Non-Fiction
On My Bike / Pema Monaghan
Image courtesy of the author.
My Uncle Matthew sent us two bikes during the summer of the pandemic, a.k.a the summer that books by Black and brown authors about white oppression topped bestseller lists internationally, a.k.a the summer when going to the pub was very suddenly encouraged as a patriotic duty, a.k.a the summer when bikes sold out everywhere and it was impossible to get even a used one for less than £150. My boyfriend and I were desperate to feel some serious movement. I had developed a renewed interest in hobbies I’d had as a teenager: sewing, video games, and reading the same one novel over and over, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, set during a hot 1970s Melbourne summer where the characters are suffering from two warring afflictions—love and cocaine addiction. As a teenager, this book epitomised freedom to me, and one of its most significant images was of the twenty-somethings cycling with their children on their handlebars, across the flat town, heat rising from the bitumen, from their over-crowded shacks built of wood slats to the blue pools, into which they and their children would jump and sink, holding their noses between their fingers. Despite the rising temperatures, pools and friends were denied to all of us. We fixated on bikes.
We got ours for a combined delivery rate of £50, because Uncle Matt is a bike parts dealer. He sells difficult-to-get parts for a model that he says is an object of nostalgia for a certain type of middle-aged British white man. He imports the parts from Japan. Uncle Matt believes his customers are mostly Brexiteers, and during the height of the Brexit debate he would include little European Union stickers alongside gears and brakes.
The bikes are brown and have a maroon cracked paint effect on the frame. It reminds me of a nail polish fad from my last years of highschool called ‘shatter’. My friend Gabi always had a very on-trend collection of nail polish. She also had great love of Katy Perry. So when Katy Perry released a limited edition run of the shatter-style nail polish with OPI, and Gabi bought it immediately, and would often wear it to school; her nails were always unchipped and well-painted, though the shatter polish was supposed to look purposefully shit.
I saw a photo of the matching bikes before they arrived, and just assumed they would be pretty ugly, but actually, they look cool. They have ‘Muddy Fox’ written on the side and little paw prints dancing along the frame. The wires attached to the gears and brakes are bright yellow, and they have nice slim frames and straight handlebars. We ordered black skate helmets online too, the same ones, out of convenience and also started wearing twin bumbags, but luckily being indoors and only with each other for four months had mostly taken away our senses of embarrassment.
Despite our matching machines, clothes, and heights, the way my boyfriend and I ride our bikes is very different. I am more experienced at cycling, but the bike seems to fit Oscar better. He can dismount easily. He is swifter than me. He doesn’t get a deep ache in his coccyx immediately after sitting on the saddle, and doesn’t seem to mind the hunched posture demanded by the bike. He doesn’t have the same energy deficiency that I do, this bone-deep lethargy I’ve had since I was a child.
*
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the way people move around a city shapes their experience of that space, and their expectations of their day-to-day. London is a city that has been heavily impacted by Covid-19. I have barely seen other bits of London since March, and my life has become increasingly online. Oscar goes for long walks every day, but I feel nervous going into public spaces. When your interactions with strangers are so limited, a few negative experiences (a man approaching you aggressively in the park, someone commenting on your mask, a stranger standing threateningly over you as you sit, making a link: Asian, virus) become representative of civic life.
Just before lockdown, waiting for a train, a man shoved me out of his way, sending me tripping towards the edge of the platform, just stopping myself in time. I turned to look at him. He was staring at me. He had stopped. I expected him to apologise, but all he said was Ugh, loud and angry, before pushing along the platform. It was busy. Everyone minded their own business.
I don’t like the tube. I dislike the sense of going down, and then some time later emerging, without any engagement with the material realities of the city. The maw into which a train disappears makes me think of an American television show where the humans are thrown back to the land of dinosaurs through a black subway hole that has turned into a time machine. You might as well be anywhere.
This disappearing and emerging makes me feel I have no real sense of how the city works. Everytime I walk somewhere farther than five minutes away, I have to use my phone to check exactly where I am going. I feel frightened if my phone runs dead, which it often does. Maps are something I watch every second, only looking up to read a street name or to make sure that I am safely crossing a road. I have no confidence that I can get myself where I am trying to go.
*
When I was a kid in Fremantle/Walyalup, Western Australia, and later when I was a teenager, I would walk around town with a book up to my face, even crossing roads that way. I could see people’s feet under my book, so I knew when someone was approaching, but I had no need to check my direction or look for landmarks. I knew where I was going.
Walyalup is the traditional name given by the Whadjuk Nyoongar people who first lived on the land; Fremantle is the name of the British naval captain who stabbed his flag at the mouth of the Swan River, at the site next to what is now one of two prisons-turned-museums in the city. Captain Fremantle went on to work in British-occupied Ceylon, and later suggested Kowloon in Hong Kong as an excellent site for further British ‘settlement’. Right before Captain Fremantle sailed to the south-west of Australia, he was credibly charged of raping a 15-year-old girl.
Fremantle, now, is a bike city. The roads are wide, and traffic is minimal. Everybody rides, or skateboards, or walks, or wheels. It has a small city centre, with the beach on one side, the river on another, and then endless suburbs. In the mid-twentieth century, a bunch of white eco-friendly cyclists came and bought cheap in the surrounding areas—plots of land that are now worth millions of dollars. They joined the Italian migrants who’d settled there in the late 1800s. In the outer suburb of White Gum Valley, I would walk past low red-brick fences, beyond which tomatoes grow on stakes placed at a grid on fertile dirt. The nonnas are sitting out on tiled patios resting from a morning watering their grapevines. Baskets of enormous, waxy lemons sat by gates. Rosemary is not something you need to buy in a small plastic bag from the man next to the station, it’s everywhere, wild, in huge bushes in front yards, on islands in the middle of the road, at the war monument on the hill. It’s on the breeze mingling with the scent of sea water. Moving to London, I was disappointed by the lack of curbside herbs.
My dad taught me to cycle. He loves bikes, and used to ride two hours back and forth from work every day. Occasionally dad would offer to pick me up from town, and he’d turn up on his bike, insisting that I sit uncomfortably on the bar between the seat and the handlebars while he peddled us both home. He lives in the countryside now, and it takes him much longer to get back and forth from work, so he now rides motorbikes, which he considers ‘a really sweet way to get around’. I, on the other hand, can’t drive motorised vehicles. My whole family expected me to be a threat to myself and others on the road and didn’t let me learn along with my peers when I was 16. I have that vibe about me, apparently. I’ve never once been hit by a car, but whoever I’m crossing the road with always grabs my arm and forces me back, convinced I am a second away from injury or causing injury. Once, in Fremantle, arriving at the bookshop where I worked, the man who ran the adjacent cafe called me over. He told me, laughing, that a customer had just been talking about me. The customer had asked the cafe owner to pass along a message that I’d better be careful on the streets, as he’d been so distracted by staring at my legs while driving his car that he’d almost caused an accident.
My first proper bike was black with purple and black streamers coming out of the ends of the handlebars. It came with detachable training wheels. After that, I’d just ride bikes that were gathering redbacks in the garage. At 14, I rode my bike home from my job at the supermarket. A couple of years later, I’d ride to beach parties or my friends’ houses. I never needed to check the destination. I knew exactly how to get there, and how long it would take me to ride at my pace. I could bike like I could swim: perhaps not with a lot of style, but with competence.
*
In my first year of uni, minoring in Gender Studies before they canned it, I learnt about the term ‘cyborg’, as in Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Haraway tells us that ‘the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation’. Cyclists are an example—machine and muscle working together, imagining and becoming something new in the process.
It still seems very strange to me that something with two wheels can stand up. A bike does have four legs, though: your legs and the bike’s legs have to work together. Aside from the burning, the movement, the power you put into the pedals, there are also constant scrapings, bruises, oil stains, banged shins, blood. It costs your body to cycle. You never forget you have legs when you are on a bike.
Some people are efficient cyclists. These people, like my dad and my manager at the bookshop I work for in London, cycle to work and get there on time. Google Maps says this trip will take half an hour on a bike. This trip will take me an hour-and-a-half. I am also a slow walker, but this is partly because I like to stop and touch leaves and take photographs of the light. But cycling can also be for people who move slowly.
Cycling in the rain is very joyful—you’re moving faster than you might usually. The rain moves the sweat down your face, over and into your mouth. Salt. You can smell everything. Your body cools down.
Or—hot and dry. With each ride, your legs are getting stronger, inevitably, even though you walk up the hills. The breeze moves through your clothes. Cycling fast downhill is closer to flying than being in an aeroplane.
*
I hadn’t ridden a bike since I moved to the UK, two-and-a-half years before I got my Muddy Fox. I was scared to ride on London streets, and had done so only once, eight years ago when I was 18, and my aunt Hannah had taken me on a terrifying route through central London. Back then, London hadn’t felt like a city that wanted cyclists on its roads; cars, buses, and endless, endless taxis shared the same space as we did; we rode down a steep hill and then curved right on an intersection that must have had about eight separate traffic lights.
Recently, I rode to Bloomsbury to pick up a gift I’d ordered for a friend. The ride there was meant to take half an hour, and naturally took me double the time. I cycled past the London Zoo, past a church where an old man was digging in the garden next to the cafe they have in the churchyard. I rode past a Chinese restaurant I’d never seen before, sitting on a barge on the canal. It reminded me of a restaurant I once visited in Kuala Lumpur, where I worked a few years ago.
I cycled past giant stone caryatids, replicas of the ones I’d seen guarding the Temple of Athena at the Parthenon, in Athens alone one week before flying to Chios. I felt confident and free. I put pieces of London together in my mind, and made turns that were wrong according to my phone’s route, but right for my body and my sense of safety. There was a long road I enjoyed riding down, home to a strange flat church that I stopped to photograph from my bike, and some mewses guarded by stumpy buildings. I arrived in Bloomsbury, and the shop I’d been cycling to was closed. But it was the first time I’d been into the city for six months, so I walked to find a Diet Coke at an open cafe. When I began to cycle back, I felt weak, and didn’t think I’d make it. But I kept going and eventually I did.
*
I’ve isolated myself from my most immediate family by moving to London, and to see them again I must fly in an aeroplane. I find it harder and harder to detach myself from the costs of my lifestyle. The machines we choose to work with have become increasingly obviously ethical choices. Haraway writes that the cyborg ‘is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence’. Given that the tube is a excellent site for the passage of the virus, it’s not ethical for me to catch the tube when I don’t explicitly need to. Given that we are in a climate catastrophe that felt slow, but is now gathering speed, I know it isn’t ethical for me to fly home to Fremantle to see my siblings. I knew these things before, but being inside a plane takes me out of my body, and I can forget about the greater cost as I float in the anxieties of family reunion, of being suspended in the air, of the things I’ve forgotten. It’s always been easy for me to slide into a drift.
Cycling is a struggle. Bikes can turn from being immensely freeing to a literal dead weight very quickly. But this is good. It’s helpful to be reminded that movement isn’t the listless shuffle back and forth from my job. Every time I cycle, the work, the incremental progress, the sensory engagement with my body and my environment, reminds me that being slow is not the same as being stagnant. I can get myself somewhere at a pace that suits me, and while I do that I can look. I can take the canal paths. I can smell curries being cooked in apartment buildings. As I pant up a slight incline, ‘I am, I am’ is the air I push out of my lungs.