Chapter 1
Twenty-Two Years to Impact
Dave
What if you could stop the world in a split second before your impending death? For example, when you’re riding a motorbike and a car is coming at you head-on. Do you go left off the road, fall into a ditch and die? Go right towards the oncoming traffic and die? Or just try to stop, then get run over and die.
It wasn’t my choice. A better rider than me had control. The love of my life Sarah had the handlebars. I trusted her with my life always. It’s others I don’t trust.
Sarah
I might as well start when I was born. I swear I was a bad girl in another life or something. When my mum found out she was pregnant, my dad ran away so fast they offered him a place in the 1972 Olympics.
My responsible mother smoked three packs a day with me inside her, stunting my growth. To add to that I came out with a red angry birthmark the size of my hand on the left side of my face. I also had wonky teeth and thick glasses. And just when you think that’s bad. On poor income and bad nutrition, I didn’t grow much and my name? …………. “Sarah Little!” But known to everyone as “Little Sarah”
I’m from Norwich and I love my city apart from the bit where I grew up in Mile Cross. If the city was a human body, Mile Cross was the asshole after the toilet paper ran out. Living there as a short ass specky four eyes with a huge mark on my face was not always easy. I was a readymade target for bullies and they often got me.
One day when I was eight, a group of boys, all of whom lived on my street, caught the bullies flushing my head down the toilet in Wensum park. Dave who was in my year at school brought his three older brothers with Charlie and Max. My bullies all tripped over their own shoelaces and fell in the icy river that January.
For a few years after that things were as good as could be. I think the fact that my stepdad had a motorbike kept me popular. My friends couldn’t protect me so much at school but around the estate I was safe. The big group of us included Dave, Charlie, Max, and others a few others.
We’d hang around together after school riding our bikes or swimming in the river on hot days and making plans for our future. We wanted to get a bike like the one on the cover of Bat out of hell. A song about somebody who dies in a motorbike accident. “Irony”
I thought it would last forever. But my life changed when my stepdad hit my mum. We ended up having to leave in the night and were taken to a refuge many miles from Norwich with just the clothes on our backs and no time to say goodbye. I was fourteen.
Dave
September of 1991 around 3 years to impact. I was at work one morning doing my apprenticeship at Morton’s Garage in the south of Norwich city centre.
I was just finishing up an MOT failure on a bike for my boss to sign off when I caught sight of a small woman pushing a stricken moped towards the reception. She wore a bright pink helmet the same shade as her moped. The rain was pouring out of the sky and the poor woman was drenched.
I hurried out of the front door and took the other side of the bike and guided her to the MOT bay. The small lady took off her helmet. Her head was covered by a woollen head warmer which covered her face apart from her eyes nose and mouth.
“Before we get to the bike are you okay?” I questioned.
She smiled weekly taking a clean white hanky from her back pocket. Flapping it open she told me in a gentle voice. “Cold, wet, tired and full of snot.” She paused and blew her nose like a kazoo and gave me a little embarrassed smile.
“Well, I’ll put the kettle on and get a hot drink in you and we’ll get the bike sorted.”
“You’re lovely” she grinned. Taking a seat, she removed her coat and underneath was a nurse’s uniform. “Can you tell me what happened with the bike?” I asked looking it over. What came out of her mouth next perplexed me, with the fact that she was a nurse, and her voice was so soft.
“It’s a fucking piece of shit that’s what’s up with it. I put a new battery in it last week. I’d just come off work it started fine. Then I stopped to get some tobacco for my Grandad and the battery was flat. Fucking alternator’s blown up. Then I kicked it over and broke the mirrors and got Fourteen years bad luck to add to the Nineteen I’ve already had.
I saw that she really had smashed the mirrors. “You know a bit about bikes then?”
She nodded blowing her nose again. (Most girls I speak to don’t know anything about their cars or bikes) She cleared her throat.
“I had a stepdad once who taught me a bit and I do my work on it, I can fit an alternator, but I left my tools in Colchester and alternators don’t just appear in your back pocket.”
“I looked for one though” She teased, “I found a pen, a used snot rag and melted Twix. Good job I got some cash put away for a …….” She looked out at the weather ironically and shrugged. “Rainy day?”
Sarah
I’m making a cut here before Dave writes a novel about the icky snotty little foul-mouthed nurse with the big smile who liked motorbikes. Intelligent readers have already guessed that it was me under the head warmer.
He didn’t know it was me because I had no glasses, and my birthmark was undercover and he didn’t know I was a nurse let alone back in Norwich. Plus I got my wonky teeth fixed.
I didn’t recognise him because I didn’t know he was a mechanic, and I was blind as a bat because I lost my contact lenses when I fell over kicking the bike. He was kind to a stranger, and we got on like a house on fire. I was considering giving him my number until I realised, he needed it anyway to call me about the bike.
I transferred to Norwich to live rent-free with my grandparents. I couldn’t live with my mum anymore and wages of a 3rd year nursing student won’t get you far on the property ladder.
The garage was full of cars and bikes to work on, but Dave’s boss agreed to let him take me home as part of a test drive for a customer. My mouth dropped; it was a Harley Davidson. I don’t care if I was sick and sleep-deprived. You don’t turn down a ride on one of those. I was surprised that such a young mechanic had a licence for a bike that big. (He didn’t of course) We did two laps of the ring road before heading off to Horsham where I was lodging. He’d forgotten to take my details so I invited him in from the rain while I found my spare glasses to write my number down. I came back minus the hood, wearing my glasses and he saw my birthmark for the first time, and I saw him properly. We just gawped for a second before throwing our arms around each other. Then he practically screamed my name and picked me up and hugged so tight I felt his heart beating rapidly. (I think he’d missed me)
Dave
The next day Sarah went to the bank and came to pay for the job. I gave her mates rates, so she offered to get me a takeaway and we drove our bikes to the park where we used to hang as kids, and we talked about why she’d not been in touch.
A week or two later we’d gone out for beers with some old friends and we painted the town red, then blue, green, and red again. Basically, we were drunk. I was supposed to sleep on the sofa while Sarah had my bed. But one of my older brother’s mates was on the sofa so I laid on the floor in my room. That was until a small hand reached out of bed and pulled me in.
Sarah
I will leave what Dave and I did together that night to your imagination. These things aligned to send our lives up to that fateful moment where we began the story.
If my moped hadn’t broken, I’d probably never of had the guts to find my old friend. If that man hadn’t been on the sofa, I wouldn’t have pulled Dave into bed with me.
For the next three years, Dave and I were inseparable. When I wasn’t working, we were together always. I popped into his work and helped when I was bored. We worked hard and played hard. Our couple’s motto was R.I.P “Rest in Pub’s”.
We got our own place and saved up for a more powerful bike and on days off and holidays we rode our 1985 Yamaha up and down the country visiting every theme park we could. We even rode 500 miles in a weekend to be at the opening of the world’s tallest roller-coaster in Blackpool and Nemesis at Alton towers.
One day at Norwich cart centre we were racing each other, and Dave yelled that if he beat me, I had to marry him. Well, I slammed the breaks on.
I got Dave bungee jumping in London for his 21st birthday and for my 22nd in a couple of weeks we were going sky diving.
MY grandad always told me “Shit happens every day, but it happens twice if you eat prunes.” On the day in question, so many more things led us to our fate. We were at Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach with the gang. Dave’s sister drove out with me asleep in the back after a night shift, while a friend took my place on the bike.
On the toboggan ride, there was a horrible bump. Dave sprained his arm, and I lost my contacts.
It wasn’t a big problem, I could ride in my glasses. I’d ridden that bike thousands of miles without problems. As I pulled onto the Acle straight the summer sun was going down on the horizon. Apart from a bend in the middle, the Acle Straight runs for eight miles across marshland on all sides. After about 2 miles doing 55mph, I saw a car coming the other way on our side of the road as they overtook a queue. The driver saw the car ahead of us in our lane and pulled in, but then he pulled out again. Our lights were on they should’ve seen us.
“Get the fuck on your side of the road!” I yelled pointing the arm of my reflector jacket to help him see us.
He pulled in at the last second, but the moron who had just pulled out behind him didn’t. In the split seconds before, and the years since I’ve gone over in my head how many factors led to that moment. What if I hadn’t had to bandage Dave’s wrist? What if I hadn’t sneezed going through Yarmouth and had to pull over to clean the gunk off my helmet? What if I hadn’t waited until the others had gone, to tell Dave the reason I skipped most of the rides? A positive pregnancy test. What if the driver coming the other way was ONLY twice the drink-drive limit?
“WE WERE SOBER.”
Dave
My brave Sarah pulled the bike as far left as possible, but the car driver pulled that way too. Sarah pulled hard on the breaks and the bike skidded hitting the car bonnet on our left side.
Or at least I thought we did but it all went blank for a second. We were riding on like we’d hit nothing. Sarah pulled the bike over to the side and pulled her visor up to look back. She was shivering and sweating with nerves. “How did you?”
“Shut up Dave!” Kind sweet Sarah swore a lot, but never spoke to anyone like that. “Sorry darling” she trembled.
Something must be wrong. The nurse in her wanted to help. She turned the bike and rode back up to where the car was stopped on our side of the road. People were gathering around something. We jumped off and she shouted, “I’m a nurse I’m here to help.”
In the road was a burning bike and next to it were two mangled bodies. …….us.
You just read a story by two ghosts who have been riding motorbikes and drinking beer in heaven since 1994.
Our gravestone reads.
Dave Reynolds & Sarah Little
Resting in pub!
Thank you for reading. Pre-order the novel currently named “Roaring into the sunset” here mybook.to/sunset
