Heavy Duty Attitude (4 page)

Not that The Brethren would be worried about security too much this morning. A further couple of dozen Harleys in various states of customisation were drawn up along the curb outside the yard and along the front of the clubhouse, all facing outwards, with their riders hanging around in groups, smoking and chatting as they waited for the off. The club’s strikers had put out some police cones along the road to reserve space for themselves. Someone had nicked them, I guessed.

I read some bollocks somewhere a while ago, some journalist who had been fed a line that bikers always parked up so the bikes were backed against the pavement and facing away from the road so as to conceal the registrations from police observers. I had almost wet myself laughing. How the hell the pillock’s informant had managed to keep a straight face with that one was beyond me.

It was just practical. If you were going to leave it on the side stand the bike was generally safer if you parked it that way so it couldn’t roll forward. Christ, I despaired sometimes at the crap some people would believe.

Faces turned to check me out as I pulled up at the far end of the line where there were a couple of anonymous large Jap bikes tucked away as if out of sight. The nearest full patch guy turned away from a youngster he was talking to and fixed me with a wary glare.

‘Yeah?’ he demanded as I swung off my bike and he eyed the large teddy bear bungeed to the pillion seat of my bike, which I had indeed put on expenses for the day, ‘And who the fuck are you?’

And a good morning to you too, I thought, but obviously didn’t say.

As he’d turned I’d caught the flash across his chest,
Sergeant at Arms
above the blood red dyed tottenkopf tab. The head of club security. Shit, just the sort of guy you wouldn’t want to have a problem with at the start of something like this.

‘It’s OK Scroat, that’s the writer guy Parke. He’s with Wibble,’ growled a voice behind him that seemed slightly familiar, as I saw the man-mountain from the meeting at the service station walking across to where we were standing.

‘We’ll be off in a few minutes so you just fit in here at the back with us and the tagalongs and Wibble’ll see you when we get there, OK?’ That was OK by me.

 

Scroat grunted and abruptly turned his back on me to resume his conversation with the kid he’d been talking to.

 

That was OK by me too.

The order in a club run is always the same. The club’s officers would be at the front, the president and the road captain first, followed by the sergeant at arms and secretary, full patch members next, then strikers and finally the lowest of the low, tagalongs and very, very occasionally, a stray civilian like myself. Sometimes there would be a full patch tail end Charlie to keep an eye on the back of the column and a support truck if there was one bringing up the rear. The pack would ride close together in pairs and with this number of bikes on the road, a couple might take it in turns to ride ahead as shotgun so as to block traffic coming out of side roads while the column passed to prevent the pack getting split up by intruding traffic.

The only variation today was that it seemed as though Scroat and the manmountain were fixing to ride at the back with me and two young looking guys.

I looked around and caught the eye of the kid standing next to the bike beside mine. From his unadorned jacket he was presumably a tagalong and I assumed also the owner of one of the Jap bikes. The other one must belong to the other lad I decided. After all, no self respecting full patch Brethren would turn up for a formal run of this importance on anything other than their hog.

It was the slickback’s first time I guessed and I wondered if he realised how much he was giving off waves of pure nervousness, as though he was trying to look tough, pleased and serious all at once. It wasn’t working. And it was the sort of thing I thought that someone like Scroat would pick up on like a shark smelling blood in the water.

He smiled at me, I think in recognition of someone who was less of a threat and introduced himself as Danny.

They would call him ‘Danny the Boy’ I thought, I could see it now. ‘Hi,’ I said and nodded at him, ‘Iain.’

He had obviously heard what man-mountain had said and he was a bright kid. He immediately put two and two together.

 

‘Hey,’ he asked, ‘are you the guy who wrote that book? You are, aren’t you?’

‘
Heavy Duty People
?’ I asked.
‘Yes, the one about Damage.’

‘That’s right,’ I admitted quietly, looking around to check out any reactions. It really wasn’t a subject that I was very comfortable with him talking about right now thank you very much. I guessed that Scroat for example might not be much of a fan.

‘Hey it was a great book.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, wanting to shut the conversation down, ‘Glad you liked it.’

‘I’ve read it loads of times. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to ride with the guys.’

 

Oh God, I thought.

‘So how come these guys are at the back with us lot?’ I asked him as a way of changing the subject, but also out of curiosity. ‘Shouldn’t they be up front with the others?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘this is my first time out with the guys and Bung’s my sponsor so I guess he’s going to keep an eye on me.’ He gestured in the direction of man-mountain, so now at least I had a name.

‘And Scroat?’ I said nodding in Mr Surley’s direction.

The kid just shrugged. ‘Guess he’s Charlie’s sponsor,’ he said nodding at the other kid who was now standing off to one side, quietly watching what was going on and ignoring us completely. Given that he looked as though he couldn’t be more than twenty or so I was shocked to see that he already had a bottom rocker marking him out as a striker, someone working his passage and on track to be voted on for a full patch after a year or so. It seemed extraordinarily early. The Brethren was a very adult organisation, in all senses of the word. Most of its active members were in their thirties, forties, even fifties, with a few grizzled veterans even older than that and still riding and rolling with the crew. While one of the byelaws said that no one under twenty-one could become a full member it was almost an irrelevance since in practice no one ever got put up for membership until they were in their late twenties or early thirties anyway. The Brethren wanted solid guys, people who had done their time, in various ways, who had proved themselves. So what was this kid doing on his way at this age I wondered, filing it away in the interesting-things-to-follow-up-at-some-time category.

Danny the Boy didn’t look as though he was about to introduce me and given Charlie’s attitude I decided that I didn’t think that was looking like any great loss.

Just then there was a sudden wave of anticipation and movement that swept its way down the crowded pavement as fags were dropped and riders started towards their machines. An instruction had plainly been given from up at the top of the line and we were about to move off.

As I turned back to my bike it suddenly struck me that there was something odd about the crowd mounting their bikes this morning. The Toy Run was a charity gig and a major club party event. But all of the guys here were single packing. Why was no one planning to take their old ladies today? Yet another thing to file away in the corner of my mind marked things to worry about. Perhaps the girls were making their way over separately, I wondered?

That would be good, I thought. But it seemed unlikely as I started to worry. There were only two reasons to single pack on a party run that I could think of. The first was because it was going to be the sort of a party that you didn’t want to take your old lady to as she might cramp your style. But on the annual Toy Run, as a semi public event, that seemed unlikely.

And the second was because you thought there was going to be trouble.

The kid next to me hadn’t clocked any of this, I could tell from his attitude. I wondered why he was here. The kid was worried about how he would hold up in this crowd, he hadn’t picked up on the vibe that there was something going down here at all. He was an innocent who just smelled of wannabe and that was never going to wash with this crowd. The other kid, Charlie, the one who’d blanked me completely when I’d arrived; he felt more right, watchful, arrogant, unfriendly. He already had the air of apartness that characterised some of the guys. Despite his age, you could immediately tell that he was right as a striker. He’d fit straight in, I thought, if he stayed the distance. Damage had talked once about recognising, not recruiting, and with these two I could see just what he meant.

‘Hey,’ Danny the Boy shouted across from astride his bike as he did up his helmet, ‘Are you writing another book? About the club I mean. Is that why you’re here?’

That was a very good question, I asked myself. A very, very good question. So as I pushed the bike upright off its stand, turned the key and pressed the starter button for the bike to crob into throbbing life, I smiled back at him and shouted across the honest truth to the kid over the roar of the engines firing up all along the kerbside.

‘The thing is kid, I really don’t know.’
*

The run, the ride there, wow that was something else, like nothing else I had ever experienced.

I’d ridden with other bikers before of course. As kids my mates and I had hung around together and ridden together as we graduated up from our fizzies and AP50s onto our first real machines, our two-fifties, Bob on his Dream, me on my GS250T, Cliff on his RS. We’d all taken our tests and ridden these throughout our student years, blasting up to town to the Hammersmith Odeon for Sabbath gigs, or to the Marquee for Girlschool, racing each other round Surrey lanes and south west London’s streets, or cruising down in a group to the west country to join the rest of the lads, with their assortment of second hand minis and parents’ cars borrowed for the week, at Croyd or Perranporth for our drunken surf and zider holidays. And then as we’d each got jobs, the first purchase had been the bigger bike, the seven-fifty, the real thing.

‘It’s like falling in love with motorcycling all over again,’ Bob had told me when I first got mine, and he was right, it was.

And for the next few years we did all the same things on them as we’d done on the two-fifties, only bigger and better and faster. The trip to Devon or Cornwall was a complete thrash, one which cost me my first three points somewhere on the A303. The biking holiday one year for three of us was a seventeen hour and fifty-six minute blast leaving from Lands End at just gone five-thirty one beautiful July dawn and pulling into John O’Groats just before midnight that evening having realised as we zoomed past Carlisle and headed to the border that we were only half way.

And when we headed down to Box Hill on a sunny weekend we needed to be careful to dodge the speed cops on the dual carriageway.

 

I’d ridden on MAG demos in London, we’d joined in semi organised runs from Box Hill to Brighton on an August bank holiday.

Courtesy of Bob, I’d even been out a couple of times years ago with his local police motorcycle club, and fun rides they were, mind the speed limits in town and don’t cross solid white lines but once out onto the unrestricted roads, it was every man, and one woman in skin tight leathers riding a bright yellow café racer Kwacker special, for themselves.

But none of those was ever anything like this.

Damage had talked to me about the discipline, the presence of an outlaw pack. But hearing about it and being part of it, even in such a tangential way at the back, was such a different thing.

Wibble had been right about one thing though. There was no need to wear anything fluorescent, not riding with this mob.

 

No one, not even the blindest Volvo driving twat, was going to do a sorrydidn’t-see-you-guv-pull-out on an outlaw convoy like this.

The lights were red as we came to the junction with the North Circular so as I pulled in at the back of the pack behind the two staggered lines of slowing bikes in the column, I was just bathed in the noise washing over me of the clattering and banging rumble of the overruns as The Brethren braked.

The Japs had copied the look of the Harley, they’d even produced some fantastically close looking clones, but it was all surface. They had never managed to capture the souls of the machines, the feel, the heart, or most gloriously, the noise. That indescribable deep melodic throaty booming rumbling burbling growl emanating from the mouths of the slash cut shotgun exhausts.

Ahead of me I could see rear mudguards shaking and juddering from the Harleys’ tick overs as we waited at the lights, a sound that at idle always seemed to clutter almost to a ragged dying halt, before tumbling over in its cycle again, the inimitable uneven mechanical heartbeat of the big V twin.

I was the only one in a leather jacket. The Brethren didn’t tend to go in for the traditional British biker uniform, distaining its practical safety aspect. Black bomber jackets or donkey jackets were their riding outfit of choice underneath leather waistcoats bearing their sacred patches.

So the riders ahead of me were a contrast of black, red and steel. The high widespread handlebars of the big bikes putting the riders into a wide shouldered stance that flew their colours in an arrogant and open challenge to the world, while below the fat bulbous chrome steel dome of the primary drive cover hanging out low down on the left side of the bike, shining proud behind the riders’ feet and hanging ponderously low, close to the rolling tarmac beneath, giving the bikes and riders that classic Harley profile from the rear.

Then the lights turned green and the noise picked up into a full throated roar as the heavy machines launched forward again in pairs and swayed in a heavy curve through the corner and out onto the main road.

*

A couple of hours later we swept through the high street of what would otherwise be a quiet Cambridgeshire fenland town like an invading army, the bikes’ reflections flashing in the windows, and the harsh bark of the exhausts bouncing between the buildings, heads turning at the approaching guttural noise, the bikers’ eyes fixed rigidly ahead, ignoring the everyday Saturday morning shoppers as they stopped and turned to watch the convoy rumble past like some kind of fearsome pageant.