Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (5 page)

It was a sunny morning. The mood was peacefu
l. Blokes stood around in knots, talking, or checking out their bikes, waiting for the signal. Eventually at about quarter to eleven, Tiny and the others around him decided that it was time to go, and the squadron dispersed.

Cigarettes were stubbed out. Helmets were pulled on.
Last words before the off were exchanged. Keys turned. Kickstands clattered up. The whirr of electric starters being cut off by the roar of motors catching. Owners of the older Brits jumped down hard on their kick-starts. Engines snarled as throttles were blipped to ensure the bikes had properly caught.

The group bunched at the entrance to the car
park. Tiny at the front on a Zed one. I pulled up to the rear of the pack on my much smaller two fifty, although I noticed that Gyppo was hanging back to take up the Tail End Charlie slot.

We were ready to go.

And then at a gap in the traffic we were off, pulling out onto the road, a cacophony of exhaust blast echoing between the shop fronts as we headed up the main drag through town and the Saturday shopping crowds on either pavement.

As we rode slowly along the road behind the traff
ic it was my first experience of riding with a group this big.

The
re was a sense of the power waiting to be unleashed, the over-revving of the engines just to get more noise bouncing between the walls on either side, the ratcheting up of our own adrenaline. I could feel a wild exuberant excitement welling up within me, a feeling of invincibility.

There was a sense of power. When you see a group of bikes, you know they are together. You know
they are a pack of guys who know each other. You know that they are heading somewhere together deliberately, as a group. You wonder where, you wonder why, you wonder who they are and what will happen on the way. And now I was part of that.

Heads turn
ed to see us go past. You didn’t look, just like you didn’t look at your reflections in the plate glass windows of the shops. But out of the corner of your eye you could see the heads turn. The small children point.

We crested the top of the rise and headed towards the crossroads and the drag up the hill out of town that allowed us to pull past the cars in front.

If you’ve ridden bikes then I don’t have to tell you what it’s like.

If you haven
’t then it’s difficult to describe.

You drive a car. You turn a wheel, you press a pedal and it goes. A car is an object that you control.

You ride a bike. You dance with it, it goes where your body tells it. Your bike is your partner, it sways and shimmies with you as you move your hips and twist your body to shift your weight.

In a car you are inside, insulated from the world, surrounded by a cocooning wall of steel.

On a bike you are outside, exposed to the world, feeling the wind, the rain, the warmth, the cold, and with only your skill, your luck and a leather jacket between you and the ripping tarmac tearing past you below.

As we headed into the open countryside, the line of bikes began to string out.
The gang were all on bigger bikes. Seven fifties and upwards, mostly a mix of UJMs
[5]
and some older Brit twins and back in the car park there had been the usual good natured joshing about Brit shit and Jap crap.

On the more open roads
we came swarming up from nowhere in seconds behind cars that we caught, and barrelling past them, rocketing by in a wail of powerful noise without even slowing down.

But then in more twisty bits we might get caught up without the clear overtake,
bunching up behind a car, all bright lights, chrome, noise and thunder just behind the driver’s back bumper, feeling the tension, the eyes in the rear view mirror, the kids in the back seat turning round to look open-mouthed, before the road straightened out again as we crunched down a gear and with a bawling scream of pure exhaust noise we launched ourselves past the outside of the car, tearing up the road again to the next bend.

Riding in a pack was completely different from riding on your own. As a rider on your own machine, you
are still singularly alone, testing yourself, totally responsible for your own actions and how far you are able to push yourself. You against the road.

Y
et at the same time there was both that feeling of invulnerability, of being part of something bigger, us against them, and that feeling of competitiveness with the other guys, As a pack you are always egging each other on.

At the back on my
two fifty with Gyppo on my tail, I was having to scratch hard to keep up with the charging pack. And failing. So the times when we got caught behind something, bunching up into a jostling knot of bikes and power and noise, just waiting to be fired past the car’s windows at the first hint of a gap were great for me as they gave me a chance to catch up before the more powerful machines howled away again into the distance, stringing out into a line of glinting swerving disappearing spots as the road opened out. Finally on the last stretch, Gyppo pulled out and twisting the throttle, zoomed past me at probably ninety or so into the final bends leading up to the summit.

As I
pulled into the Edgeside car park I must have had a grin a mile wide.

M
ost of the gang had dismounted and were already filing into the café. Gyppo and Tiny were standing by the row of bikes as I kicked down my side stand at the end of the line.

‘
Not bad considering it’s a two fifty.’

‘
You’re going to need to get yourself a bigger bike kid.’

I
got the feeling that I had just passed another test.

*

And then we were off again, down the falling hairpin curves of the Edgeside pass and out towards the flat valley below.

Riding at the tail of the pack
, for the first time in my life, I truly felt accepted in the company of men. I belonged.

I had
become a tagalong.

3              THE PATCH

I sold the
two fifty and just about anything else I could lay my hands on, lied through my teeth to get a loan, and two weeks later bought myself a second-hand silver Honda CB750F, the double overhead cam job. Gyppo gave me a lift over to the west coast to collect it. Heading out onto the road on it for the first time to follow him back, feeling the neck snapping surge of acceleration that could send the world around me into reverse, was like falling in love with biking all over again.

Over the next few months I gradually
just drifted in, becoming absorbed into the gang. We weren’t a club back then so the process wasn’t as formal or structured as it is now, so in some ways I never went through the whole striker thing.

Instead I just hu
ng around with Gyppo a lot, sat with them at the Golden Lion, tagged along on runs, joined them on parties.

Gyppo began dropping in at the flat for a smoke and a brew when he was out our way, or for when we fancied a session in the pubs around the
village square where he could crash out overnight at our place.

Billy followed me in r
eally. He sort of became my tagalong’s tagalong.

Billy was thin and lanky, scruffy with a pony tail and sheepish grin while his bones sort of looked too long for his body. He limped from a bad shunt he
’d had, flying down a country lane on his first LC
[6]
when a tractor with a trailer pulled right into a field in front of him. At close on a ton he hadn’t stood a chance. The bike smacked straight into the side of the trailer and Billy went over the bars, right across the top, and slammed onto the dirt on the other side. He spent nearly six months on his back with a smashed up pelvis, and another six months or so afterwards dealing with clips and catheters or some such shit every time he wanted a piss. He hadn’t bothered to take his test when the 250 ban came in, so rather than trade down to a 125 he just went out and bought an XS1100, the big shaft job. He reckoned the cops wouldn’t be bothering to check anyone on a bigger bike, they’d just assume he had a licence.

He
started to ride at the back with me in a sort of threesome with Gyppo as our leader.

We were all brothers of course. But it was just a bit like Billy was my younger bro.

It was dumb really, we were the same age and all. It was just that he had always tended to follow me. I never really knew why and I don’t think he did really either. In many ways as a kid it ought to have been the other way round. He was the more fun of us, I was always the more serious. He was the one with the cheeky grin, the one who would have the balls to chat up the girls, I was the one who sat silent. He was the popular one, never valuing or putting any effort into friendships as they came so easily to him that he never thought about them, there was always another one coming along when one fell away, whereas I never put any effort into friendships as they never touched me. We were always a strange pair. I have no idea why it worked, why it started even, or why it endured so long. But it did.

To this day I still don
’t know what I did for him, why I was the one friendship that lasted for year after year after year. I’m not sure he knew either, in fact I’m damn sure he didn’t. He wouldn’t have stopped to think about it for a minute. That’s not what Billy did. It was almost as if he felt that he could leave the being serious and silent and thinking to me while he had fun and just followed where I went. And so despite his success with the girls, his happy go lucky lifestyle, the fact that he so obviously didn’t need me, that you could drop him into any situation and he would just turn on those blue eyes and that smile and everybody would be falling over themselves to help him, I felt responsible for him. I worried about him.

Like I said, he was my brother. But he
was like my younger brother who I felt I had to look after. Like he fucking needed it!

As we became more and more involved with our new lives within the gang, inevitably we drifted away from the other guys we
had known before, and they started to drift away into jobs and careers and couples and kids and straight lives.

Sometimes we went back to Gyppo
’s place.

And that was when I met
Sharon again, when she opened the door that first time.

She was petite, s
lim and pretty, with medium length straightish chestnut hair framing her elfin features as it fell in a great curve to just above her shoulders, and soft hazel eyes that caught and held your gaze. Her delicate, almost boyish figure very feminine in a dark blue chiffon blouse embroidered hippy style with a mass of small white flowers, the material so thin that I could see right through it to the white top she had on underneath, a clatter of bangles at her wrist, tight faded blue jeans and leather moccasins. She was twenty-two, but with a shock I recognised her as she stretched up to kiss Gyppo as he came through the door.

Christ how couldn
’t I have done? She had been in the year ahead of me at school and one of the girls that we had all fancied like mad without ever having a hope in hell of asking any of them out. I had an abiding memory of having seen her at a party I crashed once, one of those when I was doing my level best to get as blind drunk as possible, as quickly as possible. It was a sort of slow motion, bottom of the bottle image of her as she brushed a strand of hair away from in front of her face, as she turned away from talking to some hunk from the school football team.

She was training to be an artist, their flat was decorated w
ith her pictures, beautifully intricate compositions of light, colour and joy.

Gyp
po introduced me and her smile was like the sun coming out. She had obviously heard the story.

‘
Thanks for helping Gyppo out.’

And then
, my God, she reached up and kissed me on the cheek.

*

Gyppo dealt. It was his main thing. He was a relatively small scale dealer but it made him a living and he always seemed to have access to a ready supply of dope or speed.

Billy and
I were both doing odd jobs just to get money for petrol, beer and to buy blow from Gyppo, as well as to pay the rent; mainly a bit of despatch work for cash in hand. We were both signing on for some dosh, as was Gyppo of course.

We were
scratching a living but he always seemed to have cash for smokes and drinks. So it wasn’t long before we were starting to deal in a small way for him, buying a few ounces and divvying it out in eighths at a time. After all, we were known to the guys out in the valley and to our contemporaries from school, we had the links into the club to get the stuff from Gyppo, so it wasn’t long before we had a reasonable network of customers to supply. But it was all still minor stuff; blow, a bit of whizz, the occasional experimental blotter acid that just made me rant continuously for twelve hours straight while drinking every drop of alcohol in the flat, from the beer through to the dregs of every bottle of spirits I could get hold of, apparently without any effect whatsoever.

Gyppo had
really taken us under his wing. So when, after about three months of this, he pulled up outside one day, rang the bell and asked if we fancied coming for a ride to meet someone, we didn’t ask questions. We just grabbed our gear and mounted up.