Chapter Three

I twisted and turned and slept and fretted and twisted and turned some more, and slept and woke and saw the bright sunlight shining through the curtains and gave up the fight. Besides, my body and my bike both needed checking.

In the shower – hot, this time – I examined myself. I flexed my knees and elbows. They ached but there were no cracking or scraping sounds. I needed to get moving. I also suspected this would be a fine day to be absent from the house.

Meanwhile it was good to be on my own in the kitchen. I made myself coffee and cut a grapefruit into segments. While my porridge was cooking, I went into the garden and looked at my vegetable patch. I’d never grown anything before, except maybe mustard and cress on blotting-paper when I was small, but this year I’d suddenly decided we should grow our own food. I’d gone to a car-boot sale and bought a spade, a trowel and a watering-can so nice and bright, almost new, and cheap they had clearly been stolen from someone who had forgotten to lock their garden shed. What else are car-boot sales for in Hackney? But I’d made good use of the stolen goods, measuring out a long rectangle of overgrown land, and digging it into a well-tilled plot, whose earth was loamy and rich, and studded with old coins and bits of pottery, which I collected and put on the chest in my bedroom. It was surprisingly satisfying. I relished the ache in my back, the blisters on my palms and the dirt under my fingernails. Davy offered to help with the heavy digging but I wanted it to be all my own work. I’d planted courgettes, broad beans, lettuces, beetroot and rocket – even potatoes in their own raised bed. Everyone else in the house teased me about it, but already sturdy shoots were appearing. Almost every morning and evening, I went to look at them. This morning, I had been thinking that next year I should plant sweetcorn as well, and maybe some butternut squash for soups – until I remembered that next year I wouldn’t be here. It was only then I realized that I wouldn’t be here this year, either, to harvest the vegetables I had tended so carefully. Miles and Leah would be picking them instead, enjoying the fruits of my labour.

I was on my second mug when Pippa came into the kitchen. She was dressed for the office in a soft grey suit and a white shirt. And she wasn’t alone. A man in black trousers, a flowery shirt and leather jacket came in with the familiar mixture of sheepishness and pride you see in men in the morning. She introduced him as Jeff. He sat across the table from me and, asking if it was all right, helped himself to coffee.

I was too dumbfounded to answer. Pippa was amazing. How had she done it? Where had she produced him from? I had left her at whatever time it was last night, sitting in her room. And yet somewhere, somehow, in the middle of the night, she had found this man and smuggled him into her bed.

‘Hi, Jeff,’ I said, and disintegrated into a sort of stammer. ‘How… where did you…?’

‘We’d arranged to meet for a drink,’ said Pippa, cheerfully, ‘so I said he might as well come over here. And by then it was so late that, well, you know…’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Pippa, I wanted to ask you a professional question.’

‘What?’

‘Can Miles actually, legally, throw us out? Aren’t we sitting tenants?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Aren’t you a lawyer?’

‘Are you a lawyer?’ said Jeff.

‘Yes, sweetie,’ said Pippa. ‘Hurry and finish your coffee.’ She glanced back at me. ‘That doesn’t mean I know anything. I’ll look it up or ask someone. But don’t get lawyers involved. That’s the only thing I’ve learned.’

I nodded to Pippa and said goodbye politely to Jeff, suspecting I would never see him again. I rang Campbell at the office, and he said there would be no problem in borrowing a bike for a few days. I’d just have to pick it up from the office in Clerkenwell. Consequently, that morning I must have been the only bike messenger in London who didn’t go to work on a bike. Instead I sat on the tube in tight Lycra shorts and my fluorescent yellow top, with my helmet on my lap. I couldn’t have looked more ludicrous if I’d been dressed in jodhpurs and a scarlet coat.

I hardly ever went into the office. It was really nothing more than a cubby-hole where Campbell and his assistant, Becks, took orders and phoned the riders, but it was amazingly squalid, all cardboard boxes, unwashed coffee cups and unfiled files.

‘Lovers’ tiff?’ said Campbell, as I walked into the office.

‘Car door,’ I said.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

I was less all right when I saw the bike he was lending me. Campbell saw my dubious expression. ‘It’s served me well, that bike,’ he said.

‘At least it’s not going to get stolen,’ I muttered. ‘So, what’s up first?’

He looked at his clipboard. ‘ Fancy Wardour Street to Camden Town?’

‘All I fancy is you, Campbell,’ I said, taking the piece of paper he was holding out. ‘Now that I’ve seen the state of the office, I must remember to come in less often. See you at the pub later, maybe.’

It was a lovely day, the sort that made up for January, when you got wet and numb and it was dark at four o’clock, and August, when you seemed to breathe nothing but heat and car fumes. It was sunny but with a chill, and there wasn’t too much traffic and I felt happy, even if I didn’t know why. I darted across the map of London in straight lines. After Camden Town I went from Charlotte Street to Maida Vale, then from Soho to London Bridge. On the way back I spent too much money on an exotic sandwich at Borough Market. Then it was over the river to Old Street and thence in a long straight line to Notting Hill Gate. Cycling back into town, I stopped in St James’s Park, ate my sandwich and drank a bottle of water. And so back to criss-crossing London, in and out of the photographic labs, advertising companies, editing suites, solicitors’, and offices I had been in and out of for months without knowing, or needing to know, exactly what they did.

Some days it felt like I was dragging heavy weights behind the bike, but not today. The accident had clearly done me no lasting damage. My aching limbs gradually loosened up and by the evening I’d done sixty or seventy miles and I didn’t even feel tired, just a pleasant ache in my calves and thighs. On the way home I stopped off at the Horse and Jockey. The pub was strictly for the cycle messengers. The motorbike messengers were large, bearded and male: they dressed in black leather and met up at the Crown just south of Oxford Street. They congregated on the pavement and whistled at women walking past and talked about cam shafts, or whatever it was that motorcycles were made of.

We cycle messengers saw each other as a more sensitive breed. We were certainly a bloody sight healthier, those of us who survived. When I cycled up, there was a small cheer from the people who were already there, clutching their bottles of beer. They gathered round to inspect my bruises and grazes and to comment that they were really nothing special. Then we got down to the more serious business. We talked about employment prospects, we gossiped and, above all, we slagged off the clients. We depended on them but that didn’t mean we had to respect them. Most of the job was company work, taking envelopes from office to office, but several families had accounts with us and some of them were so rich, or at least so much richer than we were, that they thought nothing of picking up the phone to summon one of us. There was an unofficial competition about the most ludicrous request. I’d once gone on successive days to deliver a forgotten packed lunch from Primrose Hill to a girls’ prep school in the West End. One messenger claimed he’d cycled to Notting Hill Gate in the rain to collect an umbrella and deliver it to a woman standing outside Fortnum & Mason. The job also gave us a chance to gawp inside some of these houses. One of the messengers said he was going to start a game: you’d get five points for a private cinema, ten for a fountain, fifty for an indoor swimming-pool.