Dead Letters Anthology (34 page)

I closed the laptop, telling myself I needed to wait for Ian’s response before I could carry on. In Jane’s bedroom, after hiding the laptop and glancing at the mannequin and noticing that she was wearing a different dress, a grey one from Phase Eight that I remembered buying, I looked at the books on her shelves, then wished I hadn’t. I pulled out a copy of Joe’s second novel, which I had lent to Jane. I opened it to the title page and saw that Joe had signed it to me.

With thanks for your help and support. All the best xxx

That slightly uncertain sign-off –
All the best
– followed by three kisses. I had to sit down on the edge of Jane’s bed. I stared at the book in my hands and then lifted my head. My gaze met Jane’s for a moment before I looked away.

* * *

Ian didn’t reply that day, or the next. I put a mental bookmark in place and carried on editing. I also finally looked at Facebook and lost an entire afternoon. I read every post and every comment. I noticed how many people had posted and who had posted and how many likes they had. I didn’t want to post, because I didn’t want to feel I was entering into some competition to reveal the closest connection to Joe or the greatest sense of loss, or to win the most likes. I generally felt uncomfortable reading people’s posts about the loss of their parents, or their dog (actually, I didn’t read those ones. Fuck them and their self-pity and fuck their dogs), and never commented. Had my father died twenty years later, there was no way I would have posted on Facebook about it. It was a matter of taste. And judgment. But I wasn’t judging the mutual friends who had written about Joe, and it was inevitable that I would follow suit, albeit awkwardly. So I wrote something quickly and quit the browser because the last thing I wanted to see was somebody liking it.

Walking by the canal in Hackney had become neither relaxing nor an opportunity to think things through, but I was determined not to be crowded off the tow path by the constant stream of bikes, runners and walkers two-abreast. There should still be room for the determined
flâneur
. Approaching Broadway Market I could see people crossing the bridge over the canal and among them I caught a glimpse of a man with a bit of a receding quiff and hair shaved up the side of his head. Then someone passed in front of him and when they had gone, he had gone also, or he had become invisible from my vantage point. To leave the canal at that point you had to double back up a ramp fifteen or twenty yards and then turn back through 180 degrees. I ran up the ramp, but by the time I got to street level, Joe – or the man who looked like Joe – was lost in the crowds of early-evening strollers and post-work drinkers gathering, in spite of the winter chill, outside the many pubs.

I poked my head around doorways and into the fringes of loitering groups – outside restaurants, spilling out of the off-licence, drawn to a roast chestnut seller. Just when I was about to give up I saw a familiar-shaped head moving away from me between a dog walker and a man pushing a bike down a side street towards the bus garage.

‘Ian,’ I shouted, but he didn’t turn round.

I ran a few steps and he started to turn at the sound of my pursuit. This man’s hair was short all over. Not even the suggestion of a quiff. He squared up to me.

I stopped short. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were my friend Joe.’

‘Make your fucking mind up,’ he said. ‘You said Ian.’

‘Did I?’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m sorry. I meant Joe. You’re not Joe. You look like my friend Joe. Or you do from the back. I’m sorry. Look, I made a mistake.’

The man curled his lip, baring tiny teeth, and shook his head, dismissing me.

I saw my hand reach out and touch his shoulder.

‘Fuck off, mate,’ he said, more casually now, yet I felt his shoulder tense under my touch and my arm fell to my side.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

His eyes flashed. ‘Look, mate,’ he said, leaning in close and lowering his voice in a way that made it more threatening. He smelled of smoke and something sweet. ‘You don’t exist and your boyfriend doesn’t exist.’ Then he placed both hands on my chest, pushed me backwards with surprising force and walked away.

I got to my feet and watched him go, shock and adrenaline making me unsteady.

Ian had finally replied to my email earlier that day, cryptically, his email containing no message but a link to an article about disagreements between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish. The lack of a message allowed me to make my own inference, which seemed pretty clear. Carver had thought Lish too interfering. Ian wanted me to lay off his prose, stop trying to tie up his loose ends.

* * *

They were all within a couple of minutes’ walk of each other, the four former Fleet Street addresses of Geographia Limited. First I found No.167, a large, anonymous-looking office block on the north side of the street, home to numerous businesses of various types. Addresses on Fleet Street are numbered sequentially, eschewing the convention of odds and evens occupying different sides of the street. Right across the street from No.167 were Nos.55 and 63, the former an upmarket pawnbroker with a downmarket email address printed on its fascia (when I checked this on the Internet it transferred to a somewhat smarter-looking jewellery business based in Colchester) and the latter an optician’s. Less than a minute’s walk east, and back on the north side, was No.111, or where No.111 should have been. A grand doorway topped with a frieze depicting a pair of cherubs either side of a garlanded globe and carved figures – 110/111 – was now filled with a picture window belonging to an espresso bar. To the right of this was a chain sandwich shop that the Internet told me occupied No.109, while on the left of 110/111 was a branch of a Japanese restaurant chain confusingly also resident at No.109, again according to my research. The espresso bar, meanwhile, located between the sandwich place and the Japanese chain, was, supposedly, No.110.

All of which, unsatisfactory and contradictory as it was, assuming either EAT had eaten Wagamama or vice versa, giving them the right to share an address, left No.111 still unaccounted for.

To the right of EAT, I’d already checked, was Vision Express at No.108. Clearly, on that side, then, the numbers were counting down in the right order.

I rested my back against a narrow section of wall between two mobile phone shops on the south side of the street and checked my email. Still nothing useful from Ian.

I tried a different approach and searched the Internet for 111 Fleet Street. The answer, when it came, was mundane: serviced offices. But the north side remained a puzzle. Between Wagamama and Boots, at No.120, there was an alleyway, Poppins Court, blocked off with three bollards. So where was No.111? Not to mention Nos.112 to 119.

My phone buzzed faintly in my pocket. A red blob had appeared on the Mail icon. I tapped the icon. An email from Ian. I felt a tightening of my scalp, tiny hairs rising on the back of my neck. I opened the inbox and tapped his incoming email, which said, simply but totally mystifyingly:

DL-CCC

I stared at my phone, trying to make sense of Ian’s message. In a daze I raised my head and looked straight in front of me. People streamed past in both directions, a blur of colour and a murmur of countless conversations leaking smells of burgers and sandwich fillings and astringent perfumes and cigarettes and Lynx and exhaust fumes and drifting from somewhere nearby the sweet aroma of roasting chestnuts. It seemed impossible to me that I should be able to see through all of this and all the red buses and black cabs and white vans and all the cycle couriers and motorbikes and the corresponding streams of people on the far side of the street to make out that distinctive shape of the back of the head ducking into Poppins Court and walking north away from me.

The human sea parted and I stepped into the road.

* * *

The medics told me I was lucky – no shit – and the police said that witnesses had reported hearing the cyclist blow a short blast on a whistle. Yes, my ears pricked up at that, too. Some cyclists use whistles, like a horn, but not that many. The cyclist hadn’t stopped. Well, he’d stopped – I’d stopped him – but he got back on again and rode off. The police said they hoped looking for a damaged bike would make it easier to catch him, but I decided they were either being kind or taking the piss.

Somehow I had managed not to break anything. Even my phone just had a little crack across the lens of the camera. But there were lacerations, a dislocated shoulder and the possibility of concussion. I was kept in for observation. A psych report was mentioned. I asked if that was because I’d insisted I’d seen angels, because all I’d meant was the cherubs, which were the last thing I remembered seeing, upside down, as I recall, before everything went dark. They said it was because I had walked straight out in front of a bus. The bus had been a couple of cars’ length away, but still.

I asked them to contact Jane, but they couldn’t get hold of her. They said the number was dead. I said I needed my work, and could someone go to my girlfriend’s place and pick up my laptop. They said they might be able to rustle up an iPhone charger.

I emailed Ian and suggested we meet. I told him where to find me. I didn’t expect a reply and I didn’t get one.

I used my newly charged phone to look into Geographia a bit more and came across a forum for collectors and map enthusiasts on which a user had posted a question about an undated map and one of the replies had explained that, if Geographia dated their maps at all, they did so in code. The code required you to number the letters in CUMBERLAND from one to ten. So, if you saw, for instance, M.RM in the bottom left corner it meant March 1963.

This got me thinking – I had a lot of time for thinking – and I looked again at the email from Ian that I’d been puzzling over just before I’d stepped into the road.

DL-CCC

I checked that out and decided Ian probably hadn’t been alerting me to the existence of the Detroit Lakes Community & Cultural Center.

Instead, applying the CUMBERLAND code in reverse produced 107–111 and when I looked up 107–111 Fleet Street, I discovered that the serviced offices at No.111 were actually serviced offices at Nos.107–111, and I knew without looking that there would be a perfectly ordinary-looking entrance to these at No.107.

The other thing I found out using my phone was that Joe had died from a subarachnoid haemorrhage. The kind of random event you can’t anticipate.

* * *

There was a lot of post in the hall at Jane’s. Some of it became squashed against the wall when I opened the front door. The flat was cold and the milk in the fridge had gone off. I whacked the boiler on and made some green tea.

I retrieved my laptop from the bedroom, pausing a moment to check Jane out. She was still wearing the grey dress from Phase Eight. The wig was slightly askew – again. I straightened it and smiled at her.

I opened Jane’s wardrobe. Everything looked normal. The upper drawers in the chest of drawers on the landing were still full of tops and tights and underwear.

I’d lost a lot of time. I worked on the edit. When I felt a headache coming on I took a handful of pills and kept going. I left all Ian’s mysteries unresolved and, in the spirit of cartographers who introduce deliberate errors into their maps to catch out plagiarists, I allowed three different spellings for one particular term – ghost writer, ghost-writer and, finally, the correct term, ghostwriter.

I emailed the edited manuscript to the publisher and they got back to me within five minutes, asking if I would be long with the cover copy. I sent them the blurb I’d written some weeks earlier and had been waiting for Ian to approve. Fuck him.

They got back to me again.
Just waiting for a cover quote now
, they said.

I sent them the following:
‘This ghostly tale of death, desire and delusion will keep you guessing right to the end – and beyond’ – Joe Cross
.

I closed the laptop and got up and stretched, which was a bad idea. My shoulder was still painful. The pipes and radiators were making encouraging noises, but the flat didn’t seem to be getting any warmer. I tried Jane’s number, but couldn’t even get it to ring. I went down to the hall and scooped up all the post and carried it back upstairs. I took it into Jane’s bedroom and dropped it on one side of the bed. I lay down on the other.

I turned on to my side and propped myself up on an elbow.

‘I think it’s just you and me now, Jane,’ I said.

Her glass eyes glinted in the light from the window.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

I shuffled through the post. Letters for dead men.

‘Maybe there’ll be something here for me,’ I said.

Nicholas Royle is the author of
First Novel
, as well as six earlier novels including
The Director’s Cut
and
Antwerp
, and a short story collection,
Mortality
. In addition he has published more than a hundred short stories. He has edited nineteen anthologies and is series editor of
Best British Short Stories
(Salt). A senior lecturer in creative writing at MMU, he also runs Nightjar Press, which publishes new short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks, and is an editor at Salt Publishing.

‘Like most of my stories, it’s eighty percent true, and the difficulty for me – hopefully the fun for the reader – is working out which is the twenty percent that’s made up. It’s not always, or even often, the strangest part.’

‘Mail Redistribution Centre’ was what Eva was supposed to call it now. She hated the way it looked on the labels she printed out in the back office. ‘Change is the only constant,’ her father liked to intone on those rare occasions when he decided wisdom was necessary. On those rare occasions when he was home.

Eva preferred the old name.

‘Dead Letter Office’ seemed more exciting, poetic, essential. As if she was dealing with artefacts, fossils, things that had once pulsed with the energy of their allotted task: to carry messages from one person to another. And she was a link in the chain that took care of them, even if only a little link. A caretaker, a pathologist, trying to work out why they’d failed to do their job, if any got a second chance (perhaps a number transposed, a missed connection with an address redirection, unpaid postage), silly little things that might be easily remedied if she did a little investigation. Mr Burstock kept pointing out it wasn’t her job: ‘Just send ’em to the specialists.’