[COPY] Reparations (Part One)

Life is a never ending short story

i)

I bought the new bike because I didn’t trust the old bike anymore. Not after it broke my shoulder. 

I’d decided to actually go to the office that morning, with the express reason of planting a seed in the mind of the HR that they should make me redundant. It would take some months to chip away at this, but I had watched others do it and it seemed to work if you tried long and hard enough. 

I got up early, did an hour at the gym and then cycled towards work. I was at a junction on Boulevard Voltaire when I noticed an 18-wheeler picking up pace behind me. I wasn’t sure what that thing was doing in the middle of Paris, but I knew the immediate danger it posed to me. A bicycle can get sucked right under one of those beasts. Were I to fall onto the road it would be unlikely the driver could stop. 

Of course, there was no reason why I should just suddenly be thrown off the bike, but I wanted to get as far away from that truck as possible. I pedalled until I was going as fast as the bike would take me, accelerating through traffic and cutting across lanes. I had just reached the safety of the cycle path when the wheels of the bike jammed. 

I went over the handlebars and met the pavement with my right shoulder, followed by the full weight of my body, then my rucksack with everything inside it and finally the bike. I’ve taken big hits before but this was the heaviest. I jumped up immediately and tried to suppress the urge to throw up on the pavement. 

All I wanted was to crawl into a bush and die but that was out of the question. I picked up the bike and pushed it the rest of the way, hoping the excruciating pain would just wear off. Even when I got to the office, and found it nearly impossible to take off my coat, it never occurred to me that my shoulder was broken. Dizzy and nauseous, I went looking for the HR, but someone told me they were off work with depression. 

After an hour at my desk I started shaking, so I spent ten minutes putting my coat back on and headed out. I left the guilty bike chained up outside and set off for the long walk home. The bike would remain locked to that railing for a year and I would never work in that office again. I would be back, though. Sooner than I expected. 

ii)

The new bike had arrived with a vital part of the frame damaged, making it impossible to attach the rear wheel correctly. I should have simply returned it, had I done that then I would have been spared what happened next. The seller told me that if I got the bike fixed he would cover the costs. He gave an address on Rue Crozatier. ‘Ask for Enzo. And get a receipt.’ 

I walked the lame bicycle up to the 12th arrondissement and found a bike shop. 

‘Are you the Italian?’ I asked the young guy covered in oil who was standing outside. 

‘I’m an Italian…’ he replied. 

He told me to come back in two days and said he would see what he could do. I began walking home but had this horrible feeling that I was being followed, or at least watched. There was nobody else on the street, but I was so uncomfortable that when a cab rolled by I got in and told him to take me to the river. It was still early, so I went to the pet store and watched the shopkeeper feed breakfast mice to the snakes. I don't remember how I got home.   

When I returned to Rue Crozatier, the bike shop looked different. Maybe they had given the place a lick of paint, I thought. There was a queue of people waiting outside to pick up their repaired bikes. I stood in line but my bike was nowhere to be seen. 

‘Let me talk to Enzo…’ I said to the bike shop guy. 

‘I’m Enzo!’ said the man, who I had never seen before that day. 

After a while I figured out I had gone to the wrong bike shop and found a random Italian repairman - who was not called Enzo - when in fact I should have gone to this shop and given the bike to Enzo, this Enzo - who was not Italian. Either way, the bike was fixed and the bill for the repairs was 20 euros. I asked for a dated receipt. 

The bike seller told me he would transfer the money for the repairs shortly. I decided I would give him a couple of days before checking in again but all this was forgotten about when I broke my ankle. That injury was un-bike related. I had slipped on a rug at a film director’s house while out celebrating the termination of my employment. 

iii)

The morning I got out of the hospital I ended up at The Bar on the corner. I had not eaten since I hobbled into the infirmary and I had barely slept either. The old man in the bed next to me spent the nights wheezing like a broken vacuum cleaner. Every now and again he’d stop and I would think he was dead, until his motor kick-started and with a splutter. I was there for just over three days, I think. 

My health insurance was supposed to provide me with a taxi home. Admittedly, this was only about 300 metres away from the hospital gates, but I hadn’t gotten the hang of the crutches and if the trip was offered I was going to take it. I got outside and called the number. While I was waiting for the cab I looked up at L'hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière for the first time. ‘Princess Diana died in this hospital,’ I heard a voice whisper. I looked around but couldn’t see anyone.

When we arrived the driver told me he knew nothing of this health insurance business and wanted paying in full. He also informed me that he only took cash. I had none of that stuffed in my fresh cast or hospital pijamas. He pointed at the ATM across the street - almost the same distance we had travelled - and watched me hobble over there. When I returned to pay, I could see that he had kept the meter running. 

The place he decided to park was about as close to The Bar as it was to my door, and I couldn’t face hopping up the seven flights of stairs on an empty stomach. I dragged myself to the terrace and shuffled into one of the empty seats. The handsome barman recognized me, then looked slightly alarmed when he saw the cast and my swollen, iodine-stained toes poking out of it. I shook my head and said nothing. 

The Bar was always a strange place. Vintage posters in one part, bucket seats from race cars in another. The music selection was schizophrenic and the menu included English-style pub food in tapas-sized portions, served in little baskets. I found something disturbing about miniature fish and chips in mesh containers that look like they were designed for elves to go shopping.

I ordered the French breakfast, then the English breakfast, and put both away slowly and methodically. As I finished the fruit compote, I noticed an alarming amount of hornets flying about. I’ve always had a phobia of wasps, and being unable to move very quickly with that leg brought an extra sense of dread. I had no idea at this point that these very hornets were building a nest above my kitchen window.

My apartment was in a worse state than I remembered. I really needed a wash, so I found a trash bag to wrap around my leg and dragged a stool from the kitchen to sit on. I had never tried to put a piece of furniture in the bath before and I got the angles all wrong, jamming it under the pipe that connects to the faucet. I tried to free it and inadvertently ripped the pipe right out of the wall. The fitting was completely ruined but miraculously the pipe hadn’t ruptured.

Determined to clean something, I hopped into the kitchen and tried to have a go at the dishes in the sink. The water had been sitting there for days and the drain made a pitiful death rattle as I emptied it. I managed to clean a few plates before I slipped and knocked the whole lot on the floor. I was left standing on a bare foot, which was now surrounded by broken porcelain and greasy water. 

I wanted to scream, but I didn’t get the chance. The exposed pipe in the shower suddenly decided it was going to burst after all. It only took a few seconds before the water spraying against the ceiling in the bathroom began to flow around my toes in the kitchen. I was stood there like some filthy flamingo when I heard the doorbell ring. 

‘Hello…’ called a female voice I had never heard before. I guessed it was the girl from the internet I had arranged to meet a few days earlier. Then it occurred to me that I had not given her my address. Before I had a chance to reply, she turned the door handle and let herself in.

Part 2 either coming soon or never at all.