Nicholas Royle - First Novel

I asked her what were her intentions regarding the children and she told me that she was virtually guaranteed to win sole care of the twins. The most I could legally expect would be visitation rights, but that, just between her and me, she would do all she possibly could to make sure those children never had to see their father again.

I signal to leave the motorway, but Lewis, whom I had assumed to be asleep, suddenly speaks.

‘Keep going,’ he says.

‘I tend to come off here,’ I say. ‘Otherwise I always seem to end up going the wrong way on the A5145. Before you know it you’re halfway to the airport.’

‘I meant keep going past the next junction as well,’ he says. ‘ If you don’t mind. We’ve not been for our walk yet.’

I cancel the indicator and keep going.

‘You’ve got a really funny way of getting people to do what you want them to do,’ I say finally.

Lewis just grunts. I think I prefer him being annoyingly chipper.

When we reach junction 24 he tells me to get off on to the M67.

‘We’re going to the Peaks,’ I say. ‘How lovely!’

Half an hour later, somewhere on the A57 between Glossop and Sheffield, he advises me to pull over. I see a layby a little way ahead, so I coast down to that and turn in. The tyres scrunch on the gravel and Lewis opens his door and slams it shut. I can see something white sticking out of the door pocket on his side. I lean over for a closer look. It’s my white cotton hat. I remove it and stow it in the glove locker.

‘How far are we going?’ I ask him once I’ve got out of the car.

He ignores my question and just says, ‘This way,’ leading me over a stile and on to a rough path.

We walk down towards a stream first of all, through a glade of deciduous woodland, and then alongside the stream until we come to another stile and a wooden bridge, which we cross. On the other side we start to climb. On our right is a pine wood; to our left, some way below us, is the river the stream was feeding into. The path diverts this way and that around boulders and rocky outcrops and becomes quite steep for a short distance and then levels off as the pine wood on our right falls away.

Lewis walks in front, not looking back. Presumably he can hear that I’m just a little way behind and keeping up with the pace. The ground vegetation begins to change, dominated now by bilberry and heather, signalling that we are getting on to the moor. The incline flattens out altogether and the path widens. Lewis stops and looks back. I draw alongside, breathing hard, and return his gaze.

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’

‘What?’ I ask.

He doesn’t reply.

‘Back at the airfield,’ I say to him, ‘how did you get into the car?’

‘It wasn’t locked,’ he says.

‘I always lock the car whenever I leave it for any length of time.’

‘It wasn’t locked,’ he insists, his cold eyes staring into mine.

In the distance the drone of an aircraft can be heard, a jet executing a final turn to join the extended runway centre line.

‘It’s not much further,’ Lewis says and starts walking again.

I sigh with theatrical exasperation and come alongside him. We walk in silence for two or three minutes before he starts speaking again.

‘He was someone I knew,’ he says, ‘someone I trusted. He was older than me, almost a father figure. A pilot. Safe, reliable. So you’d have thought. So I thought. He said he’d look after Mel and the girls while I was away. I didn’t think he meant look after in that way. It would never even have occurred to me to warn her. He didn’t seem predatory. Mind you, I didn’t know about his drinking.’

‘He was a drinker?’ I ask.

‘A bit. Apparently. Not good news in a pilot. Anyway,’ he continues, ‘he must have exuded some fatherly protectiveness or summat, because it wasn’t like he was a great catch. Whatever it was, Mel fell for it. They spent time together. The girls trusted him. Mel trusted him. Ksssh-huh-huh. I trusted him. Big mistake that was.’

Lewis’ trousers make a swishing sound as he walks. Our boots push through the heather that encroaches at the sides of the path.

‘She only slept with him a few times, he told me later. It annoyed me he couldn’t be more precise. I wanted to know. Wasn’t like it made any difference, obviously, but I wanted to know. I think it was that I hit him for, the imprecision, the not knowing, not caring presumably, rather than for the actual act of sleeping with her.’

Lewis looks across at me from time to time as he tells me all this, as if checking I’m listening and taking it all in. I’m listening, all right.

‘How badly did you hit him?’ I ask.

‘Depends how you mean. I tried to give him a right good smack, but it was soft as shit. He went down, because there was nothing to him, streak of piss; most men would have stayed on their feet.’

‘Did you hit him again while he was down?’

‘What is this? Am I on trial?’

‘Thought you’d be grateful if I showed an interest. You seem so keen for me to hear all this.’

This shuts him up for a while and we walk in silence. At one point the path narrows and he goes in front again. I look at the back of his head. His hair needs cutting. It’s only half a centimetre long, but if you’re going to keep it short you might as well keep it short, especially with male-pattern baldness. The regrowth emphasises the baldness, and straggles of curly grey hair run down his neck at the back in two lines towards his shoulders. Men who cut their own hair with electric clippers, as I assume he does, always seem to forget you need to take a wet razor to those lines. They grow quickly and become unruly and unsightly like epicormic growth on the trunks of lime trees.

‘You said you were away,’ I say in an attempt to restart the conversation. ‘Where were you?’

‘Just away.’

I remember him at AJ and Carol’s talking about having been in the Far East. Did he go to the Far East and leave his wife and girls in Manchester? Or had he come back from the Far East and gone away somewhere else, somewhere closer to home? Was he away a long time or only a few days? The thing was, even if he told me, I wouldn’t necessarily believe him. But his story lacked detail. It was imprecise, like the pilot’s confession. What was his name, the pilot?

‘What was his name?’

‘Trevor something.’

‘Trevor?’

‘Yeah.’

Now I remain silent.

Trevor .

‘Fancy losing your wife to a guy named Trevor, right? Just makes it worse, doesn’t it? Fucking Trevor .’

I look at the ground as I walk, the name Trevor going around in my head.

‘Look!’ Lewis says, pointing towards a change in the landscape in the distance. The moor starts to climb again and falls away on the left-hand side. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

He starts walking again.

‘She wasn’t that into him,’ he says, picking up his thread. ‘She went to the aerodrome to finish it.’

As we continue walking, the topographical feature up ahead acquires more definition. A small hill rises from the plateau, which itself falls away, surprisingly, on one side.

‘He told me he’d sensed she was losing heart and so he invited her to bring the girls to the aerodrome and promised he’d take them all up in his four-seater. As soon as she arrived, he said, she told him it was over. So he challenged her, asked her why she’d brought the girls if that was the case? Did she really think he would take them up if she’d just dumped him? She said none of them had any desire to go in his plane and that it had been over in her mind on the way out to the aerodrome and it was twice as over now.