My bike

I got my bike when I was eight or nine. My bike was at least second hand, if not third. It was my sister’s before it was mine; and before it was hers it probably belonged to a cousin.

It was green. It was big and bulky, unlike my best-friend-next-door’s bike which was pink and glittery and compact; a better size for an eight-or-nine year old.

My bike had pedal brakes, not the handlebar grip brakes that all other bikes seem to have. To stop this bike you pedalled backwards. These days on bikes my first instinct is still to pedal backwards to stop.

My bike had no gears, so there was no way to ease the strain of pedalling uphill. I lived in a street where the route to school took me up a hill before dropping steeply down the other side. Coming home I had that steep drop as an uphill. It was a real struggle to pedal my bike up that hill.

I could have taken the parallel street, which was much flatter, and approached home from the other two sides of the block, avoiding the big climb, but that parallel street had dogs; big dogs that ran out from their houses, barking and snapping at little girls on bicycles. Don’t fall off! Those dogs will bite you if you do.

I learned to ride my bike in the 70s. Wide bottomed trousers were in fashion. Or maybe they weren’t. I never cared about fashion to know what was fashionable or not. And it’s possible my trousers had been fashionable in a previous year, when they were new, before my cousin grew out of them and they made their way to me. I only remember these wide legged corduroy trousers because one afternoon my bike seized up and I fell off.

I tried to get up but found I was attached to the bike, my trousers trapped in a greasy mess in the bike chain. It took some complicated working of the pedals while still connected to the bike to get my trousers free.

The bike chain took its toll, however. The long wide-bottomed trousers were ruined by the combination of thick and sticky bike grease and tears from being ground through the chain cogs. (I’m sure that my mother would have cut the damaged part away and turned the trousers into culottes.)

Like many pre-teen girls, I was crazy about horses but living in the suburbs meant there was no way I could have one of my own. So I pretended my bike was a horse. I called the place it was stored its stall, and I took care to back it into its stall so it was facing out to greet me.

Because I saw my bike as a horse substitute, it was a friend-companion as well as a means of transport. When I took off cycling around the neighbourhood after school, it felt like the two of us were off on an adventure. Who knew what we might find?

Maybe we would just loop around and around the park, around the cricket pitch on the higher part, and around the playground and the creek on the lower part, knowing to avoid that area when it had been raining as I could end up with my bike sinking and me ankle deep in mud. (My mother would not be happy.)

Maybe we would go past the Witch’s House – that stereotype of a large, old-fashioned and slightly run-down house. Was there a widow living there alone, or did I make that detail up?

Maybe a dog would come rushing out at us, barking aggressively, for sure trying to kill us, or at least trying to scare us to death. If my bike really was a horse it would have shied and tried to throw me off.

Maybe we would run into some boys from school who would shout some kind of gender-based slur. It’s not nice, but it’s OK. I know what they scored on the math test. I know I am smarter than them.

Maybe we would cycle to the top of that hill just for the sheer bliss of dropping freewheeling down the steepness despite my mother’s grim warning to watch out for cars turning at the bottom of the hill that could easily take out a small child on a bicycle.

My bike and I were friends for years, probably until I went to high school. I didn’t cycle to school then, and I had more homework to do, so less free time to cycle around the neighbourhood in the afternoon. My bike probably dozed in its stall, maybe coming out in school holidays, but eventually forgotten.

I don’t remember when my bike eventually left our family. I don’t know where it went. I know I was the youngest cousin so there was no one else to hand it on to.

I hope it went to a good home.

I hope someone else learned to ride on it, banging up huge bruises on their shins.

I hope someone else found some freedom with it.

I hope it featured large in someone else’s life.