Royston Cole sits back and enjoys the feel of the afternoon sun outside of The Cambridge Pub, neatly tucked away on the University of Liverpool campus, a haven for students of all subjects, especially for some reason those whose degree involves the study of English.  The writer tells great stories, some of which only the very brave would print as they are wonderfully full of colour and reveals the extent of this man’s fascinating humour and back story.

By day Royston is Pete, a man whose work leads him to deal with some of the most destructive elements known to man and who is a Radiation Protection Adviser, but after the day job is left behind the writer emerges. His new novella, The Spider, is an intelligently written and curious look at the life of Clifford Williams, the master of the Stratocaster, in one day and how the lives of three people bought together can be as destructive and dangerous as anything else known.

Bought up on the Isle of Man, Royston has spent the last 20 years in Liverpool and the stories he tells are just as thrilling as the stories he writes. With a novel titled Flukey Duke completed, surely it is only time that stands in the way of this man’s climb up the literature ladder.

Congratulations on the book, it’s a stirring read and it’s very cool. Where did the idea come from?

“I’m an observer of people and I guess I’ve just been collecting ideas over the years. I feel that I’m like a sponge – I observe their mannerisms, their conversations, sometimes I’m listening in secretly.  The idea really came from them and various other people.  When you consider the content of it, people always say is that you? Well, not really, it’s a sort of conglomerate of people. I suppose it’s a  bit like me in the beginning with the cigarette outside – that’s me but the rest of it is a combination of many people I’ve met – uncles, friends, enemies, barmen and total randomers that I’ve known and observed over the years. It’s just a mixture of people really and I’ve just combined it all together. I sort of collect people’s idiosyncrasies if you like but then I take them and enhance them and embroil them.”

There are two provocative images for me; one is the mental degradation of the wife – that must have been very hard to write about and secondly, the confrontation between the wife and Bev, the Newsagent’s daughter.  Those two moments seem very pivotal to the book, was that hard to write about, the slow deterioration of a person’s reasoning?

“I have had some personal experience with mental illness largely because for a long time I was depressed and the doctors put me on anti-depressants, which just made things even worse. Hey I’m not saying that I’m sectionable, in fact I think most people have experienced some sort of mental illness if they’re honest with themselves. I know lots of people who have had that sort of problem. The new novella that I’m writing at the moment, The Trinity, is going to be more like this and it will deal with alcoholism and the recovery from it and destructive homophobia. Again I’ve drawn on conversations with, and observations of, friends who’ve been through all that. I’ll try and answer your question now! I always try and make the dialogue and characters as real as I can. Sometimes I found that when I was writing the Suzie character that I thought she might be becoming a bit pantomime but I have known people who have been like her who can turn literally on a sixpence – I’m showing my age now! They can turn from being what appears to be completely normal to being the opposite in the space of a few seconds.

 If you are asking was it difficult to write those scenes, not really, it just poured out, everything just came out and I enjoyed writing it. It wasn’t difficult; there were some bits in it, which, even when I was writing it made me feel a little bit sad.  None of this from my own personal experience, it’s just me embroiling things, things about how she likes being on the bus and one of the big things in the middle of the book is that she’s upset he’s gone on the bus without her.”

That seems like a huge tipping point in her day, this moment when she finds out that he’s gone off without her. The whole calamity stems from this one point.

“It’s more than that. She doesn’t even know about Clifford’s other, and perhaps more serious, transgressions, but this bus trip is just a simple, little thing, that causes so much pain. It’s the irony fascinates me about writing story lines and characters.  Just some simple, tiny, little things are so emotional. He went on a bus without her and in the greater scheme of things this doesn’t seem so bad but for Suzie it’s monumental, it’s heart-wrenching. When I showed The Spider to some of my friends, and my wife in particular, that was the bit where they cried.”

I liked that part, this whole framing, the way the story comes about is wonderful, it does hang very well on the page.  The book itself is of time, a moment of time. It’s interesting to think – why Freddie Mercury, he’s such a powerful icon and a great musician? Was it to show the antithesis of what he could have been?

“Well yes – life is a lottery. But I wanted to have some iconic figure in there who was dead and as such unobtainable.  But also an iconic figure who was quite erotic and the irony being that Suzie lusts after Freddie Mercury, this unobtainable icon, in a way she doesn’t for anyone else – even her husband.  It’s the conflict between her love for an icon that she never knew personally, never came anywhere near, and her love for her husband who is real but flawed.  Someone once said to me that you can always love something that you can’t have but as soon as it’s put it on a plate for you, you don’t want it anymore. The irony is that she is not sexual at all in her domestic life and yet she’s happy to think of this icon Freddie Mercury as an erotic beast, that she would potentially love to get her hands on but it was all in the mind! Most of our lust quests are purely mental and if you actually got to realise the
subject of your lust quest, you’ll find out that it’s not really as good as you thought it was going to be.”

I like that; I wished I’d thought of that whilst reading it, I think that’s cool. Especially with the juxtaposition of the musician himself having to use erotic pictures for his substitution.  It’s a strange title, I understand where it comes from – the spider hiding away in the bathroom, was it actually ever there? That was a nice little piece that was brought in, he’s told her this spider lives behind the cistern but he’s not sure it’s even true.

“It’s a symbol of deception but what I was really getting at with the spider was Suzie herself. She is the spider in it all – she’s a big lady, dressed in black, and very hairy – compare the spider that might live behind the boiler – and she invites Bev to come into her house – come into my parlour said the spider to the fly, and we all know what happens after that! She doesn’t damage Clifford in any way but what I was trying to get at in all of this was love.  People always say to me that love conquers all but in this case it was their love for each other that was their undoing.”

Where you a big fan of short stories when you were growing up?

“Yes, short stories and novellas, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, that was probably the first one I read as a kid. Then there’s The Alchemist by Coelho, but Steinbeck is my favourite, especially The Pearl and Tortilla Flat, and Of Mice and Men, all those beautifully written short pieces. Many of the great works of English literature have been novellas, look at The Time Machine. Maybe it’s my short attention span but I like short works that have a big impact. In The Spider I wanted short chapters as well as I think it keeps the whole thing moving along at a pace.”

Ian D. Hall