From Darling Jim:

IT ALL BEGAN with a faulty fuel line, you see. Why didn’t I just keep riding past? You be the judge. Pull up a chair and help me figure it out. Because as God is my witness, I still don’t understand all of it.

It was barely three years ago, at home in Castletownbere. Some time in May, I think. The sky was swept of clouds when I noticed a figure bent over his broke-down 1950 Vincent Comet dream machine, and cursing under his breath. I slowed down on my bicycle, not thinking he’d notice. But he turned to face me on the narrow street.

And with one look, he cracked me open like a safe and stole everything inside.

The first thing I ever heard him say to anybody was ‘Do you think that car is big enough?’

He didn’t say it to me, of course, but to the arse of the massive, yacht-sized yellow BMW that nearly clipped him as it roared up the narrow main street near the square. The tourist, whose plates said he and his bejeweled girlfriend came from some country where people drove on the right hand side, stopped and leaned out the window. The driver had more chins on him than a roomful of butchers. The muscles on his bulging wheel arm might have made reasonable men hesitate. A diver’s watch that would have sunk the Bismarck glinted in the sun.

‘What did you say to me, din skitstövel?’

The motorcyclist in the ratty leather jacket raised his head, and I saw the weak sunlight catching his irises. There was no fear in them. He was glorious. Before he answered, he took the time to nod at me as I leaned on my bike to see the show. Even today, I can’t tell you what I saw in his eyes. Perhaps it was only aggression. It could have been pure fuck-you-ness, but there was something else hiding there that the motorist didn’t immediately catch as he opened the door and took a half-step onto the roadway.

‘I believe I asked you a question.’

‘Kalle, get back in the car. Now!’ A blonde shape in the passenger seat leaned left and grabbed for the heavyset man’s suede shirt. But he kept at it, placing both feet on the deck, ready to move down the road under his own power.

Right up until he saw the look in the younger man’s eyes.

‘Before you get too upset,’ he asked the Swede, ‘can I tell you a secret?’

The motorcyclist kept his arms at his sides and smiled as he walked right up to the driver and put his gorgeous lips to the man’s meaty ear. I noticed that he didn’t just have a great arse, but carried more than muscle inside the tight black jeans and T-shirt. He moved like he had all the time in the world as he bent down to whisper something. The driver was about to protest, and his hands clenched. He could have put one of them around the young fella’s tousled black Keanu Reeves hair and squeezed. And for a second, it looked as if the pompous wanker had a mind to. His condescending smile had been widening for several seconds.

And then his jaw went slack along with his shovel hands.

I couldn’t hear what the handsome fella was mumbling, but it didn’t sound angry from across the street where I was standing. He even put out a hand and playfully pulled at the other man’s earlobe, as if making a point. Then he turned around and, smiling at me, walked back down toward his fire-engine-red motorcycle. The driver just stood there, gobsmacked, letting the wind blow into his open mouth for a bit, while he digested what he’d heard. Whatever it was, it must have come as such a shock that it had robbed him of the power to move, for the girlfriend finally tugged hard enough at his shirttail to bring him back to the here and now. He got back in his seat faster than my own students after the last bell, and gunned the engine so hard he left two fat skidmarks in the asphalt. He was past the church steps and gone in seconds, and we never saw them in town since.

Now, I know what you’re going to say.

I should have just got back on my bike, continued on my way and minded my own business, right? Don’t think I didn’t consider it. But wouldn’t you have waited just a few moments more to see if you could find out what had made the driver’s anger evaporate so quickly? Of course you would. So I leaned my bike against the window of the realty office and gathered my courage to walk over and talk to the fella, who was once again kneeling next to the mud-splattered machine that had more loose wires and plastic tubes hanging out of it than a trauma victim. I thought I heard him humming a lullaby. As if he were singing the dirty street racer to sleep right there, next to the gift shop.

He knew I was walking across the street even before my own feet did. I know he did; I could tell by the way he stopped for a second before tightening another screw.

‘Howya?’ he asked without turning around, sounding a bit like Dublin, a smidgen of Cork, and a busload of something else not from around here. His voice was as smooth as a cat’s.

‘All right, I suppose,’ I answered, feeling stupid for just standing there like an eejit. I was wearing my schoolteacher clothes, regulation skirt length and sensible shoes. Exactly the least sexy outfit to be wearing when talking to any man, and I cursed my rotten luck.

Then he turned to look at me.

I can’t say that the ground shifted underneath my feet, or any such bullshit. What I will swear to on a stack of Bibles, however, is that looking at him filled me with a kind of hope you only get very early in life, and can never quite recapture since. It felt to me as if whatever thoughts I had brewing inside me mattered more at that moment than anything else. Because he didn’t flirt this time, or wink, or smile. He just peered into my eyes, past the retina, the brain and guts and all the rest of it, and shone a secret flashlight all around my insides before crawling back out, apparently satisfied with what he’d seen. I can only compare the feeling to being in the grip of a large animal you aren’t afraid of; you know it might hurt everyone else but not you. Because despite his caressing the tourist’s ear and fashionably unshaven cheek, it wasn’t love that drove that gesture, it was a promise. The promise went something like, ‘Don’t listen to my words, but heed my willingness to tear your ugly head from its body and drop-kick it down the street.’ I knew it as sure as Easter Sunday, and I still didn’t walk away from him.

What made me stay? It wasn’t just curiosity, or a cheap fantasy of a quick ride somewhere in a quiet alley.

The best I can tell you is that I began to tune in to his voice. Like a lonesome dial waiting to hook onto a good radio station, I stood in my cheap patent-leather Dubarry pumps and let his frequency wash over me.

‘What’s yer name?’ he wanted to know.

‘It’s not for sale.’

He tightened another screw and wiped the fuel line with the bottom part of his shirt, allowing me a full view of a stomach that hadn’t seen many chips or pints of stout in its life. I knew later that he did it on purpose. ‘And now you want to know what I told the Swedish meatball to make him forget about buying his own little slice of Ireland and to drive off into the sunset instead with Miss Bleach 1983, dontcha?’

I toughened up my voice a bit, because the fella was too sure of himself, even if he’d read me dead right. ‘Maybe I do, and maybe I just wanted to see someone not from around here fiddle around with his fancy toy. What kind of bike is that, anyway?’

He put down the wrench and cocked his head to the side, as if to say, Well, damn, this one’s going to take some effort. ‘Only the most beautiful motorcycle ever made, and that’s the truth,’ he said, stroking the gold leaf lettering on the side of the large fuel tank. A tattoo-style banner had been carefully inlaid, with the word VINCENT offset in white inside. The fella finally smiled. His teeth were perfect, of course, and he spoke with a reverence I’d only heard before in church.

‘My Vinnie is a genuine racing machine, the only one left in Ireland, maybe even the world, and rare as a unicorn. A 1950 Vincent Comet, nine hundred and ninety-eight cubic centimeters, with Albion gears and a wet multiple clutch.’ He saw my befuddled expression and added, ‘All that means is she’s fast as piss, a bitch to please, and breaks down all the time. But I love her. Want a ride?’

‘Quite taken with yourself, aren’t you?’

‘Just being friendly.’

I wanted him to ask me again, but then I looked at my watch. It was nearly nine, and right up the road, twenty-three eleven-year-olds were already piling into their seats for another riveting lesson on the Nile river delta and the construction of the temple at Abu Simbel. He saw me do it and looked a little sad. Before I knew it, he had taken my hand and squeezed it, just a tidge, like a gentleman would. He didn’t stroke it, or anything.

Then he said, ‘I’m Jim.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ I let go of his hand, walked back across the road and stopped. He knew I’d do that, too, because he laughed as I turned back around. The wind was making his jacket billow on his lean frame like a leather sail. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll bite. What did you tell that Swedish fella? That you’d take his nice car and make him eat it for breakfast?’

My first real warning came rolling along right there, and I ignored it. I was already past my own good judgment and itching to share a secret.

Jim shook his head and started the engine. It roared louder than a fleet of tugboats at dawn. This made me come closer to him, of course, and he smiled again, gunning every inch of that thing. Thinking about it now fills me not with dread, but with desire still. He stuck his head out toward me and with his free hand beckoned me to bend closer to hear. As my hair whipped around in the wind and merged with his, I could at last make out what he was saying.

‘All I did was tell him a story.’

‘Must have been a pretty scary one, then?’ I tried, wanting to know more. The Vincent screamed with all its 998 cubic voices, and now my cheek was next to Jim’s. He smelled of motor oil and several days of hard road. I think I may have closed my eyes for a second.

‘No. Just one that fit what was already inside his head.’ Whatever that meant. Then he gently patted my cheek, swung back the kick stand, and gave me another one of those small nods. He tightened his grip on the throttle and took a left up the hill to the town of Eyeries, where kids walking to my own class stood and gawped after him. I remained standing in the street so long after the sound of the engine had died down that I was nearly run over by another fancy car. I moved out of the roadway and stood by my bike listening to the church bell strike nine. I’d be late for class, but so would at least ten students, because the sight of a red Vincent, driven by a gorgeous fucker who knew what lay dormant inside the heads of others, was not regular fare in the town where I grew up.

As I pedaled furiously up the hill to work, I tried to recall the look in the Swede’s eyes.

He hadn’t just been scared of what he’d heard.

He’d been afraid for his life.