Then I got a job with a firm of Motorcycle Chauffeurs, somehow convincing the manager that I was a good, responsible, and above all smooth driver (miraculously, I’d held on to a clean licence in all the mayhem of London dispatch biking, though I had been knocked down twice). The idea was that the London traffic had become so congested there was an almost literal gap in the market for getting people from one bit of the capital to the other quicker than a taxi or a limo could. A big bike was the answer; a Honda Pan European or a 1200 BMW tourer, complete with panniers to carry an extra helmet and an over-suit for the client and a tall enough screen so that the worst of any weather was kept off them (providing you were moving, though of course being on a bike, you should be able to, even in a serious jam).
The company did well enough but then ran into cashflow problems and was taken over by a limo firm; they lost half the drivers but I was one of the lucky ones.
One late spring morning, at the start of an early shift, I was called to an emergency job taking somebody from Islington to Langham Place. A car hadn’t shown and I was nearest. I pulled up at a nice, semi-posh terraced house in Cloudesley Square, one of the district’s leafier bits, and this elfin blonde in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt appeared, running down the steps pulling on a pretend biker’s jacket and waving goodbye to a sleepy-looking guy standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like a very small woman’s dressing-gown.
‘Hi!’ she said, pulling on the helmet I had held out to her.
She had a small, friendly looking face, profoundly unkempt short, curly hair and crinkly eyes that were about as wide-set as they could be in such a thin face. Cheeky-looking, somehow. I was sure I recognised her. Come to think of it, the guy in the too-small dressing-gown had rung a bell or two as well.
‘Morning,’ I said, helping her with the buckle under her chin. This wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been because she was bouncing from one foot to the other all the time. ‘You’ll have to stop jumping up and down,’ I told her gently.
‘Sorry!’ She waggled her eyebrows. The helmet was a bit big for her, but I did the strap up as tight as I could.
I got the buckle fastened and she swung her leg over and jumped on behind me. ‘Broadcasting House! Langham Place!’ she yelled, helmet banging against mine. ‘Fast as you can! If that’s okay.’
I nodded and we set off. It was about ten to six. We didn’t quite make it in time but her producer filled for her and played a couple of records back to back and – parked up by a wee café on Cavendish Street and listening on my FM earpiece – I heard her start her show, and smiled when – breathless, giggling, apologising – she said thanks to the bike guy who’d helped her get there almost on time. ‘Sorry I forgot to ask your name,’ she said. ‘But if you’re listening, mate, well done. Right…’
Samantha Coghlan was something very close to being the nation’s darling at the time. Sam had presented various shows on children’s TV, been a big hit there, tried some more serious TV without any great success – one of those deals where they keep adding zeros to the money on offer until the talent has to say yes, then the execs stand around scratching their heads, wondering what exactly to do with the star they’ve bought – and then made the move to national radio in what at first looked like an act of desperation by both her and Radio One.
As it turned out, though, she was perfect for the Breakfast Show. Well, perfect apart from sleeping in all too often with her celeb film-star boyfriend after showbiz parties and general late nights with their famous friends. Breezy and pally, but sharp and funny too, Sam added a million and a half listeners to the show and reinvigorated a career that might just have been starting to stutter. Within a year she was winning awards, fronting a TV rock and pop show to even more acclaim and helping a couple of major retailers lift their profile with a generation of customers they’d been losing touch with.
I became Biker Ken, her preferred mode of transport for most of that summer. I’d made a decision right at the start to keep quiet about my own dormant radio career. Sam started to mention me on air more often, and over a couple of months I became one of the disparate cloud of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on and, well, parasites she would mention – always funnily, never bitterly – during the course of her show; a cast of characters she built up apparently without thinking about it until we became part of a sort of real-life soap opera the listening public followed avidly five mornings out of seven.
After a while – once the bike hire company equipped us with two-way intercoms so that we could, if the client wanted to, communicate with each other – she started asking me, en route, about what I’d done before I’d become a bike chauffeur. Finally I couldn’t keep my old career quiet without either being rude or lying, so I confessed all.
‘Brilliant! Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Great! Come on the show!’
‘Look,’ I told her, ‘I’m not going to say no, Sam, but you may want to recon-’
‘Na; come on! It’ll be fun!’
So I did. And found I hadn’t lost my radio voice or my touch, and was suitably, humbly funny for a five-minute spot with her one morning when I was off duty. That afternoon, I got a call from one of the stations I’d sent a demo tape to a year earlier; would I like to come in and do an audition? So, Sam gave me my big break.
The lovely Samantha parted company with her listeners one tearful morning that autumn, leaving to go off and have babies in LA with her actor fiancé, whose career had taken off in serious style. We all missed her, but by then I had my own late-night show on a new commercial London station called M25. I sent her flowers; she sent a gracious, funny, affectionate note that I still had. She was a happily married mother of twin girls and a big hit on the Hollywood social scene, last I’d heard, but what I remembered most was not her leaving, or those five generous minutes on her show that kick-started my own stalled career, or even that morning when I first met her; what I remembered most, what I remembered now, was charging down the sleepy streets in the light of a new summer’s morning, heading south for Langham Place through the sparse five-thirty traffic with the big bike humming beneath us. She held onto the grab handles at first, then, after a couple of weeks, asked if it would be okay to put her arms round my waist.
I’d said, Of course, and so, about three mornings out of five, and usually by the time we got to Caledonian Road, she’d clasp her gloved hands in front of my belly and put her helmet against mine and then fall comfortably asleep for the rest of the journey.
When we started wearing the intercom units, I could hear her snoring sometimes, ever so gently, as we thrummed smoothly down the quiet, side-lit streets towards the heart of the slowly waking city.
In all my life to that point, I had never been happier.
Since then, only when I’d been with Ceel.
And I’m thinking about her now, because now I’m in a box, all trussed, bound up, blind in the darkness and petrified that something gruesome is going to happen to me, because all that I did earlier, all the business with the getting into and getting out of Merrial’s house was somehow not enough, and the bad men have come for me and taken me away and I’m terrified for myself and for Celia, because I have the awful, gut-churning, bowel-chilling feeling that when they take me out of here I’m going to see her and she’ll be in just as much trouble as I am.