Sam Pickering grinned at me. “Didn’t think I’d let you have a go at this loony exercise on your own, did you, Charlie?”
“What’s happened to your old Norton?”
“Nothing,” he said. “But I thought I might need something a bit more modern, so I borrowed this from a mate.”
The other prospective member, Mark, gave a snort at Sam’s description of the sixteen-year-old Kawasaki. Sam just beamed at him.
“Hi, how you doing?” he said cheerfully. He nodded to the row of parked-up bikes. “Which is yours, then?”
“FireBlade,” Mark said with studied nonchalance.
“Oh, smart,” Sam said brightly. “Same as Charlie’s.”
Mark looked crestfallen enough at that but I couldn’t resist adding a touch more salt.
“No – his is an older model.”
“All right, ladies, calm down,” Daz murmured. When I looked, his face was blank but there was suppressed laughter behind his eyes. “If you need fuel, speak now, because you won’t have time to stop. You want in, you’re going to be riding a simple set course, OK? From here you’re going up to the motorway at Penrith, a quick razz down to junction thirty-seven, across to Kendal, on to Windermere and back up Kirkstone to here. Got it?”
Most of it was almost the exact route I’d taken to get here. I felt my shoulders drop a fraction. At least I was going to be partly forewarned.
“That’s it?” Mark said blankly. “What’s to stop us taking a short cut?”
Daz broke into a smile. “There isn’t one to take,” he said. “And anyway, you won’t be on your own. The three of you are all going to set off at the same time.”
“So it’s first one back, yeah?” Mark said. I saw his gaze flick from me to Sam and back again, and he smiled.
Quite a crowd of other bikers had turned up by this time but the Devil’s Bridge Club kept themselves apart from the others, sitting together like the in-crowd, ignoring the rest.
I made sure my helmet was on straight and my jacket was zipped to the top, flexing my fingers inside my gloves, then hit the starter and the FireBlade growled into life.
Mark made certain he was first one out of the car park, with Sam close behind him on his borrowed Kawasaki. I brought up the rear, happy for now to follow the others and see what kind of breakneck pace they were determined to set.
I’d ridden out with Sam before, when he was on his Norton and I was on my Suzuki. It was a while ago, but I reckoned I knew his abilities pretty well. Mark was the unknown factor. I didn’t fancy cresting a blind brow and finding he’d got it all wrong and turned his bike into a mobile roadblock on the other side.
It soon became apparent that, for all his brave talk, Mark wasn’t quite as much of a have-a-go hero on the road as I’d feared. He was much more cautious than I’d been expecting through the winding roads that edged the lake.
I couldn’t say I blamed him for that. The road surface was awful, rutted and bumpy so that I could feel my tyres skittering on every bend. It was narrow, too, with intrusive slabs of rock or fronds of bracken on one side and a low wall leading straight into the lake on the other to funnel oncoming traffic into the middle of the road.
Cars had a nasty tendency to appear round blind corners with their drivers’ side wheels well over the white line. Too much commitment and we were in danger of smearing our head and shoulders across the front of somebody’s bumper.
Where Mark did seem willing to take risks was overtaking slow-moving traffic on our own side of the road. He hopped past cars in places that made me wince and hold my breath while I waited for the crash that never quite seemed to happen.
Sam clung tenaciously to his tail, handling the unfamiliar bike with deceptive ease. I caught the duck of Mark’s head as he checked his mirrors after every manoeuvre and wondered if he was dismayed to find the old Kawasaki still right up there with him.
He must have been hoping that, once we reached Penrith and turned south onto the motorway, it would be a different story. The trouble was that the GPZ might have been old but it was still capable of a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The FireBlades would top that by another twenty but neither Mark nor I quite had the bottle to max them out on the public road. Even if we’d had the room to do it.
Twenty-seven miles covered the three junctions down to Killington. We got there in less than twelve minutes. All the way I was praying there were no unmarked cars on patrol and that the camera van wasn’t sitting on its favourite bridge. If they caught us at these speeds they were going to lock the three of us up and throw away the key – after they’d sent us for psychiatric evaluation, of course. As it was, I couldn’t help being relieved when we thundered unmolested up the slip road by the wind farm at Lambrigg and plunged back onto the A roads again.
I’d already ridden this part of the journey on my way up to the meet and the experience had taught me to back off earlier and not go into corners quite as hot. That way I could start putting the power down sooner and slingshot out of the bends getting faster all the while.
By the time we turned off onto the road for Kirkstone Pass I was into the kind of flowing rhythm you only hit once in a blue moon. It all felt vaguely surreal. I was arriving at every corner exactly when I was supposed to, in exactly the right gear, at precisely the right speed.
I ripped past Sam, and then Mark, with the sense that I was never going to ride this well again so I might as well make the most of it. Mark was so taken aback when I slipped through on the inside of him that he let his bike come upright fractionally too early, running a tad wide on a vicious right-hander. Sam nipped the Kawasaki past while he was fighting to regain control. When I glanced back I could see the two of them neck and neck, Sam grinning broadly under his visor.
We tore through Patterdale and Glenridding, earning outraged stares from the hordes of fell walkers and
