Nicholas Royle - Regicide

He knows, I thought. He knows.

The following week was one of the best. I had the memory of the weekend just gone and the promise of the next. Annie and I spoke on the phone during the day on Monday and arranged that I would go up again and this time I would take my car so that if we wanted we could drive out somewhere for the day.

I enjoyed working, talking to customers, dealing with enquiries. I embarked on a new filing system for the jazz section. The old system split everyone up into male singers, big bands, modern jazz, trad and so on. But that was no good for people like Mose Allison — sometimes he sang, sometimes he just played — or Courtney Pine, who switched musical styles like Imelda Marcos tried on shoes. So I changed it to a straight alphabetical thing and for someone like, say, John Lee Hooker I put a card in the pop/rock section saying SEE JAZZ.

Which reminded me. I hadn’t seen the old bastard for a while, so I gave him a ring and nipped around to Bethnal Green after work on Wednesday. I told him about Annie and he was very enthusiastic. I said nothing about the map. I still wasn’t sure how he’d react and, anyway, by now I liked the idea of it being mine and Annie’s secret.

The gasholders across the canal shone like two huge polished copper saucepans. An open window admitted smells of rotting fruit and engine oil rising from the scummy olive-green canal. Jaz offered me a beer but I said no and asked him if he had any mineral water instead. He looked at me like I’d asked for giraffe essence.

‘Course I haven’t got any fucking mineral water, you ponce,’ he said. ‘But I can lower a bucket into the canal if you like.’

He went off to the kitchen muttering about fucking mineral water and came back with two cold bottles of Budvar.

‘Christ,’ he said, ‘you only went to fucking Manchester. Not exactly Paris, is it?’

I laughed.

‘The pictures look good,’ I said. He’d framed several of his urban landscapes and hung them on the walls.

‘You haven’t fucking looked at them,’ he said from the depths of his armchair.

So I went slowly around the room like it was an art gallery. Jaz was talented. And obsessed. OK, the light was different in each photograph and even the location changed, but the subject was the same: England as Post-Industrial Wasteland.

‘Like I said,’ passing behind his chair, ‘the pictures look good.’ I grabbed hold of his shoulders from behind. He squirmed and I clapped him on the arm and let go.

‘You’re in a funny mood,’ he observed.

‘I’m looking forward to the weekend. Cigarette?’ I delved into my boot and chucked him a Camel. We smoked and I got two more beers from the fridge. The light disappeared from the sky and the gasholders hovered in shadow. ‘They’re bigger than last time I was here,’ I said.

‘They’re fuller. When the gas gets pumped in they rise.’

‘I know,’ I said, stubbing out my butt in the big black ashtray on the floor by Jaz’s chair. ‘I’d best be off if I’m going to make the Hong Kong Garden before it closes.’

‘Have a good weekend,’ Jaz said.

The remaining three days went quickly and on Saturday I locked up early, leaving a note on the door saying early closure was due to British Summer Time. That should have confused a few people. In August. I drove north on the M1. The good thing about not starting your weekend until Saturday evening is that the motorway is empty, because everyone else started theirs twenty-four hours earlier. Still, quality not quantity.

When I got to Manchester, around 9.30pm, we went out for a drink at the Princess. It was excellent to see Annie, but I was exhausted after the drive up and as soon as we got back to her flat I passed out and was no good for anything until morning when I was woken by sunlight slanting through the bedroom window. I watched Annie sleep for a while then slipped out of bed without waking her and went to fix some breakfast. I even popped out for a paper.

We had breakfast and read the paper in bed for an hour, then drove to Formby. It was a beautiful day and we parked a couple of miles from the dunes. The marram grass found its way up the legs of Annie’s 501s but I was wearing my boots outside my jeans so I was OK. I offered to carry her and she told me to fuck off so I pushed her down a dune. She rolled over a couple of times and shouted ‘You bastard!’ loud enough to confuse the ships heading for Liverpool docks. I gallumphed down the side of the dune, sand getting in over the top of my boots, and when I was level with her she grabbed hold of my ankle and pulled me over.

We spent the afternoon enjoying the privacy of a hollow between three high dunes. The sun caressed our bodies. I had to cover up after half an hour as I was starting to turn pink. My long hair is only dyed black from a rather disappointing mousey colour. Late in the afternoon with the gentle roll of the breakers in our ears and the wind whistling through the marram grass we made love. The sand was a problem but it made it more fun. The second time, Annie came quite quickly and I couldn’t. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, and for once I believed it.

Back at Annie’s flat, we made love in bed for the first time and it seemed to me as the sweat poured off me and Annie’s back arched higher that what we were attempting lay in the same realm as the quintuple ice jump and the coloratura soprano’s super A. We wanted to do it no matter how unlikely we were to succeed because we felt sure we could. Mainly it was about wanting it, yearning for it. Every muscle in our bodies ached for it.

We didn’t quite make it, though we got pretty close, floating in the outermost rings of its ripple effect. At the centre, I believed, was something unworldly — two people reaching their climax together and becoming undone as individuals, being remade as a single organism just for a split second of real time, but in that state of flux it would last for an eternity.

It was like the dogs in the old factory. Their fighting became so wild and uninhibited they entered the flux. Which could explain why, although they revolted and terrified me, I had been attracted to the golden spinning ring of dog flesh.

In the early hours I slipped out of the flat while Annie slept. She had known I would be going but I left her a note anyway. In it I told her I thought I might have fallen in love with her.

I headed south through Sale and Altrincham to connect with the M6 at Lymm. I felt fine though I knew that tiredness could creep up on me at the most inconvenient times and none could be more inconvenient than when driving on the motorway. Determined not to give sleep a chance I switched on the radio and messed around with the dial until I heard something with enough balls to keep me awake. In this instance it was a jazz programme and the record playing was Cat Anderson or some other trumpeter who could blow like Anderson. Whoever he was he certainly could play and he wasn’t scared of high notes. I thought of Annie lying in bed, then of the two of us reaching our peak. We had cleared the bed in our excitement. The duvet was on the floor, the pillows thrown against the walls, as we circled each other, first with me above, then Annie, then me again and so on. For over an hour.

Cat Anderson was really going for it now, his notes sharp squeals in the confined space of the car. I turned the volume up and again it was me and Annie on the bed almost dancing around each other in our rapture. Anderson went higher and higher. I saw the golden ring of the dog fight. The starry delirium as Annie and I plunged deeper and deeper into each other. The trumpet was suddenly playing notes a trumpet shouldn’t play. The trumpet player had done it. He’d gone through the ceiling. He held the note. Surely it was the highest I’d ever heard. The sort of sound we’re not supposed to be able to hear, never mind get out of a trumpet. Too high-pitched for the human ear. Annie and me coming within a split second of each other. Just beginning to go, to lose it. The dogs whirling around and around and around. The trumpet’s triple G.