Quicksilver’s Ride

What gave the old man pleasure over and above his other pastimes was to sit in the sun by the crumbling corner of the stone wall, now that the wisteria was in flower. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight or his sense of smell. He thought it strange that a disability should be spread around in people’s minds, so that a loss of hearing – hypothetically – he liked to think through various hypotheses – was assumed to be connected with a loss of speech. He said the word ‘connected’ to himself, but what he imagined, or pictured – his eyesight being good – was a kind of contagious wash from one area of loss, or affliction, to another; a gentle wash, like that which he observed along the shoreline when the tide was on the turn. The old man enjoyed his hypotheses and he enjoyed sitting in the sun, yet each day he steeled himself for a challenge and a trial, which he called ‘Quicksilver’s ride’. Each day he steeled himself for it, and a word denoting metal was the right one, for when the boys bore down in fury on their bikes, and the sun beat down, causing them to blaze, and the blazing hair of Quicksilver, their leader, bore down ahead of all the rest, then steel, the imagining and acquisition of it, was the only possible defence.

He had tried, over the weeks he’d been subjected to the bullying, a variety of ‘onlys’. It was only their shortcut through the empty village. They were only boys. This statement stood sturdily enough on its own, but he often added an amendment. They were only boys and would grow tired of tormenting him. They would become bored: for that to happen he need only to wait. In the old man’s view of how the battle stood, they’d reached a stalemate. He would not give up his bit of sheltered sun, or the wall covered with mauve flowers – a hardy thing, wisteria. And he liked the smell of crumbling stone underneath the sweetness of it – that dustiness, a gesture towards age that stood over and against the raw gashes of the retirement village in its state of suspended construction. The dust would strengthen as the season pushed itself forward into dry heat, into short nights – noisy, with a predictable, yet random noise like faulty electrical wiring.

With summer, then, the school would close, and the boys disperse. He had to hope for that. Each day brought hope in equal measure with anxiety and determination. He had been an electrician. He would not be beaten by a gang of boys. He did not know their names; but he’d known boys like them all his life, the way he’d known his deepest fears. He’d recognised them the moment they’d appeared, hurtling down the hill. They answered to the fear that he’d suppressed ever since his daughter had persuaded him to sell his house and buy a villa off the plan. All amenities would be provided, she had assured him with a persistence that had drilled the words into his head. She had not let him forget that, in the aftermath of a stroke that had left him speechless, he was in sore need of amenities. There would be company as well. His daughter, in the full flight of her persuasive efforts, had added unnecessarily, ‘the company of people like you, Dad.’ She had meant, of course, old crocks, damaged in one way or another past repairing. She had hinted that the company of others equally infirm might achieve what expensive speech therapists had not. This was, along with sundry other miracles, to retrieve his voice.

He understood the boys’ need for a victim, if he could only have explained it to them, and, by explaining, dilute their anger, or deflect it. He understood their need to scorn and trample on their childhood selves. They were leaping out of childhood and it was a leap that terrified them. He even understood the excitement in their eyes, and in their voices that high, rich baying for the kill. Only in this way could they push down what it felt like to be weak and helpless, push memories right down into their bowels. He wondered if there might be one among them who would reflect back on the matter once his growing up was done; and indulged a fantasy that it might be so, projecting himself on through the life of one or another of them, past a time when he would be white bones. This one with red hair cut so very short, a wash of brightness covering his scalp; that one, next to redhead – they might have chosen one another for the contrast – propped with sturdy legs on either side of the shining metal frame – he was black-haired, black-avised. The old man had seen that description once, in a library book.

Their bikes matched. It was an initial oddity he’d noticed. Their parents might have chosen them on the same morning, from the same shop. One minute he was enjoying the spring sunshine, the next surrounded in an ambush. There were five. Later on he’d pondered the symmetry of this – two each side and their leader in the middle – black and red, then colours in between – brown, yellowish brown, fawn. But the ringleader drew all their colours up into himself and made a dazzle of them. Without him, the gang might have got bored and wandered off after three or four afternoons; but Quicksilver smelt blood. The old man reached for his walking stick when they appeared at the top of the hill, and only slowly, with reluctance, after the dust settled in the wake of their departure, loosed his grip.

The night of the first raid he’d found that name for the boy: Quicksilver. The word heralded a burst of light behind his eyes. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. The last speech therapist had treated him rather as an object of curiosity than a patient for whom a cure might be found. On the night of Quicksilver’s first raid, the old man recalled the letters that had passed between himself and his daughter. He’d been waiting for work on the retirement village to be completed. There’d been a dispute over some detail relating to council approval. The waiting had gone on and on.

‘Dad! Don’t let them get the better of you! Your villa’s ready. Just move in!’

His daughter’s bossiness caused less forthright people to lose their balance, step sideways for a moment – he’d seen it happen often – and while they were busy getting back on track, she performed her manoeuvres to the right and left of them. Her father’s villa had been paid for by the sale of his house. Where else was he to live? With her? It was the one solution he would never countenance.

But then, to be fair, he’d got into the swing of things. Just when his daughter’s burst of anger at the council was slowing to a natural pause, he’d said, ‘All right then.’ He’d been an electrician all his working life. His skill with wires and switches had paid for his daughter’s education, and his wife’s succession of hobbies. He’d longed for a son and had indulged her past the point where there was any hope of her providing one. Well, those disappointments were long gone, and so was she. He’d had a stroke; his tongue was a useless wad of sausage in his mouth; but his hands worked well enough to twist and bend, and he wasn’t above filching a bit of juice from the box the builders had set up and left connected to the mains. When his daughter affected concern, he turned her own arguments against her in a storm of letter writing. She’d socked it to the authorities on his behalf, well then, why couldn’t he? What better way of protesting than to show them his ingenuity, wipe their waffly noses in it, hey?

So the old man pinched his bit of electricity and availed himself of light in the evenings and a fridge, a hotplate on which he cooked meals that he referred to in his letters as ‘simple and nourishing’. His daughter bought him a mobile phone and lectured him on how to receive her messages and reply to them. He switched the phone off and buried it underneath a tea cosy. He wondered if, in some part of his daughter’s prickly self, she was proud that her father had picked up the ball and was running with it; or whether he might finally, and by good luck, have outmanoeuvred her. How she’d imagined him managing without electricity he couldn’t guess. She became concerned for his safety, squatting alone in the villa. He burnt some of her letters, telling himself he did not need to reply to every single one.

And it had not been bad, all told. In fact, until the arrival of Quicksilver, he’d had nothing to complain about. The girl at the shop where he bought his milk and bread had laughed at him and pointed to his picture in the local paper. A pile of them had been sitting on the counter. He’d ducked his head and smiled. She had a pretty laugh, shy yet unabashed. He smiled back, trying to show that he was perfectly competent, managing perfectly well, thank you. And no, it could not be long until the dispute was settled. And yes, he’d staked a claim for old folks – it was what the girl’s grandma had said. She’d chattered away to him as though he could answer. The moment had quickly come and gone when he should have made it plain that he could not. She’d been tactful, or else simply ignorant and young, repeating, with familial pride, but shyly, her grandmother’s words.

And he hadn’t minded waiting. He realised that he’d been waiting ever since his wife died. The abandoned village with its one inhabitant served only to hone and particularise an already established fact. Anybody watching would have said he was waiting for the company of other residents, for all those promised amenities. He knew now that he’d been waiting for Quicksilver.

He heard the school bell. The wind carried it, on certain days, clearly down the hill. It stirred something in him. A metallic glitter appeared on the horizon and turned into a bunch of boys. Quicksilver spotted him and called a halt. They dismounted all in one swift movement, such was Quicksilver’s command, while he continued minding his own business, waiting in his corner, in his bit of sun, under the wisteria. There was something finished in the boy’s bright skin, in the mercurial flashes of his eyes and hair, that suggested a character arrived at, rather than one in the process of becoming. This would be an attraction for the other boys, perhaps the primary one.

Quiksilver: now the name sprang up wherever the old man looked, spelt without the ‘c’. Surf shops carried it in huge lettering. When he caught the bus to the supermarket to stock up on provisions, the word beamed at him from hoardings. The bus driver knew him, knew he couldn’t speak. They nodded companionably at one another. He was careful to choose that slack time in the early afternoon, avoiding both the morning shoppers and the school-aged children. Sometimes birds got blown about in a high wind and seemed unable to control their flight. This was a problem or not, the electrician decided, depending on their destination and adaptability. He always had his money ready for the bus driver, the exact amount.

The surf shop stocked Quiksilver boards and board covers in a glistening fabric. Black full-length wetsuits bore the logo too. On their racks, lacking a body’s extremities, lacking eyes to match and measure, the wetsuits nevertheless appeared animate in some quiescent way, as though waiting only for the flourish of a wizard’s staff. The electrician never met his Quicksilver on any of these shopping expeditions, and felt confident that he would not. They had their meeting and their jousting place laid out. Of course the boy considered the construction site his territory. Of course it had been an affront to come upon a mute old man soaking up the sun. 

Inside the villa, the light was diffuse, gauzy, as though filaments of gauze were floating in it, but when he looked closely, he saw nothing untoward. It was there that he retreated after each afternoon’s humiliation. He raised his hand and felt the wetness, licked his finger. It was salt. And over there the salt vastness, just the far side of the dune. His tears linked him to the sea. There was comfort in that. He thought of what a normal man of his advanced years would do. A normal man would ring up and complain. He would speak to the police, who, armed with a description, would track down Quicksilver and his mates and give them what for. There would be two constables, a parent present, all done properly. Yet what happened next was not to be predicted confidently. Quicksilver’s laughter might fill the echo of a closing door. Yet, however the scene played out, however the boy mocked his father and mother, and whoever was sent to reprimand him, the part played by a normal victim would be that of a speaking man. All was open-ended, in the air, heralded by a particular and pregnant silence because he, this victim precisely, could not speak. 

He could write the police a letter; send them a text message or a fax. A fax would betoken greater seriousness and urgency. But he could see the smiles that would be passed around along with the sheet of paper – the fussing of an old man – why doesn’t he ring up? And if he included an explanation in the fax, would that help? Would he be taken more, or less seriously as a consequence of his disability? One might say, ‘That deaf old trouble-maker. He shouldn’t even be there.’ And another, ‘Serves him right.’ The police might frighten Quicksilver off, but they’d bring along some heavy-handed persuasion to move him out of his villa at the same time. No, that way of reaching for assistance was unlikely to produce the desired result.

He thought of the birds again, the way they might be blown off course and then regain it, or an altered one, making second best, perhaps, into a pattern of startling originality. It was how the matter appeared to him, as he sheltered his eyes against blown sand, in a strong southwesterly, holding onto a tree in order to retain his balance on the dune’s lips. Though of course he could never know what the birds were thinking, and should not presume.

There remained the few nodding acquaintances he’d made – the bus driver, in whom he sensed a kindly, yet indifferent presence. The bus driver had the air of a man who had seen and heard enough of human inadequacy to make him want to keep his distance. Whatever story the electrician presented would bear the added weight and suspect quality of the written word. The bus driver would say – mate, he would say – ‘If you’re worried, mate, go to the police.’ The girl at the corner shop was out, but her grandmother might be sympathetic. He could write to her. But how to explain himself, and where to begin?

So many incapacities to present to the doctor when he took up his position in the village: on call 24/7, his daughter had proclaimed. The electrician breathed a small, inaudible sigh of relief, thinking that whatever trials he had to face up to and to deal with, it was in solitude that he was doing the facing up and dealing. He had no one to answer to, or for. He would not send a fax to the police. He would not write to his daughter about Quicksilver, much less ask for her advice.

He made himself a cup of tea, having completed – the simple triumph in that! – a walk to the beach. It came to him in the midst of his reflections: he hated his daughter. He would offer her up to Quicksilver and no questions asked. The idea of a swap made him smile. It was as if the purpose of Quicksilver’s appearance had been to lead him to this point of recognition. He hated his daughter’s specious arguments about nursing care, and the promised company of ‘people like you, Dad’. What person existed whose situation was like his? He preferred to keep an open mind about finding someone, some day, when the dispute was over, when the retirement village was complete, if he lived that long.

But life was in the meantime. The meantime might be all he had of life, and it had thrown up an antipathy so strong it left him choking to regain his breath.

There followed days of windy rain and sunshine, and, two-thirds of the way through each, he knew, because his stomach tightened, and he felt an urgent need to clear his bowels, that the gang was on its way. On most days, he could hear the school bell, even from the lavatory. That gave him fifteen minutes. Every evening, he lectured himself in stern words: ‘That’s the last time. Positively the last.’ Yet even though he re-lived, as he brushed his teeth, the boring and predictable humiliation, he fetched his walking stick from beside the door and set out on his walk at the appointed time. For as well as telling himself – he knew it was a contradiction – ‘I will not give in’ – he feared drawing the posse to his house. Even though he’d deadlocked the door himself, and fastened catches on the windows.

Each day he walked to the corner of the wall where the wisteria continued flowering, and sat in the same spot, his stick within easy reach. When he saw them coming, he clasped it with both hands. He knew this walking and this sitting for the submission and the challenge that it was. Sometimes the southerly was freezing and he pulled his jacket close around his chest. But unless the rain and wind were so strong he was sure Quicksilver would not come, he went out to meet his adversary head on.

He’d pinned a calendar to the kitchen wall. Each weekday was marked off with a red line running diagonally right to left. The weekends were left blank. The electrician had set himself the task of lasting till the end of term, and each blank day was a promise and a herald of the long summer holidays, the lovely weeks to come, free time that would give him proper respite and a chance to work things out. For he reasoned, and this reasoning was most seductive, that holidays would offer other and better diversions, that boys eventually grew tired of the same games. In the meantime, the weekends, two days out of seven, were a time for not thinking. He shopped on Thursdays, saw to his banking and exchange of library books. For the weekends, then, he had his beach walk, his reading and his radio, the preparation of small meals. From the first he was confident – he simply knew – that the boys would not appear on Saturday or Sunday.

Then one Monday afternoon – he hadn’t slept well – he blamed the Monday blues – he shut his eyes in the sun and fell asleep, and when he opened them, Quicksilver was already there.

He reached for his stick, but the boy’s moves were liquid. One flick of the smooth, sharp wrist, the rapid fingers, and the stick was held in his confident grasp. The old man just managed to get a grip on one end before the boy pulled back, pulling him over, unbalancing him with a whoop of triumph. The old man swung left, right, left, and for a magical second they appeared to be equal: but no one was counting. Quicksilver pulled. The old man fell forward and let go of the stick. Quicksilver pranced and raised it. The old man looked up. Their eyes met.

Quicksilver laughed, and swung the stick, now this way and now that. ‘Garn git ’im! Garn git ’im!’ cried the gang. Quicksilver swung, while his quarry ducked and moaned, and the boys, excited past bearing, began moving in. But then their leader changed his mind. The old man felt it in the second when he closed his eyes, preparing for the blow, then opened them again and saw Quicksilver’s grin. Laughing, he dropped the stick at the old man’s feet.

He realised with shame that he’d wet his pants. Small boys did that, and old fools past continence and useful speech. Quicksilver was leaping out away from childhood – oh the stretch and glory of it! His high-pitched battle cries were grand!

He shut his eyes again, knowing he could do so safely. He smelt the sweetness and the dust, and mingled with it, so he fancied, horses’ sweat, the stink of urine and of boys who’d tasted blood. Quicksilver was bound now by his impulsive action, and by the terms of the duel. And surely it was fanciful to imagine that he’d want it any other way. The old man’s only weapon was his walking stick, which had, and surely would again, be turned against him.

It occurred to him that a step could be taken, alone, without involving any other person. He could find out where Quicksilver lived. The problem of how to do this without being observed occupied the whole of that night, but by dawn he had a plan. He fetched his stick from where he’d hidden it at the back of the cupboard where he kept his few clothes, and lay it down beside his bed, and then he fell asleep.

He woke up some time after ten, full of resolution. He had his own bank account. He hadn’t been so soft in the head as to let his daughter persuade him to sign over power of attorney; and to give her credit, something he’d been reluctant to do lately, she had never asked. He had his pension. It had been a pleasure each week to go into the bank and draw the money, most of it spent at the supermarket straight away; for he understood how vulnerable the elderly were, had known and thought about this vulnerability long before a boy called Quicksilver had thrust himself into the light.

He wrote a letter in his best handwriting and took it to the library to photocopy. He thought about asking for the use of a computer so that he could type the letter, but you had to book ahead, the library’s computers being always in demand, and he did not want to wait. The librarian knew him and was kind. For a moment, he thought of ‘telling’ her the story, then quickly changed his mind. He would stick to his plan. If it failed, as well it might, then confiding in the librarian could be a fallback position. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of her before. The prospect made him smile in a kind of advanced gratitude. The librarian would be used to reading. She smiled back as though she already knew and accepted precisely the kind of reading that might be required.

It all passed off more smoothly than he’d dared to hope. The bank vouched for his solvency. His driver’s licence was up-to-date. There was nothing wrong with his eyesight or his hearing. His unreliable left leg was scarcely an impediment in an automatic car. And the ability to speak – to shout, perhaps, at a wayward pedestrian, or a fool who jumped the lights – was, the last time he consulted the road rules, far from an essential requirement. So the electrician, conducting his business by way of hand gestures, as well as written questions and replies, chose a small, dark-coloured sedan and signed the rental papers with a flourish. He pulled up outside his villa, then, after a few moments’ consideration, chose a parking spot in the middle of some bushes by the half-built swimming pool. He removed the hire company sticker from the window – it could easily be re-applied – and walked carefully around the car, balancing on his good leg with the aid of his stick. Then he locked up and dropped the keys into his trouser pocket.

There was still an hour to wait, but he couldn’t be sure how parked out the street would be, with mothers and with grandparents, more usual, he knew, these days. He spent twenty minutes disguising himself with a baseball cap; his hair tucked under it so the colour didn’t show; sunglasses and a parka with a turned up collar. He didn’t stop to think how this disguise might turn him into a noticeable oddity, as he parked on the opposite side of the street from the school, with a clear view of the gates.

It wasn’t long before he was rewarded. Reward flowed over him in lovely drawn-out moments, as he watched Quicksilver charging through the gates, with the spring sunshine lighting his extraordinary face. The old man sat behind his glasses with his cap pulled down, hands braced on the steering wheel, and gave thanks that he was alive to witness and partake. He sat for a long time unmoving. Even breathing seemed a kind of betrayal. The boys would ride through the retirement village, expecting to find him in his customary spot. What would Quicksilver do? Would they circle the villa, try to break in?

He had forgotten his plan to find out where the boy lived by following him home. By the time he pulled up at the rental place, it was nearly five o’clock. But of course there’d be no trouble, sir, with keeping the car for another day. The young woman who handled his request, in hurried writing this time, avoided catching his eye, perhaps fearing a kind of contagion, as any young person might, from the old and infirm. Perhaps she simply wanted to close up and go home.

As soon as it was dark, the old man walked over the low dune onto the beach, needing to be away from even the whispering reminder of other people’s lives. He stood still, balancing on his walking stick, taking in and savouring the lambent light, the way the white tops of the waves – a miracle, really, to see so much in the darkness – curled and fell, and the beauty of that curling and that falling. He tilted back his head and gave thanks for the sliver of moon that did not dull the stars. He thought how Quicksilver would ride those waves, true to his name and branding. And there was his car behind the bushes – with very little effort, he imagined himself to have bought, rather than hired the car – waiting to lead him to Quicksilver’s home.

Next morning, the old man put his affairs in order. He wrote a reply to his daughter’s latest letter, which had informed him that she had it from a reliable source that work on the retirement village was about to re-commence. He thanked her, and said he was looking forward to it, unable to erase from his mind a picture of residents rushing to fill the village in a liquid rush – all those infirmities; all those walking frames, and sticks, and hearing aids and multi-focals and arthritic joints. How obscene to lump the old of a society together. Only from the inside could a person laugh at the obscenity. 

He propped the letter by the door, where he would be sure not to forget it. He turned on the radio and dutifully listened to the local news, though he had no doubt that his daughter was correct. She never made mistakes of fact. Mistakes of feeling, yes. She was one of those people who, under the mantle of doing what was best, managed a great deal of harm. But this harm, and himself as the recipient of it, no longer interested him very much.

He made his preparations in other small and large ways, giving thanks as he did so for the good night’s sleep that had calmed his mind. He looked through his collection of bills, and made sure all were paid and receipted. He put three library books by the door. He would drop them in the return slot, and go by the post box, on his way to the school. He shaved and dressed with more care than usual, and spent half an hour rubbing a mark off his cap that he must have picked up the day before, though he could not imagine how. He fetched his walking stick. Again and again he had checked it for damage, but it seemed to have suffered not at all from being thrown into the dirt. He wished he had a friend to write to, one person to whom he could leave an explanation for what he was about to do. His last friend had died six and a half years ago. It had been before his stroke, and he’d said a few words at the funeral. If he believed there was any possibility of connecting across the void, then last night he would have written the letter.

Over all the sun hung mildly, with a mild and tranquil light.

The last thought in the old man’s mind, before he pressed his foot on the accelerator and brought Quicksilver down to lie disabled in the dust, was of the friend he hadn’t written to. It was as though his voice came back all in a moment and he shouted his explanation to this ghost with his faculties intact, this ghost who listened and who understood. He knew his daughter was relieved to have him under lock and key, the locked ward an outcome and a destination she might have planned herself. Responsibility, except for monthly visits, was lifted from her shoulders. And she sold the villa, scandal notwithstanding, for a reasonably good price.

No speech therapists turned up with cures in mind. The old man did without amenities, though he missed sitting in the sun. For a long time, the police and doctors kept on telling him the boy would live, shouting as though he was deaf, and this was the one sentence that must, on all accounts, get through. Quicksilver would live. His bones were broken, but they could be mended. That which should have been riven past repairing would be made whole again. Of course the rental company was at fault. They should never have let a crazy old man hire a car. This became a chorus, more of a round, perhaps, in the local paper, passed in conversation from shop, to library, to bank, a round of which the old man, in his locked ward, was unaware. They’d taken away his radio after he’d attempted to smash it with his walking stick.

He could have put them right on one point. Quicksilver had not been riding home from school when the old man had repaid his debt. He’d been on his way to the retirement village. A meeting which should have resulted in the decisive defeat of one over the other remained incomplete, and it was this incompleteness that drove him to his rages. It should have been a clash of equals; and here his mind truly did become confused, picturing the boy’s namesake rather than the boy. The moment of impact was dreamt, rather than recalled, as a metallic flower that blossomed, distorting and illuminating. Liquid silver, that peerless conductor of electricity, was destroyed before it had a chance to age.