We half ride, half wobble along the wide path that runs along the coastal side of Marine Parade. Its uneven slope slides from the mint green railings atop the ailing Madeira Arches towards the road, where cars and campervans are parked at awkward angles, making progress on two wheels challenging.
As a runner, I have always found the nature of this path difficult, demanding as it does that you lean one way and place most of your weight onto the foot furthest from the road and closer to the sea. As a cyclist, it can feel impossible. Yet for M, everything is new, a shining testament to the possible, a small red steed beneath him, gleaming in the early evening sun.
He has the passion of a child experiencing something magical for the very first time
It’s the first day back at school. I’ve arrived home wild with all this newfound time, with both children now at school and days stretching out in front of me. As soon as I’ve set down my bags, though, M demands we head back out. He knows my bike is outside, at the top of the steps from our basement flat. He has the zeal of a new convert or, more precisely, the passion of a child experiencing something magical for the very first time.
Until a week ago, his bike rides were confined to an indoor sports centre and brief, downhill jaunts in the garden. Yesterday, though, he sussed out how to push off and ride on the flat and now it’s all he can think of. So now we are mobile, riding east, mimicking wild sound waves as the water crashes into the pebbles down below. He chats as he rides, at once effusive in the moment and daydreaming about something else altogether. I slow my pace to match his. He cuts me up constantly and stops to itch his chin, his cheek, his crown, pushing back his helmet so that it slides down his neck.
At a slope where the path drops towards the marina, we dismounts and I teach him how to squeeze his brakes gently as he rides downhill. He caresses them with care, amazed he can slow his progress and ride in a straight line. Beyond us, the sun is dazzling on the horizon, setting sooner now that September is underway. We wheel onto the boardwalk, where walkers allow us passage and coo at M’s manners as he thanks them loudly. This rejuvenated section of a once unloved section of Kemp Town Beach is perhaps my favourite thing about Brighton. The easy walking and riding are one thing. But it’s the rewilding efforts, the planting of marram grass and sea cabbage, the high banks of inaccessible shingle designed to protect them from the attentions of the gales which blow along the English Channel from the wild Atlantic, which have brought life back to a once desolate place. Here there is hope. I feel it in the plants and I see it in M as he rides ahead, humming Super Trooper by Abba (learned during keyboard lessons last term), lost in his own mind, a place that seems to me to be content, at one, at peace with it all.
His tenacity, his unfailing ability to keep going, is the greatest lesson he has taught me
The riding gets more challenging when we emerge onto the green-washed cycle path. A quick lesson on the importance of staying left goes unheeded and so I do my best to guard against carnage as he weaves from side to side, giggling, seemingly amazed by it all. I suggest that we stop by the steps which lead from down here on Madeira Drive back up to Marine Parade. The Victorian era lift which once plied its trade from the dance floor of Concorde 2 to the main road above has been closed for a year, doomed due to its excessive weight, a health hazard for cyclists, wheelchair users and pushchair wielding parents.
Instead, I gather both bikes under one arm and we scale the 64 steps. M stops to call me ‘the strongest person in the world’. He is always full of praise, always ready with a kind and encouraging word. He is his mother’s son in so many ways.
The bike has not come easy to him. There have been months of false starts and great upset as the pedals refuse to play ball. And yet we are here, the end of our first ever ride together, a mile and a half jaunt out and back from our seafront home, the only one he has ever known. We see the water each day, marvel at its swift change from placid to roiling back to placid again. When I explain that at his age I used to see the sea once a year, he laughs. It is as much a part of him as our family. I love that so much. Even if it isn’t forever, that feeling of proximity to the endless and the infinite will always reside in him, in all of us.
His tenacity, his unfailing ability to keep going, is the greatest lesson he has taught me. Here, as the day slips away and his bedtime looms, I know we’ve shared a moment, the same as when we took to the sea on a glorious day four years ago as one lockdown ended and another began. M often tells me to ‘think of now, Daddy, that’s all that matters’. Right now, I can’t think of anywhere else I would rather be, or anyone else I would rather be with.