Six weeks into the job, Marlon had his first crash, on Oxford Street. 

     A momentary lack of attention to the road, and smack – he collided with a woman stepping from the kerb into the fast-moving river of cars, buses and taxis.

     They both hit the tarmac simultaneously; the woman shrieking in surprise.

     Marlon’s bike came down heavily on top of him. Seconds later, he saw a bus, heading straight for his head. This is not good, he remembered thinking, this is not good at all, until he realised he might have to do something about the situation.

     Without looking to see whether the woman was still in the road, he dragged himself, his machine, and his spilled courier sack swiftly onto the kerb, just before the huge wheels hissed by.

     Then he saw she was sitting safely on the pavement; her nose bleeding, surrounded by a crowd of concerned onlookers. She turned and spotted him.

     ‘I’m so sorry, really I am,’ she babbled, as he dusted himself down. ‘It was my fault! I’m so stupid! I’m late for an interview. I was looking the wrong way . . .’

     She was younger than Marlon expected; pretty, very smartly dressed; not much older than him.

     Shaken and relieved, he managed: ‘You okay?’

     ‘I’ll live!’ she laughed, wiping the blood from her nose onto the back of her hand. One of the crowd helped her to her feet. ‘How about you?’

     There was a sharp pain in his left hand from where the bike had crushed it. He looked down. His thumb was turning black. 

     ‘I think I’ll live too . . .’

     For a moment he thought they might even swap numbers. Instead, she said awkwardly, ‘At least I’ve got an excuse for being late now . . .’

     ‘Hey,’ Marlon offered, raising his hand. ‘Good luck – ’ But she was off into the crowd, refusing all help, while he was left to limp to his next pick-up.

     Lying in the black waters of his bath later that evening, he saw his crushed thumb now bore an angry blood blister, almost the size of a penny. He’d never seen such an evil thing, except perhaps for the bruises his stepfather used to leave on him and his mother. He was still shaken up. More than anything, his confidence was dented. He didn’t want to end up dead under the wheels of an HGV. For the first time he thought seriously about investing in a crash helmet. But none of the other couriers wore one – it was part of the bravado of the job. He’d only spotted a helmet once, on a rare female rider, who also wore a sinister surgical mask against the City smog.

     Letting the water out of the bath by pulling the plug with his toe, he asked himself how long he would last in the saddle. It was summer now, but how would he fare in the rain and snow? Over his radio earlier, he’d heard his controller joke that you’re not a real courier until you’ve done your first winter. He didn’t fancy his chances. He was drifting, he knew. The problem was that he had no clear goals, no real ambitions, expect to live life on his own terms. But he didn’t want to die in the attempt.

From that moment onwards, his day always began with a tightening in the pit of his stomach. The world was out there, and might do him damage. For the best part of ten hours, he would be on two wheels, without a crash-helmet, and there was plenty London could inflict in that time. Hadn’t it done its worst to two of his fellow cycle couriers; colleagues he admittedly only knew by their call-signs? Tango 23 and Alpha 16 had been mangled on the roads of the City only the week before. He was terrified that he might be next. 

     But Marlon was nineteen, new to London, and danger still held a kind of challenge, as well as fear. A glamour, even. To have faced down adversity was headily attractive. He could hear himself boasting about the dangers he had passed to future girlfriends (he was lamentably single at the time). He was still so young, he told himself, a mere teenager.

     It was the late 1980s, that decade of childish exuberance; the Golden Age of the cycle courier, as people would tell him decades later. Back then, he felt his youth as a kind of sap that powered his system – a fuel he would top up with a pint of milk straight from the fridge every morning, before flinging the bandolier of his bag and radio over his shoulders, pulling on his fingerless gloves, and hauling the chrome frame of his Eddy Merckx racing bike down onto the sunny street. Time was on his side. He might not live forever, but he knew he had many years left, all being well. His life stretched ahead, like the empty perspective of the Harrow Road on a June morning. He was just starting the world – badly, perhaps, but he was certain there was more road ahead than behind.

     He hadn’t planned on ending up as a courier. In fact, he hadn’t planned on anything much when he’d left his hometown of Bedfordshire that May and headed to the Smoke. Escape had been his only goal – escape from an evil family situation, a violent stepfather, and a nowheresville that his friends had all deserted for university. Though he’d lived on his own for the previous year, in a cramped bedsit near the station, too much had happened in too short a time for him to stay still. He’d flunked his A-levels, left the band he’d been playing bass with, and split from the girl who’d taken his virginity. He’d been free-floating, unemployed, spending his dole on drinking in the town’s pubs with others who life had left behind. With nothing to hold him, he’d found himself another bedsit in Kensal Rise, west London (dirty, cheap, far from the centre), and left town without even telling his mother, taking the train with his bike and a hockey bag containing all his belongings. 

     He’d got himself a job on a building site from the back of the Evening Standard, where he’d lasted precisely a week. Then he’d spotted an advert looking for cycle messengers. Earn over £300 a week, it had promised. He’d visited the company base in Kensal Rise, where his controller had taken him on without even asking for qualifications. The man had merely checked he possessed two arms and legs, inspected his bike, handed him a radio and a branded courier sack, and explained the jargon (POB meant Parcel On Board, Empty meant you’d delivered). Then informed him of the tax situation (Marlon would effectively be self-employed, with no rights or paid holiday), and told him to show up on Monday ‘bright and early.’

     A month into the job, he’d never known such exhaustion. A solid ache that felled his body after his nine o’clock bath, to the stunned dawn awakenings that returned him to the day and all its potential dangers. Every morning, he felt as if he were descending into a pool – a pool of motion, out of which he only climbed when he dragged the frame of the machine up the three flights of stairs to the corridor outside his room (the hallway being too open to theft to leave it there). Though his legs were strong from years of pedalling around Bedfordshire country lanes, largely to avoid the monstrous man his mother had married after divorcing his father, he feared his hands were too delicate and finely boned for either the building site or a bike designed to win the Tour de France.

     Amazingly, he’d had the machine for almost ten years. It had been a ‘guilt present’ from his mother on his tenth birthday after his parents split up. It was a beautiful bike, magenta blue and silver, with turquoise webbing on the handlebars. Too big for him at first, but he’d grown into it. A powerful, sleek machine, surprisingly light; ideal for the endless weaving between buses, taxis and pedestrians that now filled his days. At the time, mountain bikes were in vogue, their cross-handlebars a handicap in getting through stationary traffic. Marlon often felt his slightly uncool racing bike gave him the edge over the dreadlocked powerhouses in their day-glo cyclewear who jumped lights, rode the pavement, and barrelled viciously the wrong way down one-way streets. He was silently making up time with his drop-handlebars. And it was all about time, the job. About how many parcels you could physically deliver in a day, which in turn, depended whether the controller favoured you. At first, the superhuman strength required to make fifty quid by the end of any given week evaded him. To earn £300 you must have to work day and night and possess thighs of steel. It took a while to realise that jobs were paid by distance. So the motorcycle boys whom he always saw nonchalantly standing by their bikes on Hanover Square were not slacking, but waiting for a job that took them to Leicester and back, thus making their day’s cash in a single hop. They didn’t have to fling themselves around town like so many bees in a hive.

     And a confusing hive, too, at least to begin with. Marlon had only been to London a handful of times before, and the geography of the city was a mystery. How it all joined up, how it began its endless sprawl along the four points of the compass, was something he felt he might never negotiate. In his courier bag, along with two cycle repair kits, spare spokes, and a bottle of Lucozade, was his mini-AZ – his third, after its predecessors had broken along their spines, their pages falling to the pavement, usually just as his controller sent him to an obscure street off Berkley Square, or an urgent job over in Blackfriars.  This A-Z, his bible, was now covered in sticky-backed plastic, its pages folded over at the crucial large-scale plans in the back. He was only now learning how to get from Hatton Garden to Carlos Place in Mayfair, or how the streets of Soho joined up, or the sequence of the bridges. Knowing the one-way systems, the short-cuts, the correct lane to stay in so you could peel off down to Sloane Square without going under a tourist bus, was crucial. The first time he’d winged his way around Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park Corner had been terrifying. Black cabs were the worst: they hated the couriers, and the feeling was mutual. U-turning, cutting you up, scowling behind their meters, they knew two wheels had the advantage over four, and did everything they could short of killing you to defeat you in your purpose.

     But gradually, the Knowledge became second nature. Marlon could take a parcel from the mail-room of an office on Paternoster Square and be over to Long Acre in ten minutes, without even knowing how he did it. Only when he was able to do this, did he feel parity with London’s seasoned couriers; those BMX cowboys, with their granite calves and weathered faces, their mirror shades and double-drinking cups with crossed-straws mounted on the handlebars. He hadn’t exchanged a word with any of these characters, even when they had impatiently drawn up next to him at lights, or stopped to eat sandwiches on the same bench in Russell Square. A nod, at most, was the only acknowledgment he received. At first, Marlon thought this was down to his being a greenhorn, but he soon realised that most of these desperadoes had taken the job due to radical social awkwardness. It was the perfect occupation for the misfit or sociopath – no office-politics, the freedom and romance of the road, and no reason to interact with anyone but your faceless controller all day. His only verbal encounters were with the clients, some of which were memorably strange.  

     It was a job, as someone once said, that was paradoxically both boring and dangerous. But he was stuck with it now for the foreseeable future.

A few days after the crash, Marlon’s controller sent him to Hatton Garden, then a warren of stricken streets, jewellers and warehouses, rather than the moneyed hipster hub it eventually became, with its sleek offices full of graphic designers and ‘creatives’. The journey in from west London was epically arduous. His injured hand still throbbed the whole way.  He’d barely been able to apply the brake.  The sun had been fierce at nine am, and his face was waterfalling sweat by the time he reached the Marylebone Road. 

     Once he arrived at the nondescript entryphone panel on St Cross Street, off Leather Lane, he felt as if he were still moving. A ghost body detached from his real one, yet with real sweat and London soot smearing his face and nostrils.  He locked his bike to some railings, and pressed the buzzer.

     ‘Pick-up for Mr Gold,’ he announced breathlessly into the grill, his radio crackling.

     ‘Come on down,’ a cheery voice replied at once, as the door yawned open.

     He went in only after noticing that the letter ‘l’ of Mr Gold’s name on the entryphone panel had fallen off, rendering it, comically, Mr God.

     Descending steep steps into what appeared to be a secretive warren of workshops and faceless padlocked doorways, he checked his radio attached to the strap of his courier bag. Dead, predictably. Riders were supposed to remove crash helmets and switch radios off when entering a building, but he always turned his down to a murmur. He hated subterranean pick-ups. They meant he missed crucial jobs that his controller handed to other hungry riders, whom he now considered his rivals. Pausing outside Mr Gold’s workshop, he marvelled at how rapacious he’d become. He and his fellow couriers were merely dogs, each fighting for their share.

     A door opened, and a tiny, white-haired man welcomed him in with a smile.

     ‘You must be the man from Moves – but I see you are only a boy! How old are you?’

     Temporarily disarmed, Marlon said: ‘Nineteen.’

     ‘A boy, a boy,’ Mr Gold grinned, waving him in. ‘Now – ’ And he went over to a workbench in the cramped space, which was floor-to-ceiling with filing cabinets. ‘These two wedding rings are very precious.  Priceless heirlooms from a very distinguished Russian family. I’ve just resized them, and now they need to be delivered to an address in St John’s Wood. Do you think you can cope with that?’

     ‘I think so,’ Marlon said, feeling as if he’d been called into the headmaster’s office.

     The old man turned, placed the two rings in a jiffy bag, sealed it, checked the address, and then approached him. 

     To Marlon’s surprise, Mr Gold gave him the package and then wrapped both his hands around his own.

     ‘Of course you can cope. But take good care of this one especially. Guard these rings with your life. I don’t know whether you’re aware, but thieves operate in this area. Bandits who listen in to couriers’ radios to see if they’re picking up anything valuable, and then pounce as they leave. Sometimes they attack just because you have a bicycle and a radio. But I can see you’re more than capable of evading them. You are an observant young man. A careful and sensitive young man. Ach, I was like you once. Lost and alone . . .’

     Here Mr Gold’s ancient almond eyes peered deeply into his, transmitting a world of sorrow; the sorrow of a whole race.

     ‘. . . I trust you implicitly. I think you will go far in life. You will look back on this as just the beginning.’

     The old man released Marlon’s hands.

     ‘Thank you,’ Marlon stammered, his head spinning at the strangeness of the encounter. How had the old man looked into his soul and seen so much? ‘If you’ll just sign here . . .’

     He handed Mr Gold the clipboard (still in use in the days before the electronic Xda), and fled; the high laugh and singing voice at his back: ‘A boy! A mere boy!’

A week after safely delivering Mr Gold’s rings, Marlon found himself standing by at corner of Bloomsbury Way and the top of Shaftesbury Avenue. It was the fourth of July, a day of spectacular sunshine. For the first time since the crash, he felt as if he’d regained some of his confidence. He was leaning his bike against what he’d come to think of as his favourite London tree – a sturdy plane in full leaf, dusty and gnarled, towering over the relentless lanes of traffic. If he was still a boy, as Mr Gold insisted, he didn’t feel like one. But ‘lost and alone’ was certainly correct.  Since moving to London, he’d been forced to grow up fast. In the few months he’d lived in the city he’d never experienced such loneliness – but it felt like a necessary rite of passage. An isolation vital to his newfound sense of equilibrium and clarity.  

     Taking a pull on his Lucozade, closing his eyes to allow the dappled sun to warm his face, listening to the distant sound of sirens as his radio buzzed gently with the voices of his controller and the other riders, he tried to make sense of it all. 

     Only the night before, he’d had a fraught conversation with his mother from the payphone in the hallway. It had upset his balance greatly. Now that she realised he had flown the nest for good, she was sorry. Oh, how sorry she was. Her extravagant contrition was excruciating. Why hadn’t she said as much when she was inflicting the horror that was his stepfather on everyone? How could she have been so blind? The initial point of her call was to inform him that she and this man were splitting up, at which Marlon feigned neutrality, though inside he felt his heart dance. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Marlon had said in a steady voice. ‘There’s only so long you can enjoy being a masochist.’ By this time his mother was weeping. ‘Why don’t you come home? You could have your old room back.’ His bedroom had been swiftly converted into his stepfather’s ‘computer room’ when he’d first moved out. It was supposed to be a study, but it was where, his mother had tearfully revealed, her second husband had spent his time surfing porn sites. ‘You can have it. I’m not coming back.’ ‘But what’s so good about cycling around and delivering packages all day? You’ll get yourself killed!’ His mother sounded desperate. ‘Good,’ said Marlon petulantly. ‘Then I’ll be out of your hair forever.’ ‘Come home, Marlon,’ she pleaded. ‘No,’ he had said bluntly, and hung up the phone.

     The sour taste of this exchange had poisoned his evening, and seeped into his morning. Only now was the sun beginning to bleed it out of him. He couldn’t deny he’d enjoyed punishing his mother. But he was ashamed he’d been so childish. Maybe he wasn’t as grown up as he thought.

     Touching the peeling bark of the plane tree with his fingertips, he felt an urgent need to phone his mother and apologise.

     At that moment, his radio crackled into life, and he heard his controller say his call-sign.

     ‘One-seven, one-seven. You on plot?’

     Marlon turned the radio up and spoke into his armpit. ‘Roger, roj.’

     The affirmative ‘roger’ was a word he’d used so often that it had long become meaningless.

     ‘Lovely jubbly. Pick up in Broadwick street, west one, roger?’

     ‘Roj.’

     ‘Number twenty-five.’

     ‘Roger.’

     ‘Post-room’s a nightmare, so go to reception first.’

     ‘Roger, roj.’

     ‘State your location please.’

     For a moment Marlon had no idea where he was, so paradisal had the shady bower of his favourite tree been.

     ‘Er, just checking, roj.’

     ‘In the middle yet?’

     The middle was the meridian line between east and west, marked by the perpendicular divide of Southampton Row and Kingsway.  He looked around and saw he was on the right side of Holborn to get to Soho quickly.

     ‘One the bounce from the east, roger.’

     ‘Roger-todger!’

     ‘Heading there now.’

     ‘One-seven?’

     ‘Yeah?’

     ‘Shout me when you’re POB. I’ve got a multi-drop going back the other way . . .’ Marlon’s heart sank. He had hated going to the City ever since the two couriers were injured there. He’d heard radio chatter that one of them might never walk again. ‘. . . And stop bloody sunbathing. It’s not fair on us indoors!’

     ‘Roger,’ Marlon said wearily, and mounted the saddle, readying himself to join the steel stream of the traffic. ‘Over and out.’

     He looked down at his left hand. Still there, the indigo bruise with its ebony centre, going yellow around the edges. At this rate, he thought, it would be there forever, like a birthmark. 

At the start of August, Marlon found himself another bedsit, this time in Kentish Town. The hour-long haul from Kensal Rise into town every morning had been killing him. He moved his paltry possessions in at the weekend. A similar one-ring mini-oven to the one in his previous place stood sadly on the Formica kitchen top, a foot from his bed. At least, he convinced himself, the new location was closer in for work.

     And when work was good, it was great. Nothing beat the sense of speed and grace of freewheeling down Fleet Street, or any of London’s downhill runs, in the magnesium sunshine. The ease of his machine, with gravity powering it onwards, faster than anything else on the road, was unrivalled. On a good day he would cover seventy-five miles and deliver over twenty packages. And not just faceless envelopes of documents, but hampers and bottles of bubbly from Fortnum and Mason, video tapes from Soho production houses, risky medical samples from Guy’s heading to Great Ormond Street. His access to the metropolis was unequalled.  Its doors fell open to him, one by one. The topography of the city was now clear to Marlon – he almost saw it in aerial elevation. He could see how it all joined up; the tapestry of postcodes, the London villages stitched tightly together in an intricate design. He had privileged access to the glazed sanctums of big business, the quiet Mayfair mewses, the service lifts and postrooms, the publishers and film companies, the edit suites and record companies, the glamorous designers, couturiers, milliners, tailors, and jewellers. He’d fly from Golden Square to Manchester Square like an arrow fired from an archer’s bow. Only rarely would he be sent over to the dreaded City, with its towering glass citadels; its glittering chasms and canyons. 

     And at the end of each day, immobile in the sooty waters of his bath, his lungs full of carbon monoxide, he would shed the skin of cancerous gritty particles, his muscles aching deliciously. There he would almost savour the characteristic stinks of London: rubber, tarmac, exhaust, burnt oil. The sweet odours of fried food, noodles, candy floss, coffee. Still in his ears was the shriek of airbrakes, powerdrills, emergency sirens; the endless hammering of commerce. He’d review the day’s triumphs and failures; the smiles of certain receptionists; the chains that had fallen off, the wheels that had buckled, the tyres than had punctured; the daily descent into the dust, soot, grime, and gunk that had now fused permanently with his Lycra cycle-wear.

     He’d even had a few conversations with the other riders. Not all of them, it turned out, were doing the job because of extreme social awkwardness. Some were academics or writers, actors or visual artists.  Granted, a few were danger addicts, or just addicts, but many were New Agers, squatters, or economic migrants merely passing through. Only a minority were genuinely lost, needy, psychotic; those Foreign Legion men who did the job in order to forget. A few, like Marlon, seemed to be running away from something; some unnamed curse, or terror or malaise, or simply themselves. Talking to them reinforced the feeling that courier work was a parasitic, peripheral occupation. Most of the time you were invisible, a mere tradesman. A perpetual observer, with little social contact. One notch about the security guards and contract cleaners, but only just. You were merely a worker-ant in the great capitalist economy, and you forgot it at your peril. The glamour of the job was cosmetic. Most were doing it because they had to. Anyone in the thick of it would laugh at the notion that you joined their ranks voluntarily. Despite not being a job for the lazy, it attracted its fair share of drifters and ne’er do-wells. And if Marlon knew anything about himself, it was that he was still drifting.  

When September arrived, he found himself spending a sizeable part of each day watching the sky for rain. His four months in the saddle seemed like four years. Physically, he felt done in. He was used to negotiating the fierce burn in his muscles that forced him to dismount; the leaden legs that signalled he could go no further; the sugar-crashes that sent him off the plot to seek Mars bars or energy drinks.  But daily the question arose: how long could he do this for? And when would the autumn weather really kick-in, turning a breezy summer job into a hellish ordeal? He would turn twenty on the fifteenth of the month, and was dreading it. This birthday, especially, seemed like a momentous occasion. His teenage years would be over, and he could make excuses for himself no longer.

     Every day he would stop at his favourite tree, just to watch the world pass by. He would always touch its bark twice for luck, before passing into the perpetual motion of the traffic; his radio inchoate with its babel of voices. Though he still loved his talismanic plane, the area lacked a bench, so he would travel north most days, to Bedford Square, where he would usually find a quiet spot to sit and eat his homemade sandwiches. The bench, at the southwestern corner of the square, soon became his.  Sometimes he would share it with silent office workers, but often he would have it to himself; the gentle September sun warming his face with its amber rays.

     The night before his birthday, he spoke to his mother on the phone. To his shame, he was just as bullish and pitiless as before. At the end of the call, she told him she had been sacked from her receptionist job. Then she revealed she was moving back to Wales where she had grown up. With nothing to keep her in his hometown – no partner, no real friends, and now no job – she was selling up and returning ‘back home’. ‘Aren’t you going to wish me luck?’ she had pleaded before he hung up. ‘I’d like to, but I can’t.’ Again, she had begun to sob. ‘If your father could hear you now . . .’ Marlon’s father had remarried and moved to Australia years ago. They rarely had any contact. ‘He’d have to have pretty good ears to do that,’ he’d answered, facetiously. ‘Happy birthday, son,’ his mother had blurted, just before he’d slammed the payphone back in its cradle.

The following day, he cycled into town as usual. He had intended not to work on his birthday, but at nine am he found himself racing down Albany Street past the military barracks, turning up his radio to catch the first jobs of the morning. The skies were grey, leaden, pregnant with malice. The conversation with his mother had been at work in his belly all night, like food poisoning. He felt squalid with a melange of emotions: anger, regret, outrage, and fear. Fear for the future – both of their futures.

     At lunchtime, he stopped at the bench on Bedford square to eat his sandwiches. Luckily, he had it to himself. Unwrapping the foil, and taking out the first egg and cress bap, kicking the expectant pigeons away from his feet, he sat back exhaustedly. In three hours he’d been across the river to Southwark, and then to White Cube on Hoxton Square for a stack of art catalogues heading for their sister gallery on St James’ street. And this was how he’d spent his birthday. Being twenty felt no different from being nineteen, only now there was something he couldn’t ignore. The question of how he was going to occupy himself for the rest of his life. He sat for a number of minutes unable to think of a single thing he might like to do. He knew he might have to force the world to do his bidding, or it would force him to do its own.

     Brushing the crumbs from his hands as he finished the last sandwich, he looked down and saw the blood blister had finally disappeared from his left thumb after almost three months. He hadn’t even noticed it go. Then he looked up at the sky. Definitely rain. His heart sank. His first job of the afternoon was a hike over to a law firm on Finsbury Square, one of his regulars. It struck him that he’d been back to many of the same clients since he’d started couriering, but never to Mr Gold’s on Hatton Garden. Mr Gold, who’d been so kind. For some reason, the old man’s words returned to him: You will look back on this as just the beginning . . .

     He stood up and turned on his radio. He hoped Mr Gold was right. He would make a new start, and phone his mother that night to apologise. With the swiftness of youth, he mounted the saddle, and moved off effortlessly into the rain.