She stared at the helmet he was offering. ‘You want me to wear that?’
The whole thing was ludicrous. A motorbike and sidecar dash across country, dodging fallen branches and whole tree trunks, and her in her everyday clothes?
‘Put this on as well.’ Euan stripped off his leather jacket and handed it over. ‘Are we leaving or what?’
Her phone rang again. It was either her mum, Willie or Professor Quinn-Watson, and she didn’t want to be told off by any of them, so she threw the jacket on, zipping it up, before pulling the helmet down over her face. It felt suffocating and she couldn’t see very well through the visor, but Euan held a hand out to help steady her as she clambered onto the bike behind him, sitting pillion. Sachin, very gently, laid the last two garment bags across her lap and gave her a nod.
‘Hold on tight,’ Euan called over his shoulder, and before she had time to change her mind, the tyres were rolling.
‘Wait!’ Clyde yelled out, stopping them dead. ‘Euan, listen hard to me now.’ He spoke urgently. ‘You’ve never ridden Rosie wi’ the sidecar. It’s going to feel totally different.’
Euan slapped his visor up, not happy to hear this. ‘How’d you mean?’
‘Braking, steering, everything will feel different. You can’t lean the bike on a corner, so you’ll have to handlebar steer.’
‘Got it.’
‘Wait! This is very important! When you’re turning on a bend, the sidecar wheel can lift off the ground. Avoid that, no matter what.’
‘Keep wheel on the ground? OK,’ he said, trying to appear blasé, but with the difficulty of what he was about to attempt, and with Peaches at his back, the responsibility was only now sinking in.
‘Stopping distances will be much longer, you’ll need to keep your wits about you in case you need to emergency stop, say, if another branch falls across the road before yi!’
Euan swallowed. ‘Got it. Anticipate problems. Brake early. Is that everything?’
‘No’ quite. The sidecar will pull you to about, and if there’s any camber on the road surface, you can end up in a ditch. God knows, me and your granny found that out the hard way one time we were coming back from a run to Arbroath and?—’
Euan stilled him with a leather gloved hand to his arm. ‘I’ll look after her, I promise.’ He meant Peaches and the bike, and his Granny Rosie too, who Clyde and Euan knew full well would in some way be accompanying them tonight.
Clyde’s heart was swelling with pride, and regret, no doubt, that it wasn’t him riding north on another adventure. He couldn’t speak for the lump at his throat.
The last thing Peaches saw when she glanced behind her in the little mirror was McIntyre and Clyde on the gravel drive, each with an arm raised in surrendering their handiwork, the sidecar now restored to gleaming silvery usefulness and absolutely stuffed deep into its footwell and almost overspilling with the clothes from her collection.
‘The sidecar’s going to hold, right?’ she shouted over the engine as Euan twisted the throttle.
‘We’ll soon find out!’ he shouted, and she could do nothing more than grip on tightly and count down the minutes until she would officially be too late to take part in the showcase her whole life had been building up to.
Leaving Cairn Dhu behind them hadn’t been all that bad. The road was littered with small branches which Euan rode around, and some bins had blown over, spreading litter everywhere, but they met no major obstacles until they were on the high road out of the valley.
Jamie Beaton had been as good as his word and a police outrider accompanied them, making sure they stuck to the speed limit all the way. The first fallen tree they passed was small and already cleared into a roadside ditch.
But approaching the second and largest tree, lying down fully across the road, even Euan gasped. A vast gnarled thing, easily a metre tall on its side, bark splintered everywhere and with broken fragments of smaller branches spilled for many yards across the tarmac.
The officer waved a hand to slow them down, and when it became clear Euan could indeed scramble offroad and down the grassy bank to get past the great crown of the tree, he didn’t waste a second.
‘Lean with me!’ he shouted, and as they left the level surface and bumped over the grass, dodging the river rocks straying above the bank, they both leaned far over to the right, compensating for the weight of the sidecar, the drag of gravity and the slipperiness of the gradient that wanted to pull them down into the water. The sidecar’s wheel splashed through the dark water’s margin and Peaches didn’t know whether to close her eyes or watch in terror as her collection came so close to a soaking, but in an instant they were powering back up the bank. Euan revved the bike hard to get over the cobbled kerb and they both released their held breaths when the bike hit level tarmac again.
They didn’t pass a single vehicle after that, apart from the heavy road-clearing machinery going the other way. The tractor driver flashed his lights at them, probably thinking them crazy. When Euan leant forward over the handlebars, she leaned with him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Perhaps for a moment or two during their cross-country race her thoughts strayed from the showcase and everybody awaiting her arrival, and perhaps she briefly considered shouting, ‘Euan Sparks, I could kiss you!’ over the sound of the air whipping past them and the engine roaring, before she decided against saying any such thing, and instead held on and hoped this wasn’t her big night blown before she’d even set foot on campus.
The Highland University of Art and Design was, as you might expect, cleverly designed to blend in amongst the hills and trees. Euan didn’t know they’d reached their destination until Peaches pointed him down a long road to its car park, hidden beneath an undulating green roof thick with squat sedum and moss.
‘I’ll pull up right by the entrance,’ Euan called from behind his visor, and he felt Peaches’ squeeze of agreement. The whole ride here she’d gripped him with her thighs and, slowly, she’d unclasped her hands and held on around his waist instead. He’d cooled down considerably without his leather jacket but where she touched him, his flesh was alive with warmth.
He’d been sure to avoid the potholes and puddles as best he could, wanting her to enjoy the ride, if that were possible. He tried not to imagine himself cutting up the road like Steve McQueen, the epitome of cool, but it wasn’t easy; his grandad had filled his head with visions of suave heroism.
At one point on the journey, as the highway opened up and he could tell Peaches was looking out at the view, the mountains spread so far in every direction, a person could be forgiven for thinking the earth was composed of nothing but granite peaks, grand skies and scattered ribbons of cloud cut through with blazing pink sunset in the west.
