‘In your own time, mate,’ Colin said. He was standing with Steve to my left. Straight ahead was 1.4 k’s of grey wet track. At the other end was a series of orange traffic cones indicating where I needed to grab the brakes. We had been over the length of the track, removing any stones and looking for irregularities; I’d made a mental note of a small pothole about halfway down slightly right of centre.
Rain streaked down the windshield as I leant well forward into the bike’s almost prone riding position. I pulled in the clutch and selected first gear; she jerked slightly as the gear dropped in with a reassuring thunk. I glanced down at my revs and gunned the throttle a couple of times, the needle rising and falling with the engine . . . It was time to hit the playground.
I tuned into the sound of her engine as my right hand rolled the throttle back and my left released the clutch. She pulled hard, rolling forward and gathering speed much faster than I’d expected. I slipped down and back into the seat base and let my feet find the pegs. Laying my chest down over the front end, I focused on the horizon and popped her into second. She was smooth and accelerating as fast as my regular bikes do.
Third gear at 2500 rpm and 100 kph dead straight no problems, I cruised to the end of the track and discovered she has the turning circle of a battleship. The wind gusts had been picking up and I was very conscious of them and the wet track, but the bike was just so big and heavy it reassured me, so by the time I’d gone down the track four times I was ready to see just how fast we could go.
Again I found third gear within six seconds, but this time I rolled the throttle wide open through the gearbox, red-lining the gear changes. She pulled away hard and I found my position behind the windshield, no wobbles, tank-slapping or body-tensing moments. She roared as her revs hit 3500, still pulling away in third. At 160 kph I popped her into fourth. There was a surge of power; at full throttle north of 4000 rpm she took off like the horizon just stole her handbag.
The blur of the trackside shrunk into the periphery as my vision fixed on the end of grey line ahead. The first orange traffic cone was coming up fast; I held the throttle open although everything told me not to, glanced down, passing 170 kph.
I don’t know what the odds are, you tell me, on a windy, rainy day, but right at that moment, not one but two eagles decided to fly across the track at head height.
I pinged the movement in my line of sight, stopped my brain from making my reflexes roll off the throttle, and smashed on. At that speed hitting an eagle wasn’t going to make any difference, it was all in the hands of the gods now.
Bird one didn’t see me hammering at him but bird two did; he slammed on the brakes, looking for height, while I passed through the gap between them.The funny thing is, when I tell friends these sort of stories, as I’ve always done, they invariably say, ‘Bullshit’ then ‘Did you get a photo?’ Well, this time I did; one of the guys was snapping away and the moment was caught on camera.
After that nothing else existed except the howling engine. Vibrations suddenly shaking her under me, I broke my fixation on the end of the track to dart my eyes down—177 kph and still accelerating hard.
This sort of bike, at this speed, on a track in these conditions will, I can assure you, concentrate your mind in a way you can never replicate again. I had to slow down my brain; it wanted to process double the input at 170 than it did at 70.
Piercing the static air at this speed was harder for her than learning the Russian alphabet backwards. Pushing through it for me was not just a case of holding on at full throttle. Think about all those multimillion-dollar Formula One wind-tunnel-tested racing cars you occasionally see getting flipped over or hurled into a tree by the beast that is air resistance. Parts shear off, vibrate to bits, flat-out shatter or make so much noise you can feel it in your teeth. The bike suddenly started doing all these things.
As I passed the last orange traffic cone, where I was supposed to grab the brakes, I felt the gods of speed laugh and welcome a new convert to the fold. I pictured the bleached white salt stretching into the void until the boundary between the sky and the horizon is blurred . . . then the beast, its eyes dead and dark, leant over the fairing and punched me straight in the face.
The entire front end of the bike suddenly lifted effortlessly into the air, my horizon and the disappearing track replaced with sky. My heart and time stopped, every muscle went hypersensitive. I rolled off the power and the front wheel came down fast, hitting the track and staying straight, thank god. I, however, was not straight. While my front wheel was up in the air, the crosswind had pushed the front end a few inches to the right and I was now heading straight towards the edge of the track. The problem was that unlike a conventional motorcycle, I couldn’t just lean over and correct my line because this bike was a metre wide and only a few inches off the ground; if I did lean to correct my direction I would have bottomed out the engine on the asphalt and game over. So I jumped on both brakes, squeezing harder as the edge of the track was now out of view and somewhere underneath us.
She stopped a few feet from the end of the track and a few inches from the edge.
My heart started up again.
I cranked my head around to see the boys racing towards me in the car. They screamed to a stop next to me and jumped out.
‘Jesus, fuck, man, what happened?’ Steve could hardly get his words out. ‘You nearly took off.’
I was high as a kite. ‘You tell me, mate, you built the fuckin’ thing.’
For a few moments we all stood there in the rain, dumbfounded, just looking at the bike with a mixture of awe and fear.
Then Colin’s rocket-scientist voice cut through the silence. ‘Oh dear,’ he said without looking up from his clipboard which he was busily scribbling on.
Turns out with all the wind-tunnel testing and design, everyone forgot to compensate the suspension and fairing angle for my weight. There is a metal plate under the engine, part of the rules for salt-lake racing because you can’t drop any fluids on the track. So when I’m sitting on the bike, that flat and level plate is at a positive angle into the wind, and that means when we hit a certain speed, the bike lifts off.
Colin took some measurements and crunched the numbers right there on the track, muttering to himself like the mad scientist, and after a couple of minutes looked up from his clipboard. ‘Yeah, 177 is enough to generate the lift required to pick up the bike.’
‘No fuckin’ shit,’ I said from behind the car where a nervous pee was now being held onto while I tried to climb out of leathers and gloves before I had a real accident.
So, given that the bike nearly broke a world record for flight, albeit unintentionally—and I nearly copped an eagle in the head at 170 clicks—it’s probably a good thing we missed Speed Week that year. It was back to the drawing board; we had work to do and a whole year to wait before our next crack. But that’s okay, one thing I do have is lots of patience.
MY SON, ACCORDING
to the doctor, was not going to get out and into Wally World in the conventional fashion, he was just too big. So it was decided early in the pregnancy that Clare would need a caesarean section and before I knew it we were waiting sweaty-palmed and nervous in a veritable production line of very pregnant mothers. Lola was at home with Clare’s mum—‘The Cath’—who had flown over from Sydney just like she did for us when Lola was born. I was hugely grateful to her; I simply couldn’t face the thought of having Lola in another hospital with me and time to kill while Clare was going through hell in some room I wasn’t allowed into. At least this time I wasn’t projectile vomiting and no one appeared to have a broadsword buried in their chest.
One by one the ladies went through the big double doors with their men walking alongside. The men all had that expression on their face—faking the confident supportive role, but inside we’re thinking, ‘Thank fuck I don’t have to do this shit.’ It’s closely related to the facial expression we pull when we have to stop and ask for directions or if we’re at fault in a car accident.
Clare was going in next, we were cool, I was fetching her magazines, she was totally calm, I thought I was actually doing a pretty good job of distracting her mind from the guy in the green mask next door who was going to carve her up like a Sunday roast.
Then the call came in. ‘Mrs Carter, we’re ready for you.’
The room was as I remembered when Lola was born, the giant metal arm coming out of the ceiling holding three round flashlights bent at the elbow like a transformer just put its arm in the wrong place while rummaging through the attic. The table-tennis set-up under the arm with the sheet strung up across the middle so Clare couldn’t see the Green Hornet split her open like a watermelon and dive both hands in up to the elbow. Busy people scooted about in white wellies and hairnets, I found my stool next to the table and faked a positive reassuring smile; small talk seemed so pointless, my mind went blank. She must be shit-scared by now.
The joyful masked anaesthetist leant in and started talking to us, but I was suddenly not listening as there was an immediate and very painful sensation growing in my flank; I even turned to look because it felt like someone had just tripped over and buried a scalpel in my back. Clare was already masked up, the Green Hornet was carving, my pain was wild but I blanked it out in time for Sid to appear at the top of the curtain, shrivelled and purple. Clare was happy but couldn’t see that from where I was standing she looked like a magi–cian’s accident.
Sid was a 9-pound whopper. I was a little shocked at the size of his member and pointed.
‘Oh, that’s perfectly normal,’ said a masked lady, handing me the scissors so I could cut through Sid’s umbilical cord.
‘Normal,’ I mused. It looked like a can of guinness with a cow’s heart on the end. My boy was a miracle.
There was just enough time to kiss my wife before she was whisked off to have the lower half of her body re-attached. Sid was also whisked off to have his nob recorded in the
Guinness World Records
. I smiled reassuringly as mother and child left then collapsed on the floor; I recognised this pain. After some writhing and moaning, I thought I saw the Green Hornet hovering over me, bloodied and wielding a knife, then the rest was a familiar blur.
‘Kidney stone,’ smiled Dr Brooks.
‘Yes, I know, it’s just like childbirth,’ I moaned.
The doctor nodded, smiled kindly and calmly explained that I was about to pass another boulder, this time from the other kidney. Then he gave me morphine and out came what I was thinking: ‘My wife’s upstairs having just produced a giant penis with a small baby attached to it. The Green Hornet’s up there sewing her together again right now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Brooks said as he checked my pulse.
I was wheeled into a room, a quiet, dark, private, junkie- and poo-free room. I think I called The Cath but it was foggy; I vaguely remembered Lola’s sweet voice telling me something about the zoo. The stillness and silence was perfect—so much activity and white noise had filled every day for months, it had been a long time since I’d felt such peace. I was gone, floating sound-free like a mime artist performing in space . . . until
clang!
Out came the north face of the Eiger. I went home to have a shower and drink 600 litres of water.
The Cath was making breakfast for Lola when I walked through the door. They both ran over and gave me a hug. I told them about Sid, that both he and Clare were doing well, but omitted the bit about giving birth to a mountain through my dick. ‘Are you hungry?’ The Cath asked.
I nodded and wandered off towards the bathroom. ‘Jesus, what a night, mate,’ said Jason after I told him why I was going to be late into the office. I threw the phone onto the bed and stripped on my way into the bathroom. We have one of those bathtub-shower combos so I climbed into the tub like an ancient man and turned on the shower taps.You can imagine the bliss.
As I stood there feeling safe, a little euphoric, but somewhat sore, squeezing shower gel into my hand and thinking about Sid and his mum coming home, the bathtub moaned at me. I dropped the shower gel and looked down. What the fuck? The tub groaned again then suddenly dropped, taking me and the shower curtain on a brief but exciting flight into the basement.
I lay there, still in the bath, the shower curtain twisted around me, smashed plaster and plastic pipes hanging above like giant spaghetti. My head hurt as I looked up at the light-filled hole above me, water pouring down on my face. Like an angel The Cath appeared in the light by the edge of the hole. ‘Oh my god, Paul, Pauli, are you okay?’
‘Yup,’ I replied to the light. ‘Turn off the water, will you, love?’
Slowly and cautiously moving one body part at a time, I got to my feet and realised I was unharmed. Wow, what a ride.
We found out later there was a small leak in the plumbing behind the taps in the wall cavity and over the years it had dripped away on the timber frame that held the bathtub in place. There was no substructure underneath the bath, as there should have been, so when the whole lot let go, it was catastrophic.
The Cath was there with a towel as I emerged, triumphant, from the basement. I called my insurance company and some tradies, and drank 600 litres of water.
TODAY IT’S SATURDAY
and I’m once again stumbling through all the things I take for granted. The Saturday morning grocery shop, a truly horrendous experience, but not for the obvious reasons, like the first time I took Lola to the supermarket and blew all my money on smashed produce and ten packs of jelly, all because I put her in the trolley with the shopping instead of making her sit in the little seat. This time I’m on it; she’s not smashing the eggs or randomly grabbing things off the shelves or sitting on the bread. This time she’s in her seat and taking it all in, her soft, vulnerable brain a sponge for mass-marketing—my new fear.