Nicholas Royle - First Novel

My eyes flick from one case to the next, reading the titles. It is the collection of a man who appears to wish to be perceived as somewhat adventurous in his taste, the titles of films by Almodovar and Wim Wenders (later years). Quirky Euro fare — Amélie, Delicatessen, Run Lola Run . A copy of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy , still shrinkwrapped, because I would put money on Lewis having bought it only after it was linked to the massacre at Virginia Tech perpetrated by creative-writing student Cho Seung-hui. As my gaze drifts over the spines, it’s not images from these films that flash across my mind, but imagined frame-grabs from the home movie I think I’m going to find here. Our mutual acquaintance, Carol, on the back seat of a luxury car in Wythenshawe Park, her face grainy in the near-darkness of the car park. If I do find it, who will she be with? AJ or some unknown dogger? Lewis, even? (In my nightmares.) I picture her with her hair down, as she was at the barbecue. I picture her with her top down. This is what I’m looking for, what Lewis — deliberately or otherwise — has allowed me to believe not only exists, but might be found here, in his house, among his collection of digitised images.

He’ll have a computer somewhere, of course, a PC rather than a Mac, a laptop probably, but my guess is he’ll have burned the footage on to a DVD so he can watch it on the plasma screen with the lights out and the curtains pulled to.

Prompted by this thought, I go over to the DVD player and press eject. The tray slides out. The Motorcycle Diaries . I check the shelves of the unit that houses the various machines and there, finally, I find what I’m looking for: a blank case containing an unmarked DVD-R. I am certain he would not identify the contents.

I think about slipping it into the machine to check, but I’m acutely aware of how long I’ve already been inside the house. Lewis could come back at any time. It’s one thing responding to a perceived invitation to sneak in and help myself, but quite another to be so gauche as to hang around until the householder returns. Assuming I’ve interpreted Lewis’ devious signals correctly, that is, and I’d only give myself fifty-fifty on that.

I stuff the DVD case into my jacket pocket and as I’m about to leave the room I notice a small bookcase against the wall near where I came in. I bend down for a brief inspection: his collection seems to be comprised exclusively of British crime writers. John Harvey, Steve Mosby, Michael Marshall, Mick Scully, Robert Edric. No women. Together on an otherwise empty shelf are seven copies of a book called Straight to Video by Lewis Harris. I take one off the shelf. The design is slightly off, with ugly typography and poorly used images. The publisher, Strangeways Books, is one I’ve never heard of. I turn to the author biography: ‘Lewis Harris lives in Manchester. He has worked as a shelf-stacker, bingo caller, gravedigger and security guard. This is his first novel in a projected series.’ One of those author biographies. I flick through the book, holding it up to my nose. It has no smell. I put it back on the shelf and leave the house the same way I entered it.

Five minutes later I’m inside my own house, kneeling down in front of the DVD player, when I change my mind and eject the disc. I take it upstairs and open the MacBook, sliding the DVD-R into the slot on the side of the machine that gives it a gentle tug as I let go.

I’ll admit that I was in a state of heightened erotic tension as I sat crouched over my laptop in my study at the top of the house. And that when the images appeared, it took a few seconds for that tension to dissipate. The first shot, unmistakably the product of CCTV, as banal as it is ubiquitous, showed a woman walking away from the camera holding the hands of two little children, one in a red dress, the other wearing shorts and a little yellow hat. The woman was slim, mid-thirties, otherwise nondescript only because of the quality of the picture. In the next shot, you saw them walking past a horizontal windsock towards a man — balding, slight paunch, weak in the shoulder — standing by a plane. It was a small plane in a field with several other similar craft. In the background as they walked towards the man, another plane, a two-seater, could be seen taking off from a grass-covered runway.

Shot three was intermittently affected by some form of interference, but it was possible to see the woman walking purposefully away from the plane, still holding the hand of one of the children, while the other had turned back to the man and appeared to be listening to something he was saying. He had his hand outstretched towards the departing group. There was a break. The screen was dark for a few seconds before the final shot appeared, apparently from a different camera. It showed a plane — a four-seater, clearly the same one the man had been preparing for flight — moving down the runway. Initially it wasn’t clear to me whether it was taking off or landing, but then, as if a magic trick were being performed, it suddenly lifted from the runway and climbed into the air. In two seconds it was level with the camera, which swivelled a couple of degrees as if to follow it, but then the plane slid out of frame to the right. It had not been a great shot, the runway being distant from the camera, but it had been clear that there were four people on board, the pilot and three passengers.

I think I knew as soon as I started watching what it was I was seeing. Once I was certain I had seen all there was to see, I closed the machine and now I’m sitting here staring out of the window, watching the sky slowly darken. Did I pick up the wrong DVD? Is there another disc somewhere in Lewis’ house showing Carol having sex in a car at Wythenshawe Park? Or somewhere on the Ringway Trading Estate or around the back of Somerfield? Or is Lewis shrewder than I gave him credit for? Is this what he wanted me to find, this glimpse into the past, and if so, why?

I stand in the back garden looking at what’s left of the ivy and the fence it has partially destroyed. I poke around in the soil to see if I can uncover any more bits of red plastic. Most of the rockery has gone now, carted off in the skip, and the garden looks bare, desolate. At least the rockery gave it some definition. A bit of shape.

The garden on the other side of the fence is completely out of control. I wonder if the current residents have any knowledge of the history of the house before it was converted into flats. I wonder if they know in which room the former owner committed suicide. If his action has left some kind of trace — a disturbance in the air, a shadow on the wall. I think of Pompeii. Hiroshima.

I approach the fence. It’s clear that the residents don’t use the garden at all; nor does it receive any attention. It seems unlikely that anyone has penetrated the thick growth on their side of the fence in years. I stick my head through one of the large holes created by the removal of the ivy. Brambles, nettles, privet; the remains of the ivy, now dying, cut off from its roots. I notice a splash of colour deep in the undergrowth off to the left. Further along I get a slightly better view, but can’t tell what I’m looking at, only that it’s red in colour.

I get the shears and secateurs from the cellar and return to the fence. I break off half a panel and climb over. Even with the tools and a thick pair of gardening gloves, it takes me twenty minutes to work my way to the heart of the thicket. Inching closer to the object of my labours I realise that it is a model aeroplane, badly damaged, that must have been abandoned here a considerable amount of time ago. It takes me a lot longer than twenty minutes to extricate it and get the plane back into my own garden without causing it too much further damage.