The Bicycle in the Shed

Original short story written for Revision Library; entirely fictional and not based on any published work.

Amara Okonkwo-Reeves had never much liked her grandfather's shed. It smelled of linseed oil and damp newspaper, and its single window was so grimy that the afternoon light limped through it in grey stripes. Yet on the last Saturday of the summer holidays, with rain drumming steadily on the corrugated roof, she found herself pushing open its stiff door anyway.

Her grandad, Walter, was inside, hunched over a wooden workbench, sorting screws into jam jars with the patient concentration of a man who had all the time in the world. 'Careful of the paint tins,' he said without turning round. 'They're not as empty as they look.'

Amara stepped carefully between a lawnmower missing its handle and a stack of terracotta pots, and that was when she saw it: propped against the far wall, half hidden beneath a dust sheet, stood a bicycle. Its frame was the colour of a ripe plum, though the paint had faded unevenly, and a wicker basket, now more hole than wicker, hung crookedly from the handlebars.

'Whose is this?' she asked, pulling the sheet away.

Walter set down his screwdriver. 'That,' he said, 'was your great-aunt Josephine's. She rode it from Sheffield to Whitby once, would you believe, in nineteen sixty-one, to prove a point to her brother.'

'What point?'

'That girls could do anything boys could, and generally quicker.' He smiled, though something in his eyes had gone distant, as if he were watching the ride happen all over again. 'She never let anyone else touch it afterwards. Not even me.'

Amara ran a hand along the crossbar, feeling the dents and scratches beneath the dust. She thought of a woman she had never met, cycling alone along coastal roads with nothing but determination and, presumably, extremely sore legs.

'Could I fix it up?' she asked. 'Properly, I mean. New tyres, oil the chain, that sort of thing.'

Walter studied her for a long moment. Outside, the rain had softened to a drizzle, and somewhere a blackbird had begun, tentatively, to sing.

'You'd have to earn it,' he said eventually. 'It's not a toy to be borrowed and abandoned the moment something more interesting comes along.'

'I wouldn't abandon it.'

'Everyone says that.' But he was already reaching for a spanner, and the corner of his mouth was twitching upward despite himself. 'We'll start with the wheels. If you can true a buckled wheel without losing your temper, you might just have inherited more from Josephine than her stubbornness.'

They worked for the rest of the afternoon, Walter explaining terms Amara had never heard: spokes, hubs, the delicate business of tensioning, while she knelt on the concrete floor, her jeans growing steadily filthier and her hands smelling faintly of grease. By the time her mother called her in for tea, the bicycle stood a little straighter, one wheel spinning true and silent, the other still stubbornly wonky.

'Tomorrow,' Walter said, covering the bike once more with its dust sheet, though gently this time, almost tenderly, 'we'll do the chain.'

Amara looked back at the shed from the kitchen doorway. It didn't smell of linseed oil and damp newspaper any more, not really. It smelled of something she couldn't quite name yet, but suspected might be the beginning of a story that was, at last, becoming her own.