His Coldest Winter. Derek Beaven

       I

       FIRST SIGHT

      THE NIGHT AIR was like broken glass, a black rush that crammed his mouth, cut his cheeks. Snow from the headlight sliced up at his eyes and splintered past his ears. He was seventeen – it was his first time on a motorbike and he’d just driven straight across London. His back ached, his arms ached, his shins ached. The rest of him was numb.

      He was on his way home from the family Christmas at his aunt’s. At last, the capital was behind him, its High Streets ended, its festive, undrawn curtains done with. He’d struggled through Child’s Hill, pressed on past Hendon Central. Apex Corner had been a snarl, a ring of trade names and used cars for sale, a jostle for inches by neon signs or tinselled star-buys. Everyone in town had seemed to be elbowing a way out of it before the weather turned. Now, with the traffic thinned almost to nothing and snow falling in earnest, he was on his own.

      His bike hammered under him. Two miles passed without a waymark, three … A rise foreshadowed the Chiltern hills, and he stared up the dual carriageway, waiting for detail. None came. A chain of red dots glimmered far ahead, then vanished. Oncoming headlamps swung once through his line of vision, and were gone. Some winter conspiracy seemed to have swapped the city for a void, in which the merest extra throttle caused a gale to drag his face as though he were a rocket pilot being tested.

      Then a roundabout showed at the crest. Alan braked hard, his fingers half-frozen in the glove. He could hardly feel the pedal against the tread of his left shoe; he nudged the gear change with the toe of his right, sending an icy vibration up through his knees and backbone. The big machine whined and slowed as the frame shook to the cog. Two other riders buzzed by him out of nowhere, their stop lights scoring arcs this way, now that, into the bends.

      They were racing. It was the bypass already, and they’d just shown him up. Too powerful for its rig, his own Triumph made him wait for each line to straighten before he dared accelerate, and the awkward sidecar – which the law required, and which his father and uncle had helped him bolt to the frame just that Boxing Day morning – felt like a child’s stabiliser. He tried to hurry, but the pair were out of sight before he was halfway round, leaving only their tyre tracks on the whitening ground.

      A flurry blew without warning. Torn flock seemed to swoop across the central hummock, flying up in wads against the headlight. There was a car half-blocking the exit, the driver climbing out to clear his windscreen; Alan skirted him. But the bike hit ice and his whole rig kicked sideways. He wasn’t spooked. Spurred on by the racers, he flung a challenge to the elements, bit back whatever pain he could still feel and opened up the throttle. The power was breathtaking, the flurry just turbulence left behind him as he shot like an arrow into the darkness.

      The Watford Bypass gave him his bearings. He’d been along it countless times – with his parents on their visits to London, or on theatre trips with various teachers. From here, he reckoned he knew the lie of the land. The road heads exactly north-west, giving the merest flick to either side, then tilts slightly downhill. After that, it lies true as a whip in a wound for three and a half miles, tree-lined, across fields and thickets and former country lanes. It used to come into its own about nine every night: the bike boys fancied themselves creatures of darkness. They gave the strip its mythology, and its ghosts.

      Rain or shine, this was the routine. When they’d finished at Oddhams the printers, or Metal Box, or the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factory at Leavesden, when they’d wolfed their suppers and tinkered with their bikes, they’d put on their jeans and black USAF leather jackets and ride over to the Busy Bee, the transport café in the dip, next to the Red Lion. And there, to Elvis records on the jukebox, they’d suck fizzy orangeade through straws until the summer sun went down; or, while the winter moon scuttled family men off to their wives, they’d sit and drink cup after cup of hot, sweet tea, waiting.

      Others would arrive in packs, from the Ace on the North Circular, from the Dugout, or the Cellar by the bridge at Eton. Once it was night, they’d improvise illicit races along the black main road. They’d burn it