We are both in love with our housemate Mary, and confused as to whether we love her as another little sister, the mother we miss, or the girlfriend we covet. Probably a mixture of all three: the overdetermined love of man for woman that makes life so full of jeopardy for women.

I first met Mary in the middle of an argument I was having with a cyclist on Theobald’s Road. Riding east in the early evening, I was always part of a large peloton: sensible commuters with panniers and fluorescent jackets mingling with posing faux-couriers atop lurid bikes with one gear. I was feeling quite rueful and sensitive about the bike I was riding: the old racer my father had given me was stolen as divine punishment on the night I split up with the woman I went out with too soon after Monica, and the quickest and lightest bike I could buy with the £150 budget I managed to scrabble together looked like something that belonged to a seven-year-old girl, a fixie with rave-orange frame and lipstick-pink tyres. For a brief while the chain had even matched the tyres, until London’s filth did its quick work. There were a lot of garish bikes on the road, but I hadn’t seen one worse than mine. Even the hipsters had baulked at it, hence the knock-down price I had it for from a Chinese bike shop on Hackney Road. If I shut my eyes, it was an OK ride, quick with narrow handlebars, but shutting one’s eyes on London’s roads is not sustainable, and observing myself atop this bike in window reflections was inspiring a crisis of identity in me: I am by inclination and prescription an unshaven wearer of thick-rimmed spectacles, and this bike had closed the circle. There was no denying any more that I was a man with beard and glasses wearing a messenger bag and riding his pink and orange bike to Hackney. There was always violence on the roads, but I began to provoke it more often.

On the day I met Mary I judged the space between the curb and a bus too narrow to safely undertake and held my distance. ‘Out of the way then,’ came a voice from behind me, followed by the sound of a rubber horn. I turned round. There was a man in short shorts and white socks perched on a bicycle like mine, almost identical, except for the rubber horn he had attached.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘Just fucking get down there mate,’ he said, ‘or get out of the fucking way.’

The next thing I knew I was off my bike and had his T-shirt in my hand, shouting about my friend Sam who had died in a bike accident.