Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I’d tried again, a couple more times, ringing her up in the evening after work when I hoped she’d be relaxed and receptive to my ideas. We got on fine, because I let her go ahead and take the piss, but that was as far as it was going to go, she said.

With each phone call I fell deeper and deeper into whatever it was I was feeling for her. Perhaps the map represented an escape route from this frustration. Something else to think about.

An original ’76 punk with bad teeth and nailed boots clumped into the shop and said he wanted £25 for the Skids’ ‘Into the Valley’ on white vinyl and £30 for the Wide Open EP, twelve inch on red. I suggested he’d do better to advertise in the music papers. I’d already got two copies of one and three of the other in the shop and no one seemed to want to buy them.

‘What about Roxy Music Viva! on Island? Forty quid.’

‘I’ve got three in stock.’

‘Not on Island,’ the punk argued. ‘It’s rare.’

‘It’s rare but I’ve got three of them.’

I was lying. Instinctively I’d decided not to buy anything at all off the punk. I didn’t like the look of him. I had nothing against punks. I liked them if they were clean and looked as if they could communicate without the aid of violence, but this guy looked like he hadn’t changed his bondage trousers or washed his hair since the Sex Pistols told Bill Grundy to fuck off.

He had a quick sulky flick through the new wave section before slinking out of the shop.

I took the map out and studied the layout of the streets. Bending down slightly behind the till I shut my eyes and ran my fingers over the paper to see if that would yield anything. But all I felt were the slight ridges of toner from the photocopier. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed two young girls playing peek-a-boo with me from behind the soundtracks section. Did they know anything about the map? Was it a deliberate plant? Or was I getting paranoid? Just possibly.

I stepped forward to the till to serve a boy buying a clutch of house singles and when I looked up again the girls had gone. When I gave it some thought, I realised a great many people passed through the shop, trailing their lives and their secrets, and some of what they carried tended to get left behind. When I shut the shop every night the atmosphere was a little bit richer. The records contained so many memories, good and bad, different jokes for different folks. Had I bought the Skids singles off the punk, I would have taken part of him into my shop to stay after the doors were locked. Perhaps that was why I’d said no.

Maybe the answer to the map was somewhere in the shop, left in some customer’s wake. If I searched through the racks I would perhaps discover that the LP sleeves had been refiled in some arcane pattern. I looked carefully at the records I had bought during the morning in case their titles revealed anything. But there was nothing. Obviously. I played a random selection of singles and listened with one ear to the lyrics.

The book shelf had started to receive a bit of attention. I’d sold a copy of Anna Kavan’s Ice — the Picador edition with the ghostly painted nude on the front cover — to a girl with sharp little teeth and enormous blue eyes. I ran my fingers along the spines and took out a copy of Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth that had been put back under G instead of R. I flicked through the pages, lifting it to my nose. Beneath the smells of tobacco and tea I could pick up something else, something industrial. I got a flash of one of Jaz’s pictures.

‘Excuse me.’

‘What? Sorry. Yes?’

‘How much is this?’

I looked at a guy in front of me in little round glasses holding a copy of the Banshees’ ‘Mittageisen’ single in a picture sleeve.

‘Give us a quid,’ I said.

Customers came and went steadily until it started to rain late in the afternoon and then, if anything, it got even busier.

I knew I could make something up out of all the material at my fingertips, but I would know I’d invented it. If a genuine message were to emerge I’d know it because I’d feel it. So I thought.

By the end of the day I felt saturated with images and voices and longed for abstraction and silence. The roads were empty. The Escort’s tyres hissed on wet tarmac and I cruised with the radio off. It had got dark early because of the rainclouds. The red lights in the distance became a cascade of reflections in the puddles as I knocked the gear lever into neutral and coasted down to meet them. I used to do this a lot, imagining it saved petrol. On one occasion I’d switched off the engine as well and rolled silently through the night. I got a fright when I turned the wheel and the steering lock engaged. I just managed to turn the key again before running into a lamppost. That was the last time I tried that trick.

I rolled into position behind a girl in a Mini who, like me, was waiting for the lights to change. She had shoulder-length black hair like Siouxsie Sioux — and indeed like Annie Risk — and was bobbing up and down on her seat and moving from side to side, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and banging the dash.

I suddenly wanted to know what she was listening to, in case it was a clue. The longer the lights stayed on red and she continued to bounce up and down the more strongly I felt it. My stomach twisted around and around. If only I could hear what she was listening to, then I’d share her secret and perhaps I’d know the way to drive to the streets on the map.

I wound my window down but her window was up and I couldn’t hear anything. The little car moved in sympathy with her, as if it were her cocoon. I couldn’t pull alongside because there was only one lane.

The lights changed and she was off. I jerked into first and followed, reaching across to switch on the radio to see if she was listening to a station I could tune into. The gap between us lengthened as I slewed across the dial, stopping to catch fragments of music. But there was nothing that spoke to me as clearly as the girl’s movements. It must have been a tape. She was a long way ahead now. I jumped a red light to keep her in sight but she turned into a side street and although I followed, she vanished into a warren of crescents I barely knew.

When I got in I tried Annie’s number but she was either not in or not answering. I got some food from downstairs, had a couple of beers and several cigarettes. It was an evening like any other. I sat on the floor idly looking through my white-labels.

At the shop I used to buy a lot of white label promos in blank sleeves from collectors and if there were any I wanted to keep I just took them home. It was all the same money, whether it was at the shop or at home. Lots of them had the artist’s name scrawled across the white label in felt tip, but some were blank and these were the ones I liked best because if there were no distinguishing marks I could forget who the record was by and playing it was always a surprise.

I pulled a couple out of their sleeves and studied them for clues. Nothing to do with the map, this, just clues as to who the records were by. I put one on and still couldn’t work it out. I sometimes bought stuff without knowing what it was. Maybe I should have got one of those signs for the shop: “You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.”

I fell asleep on the sofa and woke with a start when my cigarette had burned right down and stung my finger. I sucked at it as I drew my legs off the table and stood up. In the bathroom I ran my finger under the cold tap and examined it under the light over the mirror. There was a tiny patch where the whorls of my fingerprint had been smoothed over. Fascinated, I stared at the pattern of parallel lines. On the third finger of my right hand the lines seemed to fan out in a spiral from a central point, like the way hair grows from the crown. But, even though I was on a second wind, I realised that when you’ve got down to examining your own fingerprints it’s time to say goodnight.