Nicholas Royle: First Novel

It sounded rehearsed, as if it was a speech he had given before. While he was giving it, in the gaps between the words, I was able to pick up bits of Kelvin’s explanation, enough to understand that all that was happening was that while planes normally landed and took off at Manchester towards the west, today, due to the wind having changed overnight, they were taking off (and landing) towards the east. These planes, which Lewis thought were coming in to land, had in fact just taken off and were turning left to head for destinations in the north and west.

‘I’m going to stretch me legs,’ Lewis said, getting to his feet and wandering off to the end of the garden where the children had established their own territory under the leadership of a nurturing eighteen-year-old, Samantha, and her excitable thirteen-year-old brother, Thomas — Carol’s children from an earlier marriage.

Kelvin, meanwhile, was talking to Elizabeth Baines, asking her if she lived locally and she said she lived a couple of minutes’ walk away on Victoria Avenue.

‘Where they filmed Cold Feet ,’ AJ said.

‘Just a few doors down from there,’ she added.

From time to time, I could hear Lewis’ laugh over the cries and shrieks of the children.

When the doorbell intrudes on my thoughts, I decide not to answer it. I need to continue working on the ivy.

It goes again. And then a third time.

I leave my muddy boots at the back door and walk through the kitchen in my socks. I see the figure of a man through the stained glass. I open the front door. Cleo chooses that moment to run in from the front garden, flowing around our legs like a river of molten tar.

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’

I don’t say anything for a moment. I don’t know what to say.

‘Lewis,’ I manage finally.

‘That gave me a fright,’ he says, pointing up at the mannequin positioned in the bedroom window. ‘ Ksssh-huh-huh .’

When I don’t say anything, he digs his hands into his jeans pockets and looks at my front garden. I don’t intend to help him out. Instead I just wait.

‘Looks like you’re pretty busy,’ he says eventually, eyeing my gardening clothes.

‘Yes. I’m trying to get rid of some ivy.’

‘As long as it’s not Himalayan balsam,’ he says. ‘Still, it can be very persistent, ivy. Ksssh-huh-huh .’ He shakes his head. ‘Do you want an ’and?’

‘I’ve got it, thanks. I’m OK.’

He nods, pushes his hands deeper in his pockets.

I have no intention of giving in.

‘I could murder a brew,’ he says, plaintively.

I breathe in — and out.

‘Of course,’ I say.

I step back into the hallway and he clumps on to my carpet in dirty shoes.

‘You’ve also been gardening?’ I say, looking deliberately at his shoes.

‘Just tidying,’ he says, failing to pick up the hint.

I lead Lewis through the house into the back garden, because the prospect of standing with him in the kitchen for the length of time it will take the kettle to boil is not a good one.

He looks at the ivy and the fence and the rockery in turn.

‘Are you going to cut it off at ground level?’

‘Either that or try and get the roots out.’

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh . That’s a big job. You’d be looking at taking the rockery out and you’ve got a skip’s worth of rockery there.’

‘Yes,’ I say, unconcerned whether my tone conveys irritation.

‘You’d need a wheelbarrow and everything.’

‘Mmm.’

‘You’re welcome to borrow me wheelbarrow.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Just let me know.’

He steps closer to the fence.

‘It’s made a right mess of your fence,’ he observes.

‘Yes, I’m going to have to replace it.’

He takes hold of a weak section and pulls at it. With a creak it bends and snaps off in his hand.

‘ Ksssh-huh-huh . Yeah, you are.’ He peers through the jagged hole into the garden of the house beyond. ‘There’s your problem. They’ve let it go. Completely overgrown.’

‘The ivy’s mine, though. The roots are on this side of the fence.’

‘Yeah, but it’s grown up into their tree and all over the fence from their side.’

‘It’s a rented house. Flats,’ I say. ‘Apparently, the guy who used to own the house committed suicide. In one of the back bedrooms.’

I thought Lewis would relish the detail, but he doesn’t react, just places his eye closer to the large hole he’s torn in my fence.

‘Who told you that?’ he says finally, with, it seems, a trace of scorn.

‘My neighbour,’ I say.

Lewis stares through the hole in the fence again and remains silent for a while.

‘So,’ he says, stepping back from the fence, ‘you’re a writer?’

‘Yes.’ I feel my head beginning to hurt.

‘What name do you write under?’

‘My own.’

He nods.

‘It must pay well,’ he says, taking in the garden and the house with a sweep of his hand.

‘No,’ I say, ‘it doesn’t pay well. I wouldn’t recommend it as a career.’

‘Have you written anything I might have heard of?’

My head throbs.

‘I doubt it. I wrote one novel several years ago. No one’s heard of it. I’ll just go and see to that brew.’

I leave the garden and while I’m in the kitchen, watching through the window as Lewis conducts a further examination of the ruined fence, I swallow 400 mg of ibuprofen and two co-codamol. Behind me on the table is a cutting from the weekend’s paper featuring another one in the series of writers’ rooms. This one is Adam Thirlwell’s. Thirlwell got on to the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list on the strength of his first novel, Politics . Although there’s an open laptop just off-centre, Thirlwell’s desk is dominated by a red Olivetti typewriter (he’s learning to touch-type); there’s also a pewter hip flask standing on a floral mouse mat. The hip flask is empty, according to Thirlwell. Under the desk, which looks like the kind of ash-and-chrome affair you might pick up for a few hundred pounds from one of the smarter furniture shops on Deansgate, but could just as easily be a self-assembly job from Ikea, is a line of books standing snug up against the skirting board. None of the titles or authors’ names can be clearly read, but one at least is the right colour and approximate thickness. It’s impossible to be certain either way, but on balance I’d have to say it’s unlikely.

When I go back outside with two mugs of tea, Lewis seems to have got the message: he asks no more questions about my writing. The conversation, such as it is, flags until Lewis ends up raising the subject of football, about which I have nothing to say, and as soon as he’s drained his mug, Lewis leaves.

I carry on with the ivy removal, but the further I get, the clearer it becomes that I am going to have to attack the root cause. Lewis would laugh his strange little laugh at that, perhaps. I am going to have to hire a skip and borrow the man’s wheelbarrow. He had written his address and phone number down on my kitchen calendar before leaving. That in itself seemed to me like a further trespass on my property, but what’s the point of keeping a blank calendar?

Insulated from the pain that had cut him off from England for ever, Raymond Cross prospered in the Royal Air Force, which had a small presence on Zanzibar. Prospered insofar as he seemed to find satisfying the narrow range of tasks assigned to him. He ticked boxes on checklists, got his hands dirty in the engines of the few planes that were maintained daily. They were taken up only once or twice a week, to overfly the island and to hop across to Mombasa to pick up supplies. Ray was allowed to accompany the tiny flight crew if he wasn’t busy: he could be made useful loading and unloading.