1. THE FIRST FACE OF ALBERT TENCH

Albert starts the story as a 13 year old boy with a new bicycle

The new bike that they bought Albert for Christmas was the real thing. At least, that’s how he described it to Miranda when he saw her by the swings in the park and she was demonstrating the beautiful perfection of her expensive new mini dress by lifting the hem waist high and showing him her knickers, a theatrical movement which also exposed her brand new wrist watch, which he found considerably more interesting.

Albert was only thirteen and had yet to develop a proper fascination with female underwear, though he referred to Miranda as his girlfriend whenever the subject of who she was came up. And he did like her, very much because they had quite a lot in common. For starters they lived on the same street in the same town and their parents were “seeing” each other in that his mum (a widow despite her being only thirty) was tentatively being courted by her father, who had never had any luck with women on account of his bullish nature, and was single again.

So his Christmas bicycle was the real deal and he loved it despite the fact that it had more gears than he could get his head around and those drop handlebars that made him feel he might be permanently falling off it.

“That’s pretty,” he said of her mini dress, and “it suits you,” he added to prove that he’d looked at it properly whilst doing his best not to notice her knickers. Albert was a decent boy.

“What are you going to do?” asked Miranda. It was Christmas day and the two had met up as soon as the excitement of opening presents in their respective homes was over and done with and he could test-ride his new bicycle whilst she could entice the neighbourhood with her dress.

“I’m going for a ride, of course,” he said, “you’ve got a bike. Do you want to come along?”

“Where to?” she asked, “I’m not go far,” she added cautiously, “it being Christmas and dad trying to cook a Christmas dinner!”

“Dads are as good at cooking as mums are,” said Albert, defending a man he didn’t particularly like.

“Not my dad,” retorted Miranda. “I’ll go and wrap up warm if you’ve seen enough of my new mini, and fetch my bike, then. Let’s go down the trail.”

“Okay,” agreed Albert.

The trail was an ancient trodden way that led behind the estate where the two teenagers lived and wandered in a fairly straight line towards the site where there had once been a colliery and now was a small museum dedicated to coal mining. On one side were open fields and on the other a low wall that separated the trail from a barely-used road.

It being Christmas day, it would be surprising if there was anyone else going that way, which made it an excellent path for a novice cyclist like Albert. It wasn’t that he couldn’t ride a bike, just that his last one had been junk when he got it and hadn’t lasted long enough to give him total confidence in the saddle.

So Miranda took her new mini dress and pristine knickers back home and dressed in something warmer whilst Albert tried to do wheelies outside her gate. He failed.

Then Miranda reappeared, this time in jeans and a thick woolly jumper, and her dad bullishly reminded her what he was doing.

“If you’re late back you’ll know all about it,” he threatened.

“I won’t be,” she assured him, “not now I’ve got a new watch.”

And the two set off down towards the Trail.

“Do you love me, Albert?” asked Miranda out of the blue as they negotiated its unmade surface, a question that made him wobble alarmingly and almost fall off.

“You know I do,” he replied, although in truth he wasn’t sure, himself and was totally ignorant of such words as love.

“And I love you,” she assured him. “Do you think your mum and my dad will… you know, get if off together?”

He thought for a second, and “I dunno,” he replied.

In truth he hoped not. His mum was all right and probably even pretty in a mum sort of way, but Miranda’s dad was scary. He was big, liked wrestling in the ring down the town hall so that he could hurt people, and was famous for his capacity when it came to beer drinking. Not the right man for his mum at all.

“I hope they do,” laughed Miranda, peddling in front of him and zooming ahead, “then we’ll be able to see more of each other. We might even end up living in the same house. Think of that! It’d be fun!”

Albert rather hoped not but didn’t like to admit to his reservations.

“We’d be like brother and sister,” he said.

“Not quite like brother and sister,” she called back, “in fact, not much like brother and sister at all.”

He knew what she was getting at, and it scared him. He knew his own ignorance when it came to the sort of thing she was indirectly referring to and he was perfectly happy not knowing stuff like love and girls.

“Brother and sister would be nice,” he mumbled quietly, hoping she wouldn’t hear him.

“I might even let you come into my bedroom,” she said, slowing down so that he could catch her up. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you Albert? When it’s all rainy or snowy outside and there’s not much to do you’d be able to pop into my bedroom...”

“Or you pop into mine,” he contributed, thinking that way round was less pro-active.

“And we’d be able to talk,” she concluded with a big wink that opened up her personal definition of the word talk to include a great deal that wasn’t talking.

“That’s if my mum and your dad get together,” he muttered.

“And I bet they do! I really and truly bet they do!” laughed Miranda, and the whole idea of his precious mum getting together with her ebullient and rather bullying dad was enough to make Albert wobble on bis new bike, a wobble that got somehow amplified by the unfamiliar handlebars that he was trying to steer it by, and before he could say anything as impersonal as Jack Robinson he was totally out of control on a downward slope where the surface had got broken and rugged, and then he hit a large stone and suddenly was flying through the air, quite unexpectedly, before being thrown head first over a low wall and landing with a gut-wrenching and totally agonizing thump on an adjacent road just as a huge farm tractor came trundling along.

Yes, it was trundling, quite slowly because the road it was on was barely adequate for tractors this huge, but that didn’t stop it being heavy as its front near-side wheel made a truly thorough job of crushing Albert’s head unnaturally flat.

And that was all Albert Tench knew on that particular day, until he woke up lying in a hospital bed and was being urged to push and push again by a smiling nurse and as a pain he didn’t recognise or want to acknowledge shot through his lower body, and he somehow pushed.

“Come on, Caron!” urged a man he didn’t recognise but who was holding his hand with too much affection for his own good, “one more push might do it!”

© Peter Rogerson 01.05.19