Nicholas Royle: First Novel

In the cupboard under the kitchen sink I find a box of lightweight rubber gloves that I bought off an unemployed teenager from Middlesbrough who came to the door with a bag of dusters, microfibre cloths, clothes brushes, tea towels and other poor-quality household items. You can close the door on them, but then how do you know they will not target your house when you are out? The simplest and safest way to make them go away is to buy something off them.

I leave the house. Didsbury is an affluent area of south Manchester, a village in the way that Highgate in north London is a village or Greenwich Village in New York. I walk around to the humpback bridge. I take the path that leads down to the dismantled railway line, which is overgrown, a haven for goldfinches, foxes and occasional junkies and alcoholics. I peer into the tangled vegetation on either side of the little path that runs down the slope. Nothing. At the bottom, the main path — the trackbed of the dismantled railway line — leads south past Didsbury Park, past the Tesco where TV presenter Richard Madeley once walked out with two bottles of wine for which he had forgotten to pay, and eventually to Parrs Wood, an area of East Didsbury bordered by the River Mersey and the A34 and known for its eponymous high school and extensive entertainment complex. The other way, a dead end, leads north towards the humpback bridge, but is blocked off before reaching it. There’s a thicket of trees and bushes and brambles, all of which will have to be cleared if they do ever extend the tram system out here. I pick my way through razor-sharp coils of raspberry and blackberry, taking care to minimise my trail. In the shadows at the heart of the thickest vegetation, lighter patches turn out to be sweet wrappers, fast-food cartons, a copy of the South Manchester Reporter . I am about to head back up to the road when I notice what looks like a discarded pile of light-coloured textiles towards the back of an extensive nettle bed by the fence that separates the path from the new block of flats on the south side of School Lane. I realise I can get around the back of the nettle bed by creeping along the narrow ridge between the fence and the nettles, using the chain-link fence for support. This means I do not disturb the nettles. I have to make a single footfall between the fence and the light-coloured material, which I can now see is the outermost of Overcoat Man’s many coats.

He is lying on his front with his face turned away from me. He is unmoving and makes no sound. There is a strong smell rising from his body, but then there always was. I take the gloves from my pocket and put them on.

The pockets of his outermost overcoat — a filthy mac — are empty. He has two further coats and a suit jacket underneath, but all I find in the pockets of these are a dry-cleaner’s ticket stub, a button, part of a page torn from a religious tract bearing a subhead in bold type, ‘The Way Forward’, and a playing card — the seven of diamonds. I have to move Overcoat Man’s body — a deadweight — to get at his trouser pockets, which contain two scrunched-up paper napkins, a few coppers and a door key on a split ring with a cheap plastic fob and the words ‘Side door’ written on the label in a spidery hand.

I leave everything where I found it and am about to retrace my single step to the chain-link fence when I realise I didn’t check to see if the suit jacket had a top pocket. I bend down again, joints creaking, and feel my way through the outer layers to the suit jacket — cut from once-fine wool-rich cloth, ‘hand-tailored by Howard Lever’, according to the label — and in the top pocket I find a crumpled five-pound note.

I uncrumple it and study it closely on both sides. Nothing has been written on it. No phone number, nothing.

I return the note to the jacket pocket and roll Overcoat Man’s body back into its original position before retreating to the chain-link fence and extricating myself carefully from the scene.

I climb back up the path to School Lane. As I reach the pavement by the side of the Scout hut, Umbrella Lady is making her way slowly past. She wears dark glasses, pink ankle socks and carries a plastic carrier bag in one hand and a small grey umbrella in the other. I wait for her to pass and then I cross the road.

It is half past eleven in the morning. I am sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of green tea and my laptop, answering emails. There’s one from AJ and Carol inviting me to a barbecue at their house. Either I will accept or I won’t.

There’s an email from the editor of a food and drink website asking me if I want to do another restaurant review.

And there’s an email from the latest editor to turn down my proposed article about Vincent de Swarte’s Pharricide .

Pharricide , Vincent de Swarte’s first novel, is the story of a young man, Geoffroy Lefayen, who becomes the lighthouse keeper at Cordouan, a tiny island in the Atlantic close to the mouth of the Gironde. To mark his appointment, Geoffroy catches and stuffs a conger eel. For Geoffroy, taxidermy is an art form, as well as a way of conferring immortality. ‘If you stuff a living creature, death is not the end, whether it’s a conger eel, a lion, even you or me,’ writes Geoffroy.

De Swarte died in 2006 at the age of forty-one. Shortly after, I started writing to literary editors, but few are interested in articles about untranslated foreign-language novels that are not set to become the latest publishing sensation, fewer still if the book in question is about a psychopathic loner with an interest in taxidermy.

I hear the snap of the cat flap in the cellar, which will be Cleo coming in from the garden. She will stop at her food bowls before coming upstairs. I wait a moment, listening, and then I hear her running up the wooden steps from the cellar. I wonder if she has brought anything. Lately she has started bringing birds into the house. Dead birds. Birds I’ve never seen alive. Goldcrests. A blackcap. I don’t know where she finds them, where in the garden they are hiding.

Cleo enters the kitchen and jumps up on to the table, sitting on her haunches next to my laptop. She is not an affectionate cat, but she is at least sociable. She has not brought any birds this time.

I look again at the email from AJ and Carol. Either or.

AJ and Carol’s house is a short walk from mine.

On the way, I take a detour down the path at the side of the humpback bridge. At the bottom, I turn right on to the path of the dismantled railway and pick my way carefully towards the nettle bed. I stop and peer through the overhanging foliage. I approach a little closer but I can already see that Overcoat Man’s body is no longer there. A telltale patch of damaged nettles shows where he lay, but I can see no clear evidence of which route he might have used to drag himself out of the nettle bed — or by which route his body was removed.

I search the rest of the area, but there is no sign of him.

At AJ and Carol’s I encounter Lewis. He has a shaved head, which he may think disguises his male-pattern baldness, and the few extra pounds he carries are noticeable despite the untucked stencilled shirt and baggy linen trousers. His moon-like face is given a certain definition by strategically trimmed facial hair. He’s standing a little apart from everyone else eating a greasy chicken leg.

‘Lewis,’ he says, licking grease off his fingers before holding out his hand. He laughs: ‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’

‘Hello,’ I say as I take Lewis’ hand, which turns out to be dry but has a soft grip as if made of rubber.

‘I’m helping AJ with the barbecue,’ Lewis says. ‘By eating it. Ksssh-huh-huh .’

‘Hey stranger,’ says AJ as he notices me for the first time. ‘Let me get you a drink.’