Cyclogeography (5 page)

Bound by metal rods to their machines, the fiveman crew cycle from Paris to Asia paced by flying machines, reaching speeds of 300 kilometres an hour.
The Supermale
pointed towards a disturbing future in which the body would be utterly dehumanised by the bicycle, enslaved by the machines that had once promised freedom.

Samuel Beckett too was obsessed with the deranged
metaphysics of cycling, with the philosophical lessons that could be learnt from the saddle. According to the critic Hugh Kenner, Godot himself was an avatar for ‘Monsieur Godeau’, a French national champion cyclist who typified ‘Cartesian man in excelsis’. For Beckett the bicycle represented the triumph of what Kenner calls ‘the simple machines’ – lever, pulley, gear – over man in a state of nature:

Many of Beckett’s characters are dependent on the material crutch of their bicycles for support. In
More Pricks than Kicks
, Belacqua Shuah forgoes his human companion when he spots a bicycle lying in a field, before stealing it, lying down in the grass with it, and attempting to make love to it. When Molloy is separated from his bicycle he breaks down, starts staggering around in circles and eventually becomes unable to walk, so pulls himself along on his belly using his crutches before rolling into a ditch. In
Watt
, the
eponymous character dreams of bicycles as he enters the house of Knott. Beckett’s bikes, like Jarry’s, are often sinister objects. In
Mercier and Camier
he wrote ‘the bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.’ His prose evokes the bicycle at the level of the sentence too, filled as it is with its cyclical rhythms: those emergent, flowing sentences animated by short-term repetitions: a ratchet-prose ramping up momentum and significance with each turn of the cranks.

Beckett’s fellow Irish author Flann O’Brien was an equally visionary cyclist-mystic. In the cyclical hell of
The Third Policeman
he documented the curious psycho-sexual relationship that could develop between people and bicycles from within the confines of a profoundly strange detective novel. According to O’Brien’s ‘Atomic Theory’, over time cyclists begin to merge with their machines due to the exchange of atoms between the two. The unnamed narrator of
The Third Policeman
communes with his bike, becoming one with it as they traverse the bad roads of the purgatorial Parish:

In O’Brien’s novel the bicycle is given volition, becoming a character in its own right. With his ‘Atomic Theory’ O’Brien argued (with the pub-bore’s grasp of particle physics) that the constant exchange of atoms between Man and bicycle would eventually affect the psychology of each. And the process wasn’t just one way. Not only do bikes in
The Third Policeman
become endowed with humanity, humanity takes on a latent bicyclosity. Cyclists begin to sleep in corridors propped up against walls on one elbow. At rest they stand with one foot on the curb and one in the gutter. Bicycles begin to steal from pantries: crumbs and tyre marks betraying this nocturnal activity. There are hints of more sinister activity, of bicycle rapes and murders. ‘Of course there are other things connected with ladies and ladies’ bicycles that I will mention to you separately some time,’ reports Sergeant Pluck, the friendliest
of the three titular policemen, ‘but the man-charged bicycle is a phenomenon of great charm and intensity and a very dangerous article.’

I wanted to talk to someone about the long-term effects of couriering, about what it felt like to do the job for a decade or more, to think about it not as a stop-gap but as a career, or a calling of some kind. I wanted to know what couriers do when they retire. And so I sought out someone who’d been on the road for a while and got out without succumbing to the dark predictions of O’Brien’s Atomic Theory of cycling.

‘Buffalo’ Bill Chidley is a messengers’ messenger. He started working as a courier in the early ’80s, ‘when you could make real money on the road’, and when a fledgling courier sub-culture – all dreadlocks, tattoos, and tiny cycling hats – was beginning to emerge. The bicycle courier became a recognisable social type in the ’80s, Bill recalls, immortalised in the children’s TV show
Streetwise
and then, later, as ‘Tyres’, the rave-haunted courier in the sitcom
Spaced
. Bill retired after a decade in the saddle, and now works as a controller and edits
Moving Target,
a bicycle messenger fanzine. He still looks like a courier. Keys jangle from his belt. He wears a huge bag, jeans rolled at the ankle and clip-in cycling shoes. Journalists seek him out for comment on the London cycling scene. Couriers doff their caps as he passes them in the street. I knew him
as a controller, and met up with him to ask about the origins of London bicycle couriering, and about what happens when you give up the job.

We met in a pub in Islington filled with a few couriers and controllers reminiscing about their time on the road. Most of them said they had become controllers because they’d been couriers and didn’t know what to do when their knees gave out, or when the work began to feel too mind-numbingly futile to continue. One of the older riders drinking with them, Mike, told me he’d recently given up couriering because he was waiting for an operation on his arthritic knees. He missed the job, he said, but was keeping himself busy as a dog walker, trying to work out what to do next. He said he’d probably get back in the saddle once he’d had the operation. He couldn’t think of what else to do.

Like most controllers, Bill talks with fondness and nostalgia about the job. He missed the money, the freedom, and the fact that as a courier you’re paid to ride your bike for a living. Most of all he missed the City, he told me, ‘I hate the City police, but I love the City.’ He misses knowing London in that intimate way that is the privilege of the courier. He knew it these days on screen, or from the pages of the
A–Z
. ‘I still reckon that, apart from the people who are actually doing the Knowledge, couriers know the city best,’ he said.

The first recognisable bicycle courier companies in London emerged in the ’80s, Bill told me. Before that minicab companies touted for whatever business
there was, and the industry was mainly controlled by gangsters. ‘You get a lot of talk about the cab wars in the ’70s,’ Bill said, ‘where cab drivers from different firms fought for business. I heard talk of people going over and taking shotguns to taxi ranks. There used to be a company that trained couriers, and they traced the birth of modern couriers to the postal strike of ’74. But black cabs were being used to move stuff around before then. They talk about soldiers and prostitutes as the oldest jobs. I would put messengers before them.’

I asked him if working conditions had got worse since he first started the job, if couriers earn less money these days. He said they had and they do. ‘It’s not like when I was on the road, in the ’80s. Then
everything
needed to be sent physically. We were delivering tapes to radio stations, to TV stations. Display ad copy to Fleet Street.’ When I asked him why he thinks couriers have managed to cling on against a backdrop of technological change he stressed the human component of the business. ‘It’s not so much that we’re quicker than the internet’, Bill said, ‘there’s also a question of security. If you don’t actually have a physical private cable and you have something sensitive to send across town you need to use a courier. When they were filming
Lord of the Rings
I heard they had a private cable that came out at Pinewood. If they needed to do something with it in Soho, they weren’t going to send that over the Internet. They had a private cable, hard-wired
in. Nowadays we’re moving hard drives around too. When they cut it really fine, then we end up moving the hard drives to the cinemas to screen the films.’

Bill’s retired to the office now, away from the wind and the rain, from the weather and the city. He makes his money sending other riders to jobs. ‘What do you make on us? Double?’ I asked him. ‘No, generally not. If we’ve got a vanilla job, where there’s no discount, then we’re making double, yeah. But there are so few of them. As a courier you’re just above cleaners and just below security in the pecking order. We’re an office service, so we’ll tender. We’ll go in and the opening gambit of our salespeople will be “Here are our prices, and today we’re offering ten per cent off.” Everything is negotiable, but the clients have to ask us first. Desperate companies drive the prices down for everyone. “Whatever they’re doing it for we’ll do it for less.”’

We spoke about knowing London, about the uniqueness of the city experienced from the saddle. ‘I learned London, more or less, from the tube map,’ Bill said. ‘You’ve got all these lines, and all this blank space in between. You’ve got this white space, and on a bike you fill in the gaps. I was born in London. But it’s only when you look at the map, and you can see the railway lines, the river, that you realise how it all works. If you take somewhere like Fulham, it’s actually an island. You’ve got the A4 across the top; you’ve got the river, and then these developments. Planning is supposed to make the city legible, but it doesn’t.’ As a controller you
only really get to know the places in which your clients are based, he said. ‘Some guys have been on the road for ten years and still only know Soho. Riders from my company used to have this reputation: if someone saw you east of Kingsway they’d say “The West End’s that way, are you lost or something?”’

Now Bill lives through his maps, on the screen and through the radio. ‘If I actually go out now and ride around, I get lost. As a courier I got bored riding round in London because by the end I couldn’t get lost; you know where everything is. I went through a phase where I deliberately tried to get lost, because London’s so big that the idea of knowing where you are all the time is so overwhelming. But when you arrive at a point where you can’t get lost it becomes boring. Now I go out and the physical structure of the city has changed quite a bit. So it’s become interesting again. But I still think that, even though I’ve been off the road twelve years, my knowledge is better now. I’m constantly looking at a map. Always looking at a map.’

Couriering was attractive to me, as it was to Bill, because it was easy to know you weren’t exploiting anyone when you were the one being exploited. The market place is brutally efficient. Unionisation has proved almost impossible in an industry so dependent on migrant labour. Whole fleets are sacked and replaced overnight. ‘There were several attempts to unionise in the ’80s,’ Bill said, ‘but you could never push it over the line. Partly because there was always this
kind of “we don’t need a union” feeling. People were like “we’re professional couriers”, but now they’re on minimum wage. The companies have managed to pit all the couriers against each other. As a controller I see the other side of it. If I can’t cover a job I’m fucked. It only works if I can persuade you to do the job – come on, you know, do this for me. What I need is for everyone to help each other and trust that it’ll work out.’

I asked Bill if he missed the work. ‘Yeah, every day. What I miss is being outside. I ride to work and then I sit indoors. What I always miss is the sky. That’s what I would be constantly looking at. You’re always looking at it and asking is it going to rain? That’s what I miss the most. Mostly London’s weather is mediocre, but it changes. Don’t like the weather now? Just wait half an hour. A new front will roll in.’

Finally we talked about leaving the job, about how to get out. It seems tricky for many. Maybe couriering makes you sad or maybe it attracts sad people to it – the endorphins generated by exercise providing a form of subtle self-medication – but it’s true that many couriers have a touch of melancholia about them. Despite the dangers, in the seven years since I first began riding a bike for a living in London I have known more couriers to have committed suicide than to have died on the road. The isolation of the job can exacerbate despair and depression. The lack of structure, each day drifting into the next, becoming a never-ending cycle with no apparent way out, eats away at you after a while.
Career-couriers can easily succumb to the repetitiveness. Denied the enforced daily contact of office work, you can easily slip through the social bonds of the road to exist in a solipsistic vacuum. Then you become an eternal observer, your only social interaction coming from the brief and cursory points of contact with people at pick up and delivery, and the disembodied presence of the controller on the radio. It is easy to lose touch with things.