Girl vs bike

Some wobbly business

They say you never forget how to ride a bike, but that’s not true.

I had the indignity to be the last of everyone around me to learn as a kid, only to go through it again as an adult. To be fair to my little wobbly self, I didn’t get much practice time. My parents didn’t like me playing outside on our busy city street, and our time at the beach every summer was always too short – my dad not exactly delighted by the basic components of coastal life either: sun, heat, sand, people. But it was a freer and safer time. A time to watch the five-year-olds all but do stunts on their bikes, while I, still in training wheels, held on for dear life.

The summer I turned eight, my oldest cousin, God knows why, made it his mission to teach me to ride his bike. Not my own. His bike, a big kid bike, no training wheels in sight. In the wide, hazy screen of my memory, those days play out as just about short of heroic: every day we laboured, morning and afternoon, under Brazil’s scorching sun and tropical rain, bravely resisting the weather as well as the call of friends and neighbours to just go do something else already. My cousin, infinitely kind and patient, held the back of the saddle up and down the same stretch of sandy sidewalk in front of our grandfather’s house, letting go a little longer each time, until eventually – finally – I could ride in a straight line on my own.

We summoned the family to witness the miracle. I would start from a side street and turn the corner, victorious, in front of everyone. Ta-da! I wish. At the last minute my cousin’s younger sister insisted I take her bike instead. Not yet knowing to say shove it, I took it.

Unfortunately for my face, I didn’t go far before landing on it. Even worse for my dignity, it’d been far enough for everyone to, indeed, witness. In my mum’s version, recently told in fits of laughter, I actually rode straight into a ditch. Beaming with pride, I had lifted an arm to wave.

With no memory of this, I spent decades stuck in my eight-year-old mind, thinking that I should have known better than to take that cousin’s bike, should have figured it would be jinxed. Never mind I hadn’t actually practiced turning a corner. This was, after all, the cousin who’d tried to kill me the previous summer.

During a silly game of crouching our way under a boat’s propeller in our grandfather’s yard, she kicked up sand into my face. Vision impaired, I got up too soon and hit my head on the blade. When my mum heard the screams, she thought it was just a cousins’ squabble, then saw the blood running down my face. 

That was it for that holiday, and a real bummer for my back-to-school style, which had to account for elaborate combovers to hide the shaved patch of hair where the stitches had been.

And now, another summer ruined, my face swollen, my confidence shrivelled. It would be years until I asked my parents for another bike, which I only rode once, around a basketball court, then more than another decade before I was forced to reckon with this vehicle again.

It happened in Berlin. I was twenty-five, meeting friends there for a long weekend. They’d arrived the day before and I watched one by one return from Berghain in different states at different times. Our accommodation was not so much a hotel, or even a hostel, but a sort of conceptual space, with rooms individually “decorated” by different artists. It had an in-house BDSM club, but no hot water. One of the floors exuded such haunted house vibes that I didn’t dare go up alone. It was all terribly exciting.

Except for the bikes. They had all rented bikes. I tried to convince them it was fine, I’d just take the metro. They tried to convince me to give one of their bikes a go. All seven of us tried to convince a German guy that yes, I was a grown person, and no, it did not make any sense, but I needed a teen bike.

The one German was no match for all these Brazilians, one of them determined to be as close to the ground as possible. Forty minutes and seventeen years later, I had in my hands, in Berlin, a bike the same size as my cousin’s back in Brazil. 

Off we went, them cruising under the Berlin sun on their wheeled horses, me struggling to keep up on my pony. I pedalled into, over and against parked cars and vans, multiple lamp and barrier posts and a few people. The only pair of shoes I’d brought were little plastic Melissas that kept falling off as I pedalled and had to be attached to my feet with electrical tape. But keep up I did. And I began to understand the appeal, the romance and freedom of it all.

The following week in London I bought myself a Raleigh Twenty, a tiny bike for, erm, £20, and rode it from home to work, three blocks away, every day until I moved back to Brazil. It was all the freedom and romance I could manage on my own.

By the time I yo-yoed back to London to be with Hugo, he’d gotten into cycling himself and slowly upgraded me from bike to bike, ever further from the ground. He’d build up old frames we picked together helped me decorate them, meticulously cutting up vinyl and stickers to make them more fully me. 

While I truly enjoyed it, cycled often around the neighbourhood and even went on some day rides with Hugo, I still sometimes – somehow – lost balance and crashed. On my own too. Turn a corner, bam, down, bloody knees. And my hands not once left the handlebars. The only time I fell through no fault of my own was when I got doored by a parked moron.

The thing is, I am not a clumsy person. I don’t go around knocking things over left and right. I do great on the balance poses at yoga. As a kid, I played on my school’s volleyball team, and as a teen I learned aerial silks in circus school. I can still perform an ok cartwheel. Why cycling proficiency eludes me is quite simply a mystery.

So yeah, not the most obvious candidate for a transcontinental bike ride. Enters the tandem.

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