Stephen Kelman - Man on Fire

She had to believe me dead. To protect her. To stop her coming after me.

I made myself a cup of tea with two of the little tea bags they give you on a string and I counted the hairs on my ring finger until it went cold. The room was all hard surfaces and straight edges and I pined for the feel of something soft under my feet. Sand or grass. There was a voice to the room, a hum. I could hear it coming from the radiator, from the kettle as it was boiling. It was under the duvet when I lifted it up to look for the little diamond-shaped stains of bedbug shit. I thought it was the accumulated noise of all the people who’d been in the room before me. An echo of all their sleepless hopes and recreational arguments. I wondered how many of them had come here to fake an ending or to enact a real death. Their voices gave me comfort. They persuaded me that I was leaving something unremarkable behind, going to find something miraculous in the place Bibhuti had prepared for me.

Outside the wind bit into me and the cold made me feel important. The weather knew it was a big day for me and it had come to see me off.

It was you, wasn’t it? You were the weather. I didn’t know it then but it’s pretty obvious now. Your hands raiding my pockets, your teeth scratching at my neck. You were telling me I was alive and doomed and so was everyone else. You were telling me to slow down, to listen, to take it all in. This would be my last chance to feel abandoned and you wanted me to savour it. And so I did.

To leave a witness trail I stopped for a chat with an old-time biker who was warming up his hog in the hotel car park. He called himself Big Bear. He told me that at the age of seventy-three the longest word he’d learned was yes. It was a word that unlocked doors and won people over. I took his intervention as a sign that my mission was an honest one.

‘I’ve never been scared of anything,’ he said. ‘If you’re gonna be scared you might as well shoot yourself in the head. I’m gonna keep riding till the wife says I have to stop. And that’ll be never, right, Little Bear?’

The old lady sat on the bike beside him gave Big Bear a smile full of plastic yellow teeth and twisted her throttle. This action was repeated by the rest of the squadron, a dozen leathered misfits straddling their Triumphs and Harleys. The noise of revving engines cut through the wind, two arthritic fingers up to the Travelodge and the barren earth it was built on.

I told them I used to have a Lambretta, when I was nineteen. I sold it to buy a guitar and an amplifier. I was going to be in a band. We were going to be called The Navigators. It didn’t work out.

‘You should get another one,’ Big Bear said. ‘Or get yourself a proper bike.’ He patted his ride.

‘No, I’d kill myself. It’s been too long, I wouldn’t know what I was doing.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ Little Bear said. ‘You never forget. It’s like riding a bike.’ She laughed at her own joke and they wheeled themselves to the head of the pack. Engines revved again and I got out of the way to let them all past. I waved at Big Bear and Little Bear and they waved back.

‘See you on the other side,’ Little Bear shouted over the noise.

‘I’m not crossing the bridge,’ I said, but she didn’t hear me. They crept out of the car park in a careful procession, then gunned it on to the slip road. The wind when it returned was laced with their exhaust fumes and I was lonely again.

I went across the grass to the main services and had mini pancakes in the Burger King there. They didn’t give me enough maple syrup. When I asked the boy for more he said I’d have to make do with what I’d got. The amount was predetermined by computer and no one ever asked for more.

The bridge was lower than it had been the last time I’d seen it. The Severn was smaller and it seemed to flow with less conviction, as if a build-up of holiday memories tossed out from the crossing cars had formed a silt that snagged the current and held it back from its quest of the sea. Wasp stings and broken bikes, swingball beatings and early escapes cancelled at the last minute when the weather took a turn. Mum and me used to screw them all up in a ball and lob them out the window at the halfway point between countries. It was a pact we made so we could start again fresh when we got home. If we left the bad stuff behind us every time we crossed the river then the next time might be different, the sun might shine and the sandcastles might last all week.

Ashes. That’s all she is now.

I stood on the grass in the same wind that had taken Mum away, searched for something of her between the raindrops. I wondered if she’d felt the exhilaration of being scattered.

I told her out loud that I loved her. I told her I was sorry for never getting round to an impressive life while she was still here to see it. The wind took my words away. Then I turned my back on the bridge and walked back to the car where it was parked outside the hotel. I wrote a Post-It note and stuck it to the steering wheel. ‘Gone to the bridge’.

There were some things of Ellen’s in the glove box, her disabled parking badge and some bingo pens. I put my wedding ring in there. Missed calls and unanswered texts, she wanted to know where I was. She was worried about me. I took the SIM card out and left the dead phone on the passenger seat. I abandoned the car to fate and the weather.

The taxi pulled up just as I was locking up the car, making a meal of it to generate juicy fingerprints that would pin me fatally to the scene. The driver didn’t ask any questions. No cameras recorded my removal. I slept in fits and bursts between the red lights on the way to the airport. Bibhuti came to me as I drifted. He was in his white karate suit and he was breaking himself for a good reason. It made perfect sense, to want to punch a hole in the world before you left it. To be as big as you could get while you still had the strength. I could feel that I was under a spell he’d cast. It was like being drunk. I couldn’t wait to meet him and make his story mine.

After getting my fingers burned in Bollywood saga I became convinced that I should approach my next record in simplest spirit. I had been tempted away from the correct path and in punishment for this I must humble myself even further. I had almost turned my back on the common man when he most needed my example, so only way to win back his trust was to return to earliest source. I must deliver my message directly into the minds and hearts of youngest saplings from where the trees of my country’s future would sprout.

I decided to perform my next record in DAV Public School and Junior College, Airoli, close by my residence. Significantly, my son would later be a student of the school and I had been imparting training of martial arts and gymnastics to the whole lot of students for over one year hitherto. The principal watched me perform a few records in the past that motivated him to accept my offer so I could inspire his kids to embrace sports and fitness culture for overall development of a child.

We arranged the day sans hassle, and my pure motivation was restored by the thought of so many children from my locality now waiting to be instructed in the golden tenets of the dedicated sportsman’s philosophy. To include them at a deeper level Mr Kota the principal ran an essay competition among the students with winning child receiving the honour of assisting with the record attempt. Lucky winner was ready to perform after only short briefing from me. He could not contain his excitement in fact. To be the first child and non-professional to assist in one of my records was a great honour for him and he eyed the melons like a hungry snake eyes the antelope before he swallows him. Ladders arranged in gymnasium for all the student body attending. A previously existing record so ratification was guaranteed.