Chapter Three – Caught Behind the Coal Yard

Well, you couldn't make it up, could you? After everything that man had done to his wife and children, he eventually discovered that Bike Handle wasn't exactly the faithful little sweetheart he'd apparently imagined.

It happened one afternoon near an old coal yard in Hexthorpe. The husband was walking along when he heard voices coming from behind one of the buildings. He recognised Bike Handle's voice straight away, and when he went round to see what was going on, there she was with his best mate.

His bloody best mate!

I don't know what he expected to find when he went round that corner, but I doubt it was that. There was Bike Handle, carrying on with the very man he'd trusted as a friend. The husband was absolutely furious. He'd left his wife and children for this girl, and now he'd caught her with somebody he knew.

His mate looked as though he'd swallowed a wasp. Bike Handle, however, didn't appear to be particularly embarrassed. She started mouthing off almost immediately, telling the husband not to make such a bloody fuss.

Well, that was asking for trouble.

He wanted to know what the hell she thought she was doing. She started shouting back, swearing and telling him he had no right to question her. The husband reminded her that he'd given up his marriage for her, and she apparently thought that was a perfectly good reason to tell him where to get off.

What a pair of bloody idiots. His best mate was trying to avoid eye contact, the husband was beside himself with rage, and Bike Handle was behaving as though she'd been inconvenienced by somebody asking her an ordinary question.

The row went on for some time, with plenty of shouting and some language that would have made the local publican blush. Eventually Bike Handle decided she'd had enough. She wasn't going to stand there being questioned by anybody, she said, and she wasn't having some man telling her what to do.

I don't think the husband knew whether to hit the wall, kick the coal heap or simply sit down and cry.

Within a day or so, Bike Handle had packed up what little she had and disappeared. Apparently she'd managed to hitch a lift out of Doncaster. Nobody knew who'd picked her up or where she'd gone. There were a few rumours that she'd headed towards Sheffield, and somebody else reckoned she'd gone further south, but nobody had any proof.

And that was the last we ever saw of her.

The husband was left with his marriage in ruins, his friendship finished and two children who'd been abandoned because he'd been daft enough to run away with a girl who couldn't keep herself out of trouble. His wife had to carry on without him, and I always felt desperately sorry for her. She was a decent woman who'd been treated absolutely appallingly by two people who seemed to have very little regard for anybody but themselves.

As for Bike Handle, I can't say anybody in our part of Hexthorpe was particularly upset when she disappeared. We'd had enough of her shouting, swearing, carrying on and interfering in everybody else's business. She'd made herself thoroughly unpopular, and there wasn't a soul who was going to stand in the street crying because she'd gone.

We never did find out what became of her. Perhaps she found another man, perhaps she settled somewhere else, or perhaps she simply carried on as she'd always done. Nobody knew, and after a while nobody particularly cared.

There was one thing that always amused me, though. People would sometimes ask whether anybody remembered what her real name was. Of course we knew it at the time, but after all those years of calling her Bike Handle, it was the nickname that stuck in everybody's memory.

And if you ask me, she earned every bit of that reputation. She'd been a nasty, foul-mouthed, selfish little madam at school, and she'd grown into a woman who thought nothing of interfering in a marriage, helping herself to somebody else's husband and leaving a wife and two children to suffer the consequences. I wouldn't have trusted her as far as I could throw the coalman's horse.

We never saw Bike Handle again, and Hexthorpe was probably all the better for it.