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.