Cyclogeography (4 page)

Frank worked where he was needed, dodging round the office between the four bike radio channels. With two teams of riders – Bravo and Delta – each divided between the east and the west, London was cleaved into two hemispheres like an enormous brain, the corpus callosum an imaginary line running down Kingsway. Frank was able to keep track of every job and the location of every bike with barely a mistake made. It was a formidable task. There were about forty bicycle couriers at Fleetway, each pushing out twenty or so jobs a day, but Frank rarely forgot the location of any of his riders, remembering dockets from days, weeks, past. Signatures were lodged in his brain as firmly as they were on paper or in the
computer. He wielded his riders like a strategist mapping a battle.

When things went well, the network of jobs throbbing into life, the orbits of his riders coming together as a piece of complicated choreography, you could hear the excitement in his voice. ‘Am I good, am I good?’ he would call out across the airwaves as he described a particularly satisfying rhomboid onto the West End.

Controllers have the bingo-caller’s efficacy, the get-there-before-you-can vocal speed of auctioneers. The jobs themselves go out in code, skeletal details declaimed as call-and-response:

The jobs went out in these Beckettian sentences, skeletal descriptions of the day’s work. The busyness of the day was measured out in the panic of the controllers’ voices, boredom or fatigue or mutiny echoed in riders’ responses.

On an open circuit, when you can hear everyone else speaking, the radio functions as a portal, opening sonic windows across the city. The whine of a police siren asserts itself in the background whilst a rider responds to a call; the ambient chatter of other couriers betrays one who has claimed to have a puncture and is catching a few minutes rest with company. Someone once told me a harrowing story about listening over the radio to a colleague who had been hit by a lorry. After the crash and the silence, a voice announced, ‘I’m here, I’m alive: I’m trapped under an HGV.’

The radio eliminates time and distance, offering a rebuke to the tardy material procession of the city’s other traffic. After a while you come to know the voices of controllers and other riders as intimately as you do your own. Some of them I’m sure I never met, but I invented potted biographies of them based on their accents, on their seeming enthusiasms and their radio manners. Seven-three, a polite and deferential Brazilian who called Frank ‘sir’ and ‘boss’ and never raised his voice; nine-one, an irascible New Zealander who
was always threatening to go home early; six-three, a girl whose name I never learned, who spoke softly and thoughtfully, measuring each word before it was deployed; nine-nine, a verbose Welshman so well-spoken he could easily have been a continuity announcer on Radio Four.

My London was soundtracked by this chorus of disembodied voices floating over the airwaves, tipping each other off about speed traps and traffic snarl-ups: a private pirate station broadcasting its unofficial communiqués across the city. Sometimes I would turn on the radio even when I wasn’t at work and sit listening to the litany of jobs as I wrote, idly imagining the journeys it called forth.

B
icycle couriering is difficult, dangerous work. Couriers are paid for piecework and employed as self-employed subcontractors, meaning there’s no sick pay, no employment protection, no pension scheme. You earn only what you ride for. If you’re injured while working your employers have no obligation to you. Apart from the assistance of the London Courier Emergency Fund – a grass-roots organisation run by couriers that pays out small amounts to riders injured on the job – you’re on your own.

Physically, the work is grindingly difficult. On an average day you’ll cycle sixty to one hundred miles, deliver twenty or so packages, and earn maybe three pounds per package. On a good day you’ll break £100. On a fixed-gear bike like mine, with a gearing of 49/17, that amounts to around 29,000 complete pedal revolutions per day. On an average day you’ll earn 0.003p for
each turn of the cranks. On slow days you often earn far less than minimum wage. You’re largely ignored, if not disdained, by the people you work for. Like other dangerous work it fosters a strong sense of community, an informal support network focused on races, drinking, and listening to interminable stories about bad controlling or those one-off, impossibly lucrative jobs and satisfying runs.

I had a choice, of course, when many people don’t, but for me the sheer joy of being physically tired at the end of a day’s work was a revelation. In
The Soul of London
, Ford Madox Ford described labour in London as divided fairly equally between that of the mind and that of the body. ‘Workers in London,’ he wrote, ‘divide themselves, roughly, into those who sell the labour of their bodies and those who sell their attentions. You see men in the streets digging trenches, pulling stout wires out of square holes in pavements, pecking away among greasy vapours at layers of asphalt, scattering shovelfuls of crushed gravel under the hoofs of slipping horses and under the crunching tyres of wheels. If walls would fall out of offices you would see paler men and women adding up the records of money paid to these others. That, with infinite variations, is work in London.’

Since Ford’s time the balance has altered, and labour in London, as in many post-industrial cities, has become predominantly cerebral or service-based. For me couriering felt like one of the few ways left in the city to work with my body. Through cycling miles and
miles each day I got to know it alongside the city. I learned how much food and water it needed to run smoothly, how it performed in the heat or in the rain. I learned its limits, alongside those of London.

Increasingly, the lives of our bodies have become disciplined, made to conform to the stranglehold of nine-to-five existence. One of the reasons walking has become such a popular topic for writers is that physical exertion is nowadays often isolated from everyday being. Mostly, the needs of our bodies are allowed to announce themselves only at prearranged times: during the regularly scheduled run or gym appointment. In
Wanderlust
Rebecca Solnit argues that people have forgotten about their bodies, forgotten that they are more than mere vehicles for minds, passive vessels to be inhabited by our all-important egos. We have forgotten that our bodies ‘could be adequate to the challenges that face them and a pleasure to use,’ she writes; we ‘perceive and imagine [our] bodies as essentially passive, a treasure or a burden but not a tool for work and travel.’ What Solnit calls the ‘vital body in action’ has been largely misplaced in post-industrial society: lost to a world of digital distraction or annexed to the contained and constraining fields of ‘work’ and ‘play’. A Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world has been replaced with the feeling that we experience reality only through and within a variety of tightly controlled spaces: cars, cubicles, and offices.

Couriering reminded me about the existence of
my body. Daily I felt the delicious burn of muscles, the faintness of pure hunger and sugar crashes – ‘meeting’, as racing cyclists put it, ‘the man with the hammer’ – and the deep pleasure of slaking real thirst. After a year on the road couriering ceased to feel like a temporary job, a stop-gap between university courses and some still unknown career, and became all-consuming. I got sucked in.

For most of the twentieth century the bicycle was explicitly associated with work. The on-yer-bikism of Norman Tebbit, the conservative MP who in the 1980s advised the unemployed to get on their bikes to find work, merely reflected a more deep-seated association between the self-propelled movement of cycling and labour: of pedalling to work
as
work. It was partly for this reason that, at the turn of the century, English socialists seized on the bicycle as a vehicle for political agitation. The
Clarion
, a left wing newspaper founded in 1891, started life as a socialist cycling club, and later its members would deliver the paper by bicycle. In Italy, communists founded a group called the ‘Red Cyclists’ to campaign for ‘cheap bikes for the working classes’, while manufacturers tried to cash in on the socialist revolution of cycling by producing a bicycle tyre branded the ‘Karl Marx’. For the Red Cyclists, writes the historian John Foot, the symbolism was obvious: ‘to pedal was to work. The bike was the “vehicle of the poor” and the “ally of their effort.”’

In the professional peloton of the heroic era of bicycle racing, too, the bicycle represented labour. Professional cyclists still aren’t paid a great deal, especially those who aren’t famous, but before the Second World War a bicycle race represented an opportunity: a chance for poor farm hands to break away from the constraints of their lives. ‘A racing cyclist, at least in the old days,’ writes Foot ‘was a worker: one who did, and was paid a wage based on the races they won, on how well they performed.’ Much like couriering, racing was paid as piecework. In the early years of road cycling, before doping was made illegal, before the trade teams and the sponsored coddling, before the hyper-tactical machinations of the contemporary sport, ‘cyclists were individuals battling against the elements and the limits imposed by their own bodies,’ writes Foot. Racing itself was heavily politicised. For those on the left of the political spectrum – both writers and riders – the peloton was interpreted as a socialist utopia, a field of common endeavour within which racers could help each other out or show solidarity by neutralising the race, or providing aerodynamic cover for their stars. For the right the race represented the triumph of individual exceptionalism.

In Luigi Bartolini’s 1946 novel
Bicycle Thieves,
made into a film in 1948 by Vittorio De Sica, the bicycle becomes a symbol of escape from the poverty of postwar Italy. A poor unemployed man named Antonio is offered a job delivering and putting up posters around Rome. The job stipulates that he must provide his own
bicycle, and so his wife Maria sells her best bed linen to reclaim the bike Antonio has previously pawned. On his first day of work his bicycle is stolen from under his nose and, accompanied by his son Bruno, Antonio embarks on a kind of cyclogeographic tour of Rome’s less salubrious quarters to reclaim it.

The film is a quest narrative. Antonio and Bruno follow strangers through the crowds, they search for parts of his bicycle at Piazza Vittorio market, where dealers spread their deconstructed machines in front of them like piles of fruit. They find a bicycle that they think is Antonio’s and alert a passing policeman, but the serial numbers don’t match. They visit a workingman’s chapel and are forced to endure a sermon before continuing their search. At one point they give up all hope of finding the bike and, drunk with despair, Antonio spends the last of his money on a slap-up lunch in an up-market trattoria. Eventually, desperate to keep the job which was to provide an escape from poverty, Antonio himself becomes a bicycle thief. He is quickly apprehended, but the man whose bicycle he has stolen notices Bruno and, in a moment of compassion, pardons Antonio, who is left to walk home forlornly with his son.
Bicycle Thieves
is about the desperations of poverty, but it is also a meditation on the bicycle as a vehicle for self-determination through work. It’s a film I often thought about as I cycled around the city.

The association of the bicycle with labour during the mid-twentieth century was partly born of its curious hybridity as a machine. Cyclists’ bodies are subdued to their instruments, and riding another person’s bike often feels intensely alien. It is a cliché that the bike, of all tools, can become an extension of the body, but it is nonetheless true for that. After a while on the road you begin to worry about your bike as though it is a part of you. Anxiously you check the small areola of rust surrounding the hole at the bottom of the chromed seat stays; the notch in the headset giving your steering a slight bias; the creak of the wheel caused by a cracked spoke.

Many writers have reflected on the neatness of the Cartesian metaphor of bicycle and rider as body and mind, as dualist parts of a unified whole. At the dawn of the cycling era the strange logic of the bicycle – the way in which cycling creates a prosthetic relation between person and machine – was seized upon in particular by Futurist and modernist writers and artists, invested as they were in the triumph of the mechanical over the mental, or at least, in a future where human inadequacies could be engineered away by the application of reason. For these writers the conceit was obvious: people didn’t ride bicycles, bicycles rode people. The bike was a symbol of Man multiplied by machine.

In one of his Futurist manifestoes F. T. Marinetti associated the bicycle with other emerging technologies, prophesying the deranging stimulants of the mechanical age:

Like Marinetti, the artist Fernand Léger interpreted the act of cycling as the coming together of body and machine, but also as a form of art. ‘A bicycle operates in the realm of light,’ he wrote, ‘it takes control of legs, arms and body, which move on it, by it and under it. Rounded thighs become pistons, which rise or fall, fast or slow.’ The threat to autonomy associated with industrialised labour was prefigured by the threat to the individual will demonstrated by the bicycle.

The French playwright and poet Alfred Jarry, founder of the playfully counter-intuitive discipline of ‘Pataphysics’ – which he defined as ‘the science of imaginary solutions’ – called the bicycle Man’s ‘external skeleton’, and rode a state-of-the-art Clement machine running the impossibly high gear ratio of 36/9, so that his wheels revolved four times for every turn of his pedals.

Jarry saw the bicycle as the epitome of Pataphysical technology. As he rode around Paris he would let off a pair of pistols to deter attacking dogs, and he later scandalised society by wearing his cycling outfit to the
funeral of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. When he died Jarry left an unpaid bill for a bicycle which would contribute to the bankruptcy of his sister. She died soon after.

Cycling, and the image of mechanised hybridity it provided, was central to Jarry’s writing. In his short story ‘The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ he rewrote the passion of the Christ in the breathless high style of newspaper reports of the newly inaugurated bicycle races which were then sweeping France:

Five years before his death, Jarry wrote his last novel,
The Supermale
. In it he described a 10,000-mile race between a group of cyclists and a train, the riders fuelled by a mysterious ‘perpetual motion food’ made up of strychnine and alcohol. One rider dies but is contractually obliged to finish the race. For Jarry bicycle and body formed a self-sustaining system: the legs were massaged by the act of pedalling; the body self-lubricated as sweat gathered between the thighs:

Alfred Jarry riding in Paris. His wheels revolved four times for every turn of his pedals.