Nicholas Royle - First Novel

Lewis is a little way ahead of me. I catch up with him.

‘His plane was just over there,’ he says, pointing to the right. ‘She will have parked where we parked and walked in here through the gate we came through. She probably looked around, wondering where to find him. Although, knowing him, he’d have given her very precise directions.’

He stands upright, his head thrust slightly forward. There’s a breeze, sufficient to fill the orange windsock. Then he turns to look at me. I almost look away, but I know this is a challenge, so I hold his stare. His eyes are cold, red-rimmed. It could be the wind, but it might not be. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. There are lines around his mouth I’ve not noticed before.

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’

‘Then what happened?’ I ask him.

‘You’ve seen the DVD.’

‘It’s not conclusive.’

‘She walked towards the plane with the girls,’ he says, as he takes a step in that direction himself. ‘He was standing by the plane, as you know.’ He looks at me at this point, a slight curl to his lip.

‘And the next shot,’ I say, taking up the narrative, ‘is of him standing by the plane looking beseechingly, imploringly back at the woman and the two girls, although mainly at the girl in the little yellow hat, because the woman and the girl in the red dress are walking away. They have their backs to him.’

‘They’re walking away,’ he agrees. ‘And they should have carried on walking away.’

‘But the girl in the little yellow hat stops and looks back,’ I say.

‘Anna,’ he says with a hairline crack in his voice.

‘And because he looks so pathetic, because he looks like a broken man, she takes a step back in his direction.’

‘She used to cry over dead birds,’ Lewis says. ‘In the spring, when you’d occasionally find fledglings in the garden fallen out of their nests, she’d be in floods of tears. She couldn’t bear anything dead or broken. She felt exactly the same when she looked back and saw that cunt extending his fucking hand to her. She couldn’t walk away like Mel and Emily. She had to go to him.’

‘Mel was your wife.’

‘And Emily was my other daughter. She was a bit harder. Not hard. She was just, you know…’

‘Older?’ I guess.

He shakes his head as he watches a small plane flying overhead, presumably taking a pass over the airfield before coming in to land.

‘They were the same age,’ he says.

‘Twins?’

‘Not identical.’

The plane turns in the distance and describes a wide semicircle with the airfield at the centre of the diameter. Having reached a certain point, in the west, it turns again and comes in on a straight line towards the airfield. I remember Lewis using the phrase ‘extended runway centre line’ at Carol and AJ’s barbecue.

Lewis has walked away from me. He stops by a plane thirty yards away. I see him touching the fuselage with his hand. I walk over to him.

‘This is not…?’

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’ He looks at me. ‘You’ve not been paying attention,’ he says.

He’s wearing a linen shirt, similar to the one he wore at the barbecue, but without a pattern. A simple white linen shirt with an open neck. Grey hair emerges in little tufted spirals at the throat. I can see his chest rising and falling beneath the material.

‘They went up in the plane,’ I say.

He doesn’t reply. I don’t know whether to push it. Either I push it or I leave it. Let it drop.

‘These small planes,’ he says after a while, ‘there are two main types. Cessnas and Pipers. This is a Cessna. Cessna 172. It has a high wing. See, the wing joins the fuselage at the top so that you can see the ground when you look down from the cockpit, when you’re doing navs , as they call them. Navs .’

He looks at me and I raise my eyebrows.

‘Navigation flights,’ he says. ‘It would seem to make sense, wouldn’t it, sticking the wing up there so that you can see down, see what’s beneath you?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Piper owners disagree, of course.’

‘What did he fly?’

‘What do you think? A fucking Piper Cherokee. Piper owners are like Mac users. Absolutely fucking convinced their more expensive, cooler machine is somehow better than the more commonly used alternative. Cessnas are like PCs. Reliable, safer — given the position of the wing — the obvious choice. They’re the standard. Maybe if he’d been flying a Cessna 172 like this…’

This is all new to me and sounds suspiciously like bullshit. ‘How is the Piper different?’ I ask him.

‘The wing is lower, so it’s harder to see the ground. The wing comes in below where you’re sitting. It’s so fucking obviously fucked up.’ A tiny bubble of spittle flies from his lips on the final plosive. ‘When did you ever see a low wing on a bird?’ His hand forms a fist and I wonder if he’s going to take out his bitterness on whatever’s to hand. Me, for example. Or this Cessna 172. More quietly, he repeats the line: ‘When did you ever see a low wing on a bird?’

His fist opens like a flower on a passage of speeded-up film and he turns away from the plane.

‘Take me back,’ he says and walks past me, close enough that I smell his sweat.

I watch him walk back towards the control tower. Beyond him, the plane that had taken a pass over the airfield is now coming in to land. I watch its wings dip one way and then the other as it approaches the runway. Finally the pilot levels the wings as his undercarriage touches down and twenty yards later he drops the nose and the front wheel also meets the grass. The plane is travelling very slowly now. There is not that sense of something travelling far too fast that you get as a passenger on a jet touching down. The plane is always too fast, too heavy, the runway too short.

This looks much easier, much safer. The plane weighs nothing, is barely moving. It’s hard to imagine how it could go wrong.

I catch up with Lewis in the car park. He’s sitting in the car waiting for me, staring out of the window. I wonder how he got in. Surely I locked the car. I always lock the car. It’s a reflex.

I get in and stick the key in the ignition, but don’t turn it for a moment. I swivel in my seat and look at him, but his whole upper body is angled in the other direction. I start the engine and as I engage first gear I give his knee a good hard knock with the gear stick.

He fails to react.

We drive back to the M60 in silence. Even when we both look up at the sound of a small plane passing over the car, even then nothing is said. It does occur to me to ask him if it’s a Piper or a Cessna, but I keep schtum.

It’s not far from junction 11 back round to south Manchester, but when no one is speaking, motorway time gets stretched. We travel in the inside lane, doing a steady sixty-five. There’s a regular vroom as cars overtake us in the middle lane. The exit signs become generic designs, blue boards covered in meaningless white symbols. The colours of the other cars correspond to a randomly generated pattern dominated by silver, red and white. Every other vehicle is a van or a truck. I switch off and enter a kind of semi-trance. The car drives itself.

After we had sex in her Golf GTI at Hatton Cross Underground station car park, Susan Ashton and I agreed that while it was fun, it was a one-off. Indeed, we said, that was why it was fun. We exchanged remarks along these lines in comically breathless voices as we panted to get our breath back and huge planes continued to thunder over our heads as they came in to land just a few hundred yards to the west.

After disengaging, I had moved back to the passenger side and allowed myself to sink back into the expensive leather seat. Susan Ashton had reached a hand under her own seat and passed me a box of tissues.