Chapter 22
This is it.
I’m up before dawn.
I mechanically eat, putting food in my mouth, and I wait for the sun to come up.
There’s an old mirror on the wall. I look like I haven’t slept in weeks. Haggard. That beard... it doesn’t do me any favours...
I look like an addict of something.
Unwell.
Sick.
It hurts to look at myself.
My teeth are clamped down and the back of my throat is squeezing, the back of my cheeks pinching.
It’s time.
It’s freezing cold. Bitterly cold.
It’s so foggy that the air has a density to it. A thickness. Like air soup.
It's twilighty pre-dawn. I can’t see shit.
The gate at the end of the yard is obscured. Forget about seeing the house across the street...
But I have to go.
If I don’t go now I’ll stay.
And if I stay, well, I don’t know what would happen next...
The frozen, wet Shrike behaves. It always has.
It's been so damned good to me. We've gotten this far, together.
This is it. This is finally it...
I could cry.
I must be tired...
I hit the gears and we roll out, and away and towards the highway.
The wind-chill of the wet air is diabolical.
In the frosted, white air the glare from the cone coming out of my headlamp is almost counterproductive; I can barely even make out the road markings, and when a rare car comes the other way? Forget about it. Totally blinded.
My only goal is to make sure that I'm not somewhere between those two oncoming beams of light.
I have to stop after ten minutes.
I’m not equipped for cold like this. Not even close.
These fucking fingerless gloves... My dead digits are saturated in icy dew. Wooden, corpse cold again.
Nothing I can do to warm up either. I’m numb to the bone and bloodless.
I get back on the Shrike and slog on.
After a half hour the dim light has turned into something less opaque.
The fog starts to get burnt off by the sunshine.
It’s still bloody cold; my fingers still don’t feel like they belong to me, but I’ll be alright.
I stop regularly, I check everything on the Shrike.
My heart won’t stop smashing in my fucking chest, won’t give me a rest. It’s exhausting. I’m so tired of this.
Hours...
And then, Table Mountain.
Cape Town.
I ride into the city.
I'm watching myself, I want to savour the exact moment when it ends, know it, and note it; the moment when it leaves me; when I shed it off.
When it's done.
I ride through the streets till I get to the hostel I’ve booked.
I roll into the car park.
Pull up the Shrike.
Turn off the key.
I sit there in the quiet, in my helmet.
I feel nothing.
I just sit there. Waiting for it. Waiting for the moment. And, nothing.
I feel the same.
Nothing’s changed.
It hasn’t fallen off me.
No happiness, euphoria, satisfaction.
No sense of achievement.
Nothing.
I’m still me.
As I lean the bike onto the stand and swing my leg off, I know, that no matter what I achieve, no matter what the dream, no matter how hard it was to get, no matter the sacrifice, no matter what I do, I’ll always be me.
Me. In this sack of skin. In this brain.
It doesn’t matter what I do, there’ll never be another option.
Unescapable.
Here I am; I’ve done something that I never ever ever dared to think I could ever do - and I feel absolutely nothing about it.
What possibility is there in a life like this?
Nothing will ever be good enough.
I unload the Shrike - for the last time - and shack up.
In what should have been my greatest triumph, I'm at my most disappointed.
Staring into the abyss.
I never, ever, ever have to ride a motorbike ever again for the rest of my life. I really thought that that would be it; that once I didn't have to ride anymore that things would go back to normal. I thought that was what it was waiting for; the end.
Yet, obviously not.
It’s not that at all, then...
Then what is it??
Part of me wants to investigate this new detail about it, about these episodes, and what it means that it's not related at all to the ride... but that feels like dangerous territory... Places better left alone.