Regicide

Chapter One

This is what happened before I found the map.

I went out with Annie Risk. I’d met her only two days earlier at Jaz’s party. We went out to a pub and for something to eat in the West End, and then afterwards I was leading the way back to her hotel because I thought I knew where I was going. I should have done, having worked as a cycle courier in a former life. Still, there would always be one or two areas where my sense of direction would fail me. Grey areas between districts, where the streets appeared indistinguishable from each other.

Annie Risk didn’t know this part of London at all, so she was relying on me. It was only sensible, although she clearly didn’t like giving up responsibility, especially to a man. But by the end of the evening I think she’d decided I was probably all right. She could trust me this far. In any case, now that I’d lost my way, we were equals again.

One street turned into another at a right angle. None of them appeared to be named and the Georgian terraces that lined them looked identical. The windows were dark, the doors locked tight. The air was warm. We turned right and right again, then went straight on and turned right once more.

I sensed Annie watching me as I pushed my nose forward into the sticky night haze of petrol fumes and fast food. She must have thought I was trying to sniff our way out. I was. My sense of smell is renowned. Or it should be. I wondered what she made of my appearance. I had long hair which had been dyed black so many times it was beginning to spoil. My face is big and stupid — open and kind, an old girlfriend had told me; I’d like to believe it — and by late evening it’s usually dark with stubble. My eyes are grey and they don’t always manage to hold your gaze. Although it depends who you are, I suppose. At the time I had this beaten old white leather jacket which I loved and wore always. With it that evening, if my memory is reliable, I was wearing a baggy white cotton shirt and tight black jeans. Jaz often told me the jeans made me look ridiculous; other people just said they were retro. In any case, they emphasised the thinness of my legs, which for one so tall — I’m over six foot — did make me look kind of odd. My cowboy boots — worn outside the jeans — were black with a white butterfly motif on the back. Because of the pack of Camels I kept down the left one I walked with a slight limp.

I don’t know, I liked the way I looked, or I’d grown used to it and felt pretty comfortable about it. It had been a long time since I’d had to worry about what someone else might think.

I kept looking around for landmarks. But there weren’t any and if the doors had numbers, I couldn’t bloody well see them.

‘It’s around here some place,’ I said, peering into the gloom for a way out of the seemingly endless maze. A pulse in my temple had begun to irritate me and I thought I might be getting a headache. The night air was close and thick. But the evening had filled me with hope and I was determined not to let things get to me. These streets couldn’t go on forever. We’d find Annie’s hotel. I hoped she wouldn’t think me foolish for leading her into this warren and not being able to find the way out.

‘It must be quite an expensive hotel,’ I said. The area we were in — south of Euston Road, east of Paddington, on the edge of Marylebone — was not exactly cheap.

‘Actually no,’ she said. ‘Not for me anyway. It’s run by a friend of a friend of mine’s dad and I get a special rate. It’s where I always stay now when I come to London.’

The distance from one streetlamp to the next remained constant. The windows on all sides were dark, many of them shuttered.

‘How often do you come down, then?’ I asked her as I glanced across the street.

‘The last time must have been two, three years ago.’

The pulse in my head throbbed. I wondered if I’d had too much to drink. ‘It’s not exactly a regular thing then?’ I said.

She lived in Manchester in her own flat and earned her living as a graphic designer. Already, from the sparse details she’d given me, I’d pieced together a picture of her flat. Tucked away in a row of terraces like the ones filing past us now, it was small and warm. She liked cushions and hanging things — rugs on the wall and curtains in doorways — and somewhere there would be a kitten drowsing. In contrast to all of this would be her computer, occupying pride of place on the small desk by the window. I imagined her sitting there early in the morning perhaps, still in her dressing gown, the cat purring in her lap, as she clicked and double-clicked, pulling the design on the screen one way and squeezing it then changing her mind and altering the whole thing.

At Jaz’s party I’d been struck by her right away. We’d chatted a bit and after several beers I was relaxed enough to ask if I could see her again. She’d said no. But it was in my nature not to give in, even if I sensed complete futility. Anything’s possible had always been my motto, though with women this was more an article of faith than the result of experience.

Annie had said it wasn’t a good idea because she would be going back to Manchester, and in any case she didn’t want to complicate her life.

She was about five foot five with black hair, dark eyes of indeterminate colour, a loose top, a baggy dark grey and green cotton skirt with tassels and lace-up leather boots. The more we talked, the less I allowed myself to be distracted and the more I felt my slightly drunken smile relaxing into a stupid grin.

She’d finally given in to my request in spite of her resolve. Perhaps she saw something in me she liked. We could have some fun before she went back, she might have been thinking.

‘Just go for a drink,’ she said.

‘Maybe something to eat as well,’ I pushed.

‘OK, but then I’m going back to my hotel and back to Manchester.’

I raised my hands in innocence.

We met in town, just off Cambridge Circus. I’d walked down from the Caledonian Road after locking up the shop. She was wearing a cut-off red denim jacket and the same tasselled skirt as at the party. Her dark hair was drawn back in a ponytail; a few strands escaped and fell in front of her ears.

I stopped staring and we stepped into the Cambridge for a drink. We stayed for over an hour and when we came out Annie’s hair was loose. She was no longer making a clear effort to remain beyond my reach, but I hung back nevertheless.

Usually, when I knew someone only from afar and then spent time with them in close company I saw through the daunting exterior to the younger, more vulnerable person underneath. Some men revealed themselves as boys and in my eyes would never grow up again. Annie showed signs of the girl she had been but that was all they were — signs and clues to the woman she had become. She laughed a lot after we’d had a couple of drinks and though her words of warning about going back to Manchester free of complications rang clearly in my head, I began to feel that more might be possible.

We had some pasta in a scruffy little Italian, the Centrale, and shared a bottle of wine. Annie’s eyes sparkled. Still I didn’t push it.

‘I’ll walk you to your hotel,’ I suggested as we hit the sultry pavement again.

She fluffed her hair with both hands. ‘I could get a cab.’

‘It’s a lovely night,’ I said, reaching into my left boot for my cigarettes. I cupped my hand around my lighter. She told me the address of the hotel and I said confidently, ‘I know where that is. No problem.’ We walked through Soho. I noticed people glancing at us. We looked good together. I said to her, ‘The world is full of all sorts of possibilities and you’ve got to make the most of them, or what’s the point?’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said.

I had thought I was happy being single but now I was excited. As I sneaked sidelong glances I saw her lips constantly breaking into a smile. No complications, she’d said. Yeah, right.

‘How long have you lived in London?’ she asked me.

‘Nine years,’ I told her. ‘But it was working as a courier that helped me find my way around. That’s when I met Jaz.’

We crossed Oxford Street and turned left towards Regent Street.

‘It’s warm, isn’t it?’

Annie nodded. ‘Do you know the way?’ she double-checked.

‘Oh yes.’

The deeper into the maze we penetrated the more hopeless our chances seemed to become of finding the hotel, at least before its front door was shut for the night. And yet, I thought, the further we walked the nearer we were to eventually hitting a street I recognised.

‘You’re very optimistic,’ she said.

‘I’ve always thought you can influence the outcome by the way you think,’ I said, while she looked unconvinced. ‘I know these streets…’ I went on, and her look changed to one of incredulity. ‘I mean I don’t know this actual street but I can picture the area on the map and it’s impossible to get lost. As long as we keep walking, sooner or later we’ll reach a familiar street.’

‘They all look familiar to me,’ she said. ‘Familiar to each other.’

I had to admit she was right, and for a moment I imagined we’d entered another world in which quiet city streets could multiply. It was that kind of evening. It felt weird. The only limits seemed to be those of my imagination.

It was only when we heard the telephone ringing in the next street that we realised how strangely quiet it had been up until then. Not only were the streets we were walking through devoid of traffic, but there was no distant murmur of cars heading west on the Marylebone Road. There were no sirens wailing beyond Baker Street, no Tube trains rumbling underneath our feet, there was no drunken abuse being hurled from pub doorways. There weren’t any pubs.

So we both heard the phone before we reached the street. The ringing got louder as we approached the house it was coming from: a house with dark windows just like those on either side, with nothing special about it apart from this insistent ringing.

I looked at Annie and she smiled nervously. I raised my eyebrows and we carried on past without stopping.

‘I wonder who’s ringing,’ she said as we turned into the next street.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It must be important to keep ringing for so long and this late.’ The sound was barely audible now and I realised that was because other noises had intruded. I could plainly hear the faint hum of passing traffic and the light step of pedestrians coming from the end of the street.

We turned right and a hundred yards later stumbled blinking into Marylebone High Street. Looking at each other, we said nothing. I just took a cigarette from the pack squeezed down my boot and lit up.

‘It’s straightforward now,’ I said, loping into my stride and casting an eye back for Annie. She seemed to be walking closer to me, whereas I had expected she might back off now we were in more familiar surroundings. I slowed down fractionally to allow her to catch up. If she did decide to see me, would I always be as thoughtful? Was that what she was thinking?

We walked on.

‘This is it,’ I said, taking a step back from the building and looking up at the full height of it. ‘It doesn’t exactly leap out at you, does it?’

There was no hotel sign, just a polished brass plaque bearing the number 23. Something about it disturbed me and the pulse in my head returned. I made a mental note to drink several glasses of water before going to bed. ‘Why so low key?’ I asked, nodding towards the hotel.

Annie shrugged. ‘They don’t need to try? I don’t know.’

For a few moments we both stood there awkwardly, a yard apart in front of the hotel.

‘Well, thank you,’ I began as I bent down to kiss her on the cheek. But I didn’t finish because she turned her face towards mine and met my mouth with hers. She allowed the tiniest amount of give and I could sense the hardness of her teeth behind the softness of her lips. I felt an instant, euphoric pleasure.

Annie pulled away and looked down. Apart from feeling I ought to apologise for the taste of my cigarettes, I didn’t know what to say or do.

Annie was muttering something about going in before they shut the door. Her cheeks were flushed.

‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ she said as she made for the doors, probably hoping I wouldn’t ask the question I wanted to ask: could I see her again? She looked back. I’d started to look away and my hair had fallen forward to curtain my face, so she almost certainly couldn’t make out my expression.

I watched through the glass in the door until she’d collected her key and been swallowed by the ornate, gilt-decorated lift, then threw my head back and took in a deep breath from the stifling night. I made off down the street like a child wading through the shallows at the seashore. My mind was swimming with pictures of Annie’s upturned face, thoughts about seeing her again and the smells and sensations of her hair brushing my cheeks as we kissed. I found myself yearning for more. There was no excitement the equal of this. Anything really was possible now. I turned left, and right at the bottom of the street, then left again, heading east.

Because my head was full of Annie Risk it took me a while to realise I was locked back into the maze of streets it had taken us so long to negotiate before. It was the silence that made me realise it and, once again, only when I heard the faint ringing of a telephone. Something made me believe that it was not only the same telephone, but that it had been ringing non-stop since we’d passed it on the way to the hotel.

Soon I was in the very same street and approaching the house. The ringing grew louder. I looked around: the street was empty, all the windows plunged into dark reflection. The thick air enveloped me like the still waters of a deep pool. The telephone continued to ring.

I reached into my boot for a cigarette and spun the wheel on my lighter.

The telephone rang.

I took a deep drag and dropped the cigarette without bothering to grind it with my boot heel. Afterwards I couldn’t fully account for what I did next except by restating the fact that it was a weird evening. Getting lost in streets I thought I knew. Also, I was high on a cocktail of drink, cigarettes, arousal, imagination and Annie Risk. It felt as if the universe were spinning around me. I felt a compulsion and I didn’t question it. I just went ahead and did it.

Within moments I had climbed the four steps and tried the door, only to find it locked. I took off my jacket and bunched it up against a small square pane in the window. Delivering one swift punch to the jacket I broke the glass which seemed to melt rather than shatter and flow into the interior gloom.

The telephone was still ringing.

I reached an arm through the hole and fiddled with the catch until it sprang open. The window opened easily after that and I jumped into the room. For one sickening airborne instant I feared the floor would give way under my feet, but it was solid.

I crouched and looked around. The ringing seemed to be coming from a room deeper inside the house. Slipping into my jacket I stepped as lightly as possible to the door, my way lit by the glow of streetlamps. In the hallway, illuminated by a faint glimmer from the half-moon of stained glass above the door, I orientated myself. The ringing was coming from the dark end of the hall. My breathing had become shallow. It was not only that I was frightened by the possibility of disturbing the owner of the house, I was still gripped by the feeling that this wasn’t an ordinary evening. I was buzzing. I had to answer the phone. It was important.

At the end of the hall were two doors.

I tried them both. The telephone was behind the second.

I saw it from the doorway. Black and lobster-like it sat hunched on a small wooden table draped with a white sheet which looked as if it had been daubed with black ink.

It was still ringing; now, of course, louder than ever.

The thick carpet sucked at my feet as I started to cross the room and I worried I might lose a boot. The air in the room smelt musty and old, as if by opening the door I had broken the seal on a long-kept secret. Perhaps the phone had always been ringing. Air swirled past me as I used my arms like a swimmer to move forward.

I hesitated for a moment as I stood over the little table. What if the phone went dead just before I picked it up? I almost hoped it would.

I lifted the receiver and the ringing stopped. The Bakelite felt clammy in my hand as I raised it to my ear. On the edge of hysteria a woman’s voice just had the chance to utter these words — ‘Carl! Help! Come quickly, Carl! Please!’ — before the connection was severed.

As I stood there in the darkness and the line buzzed, I became more and more frightened.

I didn’t tell you my name, did I? That was deliberate. As you’ll have guessed, my name is Carl.

Chapter Two

The following morning I went back to the area in which Annie Risk and I had got lost. It was a Sunday so I didn’t have to worry about the shop.

I drove around for half an hour, but it was daylight and I could read all the street names and there were numbers on most of the doors. If I did drive down the street where I’d broken into the house to answer the phone, I was unable to recognise it. Certainly I didn’t see any broken windows.

Confused, I went back home and rang Jaz. I asked if he was busy and could I come around for a bit.

‘Yeah, I’m busy,’ he said. ‘But come round anyway, you old bastard.’

I drove down through Barnsbury and Islington. When I got close to the canal, passing between Dalston and Hoxton, I saw a pack of dogs on a tiny patch of waste ground. With their ears pricked up they watched me go past and I was glad I was not on foot. I couldn’t see anyone about, which seemed odd for a Sunday afternoon. I drove on.

Jaz’s flat was tucked away somewhere between Hackney and Bethnal Green, on the second floor of a rundown building backing onto the canal. Different smells rose from the water in different seasons and at different times of the day, but not one of them was sweet.

The flat was large for one but Jaz had explained that was because it was hard to let and I could believe it. So much water came running down the bathroom wall you could take a shower in it, and there were constant scratching sounds which Jaz attributed to vermin without being any more specific. The doors to most of the flats were covered with graffiti. The communal stairs stank of rotting vegetables and animals. Rats, I hoped, because I hated them less than dogs.

I managed to get around to see Jaz maybe once a month. His building depressed me slightly but Jaz only ever wanted to meet there nowadays rather than in the Swan or the Queen’s Head in Islington. The stairs made me nervous, so I always ran up, my boots clumping on the stone steps and echoing throughout the building.

Jaz was a while answering the door. ‘I was in the darkroom,’ he said when he finally appeared. Jaz was a freelance photographer. When we had met as couriers working for the same firm, Jaz took pictures as a hobby. Now, seven or eight years later, it was his livelihood. He’d done occasional fashion shoots and cookery features for the Sunday magazines, but he preferred working in the open air. His most recent project seemed to be all about grim photographs of urban landscapes.

‘Hang on while I finish up in the darkroom,’ he said as he disappeared, leaving me to close the door. The flat was back to its normal grand, lonely self. The last time I’d been there was for the party, when fifty or sixty people had been crammed into the high-ceilinged rooms and all the lights had been replaced by candles.

‘Can I help?’ I shouted to Jaz.

‘Can you fuck,’ came the reply, from behind the closed door at the end of the hall.

I wandered into the kitchen and looked out of the window. Two black dogs picked their way across the bomb site of a council block car-park. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The dogs loped towards three young boys playing with pieces of brick. One of the boys hefted a half-brick and I thought he was going to attack one of the dogs. But the animals trotted past and the boy’s half-brick came down on a beaten disc of metal, an old road sign by the look of it.

‘Nice area, isn’t it?’ Jaz had joined me at the window. ‘Which way did you come today?’

‘Downham Road and Lee Street. Haggerston Road and over the canal.’ The names lifted accurately from my mental map.

‘Not the same though, is it? By car, I mean.’ Jaz went to the fridge and took out a couple of beers. ‘Not like on the bike. Like the old days.’

‘You’re right. I miss it.’ Not strictly true, but I’ll come to that. I moved away from the window and took my Camels from my boot and lit up, offering one to Jaz, who declined and levered the caps off the beers before handing one to me. Then he lit a Consulate, leaning back against the sink, and I grinned. ‘Don’t know how you can smoke those things,’ I said. ‘Like smoking Polos. Don’t know how you can smoke at all. Filthy habit.’

‘Too fucking right.’ It was Jaz’s turn to laugh. I’d been trying to give up on and off for some time.

Jaz went back to the window and I took a drag on my cigarette. ‘Where did you park your car?’ Jaz asked. It was a joke. It wasn’t funny but it was a joke. I knew that the car was parked right beneath where Jaz was standing, that he could see it from the window, and that he knew the car almost as well as he knew its owner. A Mark One dirty grey Escort with two missing wheel trims and a boot lid that wouldn’t shut. The joke was it had been nicked. But I daresay you’d already worked that out.

‘Pretty funny, Jaz,’ I said from my end of the kitchen. ‘No one would nick that car. It’s a state, I know. But it gets me where I want to go.’

‘So where’s that?’

I looked around for an ashtray and decided the question wasn’t worth answering. ‘The other room,’ I said sardonically. Jaz followed me through and again made straight for the windows. For someone who didn’t like to leave his flat he sure liked the view. I went to the other window and put a foot up on the low ledge, staring across the canal at the iron latticework cradling two large, empty gasholders.

I moved away from the window and sank into one of the deep sheet-covered armchairs that were the only items of furniture in the large, bare-boarded room. On the walls were a couple of Jaz’s favourite black-and-whites in cheap clipframes. There was a good one of me sitting on my bike near King’s Cross looking a bit the worse for wear. I gripped the chilled bottle in my right hand and enjoyed the sensation. It was another warm day.

‘That girl at your party,’ I said casually while still looking out over the canal, ‘what was her name? Ann, I think…’

‘I think you mean Annie. And I think you know very well what she’s called. Fucking hell, Carl, you stand out too much to be subtle.’ He dragged on his Consulate. ‘Have you been out with her then?’

I looked at Jaz. He was drinking and watching the scum drift on the surface of the canal. Was I really that transparent or had Jaz been unusually sensitive? For some reason I didn’t want to go into details about Annie with Jaz. Some irrational mistrust or shyness held me back. However, I said: ‘We went out, had a good time. But she’s gone back to Manchester. Why does she want to live up there anyway?’

‘You tell me, Carl. She’s your babe.’

‘She’s not though. She made that quite clear. Didn’t want to get involved. Wasn’t interested. And yet,’ I went on, ‘I can’t help thinking she was but she was hiding it or something.’

‘Obviously,’ Jaz said.

I lit another cigarette in response to this and arched my back as I settled deeper into the chair.

‘You haven’t got her number, have you, in Manchester?’

Jaz bounded across the room and I heard the darkroom door open. He returned with an old blue address book which was falling apart. He leafed through it. ‘Have you got a pen?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘Fucking hell. Do I have to do everything for you?’ He got a pen from the kitchen and wrote the number on a piece of scrap paper, which he then passed to me. I held it tightly as if it were a hard-won secret or a key to the next stage in a complicated board game. Folding it in half I slipped it in the back pocket of my jeans.

Jaz was by the window again, watching the canal and the gasholders. ‘How’s the shop?’ he asked.

‘The shop?’ I ran a small second-hand record shop on the Caledonian Road. I’d taken a lease on a former sex shop — a filthy, rank, dilapidated property — with the cash I’d saved from the courier job and various others, and started off by selling some of my own rare picture discs and limited editions: coloured vinyls, Bowie’s foreign singles, Roxy Music’s Viva on Island instead of Polydor. That sort of stuff. They were worth a fortune, some of them — things I’d collected in my youth — but I sold them for whatever I could get just to get through the first weeks. ‘It’s going OK,’ I said. ‘I thought I’d branch out. Sell a few second-hand books as well.’

‘That should make your fortune.’

‘Keeps me off the streets.’

The shop was doing OK. Surviving. It was like my life at the time. Everything was just sort of going along. Nothing major, good or bad. I felt like an engine that was idling, just waiting for someone or something to kick me into gear.

‘You liked her then?’ Jaz said, switching subjects. He was still staring at the canal, occasionally swigging beer. I should tell you what he looks like before you picture him all wrong. Shorter than me and stockier, he wore his dark, wavy hair cut short. His eyes were deep-set beneath prominent brows which made him look quite intense. He had a big nose and a beefy jaw. Like me he wore a lot of black.

‘Yeah, I liked her,’ I said.

Jaz went back to contemplating the canal. I swallowed another mouthful of beer and reached into my left boot.

I met Jaz on my first day at City Circle Messengers. Desperate for a job in the hot summer of ’83 or ’84, I’d looked up courier companies in the Yellow Pages and gone knocking on doors until one of them offered to take me on. City Circle were based in the scraggy grey area between King’s Cross and the Angel, just off Pentonville Road in a vulnerable terrace of bookmakers, video shops and dressmakers surrounded by council blocks and cleared housing.

I climbed a greasy flight of stairs to reach their office. It was thick with acrid smoke that spiralled slowly in thrall to a big fan hanging down from the ceiling. A thin, sandy-haired man at the wrong end of his fifties, wearing a vest and a ropey old pair of headphones, sat behind a desk shouting adenoidally into a dented microphone. ‘Alpha One Eight. Alpha One Eight. Where are you, One Eight? Come in, One Eight. Do you read me? Over.’ Leave the poor bastard alone, I thought. Did I really want to work for this man? As I said, I was desperate.

Almost as pungent as the controller’s Capstan Full Strength was his sweat. His name, I would learn later, was Anderton, but I would give him a different name: the Thin Controller. He had long insectile eyebrows and wore old glasses with grubby lenses and a wire frame that had been driven over by a bus and reassembled by a team of blind people with a roll of insulating tape. ‘One Eight. Where are you, One Eight?… What the fuck are you doing there? You’re supposed to be at number fourteen.’ Another thing I would learn later was that regular client companies had numbers which you had to memorise. Fourteen was some PR agency in Victoria. I don’t remember exactly where now. One Eight, it seemed, wasn’t in Victoria. ‘Do get a move on, One Eight,’ he moaned sarcastically.

So the guy had a business to run and it depended on messengers turning up at the right place at the right time, but did he have to be such a complete twat to make it work? I didn’t know, but I wished him dead. Stomach ulcer, throat cancer, whatever.

Also in the room were an obese, tough-looking woman in blue crimplene trousers and an orange T-shirt with strange stains down the front, and a huge black dog which skulked under the Thin Controller’s desk. This disturbed me most of all. Then I noticed another messenger slumped in a plastic chair, playing with his two-way radio. His appearance and position in the chair made me think of an ape, but he was looking at me. It was a sympathetic look, almost a smile, and I was grateful for it. He might almost have been about to say, Forget it, mate, don’t work for this guy. He’ll fuck you sideways.

But I liked the look of his radio.

‘Alpha Two Four. Two Four, Two Four, Two Four.’

The Thin Controller made some kind of signal in my direction, which the Fat Woman interpreted in her own way. ‘You looking for work?’ she asked me. I nodded, keeping a nervous eye on the black dog which had lifted its head and was slavering lazily. The Fat Woman got up, flesh shivering under the stress of walking. I hoped I would be able to stay out on the road and not have to call in at the office too often. The messenger sitting at the far end of the room drained a can of 7UP and tossed it into a wastebasket. The Thin Controller glared at him. The Fat Woman produced a form from under a mug stained with so much tannin it was black inside. I filled out my name, address and other details and signed some kind of disclaimer without bothering to read it. ‘Where do I get my radio?’ I asked.

The Thin Controller looked up. ‘Listen to ’im. Wants his fucking radio. It’s not a fucking holiday camp, you know.’

The Fat Woman steered me out of the office. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the other messenger watching me with amusement. In a tiny, nicotine-stained office down the landing, which smelt of worn-out house slippers and old files, the Fat Woman gave me a pad of dockets and a fluorescent bag. ‘You have to wait two weeks till you get a radio,’ she said. ‘You have to phone in for jobs.’

This seemed a bit crap to me but I just nodded. It was a job. The Fat Woman then turned her attention to an in-tray overflowing with invoices and seemed to forget about me. I didn’t know what to do. ‘When do I start then?’ I asked.

‘What? Oh now. Today, I suppose.’

‘Well, what’s my first job?’

She looked up again and tutted. If they’d wanted a clairvoyant, they should have advertised. I mean, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. She pushed past me — I held my breath — and I heard her mumbling to the Thin Controller in the other room. I picked out his nasal tones responding: ‘Tell him to go to the West End and ring in.’ I looked out through a jagged hole in the back window — the glass was too dirty to see through — and saw what looked like a tangle of rusty old bicycles in the weeds and rubble of the back yard.

The Fat Woman reappeared and I said, ‘I heard.’

‘What’re you waiting for then?’

When I went out onto the street, the ape-like messenger was sitting on his bike at the side of the road. ‘I’m Jaz,’ he said. I said hello. In those days I didn’t wear the boots and the white leather jacket. I dressed more quietly in torn jeans and fake Converse All Stars. Jaz had all the proper gear: black Lycra cycle shorts and a black sweat shirt. We wheeled our bikes down Pentonville Road together and he talked to me about City Circle and the creatures that ran it. ‘Apparently they sleep together, those two,’ he said, nodding back in the direction of the office. ‘Horrible idea, isn’t it? I think she joins in sometimes as well. His missus.’ He was cracking jokes like this as soon as I met him. They weren’t especially funny, but that was all right. He was a friendly face when I needed one.

I’d always wanted a brother, someone I could just hang out with. Just go somewhere and sit around with and for there to be no pressure. Someone who would help me out if I needed it. Wouldn’t let me down.

Jaz wasn’t necessarily that person. But the position was vacant.

Jaz showed me a few tricks. He told me never to phone in before I had to. The Thin Controller was not all that clued up and had no idea how long it took to cycle from, say, St Paul’s to Kensington. So you could make the delivery in twenty minutes then have time for a coffee or a beer before calling in. The point was he always shouted at you for taking too long, even when you broke your neck to get somewhere quickly and rang in immediately. So there was no point stretching yourself for him. The incentive for zipping around from one place to another was that you could take a break on company time. The drawback was you got paid per job, so the more rests you took the less money you made, but money wasn’t everything and taking advantage of the Thin Controller’s stupidity was worth it in itself.

Jaz took me to Hanover Square and Soho Square, gathering points for couriers. You could meet people. There was a good atmosphere and a sense of solidarity. Most couriers had some horror story to tell, having narrowly escaped death-by-car-door-opener or themselves avoided killing passengers who stepped off buses in the middle of the road without looking.

I didn’t enjoy the job as such and I hated having to speak to the Thin Controller on the phone but there was an aspect of the work that appealed to me. I had always loved maps, both for practical use and just for the pleasure of losing myself in them. If I wasn’t reading a experimental French novel, then I’d have my nose in a map book. There really isn’t that much difference. A map tells countless stories and, however crap it may sound, the novel — even one by Alain Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor — can be a sort of large scale map of the human experience. Or maybe I just like the way things fit together. And the way they sometimes don’t quite fit. What I did enjoy about the job were the times when I found myself between districts, leaving Maida Vale but not quite arriving in Kilburn. I could never decide if there was a gap between neighbouring areas or if they overlapped. I learned pretty quickly that they certainly didn’t fit exactly. Borough boundaries might be precise — often running down the middle of a street — but real boundaries, those perceived by the people who live there, are not so fixed.

I pissed the Thin Controller off on only my second day. I’d just delivered a package in Southampton Row — and had a fifteen-minute rest in Russell Square — and I went looking for a phone box so I could call in. This was the summer of ’83, remember, or ’84, when the bookmakers were offering fifty-to-one odds against finding a public phone that worked, so I had to go quite a way. I called him eventually from an old red phone box somewhere east of Queen Square and he asked, ‘Where are you, Two Three?’ My call sign. Alpha Two Three. Jaz had told me the Thin Controller even had a number for the Fat Woman. And one for the dog.

I said, ‘Somewhere between Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell.’

He gave a fruity cough, then said, ‘This isn’t a fucking guessing game, Two Three. Where are you?’

But I genuinely didn’t know where I was. I knew London well. I wasn’t lost. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t know whether I was in Bloomsbury or Clerkenwell. I was too far east still to be in Bloomsbury proper and, surely, this far west I could hardly be in Clerkenwell.

‘I don’t know exactly, TC.’

‘TC?’

‘Er, The Controller.’

‘Two Three, what’s the fucking street called?’

I leaned backwards out of the phone box but couldn’t see a street name. ‘Can’t see it, control. But I’m really quite close to Russell Square. Not far from Gray’s Inn Road, not far from the office actually.’

Something really nasty crept into his voice now. ‘Just find out exactly where you are, Two Three, and ring back. I can’t waste time like this. You must think I’m made of money.’

‘You’re a cunt,’ I said. After I’d hung up. What was he on about — made of money? I was paying for the fucking call.

The nice thing about all this was that I still didn’t know where I was, Bloomsbury or Clerkenwell. Or some weird shadowland between the two, I might well have joked.

I used to wonder about places and how they came to be or ceased to be. There are names that hardly have places to belong to any more. Like Finsbury and Hornsey. There’s a Hornsey High Street, a borough of Hornsey, a Hornsey Road and Hornsey Lane, but where the hell is Hornsey? You get there and all you find is a row of shops. There’s no centre, no focus, no place.

Look down from the bridges you cross, however, and watch the railway lines that are carried over the road you’re walking along. These are the transport routes in and out of places. But that’s obvious. Railway lines, canals, wasteland stretching into the distance. What I’m saying is, so much of what surrounds us is hidden from view. We have to look for it. And if you look hard enough you’ll find it. It’s there. Everything’s there somewhere and anything’s possible. Honestly. I know.

Jaz was still staring at the canal. I lit a cigarette and the flare of the match caught his attention. He went into the kitchen and shouted, ‘Another beer?’ as he opened the fridge door.

‘One more, then I must go,’ I said.

He returned with two beers and sat opposite me in one of the other big chairs. For a moment it seemed as if there was nothing to say.

I hadn’t told Jaz about the incident with the phone in the house and the caller asking for me. In fact, whereas at the time it seemed as if the call were intended for me, by now I was thinking maybe I’d just stumbled across an odd coincidence. And perhaps the reason why I didn’t mention it to Jaz was because of his habit of saying the wrong thing. He might have made some flippant remark which would have irritated me. He often seemed uncomfortable with anything that wasn’t clear-cut and black and white like his photographs. For the time being I put the matter out of my mind.

I left Jaz’s flat soon after the second beer. On my way downstairs I paused at a south-facing window. The sun’s rays struck the gasholders’ cradles almost horizontally and made them glow a deep ruddy gold. I knew that particular angle of light would last no longer than a minute or two. For some reason it seemed like a good omen to have caught it. I thought about standing there and enjoying the view until the sun went down, but decided the omen would lose its potency if I watched the gasholders slip into shadow. I slipped out of the building and crossed to my car, Annie Risk’s phone number in my back pocket.

Chapter Three

That evening when I got back to the flat I was too tired to do anything except collapse in front of the television. I channel-hopped — through an old black and white movie with lots of stark lighting and cigarette smoke, a 70s TV movie featuring actors I recognised but couldn’t put names to, and a political discussion which went around and around and got nowhere — until I settled down to ice-skating coming from somewhere in Europe. In fact, it doesn’t matter where it’s actually coming from because it always seems like Europe, either high in the alps or up in Scandinavia or Russia or somewhere else cold and icy. It’s all quite simple really.

The thing about ice-skating is not only do skaters desire to break their own records as well as matching themselves against the competition, but also they long to surpass what is accepted as possible in their field. Occasionally they strain at the barriers of what is humanly possible. When they jump, they’re hoping for a triple salchow, or axel or lutz. Quadruples are rare. I once saw a quadruple toe loop, by a French woman in the Winter Olympics. I remember her face as she landed: it was ecstatic, but there was a look in her eye of something close to madness.

Watching ice-skating always reminded me of my favourite track by my favourite band, ‘Watching You Dance’ by the Passage, a group that emerged from Manchester’s soot and shadows just before I left for London in the early 80s: Dick Witts’ whispered vocal about an unnamed dancer shooting through the air, escaping the earth.

I dragged myself to the fridge to get a cold Sapporo, then collapsed in front of the skating. When a skater goes into a triple lutz she throws everything into it. The judges might not require her to jump a quadruple, but that’s what she’s straining for. She wants to stay up there a little bit longer; like a ballet dancer, she wants to fly, escape the earth. Only it’s not possible. It’s not supposed to be possible. But it doesn’t stop her wanting it. And it doesn’t stop me wanting it for her. I watch ice-skating and I’m emotionally drained; my body aches in sympathy.

They jumped and span. They landed; one or two stumbled. One guy skated into the barrier and fell over, hurting his knee, but carried on to do a triple toe loop and a double axel. The crowd loved him. He was crying as he bowed. Me too. Christ, I was bawling my eyes out. I suddenly realised I was thinking about Annie Risk and the evening we’d had together; the kiss. Fuck it. I’d got her number, why not use it? I reached behind the sofa for the phone. It was on the floor, strangled by its own curly flex. I fished the scrap of paper out of my jeans and punched in the digits. As I waited for the connection I had second, third and fourth thoughts. It was late. I was being too keen. Spur-of-the-moment decisions invariably land me in the shit. I returned the handset to the cradle. It seemed more sensible just to go to bed.

A that moment the phone rang, startling me. I was still holding it in my lap so I grabbed the receiver. ‘Hello? Hello?’

There was no answer.

‘Annie,’ I tried, thinking that somehow she had known it was me ringing a moment before. No reply. I said hello a couple more times only to hear those strange metallic grating and echoing sounds you hear on these occasions. No one there. I replaced the receiver and sat staring at the phone for a while before deciding to go to bed.

The alarm woke me at eight in the morning. Taking a cigarette from the pack next to the bed I lit up and lay back against the pillows. Breakfast. I thought about the day ahead as I looked around the bedroom. The walls held posters of Siouxsie, John Lee Hooker and Lenin, and the covers of the first two Passage LPs, Pindrop and For All and None. There was also a faded picture of the 1971 Manchester City squad and a clipframed photograph of me and Jaz freewheeling down Ludgate Hill. He’d set the camera up on a tripod and we’d got it just right first time.

Cigarette finished, I visited the bathroom, then pulled on my tight black jeans and a red sweatshirt and lit another cigarette while I made coffee. I had a loaf of bread somewhere and boxes of cereal. I don’t know why because I never had more than black coffee and cigarettes for breakfast. I took my coffee into the living room and sat back on the huge low-slung sofa. There was a big glass ashtray overflowing on the coffee table between piles of videos and record sleeves and books. All around the room, and out into the hallway, the walls were shelved to take my collection of records and CDs. I didn’t know how many there were. Thousands. Books, there weren’t so many. My tastes were quite narrow. Cult fiction, anything published by John Calder or Peter Owen or Marion Boyars; compilations of Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles; road atlases, map books, A — Zs.

I parked the car a couple of streets away from the shop. There was no good reason why I did that. I’d done it once and it became a habit. There had been space in front of the shop but I’d chosen not to use it. Maybe I just wanted a short walk before the day began.

I paused briefly to light up. There was that sense of anticipation you get at the beginning of a fine summer’s day; a slight breeze turned drink cartons and leaflets for carpet warehouses over in my path. I took a drag on my cigarette and it must have been too deep because my head started to swim. I stopped walking to let it clear. It did, but for a moment my senses seemed strangely heightened. Everything around me had become more vivid. A bright post box, a tree in bloom, which I passed every morning but noticed now for the first time, was an explosion of colour, a gleaming black Mini that drove past with a single occupant whose black hair shone like Siouxsie Sioux’s or Andy Wilson’s from the Passage — or my mother’s.

The breeze whistled past my ears and carried a slight tang that I failed to identify. I could hear individual scraps of paper grate against the pavement.

I thought to myself that I should consider switching to Camel Lights or those yellow Silk Cut that had so little tar in them they arguably didn’t exist.

The sensation lasted only a couple of seconds and as it passed and I rubbed my eyes and shook my head I saw the map at my feet. It appeared to be a page photocopied from an A — Z. In black and white, printed only on one side, frayed at the edges and scored with deep folds, it looked as if it had been blowing about for a while. I picked it up and had a proper look. Mildly interesting, I thought, assuming it to represent part of North London, and I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans with Annie Risk’s phone number.

When I reached the shop there were two or three kids hanging around waiting for it to open. I greeted them and they grunted back. My customers kept me in Camels and takeaways from the Hong Kong Garden, the Chinese place two floors beneath my flat. It wasn’t really called that. The real name didn’t roll off the tongue as easily and wasn’t a Siouxsie and the Banshees song title.

One of the kids who’d been waiting wanted Toy Planet’s first LP on Spoon Records which was so rare even I didn’t have a copy. Not in the shop anyway. I had a copy at home but that was mine, bought from a little place in Brighton some years before. He wasn’t having that. I occasionally took home records I bought from punters in the shop, but only rarely did I sell anything from my own collection.

I recommended Can. He looked doubtful. ‘It’s the same guy,’ I said and he brightened up, leaving with a copy of Tago Mago for not much more than I’d paid for it.

There was a quiet period during which I looked over the latest addition to the shop — the single shelf of second-hand books I’d mentioned to Jaz. I’d gone for a limited range of titles that both reflected my taste and projected a particular image. So there were some Penguin Modern Classics, a few Picadors — Knut Hamsun, William Burroughs, The Existential Imagination, The Naked I — and anything I could find by Anna Kavan, Alan Burns, Boris Vian and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It probably didn’t fit with the whole cowboy boots and leather jacket look I affected, but I was a sucker for the nouveau roman. The only trouble was my extremely limited French, which was where John Calder’s translated editions came in.

The LP that was playing came to an end and I replaced it with the second Passage album, For All and None. I dropped the needle down at the start of track two, ‘Lon Don’, the Manchester band’s caustic demolition of the capital.

I remembered the map in my back pocket and was about to get it out when a man in a brown suede bomber jacket came in with a box of old singles he wanted to sell. While I was dealing with him the shop slowly started to fill up. I bought all the singles — evidently stuff he’d bought in the 70s, as an enthusiast, and had grown out of — and I bought them even though many were already in stock, because I don’t like to send people away disappointed. When the record came to an end I turned it over. I lost count of how many times I turned it over during the rest of the day and I didn’t think about the map again until I locked the door and flipped the open/closed sign. I was reaching into my back pocket for Annie’s number because I’d thought I would give her a call and I pulled out the map. Unfolding it for the first time since that morning, I sniffed it. There was a strange, pungent odour detectable beneath the familiar smell of my jeans. Or I thought there was. An industrial smell, almost. Railways or diesel oil. Engines. But I was losing myself. The main thing was the map.

I looked at it for a minute or two but couldn’t work out where it represented. So I switched off the main light and went into the back office where I made coffee, pulled the anglepoise lamp down over the desk and lit a cigarette.

I studied that map. I gave it twenty minutes’ solid concentration. I don’t give up easily once I feel I’m on to something. I’d always enjoyed crossword puzzles, word games, Scrabble. It’s the challenge of figuring out something to which you know there is an answer. It’s just a question of working it out.

I knew North London well enough to be certain it was not north of the river and my knowledge of South, East and West London was good enough to be fairly sure it was, in fact, nowhere in the capital. And yet it looked like someone had needed to go somewhere and they had taken the A — Z and photocopied a page to take with them because they didn’t want to carry the whole thing. Then they’d dropped their page in the street. A London street, which would suggest they were going somewhere in London. But it wasn’t London. By the end of twenty minutes I was confident enough to put money on it being out of town. I’d been looking for clues in the street names to what provincial city it might be part of, but there was nothing, no mention of the Tyne or the Potteries, no name check for the Malverns, the Chilterns or the Peaks. There weren’t any obvious Irish, Scots, Welsh or Cornish names. They were all bland, English street names. I’d walked down several of them in different cities but not on the same page.

I would have to look at my A — Zs when I got home.

At this stage the map was just a diversion, a puzzle that I expected would keep me occupied for a day or two until I found out whereabouts in the country the streets on it were located. It looked like an area quite close to a city centre. Some of the roads were densely packed. There were long straight drives and grids of narrow streets. There was a park, a canal and railway lines and I would have said from the movement towards the top of the page that the city centre lay just to the north. An inch south of where it started getting busy there was an estate where the streets curved around and around like that game of solitaire where you have to get the ball to the middle of the maze. There was even a little circle at the centre.

I stubbed out my second cigarette, put the map back in my pocket and switched off the light. I sat for a moment looking through the doorway into the darkened shop. Passing cars splashed light over the racks of dog-eared LP sleeves, flashing in the CD cases in the wall-mounted display units. I liked the silence after the continuous noise of the day. I have always liked busy places best when they are empty. It’s partly because I’m there and all the other people are not, and partly it’s that although they’ve gone they’re still very much in mind because of the traces they leave: echoes, memories, smells, a door left open, a dropped glove or, in the case of my shop, a misfiled LP sleeve or a list written in felt tip that says, ‘Only Ones, Dead or Alive, P. Furs, The Servant(?)’.

I hesitated at the door. It had started to rain. Rear lights melted into red pools as cars braked for the stop sign. I hoped the original owner of the map fragment wasn’t wandering around getting wet and hopelessly lost. Then, as I was turning the key in the lock to let myself out, the phone began to ring. I thought about leaving it because the shop was closed, but it was possible it was someone who’d tried me at home and wanted to get hold of me. I left the door unlocked and darted back into the little office.

‘Hello,’ I said, and as soon as I’d said it I knew there was no one there. I heard that same metallic sound I’d heard on the phone at home the night before. Then a whole train of olfactory hallucinations kicked in. I imagined I could smell axle grease and diesel oil and the peculiar tang of rusty cast iron.

My imagination, I told myself as I got up to go. As I was leaving the office, my eye alighted on an old tool box I’d stashed under the desk a few weeks earlier after I’d been doing some emergency repair-work on the car. There was an oily rag sticking out of the top section. I smiled to myself. Imagination overload. I nipped up the back stairs to use the toilet.

Walking to my car I realised I was looking twice at everything I saw, watching taxis and buses and pedestrians. As if I were looking for something without knowing what.

The rain had stopped but my car was covered with droplets. From a distance of thirty yards, because of the streetlamp directly above it, it looked as if it were encrusted with jewels. Once I was behind the wheel I took the pack of Camels from my boot and hit the lighter in the dash. The car started on the third attempt and the lighter clicked out. I raised it to my cigarette, averting my eyes from the glowing spiral filament.

I drove home slowly, avoiding puddles wherever possible because the engine on the Escort did not react well to direct contact with water. The Hong Kong Garden looked inviting — as it did every night of the week — so I went in and ordered hot and sour soup and fried chicken with pineapple and waited while it was prepared.

I was halfway through my dinner when I remembered the map. I didn’t know why I kept forgetting it. Five minutes later I had the map open on the coffee table, the London A — Z, my food and a can of Sapporo. Things were looking up. I went right through the A — Z, checking every page. I picked out a couple of the street names from the map and tried them out on the A — Z index. They were in there, but not on the same page.

Finally I was satisfied that what I had already believed was indeed the case. The streets on the map were nowhere to be found in London.

I also had A — Zs for Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle. Before looking for them — I wasn’t entirely sure where they were — I stuck on a CD. Something by Vangelis seemed right, just to play in the background while I got on with my search. I chose The City, because it seemed kind of appropriate, and turned the volume low. The downstairs tenant was out — I was on the second floor at the top of the building, there was one tenant on the first floor and the Hong Kong Garden occupied the ground floor. I was glad he was out. When he was in, my life was like a film with a heavy metal soundtrack.

I found the other A — Zs on a bookshelf in the bathroom and spent half an hour or so looking through them before concluding that the streets on the map were not to be found in Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle.

Obsessive behaviour? I guess so, but to me it didn’t seem all that different from trying to complete a crossword puzzle. It occupied my mind and stopped me thinking about Annie Risk. I took out a road atlas and pored over that for a while, studying the city centre street maps in the back and glancing through the place names in the index.

The following evening, after I’d locked up the shop around 6pm, I drove into town, parked up by Russell Square and walked over to Charing Cross Road. I had the map in my pocket and an hour or so in hand before the bookshops closed. In a succession of basements, enveloped by the smell of new books, I checked the indexes of every A — Z and every street plan for all the major towns and cities in the UK. I checked Cork and Dublin. The map didn’t figure anywhere. I’d ruled out Australia and America and former colonies.

It was 9.30pm when I arrived home, which I thought sounded like a pretty good time to phone Annie Risk. It was likely she would tell me to fuck off but I couldn’t just let it go.

I rang the number and she answered. The conversation went something like this.

‘Aw, go on.’

‘No.’

She wasn’t interested in a relationship. She’d recently broken up with someone and the experience had left her wary of men in general. She wasn’t ready to try again. I said there’d be no pressure, no commitments on either side, we’d see each other when we both wanted to etc. ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a relationship,’ she said. Oh, and she said no. She kept on saying no.

The thing was I could see her point of view. He sounded like a dick, the one she’d broken up with. Just like me. He’d promised her all sorts of things and let her down.

‘Men,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ she responded. ‘Which doesn’t help your case very much, does it?’ She was not wrong. I let her go on talking. It might sound crap but I liked the sound of her voice. She lived in Manchester but had been brought up in Nottingham and her accent came from there. If she was in a film she’d keep saying ‘duck’. She didn’t call me ‘duck’ but I’d been out with a Nottingham girl before so I recognised the intonation. That relationship hadn’t lasted very long. None of my relationships had. It’s more to do not just with meeting the right person, but with meeting the right person at the right time. And not being fucked up with certain ‘issues’ helps, too. Apparently.

‘I think we’d be good together,’ I told her. ‘You with your cynicism and me just kind of rolling along. I’m not going to try and control you.’ That’s what you say at times like this, isn’t it? And you mean it too.

‘But I want to be controlled,’ she said. She was difficult to get a handle on, Annie Risk.

‘Do you play Scrabble?’ I asked, changing the subject with the deftness of a politician. ‘We could play Scrabble.’

‘Interesting idea,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Beats going out and having a good time. Anyway, you’d win.’

‘No I wouldn’t. I’m rubbish at Scrabble. I’m no good at most things. I just enjoy doing them.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said. She was giving me a bit of a hard time and I supposed that was fair enough because I was putting her under some pressure. We talked for another five minutes.

‘Can I ring you again?’ I asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I like talking to you.’

So, I hadn’t got a result but I’d got something — a goalless draw maybe — which was better than nothing and I was happy with that for the time being. A score draw, perhaps. Away.

Excited, I prowled around the flat. I trailed my fingers along the spines of hundreds of LPs and slid out one or two at random. About a third of my collection had been bought second-hand, either through the shop or before all that started. I could spend hours just looking through the shelves, not necessarily playing any records, just looking at the sleeves and occasionally slipping the record out to smell the vinyl and read the inscription, if any, etched into the runout groove by the cutting engineer at his lathe.

I took down a 12 inch single — IV Songs by In Camera — and had a look at the inscription scratched into the runout groove: ‘Thanks Ilona’. Inscribed on the original acetate by the cutting engineer, these messages fascinated me; they were clues to a world of secrets and hidden relationships that existed behind or beyond the record. I put the In Camera single back.

It was late and I was tired. I went to get another beer from the fridge and played a couple of old Banshees tracks. I took a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table and looked around for my lighter. It wasn’t on the table, nor in my jacket pockets, nor my left boot. I rummaged in the kitchen drawer but I appeared to be out of matches. My last resort — and I took it reluctantly — was to use the electric ring on the cooker. I’d never liked old-fashioned electric rings.

I was four or five. My mother was cooking in the kitchen and I was sitting on the orange plastic seat watching her. We were company for each other while my father was out doing shift work. My mother was mixing ingredients in a dish on the work surface and her beautiful black hair fell from behind her ear, forming a temporary curtain between us. She would no longer have been able to see me out of the corner of her eye. But I was keeping quiet and she knew I was all right. She never really had to worry about me. Until that evening. Maybe I was restless because I no longer had even half her attention. Whatever. I placed my hand on top of the edge of the cooker to pull myself up out of the chair. Then without looking I placed my hand flat on the electric ring, the idea being to take my body weight and swing from the chair onto the surface where my mother was working.

But the ring was on. My mother had put it on in readiness for the dish she was preparing. It was bright orange. I seemed to hang in mid-air for eternity before I screamed. My mother jumped and whirled around. I’m not sure I can describe the pain. It shot up my arm and my head felt as if it were in a vice. Next thing I knew I was on the floor and my mother was screaming but nobody else came. She held my little hand delicately and tried to uncurl my fingers. They were shut tight as if I had something secret in my hand I didn’t want to show anyone. By now my head was swimming. She managed to open my hand and I looked. A dark brown spiral covered my palm. For the first time in my life, I smelt burnt flesh.

It took months for the scar to fade.

So, when I moved into the flat and discovered it came with an electric cooker, I promised myself I would replace it, but I never did.

When the ring had heated up sufficiently and was already an orange blur — I tried not to look at it directly — I swept my long hair away from my face and bent over the ring with the cigarette in my mouth. In the coils of my mind I heard the Passage sing about gas and electricity in ‘Shave Your Head’, the smell, the burning. Instead of switching the cooker off like an intelligent person would have done I watched the ring get hotter and hotter and brighter and brighter. It smelt dark and sharp, becoming more intense the hotter it got. It was like vertigo: you’re scared of heights precisely because you’re attracted to them. It took an effort of will to switch the ring off and leave the kitchen.

I returned to the main room and had a swig of beer. The very best way to round off the evening, I decided, given that I wasn’t going to get any further with the map when I was this tired, was watching Siouxsie. I’d recorded the ‘Kiss Them For Me’ video off the TV. I stretched out on the sofa and watched her dance. When you’ve had enough beers and you’re already quite tired, it’s not difficult to convince yourself she’s in the room and dancing and singing just for you. It helps if you put the lights out and if you’ve got a decent-sized TV. There’s nothing worse than a small TV.

I kept watching until I was too tired to rewind it back to the beginning each time. The way she moved in that video made me feel less lonely. I went to bed tired but unable to sleep. I reached for my book — Robbe-Grillet’s Un Régicide — and found my place and tried very, very hard to pick up the story. Although Un Régicide was Robbe-Grillet’s first novel, written in 1949, it was not published until 1978, and so was something like his ninth or tenth to appear depending on whether you regard La Belle Captive as a novel, and then only in French. There still had been no English translation, so I was struggling through it with my A-level French, largely forgotten.

The action kept switching between an unnamed modern city and a mist-cloaked island. I couldn’t quite work out if Boris, who was a factory worker in the city, was meant to be the same person as the unnamed narrator of the island sections. It was probably not the best thing to read at the end of a long day. I managed half a page before the narrator’s stumbling around lost in the mist began to reflect my own vain attempts to focus my attention.

Chapter Four

And this is what happened after.

I thought about the map constantly while serving customers and sorting through boxes of scratchy singles and unwanted albums. It wasn’t that I was bored of my customers’ frequent complaints and demands for a few extra quid, but that the business of running the shop was no longer sufficient to distract me from thinking about Annie Risk.

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.

I was smoking and reading Un Régicide in bed when the front door rattled in its frame. With a clear view of the door from my bed, I looked up and put my book down beside me. When the door opened I wasn’t altogether surprised to see the girl from the car. Her black hair framed a face that was Siouxsie’s, except that it wasn’t. Because it was Annie Risk’s. But it wasn’t hers either: the hair was too low over the forehead. She was like a composite of both of them. The only two women in my life, both very much on its fringes, synthesized into this one girl.

She walked in and turned past the bedroom doorway to enter the living room. I followed her. She went over to my stereo and slipped a single from inside her denim jacket onto the turntable. She stood back and I came forward to see what she’d brought. A white label disc was spinning at 45 rpm and the needle cut into it. I looked up but the girl had gone. I whirled around and ran to the door but it was shut and there was no sound in the stairwell. I bent over the record player again and saw that as the needle travelled around the groove towards the centre it left a fine spiral of raspberry-coloured liquid in its wake.

I woke up. My cigarette had burnt a hole in the duvet cover. I smothered it quickly with a pillow, but there was no need: the cigarette was cold. I felt sick and shivered. Brushing the curtain behind my head to one side I looked down into the street for a Mini, but there was only my Escort and one or two other familiar cars.

I checked the front door — undisturbed — and the stereo. There was no record on the turntable and no blood anywhere — naturally — but the power was on. I never left the power on. I flicked the switch and went to use the bathroom. I decided my subconscious had known I’d left the power on and so I’d dreamt about it.

I went back to bed but couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and went through to the living room. A cigarette and the Siouxsie video. It was a combination that never failed to engender pleasure, but if I’d wanted to become either completely relaxed or tired enough to go back to sleep I would have been disappointed. My body was exhausted but my brain was active. At dawn I was thinking of taking the car for a run down to the crescent where I’d lost the girl in her Mini when I finally fell asleep in front of the TV.

Driving to the shop a couple of hours later I felt like a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together wrongly. Someone had tried to force pieces into each other and they held, but only just. I had a craving for fresh orange juice but made do with a cigarette instead. I pushed in the dashboard lighter and waited for it to pop out. I withdrew it and brought it up to my mouth. While driving I looked down to align the end of the cigarette with the lighter and my eye was drawn to the burning orange element. I lost my grip on the steering wheel and went the wrong way around a set of bollards. Instantly nauseated, I righted the car and coasted to the kerb. I got out, threw the cigarette in the gutter and leaned against the bonnet for a few moments. The shop would have to open late for once.

I kept seeing the needle cutting into the record and drawing blood. I climbed into the car and got back on the road. Every Mini turned my head. I’d never noticed them before but now it seemed like the city streets were full of them. I couldn’t remember what colour the Siouxsie/Annie girl had been driving. It had, after all, been dark.

I imagined, during the hours of daylight, it parked up in one of the streets on my map. Only by night did she venture into the light of the real world.

I struggled to concentrate on the business of running the shop. The jigsaw feeling had faded but I still wasn’t on top form. I chainsmoked and played randomly selected singles back to back all morning. Customers brought me boxes of records and I bought them all with the briefest examinations and without haggling. The shop was infested with Siouxsie clones but they were all years out of date, painted dolls and scarecrows, their faces plastered with the Halloween make-up Siouxsie herself now did without. Over the years, as the masks had been slowly stripped away she had become more and more beautiful to the point where her beauty was now a provocation, like the music had always been.

I slipped Superstition into the CD player and pressed repeat.

In a stream of people offering me their old picture discs and limited edition gatefold sleeves a girl’s hand pushed a white label single onto the counter. I gave a small cry and immediately looked up but the floor was crowded with customers. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door close, but it could have been anybody. Nevertheless, I squeezed under the counter and pushed through the crowd to the door. I craned my neck and looked in all directions but she had disappeared. There was no sign of a Mini parked nearby. Heart pounding, I re-entered the shop.

Word must have got around that I was throwing money away today: it seemed as if the whole teenage population of the city had descended on the shop. ‘Whose is this?’ I asked, holding up the white label. No one claimed it. ‘Is it yours?’ I asked the next girl in the queue. She nodded. Someone behind her cackled like a hyena and I felt foolish, but for all I knew it could really have been hers and she’d been too shy to stick her hand up. The colour of the label could have prompted me to imagine someone who hadn’t been there at all. I took the other stuff the girl clearly hadn’t been expecting to sell, then lit a cigarette and put the white label underneath a stack of CDs to look at later.

It was with relief that I locked the door and flipped the open/closed sign. I didn’t need this. I stood and watched the rain through the glass as I lit a cigarette and put the lighter away in my jacket pocket. Cars squealed softly as they braked for the red light. I smoked nervously, unhappy about acknowledging my fear of the unknown girl and the white label. In the brightness of the afternoon it had been easier to rationalise. I watched car headlamps dazzle and melt into wet reflections like silver waterfalls. Taking a deep drag that caused my head to spin I turned away from the window and went back to the counter. I felt like a bug in a killing jar. They could be watching me through the windows from across the street. They would want to see how I reacted when I listened to the white label.

I slipped it out of its blank sleeve, holding it by the edges and angling it so that the light fell across it. There was nothing written on the label, but on the runout groove I made out the inscription ‘It’s a gas’. It meant nothing to me. Just some cutting engineer’s throwaway remark.

I placed the record on the turntable with care and positioned the needle before pressing release. It landed with that satisfying clunk I had heard a million times. It doesn’t matter how new a vinyl record is, you always hear something apart from what you’re meant to hear, even if it’s only the hiss of dust. I wondered what I would actually hear, as the needle wound its way towards the music.

But none came. I checked the amp controls. Everything was on and the volume was turned up. I looked at the needle. It was a third of the way into the record and still there was no sound.

I turned the volume higher and listened more intently. There was the usual rumble of ticks and bumps you get at the beginning and end of records. When it finished I repositioned the needle and played it again. With the volume full up I fancied I could hear the needle itself scoring the groove a fraction deeper. I found myself becoming drawn to the sound. Without the distraction of music it was somehow purer, more elemental. I played the flip side and it was the same. The more I played it and the harder I listened, the more it sank into me. I noticed also that my forehead had begun to hurt where the skin stretched tightly across it. A sharp irritating pain like a paper cut.

Pain or no pain I was in thrall to the record. I loved its silence and slowly I began to make out the sounds that were there to be heard if you listened hard enough. I played it again and again until I felt I was in a waking dream.

Towards midnight I locked up and walked to the car, the white label in a padded envelope under my arm. I laid it carefully on the passenger seat and started the engine. I drove like an automaton, wide, dry eyes sweeping the road ahead in search of the girl’s car. I felt I knew now what she’d been dancing to. I’d felt like dancing myself. In the shop. Listening to the record over and over again. It was as if the walls and ceiling had receded and I had felt myself at the centre of a huge spiral descending upon me from the sky.

Waiting at a red light, rain stippling the windscreen, I pressed in the cigarette lighter and reached into my boot. I stuck a cigarette between my lips. The lighter popped out and I withdrew it. I stared at the burning spiral for a few moments before inserting the third finger of my left hand into the barrel of the lighter and pressing the tip against the element. I didn’t blink. Rain fell more heavily on the car, beating a tinny tattoo on the roof. The light went green but I didn’t move. An acrid smell of charred flesh filled the car.

I only pulled my finger away when I felt my nail grating unpleasantly against the metal coil.

My finger was black, my face in the rearview mirror as blank as a piece of paper. The light was red again. I replaced the cigarette lighter and waited for the light to change. When it did I shifted into first gear, wincing as my finger brushed against the passenger seat.

How long would it be before she appeared? I cruised slowly to give her enough time, but there was no sign of her and soon I was pulling up outside the flat. Maybe she’d be waiting for me inside. I looked at my finger as I climbed the stairs. It hadn’t bled; I’d cauterised it. I stuffed my hand in my back pocket to check on the map. It was still there. My finger scraped against denim, but I felt no pain.

The flat was empty but it didn’t feel like mine any more. When I put the record on and turned the volume right up I felt a druggy mixture of euphoria and emptiness. My forehead itched. I wondered dully who else was involved. The girl couldn’t have recorded, cut and pressed a record all on her own; she needed accomplices. Someone had to inhabit the streets on my map.

I looked at the thousands of records lining the walls. I had wasted so much time.

In the kitchen I switched the ring on full and watched it get hot. I could still hear the music swirling around me. My forehead was hurting, like scratched sunburn. Maybe I could burn up the pain. As I bent over the cooker I heard a car pull up outside.

I left the kitchen without switching off the cooker and looked out of the living room window. There was a black Mini parked in front of the Escort. I crossed to the door to leave and as I looked back for a moment before closing the door I felt a tug.

As I stepped into the street I felt a warm breeze and detected the faint odour of gas. The map was in my back pocket. I reached for the door handle on the Mini but the girl gunned the engine into life and moved forward several feet to dissuade me. I walked towards my own car, glancing in through the Mini’s rear passenger window.

On the back seat lay a long knife.

I followed her in the Escort. She turned off my familiar route into the warren of semi-circular streets where I’d lost her the first time. She turned right again and drifted down to a set of lights which changed as she approached them. A left turn, more houses, and she pulled into a short gravelly drive, parking next to a big wire mesh gate. Beyond the fence were two huge gasholders. She unlocked the gate and started walking towards the nearest of the two.

It reared up before me, an awesome monster of overlapping curved metal plates. A telescopic spiral ready to expand or contract. It glowed in the moonlight, appearing to hover just above the ground like a ghostly carousel.

I followed the girl until she reached the base of the gasholder, the long knife sticking out of the back pocket of her jeans. She turned and looked back. The moon fell on her face. Her hair was swept back from her forehead which I now saw properly for the first time. She was the perfect synthesis of Siouxsie Sioux and Annie Risk, possessing the most beautiful face I had ever seen. My stomach went into a slow dive. I would have wept but for the detail on her forehead which, though I only caught the briefest of glimpses, chilled me.

She turned and vanished around the side of the gasholder.

I followed because it seemed to me that there was nothing else I could do. I went around the back of the huge structure but the girl had disappeared. I collapsed against the side and my cheek rested against the cool metal. I opened my arms to embrace the structure. Over my panting I listened for any sound of the girl — or of gas. But each was as deathly quiet as the other, if either was there at all.

Chapter Five

The problem I had with my nocturnal adventure was that I didn’t know how much of it I had dreamt and how much had really happened.

I had a burnt finger that remained sore for weeks and I still had the white label single which I played even though there was no music recorded on it. The hisses and ticks and booms could represent some kind of message but I had to find the key to unlock the code. I’d stick it on the turntable in the morning after waking up and it was a gentle start to the day, provided my downstairs neighbour wasn’t working an early shift. I’d smoke a cigarette and lie there propped up against a couple of pillows trying to discern order from chaos. After a while I formed the impression that the sequence of sounds actually changed with each playing. Because I found this such an attractive idea I didn’t check it by recording the single on tape and comparing the two — which would have been easy to do — in case I discovered I was wrong. I suppose this idea and act of self-denial were the first steps I took on my own initiative into fantasy. But almost certainly I wouldn’t have taken them at all if it hadn’t been for the girl in the Mini. I started to think of her alternately as an imaginary siren and as a real woman who was in fact out there somewhere. And in both these roles she became my quarry. She could be a distraction from the elusive Annie Risk.

One night after shutting up the shop I drove around between King’s Cross and the North Circular for two and a half hours, just cruising, looking for the girl. From the back she looked like millions of other girls so I was forever slowing down and rubbernecking. I was lucky not to get picked up by the police. Each time I sighted a black Mini down a side street I’d make a late turn and check it out.

Held up by roadworks on the A10 in between Tottenham and Wood Green I remembered something that made me realise I was probably wasting my time. Years ago in a Crouch End pub I’d sat mesmerised for half an hour by a girl drinking with another girl at a nearby table. When her friend accidentally knocked over the ashtray, the first girl and I had exchanged a look and she had smiled at me. I formulated a dozen chat-up lines but lacked the nerve to use any of them. She had dark brown hair tied back with a faded silk scarf and was wearing old jeans and a tan-coloured T-shirt that was cut pretty low for the time. When they got up to go I was looking at her and she smiled at me again. The smile was so friendly I felt certain she would have listened to me if I’d tried to strike up a last-minute conversation. All it needed was a remark about the pub or the warm weather but I dried and she walked out of my life. I followed her discreetly out of the pub and watched as she and her friend split and walked in separate directions. It was a Saturday lunchtime, the sun was beating down and this girl was right there. I’m not saying I’m a catch, but you know when someone’s given you a look, and all I had to do was catch up with her, apologise for staring in the pub and see where it went from there. Instead I watched her wait at a bus stop, climb on board a W7 and disappear in the direction of Muswell Hill.

I went back every Saturday lunchtime for the next eight weeks but never saw her again.

As the lights changed to green and I slipped through the single lane section of the A10 I wondered if my search for the hybrid girl would end the same way. There were at least six million people crammed into the capital and I was hoping to catch sight of one of them. It doesn’t matter that you can bump into one of your oldest friends on Neal Street when you haven’t seen him for twenty years or that you can recognise the same complete stranger two days running in Tube stations at either end of the underground system — you never come across whoever it is you want to see, especially if you’re out there looking for them.

I took a left and headed back towards home. It was dark now and I tried to concentrate on the road but I kept looking around at everything. I noticed a man who’d paused in the act of drawing his curtains together in a first floor flat above a bookmaker’s. He was gazing at the horizon above the row of shops opposite.

I was growing tired of driving but snapped awake when I saw two great gasholders on my right. I checked the rearview mirror and slowed down. There was a turning into a gravel driveway which ended at a pair of wire-mesh gates. Slowly I swung around, turned in and scrunched to a halt on the gravel. When I switched off the engine I could hear my heart beating. For five minutes I didn’t move from the car but just watched the gasholders for any sign of movement. There was a slight breeze which disturbed the tops of the trees but nothing else. I stepped out of the car and closed the door quietly, then approached the gates. When I’d been here with the girl she had used a key to unlock the padlock which now barred my way. But not for long. I climbed up the gate using the pointy toes of my cowboy boots to gain footholds in the wire mesh. I teetered at the top and dropped down in a crouch on the other side.

Unlike the last time, which had felt like a dream and may, for all I knew, even have been one, now I knew I was trespassing.

I looked around for any reaction to my break-in and once satisfied I was unobserved I moved off at a low run in the direction of the nearest gasholder. I’m not a small man and the noise generated by my progress was deafening: sticks, litter, gravel, puddles. My size elevens came into contact with every obstacle and I considered the wisdom of getting hold of a pair of trainers if this sort of thing was going to become a regular feature. I might still have stashed away somewhere the baseball boots I used for the courier job.

The gasholder blocked out the light. The street lighting, obscured by trees, was poor anyway. There were a couple of big floodlights on the other side of the gasholder but now I was in its shadow. I don’t know what was scaring me more — the idea of getting caught or of finding the girl — but I could have done with a hot bath, a cold Sapporo and a neck rub. I went up to the base of the gasholder and reached out to touch it. My finger withdrew abruptly in a reflex reaction, though the metal wasn’t hot. I had felt something, a slight jarring, maybe the displacement of gas inside. Now I pressed the flat of my palm against the metal wall and felt nothing apart from the ghost of that first reaction.

I laid my other hand on the metal and thought about how I was tapping into a system that ran the length and breadth of the country. Millions of feet of pipes carrying fuel from gasworks to homes and industry, hundreds of gasholders storing and supplying gas according to requirements, themselves literally rising and falling with demand.

Within half an hour I was back in the flat with a beer and a Chinese, watching ice-skating recorded a couple of nights earlier. I’d already started watching it the night before but I’d been so tired I’d fallen asleep. I’d kept waking myself up and managing to watch a minute or two at most and then my eyes had closed again. For some reason, even though it’s a recording and you can watch it any time, you try to watch it all the way through, even when you’re clearly too tired. You know you’d enjoy it more if you waited. But still you persist.

There was an Italian girl skating. Sveva Ricciardi. I remembered the name from the night before. She was putting together a fairly ordinary free programme, which I felt sure I’d seen the night before, when suddenly she jumped a quad. The commentator was as surprised as I was. ‘It’s a quad! Ricciardi jumped a quad!’

I moved to the edge of my seat.

The thing was, she hadn’t done that the night before.

The obvious explanation was I’d slept through it the night before. But a small part of me felt sure I’d been awake throughout her performance. I even remembered her score coming up at the end. A string of 5.8s and a 5.9 from the Austrian judge.

So I could have fallen asleep for a second. A microsleep. That’s all it needed.

But the other thing that happened was that no sooner had she landed than the phone rang. I stretched and picked it up, said hello a couple of times but there was no one there. That was no coincidence. Or I was becoming paranoid, and I didn’t buy that.

The Italian girl jumps a quad. The phone rings and there’s no one there. Again.

I keyed in Annie Risk’s number.

‘Hello?’ she said. I loved the way she said that.

‘Hi. It’s Carl. Listen, was that you? Did you just ring me?’

There was silence for a moment before she answered. ‘What?’ She said it wasn’t her but we talked for a while. I said I hoped she didn’t mind me ringing her this late and she said it was always a pleasure. I smiled at that and asked if I could go up and see her for the weekend, not expecting her to say yes. So I was gobsmacked when she said, ‘Yes, OK. I’m not doing anything this weekend.’

‘I’ll come up on Saturday evening,’ I said, aware I mustn’t seem over-keen.

That was Wednesday night. The rest of the week passed at the speed of a man reading a book in a language that is not his own. I spent most of Thursday and Friday abstractedly dealing with customers while puzzling over a detail in Un Régicide. Boris discovers a gravestone for a student called Red. By this stage, Boris has already decided he is going to assassinate the King, for no other reason than that he doesn’t like his smile. The inscription on Red’s headstone reads Ci-gît Red. Here lies Red. It was one letter away from being an anagram of régicide. Why had the author settled for something that was almost an anagram but not quite? And how would a translator possibly render that in English? It wasn’t my problem, of course, but it gnawed away at me.

Saturday came around and it too went slowly. I was left pretty much alone so I spent most of the day looking at the map. I wondered if it could turn out to be part of Manchester, but I’d checked the appropriate A — Z and ruled out that possibility. Nevertheless, like the Italian skater who jumped a quadruple salchow, the second time the tape was played maybe the streets on the map would insinuate themselves into Manchester in time for my visit. Reality was mutating.

As soon as it started getting towards five o’clock, I waited for a lull in customers and closed up early. I could have driven up but I chose to take the train because I was tired after a hard week. Running a record shop single-handed was no joke but it was beginning to feel like one.

I took my seat at Euston and settled down to enjoy the journey. I had a can of some inferior beer from the buffet and a packet of Camels, a seat at the front of the train, in a smoking carriage, naturally. I pulled down the little table on the back of the seat in front and spread out the map.

As the train rolled through the Midlands I watched the light get squeezed out of the sky by a bank of deep violet cloud in the west. I peered down single-track branch lines that peeled off from the mainline. Their secrets were kept safe by thick stands of trees and thorny bushes.

At one point the railway ran alongside a main road, then the two diverged and smaller roads passed underneath the tracks. The train flew past a depot with sidings where strings of freight trucks stood waiting. Two rows of shunters and larger diesels loomed. Because I rarely travelled by rail I was fascinated by the detail, by the intricacy of the network laid out over the whole country, a multiplicity of directions of travel, different routes to destinations; a world of possibilities.

In my life I got up and I went to work and sometimes I walked around the West End, drove around North London — a limited set of variables. The structure and scope of the rail system attracted me in the same way as the gas pipes. The depots were like gasholders. Maybe those trucks would sit there months; or maybe they’d get shunted into service tomorrow.

I was in awe of this vast network of communication that I had no part in, nor any real knowledge of. There were so many secrets, so many discoveries to be made.

I swigged back the rest of the lager, lit another cigarette and folded the map. The closer I got to Manchester the more excited I became.

Suddenly I felt a cool draught as if someone had left a door or a window open. But these new trains were hermetically sealed. I shivered and felt goose pimples rise on my arms. As I reached for my leather jacket and twisted to get my arm in it, I happened to look outside. It was quite dark now and I couldn’t make out very much apart from trees and ditches and tangles of nettles and brambles. A branch line swung in from the left. I looked down it as the train sped past. The twin rails curved away into darkness.

Then I noticed something flashing. Two little things that flashed together like eyes. I wondered if they were my own eyes reflected in the window but pretty soon, as I shaded my view and concentrated, I realised that I was looking at a pair of eyes outside. They flashed in the light from the train carriage. What’s more, they were keeping up with the train.

I cupped my hands either side of my face and stared back at the eyes.

I went cold. Then hot. And cold again as I started to sweat.

It was a dog running alongside the train, jumping as if it were all a game, but those eyes weren’t playing. The beast was bounding along, leaping over bushes and piles of dumped sleepers, head twisting to the right so it could watch the train. I could see its strong white teeth as the loose flaps of skin around its mouth flew up and down. Thick strings of saliva trailed behind its head. It looked like a bull, eyes rolling, tossing its head one last time before goring its taunter. I briefly shuddered. Its pumping flanks were slick. It opened its mouth and showed an impressive set of teeth. Still it kept pace with the train. I looked around the carriage. There were only two other passengers, heads turned the other way as they stared into the darkness outside their side of the train.

I looked back, hoping that the creature would have disappeared, but it was still there, leaping at the glass and snapping its jaws. I found myself unable to look away, terrified that if I did the dog would somehow manage to get inside the train, either by leaping through an open window between carriages or by smashing a window with its skull — the thing looked hard enough. Now it actually began hitting the side of its head against the window, and the skull cracked like a fancy chocolate, smearing strawberry cream on the glass. I reacted — recoiled, yelped — but the other passengers continued to look out of their own windows. I started to question the reality of what was happening. The dog was doing things that shouldn’t have been possible and whereas I liked that in an ice-skater or a singer I wasn’t sure I was in favour of it for dogs. I’d always believed I’d rather submerge myself in a bath of spiders than meet a pit bull terrier down a dead end street.

It was hard to tell, because of the speed and the poor light, but I thought it was a pit bull that was beating its head against the window.

The train wasn’t going very fast but neither was it crawling along. I was rocking forward on my seat willing it to go faster. The dog showed no signs of tiring. It thumped its head against the glass, working its jaws on the night air like scissors. The eyes were the worst because they were so blank, devoid of intelligence. I felt sucked into them. I had to get away; specifically, I had to go to the bathroom, in a hurry.

I locked the door behind me and for a moment felt more secure. I used the facilities and stood looking at my white face in the mirror.

But I’d been an idiot.

There was a thud on the outside of the frosted window. In the confined space it was deafening.

I’d been an idiot by not taking care to use the toilet on the other side of the train.

There was another solid thump and with an almost imperceptible bending inwards a fine map of cracks spread itself over the small square of glass. I watched it transfixed. With one final blast the window shattered, sharp triangles scattering over me and over the floor, and the dog’s wicked, ugly head thrust through into the tiny cubicle.

I stood unable to move, a wave of revulsion sweeping through me. I watched the dog and the dog watched me. Then the head whipped from side to side catching the neck on jags of glass and spotting the floor with blood. Its eyes followed mine but I couldn’t move. The dog lunged forward, cutting its throat more deeply, and snapped its stinking jaws at me. I felt its hot breath and sticky spittle on my face. The animal made another lunge forward, and its throat was opened so deeply by the glass that a jet of dark blood struck me in the chest. This seemed to set me free. I grabbed at the door handle and within seconds was reeling about the space between the carriages tearing at my formerly white cotton shirt — panicking, muttering, laughing, crying, all at the same time. After pulling the toilet door shut I’d been able to hear the blood drumming against the door.

Once I’d got rid of the shirt I pulled my leather jacket around me and sat hunched up, shivering in a corner by the door until the train pulled into Stockport. The two people who’d been sitting in my carriage and had remained oblivious to the dog’s assault got off here without even glancing at me. They walked off towards the exit without a backward glance. Weird fuckers, I wanted to shout after them. What kind of twisted, secluded lives were they returning to? I pulled the door shut and wrapped my arms around my legs to try and control the shaking that had taken hold of my body.

I took a cab from Piccadilly Station to Annie’s place, which was a top floor flat in Mayfield Road, Whalley Range. As I stood waiting for her to come and answer the door, I looked across the main road to the mature trees of Alexandra Park. Just the other side of the park was Moss Side, and Maine Road football ground, home of my boyhood club, ‘the only football team to come from Manchester’, as the song went. The door opened and Annie looked at me shyly with her head on one side, then glanced down at the threadbare carpet and fidgeted.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ I said, then followed her up the hallway.

‘The neighbours are nice,’ she said as we climbed the stairs. The building smelled faintly of laundry, alcohol and Indian food.

‘Have you made me a curry?’

‘I thought you might be hungry,’ she said, leaning on the banister and looking down at me. I was still checking out the steel door to the flat below. ‘They’ve been broken into six times.’

‘Perhaps they should get a new door.’ I suggested.

‘They did,’ she said.

‘Yeah, I, er… Never mind.’

Annie’s door was a sturdy wooden affair. ‘Have you not been broken into?’ I asked as she closed it behind me.

‘Only once,’ she said. ‘They took my collection of coloured glass bottles. You know, they were just about the only things I cared about and they picked them out of everything else. Two thousand pound computer? No thanks, I’ll just have these old blue bottles, they might fetch ten quid down Affleck’s Palace. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Seems weird,’ I agreed. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t someone you know? I mean, it sounds like it might be a personal thing.’

She seemed to consider this and then asked, ‘But who’d do a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘a wronged boyfriend, someone you sacked or beat going for a job. The world’s full of people with reason to want to hurt you.’

‘Well, fuck me, I’m glad you came.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you can affect people’s lives without meaning to and we never think about them coming back and saying, “Hey, I want to get my own back.”’

She gave me an odd look and walked into the little kitchen.

I didn’t know what had come over me to make me say such things. ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. The journey was… well, it was a journey.’

‘Make yourself at home, Carl. Take your jacket off,’ she shouted above the noise of the kettle and I realised I couldn’t. I needed a shirt.

‘What happened?’ she asked, coming back into the main room and looking at me standing there like an extra from Dawn of the Dead.

‘I had to throw my shirt away,’ I said. ‘I spilt something all over it.’

She gave me another odd look, which I added to my collection, but she did go and get me a shirt from her bedroom. ‘It should be big enough,’ she said as she passed it to me. ‘It’s one I use to sleep in.’

A momentary thrill. The thought of having her night shirt next to my skin. She went back into the kitchen and stirred the curry while I took my jacket off and put the shirt on. It was a long white T-shirt with the words Holiday Time stencilled on the left breast. It smelt of washing powder.

‘Do you mind if I use the bathroom?’ I asked.

‘Help yourself.’

I locked myself in and let out a big sigh. It wouldn’t do me any good to be so nervous but so far I was getting everything wrong. She was probably sorry she’d let me come. I looked at myself in the mirror. I’d got some colour back in my cheeks and I needed a shave. Obsessed with travelling light I hadn’t brought anything except a toothbrush and my copy of Un Régicide.

The bathroom was painted blue with bits of mirrored glass and glazed tile stuck on the walls like a kind of mosaic. She had lots of Body Shop soaps — fruit and animal shapes — and a big bottle filled with tiny sea shells.

I splashed cold water on my face and dabbed myself dry with a big soft white towel. There was a peach-coloured bathrobe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I buried my face in it to see if I could smell her. The trouble was, I hardly knew what she smelt like.

I used the toilet, washed my hands and laid my hand on the door handle.

Before the door opened I had a split-second vision of me opening the door and there being nothing there but utter darkness. No flat, no Annie Risk, just emptiness, cold and vast.

Then it was gone and I stepped into the hall. I smelt the curry.

‘Nearly ready,’ Annie shouted.

‘OK,’ I called, but I could still feel the chill.

We sat on big floor cushions in Annie’s lounge to eat the curry. She’d produced a bottle of wine and I hoped I wasn’t going to make any more stupid remarks. I told her it was great curry and she smiled, pouring more wine. I relaxed and the conversation flowed naturally. We accepted each other’s childhood reminiscences as if they were precious stones that we turned over in our hands and polished and put away in a safe place. The clumsy line on which I’d started the evening was forgotten, at least by me. By midnight two empty wine bottles stood next to each other on the table. After Annie had opened a third, the conversation took a darker turn and we started talking about ghosts, fears, dreams. I asked Annie what she was scared of.

‘Birds,’ she said, playing with one of the wine bottle corks.

‘Birds? Why?’ I asked.

‘For many years I didn’t know. I was just scared of them. It was a phobia; it didn’t need a reason.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘But then one day I was walking across the park.’

‘Alexandra Park?’

She looked at me, slightly exasperated, as she continued to turn the cork over and over in her hand. ‘Yeah, probably. But, you know, any park. It doesn’t matter. Just — the park.’

‘OK, sorry. Go on.’ I smiled at her.

‘I don’t know where I was up to now.’

‘You were walking across the park.’

‘And there was this great big crow in front of me. Just ten or twelve feet away. Great big thing. And it opened its big black beak and came out with this awful, harsh, raucous cry.’

‘Yeah, they can be pretty frightening, crows,’ I said.

Annie threw the cork at me and I ducked.

‘The point was — or is — I wasn’t that bothered by it, but it made me realise what it was about most other birds that freaked me out.’

‘Go on,’ I said as she paused.

‘It was the disconnect between what they look like and what they sound like.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my hand brushing Annie’s leg as I placed my wine glass on the floor.

‘I mean they have these horrible little legs with claws for feet, tiny little cold, black eyes, and most importantly this hard, angular beak out of which, weirdly, comes this beautiful burbling song. It doesn’t add up. It’s all wrong. It’s not for nothing that Hieronymus Bosch painted so many birds in his visions of hell. They’re horrible, nasty, weird little things and I won’t have them anywhere near me.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘You really don’t like birds, do you?’

‘I really don’t like birds.’

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘The wine’s all gone,’ Annie said, at length, leaning back against a cushion. ‘But I can offer you something from the liqueur trolley.’ She was pointing to the corner by the window. There was a small table with short legs and on it stood a bottle of Cointreau and what looked like some foreign brandy. From where I was sitting and with a quart of wine inside me I was having trouble reading the menu. It crossed my mind that if these floor cushions were not intended as my bed for the night I might not be in the best condition to make the most of any opportunities arising. But Annie had drunk as much as I had and she was a lot smaller, so in fact I was impressed she could still string sentences together coherently. We had a plum brandy each and Annie said to me, ‘How about you then? What are you scared of?’

‘Dogs,’ I said.

Chapter Six

When I was doing the courier job I stayed on the road as much as I could and kept out of the office if at all possible. The Thin Controller had vertical pupils, small bumps on either side of his forehead and he never got up from behind his control desk. If you sat down on one of the orange plastic chairs facing the desk his big black dog was always lying under the desk stopping you seeing his cloven feet.

What I’m trying to say is he wasn’t a very nice man and try as he might to conceal his infernal provenance — never letting you see him standing up; the dog hiding his feet — just about every courier on his books had a good idea where he came from.

He called you up all the time, interrupting just when you were dismounting or delivering at some uptight Mayfair address, where more often than not a sign was fixed to the wall advising couriers to keep the volume down. I actually quite enjoyed doing jobs in Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Middle-aged receptionists would rumple their silk blouses and crease their foreheads as they turned and frowned at my entrance. The helmet, the fingerless leather gloves and the shorts — I acquired some Lycra after a couple of weeks; Jaz helped me get kitted out — were regarded as threatening at many W1 addresses west of Regent Street.

It wasn’t always possible to avoid the office, however. The Thin Controller made a point of calling you in every so often. There was never any good reason. He’d give you a job he could just as easily have given you over the radio. It seemed like he just wanted to keep an eye on you. He liked confrontation. I didn’t. So I dreaded him calling me in. It wasn’t just the Thin Controller I didn’t like; there was his terrifying dog as well.

If I’ve given the impression the dog never left its lair under the Thin Controller’s control desk, scratch that. As soon as I reached the top of the creaky old wooden stairs from the street the dog was barking like a bastard and bounding along the top landing to meet me. As far as it knew I could have been some suicidally depressed burglar come for the Fat Woman’s petty cash box. I’m not saying it was a stupid dog; I think, like its master, it was in league with dark forces. Whenever the Thin Controller called me in I used to think maybe the dog would have recognised the scent of his owner’s couriers by now. Ha!

Every time I mounted those stairs I did so with my heart in my mouth.

The morning in question was no exception. The step three from the top creaked like a Jeffrey Archer plot and the dog was upon me more like something out of a certain Conan Doyle mystery.

Whenever I’m called upon to explain my fear of dogs I tend to overreact and get all incredulous, wanting instead, demanding even, to know why we should trust dogs. They are, after all, animals. Beasts with too many teeth. They’re carnivorous and have small brains. Is that a good combination? All that stuff about man’s best friend is bollocks. Man’s most likely betrayer more like. One man’s friend, another man’s killer.

They don’t think or reason. It’s not, Shall I bite this little girl’s face off or shan’t I? It’s just, Bite, bite, bite the fucking thing off. Owners think their dogs understand them and the reverse is true. All the dog’s doing is picking up on a few basic reactions to repeated cues. It knows how to get food out of you and how to avoid getting hit. That’s not clever, it’s just survival.

I see mums and dads — dads most of all — letting kids play around with the pit bull and I just want to fucking shoot them. The one good thing the Tories did was introduce legislation about dangerous dogs. Being idiots, though, they didn’t go far enough.

So, I’m at the top of the stairs and the dog’s about to have my testicles for lunch. The Thin Controller does fuck all and the Fat Woman, sitting in her tobacco-stained office, just farts. I always dealt with the dog in the same way: making an effort to control my bowels, I would raise my hands above my head and make all sorts of ridiculous noises to soothe the beast. These ploys felt about as useful as opening up an umbrella against a tsunami but somehow I manage to sidle along the landing to the Thin Controller’s control room, whereupon the dog retreats to his position under the desk, because it remembers I mustn’t see his master’s feet or it’ll get a beating.

The Thin Controller was in the middle of giving someone a hard time over the air. Alpha Two Six by the sound of it. ‘When I give you two jobs you do them in the order I give them to you, Two Six, not in some strange order you invent yourself. What do you think this is, a fucking holiday camp?’

I sat down on one of the orange chairs. The dog growled softly. I didn’t know what breed it was, or what combination of breeds. I just knew I didn’t like it very much.

While waiting for the Thin Controller I did the one thing that annoyed him and which you could get away with. I lit up. For some reason it irritated the crap out of him when couriers smoked in his control room but since he smoked roll-ups constantly himself there wasn’t much he could say. There was, of course, because he was hardly a reasonable man, but he never told you to put it out. He just grunted his disapproval and looked even more put out than usual. It was Jaz who told me about the cigarette smoking thing. In the same way I would pass it on to someone else in the unlikely event that I stuck around long enough to be anybody’s mentor.

Several couriers, health and fitness fanatics all of them, actually took up smoking just to spite the Thin Controller. And not Silk Cut Mild either; they smoked Capstan Full Strength, Woodbines and foul-smelling Turkish brands.

I tried to flick my ash over the dog but its growls grew louder, so I abandoned that.

The Thin Controller finished moaning at Two Six and took his rolly from between his lips with yellow fingers. He always kept his headphones on when talking to you. They were cheap-looking grey flimsy things like we used to use for language work in school.

He grunted. He did that: he called you in then acted like you wanted to see him. I never bothered to play along.

‘You called me in,’ I said.

‘Did I?’

Not worth answering.

He shuffled various papers around on his desk, pretending not to remember what he’d called me in for.

‘Got a job for you.’ The words slipped out of the corner of his mouth like slivers of unwanted food. His antennae eyebrows twitched.

‘A job, is it?’ I said flatly.

He screwed up his face and lit the blackened rolly which had gone out while he’d been sorting through his papers.

‘Don’t fuck about, Two Three. Just do the fucking job for me, will you.’ He plucked the rolly from his mouth and set about trying to remove a shred of tobacco from his tongue by blowing and spitting. Under the desk the dog stirred and the headphones crackled. I could just hear the tinny voice calling in. ‘Alpha One Eight.’

‘Where are you, One Eight?’ A beat, a drag and the metallic rustling of the courier’s voice. ‘What the fuck are you doing in Regent’s Park? You’re going to thirty-six from Covent Garden and you’re in Regent’s Park. What is going on, One Eight?’

He went on like this for a while and as he was still talking dug a docket out from under the messiest part of his desk and held it out for me to take. I was relieved to get out of there. I looked at the docket as I returned to my bike. The job was somewhere near the Barbican, between St Paul’s and Old Street. Not that far from the office. I freewheeled down Pentonville Road and took a left.

A few minutes later I was going down a bus and cycle lane with a line of traffic stationary on my right and some fucking well-intentioned idiot left a gap in the queue and waved through a Vauxhall Astra that was aiming to cross from the other side of the road into a garage forecourt on my side. But the driver didn’t look out for me. I could almost forgive that. It was the twat in the Golf who waved her through I soon wanted to have buried alive.

So the Astra crossed my path — nice and slowly as well, that was the essential comedy touch; if she’d been doing more than ten miles an hour I’d have missed her — and I braked but there wasn’t much point. My front wheel smacked straight into the rear door and then I was flying. It must have been an impressive sight for all the motorists sitting in their cars with nowhere to go as my body described a parabola in the air above the Astra and landed with a sickening crump in the bus lane just beyond the car.

I lay still and in total silence for a few moments not knowing if I could move, not daring to try in case it was bad news. Then the spell was broken as the driver of the Astra came running and crouched down beside me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she was saying. ‘I’m so sorry. Are you all right? He waved me on. I thought it was clear.’

I sympathised. She hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. Obviously she should have looked instead of relying on the wave. It was the man who waved I wanted to have a stern word with, but the traffic was moving again. Which was more than I was.

‘Are you all right?’ The woman was frightened she’d done terrible damage. At this stage I still didn’t know. I was just lying there sort of enjoying the attention and the luxury of being able to lie flat in the middle of the road. ‘Please say something,’ the woman implored.

‘OK,’ I said, deciding it was time to see what the score was, and I started to feel my way back into my body. It was all there, as far as I could tell, and in one piece.

No dogs yet, but stay with it. I’ll come to the dogs.

Soon I was getting to my feet and the woman was helping to dust me down. I probably ended up cleaner than before. She went and looked at my bike before I did. She was gone a while, around the other side of the car. Meanwhile everyone was just driving past, slowing down to look for blood on the road. When she came back I was lighting a cigarette. I was shaking like fuck but had been remarkably lucky to have sustained only grazed ankles and an extremely sore back and shoulders.

‘The news is not good,’ she said, wearing a very worried expression. ‘I’m very sorry. It was my fault and I’ll pay.’

‘Don’t worry.’ I tried to reassure her. ‘No bones broken, I don’t think, and I’m not leaking smoke anywhere.’

She laughed nervously and we both went to take a look at my bike. She had been understating it really. The bike was completely fucked.

‘I’ve no idea what bikes cost,’ the woman said, producing a chequebook and pen. ‘If this isn’t enough I’ll write my name and address on the back, just let me know what else I owe you.’

I was a bit dazed at this point and didn’t look at the amount. The poor woman was muttering away to herself about having to go. I dragged my bike onto the garage forecourt she’d been trying to get to and then she was in her car burning rubber. I sat down on the little fence at the front of the garage, lit a cigarette and looked at the cheque for the first time. Two hundred pounds. To me that was a fortune and would have bought eight bikes the equal of mine. I suddenly felt quite lightheaded and started daydreaming about spending all that cash. I was brought back down to earth by the Thin Controller’s nasal voice crackling over the radio.

‘Alpha Two Three… Alpha Two Three. Where are you, Two Three?’

‘I had an accident, control.’

‘What about the job, Two Three?’

What a cunt. No How are you? Are you hurt? Was it serious? None of that. For all he knew I could be in casualty with only my voice still functional and the nurses were only waiting for him to call before unplugging the machines.

‘I’ve got to do something about the bike, try and get it fixed up,’ I said, surveying the wreckage in front of me.

‘Will you be able to do it?’

‘Probably. The wheels aren’t too good. A couple of new wheels and a bit of work and it should be OK.’

‘The job, Two Three.’ His voice had risen an octave. I could almost smell his dog and his disgusting roll-up cigarettes. ‘Will you be able to do the job?’

As I say, what a cunt.

I wanted to tell him to roll the job up tight and stick it up his arse and I’d help if he was having difficulty.

‘The job will get done but it may take a while to fix the bike,’ I said through clenched teeth.

‘Call me when you’ve done the job, Two Three.’

I lit another cigarette and kicked my bike. Then I remembered the cheque and smiled. Two hundred quid. I hoped there’d come a day when I’d demand a good deal more to cheat death and be completely humiliated in the space of ten minutes, but the state of my finances at that time meant it was a pretty good deal.

I left the pile of scrap where it was and walked the remaining mile and a half to the job address. I often asked myself later why I bothered to complete the job, given that I’d decided after picking myself up off the road — even before seeing the state of my bike — that I would ride no more jobs for the Thin Controller.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t like to leave loose ends. I find it hard to walk out of bad films and I never leave a football match until the final whistle even if my team are three goals down and leaving five minutes before time would get me home an hour earlier. I like to see things resolved. It sort of all ties in with my love of maps and my search, years later, for the city on my map.

It was painful to walk for the first quarter of a mile but then I seemed to loosen up and I knew how best to place my feet to minimise the jarring effect.

I headed vaguely south. I had my A — Z in the big fluorescent bag along with the radio and the job itself. Sometimes I wondered what was in the envelopes and packages I delivered. I liked the mystery and the sense of bringing people together, becoming a conduit for their communications. This job was a stiff-backed envelope, A4 size, bearing an address label and the words, handwritten in ballpoint, ‘By hand’. Despite my natural curiosity I had never been tempted to open any of the jobs.

The sun had sunk behind the old warehouses on the other side of the street. I wondered what I might do next. The idea of telling the Thin Controller I was no longer going to work for him frightened me a little. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have just called him up and told him, but I had to return the bag and the radio, and I had to get paid for my last week.

Eventually I reached the street, without the aid of the map, and crossed over to the odd numbers, looking for number 23. At first there didn’t seem to be one; it was a short street and the numbers only went up to 15. Then I noticed an alley down by the side of number 15. I turned down it and the alley opened out into a narrow road with old derelict properties on either side. They seemed to have been workshops and light manufacturing units. There were also occasional doorways that could have led to flats. Most of the jobs I did were delivering to businesses but very occasionally I’d get one to a residential address. There were no numbers on the doors and the street had not been given a name unless it was a continuation of the first street. Down near the bottom on the left hand side was an archway with the number 23 hand-painted on the wall at waist height. I passed under the archway into a courtyard scattered with household rubbish and black binliners ready to burst. All I wanted was a door with a letter box. I wasn’t sure I would bother waiting for a signature this time. I was feeling nervous, though I couldn’t account for it.

I heard a high-pitched keening noise like a circular saw coming from somewhere inside the building that abutted the courtyard on two sides. I saw a doorway but there was no door to speak of and certainly no letter box. A few bits of wood hanging on a rusty hinge wasn’t enough for me. A job worth doing and all that. I stepped inside and immediately felt the temperature drop. The walls wept foul-smelling moisture. Boards creaked under my feet and I heard noise coming from somewhere ahead of me, the same high-pitched sound again and the murmur of men talking in loud voices behind closed doors. I should have left the job on the floor and retraced my steps but something drew me on. I wanted to know what was going on. I stepped forward, taking care over the placing of my big feet. The building smelt of grease and sewage. I opened a door at the far side of the room and found a corridor that stretched ahead twenty yards. It was very cold and water dripped from pipes that ran along the ceiling, forming puddles on the sunken concrete floor. I felt completely alone, as if no one could see me, no one knew where I was, not even the Thin Controller, who’d sent me there. It was something to do with the cold of the place and the sense of utter neglect. I could still hear the men’s voices but something gave me the idea they’d reached wherever they were by some different entrance. I hurried to the end of the corridor and turned left into a disused office. Old telephones sat like fat spiders on desks thick with dust and fur. Cobwebs darkened every corner and I heard something scuttling behind the rusty filing cabinet. There was a louder noise though, coming from the far side of the room, which made the hair rise on the back of my neck. I reached a door and peered through the dirty circle of glass fitted at its centre. Beyond was a sort of galleried section with a wooden rail only fragments of which were still supported by splintered uprights. About eight feet below, at least a dozen men stood around a circular pit in which two dogs were fighting, yelping and snapping at each other as the spectators goaded them on.

My instinct for flight was countered by a compulsion to watch.

The two dogs — pit bull terriers — moved around the ring as they eyed each other and lunged forward, snapping their jaws. They were like boxers, but there was no referee, just a bloodthirsty crowd. The speed with which they darted at each other and withdrew increased as the sweat trickled down the back of my neck. With one attack the brown dog managed to fix its jaws onto the side of the black dog’s head. The black dog jerked its head this way and that until there was blood spotting the floor of the pit and the brown dog let go. Black instantly leapt on Brown and sank its teeth into the back of Brown’s neck. Brown tried to shake off the other dog and was successful but Black had torn away a chunk of hair and skin. Blood flowed from the wound. The men cheered and punched fists. As each dog launched fresh attacks I realised the men were split in their allegiance. Some were shouting, ‘Come on, Griff!’ while the others yelled, ‘At him, Storm!’

Hair, skin, gobbets of flesh, streams of blood flew from the skirmish as the speed and ferocity increased and the men watching became more and more excited. I felt sick but couldn’t stop watching. The dogs became ever more vicious, the fight clearly intended to last until one of them was killed. Soon, to me, they became a blur, a nightmarish slurry of spitting bleeding dog-flesh spinning around and around the ring. I imagined that if I approached I would be able to dip my hand into the flux. The air seemed charged with possibilities, as if the dogs were actually changing and I could change with them. At that moment the dream of escaping the humdrum seemed the reality. Mesmerised by the now golden flux of the fighting dogs, I fell against the door. The men turned and saw me through the glass, and suddenly there were dogs — other dogs — coming for me. I heard their feet clattering on a set of stairs and their mad barking echoing off the walls all around me. I sprang back from the door and looked around quickly to see if I could tell which direction they were coming from.

Within seconds they appeared in the doorway through which I had come. These dogs were fresh. They had mayhem in their eyes. I had the impression that they hesitated before leaping at me from the doorway as if savouring the moment before the kill, but it could just have been my mind playing tricks, like when you’re in the car that spins out of control and you have that moment of utter passivity and sense of inevitability. They moved in slow motion, allowing me to see every minute detail of their bodies. A pit bull terrier can pull ninety times its own weight. It’s bred for fighting and it never gives up, not even to save itself. This is what makes it so deadly. And there were two of them coming straight at me. One went for my hand, the other my leg.

Chapter Seven

Light had crept into the sky outside the window behind Annie’s head while I’d been talking. The birds had started to sing. I’d gone beyond tiredness and Annie also seemed wide awake. I lit a cigarette and noticed Annie looking at my hands.

‘It healed,’ I said.

‘What about your leg?’ she asked.

‘There’s a scar. It’s not too bad. I walked with a limp for a while, a real limp.’ Even if I’d wanted to get a new bike and carry on cycling I wouldn’t have been able to. ‘So you see why I’m frightened of dogs?’

‘What about guide dogs? Guide dogs are OK, aren’t they?’

My real problem was with the so-called dangerous dogs, those bred for fighting and kept by sociopaths, but it extended naturally to include all other dogs. ‘Still not keen,’ I said.

‘So what happened after they attacked you? Did you manage to get away?’

‘Jaz saved me.’

Jaz had heard that last exchange between me and the Thin Controller and had gone out of his way to see if he could catch up with me before I delivered the job. He was going to help me fix the bike or give me a ride, or just do the job for me while I fixed the bike. As it was, he caught up with me just as the dogs were released and he used an iron bar to beat them off me. He probably saved my life but Jaz being Jaz he shrugged it off when we talked about it later.

Annie suggested we have a coffee and she went off to make it. Our heads were full of that spangly brightness morning brings after a sleepless night. A coffee would calm us both down. I knew I would probably crash at some point during the day. Gone were the days when I could stay up all night and not suffer for it. Jaz and I had gone to a couple of all-nighters at the Scala in King’s Cross but we were younger then and our bodies could take it.

After coffee Annie and I went for a walk across Alexandra Park into Moss Side and past Manchester City’s ground at Maine Road. It was warm and overcast.

‘Probably be a storm later,’ I said and Annie nodded. Apart from that we didn’t say much. But it was OK: there was no need to talk and no awkwardness in the silence. I felt I could almost have taken hold of her hand and she would have been glad. Occasionally the sun broke cover and splashed an end terrace or a back entry. Fast food containers scuttled around and around in shop doorways as a breeze got up. Sheets of newsprint rose up like kites and grit got into our eyes. Annie stopped and bowed her head.

‘Something in my eye,’ she muttered. ‘Will you see if you can see it?’ She tilted her head back and pulled the skin away from beneath her eye. I’m squeamish about eyes and I almost had to cry off, but I steeled myself and peered into the red insides of Annie’s eye. There was a tiny particle.

‘Found it,’ I said.

‘Will you get it out for me?’

I had to see what I could do — she was in discomfort — so I took a clean tissue from my jeans pocket and folded it to get a stiff corner. I asked Annie to lick this so it would be less abrasive and very gingerly I lowered it to the inside rim of her eye where the little black mote was lurking. I felt queasy dipping into such delicate matter. I didn’t like to see the hems along which the body could come undone. But with careful probing I caught the piece of grit on the end of my tissue and removed it. I showed it to Annie and she looked at it — holding my hand to steady it — and said, ‘God, it felt like a rock.’ I was sorry when she took her hand away.

We wound up in Rusholme and had lunch in one of the dozens of Indian restaurants that lined both sides of the road.

‘How do you decide which one to go in?’ I asked as our jug of Cobra beer arrived and I poured us both a glass.

‘Easy,’ she said, breaking a poppadom. ‘I go in a different one each time.’

‘Then you know which ones are no good and you avoid them next time around?’

‘Nice idea,’ she said, dipping popadum into chutney, ‘but I always forget.’

We ate in silence for a while. There were so many things I wanted to say to her that I couldn’t think how to start.

‘Food’s good,’ I said when the main course had arrived.

‘What’s your favourite kind of food?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Indian, I think, or Chinese. There’s this great Chinese right underneath my flat. You must come to London again and try it.’ I cringed inwardly. It was like, Do you want to come up for a coffee?

Annie smiled.

‘What’s yours?’ I asked.

Because she had a mouthful of aloo gobi she pointed at her plate with her fork. ‘This stuff,’ she said after a moment. ‘Indian vegetarian food. It’s bloody great.’

‘Ask me what my favourite word is,’ I said.

‘What’s your favourite word?’

‘Yearning. And my least favourite is inevitable.’

‘Clearly,’ she said, ‘for what they mean rather than the sound of them.’

‘I had a friend who said life is yearning. I didn’t know what he meant at the time but I think I do now.’

‘How come?’

I told her about the map. That wasn’t the whole story, of course, about yearning, but it had become a quest that seemed to represent the way I felt about life.

I told her how I’d found it and verified that the streets belonged to none of the major towns in the country. I tried to explain how I’d decided the map represented a real place despite this, and how I was determined to find it. She listened closely and at no point did she attempt to rationalise the whole business.

‘How will you find it?’ she asked as the waiter hovered. We ordered gulab jamun.

‘There are clues,’ I said. ‘All around us.’ I realised this was the point at which she could either accept what I was saying and go with it or decide I was paranoid and announce she would never see me again.

‘What sort of clues?’

‘People must know about this place,’ I said. ‘Someone lost the map in the first place. So sometimes I see people talking and something about the way they look makes me think they know.’ I spooned a suet ball into my mouth. ‘Have you never sat on your own somewhere and watched other people?’ I continued. ‘And seen two people sharing a joke or talking with serious looks on their faces and wanted — and I mean really wanted — to know what they’re on about?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, that’s all I’m saying. That’s the reality. The rest is metaphor, if you like. It’s all about knowing what they know, slipping into their lives, almost being another person. Have you ever thought how strange it would be to be another person?’

She nodded again, frowning.

‘That’s all it is,’ I said. ‘Knowing what others know. We’re all too isolated. It’d be great to know everything.’

‘I don’t know. I like the mystery.’

‘So do I, though. That’s what it’s all about. Mystery. Not knowing. Wanting to find out. Mystery is a transient thing on its way to knowledge. It’s like a sheet that you’re trying to get at to pull aside. Look,’ I said with a sudden movement backwards. I reached into my back pocket. ‘This is it. This is the map.’ I unfolded it and spread it out on the cloth. ‘What do you think?’

I watched Annie looking at the map, followed her eyes as she examined the streets, the squares, the boulevards.

‘It exists somewhere,’ I said, then the waiter came back and we ordered coffees.

We walked slowly back to Annie’s place, taking short cuts down back entries.

‘I like these places,’ I said. ‘They’re like secret passages.’

Annie laughed. ‘We’re trespassing really,’ she said. ‘It’s only the kids who use them. Grown-ups use the streets. It’s a sort of unwritten law. I use them sometimes because they remind me of being a kid. I like that.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘It’s like me and my map. Your childhood is a strange place, like the city in the map. And it’s good, isn’t it? It’s good to go back there. Or make it feel like you’ve gone back.’

‘Do you want to play Scrabble when we get back?’ she asked out of the blue.

I gave her a look.

‘I used to play it when I was a kid,’ she offered with a smile.

‘In that case, yes.’ I said. ‘I like Scrabble.’

I did like Scrabble but I never won.

Annie made a pot of tea and we sat on the floor in her living room.

I got rubbish letters to start but got rid of them in a couple of goes and after ten minutes I had five letters of a seven-letter word. The word was ADVANCE and I needed only the last two letters. In their place I had a useless K and I. So for the next quarter of an hour I scored in single figures, placing only one tile each go while I hoped to pick up the C and the E. Annie laughed at my piddling scores as she raced ahead. I got the E but it took ages to get the C and of course once I’d got the word the board was almost full and there was nowhere to put it. Chasing a fifty-point bonus had lost me the game, as it almost always did.

Game over, we sat back against her huge cushions and our sleepless night caught up with us. Within seconds I was drifting off, dimly aware of Annie’s head resting nearby. I felt very peaceful, extremely relaxed.

We weren’t actually asleep that long, a couple of hours at the most. Annie stirred first and her movement woke me. Her head was inches from mine and I could see her eyes moving and a wisp of hair that had fallen across her mouth rising and falling.

‘Sleep well?’ I said.

‘Mmm.’

I took hold of her hand, which was lying curled up on the cushion next to her head, and she squeezed my hand firmly. Then she turned and was facing me and I looked at her for a moment before leaning forward and kissing her.

We made love slowly, undressing gradually and spending a lot of time just holding on to each other and either just watching or kissing each other softly.

For a short time I felt slightly detached, observing myself while my mind raced off on its own, recording the various sensations, the emotions. Annie’s body welcomed me like a warm scented bath, and as I immersed myself, the foamy water stroked every inch of my skin.

Later we lay in a cushioned embrace whispering silly things to each other. Reluctantly I reached my hand under the cushions, looking for my watch. It was time to go if I was going to catch the last train back to London.

‘You can stay if you want,’ Annie said.

‘Better not,’ I said. I wanted to but I’d made the mistake before of too much too soon. When my mother warned me in my teens that to go too far with a girl too quickly would spoil the relationship in the long run I had never believed her. But experience had taught me she had been right. She usually was.

I got dressed and went to the bathroom. When I came out Annie was walking across the hallway towards me, her hair in her eyes and orange street lighting from the windows catching her hip and the side of her body. My mouth dried. I felt a rush of blood and had to be strong-willed as I enfolded her in my long arms that for once didn’t feel as awkward as the unfastened arms of a straightjacket. I kissed her on top of her head and she caught hold of a handful of my hair and gave it a little tug.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to stay?’ She pressed close to me.

‘Better not,’ said a part of me that believed in walking away from piles of presents wrapped in shiny paper with the name Carl written on each one. Another part of me was all for staying and never going anywhere ever again. But I knew we’d stand a better chance if I left now and came back again soon.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said, kissing her on the lips. ‘Thanks for everything. I’ve had… you know what kind of time I’ve had.’

As she opened the door for me Annie said softly, ‘Have you got your map?’ I patted the back pocket of my jeans and smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘you don’t want to get lost.’ And she kissed me again lightly and locked the door after me.

I sat and waited on the platform at Piccadilly and smoked a cigarette. I walked along to the end of the platform and looked out at all the lines going off into the darkness. I felt a lot closer now after my weekend with Annie, particularly after the last couple of hours. I was beginning to find my way. As I stared into the darkness I saw at its very heart a light, at first just a pinprick, emerging and expanding. Excitement grew in me as the light got bigger and bigger. I waited for it.

Sitting in the first carriage as the train headed back down south through the night, I looked out of the window. No terror dogs tonight; only a row of terraced houses — beyond Stockport but not yet in Macclesfield — all in darkness except for one bright top-floor window washed yellow like a painting with a figure in the centre of the frame waving his arm at the train.

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.

The glass in the speedometer dial smashed. In a shower of blue sparks the radio blew and possibly one of the tyres also. The engine died. I broke out in a sweat. There were cars coming up fast behind me.