Marcel Theroux: Strange Bodies

It turned out that Leonora was on holiday with the children at the time, and it took them a few days to get hold of her. When they reached her, she was, understandably, frosty. Her husband had been dead for months, she told them. And she faxed over the death certificate to prove it.

Exactly a week after Nicky died, two police officers dropped by the shop. I made two cups of tea in the back room and as I came back with them, I glimpsed the page of a notebook the younger one was holding. He’d written dead white male in a mixture of lower case and capitals and underlined it twice. In retrospect, I see I should have been on guard from then.

They explained there was confusion over the dead man’s identity and they were trying to establish who he was so they could release the body to his relatives for burial. I told them that as far as I was concerned he was Nicholas Slopen. They asked me why I thought that, and I mentioned John Stonehouse and my assumption that Nicky had been running away from something.

Up to then, it had felt like a friendly chat, but at that point they became very aggressive. The older of the two policemen whipped out these awful autopsy photos from an envelope he was carrying and pushed them in my face. He said that Nicky would have to be Harry Houdini to be alive after an accident like this. He shouted that Nicky had been dead for months and I should think about the pain I was causing his widow and his children.

They clearly thought I was a troublemaker: some crazy abandoned woman fixated on an old ex-boyfriend, tormenting Leonora with my fairy tales about her dead husband.

I was shaken by the photos, by their obvious hostility, by Nicky’s reappearance and death, and I didn’t have the stomach to argue with them. I capitulated. I said I hadn’t seen him for almost twenty years and that I must have been mistaken.

Their aggression surprised me, but in retrospect, I see it shouldn’t have. It’s baffling to have the laws of physics subverted. Dead men don’t go wandering round the Midlands looking up ex-girlfriends. And behind the woman who says they do is an uncomfortable archetype. It felt like those policemen wanted to stick me on a ducking stool or burn me at the stake.

‘You don’t actually know anything, ’ the older of the two policemen had said every time I had tried to explain why I’d drawn the conclusions I had. And part of me was relieved to be able to agree with him.

So that’s how they left it. Officially, the man who died on my living-room carpet remains unidentified to this day. They preserved some DNA and cremated the rest of him.

Two months after Nicky died, I discovered that Babette had been posting her tiny rice cakes down the back of the sofa. We’ve had a rodent problem in the past here, so I went into overdrive trying to clear the place up. Sure enough, she’d been doing it for a while and I had to pull the cushions off everything to sort it out. Under the chair where Nicky had been sitting during book group, I found a tiny flash memory stick that I didn’t recognise. I stuck it into my computer to see what it was. It didn’t cross my mind that it would have anything to do with Nicky until I started reading it.

What follows is the text just as I found it.

I don’t think a day has gone by when I haven’t thought about Nicky’s visits and asked myself why he came to me, particularly that second time. He must have known how close he was to his last hours. My feeling as I’ve got older is that human motivation is more opaque and more contradictory than we like to admit. But I’ve come to the conclusion that Nicky left that flash drive here on purpose; that he wanted someone to find it and make its contents public. I believe that Nicky felt a genuine connection to me and for that reason he entrusted me with his story.

Susanna Laidlaw-Robinson

My name is Nicholas Patrick Slopen. I was born in Singapore City on April 10th 1970. I died on September 28th 2009, crushed in the wheel arch of a lorry outside Oval tube station.

This document is my testimony.

As will shortly become clear, I have an unknown but definitely brief period of time to explain the events leading up to my death and to establish the continuity of my identity after it. In view of the constraints upon me, I hope the reader will forgive my forgoing the usual niceties of autobiography. At the same time, I will have to commit myself to some details with a certain, and perhaps wearisome, degree of exactitude in order to provide evidence to support the contention contained in the first paragraph of this testimony: that I am Nicholas Slopen, and that my consciousness has survived my bodily death.

According to convention, I ought to give some account of my birth and childhood, but time is very short and little of that information is of material consequence to my narrative. The events leading up to my death began with the moment on 15 April 2009 when I arrived for lunch at the Green Gorse Tavern in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, shortly before 1 p.m.

I had been invited there by Hunter Gould, who is, as I believe is well known, a figure of some notoriety in the music industry. It’s not my intention to disguise or protect any identities in this document. Let them be answerable for what they have done.

Hunter, whom I had never met before, had approached me with an invitation for lunch through his secretary, Ms Preethika Choudhury. In a subsequent exchange of emails, Preethika explained that in addition to his musical interests, Hunter was a keen amateur collector of literary memorabilia and was seeking my help in authenticating a collection of letters which had been offered to him for sale by a private dealer.

Though it was a mild day, I had brought with me a precautionary raincoat folded into an oblong package under my left arm; in my right hand, I held a dented leather briefcase which was a gift to me from my wife, Leonora, and had belonged to her father, Bahman, who was himself a scholar of English literature, though his principal expertise was in early mediaeval Farsi poetry. I surrendered the coat to the maître d’, but kept hold of the case, which contained a facsimile holograph letter written by the eighteenth-century lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson, a back number of Modern Languages Quarterly, a crumpled copy of the Evening Standard and a sachet of anti-wrinkle cream.

I see already I have failed in my resolution to be as concise as possible.

Forgive me. It must be hard for anyone to imagine the degree of comfort I obtain from the vividness of these recollections.