Still Dad's Bike

The bike came to Owen in eleven boxes and a frame, which was how his father had left it when he died, halfway through a restoration that had already taken six years. It was a 1971 Triumph. Owen's father had bought it at twenty-three, ridden it to his own wedding, ridden it until the gearbox went in 1989, and then wheeled it into the garage and started taking it apart with the intention of putting it back together properly. The intention outlasted him. Owen was not a mechanic. He was a quantity surveyor. But he had the boxes and a manual and a winter, and he started. The frame had rust through it at the rear loop, past saving, and a man on a forum found him another from a scrapyard in Kent. The engine cases were his father's, but the barrels were bored out and new pistons went in, and the crank was reground, and by spring the only original thing in the engine was the block itself and the number stamped on it. The tank was his father's and he kept it, dents and all. The wheels were rebuilt with new rims and spokes on the old hubs. Every cable, every seal, every bearing, every bolt: new. The wiring loom he made himself, from a kit, over four nights, swearing. His uncle Vic came to see it in June. Vic had ridden pillion on it in 1974 and had opinions. "That's not his bike." "It is." "Frame's not his. Engine's mostly not his. That's a new bike with his tank on it." "It's got his cases. His hubs. His tank. His seat." "Seat's recovered." "The base is his." Vic walked round it. He was not being unkind. He was a man who had known the bike when it was one thing and was looking at it now that it was possibly another, and he wanted to be honest about what he saw. "When did it stop being his?" Vic said. "When you put the frame in? Or the pistons?" "It didn't stop." "Then when would it? If you'd replaced the tank as well. The cases. Everything. Same bike?"

Owen didn't have an answer. He'd thought about it, most nights, in the garage with the radio on. There was no part he could point at and say, that's the bike. If Vic took every original piece off and laid them on the bench, they'd be a tank, two hubs, some engine cases, and a seat base. Nobody would call that a Triumph. "I'll tell you what it is," Owen said eventually. "It's the bike he was building. He didn't get to finish it. I finished it. It's the same job, it's just a different pair of hands on the end of it." Vic thought about that. "That's not the same as it being his bike." "No." "But it's something." The bike started on the fourth kick. Vic listened to it for a while with his eyes closed, and then he said, "Sounds like it," which Owen took, and then Vic said, "Sounds like it did before the gearbox went," and Owen took that too. He rode it to the crematorium on Sunday, where there's a bench with his father's name on it, and sat on the bench and looked at the bike, and did not settle the question, and did not need to.