“Sure I’ll pick you up on the way,” he says.
“Frank, there’s no need. It’s fifteen minutes’ walk. And I have a bike of my own.”
“Ah sure, it’s no bother. It’ll be fun. We can chat before we get there.”
He calls when he’s outside. “I don’t want to lock her up if you’re ready. Are you ready?” I come down the stairs and Frank is standing there holding the gate and his new bike. “Come on fella. I said we’d be there by nine.”
I climb up on the rear end of the thing and we take off. We pull down my potholed lane and out into Ranelagh traffic. “Of course, I can’t promise you a lift home, hah?” he calls over his shoulder.
“We look like a couple,” I reply. A taxi beeps at the lights. “Why didn’t you just let me take my own bike?”
“And how ridiculous would that have looked?” he shouts back. “You on your bike and me holding up the front end of a tandem.”
“Right.” Still, it’s nice and all. He’s taking care of the steering and all I have to do is pedal. And sometimes not even that.
“Would you fucking pedal?” he says, huffing over the canal bridge. I put my feet back in the straps.
“This thing must weigh more than two bikes:,” I tell him.
“Not a bit of it. It’s grand. We’re grand.”
It takes ten minutes and as many catcalls to get to Devitts. The tandem won’t fit on the bike racks so we lock it to a railing down the street. There was no real talk on the bike so we sink a pint at the bar before heading upstairs to where everyone’s gathered.
“A fucking tandem Frank?”
“It’s grand.”
“A bit limited maybe? You won’t be getting up the mountains on that thing.”
“I will if I have someone with me. And there’ll be someone to eat lunch with at the top.”
“‘If’ you’ve someone with you?”
“And why wouldn’t I? I bought a fucking tandem!”
Upstairs everyone wants to know about it too. “You really got a tandem, Frank?” asks Dervla, smiling, and I can’t tell whether she’s laughing at him or what. But after ten minutes he’s promised Beth a ride home and Dervla a trip to Howth Sunday.
“Now ye’ll have to pull your weight ladies. It’s not a horse trap,” he says.
“What are you saying?” grins Beth and he colours as the whole table lights up.
“I was thinking of getting a tandem myself,” says Mark. “A few years ago.”
“A unicycle would be more your thing I thought,” someone shouts and the table is off again while “It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t even make sense,” goes Mark over the noise.
A while later and I’m talking to Frank again and he’s getting loose at this point. “You remember my dad’s old Raleigh,” he’s saying. I don’t. “A big, brown heavy thing that’d fly forever once it got going. He used have a little red saddle on the crossbar, and two steel footrests down below. And I’d sit up there with his two arms either side of me, and I’d jam my little hands in between the bell and the light on the handlebars. We’d go miles and miles with him describing the world into my ear, or else just wheezing up some hills around Ballymore. I can remember the smell of the hot road and the trees we went under, and sometimes we’d stop along the way and put our feet in the Liffey or share a can of orange from the petrol station. It was before I could cycle, even. I must have been four maybe.”
I up the eyebrows at him later as he’s sitting Beth up on the back of the thing. He grins like a man after winning the horses. And that grin lasts a few weeks, but he’s not wearing it when I see him on the way into work one Tuesday morning, groaning and sweating up Leeson Street so tired he doesn’t even say hello. And he’s not wearing it the next week when he’s on drunk duty again, loading Patrick Mullins onto the rear saddle and yelling at him to hang on, would he, before he kills them both getting home. “This fucking tandem,” he mutters at me going past, and I want to remind him of his father and the hot, sticky road in July.