13

The AJS had been wheeled into Chaffey's shed where it had been, solicitously, covered with a tarpaulin to keep off the shit of wandering chickens.

It was a hot night and the smell of the mouse plague was heavy in Charles's nostrils as he lay in bed. He could hear the mice gnawing at the walls and scampering across the ceiling and, occasionally, a small squeak to indicate that one of his snakes was still dining.

He was hungry. His stomach was tight and he had a taste like iron filings in his mouth but it was, just the same, lovely to lie in a bed in a room by himself, even if the room was just an open back veranda. The mattress smelt a little unusual, but he was used to other people's smells, strange sheets, hessian blankets, beds shared with bony children, pissing children, pinching children. He could sleep anywhere, on kitchen tables or in hay sheds, it made no difference, and when he was an older man, suffering insomnia, he would look back nostalgically on those lonely nights when he could escape hunger or heartache just by lying down and closing his eyes.

He slept easily, dreaming instantly of his pet shop in which environment the smell of mice (now gnawing at the salty underarms of his carelessly discarded shirt) was nothing more than the aroma of a pet's cornucopia.

So as Charles contemplated a rare golden-shouldered parrot, a being so beautiful that its dreamer's face showed a beatific smile, Les Chaffey quietly slipped the tarpaulin off the H-series AJS and stood there, contemplating it. There was a look on his face that could be mistaken for hostility, the way he narrowed his eyes and pushed his head forward, but it was no more than intense curiosity, and it was easy enough to imagine that it was the sheer force of his gaze that had worn away at his wife's face until it had taken on the look of a pretty fabric that has been laundered too often, the bright blues gone chalky pale and the pinks almost white.

The AJS, Les Chaffey thought, was an interesting machine. He squatted beside it for a moment. Then, like a fellow reaching for his pipe, he pulled a small wooden-handled screwdriver from his back pocket and, in four fast neat movements, removed the single screw from the pilgrim pump. He could see, before he touched that screw, what the pilgrim pump was, i. e., a device for automatically controlling the oil feed to the engine, but that was not enough. He wanted to know how it worked. He fetched a spanner and disconnected the pipes that led to it. He removed the little knurled nut on the pump itself and was surprised by the spring-loaded cams. He had not expected spring-loading and the spring escaped him, flying beyond the circle of lamplight. He collected what remained (a worm and roller, two cams, the knurled nut) and held them in the dry cup of his hand. He thought about the spring a moment but decided to wait for daylight.

Having fiddled with the worm and roller, having learned the rate was controlled by the magneto sprocket, the mystery was more or less explained and, glancing over the bike again, he was struck by the small clearance between rear tyre and mudguard. How, he wondered, would a fellow change a tyre on a machine like this? Indeed, at first sight, it looked impossible.

He was busy removing the chain guard when his wife came in and stood behind him, eccentric only in her nakedness.

"Come on, Dad, leave it alone."

"Nah, Marjorie, just looking." He looked up and gave her a creased smile and tapped her bare ankle with the screwdriver. "You go to bed."

"What is it?" She squatted, and her body, had anyone been interested to look at it, was what you might expect of a forty-five-year-old woman accustomed to hard physical work. She was slight, like her husband, and her biceps showed a similar wiriness. They both had suntans that stopped just above the elbow.

"A pilgrim pump," said Les, opening his hand to show her the parts. "A wonderful thing. But what I'm worried about is this rear wheel. Could I trouble you to hold the lamp, Marjorie?"

She held the lamp for him while he placed the chain guard gently on the floor. He unclipped the chain and folded it neatly. He put the chain clip in his shirt pocket.

"I'm going to hold up the back of the bike," he said. "Now if you could just wiggle this back wheel around, we'll see what's what."

She sat on the dusty floor behind the cycle, heedless of the dirt on her naked backside and, while her husband took the weight off the back tyre, she wiggled it as asked.

"Did you ask his permission, Leslie Chaffey?"

"For God's sake, Marjorie, don't nag."

"I weren't nagging."

The back wheel suddenly found its way free, just where it had appeared impossible, slipped neatly out beside the guard, and, taking Mrs Chaffey by surprise, rolled gently away from her to fall down in the shadows.

Les Chaffey waited until his wife was clear, then lowered the rear of the bike. "I'll have it back together by morning."

"You forget."

"What do I forget? Hold this a sec."

He handed her the chain while he fetched, from a high shelf in the unlit upper half of the shed, a stack of old newspapers. He spread these out, slowly, like a man laying out a hand of patience.

"You forget," she said, holding the oily chain in her two outstretched palms. "You forget."

He was now at the clutch, or rather at the place where the clutch cable attached itself to a small lever on the gearbox casing. She came and squatted beside him and, when he held out the lamp to her, she placed the oily chain on the newspaper and took it from him. "You forget," she repeated. "The threshing machine."

"For God's sake," he grunted, "that was twenty years ago. You didn't even know me."

"I heard about it just the same. You forget what you're like." Just the same, she held the lamp high, and helped him to find the small metal ball when it popped off the end of the gearbox spindle.

"The thing I can't understand", said Les Chaffey, digging out the parts of the pilgrim pump from his pocket and rolling them around his open palm, "is how they got the bank manager to lend them the money. How could you explain it to a bank manager?"

"Oh, pity's sake, don't go on about it."

"It was a good plough, Marjorie. Everybody said so."

"They did," she said. She stood up. "I'm filthy and we've got two hundred gallons of water." When he didn't answer she shrugged and walked back to the house, hanging her head and kicking out her legs like a fourteen-year-old girl. She washed quietly, with three cups of water, and left the dirty water at the back door for her husband to use later.

She lay on her bed and was asleep almost immediately. She opened her eyes – it seemed like a minute later – to see her husband standing there with a piece of glistening metal in his oil-black hands.

"Marjorie, come and look at this."

"I want to sleep."

"Marjorie, this is a beautiful thing."

"Oh, for Pete's sake." She sat up. She was cold. It was the cold that made her look at the clock. "Dad, it's five in the morning."

"I know, I know, look how it's turned."

"Oh God," she realized what it was. "God, it's the crankshaft." If he had stood before her with a pulsing red heart in his hands she could hardly have appeared more horrified.