Nicholas Royle - Regicide

Pain or no pain I was in thrall to the record. I loved its silence and slowly I began to make out the sounds that were there to be heard if you listened hard enough. I played it again and again until I felt I was in a waking dream.

Towards midnight I locked up and walked to the car, the white label in a padded envelope under my arm. I laid it carefully on the passenger seat and started the engine. I drove like an automaton, wide, dry eyes sweeping the road ahead in search of the girl’s car. I felt I knew now what she’d been dancing to. I’d felt like dancing myself. In the shop. Listening to the record over and over again. It was as if the walls and ceiling had receded and I had felt myself at the centre of a huge spiral descending upon me from the sky.

Waiting at a red light, rain stippling the windscreen, I pressed in the cigarette lighter and reached into my boot. I stuck a cigarette between my lips. The lighter popped out and I withdrew it. I stared at the burning spiral for a few moments before inserting the third finger of my left hand into the barrel of the lighter and pressing the tip against the element. I didn’t blink. Rain fell more heavily on the car, beating a tinny tattoo on the roof. The light went green but I didn’t move. An acrid smell of charred flesh filled the car.

I only pulled my finger away when I felt my nail grating unpleasantly against the metal coil.

My finger was black, my face in the rearview mirror as blank as a piece of paper. The light was red again. I replaced the cigarette lighter and waited for the light to change. When it did I shifted into first gear, wincing as my finger brushed against the passenger seat.

How long would it be before she appeared? I cruised slowly to give her enough time, but there was no sign of her and soon I was pulling up outside the flat. Maybe she’d be waiting for me inside. I looked at my finger as I climbed the stairs. It hadn’t bled; I’d cauterised it. I stuffed my hand in my back pocket to check on the map. It was still there. My finger scraped against denim, but I felt no pain.

The flat was empty but it didn’t feel like mine any more. When I put the record on and turned the volume right up I felt a druggy mixture of euphoria and emptiness. My forehead itched. I wondered dully who else was involved. The girl couldn’t have recorded, cut and pressed a record all on her own; she needed accomplices. Someone had to inhabit the streets on my map.

I looked at the thousands of records lining the walls. I had wasted so much time.

In the kitchen I switched the ring on full and watched it get hot. I could still hear the music swirling around me. My forehead was hurting, like scratched sunburn. Maybe I could burn up the pain. As I bent over the cooker I heard a car pull up outside.

I left the kitchen without switching off the cooker and looked out of the living room window. There was a black Mini parked in front of the Escort. I crossed to the door to leave and as I looked back for a moment before closing the door I felt a tug.

As I stepped into the street I felt a warm breeze and detected the faint odour of gas. The map was in my back pocket. I reached for the door handle on the Mini but the girl gunned the engine into life and moved forward several feet to dissuade me. I walked towards my own car, glancing in through the Mini’s rear passenger window.

On the back seat lay a long knife.

I followed her in the Escort. She turned off my familiar route into the warren of semi-circular streets where I’d lost her the first time. She turned right again and drifted down to a set of lights which changed as she approached them. A left turn, more houses, and she pulled into a short gravelly drive, parking next to a big wire mesh gate. Beyond the fence were two huge gasholders. She unlocked the gate and started walking towards the nearest of the two.

It reared up before me, an awesome monster of overlapping curved metal plates. A telescopic spiral ready to expand or contract. It glowed in the moonlight, appearing to hover just above the ground like a ghostly carousel.

I followed the girl until she reached the base of the gasholder, the long knife sticking out of the back pocket of her jeans. She turned and looked back. The moon fell on her face. Her hair was swept back from her forehead which I now saw properly for the first time. She was the perfect synthesis of Siouxsie Sioux and Annie Risk, possessing the most beautiful face I had ever seen. My stomach went into a slow dive. I would have wept but for the detail on her forehead which, though I only caught the briefest of glimpses, chilled me.

She turned and vanished around the side of the gasholder.

I followed because it seemed to me that there was nothing else I could do. I went around the back of the huge structure but the girl had disappeared. I collapsed against the side and my cheek rested against the cool metal. I opened my arms to embrace the structure. Over my panting I listened for any sound of the girl — or of gas. But each was as deathly quiet as the other, if either was there at all.

The problem I had with my nocturnal adventure was that I didn’t know how much of it I had dreamt and how much had really happened.

I had a burnt finger that remained sore for weeks and I still had the white label single which I played even though there was no music recorded on it. The hisses and ticks and booms could represent some kind of message but I had to find the key to unlock the code. I’d stick it on the turntable in the morning after waking up and it was a gentle start to the day, provided my downstairs neighbour wasn’t working an early shift. I’d smoke a cigarette and lie there propped up against a couple of pillows trying to discern order from chaos. After a while I formed the impression that the sequence of sounds actually changed with each playing. Because I found this such an attractive idea I didn’t check it by recording the single on tape and comparing the two — which would have been easy to do — in case I discovered I was wrong. I suppose this idea and act of self-denial were the first steps I took on my own initiative into fantasy. But almost certainly I wouldn’t have taken them at all if it hadn’t been for the girl in the Mini. I started to think of her alternately as an imaginary siren and as a real woman who was in fact out there somewhere. And in both these roles she became my quarry. She could be a distraction from the elusive Annie Risk.

One night after shutting up the shop I drove around between King’s Cross and the North Circular for two and a half hours, just cruising, looking for the girl. From the back she looked like millions of other girls so I was forever slowing down and rubbernecking. I was lucky not to get picked up by the police. Each time I sighted a black Mini down a side street I’d make a late turn and check it out.

Held up by roadworks on the A10 in between Tottenham and Wood Green I remembered something that made me realise I was probably wasting my time. Years ago in a Crouch End pub I’d sat mesmerised for half an hour by a girl drinking with another girl at a nearby table. When her friend accidentally knocked over the ashtray, the first girl and I had exchanged a look and she had smiled at me. I formulated a dozen chat-up lines but lacked the nerve to use any of them. She had dark brown hair tied back with a faded silk scarf and was wearing old jeans and a tan-coloured T-shirt that was cut pretty low for the time. When they got up to go I was looking at her and she smiled at me again. The smile was so friendly I felt certain she would have listened to me if I’d tried to strike up a last-minute conversation. All it needed was a remark about the pub or the warm weather but I dried and she walked out of my life. I followed her discreetly out of the pub and watched as she and her friend split and walked in separate directions. It was a Saturday lunchtime, the sun was beating down and this girl was right there. I’m not saying I’m a catch, but you know when someone’s given you a look, and all I had to do was catch up with her, apologise for staring in the pub and see where it went from there. Instead I watched her wait at a bus stop, climb on board a W7 and disappear in the direction of Muswell Hill.