Spooky Mouse

CHAPTER 49

Spooky Mouse

Early 80s

I had a friend called Mouse.

I never knew his real birth name, if he must have had one, but it was never used, he was known as mouse and that is what everyone called him, he seemed happy with it.

He was a small guy with long straight dark brown hair that hung down over his shoulders, he looked like a typical biker from the early 80s with a black leather jacket that had some miles on it and a denim cut off with various cloth and small metal badges placed randomly on the front, he also wore blue denim jeans that looked as if they had never been washed, sewn on both legs were two beer clothes, the type you would see on the bar counter in a pub to soak up any spillages, many bikers back in the day had this kind of additions to their jeans, it’s just what we did back then.

Mouse was around my height maybe an inch shorter and I'm shorter than the average human so i'm told, and he was a little lighter than me in weight with a slight build, hence the nickname mouse, obviously because he was as small as one.

He hailed from the Rhondda Valley and was one of the Rhondda boys that I knew from the Knights Arms in Porthcawl, his ride was a Suzuki T-500 two-stroke twin.

On one wet day up in the Rhondda Valley, mouse dropped his Suzuki while overtaking a car and tragically died at the accident spot.

And that I thought would have been the end of Mouse’s story, but strangely the story involving myself and one of the Rhondda boys did not end there.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but memories do play tricks and energy never dies, it just transforms into something else, Albert Einstein’s theory not mine, maybe the energy transformed into something like a visual memory that is triggered by a sound or an odour or possibly a place, that is how I explain grey dancing shadows in the twilight.

( Photo 1 ) . Suzuki T-500, exactly the same colour and type of bike mouse rode, I’m sorry to say, I do not have any photos of Mouse.

Mouse had been dead for almost a year, you never forget your dead friends even if you do not think about them very often, they are always there at the back of your mind, tucked away in your memories until something triggers the memory.

This spooky event that happened to me was around 1983 around a year after mouse had gone to the great bike rally in the sky.

I was walking up Nolton street in Bridgend town with a couple of my friends, we had been down town for a wander, just to have a look around and a couple of drinks in whatever pub we decided to go in, this was something we did quiet regularly when we had nothing planned for the weekend, we were heading back up town, myself and Wobble and Big Roy had been in the York pub for a couple of Saturday morning pints, we were approaching the traffic lights at the top of Nolton street just alongside the Hen Castell pub ( Old Castle ).

I heard a bike behind us coming up the road, I automatically turned around to see who it was riding the bike.

I recognised the type of bike immediately, it was the same type of bike that Mouse used to ride, the only other bike that was around Bridgend that looked and sounded similar was Tony Dog’s Suzuki 500 which was the same model of bike.

I was a little puzzled at first as I watched the bike and rider ride past, I turned to Wobble and Roy and said that looks like mouse, they did not take much notice of me, they were talking to each other and with the noise of all the other traffic they did not hear me at first, and there was nothing unusual of a bike passing us on this road after all we were close to two busy bikes shops, both shops are sighted near the traffic lights, there were bikes everywhere, so it was nothing unusual to see a bike being ridden up on this road.

I could not believe it, the rider was the spitting image of Mouse, same jacket, same helmet, same bike.

He always wore a Matt black open face helmet with a red German Maltese type cross on both sides.

The rider didn’t stop at the lights and rode straight through, the lights were green, that was something that very rarely happen to me, the lights always seemed to be on red when I approached them.

I know you will say it could have been anyone that looked similar to mouse, but I would swear even today that it was mouse riding that bike.

I am 100 % certain it was him, even thou I knew he had been dead for around a year.

A few days later with this experience still on my mind, I phoned a friend called Yanto, seeing the bike was playing on my mind big time, I was convinced it was mouse.

Yanto lived in the Rhondda valley and mouse was one of Yanto friends that he rode with, he knew mouse better than i did. Yanto was from same valley where Mouse was from.

The Rhondda valley is a big place, they lived in two separate villages, around four miles apart from each other.

I told yanto about what I think I saw in Bridgend.

To my surprise he told me a similar story, he said he also thought he had seen mouse riding in Treorchy the previous week.

He just put it down to someone that may have looked like him, but even saying that he had doubts, but he too was positive it was him.

He also told me that Mouse’s bike had been scrapped off after the accident, Mouse’s father did not want anyone else riding the bike.

I’m not really explaining the spookiness of the sighting, but try and put yourself in my position, if you have known someone for a few years, you tend to remember little things about them that would help you spot them in a crowd of similar looking people, people are unique, we are all different.

Don’t get me wrong anyone can make a mistake, lots of things can remind you of someone else, as in this case, the bike itself, the way people sit on bike, we all have certain comfortable positions we prefer when we ride, The sound of the bike, so many possible reason to make a mistaken identity.

And I had been out drinking with Wobble and Big Roy, and when I say we popped out to the pub for a couple of pints, a couple of pints doesn’t necessarily mean two in this case.

But saying all that, the end result in my opinion, the rider on the T-500 on that day in 1983 riding up Nolton Street was Mouse.

I can't explain it, but to my dying day, I will believe it was Mouse going for one last ride following a route down from the mountains of the Rhondda valley to the coast.

Strangely, the last time I had seen him alive was when he was parked up outside Two Wheels Services with some of the other Rhondda bikers, this was literary a few yards away from when I seen him ride past a year or so later.

( Photo 2 ) . The Rhondda valley, the home valley of Mouse.