The bicycle returned

A newly written first-person fictional account of collecting a bicycle after it has been repaired.

I followed the smell of oil into the workshop, already imagining my hands around the familiar blue handlebars. My bicycle had been there for a week after its chain snapped, and I had missed the quick rattle it made whenever I rode over a drain cover.

At first, I walked straight past it. Then I saw my name on the label and stopped. The bent mudguard was straight, but the basket had disappeared. The faded stickers had been scraped from the frame, and a new black bell had replaced the silver one I had rung on every journey since primary school.

“There you are,” said the repairer. “Almost like new.”

He sounded pleased, so I thanked him. I did not say that I had never asked for new. Where the stickers had been, pale patches showed through the blue paint. They looked like little windows opening onto all the rides the repairer knew nothing about: the hill I had finally climbed without stopping, the wet journey home from the library, the summer evening when my cousin had run beside me.

Outside, I pushed down on a pedal. The chain moved smoothly. The brakes responded at once, and when I crossed the first drain cover there was no rattle. I had to admit that the bicycle felt safer and easier to ride, although its silence seemed wrong.

Before I left, the repairer came to the door holding the old silver bell. “Thought you might want this,” he said.

I fastened it beneath the new one. Its ring was thin and slightly uneven, exactly as I remembered. The bicycle was not unchanged, and perhaps it should not have been. But as I rode away, that small familiar sound travelled with me.