Nicholas Royle - Regicide

‘Only once,’ she said. ‘They took my collection of coloured glass bottles. You know, they were just about the only things I cared about and they picked them out of everything else. Two thousand pound computer? No thanks, I’ll just have these old blue bottles, they might fetch ten quid down Affleck’s Palace. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Seems weird,’ I agreed. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t someone you know? I mean, it sounds like it might be a personal thing.’

She seemed to consider this and then asked, ‘But who’d do a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘a wronged boyfriend, someone you sacked or beat going for a job. The world’s full of people with reason to want to hurt you.’

‘Well, fuck me, I’m glad you came.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you can affect people’s lives without meaning to and we never think about them coming back and saying, “Hey, I want to get my own back.”’

She gave me an odd look and walked into the little kitchen.

I didn’t know what had come over me to make me say such things. ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. The journey was… well, it was a journey.’

‘Make yourself at home, Carl. Take your jacket off,’ she shouted above the noise of the kettle and I realised I couldn’t. I needed a shirt.

‘What happened?’ she asked, coming back into the main room and looking at me standing there like an extra from Dawn of the Dead .

‘I had to throw my shirt away,’ I said. ‘I spilt something all over it.’

She gave me another odd look, which I added to my collection, but she did go and get me a shirt from her bedroom. ‘It should be big enough,’ she said as she passed it to me. ‘It’s one I use to sleep in.’

A momentary thrill. The thought of having her night shirt next to my skin. She went back into the kitchen and stirred the curry while I took my jacket off and put the shirt on. It was a long white T-shirt with the words Holiday Time stencilled on the left breast. It smelt of washing powder.

‘Do you mind if I use the bathroom?’ I asked.

‘Help yourself.’

I locked myself in and let out a big sigh. It wouldn’t do me any good to be so nervous but so far I was getting everything wrong. She was probably sorry she’d let me come. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d got some colour back in my cheeks and I needed a shave. Obsessed with travelling light I hadn’t brought anything except a toothbrush and my copy of Un Régicide .

The bathroom was painted blue with bits of mirrored glass and glazed tile stuck on the walls like a kind of mosaic. She had lots of Body Shop soaps — fruit and animal shapes — and a big bottle filled with tiny sea shells.

I splashed cold water on my face and dabbed myself dry with a big soft white towel. There was a peach-coloured bathrobe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I buried my face in it to see if I could smell her. The trouble was, I hardly knew what she smelt like.

I used the toilet, washed my hands and laid my hand on the door handle.

Before the door opened I had a split-second vision of me opening the door and there being nothing there but utter darkness. No flat, no Annie Risk, just emptiness, cold and vast.

Then it was gone and I stepped into the hall. I smelt the curry.

‘Nearly ready,’ Annie shouted.

‘OK,’ I called, but I could still feel the chill.

We sat on big floor cushions in Annie’s lounge to eat the curry. She’d produced a bottle of wine and I hoped I wasn’t going to make any more stupid remarks. I told her it was great curry and she smiled, pouring more wine. I relaxed and the conversation flowed naturally. We accepted each other’s childhood reminiscences as if they were precious stones that we turned over in our hands and polished and put away in a safe place. The clumsy line on which I’d started the evening was forgotten, at least by me. By midnight two empty wine bottles stood next to each other on the table. After Annie had opened a third, the conversation took a darker turn and we started talking about ghosts, fears, dreams. I asked Annie what she was scared of.

‘Birds,’ she said, playing with one of the wine bottle corks.

‘Birds? Why?’ I asked.

‘For many years I didn’t know. I was just scared of them. It was a phobia; it didn’t need a reason.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘But then one day I was walking across the park.’

‘Alexandra Park?’

She looked at me, slightly exasperated, as she continued to turn the cork over and over in her hand. ‘Yeah, probably. But, you know, any park. It doesn’t matter. Just — the park.’

‘OK, sorry. Go on.’ I smiled at her.

‘I don’t know where I was up to now.’

‘You were walking across the park.’

‘And there was this great big crow in front of me. Just ten or twelve feet away. Great big thing. And it opened its big black beak and came out with this awful, harsh, raucous cry.’

‘Yeah, they can be pretty frightening, crows,’ I said.

Annie threw the cork at me and I ducked.

‘The point was — or is — I wasn’t that bothered by it, but it made me realise what it was about most other birds that freaked me out.’

‘Go on,’ I said as she paused.

‘It was the disconnect between what they look like and what they sound like.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my hand brushing Annie’s leg as I placed my wine glass on the floor.

‘I mean they have these horrible little legs with claws for feet, tiny little cold, black eyes, and most importantly this hard, angular beak out of which, weirdly, comes this beautiful burbling song. It doesn’t add up. It’s all wrong. It’s not for nothing that Hieronymus Bosch painted so many birds in his visions of hell. They’re horrible, nasty, weird little things and I won’t have them anywhere near me.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You really don’t like birds, do you?’

‘I really don’t like birds.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘The wine’s all gone,’ Annie said, at length, leaning back against a cushion. ‘But I can offer you something from the liqueur trolley.’ She was pointing to the corner by the window. There was a small table with short legs and on it stood a bottle of Cointreau and what looked like some foreign brandy. From where I was sitting and with a quart of wine inside me I was having trouble reading the menu. It crossed my mind that if these floor cushions were not intended as my bed for the night I might not be in the best condition to make the most of any opportunities arising. But Annie had drunk as much as I had and she was a lot smaller, so in fact I was impressed she could still string sentences together coherently. We had a plum brandy each and Annie said to me, ‘How about you then? What are you scared of?’

‘Dogs,’ I said.

When I was doing the courier job I stayed on the road as much as I could and kept out of the office if at all possible. The Thin Controller had vertical pupils, small bumps on either side of his forehead and he never got up from behind his control desk. If you sat down on one of the orange plastic chairs facing the desk his big black dog was always lying under the desk stopping you seeing his cloven feet.

What I’m trying to say is he wasn’t a very nice man and try as he might to conceal his infernal provenance — never letting you see him standing up; the dog hiding his feet — just about every courier on his books had a good idea where he came from.

He called you up all the time, interrupting just when you were dismounting or delivering at some uptight Mayfair address, where more often than not a sign was fixed to the wall advising couriers to keep the volume down. I actually quite enjoyed doing jobs in Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Middle-aged receptionists would rumple their silk blouses and crease their foreheads as they turned and frowned at my entrance. The helmet, the fingerless leather gloves and the shorts — I acquired some Lycra after a couple of weeks; Jaz helped me get kitted out — were regarded as threatening at many W1 addresses west of Regent Street.