Nicholas Royle - First Novel

Eventually, still keeping an eye out for runners or cyclists, I’ll lower myself into a crouch between river and tree. I’ll feel the muddy bank beginning to slope away beneath my feet. I’ll wonder why I didn’t bring gloves. As I extend them through the undergrowth, my hands and lower arms will be etched with red scratches, reminding me of the marks on Grace’s arms, but finally I’ll catch hold of a scrap of coat and I’ll work out — from a hard, bony protuberance and the arrangement of the coat — that I’m touching a shoulder. Reaching for the other shoulder, my fingertips will alight on a surface as damp as the coat but colder. My hand will shrink back from the contact and the edge of my palm will snag on something sandpapery and I’ll remember reading somewhere that it’s a myth that hair and fingernails continue to grow, post-mortem, for up to seventy-two hours. Instead it’s shrinkage in the skin and the flesh — hair follicles, nail housings — that’s to blame.

As I get my hands under the arms and start pulling the body further down towards the river, into the concealment of thicker, taller undergrowth, I’ll notice, for the first time, the smell. It will remind me of the time I emptied the salad drawer of contents that had been left in there far too long. I’ll leave the body close to the lip of the bank, the legs anchored by tough brambles, and retreat, doing my best to leave the vegetation looking as undisturbed as possible.

Back on the path, I’ll start walking upstream. When I reach the Pyramid, I’ll look up at it and wonder, as I’ve wondered before, about the window in the middle of the east wall that’s a different colour from all of its neighbours. I’ll cross the roundabout at the lights and retrieve my car and drive to the university, where I’ll look up an address. I’ll get back in the car and drive to Fallowfield or Oldham or Blackley or Swinton, wherever her records show her as living. The house will be a little redbrick terraced two-up two-down with a landlord living in Didsbury or Prestwich or Altrincham or Ellesmere Park who’ll have several places like it on his books, but either there’ll be no answer to my knock on the door or it will be opened by a girl in denim shorts over black tights who’ll say she hasn’t seen Grace in over a week and I’ll leave and drive around aimlessly for a while before heading back home and parking not outside my house but outside a house a couple of streets away with scaffolding climbing up the walls.

I’ll bang on the door until he answers it and I’ll walk into his house without being asked. What the fuck? I’ll say to him. What the fuck? Ksssh-huh-huh , he’ll go, in his lounge surrounded by his world movie DVDs and his Neil Roland photographs and his seven copies of Straight to Video published by Strangeways Books. What? What the fuck, I’ll say again and then I’ll smack him. And then I’ll either leave him lying on the cheap, lumpy wooden floor, rubbing his stubbly jaw, or I’ll pull him up to his feet and suggest that we go out to the car and we’ll drive out to the Peaks and I’ll drag him up the hill and dig and dig and dig and show him that nobody’s coming through that fucking mountain. The remains of his family were cleared up years ago with the wreckage of the plane. Crashed aircraft do not move through solid earth. The dead do not come back to life. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is a work of fiction. Pyramids are nothing but monuments to obscene power and colossal vanity. And he’ll go, What the fuck?

That night, after driving back and dropping Lewis outside his scaffolding-clad house, I’ll stay up drinking until I succeed in numbing the pain or until I replace the pain with a new pain in a different place but that’s acute enough to distract me from the original pain and then I’ll go to bed and I’ll fall into a fitful sleep and I’ll be woken by the rain. I’m not normally woken by rain unless it’s particularly heavy rain and then I hear it in my dreams as it’s blown against the windows and as it pours out of the gutters and splashes on to the ground at the front of the house. I’ll exit my dreams and lie there thinking about the body perched on the edge of the riverbank, albeit tethered by thorny stems. I’ll try to get back to sleep, but I’ll be unable to and I’ll know from experience that it’s hopeless, so I’ll get up and dress in the dark and make a cup of tea that I’ll sit and drink in the kitchen staring at the rain lashing against the windows.

Dawn will break without my being aware of its happening. One moment it will still be night, the next the sky will have turned a uniform misty grey. At the same time the rain will have eased off. I’ll leave the house and walk down the dismantled railway line through a fine drizzle. I’ll pass through the tunnel under Didsbury Road without hesitating and across the middle of Green Pastures and then I’ll be down on the riverbank and the rain will have stopped, but the water will have risen by an appreciable amount. The sand martins’ nests will not only have filled with water but the force of the flow will have swept away parts of the bank. The pylon will be emitting a strange buzzing noise as if affected in some way by the rain. A thin grey tablecloth of mist will have been laid over the field on the far side of the river.

There’ll be no one on the path, no cyclists, no horse riders, no trans-Pennine ramblers. I’ll step off the path into the brambles, which will resist my progress as staunchly as if I had never before penetrated them, but I’ll finally reach the spot where I expect to find the body and I won’t immediately see it and I’ll have visions of it having been dislodged by the fiercest of the flood and dragged into the flow and carried downstream until arrested by some obstacle and left hanging in a grotesque tableau to be discovered, with awful, clichéd inevitability, by a dog walker, but then I’ll smell it and I’ll suddenly see it and I’ll realise I’d hidden it better than I thought I had. I’ll make sure the body is still secure and I’ll check the height of the water and I’ll observe that it’s unlikely to rise much higher than it is at the moment and I’ll slowly and carefully extricate myself from the brambles and nettles and return to the path. I’ll stand there for a moment and sniff the air, but I won’t be able to smell anything, and so I’ll start walking back towards Parrs Wood.

When I get home I’ll find the model aircraft that I salvaged from the garden beyond the back fence and I’ll get the broken pieces of red plastic and I’ll put them all on the kitchen table. From the drawer I’ll take a tube of superglue and I’ll fix all the pieces back together and then I’ll sit and look at the aircraft. I’ll turn it this way and that, examine every angle. I’ll allow most of the morning to go by in this fashion and when I feel the first pangs of hunger, instead of getting some lunch, I’ll go outside and get in the car and drive round to Carol and AJ’s and I’ll park outside on the opposite side of the road and sit and watch their house. I’ll sit there for a long time and either I’ll see Carol at one of the windows or I won’t. And if I do, either I’ll wave or I won’t. And if she sees me she’ll either wave back or she’ll ignore me because she doesn’t recognise me, and if she waves back I’ll get out of the car and I’ll walk up the drive to her front door and she’ll come down and let me in, and I’ll smile at her and either she’ll invite me in or she’ll ask me what’s up and if she invites me in I’ll go in and she’ll close the door behind us and I’ll walk into her kitchen and I’ll ask if AJ is there and she’ll say, No, he’s at work. Some of us have jobs to go to. And I’ll laugh and she’ll look a little uneasy and either I’ll say, Look, this was a mistake, and leave, or I’ll tell her that it doesn’t matter that AJ’s not in because it’s her I’ve come to see. I’ll start to tell her how I feel about her, and it will occur to me that I don’t know how I feel about her. It will occur to me that I don’t actually feel anything about her apart from a basic, almost animalistic attraction that I might feel for anyone but that I just happen to feel for her, and she’ll either slap me across the face or look away and start picking at the cuticle of her thumb. I’ll tell her I’m sorry and that I had to see a friendly face and there was no one else I could think of. I’d have gone and seen Lewis, I’ll say, except I saw him last night and I’m sick of seeing him, to be honest, and she’ll say Who? and I’ll repeat his name and she’ll say, Who’s Lewis? And I’ll say, You remember, and she’ll say, I think you should leave now.