroom door anymore.

Until then, you go on loving him. Your love will keep sitting like scaffolding that holds up his bones. Like ropes that trail up his arms. Go on loving him.