As requested (by Anonymous) - in exactly 1025 words

Untitled by Tim J Rhohn-Sayers. Possible titles are: Bluey or Nipple. (1025 words exactly excluding this nineteen word preamble).

Back in 2018 an unhealthy man was leading a quiet life in a rural community but he wasn’t part of that community. He was insular.

Before his death he held an unlikely ambition. He wanted to be a successful writer but all his friends and family either told him, or secretly thought, he had no chance. This was because he didn’t read. He’d never read. He could – indeed he had good grammar and spelling and was articulate, with good vocabulary but this was learnt from those around him, very little from reading. He did, however, read dictionaries long before people just looked things up on The Internet. 

As a boy he was bright and he had an influential father who was quite well educated. He had been promised a new bicycle by his mother in 1960 when he was due to take his eleven plus examination. In theory he should fail the exam because he was rarely at school. He was a truant: an ‘escapee’. The bike was a genuine ‘carrot’ offered by his mum in case he was at school the day of the exam and in case he took the exam and in case he passed it.

He loved that bike. It was named after a new rocket (missile) – Blue Streak – a Raleigh bike, gleaming, bright blue and he was very proud of it. He rode it everywhere, even fifty miles to Brighton as he approached teenagerhood and the dreaded thing called puberty.

He was a loner; as long as he had his bike, nothing mattered, nobody mattered. He would set off early morning and just ride and ride and ride. Sometimes he forgot all about time and he would return home in the early hours and his mother would shout at him and send him straight to bed even though she might have known that he had not eaten all day.

He would lie in bed and look at the ceiling and remember his route out of South London, up Box Hill, down the other side, along to Leith Hill, onto the A24 and into dangerous traffic which he dodged in and out of during the holiday coast-bound traffic jams. He saw the signs for Worthing and he’d long to cycle on to the coast but he knew he would have to turn back as it was three in the afternoon. Back he’d go varying his route, past beautiful scenery, up and down little lanes back in the days of unspoilt home county nooks and crannies to reappear often after midnight, exhausted. Sometimes he got a puncture and he lost an hour or two repairing it at the roadside.

Nobody asked him where he’d cycled, nobody cared much as long as he returned home safely. He wanted to share these places, these secret places with anyone – his parents – a friend – but he had no friends (apart from Colin).

Colin lived in Bassano street, a short walk away. Colin’s birthday and his parents’ wedding day exactly matched his friend and his parents’, and all parties were aware of that strange coincidence, but they never celebrated it together.

Colin knew that he was Timmy’s only friend and he would take advantage of it. He led the way. He would decide what to do when they played out in the street – a common and fairly safe thing that was done on South London streets in the 1960s. Colin liked hide and seek in the petrol-smelling dumped car that had been there for months - or a street or two away on the bomb site (there were still many around London even up to twenty years after the end of the war). The bike was often stood-up outside Colin’s house, sometimes for hours, glinting in the bright sunlight – a beacon in the shabby street. It was always clean and carefully maintained, including by granddad, who used an old quill to direct 3 in 1 oil down into something with a rude name – a nipple. Timmy only ever remembered that about grandad. He died.

They were playing together at the top of Chesterfield Grove, just next to Mrs. Watson’s (who looked after children for working mothers). He’d been looked after often by her and he had always been instructed to say hello, which he did as he clambered over the bomb site rubble with Colin.

Shortly after, several boys appeared including the fat one that he knew from the odd occasion he was at primary school where that same fat one bullied him. Suddenly fat boy shouted at them all to get him. Colin ran away immediately. He was knocked to the ground, cutting his face but he grabbed a brick and smacked the fat boy on the back of the head. He screamed out “my dad’ll have you – you bastard.” They all ran away – fat boy crying and bleeding from his head. Colin was nowhere to be seen.

He walked back towards home, forgetting everything except his thudding heart, his aching head and bleeding face that would not stop bleeding; he started crying and then running towards home. His mother opened the door and he sobbed as he tried to explain what happened. She was unsympathetic as she mopped his wound and again sent him to bed without any food. He lay in bed again, looking at the ceiling and he pictured fat boy’s bloody head and he wondered what a bastard was. He looked that word up and the next day he asked his father if he wasn’t marred to mother. He was quizzed but he ran back to his room, lay on the bed and waited for the door to be knocked but no one came.

Like a thunderbolt he suddenly remembered Bluey. He jumped-up, ran downstairs and out into the day and ran all the way to Bassano Street. Outside Colin’s house, his breath gasping, he saw no propped-up bike. He knocked and knocked but no one came to the door. Then riding past was fat boy on Bluey with his dad grinning as he said “an eye for an eye or in this case an eye for a bike sunshine. – ours now”.