Free On the Road Bike by Ned Boulting Page A

winner would finish at 15.05, and he’d gone for 15.10. We wagered ten pounds on the outcome, nearest time wins.
    When Mark Cavendish eventually crossed the line in Blackpool, it was exactly 15.06.27. I know this. It is precise to the microsecond, because we cross-referenced a shot of him finishing against the time code in the TV truck. That ‘time of day’ code is accurate to a tiny fraction of a second. It is the international standard.
    You might infer from that, that I had clearly won the bet.
    But the next day, Mick was still refusing to pay. He’d consulted the finish-line judge (an old mate from years gone by, no doubt), and between them, they’d concocted some bizarre calculation involving average speeds, the movement of the tides, the influence of Halley’s comet and relative tyre pressures on Cavendish’s bike, and produced a work of utter fiction, to which Mick was still clinging. (A little childishly, I thought. And told him.)
    â€˜You’ve bloody colluded with the guys in the TV truck, Ned. Bloody conspiracy. He came in at 15.09, and you know he did.’
    He was smiling, just. So I thought we were still ‘joshing’.
    â€˜If I give you my sort code and account number, you can send it to me over the Internet, if that makes it easier, Mick.’
    He looked sternly at me, and then broke into a very sudden, very unsettling attack of laughter. At the same time, he cuffed me ‘playfully’ around the back of my head, nearly breaking my neck. I can still feel the bruising.
    â€˜Ha ha ha ha,’ he laughed at me, loudly and robotically. ‘You cheating bastard.’
    He stomped off into Stoke, without paying up. And that was the last time I saw him that day.
    And now Mick Bennett was pointing a pencil at me. It had been sharpened to a murderous degree. He’s a trim, upright silver-haired man in his early sixties. He has an intense stare, and a cautious delivery edged with an accent that bears witness, just about, to his Birmingham upbringing.
    Mick was born in 1949. ‘I’m from a very poor background. No hot water. No bathroom.’ His story was not uncommon in that regard, but nonetheless remarkable.
    â€˜Where did you grow up, Mick?’
    â€˜Spark Brook.’ That rang a bell. It was a curious sounding neighbourhood. Like Tower Hamlets, or Westward Ho!, it sounded like the careless working title that some junior draughtsman in the town planning department had dreamt up over a cup of tea.
    â€˜I was given a bike by my next-door neighbour when I was young, and it saved my whole life. It was as if someone had gone, “There you are. That’s changing your life.”’
    Mick was miming someone handing over a gift, imparting a treasure, stretching his arms across the table at me.
    Just then, his BlackBerry suddenly chirruped on the desk at his side. Without even minutely averting his gaze from where it was fixed across the space at me, he deftly reached out with his left hand, switched it off, and returned his outstretched arm to the point where his neighbour had just handed him his life-changing bike. I was transfixed, and very nearly reached across the empty space to receive the notional bike.
    As he recalled his childhood, I saw a landscape of brickwork, gutters, washing out in the backyards; all the post-war clichés made poignant by the reality of their existence. And I saw Mick, out on his BSA bike, rattling over the cobbles. ‘One day I stopped this guy, this Graham Webb, and he said, “Come round to my house”, which was two streets away from my house.’
    Graham Webb. So, half a century ago, Mick Bennett and he had been neighbours!
    â€˜I knocked on his door. And I went into this “two-up two-down” like all the terraced houses were, and he showed me a laundry bag full of medals and he put them on.’
    I pictured the two of them. Graham, maybe eighteen years old, proud of his haul, but modest