Nicholas Royle - Regicide

It wasn’t always possible to avoid the office, however. The Thin Controller made a point of calling you in every so often. There was never any good reason. He’d give you a job he could just as easily have given you over the radio. It seemed like he just wanted to keep an eye on you. He liked confrontation. I didn’t. So I dreaded him calling me in. It wasn’t just the Thin Controller I didn’t like; there was his terrifying dog as well.

If I’ve given the impression the dog never left its lair under the Thin Controller’s control desk, scratch that. As soon as I reached the top of the creaky old wooden stairs from the street the dog was barking like a bastard and bounding along the top landing to meet me. As far as it knew I could have been some suicidally depressed burglar come for the Fat Woman’s petty cash box. I’m not saying it was a stupid dog; I think, like its master, it was in league with dark forces. Whenever the Thin Controller called me in I used to think maybe the dog would have recognised the scent of his owner’s couriers by now. Ha!

Every time I mounted those stairs I did so with my heart in my mouth.

The morning in question was no exception. The step three from the top creaked like a Jeffrey Archer plot and the dog was upon me more like something out of a certain Conan Doyle mystery.

Whenever I’m called upon to explain my fear of dogs I tend to overreact and get all incredulous, wanting instead, demanding even, to know why we should trust dogs . They are, after all, animals. Beasts with too many teeth. They’re carnivorous and have small brains. Is that a good combination? All that stuff about man’s best friend is bollocks. Man’s most likely betrayer more like. One man’s friend, another man’s killer.

They don’t think or reason. It’s not, Shall I bite this little girl’s face off or shan’t I? It’s just, Bite, bite, bite the fucking thing off. Owners think their dogs understand them and the reverse is true. All the dog’s doing is picking up on a few basic reactions to repeated cues. It knows how to get food out of you and how to avoid getting hit. That’s not clever, it’s just survival.

I see mums and dads — dads most of all — letting kids play around with the pit bull and I just want to fucking shoot them. The one good thing the Tories did was introduce legislation about dangerous dogs. Being idiots, though, they didn’t go far enough.

So, I’m at the top of the stairs and the dog’s about to have my testicles for lunch. The Thin Controller does fuck all and the Fat Woman, sitting in her tobacco-stained office, just farts. I always dealt with the dog in the same way: making an effort to control my bowels, I would raise my hands above my head and make all sorts of ridiculous noises to soothe the beast. These ploys felt about as useful as opening up an umbrella against a tsunami but somehow I manage to sidle along the landing to the Thin Controller’s control room, whereupon the dog retreats to his position under the desk, because it remembers I mustn’t see his master’s feet or it’ll get a beating.

The Thin Controller was in the middle of giving someone a hard time over the air. Alpha Two Six by the sound of it. ‘When I give you two jobs you do them in the order I give them to you, Two Six, not in some strange order you invent yourself. What do you think this is, a fucking holiday camp?’

I sat down on one of the orange chairs. The dog growled softly. I didn’t know what breed it was, or what combination of breeds. I just knew I didn’t like it very much.

While waiting for the Thin Controller I did the one thing that annoyed him and which you could get away with. I lit up. For some reason it irritated the crap out of him when couriers smoked in his control room but since he smoked roll-ups constantly himself there wasn’t much he could say. There was, of course, because he was hardly a reasonable man, but he never told you to put it out. He just grunted his disapproval and looked even more put out than usual. It was Jaz who told me about the cigarette smoking thing. In the same way I would pass it on to someone else in the unlikely event that I stuck around long enough to be anybody’s mentor.

Several couriers, health and fitness fanatics all of them, actually took up smoking just to spite the Thin Controller. And not Silk Cut Mild either; they smoked Capstan Full Strength, Woodbines and foul-smelling Turkish brands.

I tried to flick my ash over the dog but its growls grew louder, so I abandoned that.

The Thin Controller finished moaning at Two Six and took his rolly from between his lips with yellow fingers. He always kept his headphones on when talking to you. They were cheap-looking grey flimsy things like we used to use for language work in school.

He grunted. He did that: he called you in then acted like you wanted to see him. I never bothered to play along.

‘You called me in,’ I said.

‘Did I?’

Not worth answering.

He shuffled various papers around on his desk, pretending not to remember what he’d called me in for.

‘Got a job for you.’ The words slipped out of the corner of his mouth like slivers of unwanted food. His antennae eyebrows twitched.

‘A job, is it?’ I said flatly.

He screwed up his face and lit the blackened rolly which had gone out while he’d been sorting through his papers.

‘Don’t fuck about, Two Three. Just do the fucking job for me, will you.’ He plucked the rolly from his mouth and set about trying to remove a shred of tobacco from his tongue by blowing and spitting. Under the desk the dog stirred and the headphones crackled. I could just hear the tinny voice calling in. ‘Alpha One Eight.’

‘Where are you, One Eight?’ A beat, a drag and the metallic rustling of the courier’s voice. ‘What the fuck are you doing in Regent’s Park? You’re going to thirty-six from Covent Garden and you’re in Regent’s Park. What is going on, One Eight?’

He went on like this for a while and as he was still talking dug a docket out from under the messiest part of his desk and held it out for me to take. I was relieved to get out of there. I looked at the docket as I returned to my bike. The job was somewhere near the Barbican, between St Paul’s and Old Street. Not that far from the office. I freewheeled down Pentonville Road and took a left.

A few minutes later I was going down a bus and cycle lane with a line of traffic stationary on my right and some fucking well-intentioned idiot left a gap in the queue and waved through a Vauxhall Astra that was aiming to cross from the other side of the road into a garage forecourt on my side. But the driver didn’t look out for me. I could almost forgive that. It was the twat in the Golf who waved her through I soon wanted to have buried alive.

So the Astra crossed my path — nice and slowly as well, that was the essential comedy touch; if she’d been doing more than ten miles an hour I’d have missed her — and I braked but there wasn’t much point. My front wheel smacked straight into the rear door and then I was flying. It must have been an impressive sight for all the motorists sitting in their cars with nowhere to go as my body described a parabola in the air above the Astra and landed with a sickening crump in the bus lane just beyond the car.

I lay still and in total silence for a few moments not knowing if I could move, not daring to try in case it was bad news. Then the spell was broken as the driver of the Astra came running and crouched down beside me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying. ‘I’m so sorry. Are you all right? He waved me on. I thought it was clear.’

I sympathised. She hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. Obviously she should have looked instead of relying on the wave. It was the man who waved I wanted to have a stern word with, but the traffic was moving again. Which was more than I was.