been thinking a lot about paths lately, the paths of the living, the paths of the dead, how maybe there’s only one path, and I have set my foot upon it.
I was pretty busy for a few days after my Great Adventure began, so I had little chance to mark its beginning by any kind of celebration. But as the weekend approached, I felt an urge to do something different, a little special. And I recalled my cheerful AA man telling me how chuffed he’d been on his return from Corfu to discover that a new Greek restaurant had just opened in town.
‘In Cradle Street, the Taverna,’ he said. ‘Good nosh and there’s a courtyard out back where they’ve got tables and parasols. Of course, it’s not like sitting outside in Corfu, but on a fine evening with the sun shining and the waiters running around in costume, and this chap twanging away on one of them Greek banjos, you can close your eyes and imagine you’re back in the Med.’
It was really nice to hear someone being so enthusiastic about foreign travel and food and everything. Most Brits tend to go abroad just for the sake of confirming their superiority to everyone else in the world.
Down there too?
There’s no changing human nature.
Anyway, I thought I’d give the Taverna a try.
The food wasn’t bad and the wine was OK, though I abandoned my experiment with retsina after a single glass. It was just a little chilly at first, sitting outside in the courtyard under the artificial olive trees, but the food soon warmed me up, and with the table candles lit, the setting looked really picturesque. Inside the restaurant a young man was singing to his own accompaniment. I couldn’t see the instrument but it gave a very authentic Greek sound and his playing was rather better than his voice. Eventually he came out into the courtyard and started a tour of the tables, serenading the diners. Some people made requests, most of them for British or at best Italian songs, but he tried to oblige everyone. As he reached my table, the PA system suddenly burst into life and a voice said, ‘It’s Zorba time!’ and two of the waiters started doing that awful Greek dancing. I saw the young musician wince, then he caught my eye and grinned sheepishly.
I smiled back and pointed to his instrument, and asked him what its name was, interested to hear if his speaking voice was as ‘Greek’ as his singing voice. It was a bazouki, he said in a broad Mid-Yorkshire accent. ‘Oh, you aren’t Greek then?’ I said, sounding disappointed to conceal the surge of exultation I was feeling. He laughed and admitted quite freely he was local, born, bred and still living out at Carker. He was a music student at the university, finding it impossible like so many of them to exist on the pittance they call a grant these days and plumping it out a bit by working in the Taverna most evenings. But while he wasn’t Greek, his instrument he assured me certainly was, a genuine bazouki brought home from Crete by his grandfather who’d fought there during the Second World War, so its music had first been heard beneath real olive trees in a warm and richly perfumed Mediterranean night.
I could detect in his voice a longing for that distant reality he described just as I’d seen in his face a disgust with this fakery he was involved in. Yorkshire born and bred he might be, but his soul yearned for something that he had persuaded himself could still be found under other less chilly skies. Poor boy. He had the open hopeful look of one born to be disappointed. I yearned to save him from the shattering of his illusions.
The canned music was growing louder and the dancing waiters who’d been urging more and more customers to join their line were getting close to my table, so I tucked some coins into the leather pouch dangling from the boy’s tunic, paid my bill and left.
It was after midnight when the restaurant closed but I didn’t mind sitting in my car, waiting. There is a pleasure in observing and not being observed, in standing in the shadows watching the creatures of the night going about their business. I saw several cats pad purposefully down the alleyway alongside the Taverna where they kept their rubbish bins. An owl floated between the chimneys, remote and silent as a satellite. And I glimpsed what I’m sure was the bushy tail of an urban fox frisking round the corner of a house. But it was the human creatures I was most interested in, the last diners striding, staggering, drifting, driving off into the night, little patches of Stimmungsbild – voices calling, footsteps echoing, car doors banging, engines revving – which played for a moment against the great symphony of the night, then faded away, leaving its dark music untouched.
Then comes a long pause – not in time but of time – how long I don’t know for clocks are blank-faced now – till finally I hear a motorbike revving up in the alleyway and my boy appears at its mouth, a musician making his entry into the music of the night. I know it’s him despite the shielding helmet – would have known without the evidence of the bazouki case strapped behind him.
He pauses to check the road is empty. Then he pulls out and rides away.
I follow. It’s easy to keep in touch. He stays well this side of the speed limit, probably knowing from experience how ready the police are to hassle young bikers, especially late at night. Once it becomes clear he’s heading straight home to Carker, I overtake and pull away.
I have no plan but I know from the merriment bubbling up inside me that a plan exists, and when I pass the derestriction sign at the edge of town and find myself on the old Roman Way, that gently undulating road which runs arrow-straight down an avenue of beeches all the five miles south to Carker, I understand what I have to do.
I leave the lights of town behind me and accelerate away. After a couple of miles, I do a U-turn on the empty road, pull on to the verge, and switch off my lights but not my engine.
Darkness laps over me like black water. I don’t mind. I am its denizen. This is my proper domain.
Now I see him. First a glow, then an effulgence, hurtling towards me. What young man, even one conditioned to carefulness by police persecution, could resist the temptation of such a stretch of road so clearly empty of traffic?
Ah, the rush of the wind in his face, the throb of the engine between his thighs, and in the corners of his vision the blur of trees lined up like an audience of old gods to applaud his passage!
I feel his joy, share in his mirth. Indeed, I’m so full of it I almost miss my cue.
But the old gods are talking to me also, and with no conscious command from my mind, my foot stamps down on the accelerator and my hand flicks on full headlights.
For a fraction of a second we are heading straight for each other. Then his muscles like mine obey commands too quick for his mind, and he swerves, skids, wrestles for control.
For a second I think he has it.
I am disappointed and relieved.
All right, I know, but I have to be honest. What a weight – and a wait – it would be off my soul if this turned out not to be my path after all.
But now the boy begins to feel it go. Yet still, even at this moment of ultimate danger, his heart must be singing with the thrill, the thrust, of it. Then the bike slides away from under him, they part company, and man and machine hurtle along the road in parallel, close but no longer touching.
I come to a halt and turn my head to watch. In time it takes probably a few seconds. In my no-time I can register every detail. I see that it is the bike which hits a tree first, disintegrating in a burst of flame, not much – his
