Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There (26 page)
My point of no return had already passed in third gear. I lost my battle as the wind relentlessly shunted me over to the left and that was it—by the time the wind was gone I’d run out of room again; there was no touching the brakes out there and I needed the remaining track to slow down using the gearbox. The second I rolled off the power I knew it was over, I was done. ‘Chalk this up to gaining experience, mate,’ I told myself. If there was a lesson to catch, I caught it. I caught it between my butt cheeks.
Rolling into the back of the queue I was met with some big smiles—98.2 mph, 158 kph. Colin was beaming from ear to ear. ‘That’s an Australian record.’ He was pumped. I was getting closer to the world record on every run. It was four in the afternoon by then and the lads and I decided to shut it down for the day. Jeff waved to me as we left the salt for our camp and shouted, ‘Tomorrow, mate, you’ll crack it tomorrow.’
That night it was Simon’s Surprise for dinner, and the man can cook. His tent was big enough to hold an air show in; in fact, every single bit of kit he had was emblazoned with his employer’s logo, he had just grabbed whatever he could and bolted. The end of that first day of racing had wasted all of us. I fell into an exhausted, blank sleep.
The next day I was crawling out of my swag like Satan himself had put on an oversized ski boot and spent the entire night kicking my lower back. Rob’s Breakfast Surprise with a generous side of Tramadol put me in a lucid but slightly wonky state as I pulled on my sweat-soaked leathers in the pits and waited for the drugs to kick in.
There was that massive queue again. With just two tracks open, and most of us restricted to running on the GPS track, 330 racers meant you had to wait, a lot. By 9 a.m. it was already 45 degrees Celsius under that sun. Just as it’s getting hard and down to the pointy end, that’s when Speed Week will stop you in mid-conversation and leave you standing motionless with your mouth slightly agape while the hairs on your arms stand up as you see, for the first time, a magnificent race spec Streamliner at full tilt hurtling down the main track like a bullet through the heat haze. Its trajectory is bewildering against the white and red background of this place, salt blasted into a vapour trail behind this missile, its massive engine noise out of sync with the speed as you try to wrap your head around the physics and what the driver is experiencing at more than 250 mph. There was a momentary silence as everyone focused completely on this one event and collectively tracked the run, which relaxed only when the chute billowed and the engine noise was gone, then it was straight back to whatever you were doing. It was a definitive Speed Week moment.
‘Morning.’ The starter was chirpy.
‘Crosswind?’ I asked.
‘Yup, same place,’ he said.
Then we went through our little ritual that finished with him yelling ‘Go’, and so it went on for the rest of the day. I never got past my fastest run of 98.2 mph. By three o’clock my toe and back were fucked and we called it a day.
‘Can’t do it, Colin.’ I fell off the bike and lay on the tarp in our pits, undoing my helmet strap while prone.
‘Mate, you managed an Australian record,’ Colin said as he eased the helmet off my head. ‘That’s good enough for your first race meet.’
I lay there looking at the shade sail flapping in the wind. He knew what I was thinking: it wasn’t good enough, I wanted the world record. ‘Next year,’ I said.
Ed came over and pulled my boots off. ‘Well done, mate,’ he said as he threw my boots in the back of the trailer and helped me up. ‘Let’s go and have a whiskey.’
We loaded the bike into the trailer and headed down to the main track where only a handful of cars and bikes had qualified to race the full 8 miles. We pulled out deck-chairs and sat on the roof of the trailer with umbrellas, watching the show.
And what a show it was. One car flipped at over 150 mph; its nose lifting and swapping ends mid-air, it smashed its way down the track several times while we stood on the roof frozen. The driver was pulled out with only eight-ball haemorrhages in his eyes, other than that he was fine. The safety procedures at Speed Weed work. But I was amazed that his first bounce covered 130 metres in distance, and totally floored when the driver announced he was ready to get back in and do it again.
I watched other bike riders get hit by that potentially lethal crosswind and get the wobbles on, sliding all over the track at more than 200 mph, then regain control and hammer on. There were a few who came off, but they all walked away. Well, except for the two guys who came off their bikes on the way home; one broke his neck, the other his femur.
By the time the event was over there was a total of 641 runs logged, with 72 records set—38 new ones and 34 existing records broken—and 21 men joined the Dirty Two club. Me, well, I didn’t do what I intended to, but I got a good taste.
We left the salt the next morning. Jeff Lemon was standing in his bush shower as we drove past on our way out of camp, his head covered in soap. ‘Catch ya next year, mate,’ he shouted.
I looked at Colin, quiet in the back seat. ‘Will he?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we’ll work it out somehow, Pauli.’ He smiled. ‘But you need to ride like hell next time.’
IT’S EARLY IN
the morning: the kids are still asleep, Clare is in the kitchen making coffee. I hear the phone ring inside and walk in through the back door. ‘It’s your sister.’ Clare looks worried and hands over the phone.
My father is dying. His optimistic phone banter has been so convincing these past months, but now I’m listening to my sister tell me he’s losing his battle.
She is in tears, and reveals that my father is holding on to meet my son. Anyone in my position would drop everything, gather their family together and get on the next flight to London. I dump several things on Maximum Dave, both work and personal; he even collects the mail and mows the lawn while we’re gone.
The Olympics are about to wind down, introducing a state of chaos for everything from booking flights to getting a hotel room, so I give my good mate Shane Edwards—Fast Eddy—a call. As usual, he is spectacular; in a day he has the lot set up like clockwork, even transport from Heathrow to the Hilton, which he’s chosen for its location across the street from Paddington station and the train to Cheltenham where my mother and sister would pick us up. He has also squared away a car with child seats and a ground floor apartment just 2 miles away from my father’s house; how he does this in the lead-up to the Cheltenham horseracing season I don’t know, but that’s why he’s Fast Eddy.
We board our flight in a state of limbo, the beginning of what is basically a series of queues; for the next 36 hours we will be in a queue of one form or another. For once, our kids are controllable, Sid only occasionally throwing food at the other passengers, Lola happy to just sit and draw or watch the TV. By the time we land in London 24 hours later they are both exhausted and asleep. Eddy’s driver is there and soon we are all passed out in a hotel room.
The end of a long warm English summer has London’s streets bathed in sunshine and a few hundred thousand punters spilling in and out of Paddington station. We jostle our way through the ticketing machine queue while Sid decides to lick every possible surface his head can reach all the way to our seats.
Cheltenham lies two hours down the track northwest of London. Sitting there on the train, my blank face pointing out the window as rural Britain went by, the familiar deep green patchwork and ancient hedgerows blur seamlessly into the memory of the last time I saw my dad. Almost a year ago, standing in the Gloucestershire sun on the platform at Cheltenham station, seeing me off. He knew then that he was very sick, and I suppose I felt it, the sense that there was something wrong, but I let my life batter its way into my radar and scramble the message before I understood it. Now as we coast into the same station, in the same light, I can picture him there, waiting, his hands shoved into his pockets and a big bearded smile creeping across his face. This time, though, it’s my mother, looking fabulous, who I see first when we arrive, she’s there with my sister, France, my stepfather, John and my brother-in-law, Barry.
The scene is a happy one, but I know we’re going straight to my father’s house and I’m going to get a shock. Elisabeth, my father’s partner for more than twenty years, answers the door; she’s the most remarkable woman, not only because she was able to control my dad. She was also in the Royal Air Force and outranked him before retiring from a long and distinguished military career. I think it is her resolve and inner strength that inspires me more than anything else while dealing with this, a parent’s death.You know that in the normal order of things this will one day happen, but you’re never prepared for it when it does.
Dad is up and smartly dressed, half his normal body weight and ravaged by the cancer, his face grey and drawn. He was a big powerful man once, now I can lift him off the sheets. He has two visits with us and the kids, soaking up every second with Lola and Sid; although drawn and sunken, his eyes light up when his grandchildren hug him and chat the way little children do. It takes every ounce of strength he has to get up and be there for us.
Five days later I’m there at the house. It’s late, past midnight, when I stir from my sleep on the couch and get up to check on dad. Elisabeth is in there with him, of course, as is my sister. I sit on the end of his bed and chat to him; he makes no sound other than laboured breaths. I don’t know how much time passes while I talk and Dad’s chest moves in a slow, uneven rhythm with his breathing. He leaves us very quietly, just a brief last look, then his eyes close for the final time, and all the while Elisabeth talks to him, her voice so soft and reassuring. After a life that had been at times fraught with danger and so much tension, of which I only know of fragments, he had a peaceful death at home surrounded by his children and his true love.
It’s only now that I can start to understand how close life and death are all the time, so much closer than my rational mind can process here in my safe, secure, free western democracy. It takes on a new parallel when it’s your immediate family; he was gone, just when our relationship was getting interesting. I step outside into the street with a glass of Dad’s Macallan; I found the bottle in his collection, one that I gave him thirteen years ago, still wrapped up, a 1969 vintage, the year I was born. The house is an old Georgian three-storey right in the centre of town, the wide street in the early morning standing deftly quiet. I pace up and down in the half light of a new sunrise and toast my father. I wonder if Sid will do this one day; my son reminds me of my father more and more each day. I’ll hold on to the thought that the soul lives on in memory and the next generation. Now I have moved up the queue, the big queue, that is.
The one thing that I have learnt from this is get prepared, get a life insurance policy, get your will sorted out, get your affairs in order, and your bills paid, and if you’re done with some possession, collection, hobby or other accumulative pursuit, get fucking rid of it or leave it specifically covered in said will before you die, if not for tax reasons then just so your family are not suddenly laboured with what to do with, oh, say, a silenced weapon and 500 rounds of subsonic pistol ammunition or a 1964 Commendation for Bravery from HRH the Queen that no one knew about and you’ll never get the chance to ask. Or the collection of various passports, or the albums of photographs of people you have never seen before—I could go on. Suffice to say I don’t think I even scratched the surface of getting to know who my father really was, I don’t think anyone did. He presented a myriad of different versions of himself to suit the particular audience, and somewhere within that stood my father.
I choose a nice two-piece grey suit, his favourite shoes and tie, and we wait for the funeral director to come and collect him. That’s a strange time. Elisabeth suggests we lie Dad out straight while he is still flexible. ‘It makes the funeral director’s job so much easier if he’s nice and straight when they get here,’ she says, ever thoughtful. So we pull off the bedclothes and get him nice and straight and level, the only problem being when I pull the pillow out from under Dad’s head and his mouth opens up. Elisabeth has already left the room; my sister looks at me with this ‘What now?’ expression and starts crying. ‘Go and put the kettle on,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll sort him out,’ I say, like I know exactly what I’m doing, and she leaves.
Dad’s mouth is wide open, and he had a big mouth, in a physical sense. I lean over and very gently push his jaw up and close it, delicately drawing back and looking down at him; it stays shut for about ten seconds, then pops open again. Now this goes on for a good few minutes, getting slightly harder with each push, and every time when I close Dad’s mouth he begins to have a slight smile on closing, just a hint at first, but it was definitely a smile by the time I start losing it. I prop a pillow under his chin, then a cushion, I try a book, I go into his closet, pour another glass of scotch and come out with one of his neckties and stand there talking to him. ‘Look, mate, just help me out here, for Christ’s sake,’ and I down my drink and tie his jaw up with a nice bow at the top, and pop, his mouth opens up again. I try a belt, pop, another tie, pop, two ties, pop, two ties and the belt, pop. Another scotch and I’m eyeballing the stapler on his desk. ‘You’re loving this shit,’ I say and he smiles back at me in that knowing way.