First Novel

Campus

I AM INTERESTED in straight lines.

I was born in Manchester, but left at the age of seventeen to go to London. London doesn’t really do straight lines. There are straight roads, of course; they stand out. The A5. The A1, for a bit. The A30 as it approaches Hatton Cross Tube station and the perimeter of Heathrow Airport. No one can miss those. On the ground, on the map.

When I moved back to Manchester I became aware of a number of less obvious straight lines. If I stand in the bay window of my bedroom and look into the bay window of my neighbour’s bedroom, I can actually see through that bay into the bay of the next house and so on down the street.

If, on a dark night, you come off the M60 at junction 25 and head north up Ashton Road towards Denton, you see the road surface shining ahead of you in a straight line. Only at the last minute do you see that your road — Ashton Road — bends sharply to the right. The road that appears to continue in a straight line, Castle Hill, is actually a left turn off the main carriageway. To take it at speed would lead you quickly into difficulties.

Drive south down Holme Road in Didsbury, alongside Marie Louise Gardens, and turn right at the bottom into Dene Road West. Ahead of you the road is invitingly straight. Certain features conspire to conceal the much bigger and busier cross street, Palatine Road: an overgrown bush hides the stop sign, a speed bump obscures the white markings of the junction itself. I always want to drive straight across Palatine Road and into Mersey Road without stopping. It looks as if you should be able to. There’s a risk involved, perhaps, but a risk worth taking. A risk you should take, even.

The Modern Jazz Quartet’s ‘Pyramid’ is playing on the car stereo as I turn left into Longley Lane. ‘Pyramid’ was written in 1957 by Ray Brown after hearing the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson in concert in Lenox, Massachusetts. The title came from the group’s attempt to impose a ‘tempo pyramid’ on the song’s arrangement. Very little remains of that experimental version of the song, but John Lewis’ quick little runs up and down the keyboard have the power to suggest the ascent and descent of a pyramid.

Pyramids are another thing.

Pyramids and straight lines.

Longley Lane takes us over the M56 and eventually into Styal Road, which heads away from Sharston and Gatley. Styal Road is not straight, but it is my preferred route to Moss Nook and the airport because as you meander south down Styal Road, sooner or later you will hear a plane passing directly overhead. If it is big enough you will become aware of the vibrations too, in your chest cavity, in your breastbone. You may even become aroused.

Erica, my passenger, lives in Kenworthy Lane, Northenden. I hadn’t known that when I had entered the Cooperative Bank two days earlier. I hadn’t known her — Erica — at all. The Corporation Street branch in town is large enough that you can hang around without attracting suspicion. I watched the various tellers at their windows and eventually settled on the third from the end. Then all I needed to do was wait until the queue had gone down so that I could go straight to her window.

She looked up and smiled at me. Pleased that she didn’t ask ‘Are you all right there?’ as everyone behind a counter seems to do these days, I did my best to smile back. I could see from the tiny lines around her almond-shaped eyes that she was a little older than I had thought. But that could work in my favour. The absence of a wedding ring — indeed, any rings at all — was promising. There was a good chance that a bank teller in her late twenties, if not married, was not seeing anyone either, or not with any degree of seriousness. She was wearing a pale-blue wrap top, without any necklace or pendant. She would have known that with the wrap top none was necessary.

I told her I was considering opening an account and wanted to know what the bank had to offer to prospective customers. She started telling me and I pretended to listen while I watched her lips move and I pictured her dressing for work. I saw her kneeling on the floor in front of a full-length mirror, inspecting the tired skin under her eyes while waiting for her hair-straighteners to warm up. I imagined her getting out the wrap top and a plain blue round-neck T-shirt and putting them side by side on the bed as she tried to decide between them.

I waited for a gap and when it came I asked her if she would like to go out for dinner. She recoiled slightly and a little colour appeared in her cheeks. I apologised and explained that I was a writer and I had just been asked to review a restaurant at short notice and I had no one particular in mind to go with. I had acted on impulse, I said, with a little smile, and hoped she would forgive me.

‘Are you actually interested in opening an account?’ she asked.

‘Absolutely,’ I said and let her go on outlining the benefits I would enjoy as a customer of the bank. When there was another pause, I said, ‘It is meant to be a very good restaurant.’

If a half-smile hadn’t appeared on her lips at that point I would have walked away.

‘There is a dress code, by the way,’ I added. ‘You have to wear that top.’ I smiled again so that she would think I was making a joke.

As I jump a red light at the junction of Styal Road with Simonsway and Finney Lane, I hear the deep bass rumble of a large aircraft. It flies over the roof of the car no more than 250 feet above us. I imagine pulling over and having sex with Erica right there in the car at the side of the road. Instead I watch the plane as it follows a straight line — no evident sideslip this close to landing — on a diagonal trajectory towards the start of runway 24 less than a quarter of a mile away.

‘Look at that,’ I say. ‘747.’

‘You like planes?’ she asks, amused.

‘I like it when they go over. I like to think of all those people in there travelling at 150 miles an hour right above our heads. Some of them relaxed — reading, doing a Sudoku. Others terrified as the ground approaches ever faster. Toy cars revert to normal scale and ants become humans.’

I turn to look at her. She is wearing the pale-blue wrap top exactly as I wanted her to, but she has combined it with a simple amber pendant possibly as an act of mild defiance, or, more likely, self-protection. She smiles nervously.

I turn right into Ringway Road and then right again into the restaurant’s own small car park, which I notice has a lockable gate currently standing open.

Almost the moment we enter the restaurant, I realise I have made a mistake. It’s not the sense of stepping back into the 1970s: the patterned carpets, old-lady lighting, and tasselled swag curtains. I don’t mind all that. It’s not even the slightly uneasy combination of excessive formality with unconvincing overfriendliness, to which I am impervious. It’s more that as we are shown to a table by the window, I see a plane passing 200 feet above Ringway Road and I can’t hear a thing over the tinkle of cutlery and the rustle of conversation. I had anticipated it being the other way around. I knew the restaurant was a few hundred yards from the flight path rather than directly underneath it, but I had imagined diners straining to hear each other above the roar of jet engines. I had thought the mullioned windows would be rattling in their panes. Instead, the restaurant could be anywhere, double-glazed into oblivion. The place trades on its proximity to the airport, yet it goes as far as it can to eradicate any trace of aircraft.

I notice Erica looking out of the window.

‘Do you ever get to go to the Pyramid?’ I ask her.

‘What pyramid?’

I sense her bristling slightly.

‘The Stockport Pyramid. The blue one. It’s got your bank’s logo all over it.’

‘No. If you don’t work there, there’s no need to go there. I work in town. You know that.’

‘Right.’ I take a sip of wine. ‘Well, I do need to go there. I need to get inside. I wondered if you could help?’

‘Is that what we’re doing here? You think I can get you into the Pyramid?’

I try to assess how close she is to walking out.

‘Of course not,’ I say.

She lifts her glass and appears to be debating what to do with it. She opts to drink its contents and I refill it from the bottle, which brings the waitress scurrying to our table. It’s that kind of place. The kind where they insist on filling your glass for you.

‘Is everything all right?’ asks the waitress.

I look at her. I can feel Erica looking at me. The waitress is of mixed race with light-brown skin and long, dark wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail accentuating high cheekbones. She’s a tall, attractive woman but she looks worn out and it’s only the start of the evening.

‘I can’t hear the planes,’ I say.

‘You want to try living here,’ she says.

I raise my eyebrows. ‘Do you live locally?’ I can still feel Erica’s eyes on me.

‘Just down the road.’

‘This side of the runway?’

‘Just.’

‘I like the planes,’ I say, leaning back in my seat.

She directs her tired gaze at Erica, whose cheeks, I notice, are tinged pink.

‘He does,’ she goes on, for Erica’s benefit, ‘he wants to try living here.’

‘Yes,’ I say, so that she looks at me again. ‘I do. I do want to try living here.’

‘It’s no fun when you’re tossing and turning and a great big bloody jumbo jet goes over,’ she says, her hands planted assertively on her hips.

‘Well, I beg to differ,’ I say, just about able to remember Susan Ashton. Her Golf GTI. Hatton Cross Tube station car park.

The waitress shrugs as a way of bringing the subject to a close and asks if we have finished with our starters.

Erica is looking around the room. Anywhere but at me, I suspect. I follow her gaze. We are the youngest people in, by some way. Most of the other diners are couples. Golfers and their wives. Golfers and their husbands. The acoustics are such that you can hear conversations from other tables quite clearly even though no one is speaking especially loudly. You try to distinguish one table’s chat from another, as if angling a boom mic from one group of diners to the next, but find you can’t. You watch one white-haired man’s lips move and realise the voice you can hear is that of a retired headmistress on the other side of the room.

The waitresses, meanwhile, are wheeling a trolley towards the table in the far corner. On it are two plates, each covered with a domed silver lid with a small knob on top for a handle. They deposit the plates on the table in front of an elderly couple, and then, with practised ease, lift the lids in perfect synchrony with a flourish that comprises a girlish swing of the hips with the slightest genuflection like a half-curtsey. The elderly couple do not react; they’ve seen it all before. They’ve been coming here for years and now barely have the energy to lift their cutlery. For the waitresses the reveal is clearly a tiresome routine, one they yearn to leave behind, but it goes with the territory. If they had a contract, it would be written in.

The trolley is wheeled back into the kitchen and I swivel to look at Erica. She turns at the same time and our eyes meet for an awkward moment. I look down and my gaze snags on her amber pendant. She has large breasts. The clingy material of her pale-blue top wraps itself around one of them like a promise. I have to tear my eyes away.

‘Are you married?’ she asks suddenly.

‘Kind of.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘She died,’ I say. ‘She’s dead. Or she’s enjoying eternal life, depending on what you believe.’

At that moment the two waitresses arrive at our table with their trolley. On it are two plates covered with the same silver domed lids. The girl with the ponytail and cheekbones places mine in front of me while the other waitress, a middle-aged woman with short, dyed blonde hair, serves Erica. Then they each delicately grasp the nipple-like handles and their eyes meet. On a signal invisible to us they swing, bend and lift in one fluid movement. All it lacks is someone to say ‘Ta-da!’ in an ironic tone of voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Erica as the waitresses withdraw, and she sits forward to communicate sincerity.

I look back at her and don’t know what to say.

‘Who does work there?’ I ask eventually.

‘Where?’ she says, taking my non sequitur as a sign that she may start to eat.

‘In the Pyramid.’

‘Mortgage people. Business and personal banking. Smile.co.uk. Computer banking, training. All sorts. Why are you so interested? Are you a bank robber?’ she asks before closing her lips around a piece of salmon caught on the end of her fork.

‘No, more of a grave robber. You know, like Howard Carter.’

‘Howard who?’

‘Never mind. The Pyramid offers the promise of eternal life. I’m interested in that.’

‘Who isn’t?’ she says, tipping wine into her mouth.

‘I have a particular interest in it,’ I say.

There’s a pause before she apologises again and then there’s a further pause while we both eat.

I see that she has finished.

‘Shall we get out of here?’ I say.

‘I thought you had to write a review.’

‘I’ve seen enough.’

We cause a bit of a stir by paying on the way out. The staff handle our sudden desire to leave with tact and aplomb; it’s among the remaining diners that we detect the lightest of tuts and softest of glares.

‘A short walk?’ I suggest, heading away from the car park down Ringway Road. I watch the little houses on our right. The waitress with the ponytail will return to one of them later. She will down a glass of vodka, neat, then strip to her underwear and crash out.

On the left is a small layby where before 9/11 you could park to watch and listen to the planes thundering overhead. The landing lights loom over the fence on our left, burning in the darkness, casting a gauze of yellowish sparkles into the night sky above the road. I take hold of Erica’s arms and pull her towards me. I place my lips on hers. At first she neither yields nor resists, then she softens, but I feel nothing. I move my head to one side, while still holding her close to me. In the sky above the Moss Nook Industrial Area on the north side of the road, twin white lights can be seen growing steadily larger and brighter. At that distance they will have passed over the Pyramid and be approaching Cheadle Royal. Erica tries to say something, but her mouth is pressed against my shoulder, her voice muffled. I can hear the plane now. It’s a medium-sized passenger aircraft, a 737 or an Airbus 320. I can feel Erica squirming beneath me, trying to get free. The plane flies overhead, its deafening roar filling my ears. I turn my head to watch it overfly the landing lights and I release my hold on Erica.

From the layby you can’t quite see touchdown, but you can hear it. The sudden exhilarating explosion of reverse thrust. The application of speedbrakes. The squeal of rubber on tarmac.

I look down. Erica is straightening her clothes. She seems upset.

‘I’ll take you home,’ I say and turn and lead the way back towards the restaurant.

Several cars remain in the car park as we leave it, turning left to go back the way we came. The streets are quiet, splashed with pools of orange light. In the car neither of us speaks. When I look to the left to check for traffic, I see her face reflecting the glow of the city in the night.

As we approach Northenden I think about taking a short detour to Marie Louise Gardens and driving from Dene Road West into Mersey Road by going straight across Palatine Road without stopping. At this time of night there would be very few cars on Palatine Road. We would be unlucky to be hit. I stop at the lights at the end of Church Road. Right for Deane Road West, straight on for Kenworthy Lane. Either or.

The light changes to green. I sit there undecided. Erica’s eyes are on me; she’s wondering why I don’t move forward. Eventually, as the lights are changing back, I do.

On Kenworthy Lane I stop outside the little house where I had picked her up at the start of the evening. She gets out without a word, then bends down to look back in before closing the door. I turn towards her, but her eyes are hard to make out, the wrap top and its contents lost in shadow.

‘Goodnight,’ I offer, my eye drawn by the amber pendant, which swings clear.

‘Goodnight,’ she says non-committally and then she is gone.

I drive on to the end of the road, which runs straight for a couple of hundred yards before meeting a confluence of cycle paths and pedestrian routes that extend under the interchange of the M60 and Princess Parkway. After a bend to the right, the road continues in a straight line beyond a row of four concrete bollards. I think about the electronically controlled bollards in town that rise and fall allowing buses to pass over them. At least once a week a car is written off in a collision with one of these. It seems there is an unending supply of motorists who think that if they follow the bus and put their foot down, they will get through in time, and on every occasion they are disabused of this notion by the swift and inexorable rise of the bollards, which strike the bumper or enter the engine compartment and jack the car up off the ground.

With my engine still running, I consider flooring the accelerator and driving at the concrete bollards in the hope that they might sink into the earth.

I remember Moss Nook and the sparkly glimmer of the landing lights. I think that if I return there now and drive slowly along Ringway Road I will see a tall, ponytailed figure walking slowly, tiredly, along the pavement between the restaurant and the runway.

I look again at the line of bollards.

Either I go for it or I don’t.

I depress the clutch and select first gear.

I have tried to get an office of my own, since one was as good as promised to me when I joined, but other promises that were made at that time have not been kept and I don’t suppose this one will be either. Actually, that is not true. What is true is that I was not discouraged from thinking that I might one day get an office to myself. As the months passed, it became clear that there was less and less chance of this happening until I finally accepted, within myself if not outwardly, that it would never happen. When I think about it, there were no promises made at all, but there were certain things that were not said.

I was told I would have contact with undergraduates as well as MA students, but it was not explained that this contact would take the form of teaching on a unit devised and run by another lecturer whose vision of creative-writing teaching was somewhat at odds with my own.

Nor was I told that there would be endless meetings about administrative matters that I would be expected to attend, in spite of my having nothing useful to contribute.

Nor that some of the students would barely be able to construct a sentence using correct grammar and punctuation. Fortunately they are outnumbered by the good ones.

As I walk towards the end of the corridor I note that no light is visible from within the office. This means that none of my colleagues is in. In truth it’s rare that we are in at the same time. My own advertised ‘office hours’ are on a Tuesday morning. I unlock the door and walk past Will’s desk. Will is a big man with big hair that he greases and combs back from his forehead. He wears bootlace ties and a leather belt with a big silver buckle in the shape of a steer’s horns. When he is in, he listens to a wide variety of music on his computer, using headphones, from knockabout rockabilly to the most avant garde industrial noise, which he buys second-hand from Vinyl Exchange on Oldham Street. He also insists on having the window open, even in the middle of winter.

Frances is not in either. Tall, stick-thin Frances with the permanent dark shadows under her eyes, who talks incessantly about anything at all the moment anyone enters the room. I have long suspected that when no one is in she talks to the empty office. With Frances, every action demands a reaction. She is one of those people around whom it is impossible to relax.

I also pass Patience’s desk, Sellotaped to which there is a single piece of paper with ‘Patience’s desk’ written on it. There is nothing else either on, inside or near her desk. Patience is on long-term sick leave. I have seen her only once.

I sit down at my own desk, which I have attempted to screen off with large blue room-dividers. If anything, this has the effect of emphasising the presence of other people in the room rather than providing me with privacy. But now that I have got the screens, I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. To make my corner of the room seem a little less like the set of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, I have pinned up a few posters advertising academic conferences and readings in which I have taken part. Similarly, Will has stuck up a selection of covers of the how-to books he has written that have been translated into dozens of languages. Frances has just one poster, for the one-off read-through at the Bolton Octagon of a play she wrote fifteen years ago.

There is a knock at the door. I look at my watch. I turn sideways on to pass between two of my screens and navigate my way around the uncomfortable armchairs positioned around a coffee table in the middle of the room. I open the door.

‘Hiya,’ says Helen, an MA student I am supervising during her writing-up year.

‘Hello,’ I say as I hold the door open to allow her to enter the room.

I show her the way to my desk, as if she might have forgotten it, which is unlikely as she is one of the few students who make full use of their allocated number of one-to-one tutorials. Normally these students are the same as those who have trouble using correct punctuation around direct speech. Not so Helen, whose writing I regard as being close to publishable. In fact, given that it is more interesting than a great deal of the fiction that is piled high on 3-for-2 tables in Waterstone’s, it is definitely publishable, but in my opinion she still makes the wrong word choice from time to time. I regard it as my job to help her see where she has made the wrong choice and to help her make the right choice instead.

Helen is a little shorter than me. She is about twenty-seven or twenty-eight with long dark-brown hair that she usually wears gathered in a ponytail. While talking about her work, she will pull the ponytail over her right shoulder and comb her fingers through it and not toss it back over her shoulder until I say something with which she disagrees. She will not say that she disagrees with me, but the tossing of the ponytail is a clear sign. She has chestnut-coloured eyes that somehow manage to seem both sad and happy at the same time, a small, delicate nose and lips that I have never seen without vivid red lipstick.

She is also direct. Most of the students are, whatever the standard of their work. They are paying for the privilege of being taught by myself and my colleagues and some of them like to remind us of that whenever they perceive that they are not getting value for money. Helen is not like that, but she can be very direct.

‘What did you think of my short story?’ she asks. ‘Is it any good?’

‘I think it’s pretty good,’ I say, pulling a typescript from out of a pile of papers and newspaper cuttings to the left of the PC that I never turn on because I would rather bring in my Mac and connect to the university email system that way, wirelessly, and without having to choose between right-click and left-click. I find it hard to distinguish between right and left, east and west, on and off. When I lived in London I often had to use the Central Line. I would walk down the steps towards the platforms and I would stand for a moment in front of the maps that showed the two entirely different routes, one going east and one going west, and I would still sometimes choose the wrong one, ending up on a train bound for Hainault when I should have been going to Holland Park, or en route for West Ruislip when my destination was Mile End. It would take me two or three stops to realise my mistake.

‘Cool,’ says Helen, her eyes definitely looking happy rather than sad.

‘Yes. It’s very bold.’

‘But?’

I take a moment. ‘It’s bold in context. Would it seem bold taken out of context? If you weren’t you and I wasn’t me? If you weren’t studying for an MA in creative writing here and I wasn’t your supervisor. Would it seem bold then?’

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’ She levels her gaze at me like a challenge.

‘It’s interestingly metafictional—’ I begin.

‘But only in the context of this situation,’ she interrupts. ‘But then doesn’t that make it even more metafictional?’

I think about how to answer. ‘Metafiction isn’t one of my specialist areas,’ I say. ‘But we do have a PhD student doing research on it. I’m just wondering if it gets a bit Grand Guignol?’

‘But nothing happens,’ she says, taking hold of her ponytail, drawing it over her shoulder. ‘It’s all implied. Nothing happens on stage, as it were.’

‘But if it were to happen, as implied, wouldn’t it be a bit Grand Guignol?’

She looks at my bookcase. If she looks hard enough she will see my small collection devoted to Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. She might even spot my copy of Richard J. Hand’s Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. She might wonder why I’ve implied that Grand Guignol is a bad thing.

‘Are you a bit creeped out by the thought of me walking down your street and checking out your place?’ she asks.

‘That would be a very predictable response.’

‘You wouldn’t want to be thought of as predictable.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Did I at least get the commas in the right place?’ she asks with her head on one side.

I smile. ‘It’s a good story,’ I say. ‘It’s publishable.’

‘Where could I send it?’

‘I keep a list of magazines up to date on my machine. An increasingly short list. I’ll email that to you with one or two suggestions.’

‘Thanks. Maybe there’s one that specialises in Grand Guignol?’

I don’t take my eyes from her.

‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘What are you working on?’ Once again, she has been very direct.

‘Bits and pieces.’

‘A novel?’

‘Maybe. Bits of journalism. Restaurant reviews.’

‘Cool.’

She looks away again. I am not sure whether I should say what is in my mind. Either I say it or I don’t. Either it turns out to be the wrong thing to say, or it leads to something. I wonder if she really has read my novel, as suggested by her story.

‘I’m writing about south Manchester, too,’ I say. ‘Using real places, actual locations.’

‘Really?’ That she doesn’t look back at me immediately as she says this tells me she is more interested than she appears.

‘Well, it’s very early stages. I’m not really writing, just researching.’

‘How do you research?’ she asks, finally turning back towards me.

‘I hang around the airport, watch the planes, talk to pilots. Drive around Cheadle and Heald Green at night. I find it very fertile ground. Stories grow there. Industrial areas that change character after dark. Business parks with one or two poorly paid security guards nodding off over their screens and car parks full of Mercedes and Audis.’

‘Sounds fascinating,’ she says, deadpan.

I try out a little laugh and she smiles.

‘I’d best be off,’ she says.

At the door, she turns and says, ‘Maybe I should check out Cheadle? Get more of a sense of place.’

I wait. We both know I can’t be the one to suggest it.

‘I could go with you,’ she says at last.

‘Good idea,’ I say. ‘I’ll email you.’

After she has gone I return to my desk and pick up Helen’s typescript. I put it back on the pile of papers next to the PC and leaf through what’s there. There are several cuttings from the Guardian. More writers’ rooms. Here’s Michael Frayn’s. Some reference books on the desk, a German dictionary. The same one I have at home, I see. The same typeface on the thick spine. I wonder what he uses his for. I remember buying Michael Frayn novels for Veronica after she had read and enjoyed Headlong. I had thought of him as a playwright, primarily, before Headlong came out and was shortlisted for a prize or won a prize, but then I would come across his earlier novels in second-hand bookshops while browsing to add to my Penguin shelves. I remember buying one novel in particular and giving it to Veronica and her saying, ‘I’ve read this one. You bought me this one in hardback,’ and I remembered I had picked up an ex-library edition, very cheap, somewhere. Perhaps in a library.

I carry on through the pile of cuttings. Sarah Waters. Not a book in sight. Instead she has a map of the world and a poster on the wall with a wartime motto: ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’. Hilary Mantel’s room is also book-free. She writes in the main room of her flat in a converted Victorian asylum in Surrey. There’s no stuff or clutter. She has the same desk as Andrew O’Hagan and Antonia Fraser. A. S. Byatt’s room looks more like my own with its ‘purposeful disorder’, a glass case of large insects and another German dictionary. There’s a row of books on the window ledge, where they will spoil in the sun, their titles only half visible.

I sit at my desk in my study at the top of the house. The laptop is open but I am not writing. I had been looking at websites of office furniture suppliers, but the screen has gone dark through lack of use. I am actually looking at the seven pieces of red moulded plastic lined up on the desk next to it. These came out of the mound of rubble and crap in the back garden. They are all obviously from the same source, originally part of some coherent object that has been broken apart. The temptation is to try to fit them together, as if they were part of a jigsaw puzzle, but I have tried and it is clear that many pieces are missing. Three of the seven fragments I have are flat, four are curved. There are no markings or patterns, no scraps of any other material present. I have washed them in warm soapy water to remove any trace of the various other substances found in the landfill.

‘What do you think, Cleo?’ I ask the cat curled up in the armchair behind me. ‘What do these come from? What are they? Eh?’

I pick up the biggest piece and slot my thumb into its curved hollow. I get up and move away from the desk. Cleo stirs, but remains where she is.

‘What about you, Mr Fox?’ I look at the stuffed fox’s head as I stroke the red plastic with the pads of my fingers. ‘What do you think? What do you have to say?’

I remember being in the back of a car, my parents’ car. It was late, dark outside. My father was driving slowly, then speeding up, then slowing down again. He was leaning across my mother to see out of her window. They were trying to read house numbers in the darkness, looking for a particular address. He would slow down, they would both rake their eyes over the porches and doorsteps and brick walls and pebbledash and either see a number or not see one, and the car would roll slowly forwards, then my father would step on the accelerator once more, always a second or two before returning his gaze to the road ahead.

I saw it first. The golden flank, white underparts, face turned towards the oncoming car. Imprinted on the Kodak paper of the suburban night by flashgun headlamps. And then my father put his foot down again. I cried out, too late. The impact rocked the car, my father standing on the brake pedal. He got out and picked the animal up and laid it across my mother’s lap. Her face was white. I watched in rapt silence as a trickle of dark blood escaped from the corner of the fox’s mouth.

I knew the animal was dead, but the gentle motion of the car gave it the illusion of life.

And then, every time my father turned a corner, the fox’s head lolled and swung on its broken neck.

A week later, my father presented me with the fox’s head on a mahogany mount. I called him Mr Fox.

That evening, I am returning from Tesco with a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk, thinking about the student who came to see me after Helen. His name is either Lawrence Duncan or Duncan Lawrence. Either or. I can never remember which. There will be a list somewhere with his name on it, but probably accessible only from the PC at work and not from my Mac. His email address doesn’t help, since it includes neither of his names. I have asked him once or twice to remind me, pleading forgetfulness, but it is not forgetfulness that is to blame. It is rather that I know that both variations are possible and so I find it impossible to distinguish between them. Like hot and cold. Sometimes I will look at the taps on a washbasin, even ones affixed with a blue or red spot, and I don’t know which one to turn.

Like on and off. Televisions have become so complicated, having so many external devices. Standby, remote on/off, hard switch-off. Sometimes I don’t know whether it’s on or off.

Life and death is another. There are numerous well-known public figures who could be alive or may be dead. Members of the royal family. Is the Queen Mother alive or dead? Sometimes I know she is dead, at other times I think she may still be alive. Film actors. Directors. Sam Peckinpah. Is he alive or dead? Joseph Losey? Jazz musicians. Gerry Mulligan? Is he dead? I think so, but I’m not sure. Herbie Hancock? I might have said dead, but I saw he made a new record and was touring recently, so presumably still alive. Even members of my own family. Cousins. Aunts, uncles. My wife.

It’s not that I think there is little difference between being alive and being dead. It is that I cannot distinguish between the two. Almost as if I cannot choose.

Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — is in his first year on the MA. He is a promising student. He and Helen and others like them are easy to teach. Mostly what you do is encourage them, give them the confidence they need. Every time I see Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — I remember what he was like in his interview. He was so nervous he was shaking and stammering. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, he blushed to the roots of his hair. He was about twenty-three and had spent two or three years since graduating, in English, doing various jobs and reading a lot, he said. The portfolio he had submitted with his application, however, had been outstandingly good and when he started work on his novel and submitted chapters to be workshopped, the reaction from his fellow students and from myself had given him that confidence. He was writing about a group of young people in a very contemporary idiom and was doing so with a certain flair.

He’d been due to come to see me earlier today, however, about the First Novels unit that I run alongside the workshop for the MA as well as the BA. While waiting for him, I had moved my chair away from the desk until it was facing one of the room-dividers. I was sitting forward in the chair, having lowered it slightly, until my spine was curved over and my elbows were resting on my knees. I pictured myself as a graphic on a piece of laminated card stored in a seat pocket. I placed my hands over my head, one on top of the other, unclasped. I felt the rough fabric of the room-divider where it grazed the front of my head. On a plane, that would be the back of the seat in front.

It was at this point that there was a knock on the door. I waited for a moment or two then pushed back the chair and crossed the room. I opened the door to allow Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — to enter.

‘Hey,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ I said, as I led him across the room to my corner.

‘Why,’ he asked, after a minute or two of small talk, ‘has Philip Pullman’s first novel never been reissued? I mean, he’s mega. A reprint of The Haunted Storm would clean up, wouldn’t it?’

‘Of course it would. That’s one of the things we’ll discuss in the group,’ I said, fiddling with the lever on my chair to raise it to the correct height. ‘Why do some writers go to such lengths to keep their first novels out of the hands of readers? In Pullman’s case, he refuses even to talk about it. If you manage to get hold of a copy and you ask him to sign it at a reading, he refuses. So I’m told. I haven’t tried. But copies of the first edition go for a grand. With his signature even more.’

‘Cool. That explains why I’ve not been able to get hold of a copy.’

‘The paperback is a little easier to find, but only a little. You can pay a hundred quid for a copy on eBay.’

‘Dude, you can, perhaps. I can’t,’ he said with a laugh.

The nerves Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — had shown in my first encounter with him had not reappeared since then. They had been interview nerves. Nothing more. Once on the course, he was as relaxed and informal as students tend to be these days.

‘I have an idea to get around this problem,’ I said.

‘What? The photocopier?’

‘That would be against copyright law.’

He shrugged and raised his hands palms upward as if to say, ‘What copyright law?’

‘I have two copies,’ I said. ‘It’s a small group.’

‘You loan it out.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And we take great care of it.’

‘Precisely.’

‘Coolio,’ he said, then: ‘Dude, I’d like to read your novel but I can’t find a copy anywhere. How about you do the library thing with that?’

My thoughts about the tutorial with Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — are interrupted by the sound of some-one calling from out of the darkness on the other side of the street.

‘Paul,’ the voice says again as its owner crosses the road. ‘I thought it was you. Ksssh-huh-huh.’

He stands in front of me, as if barring the way, smiling.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Come and have a drink.’ He indicates the pub on the corner.

I glance at a figure who walks past us. Untidy shock of white hair, green anorak unzipped, suit trousers at half mast — Polling Station Man. On polling days he sits behind a desk in the local primary school and crosses voters’ names off his list. At other times he is seen walking with long strides and carrying a single white plastic carrier bag. I remember standing in the polling booth not knowing where to place my cross, unable to choose. Either this one or that one.

‘I’ve got to get back,’ I say to Lewis, showing him the milk I’ve bought.

‘Come on. All the lads are there. AJ’s not there, but Jon and Chris and Gary. Kelvin—’

‘Kelvin?’

‘Yeah, you know, the pilot. Wasn’t my idea, but still. Ksssh-huh-huh.’

I look at the shopping bag in my hand.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe a quick one.’

‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’

The pub is noisy and smells of damp bar towels. I accept a drink from Lewis and sit down in the only free seat next to a man I don’t know who is telling a story about a football match.

‘… and this guy’s constantly shouting out that he’s a cunt.’

‘The linesman?’ says Gary, whom I have met before, somewhere.

‘Yeah, this guy behind me is shouting out in a really miserable voice that the linesman’s a cunt, like, every time he misses an offside. “You’re a cunt, liner. You’re a cunt, liner.” On and on and on. And then the linesman does raise his flag. He does give an offside, and an ironic cheer goes up from the crowd and a round of applause. And this guy, he times it perfectly. He waits a moment, until the noise has died down, and then in this, like, moment of quiet you hear his voice, really kind of morose but still timed to perfection, aware of the effect he was about to create: “You’re still a cunt, liner.”’

The story prompts laughter in the group. I raise my glass to my lips. The lads say hello to me and we exchange small talk. As soon as there is an opportunity I move around and take a seat next to Kelvin. I remind him where we’ve met and he says he remembers.

‘You’re obviously not flying tomorrow,’ I say to him, looking at his pint.

‘They’re very careful,’ he says. ‘Random testing. It’s not worth it.’

We sip our drinks as another story is begun in which I have no interest.

I turn to Kelvin.

‘Is it true,’ I ask him, ‘what they say about brace? About the brace position?’

‘What?’

‘I heard that the brace position doesn’t save lives. Isn’t intended to save lives. It’s designed to ensure that you die instantly by snapping your neck. Because it’s cheaper for the airlines to pay out for wrongful death than lifelong disablement. So if the plane’s going down, they’d rather you die than survive with terrible injuries. Also, it handily keeps all the body parts together in one place.’

‘Where did you hear that?’ he asks.

‘Two guys on a train,’ I say. ‘So, it’s true, then? I mean, I can see it would make the job of cleaning up considerably easier. From the point of view of identification and so on.’

Kelvin looks up from his pint. ‘Conspiracy theory,’ he says. ‘The brace position does save lives in the event of a crash. Kegworth proved that. Remember Kegworth?’

I remember Kegworth.

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Last question. Is it true that the engines on an airliner are designed to fall off if something goes badly wrong?’

Kelvin places his pint on the table. ‘The engines on a Boeing 747 were designed to break away in the event of catastrophic failure, but it didn’t work out the way they planned. In one or two cases, the engine that broke free, instead of dropping safely to the ground, smashed into the other engine on the same wing. You can imagine the consequences. Amsterdam, for example. You remember Amsterdam?’

I remember Amsterdam.

I go to the bar to buy a round and when I rejoin the group, I find myself sitting next to Lewis. He looks at me and grins as I pass him a pint of bitter.

‘All right?’ he asks.

I nod.

‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’

I look away. We sit in silence for a few moments. I put my hand in my pocket and take it out again.

‘What’s that?’ he asks, looking at my hand.

I see that I’m holding one of the pieces of red plastic, the one into which my thumb slots neatly, and I’m caressing it with my fingers.

‘It’s from my back garden. I’ve dug a whole load of it up. I don’t know what it is or where it’s come from.’

He holds his hand out.

I hesitate momentarily, but then drop it into his palm.

He holds it up close and studies it. He pulls a face that says he doesn’t know either.

‘Some years ago,’ he says, ‘there was a plane crash in South America.’

‘In the Andes?’ I ask. ‘The Uruguayan rugby team? The Alive story.’

‘No. Much later.’

‘That story had a profound effect on me as a child,’ I say.

‘On a lot of people, I’m sure, but this was twenty years later, maybe more. A passenger aircraft was flying over a mountain range — maybe it was the Andes, maybe not — and it went off radar. Just disappeared. They sent out military jets to search for it and everything. Nothing. Nada. Ksssh-huh-huh.’ He sips at his pint before continuing. ‘Then they discovered the wreckage, I don’t know, a year later or summat.’ He looks at me. ‘On the wrong side of the mountain.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I said. They knew where the plane was when it left the radar. They knew what direction it was flying in. They knew where it must have experienced what they call an “uncontrolled collision with terrain”. But when they performed a fly-past, there was nothing to see. And then, a year later, they discovered some wreckage, on the wrong side of the mountain.’

‘The plane must have travelled some distance after leaving the radar,’ I say. ‘Gone around the mountain, changed direction.’

‘Then why, shortly afterwards, did they finally find some wreckage on the right side of the mountain as well?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m not saying owt. All I’m saying is what I read in the paper. After they spotted the wreckage on the wrong side of the mountain they sent out search teams, which found debris from the plane on both sides of the mountain.’

‘Near the summit, perhaps?’ I try. ‘It hit the mountain near the summit and part of the plane flipped over the top.’

‘Nice idea, but no. Five hundred feet from the top and no easy way round either.’

He lifts his pint. A trickle of bitter overflows at the corner of his mouth and drips on to his patterned shirt. I am reminded of Mr Fox on my mother’s lap.

‘Seen Carol lately?’ he asks.

‘No, I haven’t seen Carol. Or AJ.’

‘You know what they say about Carol?’

‘What? What did you say?’ I look at the grin that cuts open the lower half of his face like a wound.

‘You know what they say?’

‘No.’ Not ‘No?’, but ‘No.’ I didn’t want to know.

‘Cars,’ he says, regardless.

‘What do you mean?’

No one appears to be listening in. Group conversations underway. Pub hubbub.

‘Apparently, Carol likes to have sex in cars.’ Lewis looks at me intently, as if it is an important piece of information, something I have been waiting for.

‘With AJ?’ I ask in spite of myself.

Lewis shrugs. ‘With or without AJ, is what I hear.’

‘Really?’ I mean it to sound as if I am indifferent, but the way it comes out, it’s more like I don’t believe him.

‘See for yourself.’

I frown at him.

He taps the side of his nose like a cartoon lech.

‘Video,’ he stage-whispers. ‘DVD. Apparently.’

I curl my lip.

‘I mean, there’s definitely some footage. It’s just hard to say who it is.’

He raises his half-empty pint glass and seems to want me to do the same.

‘Here’s to Carol,’ he says, ‘whoever it is on the DVD.’

I drain my glass, then ask him, ‘When was that plane crash? When did you read about it in the paper?’

‘I can’t remember,’ he says. ‘I’ve tried going online and can’t find owt about it. I mean, it’s not a lot to go on. Plane — crash — mountain. You get a gazillion hits.’

‘They’re not called hits.’

‘Whatever.’

‘What about adding “wrong side”?’

‘Nothing.’

Lewis gets to his feet and points across the bar.

‘Piss,’ he says. ‘And when I get back I want to ask you about how you write. Your routine, discipline, all that.’

As Lewis makes his way to the Gents, I sense Kelvin’s eyes on me. I turn to look at him. His expression is unreadable.

‘I need to get this home,’ I say to Kelvin, showing him my bottle of milk, and while an argument about different interpretations of the offside rule is occupying the other members of the group, I quietly leave the pub.

The Writers’ Rooms series kicks off with Beryl Bainbridge. What makes them pick her rather than Michael Frayn, I wonder, who appears in week two? Strangely, on the Guardian website, the order is reversed. Beryl Bainbridge has books on her shelves, but they are some distance away from the lens, and the glare of sunlight makes it difficult to read any titles or authors’ names. Of more interest to the photographer, Eamonn McCabe, are the pistol and old typewriter on the table in the foreground.

Michael Frayn has a high-backed chair with a neck support of the kind that is good for bad backs. There are a number of similar chairs. Sarah Waters, David Lodge, Esther Freud, Simon Gray and Al Alvarez all have similar chairs. Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton, Siri Hustvedt and Francesca Simon all have exactly the same chair as each other: it has a wide curved back and sturdy arm rests and several controlling levers. A surprising number of writers — David Hare, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Drabble, Colm Toíbín, Louis de Bernières, Martin Amis and many more — get by without castors. I imagine their chair legs scraping and dragging awkwardly on rugs, carpet, sisal matting and varnished floorboards as they sit down at their desks. William Boyd accessorises a rattan chair with some cushions, but it can’t be good for his back. Most of his books are at too tight an angle to the camera for the spines to be easily read. Those that aren’t are piled with the spines facing away. Any one of those could be of interest, but how would you know?

The only books visible in Ronan Bennett’s room are behind glass, obscured by reflection, but pride of place is given to a vast collection of chess pieces also in a glass case. Penelope Lively’s books are too far away in an alcove and all the stacks in the foreground reveal is a taste for Seamus Heaney. In the attic room of his house in Dublin, Seamus Heaney writes under the glass-eyed gaze of a stuffed yellow bittern in a bell jar. A short-haired cat tiptoes across Joshua Ferris’ desk, a tabby occupies the corner of Julie Myerson’s and a dog called Watson squats on Nicola Barker’s chair. Barker has some orange-spined books, but they’re easily identifiable as A-format Penguins.

Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Al Alvarez all have some larger-format orange spines with black writing, but they’re too far away to make out. The photographer’s job is to get as wide a view of the room as possible, not to allow you to read the spines of the books on view, which is what I am trying to do. Anyway, what could ever have motivated Eric Hobsbawm, Elizabeth Jane Howard or Al Alvarez to pick up a copy of a novel published in a limited edition by a tiny independent imprint in the early 90s?

A wooden artist’s figure with articulated joints strikes a ballet pose on John Banville’s desk, close to a neat pile of three Moleskine notebooks. His bookshelves are full of reference volumes and books on Bill Brandt and Koudelka. Siri Hustvedt keeps Gray’s Anatomy, Principles of Neural Science and The Norton Anthology of Poetry to the left of her desk. Most of her other books are just slightly too far away to read the titles or authors’ names. There is one orange and black spine that looks promising, but it’s impossible to say. Though why would a copy have crossed the Atlantic? It was barely distributed in the UK, never mind the US.

In Martin Amis’ room, in a separate building at the end of his garden, light pours in through a glass ceiling and there are numerous books scattered in an apparently random pattern on the floor: a huge book on Vladimir Nabokov and two or three spiral-bound manuscripts. On a table in the foreground, a paperback edition of J. G. Ballard’s Cocaine Nights with a yellow Waterstone’s 3-for-2 sticker showing that he didn’t blag a copy, he bought it. The shelves seem to house mainly non-fiction: books on Hitler, Islam, cultural amnesia. Amis’ own books are lined up on Catherine O’Flynn’s shelves in a large photograph appearing in another newspaper, the Independent: London Fields, Other People, Night Train. Hilary Mantel is there too with Beyond Black. James Ellroy, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Camus, Kafka. But there appears no order, alphabetical or otherwise. Still, I can see that the book I’m looking for is not there. Or not in shot, at least.

Julie Myerson is photographed, also in the Independent, in front of, or rather sitting below, a shelf of first editions protected by plastic covers. You can see the light glinting off them. Murdoch, Updike. When it’s her turn in the Guardian, it’s strikingly domestic: cat basket, baby photo, a tiny pile of books to the right of the desk. Joanne Harris, in the Observer Magazine, reveals that she collects French books, the Livre de Poche colophon and distinctive spine recognisable even across the room. Also in two separate Observer supplements, plastic covers are in evidence in different shots of, again, Siri Hustvedt, photographs clearly taken on the same day, unless she wears that black and white striped cardigan and dangly earrings for every photographer that comes to the house. In the background a wall-mounted bookcase, lines of serious-looking volumes in plastic sleeves. An olive-green leather sofa. In one shot, Hustvedt stretches out her long legs across the wide cushions; in the other she is sitting on the floor in front of the sofa leaning on the coffee table in the foreground on which are stacked various large-format books: Conjunctions 49: A Writers’ Aviary, a monograph of René Char, L’Oeil de Simenon, a visitors’ guide to New York City and The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard. To the right of the sofa is another bookcase on the adjoining wall. It contains a number of orange-spined books that could be Penguins but equally might not be.

Both Marina Warner and Simon Armitage have music stands.

Sarah Waters, Charlotte Mendelson and Sebastian Faulks all have the same poster on the wall, the wartime slogan ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’, in white on a red background.

Will Self and Sarah Waters have maps of London hanging on the wall. Robert Irwin has a map of the Middle East and North Africa. Esther Freud has an etching by her father Lucian, J. G. Ballard a copy of a painting by Paul Delvaux. Hanif Kureishi has a picture of Kate Moss above his desk. Kate Mosse has a photograph of sunrise in the Pyrenees.

William Boyd, Jacqueline Wilson, Adam Thirlwell, Anne Enright, Blake Morrison, Jonathan Bate, Sebastian Faulks and Deborah Moggach are all Mac users.

Simon Gray, John Mortimer and J. G. Ballard have all died since appearing.

Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble, husband and wife, have both been featured, separately, in the Guardian series. His room is much untidier than hers. Claire Tomalin’s room is caught in the photographer’s lens three months after that of her husband, Michael Frayn. Hunter Davies, still using an Amstrad PCW9512, is scarcely more technologically evolved than his wife, Margaret Forster, with her fountain pen and A4 paper. Joanna Briscoe and Charlotte Mendelson live together in north London; their respective rooms appear almost a year apart. Mendelson’s temporary lodging in the downstairs front room is dominated by children’s toys, kitchenware and an improvised barrier against the life of the street — a huge mountain of boxes blocking out the view of Dartmouth Park — while Briscoe’s beloved top-floor book-lined ‘tree house’ study is destined to become a bedroom.

Among the reference volumes on Briscoe’s bookshelves is an edition of the Time Out Film Guide, not recent enough to include Andrew Davies’ adaptation of her novel, Sleep With Me. Halliwell’s Film Guide sits on Marina Warner’s shelf; had he still been alive on its release, it’s doubtful Leslie Halliwell would have liked — or even included — Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film Asylum, in which Warner appears as herself. Martin Amis and Siri Hustvedt each have a different edition of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia.

Siri Hustvedt’s husband, Paul Auster, has not been included in the Writers’ Rooms series, but I doubt very much that it’s because he hasn’t been asked.

I have another look at Siri Hustvedt’s half-page in the Guardian. Top shelf, slightly to the left of centre. Orange spine, black text. With her long legs she’d be able to reach it with-out needing to stand on that chair — the same chair as Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton and Francesca Simon. I imagine her lifting her left foot off the ground and standing on the toes of her right, extending her right arm and stretching her calf and trapezoid muscles, questing fingers latching on and extracting the book, taking it down, opening it, sniffing the pages. Has she read it? Is she intending to read it? I don’t know, but I’d like to find out.

I have never read Siri Hustvedt. I think maybe I should. I will start with her first novel, The Blindfold.

I am invited to read at a new monthly live literature event in town. This is an event that in a few months has become unexpectedly popular. The first night was in the basement of a bar in the university district. The venue was tiny and it was packed. If you weren’t standing by the bar there was no way you could get a drink. The organiser was a young writer who had just won a two-book deal with a fashionable publisher, but he was so modest and self-effacing in his skinny jeans and crumpled shirt, no one was anything but pleased for him. Plus, he could write, which helped.

They held the second evening in the upstairs room at the same venue, which was much bigger with a proper stage, decent seating and a disco ball hanging from the high ceiling. Still, the crowds kept coming, creative-writing students mainly, but also each successive month seemed to draw in more and more characters from the north-west writing ‘scene’. Bloggers, debut novelists, literature professionals. Lecturers in creative writing. Across town, science-fiction writers and crime novelists soldiered on in readings at local libraries where they and the sad-eyed staff easily outnumbered the few people who had dragged themselves in off the streets to ask where the writers got their ideas from and how they had found their agents.

As I sit waiting to go on, I listen to the other readers. Girls with dyed hair and low-slung jeans read rough poems about sex and alcohol. Boys with pipe-cleaner legs and Converse trainers, and bookshelves back home full of Richard Brautigan and Charles Bukowski, tell stories about pool tables and girls and lonely men and failed sexual encounters and alcohol.

I go on and look out at the sea of faces twenty years younger than mine, their owners lifting expensive bottles of beer to their lips or rolling spliffs to stick behind their ears for later on, and I wonder for the first time if these reading nights have encouraged the formation of a particular school of writing marked by whimsy and flippant jokes and throwaway lines about sexual inadequacy. I wonder, if that’s the case, how my own stuff will play. But as I stand thinking, the murmuring falls away and the room is filled with a tense, electric silence, in case I have dried.

But I begin. I read an extract from my novel-in-progress. It’s a scene set in a pub. Dialogue between the narrator and two other characters, one more important than the other. While I read, I am aware of my attention wandering. When this happens, I am always surprised by my ability to stick to the script. Like flying by wire. Some back-brain function keeps the reading going while my mind fills up with unrelated thoughts. I look up frequently and at a table near the front I see Elizabeth Baines, her silver-blonde hair cut in a flattering new style, the lights reflected from the disco ball flashing in her spectacle lenses. I think of the barbecue at AJ’s. I briefly picture Lewis. Even that doesn’t put me off my stride.

When I have finished I leave the stage and the organisers call a break. Before I have a chance to sit down, I notice someone walking towards me. A woman, tall and angular, with heavy eye make-up and dark bobbed hair beginning to go grey. She’s familiar, yet I cannot place her. She offers her hand and I take it hesitantly. Her handshake is firm but brief. When she introduces herself I realise I’ve seen her photo on a book jacket. She lectures in creative writing at one of the other universities.

‘Nice reading,’ she says as she touches my arm and smiles from under her hair. ‘I just wanted to give you a heads-up.’

I realise that she is quite drunk. She goes on to say that the scene in the extract I just read — about the brace position and whether it’s intended to save lives or curtail them — had sounded very familiar to her and her friends.

‘Around our table,’ she adds, gesturing vaguely towards the back of the room. ‘We looked at each other and we said, “That’s familiar. That’s Fight Club.”’

I raise my eyebrows. At the same time I become aware of someone, another woman, standing close by, as if she wants to speak to one of us and is waiting for an opportunity.

‘I’m not saying you lifted it, of course. We’re not saying that. But it’s similar. I just, I suppose, I just wanted to let you know, in case, you know…’

‘That’s very thoughtful of you,’ I say.

‘In case, you know, anyone says, anyone else. You’ll know, you know.’

‘Yeah.’

She touches my arm again.

The other woman, whoever she is, will have seen that. I glance towards her, but that hand is still on my arm and I look back at its owner.

‘The book, I mean,’ she continues, ‘not the film. Definitely the book.’

‘Well, that’s good. I haven’t even read the book. I’ve seen the film. Everybody’s seen the film, haven’t they? But I haven’t read the book.’

‘It’s in the book, I’m sure it is. I just thought. We just thought. You should be aware of it. In case.’

‘Thank you,’ I say and I can see that she is finally backing off and as she does so I realise how close to me she had been standing. She smiles as she turns away to face the direction in which she is walking, with exaggerated care.

I look at the other woman properly for the first time. I recognise her, but I don’t know from where. I smile at her. Too late I realise it’s Grace.

‘She was winding you up,’ Grace says.

‘You think?’

‘She was definitely winding you up.’

‘She said she was just letting me know so I could check it out, so I’d know, you know. I’d be prepared should anyone else make a similar remark. I’d have had a chance to figure out what to say. Or I could cut the scene.’

‘Exactly,’ says Grace. ‘She’s playing with you.’

‘Either she is, or she isn’t.’

‘Believe me. She wants you to cut the scene, or to be uneasy about it.’

‘Or spend time and money checking to see if she’s right,’ I say.

‘Exactly. And you will, won’t you?’

‘Either I will, or I won’t.’

I experience a sudden wave of tiredness and glance towards where I’d been sitting. Grace seems to sense my need and nods at the table. I don’t invite her to sit down, but she sits down anyway. I take a long drink from my glass. I wonder how many more readers there will be. I wonder how long the break will last before they start again. I wonder how long Grace will sit there giving me her basilisk stare.

‘What did you think of what I sent you?’ she asks out of the blue.

I have to think before I know what she is talking about.

‘It was good. I liked the setting,’ I say. ‘Very vivid. I’ve never been to Zanzibar — never even been to Africa — but it felt authentic. And the detail about low flying and very low flying. I liked that too.’

‘Was there anything about it you didn’t like?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I think I liked it all.’

‘What about the ending?’

‘OK, the ending. I wasn’t sure about the ending.’

‘Wasn’t sure about the idea or that I’d got it right?’ Grace’s persistence lacked the charm of Helen’s. ‘You can see what I’m trying to do there?’

‘You are suggesting that his head is taken clean off by the undercarriage of the Hercules and you ambitiously have the POV switch to the severed head as it hits the ground and rolls across the beach. You describe what the eyes see as this happens, picking up on an earlier point about consciousness surviving for a certain amount of time after beheading.’

‘Yeah. What’s not to like?’ she says, her eyes glittering in the reflected light from the disco ball.

‘I like it. I like it very much. I applaud the ambition. I’m just not sure the impact of the plane would sever the head.’

‘Isn’t that a little pedantic?’ she sneers.

‘Isn’t it my job to be pedantic?’

‘With punctuation?’

‘Luckily you don’t need that level of hand-holding. Wouldn’t whatever part of the plane strikes the head just deal it a terrible blow, take a chunk out of it?’

‘Well, I don’t know. I can’t very well set up a controlled experiment.’

‘Mmm. A blind experiment.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘I probably am being a little pedantic,’ I say. ‘You take a leap of the imagination and the momentum of the story, the boldness of the conceit, should take the reader with you.’

‘Yeah, but if that doesn’t happen, it undermines the whole story. That’s what you’re saying.’

‘But that’s the beauty of the form. Of the short story. You can take risks that you wouldn’t in a novel. How much time have you lost writing it? How much time has the reader lost reading it? And if we get it, if our suspension of disbelief is unbroken, it’s all worth it.’

‘Hmm.’ She looks agitated.

It is my job to encourage the talented students, not discourage them. Grace is clearly talented, but there is something about her that makes me uncomfortable.

‘How’s your novel coming along anyway?’ I ask her.

‘The story is part of it,’ she says, her jaws snapping shut like an insect’s.

‘Great. That’ll work.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know; you tell me.’

She laughs a rustling, almost metallic laugh. ‘We’ll see,’ she says, placing one large hand over the other on the tabletop.

I drain my glass.

‘I’m going to head off,’ I say, getting to my feet.

‘Don’t forget to check out Fight Club,’ she says, a slight jeering tone reminding me either of what she thought of my passivity in dealing with the drunk novelist, or of what she herself thought of the drunk novelist.

Following Flynn’s death on Uroa beach, Ray struggled to carry out his full range of RAF duties. He gave it six weeks and then applied for medical discharge, which was granted. He wondered if it was granted in the hope that it would buy his silence. He had answered all questions put to him in the internal RAF inquiry that took place immediately after the ‘accident’ and he assumed that the two nurses who had been present in the Hercules had answered just as truthfully. He had no idea what Dunstan himself had told the inquiry and he didn’t ask. But he suspected that the outcome of the internal investigation would be either hushed up or massaged into ambiguity if it wasn’t the desired outcome and he knew that normal procedure dictated a full and open inquiry would have to be held at some future point according to the laws of the United Kingdom. He preferred to return to the UK as soon as possible to be ready for that, whatever he might choose to say when the time came.

Ray flew into RAF Northolt and caught the Tube to London and then a train to Manchester. He took a bus from Piccadilly Gardens to Hyde and felt mildly alienated — although he wouldn’t have used that actual word to describe the feeling — to find himself walking down the streets of his childhood after three years spent living thirty miles off the coast of East Africa.

‘It’s our Raymond,’ his father said when he opened the door to him, offering a slightly awkward handshake.

Ray’s mother appeared and hugged him, not without warmth, then led him into the morning room, which had been transformed. It had been repapered and a new carpet had been put down. A playpen formed a square enclosure on the floor and in it sat a three-year-old boy playing with a wooden train set.

‘Is this…?’ Ray asked.

‘This is Nicholas,’ Ray’s mother confirmed.

‘Hello Nicholas,’ said Ray, bending down beside the playpen.

‘Nicholas,’ Ray’s mother said, folding her arms under her bosom, ‘this is… this is your father.’

Nicholas looked up briefly, turning startlingly big blue eyes on the newcomer, then returned to his train set.

‘Nicholas…’ said Ray’s mother.

‘It’s all right, Mam,’ said Ray. ‘He’s not set eyes on me for three years.’

‘And he may not for another three either,’ grunted Ray’s father from the doorway.

‘Me dad’s right, Mam. Looks to me like you’re doing right by the little feller.’

‘Aye, well,’ said Ray’s mother, moving some knitting off a chair so she could sit down.

‘You’ll not be stopping long,’ Ray’s father said.

It wasn’t clear to anybody, possibly even to Ray’s father himself, whether this was a statement or a question.

‘I’ve got to go to Newcastle,’ Ray said.

Nobody asked why.

He took a train from Victoria. Three hours later he stepped on to the platform in Newcastle. He caught a bus to Whitley Bay. North of the white dome of Spanish City, the seafront was windswept and bleak. He walked a little way on the links, then turned inland under the shadow of a tall block of flats. He checked the name of the building — Beacon House. He was going the right way. Leaving Beacon House to his left, he entered a new estate comprised of two or three long, looping roads and numerous dead ends. Modern, boxy, flat-roofed houses constructed out of brick, tile and wooden boards. When he reached Granada Place, he turned in. It was a short cul-de-sac, houses on either side, a white wooden fence at the end. On the right, a man with a bald head and tufts of curly grey hair above his ears was cleaning a red Beetle. The door to his house was standing open and from within could be heard the sound of scales being played on a piano. The man smiled at Ray, who smiled back once he had spotted the number on the house, an even number.

Number 7 was at the end on the left. A grey Morris Minor stood on the short concrete drive in front of a yellow garage door. Ray took a deep breath, held it and let it out. He looked towards the white wooden fence that marked the edge of the property. Beyond it lay a green space bounded at the far side by a wooded gulley.

Ray stepped up to the front door and rang the bell. A two-note tone could be heard from inside the house. Ray took a step back and swallowed. He heard footsteps within and then the door was opened by a thin woman of about forty in a simple nylon dress with a pattern of blue and green pebble-like shapes. Her face looked tense under carefully applied make-up, large grey-green eyes wary beneath blue-shadowed lids.

‘Raymond Cross,’ he announced.

‘Hello, Mr Cross. June Flynn. Please come in.’

June Flynn led Ray into an open-plan lounge/dining room that ran from the front of the house to the back. A wide wooden cabinet stood in the middle, two pot plants trailing upwards into a trellis-like structure that formed a subtle division between two distinct areas.

‘Please have a seat, Mr Cross,’ said June Flynn.

‘Thank you, Mrs Flynn. Please call me Ray.’

June Flynn offered a weak smile. ‘Then you must call me June. My husband will be down in a moment. You have had a long journey. Would you like some tea?’

‘Tea would be lovely. Thank you.’

June Flynn left the room. Ray could hear her heels crossing the tiled floor in the hall and entering the kitchen. He heard the opening of cupboards and a fridge, the boiling of a kettle. Otherwise the house was silent. Eventually, June Flynn returned carrying a tray. She put it down on the coffee table in the centre of the lounge area. There was a pot of tea, a small jug of milk and three cups and saucers.

The tea was poured. Ray noticed that June Flynn placed her husband’s cup on its saucer, but poured neither milk nor tea into it.

‘Would you like sugar, Ray?’

‘No, thank you, June.’

She passed him his tea and he thanked her again.

‘You have a lovely house,’ he said, ‘in a very nice setting.’

‘Thank you. Yes, Briar Dene is lovely.’ She indicated the common land next to the house. ‘Russell used to play there when he was little.’

Immediately her eyes glittered and she turned away.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, getting to her feet and going to the wooden cabinet for a box of tissues. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Cross.’

‘Please, June,’ Ray said, moving forward to the edge of his seat. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you by coming.’

‘I’m very glad you’ve come. Very glad.’ June Flynn dabbed at her eyes, trying not to smudge her make-up. ‘The RAF sent someone, of course, but that was because they had to. It was official.’

‘Yes.’

There was silence for a few moments and then they both started speaking at the same time.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Ray. ‘After you.’

‘I was just going to ask how well you knew Russell.’

‘Well, as you know,’ Ray began, clearing his throat, ‘Russell had not been in Zanzibar very long before he…’ Ray paused, spotting the trap he had unwittingly set for himself.

‘Before the accident.’

‘Yes, before the accident. Mrs Flynn. June. I wanted to come and see you and your husband to express my condolences in person and to say that Russell was a fine young man, an excellent addition to the squadron and a real credit to you.’

June Flynn suddenly spasmed and coughed explosively as she leant forward. The cough turned into a brief but horrifying moan and a flurry of tears fell on to the coffee table. Ray leant across and gently pushed the box of tissues in her direction. After a moment, she recovered her composure.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do this,’ she said.

‘Please,’ said Ray. ‘There’s absolutely no need to apologise.’

‘Will you excuse me for a moment?’

Ray got to his feet as June Flynn left the room for a second time. He crossed to the mantelpiece over the gas fire, where there were two framed photographs. One showed Russell and his parents when the boy could only have been about thirteen or fourteen. June Flynn looked happy and relaxed, not as gaunt and serious as the woman who now lived in the same house. Her husband stood slightly behind her wearing a pink button-down shirt, a thin black tie and a narrow-lapelled tweed jacket. He wore glasses that reflected the sunlight so that Ray could not see his eyes.

The other photograph showed Russell Flynn wearing his uniform with obvious pride, his blond hair combed back from a wide, clear forehead. Ray returned the photograph to its original position as he heard June Flynn coming back into the lounge. He stepped away from the fireplace and turned to face the room, assuming that she had perhaps gone to get her husband, but she had returned alone.

‘My husband and I would like you to have this,’ she said, holding an unidentified object out towards him.

Ray took a step closer and saw that she was holding a shell in the palm of her hand. It was a conch or a whelk — Ray was no expert — in perfect condition about three or four inches long.

‘May I?’ Ray said.

‘Please do.’

He took the shell and brought it up to his nose. It smelt only faintly of the sea. He held it up to his ear and gave his head a little shake, trying out a small, friendly smile.

June Flynn smiled too.

‘It was among his things,’ she said. ‘His personal effects. There wasn’t much, but there was this, and there was a diary, which I’m ashamed to say I read from cover to cover. I don’t think it contains anything he would not have wanted his mother to read.’

‘I’m sure,’ Ray said.

‘He wrote in his diary that you gave him the shell and that he liked you. It seems you looked out for him.’

Now Ray remembered picking the shell up off the beach and handing it to Flynn. He felt a sudden tightness at the back of his throat.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if we sit down again?’

‘Of course. Sorry.’

‘But I can’t accept this,’ Ray said, offering the shell back.

‘I would like you to. I have his diary. When I reread it, as I will many times, I’m sure, it will remind me of the shell and it will make me happy to think that you have it.’

‘If you’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

There was another silence, more comfortable this time.

‘I should go, June. You’ve been very kind letting me come to see you. And thank you for the shell.’

‘I’m very grateful to you for coming,’ she said.

They both stood up.

‘I’m sorry about my husband,’ she said. ‘He finds it very hard.’

‘I understand.’

She showed him into the hall and opened the front door.

‘Thanks again, Ray.’

‘Thank you, June.’

They shook hands and he stepped on to the drive, hearing the door shut behind him. As he drew level with the front bumper of the Morris Minor, he turned and looked at the house. A movement caught his eye. The bedroom window. The corner of a lace curtain.

At the end of Granada Place he turned right instead of left and found his way, via a small sheltered car parking area clearly intended for local residents, on to the field at the side of the Flynns’ house. He walked across it towards the stream — Briar Dene, June Flynn had called it — at the far side. A path led down through a copse. He imagined the younger Russell Flynn playing here. An only child, he would have relied on his imagination, playing one-sided games involving battles with various different enemies, making bivouacs and secret hiding places for sacred artefacts.

Ray thought about Russell Flynn’s father sitting in his bedroom throughout Ray’s visit. Either his own bedroom, or possibly his son’s. Maybe he had been too upset by the official visit from the RAF to be able to stomach another one, albeit unofficial? Maybe he blamed Ray for his son’s death, since it was known that Ray had been a passenger on board the Hercules at the time of the accident?

Ray climbed out of the shallow gully and looked back across the field towards the house at the end of Granada Place. He hoped that, whatever the reason had been for the boy’s father’s reluctance to come downstairs, he and his wife were now sharing each other’s company rather than remaining isolated in their own private grief.

He proceeded down to the road and crossed it to get to the links. Then he walked the short distance over the links to the beach. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers and walked on to the sand. A cold wind blew in off the sea. To the left was a lighthouse that could be reached by means of a causeway, which looked as if it would be inaccessible at high tide. To the right, a few miles to the south, lay the mouth of the Tyne. He kept on walking until he felt damp sand beneath his feet. Zanzibar had been somewhat warmer and arguably more beautiful than this, but he knew he had done the right thing by coming back. The sea, when he eventually felt wavelets washing over his bare feet, was icy cold. He put his hands in his pockets and found the shell that June Flynn had given him. He closed his fingers around it.

Life was short and unpredictable and Ray decided he would not spend a single second of it living in regret.

The house possesses a particular stillness. It is the stillness of a house you are not supposed to have entered. I think back to the time when Lewis mentioned that he habitually leaves certain doors unlocked and wonder if his mentioning it was deliberate. Did he want me to pick up on the line; did he want me to remember it? Or was he simply boasting that life here is like that? You can leave your door open without worry — who is going to come in? Or was he suggesting that he has nothing worth stealing? Since he has already lost what was dearest to him, what would it matter if burglars nicked his TV, his DVD player, his collection of Smiths albums? Actually, with regard to the latter, I might suggest they would be doing him a favour, although, as I’m always having to remind my students, since my opinion of the Smiths is irrelevant here, I have no business including it. It doesn’t buy its way into the piece.

Although maybe it demonstrates character, my not liking the Smiths? Perhaps it’s designed to show that I’m an outsider, a Mancunian in his forties who doesn’t like the Smiths.

I close the connecting door to the garage quietly behind me.

There is a low hum from the fridge, a dripping tap. Beyond these noises lie the stillness of empty rooms, the tension of untrodden stairs. I move out of the kitchen into the hall. At the other end of the hall is the front door. I am about to cross the hall to reach the living room when I hear the clatter of the gate and then through the stained glass of the front door I see a dark shape approaching the house. Adrenaline surges to aid flight, yet I know that the slightest movement will betray my presence. The figure bulks up in the stained glass, bulging and distorting as it reaches the door. There is a pause during which everything is still. The shape of the shadow alters slightly, then the letter box is shoved open with a brassy clang and something is thrust part of the way through. A final push and a piece of twice-folded glossy paper falls to the floor. Splashes of colour; distended typefaces; pornographic photographs of what would pass for food only among the starving.

The takeaway menu delivery guy retreats down the path and I hear the gate snap shut.

The next sound I hear is the breath rushing out of me. I look at my hands. They will take a moment to be still. To my left is the lounge. I am like a concert pianist waiting in the wings, trying to shake the tension out of my arms, before walking unsteadily through the open doorway.

I immediately clock the large framed photograph on the wall above the hearth and recognise it as the work of Neil Roland, a local photographer who has built a successful business on giving the public exactly what they want: tasteful images of their immediate surroundings. Stained glass, gateposts, doors; the colour red, the colour blue. Lewis’ TV, digibox and DVD player are in an alcove to the left of the Neil Roland picture. I look around and see a shelf of DVDs in the matching alcove on the other side of the hearth, which features a gas-fed coal-effect open fire. On the mantelpiece is an isolated photograph of Lewis’ wife and daughters in an expensive frame.

As I cross the room, someone walks past outside the house in the opposite direction. The downside for me in this being a neighbourhood where Lewis feels able to leave his door unlocked is the possibility that anyone passing by might know Lewis or me and suspect that I have no right to be inside his house. Yet it seems that the best course of action to avoid attracting attention is to act normally. So I stoop to check out his DVDs.

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.

I lay it down on the lawn, then immediately pick it up again and take it inside the house. I put it down on the kitchen table and study it. The pieces of plastic on the desk in my study are from the nose cone, one of the wings and a central section of the fuselage. I could go and get them and fit them into place, but there’s no hurry. The plane is not going anywhere. There are obviously other bits somewhere else in either my garden or theirs, because the damage to the plane is fairly extensive.

With a wingspan of about three feet, the model would have stood almost a foot off the ground with its undercarriage intact. A serious model aircraft, then, complete with engine, propeller, authentically detailed cockpit. An enthusiast’s much-loved toy.

I remember talking to Lewis in the pub about the pieces of red plastic.

I hear the cat flap and moments later Cleo jumps up on to the kitchen table and sniffs at the model plane.

‘What do you reckon to this, Cleo? What does Lewis know about this, eh?’

Why don’t you ask him?

‘Why don’t I ask him? Because I’m not sure I like the way this is developing. That DVD of his wife and daughters getting into that plane, which I think he wanted me to find. And now this, which I also can’t help thinking he wanted me to find.’

You won’t know for sure unless you ask him.

I stroke Cleo, from the top of her head, pressing back her ears until they lie perfectly flat, to the tip of her tail. I tickle her under her chin and, as usual, she lifts up her head and starts purring.

‘I don’t know.’

I arrive outside Lewis’ house. There’s a slight bite in the air, the sky clear. I’m wearing a little white cotton beanie. The DVD is in my pocket. I have been to a photo lab and had a copy made, which is now in my study.

I stand in his drive, still not sure what I am going to do. Either I tell him or I don’t. About the DVD. And about the model plane. Either he is in or he is not.

I take my hat off and stuff it in my pocket.

I knock on the door and wait. Someone walks past behind me. I turn around. Wearing a dirty raincoat and a flat cap and carrying a big striped laundry bag, it is Laundry Bag Man. He will deposit his bag on the pavement after twenty or thirty yards and go back for the other one. Laundry Bag Man always has two identical striped laundry bags with him, but seems unable to carry both of them at the same time. I don’t know what he keeps in his bags, but I doubt that it’s laundry.

I knock again.

I walk slowly to his garage door, open it and slip inside. I hear my heart beating faster as I approach the door to the kitchen. It, too, is unlocked. I enter the kitchen. Everything looks the same as before. I cross the hall to the living room and get down on my knees in front of the TV unit. I quickly remove the DVD-R, in its blank case, from my pocket and return it to where it had been when I found it.

As I am getting back to my feet I hear the clatter of the gate.

Without stopping to think, I scuttle back across the hall to the kitchen, rising to my feet once I can no longer see the front door. I cross the kitchen on my toes and wait to open the connecting door to the garage until I can hear Lewis’ key rattling in the lock of the front door. As he moves into the hall, I negotiate a route from the side of the garage to the front and take care to lift the main door on its hinges so that it does not scrape against the tarmac of the drive as I leave.

Walking home, heart still thumping as I overtake Laundry Bag Man, I reach into my pocket for my hat, but it is not there.

At home, even though it’s probably the last thing I should do, I watch the DVD again. The red dress, the little yellow hat. The woman walking past the windsock holding the hands of the children. The balding man with the paunch and the weak shoulder. The woman walking away, holding the hand of the child in the red dress. The other child, in the yellow hat, looking back at the man, undecided, torn. He seems to be offering some kind of promise. You wonder how much of an enticement it could be, looking at him. He doesn’t look as if he has a great deal to offer. But the child in the yellow hat is considering it. Maybe that’s all it takes? One child’s hesitation. The woman walking away, the child in the red dress. Shall we say the girl? The woman and the girl walking away. The other child, in the shorts and the yellow hat. Shall we say the girl in the case of this child as well? The woman walking away, the girl in the red dress. The girl in the yellow hat looking back. The balding man’s outstretched hand. His offer, promise, enticement. The outstretched hand.

The woman walking away from the camera, the first camera, holding both girls’ hands. They walk slowly. As if relaxed? As if obligated? Either or. Compliant? Reluctant? Either or. The girls hold her hand, trusting. They will follow her anywhere. Do what she says. She walks away from the camera, holding their hands. Past the horizontal windsock towards the man standing by the plane. His plane? Has he hired it? Does he own it? Can he even fly? Maybe he’s just showing it to them? Maybe all four will eventually leave together, on foot? Maybe the woman and the two girls will leave and the man will stay? Maybe he’s still there, waiting, the woman and the girls somewhere else, not coming back?

The woman walking away from the man, her mouth a straight line, eyes tiny black dots. The girl in the red dress holding her hand, compliant as before, but struggling slightly to keep up, perhaps? The skirt of her dress — and the dress of the woman — caught in the wind that tugs at the windsock. The girl in the yellow hat looking back. The man’s outstretched hand. The man’s slight paunch. His jeans belted beneath his little round stomach. The knees bagging out. One shoulder dipping slightly. The shoulder that carries the arm that connects to the hand that is outstretched. Maybe it’s lowered by the action of stretching out the hand? Maybe the stretched-out hand is too aggressive, the dipped shoulder the man’s way of compensating? He wants them all to come back but doesn’t want to coerce a small child. Doesn’t want to be seen to coerce a small child. The woman walking away. The child will join her. The three of them will walk away. He will be left standing there by the plane.

The plane, the four-seater plane moving down the runway, the grass runway. The wheels turning and turning. The plane moving down the runway. The wheels turning. The plane lifting, suddenly suspended, the wheels ceasing to turn. The plane moving forward, away from the camera, all of its seats apparently occupied. Is it the same plane the man had been standing beside? Is there an obvious gap in the field where his plane had been? Is this definitely the man’s plane? The four-seater plane moving down the runway. The wheels turning on the flattened grass. The sudden lift, the rise into the air, as if on a string. The careful steadying of the wings. The gradual ascent.

The phone rings. I pick it up.

‘Hello?’

Even to me, on my end of the phone, my voice sounds disembodied, alienated, suspicious.

‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’

I don’t have anything to say, so I remain silent.

‘So listen,’ Lewis says, ‘do you want to go on a walk or what?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let’s go out walking. We’ve got stuff to talk about.’

‘Have we?’

‘Yeah. Free tomorrow morning?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll pick you up at nine.’

‘Make it ten.’

‘Whatever.’

The moment I put the phone down it rings again. I pick it up.

‘What the fuck is it now?’

‘Paul Kinder?’

I don’t recognise the voice.

‘Yes?’

‘Delivery. I’m outside your house.’

I apologise and hang up. I run downstairs and open the door.

There’s a man on the doorstep wearing a blue driver’s uniform jacket over a Manchester United shirt. He has dark hair going grey cropped to the length of his stubble. A gap between his two front teeth and a bigger gap in the bottom set where he’s lost a tooth and not replaced it. A tattooed spider’s web crawls up the side of his neck from under the United shirt. He’s holding a bulky electronic device with a keypad, a little screen and a stylus attached by a curly plastic flex.

‘Sorry about that,’ I say.

‘No worries, mate. Expecting a chair?’

‘Er, yeah.’

‘Sign here.’

I sign and he steps aside to reveal the chair standing on the path behind him.

‘All yours, mate,’ he says.

‘Thanks.’

I carry the chair into the house and stand it in the hall for a moment. I get a knife from the kitchen and cut through the strong plastic wrapping. It is a black office chair with a wide curved back and sturdy armrests. Connected to the shaft under the seat are a number of controlling levers. It’s quite heavy and an awkward shape, but I manage to carry it upstairs without crashing into the wall or having to take a break. I wheel it into my study. I pull my old chair away from my desk and slide the new one into place. Finally, slowly and with a certain amount of ceremony, I lower myself on to the chair and feel it gently sigh at it takes my weight.

It offers my back lots of support and is extremely comfortable. As it should be, given how much I’ve paid for it.

It is a Herman Miller Aeron chair.

It is the chair that Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton, Francesca Simon and Siri Hustvedt all use.

Since coming back from Zanzibar and then shortly afterwards visiting Russell Flynn’s family in Whitley Bay, Ray had spent most of his time living in a small flat in Whalley Range, Manchester, trying to decide what to do with his life. He visited his parents in Hyde. With Ray’s blessing they adopted Nicholas. The boy called them his Nana and Grandad; Ray was Daddy, and Mummy, if Nicholas ever asked, was in heaven. Ray felt a little uneasy about this, but he accepted that it had to be his parents’ choice what they told the boy since they were giving his son a home and an upbringing, and in any case, Ray couldn’t think of a better alternative.

Ray read a lot — poetry, mainly — and applied to university with a view to perhaps taking teacher-training qualifications in due course. He was aware of England winning the World Cup at Wembley — it was hard not to be — but football had never been among his interests and the way the RAF had handled the death of Flynn had dealt a blow to his sense of national pride.

William Dunstan’s trial was set for September at the Old Bailey. It meant missing the start of university, but Ray had no choice. He would be called as a witness. Even if he hadn’t been required to attend, he would have done so. He owed it to Flynn and he was curious about Dunstan.

Over the summer he listened to a lot of jazz at home and went to concerts in Southport, Stockport and Manchester. He was living on a small pension from the RAF, which he thought of as blood money; he supplemented it with a few shillings earned collecting glasses at pubs around Ardwick.

The RAF offered to find him accommodation in London, but he preferred not to have to rely on their help and sorted himself out with a bedsit in Earls Court. He visited some of the local pubs, which appeared to be favoured by either Australians or homosexuals. Either way, the company was overwhelmingly male.

On the opening day of the trial, having been told that he might be called on the first day but equally might not be, Ray was led to the witnesses’ room. There were two other people present. One, a stocky man wearing a blue suit with his red hair shaved up the back of the neck, was sitting with his back to the door. Ray had only ever seen Henshaw in his engineer’s overalls, but he was easily recognisable from behind. The other man, a court usher, exchanged a few quiet remarks with the woman who had escorted Ray, before she left again.

Ray found his thoughts escaping from the room like smoke and drifting into another part of the building. He pictured Billy Dunstan, sat in profile in the dock. Composed, erect and alert, impeccably turned out in his squadron leader’s uniform, he would cut quite a different figure from the dashing individual in his leather flying jacket and white silk scarf. His dark reddish-brown hair, glistening with Brylcreem, would be combed straight back from his forehead, with a severe side parting. Ray tried to imagine Dunstan’s barrister, and his opposite number, but found that he couldn’t.

Which of them, Ray wondered, would he end up doing battle with? It depended which version of the truth he told. How important was it to mention, for example, the sexual attraction between Dunstan and the nurses he was trying to impress? It only had to be mentioned and it would stick. It would help to convict. All Ray had to do was stay away from that angle. The nurses were on the plane because they had been invited by Flight Lieutenant Campbell. With Campbell having been drawn away to Pemba Island, Dunstan had merely sought to avoid the nurses’ disappointment by still allowing them on board. He was a kind man, a gentleman. What happened to Flynn was a terrible accident, a tragedy.

It would depend on what Frankie and Joan, the nurses, said on oath.

And on what Ray said, too.

Ray had never seen justice operate at first hand, and while he understood it and knew how it was meant to work, he felt anxious. What if the defence barrister wasn’t as persuasive as the prosecutor? Supposing the defence had the balance of evidence slightly in their favour, but the prosecuting barrister was the more accomplished orator and cross-examiner? An innocent man might easily go down. Or a guilty man get off. It all rested on the intelligence of the jury, on their ability to see through all the arguments, specious and otherwise. They had to be able to see through, say, the prosecutor’s efforts to establish a defendant’s guilt even when it was clear to everyone in the room that the man was not guilty.

In the case of Dunstan, Ray was still undecided.

Ray’s reverie was interrupted by the sound of the door opening. He looked up and saw the two nurses, Joan and Frankie, entering the room. He caught Frankie’s eye, but she immediately looked away, first at Joan and then down at the ground. Joan didn’t look in his direction. Together the two women sat in a similar position relative to Ray as Henshaw, although several seats away from the engineer, and Ray was left to contemplate the backs of their heads as they leaned close and whispered to one another.

The first day was adjourned and Ray was yet to be called. He decided to walk back to Earls Court. His route took him through Covent Garden into Soho, where he stopped for a drink in the Golden Lion on Dean Street. He got himself a half and sat at a table on his own, but it wasn’t long before a man came and sat opposite him, without asking if the seat were free. The man was wearing a denim jacket, a T-shirt bearing an illegible slogan, and a pair of jeans. The newcomer launched into a conversation that seemed as if it had already been started earlier. He asked Ray if he liked the pub and if he thought he might want to come there again. Ray didn’t know what to say and he kept his replies short, but there was something in the man’s appeal Ray found hard to resist. Possibly it was nothing more than the fact that the man clearly wanted something — and wanted something from Ray.

Ray couldn’t deny he felt pleased to be wanted.

After a while, the man asked fewer questions, but they became more pointed. Encouraged by Ray’s answers, the man gave him some directions. Eventually the man got up and left the pub and Ray walked out behind him, following him to a public toilet just off Shaftesbury Avenue. Ray waited for a moment while the man went in and then he went in also. The light in the toilet was completely different from that outside. There were skylights, but they were of thick glass and the air inside was damp and gloomy. There was a smell of disinfectant and pools of water on the floor. The attendant’s heavy wooden door appeared locked. On the right-hand side were four cubicles, faced by a urinal on the left. Ray walked up to the third cubicle along, which was shut. He gave a short double-knock and immediately heard a bolt being drawn back within. The door was pulled open and Ray stepped inside. The man, whose semi-erect penis was poking out of the fly of his jeans, pushed the door shut behind Ray and locked it.

Without speaking, the man sat on the pulled-down toilet seat and placed his hands on Ray’s belt. His eyes swivelled upwards to seek approval. Ray felt incapable of voluntary movement and imagined — hoped, even, although he would have not liked to admit it — that his lack of any signal would be taken as acquiescence.

The man unbuckled Ray’s belt, unzipped his fly and lowered his trousers, followed by his underpants. He started to rub and stroke Ray’s penis, which responded by becoming stiffer, longer, heavier. The man glanced up at Ray, who was looking down on what was taking place with something close to disbelief. The man might have thought that the expression on Ray’s face was a smile. It might even have actually been a smile.

The man put Ray’s penis in his mouth and started to move his head backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. His left hand alternately encircling Ray’s penis at the root and lightly squeezing his testicles, the man moved his right hand down to his own penis, which Ray could see was now fully engorged. The man moved his right hand quickly up and down the shaft of his own penis while continuing to suck on Ray’s and to fondle his balls. After a few moments, the man convulsed and jerked backwards as he ejaculated. He stopped rubbing himself, but his penis remained hard and erect and white in the greenish underwater light of the cubicle as he continued to do what he was doing to Ray, who was trying to shut down the workings of his own mind so that he might relax enough to achieve the same kind of release. Suddenly into his mind popped an image of himself on the beach at Whitley Bay, the damp sand under his feet, the hard convolutions of the shell in his hand, the tall white lighthouse rising out of the sea. The feeling — the conviction — that life was short and unpredictable. The promise that he would not live in regret. And he suddenly exploded with the very opposite of regret, with joy, a great, spontaneous, shocking rush of joy.

And the man grinned as he wiped his face with the back of his hand.

In the morning, just before ten, there’s a knock on the door. I open it.

‘Ksssh—’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, interrupting him, although I notice he’s not looking as annoyingly chipper as usual. The annoyingly chipper look, though, is, I suspect, paper-thin.

‘Shall we go for a drive?’ he says.

‘I thought we were going for a walk.’

‘Summat I want to show you. We can go in your car.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘I thought you were picking me up.’

‘My car’s fucked, mate.’

‘Right. Hang on.’

I go back inside for the keys. This is a bad idea, I can tell. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant.

‘Come on then,’ I say, locking the front door behind me and opening the car.

Lewis sits with his legs far apart, so that I keep knocking his right knee with the gearstick. He neither apologises nor makes any effort to move his leg.

‘Where are we going, then?’ I ask him.

‘Get on to the M60,’ he says. ‘Westbound.’

For some reason I’d expected us to be going in the opposite direction.

‘Are you going to tell me where we’re going or what?’

‘I’ll direct you,’ he says, adding, ‘if that’s all right.’

It’s my turn to say ‘Whatever’.

The motorway is pretty quiet, unlike Lewis.

‘All that teaching you do,’ he says, ‘do you enjoy it?’

‘Depends,’ I say.

‘On what?’

‘On how good they are, or how willing they are to take advice.’

‘Which ones are willing to take advice? The good ones or the others?’

I see the gilt domes and trashy cupolas of the Trafford Centre coming up on the right-hand side.

‘Generally,’ I say, ‘the worse they are, the more resistant they are to accepting any advice at all, whether it’s from me or the other students.’

‘Take the next exit,’ he says. ‘What about the good ones?’

‘Now and again,’ I say, indicating to leave the motorway, ‘you get someone who’s very good and knows it and doesn’t really see the point in listening to what anyone’s got to say about their stuff. Left or right?’

‘Left. Maybe they’re right?’ he says as I change down into second and my hand knocks his knee.

‘In one or two cases, maybe, but then what are they doing on the course? The best ones might know they’re doing something right but they’re keen to take on board any advice, whether it’s from me or anyone else in the group.’

‘Straight on,’ Lewis says. ‘Anyway. It’s not like anyone buys books any more.’

We drive in silence for a while. Salteye Brook is on our left — the old course of the River Irwell — hidden behind a long line of redbrick houses with white PVC window frames and the shortest front paths in Manchester.

‘It does sometimes seem,’ I say finally, in response to his last comment, ‘as if there are more people studying creative writing than there are people buying books. Even some of those who want to write can hardly be bothered to read.’

‘Turn right here,’ Lewis says, pointing across my chest.

I turn into the car park and pull into a free space at the end, killing the engine.

‘Ta,’ says Lewis as he opens his door and gets out.

‘You’re welcome,’ I mutter as I open my own door.

Barton Aerodrome was opened in 1930, the first purpose-built municipal airport in the UK. It was intended to be the Manchester airport but within a short time it became obvious that the boggy terrain would not support the heavier aircraft coming into service, and plans were drawn up for Ringway to the south of the city. Renamed City Airport Manchester in 2007, it remains a busy airfield for general aviation. Some eighty or so private owners keep their Pipers and Cessnas there, paying fees to the airfield authority for the privilege.

Lewis leads me through the little gate on to the airfield itself. No security here. Apart from the CCTV cameras that I see bolted to the brickwork of the control tower and affixed to a couple of free-standing poles.

To our left, fifty or sixty planes are parked in neat rows, all facing the same direction — west. Ahead of us, the grass runway that I recognise from the DVD runs from left to right, west to east. And to the right, a few more planes, scattered more randomly than the larger group.

I experience a strange sense of temporal displacement as I scan the endless green for a glimpse of the red dress or the little yellow hat. I realise I don’t know what colour dress the woman was wearing. I can picture her walking away from the camera — I look up for the right camera to orient myself within the field of that shot — but I can’t remember what colour dress she was wearing.

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.

‘Well prepared,’ I said and we both laughed.

‘That was nice,’ I said.

‘Very nice,’ she agreed.

She busied herself with a tissue and I belted my trousers and she pulled down the sun visor and adjusted her make-up in the mirror and I pressed the on/off switch on the cassette player and ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime’ by the Korgis squirmed synthetically out of the loudspeakers. I looked at her and we both burst out laughing. We tried to sing along, but we got the giggles. At the end of the track, she switched it off and we sat there in silence for a while, occasionally smiling to ourselves.

‘It’ll be all right, you know, with Tony,’ I said.

‘And you’ll be fine with Veronica,’ she countered.

‘Everything will work out,’ I said.

‘It’ll be like this never happened,’ she said.

And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ and I laughed and after a moment she laughed too.

She offered me a lift.

‘What, to Feltham?’ I said. ‘You want to introduce me to Tony?’

She smiled, then the smile quickly vanished and a look of worry crossed her face for the first time.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘This can’t happen again,’ she said.

‘I know. I know it can’t,’ I said. ‘Veronica wouldn’t hear of it.’

She looked at me with the kind of look a parent gives a naughty child.

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I’ll get the Tube. You gave me a lift to the Tube, that’s all.’

‘Go on, bugger off,’ she said and leaned over towards me.

I tilted across to meet her lips and her rebuttoned blouse gaped in front of me and just at that moment a 747 flew over the car, making it vibrate. We lingered on the kiss for a moment, then parted and I caught her looking at me. It was a look that suggested to me that this whole one-off thing was not necessarily going to work. Not because I was so irresistible or anything. I didn’t have any illusions about that. But there was something in the look, something I’d noticed at several points during the staff development weekend. A mixture of panic, abandon, desire. It almost felt like a dare.

As I reluctantly pulled away, I reached into the rear of the car and caught hold of her bra.

‘Don’t forget this,’ I said.

She smiled and I reached for the door handle, grabbing my bag from the footwell.

‘See you.’

‘See you.’

On the Tube back into London I sat opposite a young mother and her two small children. They were too young to be fighting with each other and causing her problems of that kind, but they were hard work all the same. She wiped their noses and checked their nappies and gently admonished them when they tried to climb on to my seat. By the time the train reached Acton Town, she looked worn out and I was experiencing a full-blown attack of remorse. I felt that my guilt was stamped across my forehead for everyone to read — this woman, the other passengers, even the woman’s tiny innocent children. How would Veronica not see it there the moment I walked in the door?

I got off the Tube at Hammersmith and phoned home from a call box. The conversation was a little strained, almost as if she already knew. But this was silly. She was just reaching the end of a long weekend’s solo childcare and wanted me back to take them off her. She needed a break. ‘Where are you?’ she said.

I wondered that myself.

The pact that Susan Ashton and I had made, such as it was, lasted about a week. I struggled through the days, feeling guilty about what had happened when I was at home and watching Veronica feeding the twins, and guilty about the fact that, whenever I saw Susan Ashton at work, I wanted it to happen again.

Above all, I felt depressed by the predictability of it all, by the fact that it was such a terrible cliché. I was a weak male, easily tempted. I had spent a weekend away from the company of my wife, leaving her to look after our very young children, and I had succumbed to the oldest temptation in the world. And then I felt guilty that I was more upset by its being a cliché than I was about the fact that I had cheated on my wife and that I wanted to do it again.

I watched Veronica while she slept and I knew that nothing had changed, really, between the two of us. I still loved her and I felt she probably still loved me, but we had allowed the stress of childcare to obscure that love, to get in the way. We had reacted to perceived injustices in the division of labour in a tiresomely predictable and destructive way, bitching and sniping at each other, sometimes at home just the four of us, but also on the few occasions we got to go out and be with other people. We bitched about each other when we were out separately with our own friends and we bitched about each other when we were out together with mutual friends. We’d see them looking at each other, perhaps in recognition, but more likely in grateful realisation that someone’s marriage was in a worse state than their own. So they thought.

Susan Ashton stopped by my desk in a crowded office on a spurious errand and typed out a message in the document I had open on screen.

Do you want to go for a drink after work?

I thought about it for two seconds and then typed a reply.

Go on, then.

She walked off and I watched her go. When she reached the doorway, she didn’t look back.

I deleted the messages and met her after work.

We sat in an alcove in a basement bar sipping halves of lager.

‘What a cliché!’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘I just… Nothing,’ I said, since I could see that she didn’t know what I was talking about.

She caught my hand under the table and held on to it. I could feel a pulse where the tip of my finger pressed against the base of her thumb, but I didn’t know whose it was. I could smell a powerful scent coming off her and I didn’t think it had come out of a bottle. She was wearing a blouse, as she had been at the weekend, and again it was unbuttoned a little further than you might expect it to be. I imagined her unfastening a button or two as she stepped down into the gloom of this empty bar (we had left work separately and she had arrived first) and I felt both excited in a visceral, animal sense and overwhelmingly tired at the same time, and not just physically. I didn’t want this to happen. All I had to do was explain that to her, briefly, remind her of what we had agreed, and leave, walk up the stairs into the sunlight and not look back. Quit the job if necessary, get another. It wasn’t like I was wedded to my employer like I was wedded to Veronica. There were a dozen jobs like mine available at any one time.

And at the same time I did want it to happen. A part of me wanted it to happen. Something in my stomach wanted it to happen. Something in my trousers wanted it to happen. But also something in my brain. Something in my brain both wanted it to happen and wanted it not to happen.

Either it would happen or it wouldn’t happen. And if it happened, either it would fuck everything up or it wouldn’t. And if it fucked everything up, either I would end up having to kill myself or I wouldn’t.

We finished our drinks and I let Susan Ashton leave first. I got another drink and sat in the semi-darkness brooding, worrying, flipping coins in my head.

When I got home, Veronica was in the kitchen with the children. She was hovering with a cloth while they spooned food into their mouths, occasionally missing.

‘Hello honey,’ she said, getting up to kiss me.

‘Hello darling,’ I said. ‘How’s my favourite girl? Oops, I mean how are my favourite girls?’

Laura giggled. She didn’t necessarily know what was funny, but she had learned to laugh at the joke.

‘Have you been for a drink?’ Veronica asked.

I looked at her quizzically.

‘I can taste it.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A few of the lads were going out. Someone’s birthday.’

Veronica smiled and I leaned in to wipe some food away from Jonathan’s chin. I saw the tiny round scar at the corner of his eye, caused by his sister having accidentally caught him with a pencil. At least, we hoped it was accidental.

Although I stayed in the kitchen and helped clean up and then cooked our food, I felt as if I wasn’t there, as if I had already moved out into some miserable bedsit where I would barely have enough shelf space for my copies of my own book, which had been published to widespread apathy the year before, never mind my library. I knew what I had to do. I just didn’t know if I could do it.

At the weekend, I told Veronica a despicable lie and took a train from Waterloo to Feltham. I walked the short distance from the station to the address Susan Ashton had given me, my stomach churning not so much with butterflies as with unknown lacy-winged insects, patent-leather beetles and hairy moths like winged cigars.

We had sex in her bed with sunlight slanting in through the slats of the silver venetian blind. I could hear the planes coming in to land a mile or so to the north, but the noise was too faint. It lacked detail, character, specificity. The deep bass rumble of a 747 was inaudible at that distance. I couldn’t feel the vibration in my bones. In purely mechanical terms it was good sex, but the tenderness was simulated. We didn’t talk, or if we did what we said meant nothing, like the sex. Susan Ashton was beautiful, but the connection between us was an illusion, an accident of time and place. The artificiality of the previous weekend. The car park. The expensive leather seats of her Golf GTI. The planes. Most of the time it seemed to me that she was switched off. Now and then she would flicker into life and you’d see it in her eyes and you’d want her, or you’d want some small part of her. You didn’t really want her and she didn’t really want you.

Nevertheless.

‘That was nice,’ I said.

‘Very nice,’ she agreed.

‘Of course, it must never happen again,’ I said.

‘Of course not.’

But I meant it this time.

I took the train back to Waterloo and switched to the Tube. When I got home, Veronica and the children were out. I filled a bucket with warm soapy water and cleaned the bathroom. I scrubbed the surfaces until they shone. I went through the kitchen cupboards and threw out everything that was past its sell-by date. I ran out to the shops and bought new stuff. I filled the fruit bowl and arranged some flowers in a vase. I didn’t question whether Veronica would see through all of this. I just did it. By mid-afternoon I had finished and was beginning to get a bit twitchy. No note had been left. We didn’t generally do much on a Saturday, just tended to hang around the house. I had thought the only place they were likely to be was the park, but not for this long. By the end of the afternoon I was checking in Veronica’s wardrobe and in the kids’ drawers to see if there were any unexplained gaps. I sat in my tiny box-room study. I switched the computer on and switched it off again. I sat on my swivel chair and spun around. The dummies made the room seem even smaller than it was. I had a full-size female dummy and two child-size mannequins that I’d picked up from second-hand shops on the Holloway Road. Veronica didn’t mind them, she said, as long as they stayed in my room.

They weren’t going anywhere.

‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’ I said, my voice loud in the empty house.

I looked at the bookcase. At the end of one shelf at eye level was a row of orange spines with black lettering. Bigger than A-format, slightly larger even than B-format, but not quite C. A somewhat awkward size, in other words. My novel, published the year before. Out of print, forgotten by the few people who had bought it and read it or been sent a review copy and never opened it. I took one out from the row, held it up to my nose and flicked through the pages. It had never had a smell, so I don’t know why I expected it to have acquired one over time. I looked at the publisher’s name at the bottom of the spine. A one-man operation whom few people had ever heard of publishing a book no one wanted to read. That was fair enough. If a book was rejected by all the publishers in town, that was generally thought to be a sign that it was either no good or it could not be imagined that anyone would want to read it. Or not enough people, anyway. Smaller publishers existed for the more marginal stuff and somehow they survived on subsidies or by having the odd surprise success. Most of these, too, had rejected my novel. I didn’t blame them for it. I was grateful to the publisher who had taken it on. He’d done a couple of books before. He was smaller than the small presses. He would not have been expecting to have the odd surprise success.

I’d been toying with ideas, writing experimental passages, when I’d met Veronica. Meeting her had seemed to galvanise me and I’d written the book in a couple of years, in snatched moments, late at night, early in the morning, finishing it when the twins were about a year old. Veronica wasn’t sure about it. It was macabre, she said, as if that were a criticism, which I guessed it was if you didn’t like the macabre. I understood why she didn’t really like it a great deal, and I didn’t pretend it was just because she was a lawyer and didn’t read a lot of fiction. She thought it was all a bit close, uncomfortably so. The female character in the book could be her, she said. The children could be ours. It wasn’t, and they weren’t, but I understood the objection.

When I’d started sending it out, the reactions of publishers had shown a degree of consistency. It was overwritten, it was too weird, it was unlikely to gain a mass audience.

I heard the door and quickly slid the book back into the row of identical volumes, aware that in my haste I had caught the bottom corner and it would now be folded over.

Veronica seemed happy and the children were excitable. They had been to a museum and had ice creams and come back on the Tube. I thanked Veronica and she smiled her acknowledgement.

‘I’m knackered,’ she said before collapsing like a rag doll on to the settee and making the children explode into fits of giggles.

‘Do you know what time it is, children?’ I asked in my giant’s voice.

They looked at me wide-eyed and waited.

‘BATH TIME,’ I roared and ran to scoop them up, one under each arm as usual.

There were more giggles as they fought to escape and I heard Veronica faintly saying, ‘It’ll end in tears,’ as I headed for the stairs with the children.

They eventually quietened down enough to be sat in the bath and given a good clean. Downstairs I heard Veronica opening a bottle of wine and then the clink of glass. As I played with the children, a number of thoughts drifted through my mind. This was what I treasured. Again it was a cliché, but a good cliché. This was what was important to me, not a fling with a colleague. I wondered vaguely if I would be saying the same thing if the sex the second time, in Susan Ashton’s bedroom in Feltham, had been as good as the first time, in her car at Hatton Cross Underground station car park. But this wasn’t a helpful thought. I was glad the second time had not been as good. It had helped me realise sooner rather than later that I was making a colossal mistake.

Ray’s day in court finally came. From the moment he heard his name called in that great dark echoing chamber of a courthouse he felt as if he was outside himself watching the proceedings. He heard his own voice answer the questions that were put to him, whether they came from the prosecuting or the defending barrister, truthfully. His answers betrayed no suggestion of bias or preference. Here was a man, they seemed to say, who was present when the event took place and who has come here today to tell us, in his own words, what happened. He neither invented nor embellished. He offered not his impression of events, but his record of what took place. Where any gap in the narrative existed he did not try to fill it with conjecture or fantasy.

When all of the questions had been asked, he was thanked and dismissed and as he left the stand he felt a strange, almost visceral reconnection with himself. No longer was he observing himself from above. There was no doubt in his mind that he had done the right thing. There would be moments of sorrow, he sensed, but he would not allow them to consume him. They would not define him. He would rise above them and move on.

From the dock, Squadron Leader William Dunstan turned to look at Ray, but Ray felt no guilt, only a twinge of regret that this man, this beautiful man, would be beyond his reach, not only for the length of his sentence, but for ever.

From the Old Bailey, Ray walked to Soho and entered the Golden Lion on Dean Street. The man was not there, but other men were.

Later, he bought a cheap bound notebook from an oriental supermarket in Chinatown and sat in a noisy café writing notes, ideas, scraps of poems. When he was asked later, years later, when had he started writing, he always said it was that night. It was months before he produced anything he thought was worth sending off. But when he did start writing decent stuff, as he thought, he didn’t allow rejection to stand in his way. He kept on writing and typing and sticking stamps on envelopes. His first offer of acceptance came from a relatively new magazine called Ambit. The editor, Martin Bax, wrote Ray a short note saying the editors had enjoyed his poem very much and would like to include it in the next issue. He was offered a small fee and encouraged to send in more work as and when he produced it.

Ray never did take up his university place in Manchester. His attendance at Dunstan’s trial meant he missed enrolment and his simultaneous entry into London’s homosexual subculture reduced his desire to return to live in Manchester, where he imagined the opportunities for experimentation and exploration would be thinner on the ground. The poetry magazines were mostly based in London, which was also where the more interesting live events tended to be put on. The Royal Albert Hall had been full to hear Allen Ginsberg perform at the International Poetry Incarnation a couple of years earlier. Because of his success with Ambit, which continued to publish his poetry, Ray took part in a reading that the magazine organised at the ICA with a new writer called J. G. Ballard who was making waves in science fiction. Ray let his hair grow down to his shoulders; a moustache appeared. The poems kept coming and they featured in a growing selection of magazines: London Magazine, Bananas, Samphire. Alan Ross even lofted the idea of a collection from London Magazine Editions. Ray demurred, not wishing to appear presumptuous. He had not been writing long, he said, and wasn’t so sure he had a collection in him. He had been reading widely and making new discoveries all the time. Peter Redgrove, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were writers whose work he admired. At the same time he found himself brushing shoulders with the likes of Christopher Logue, Michael Horovitz and Lee Harwood at readings and launches. His name started appearing on guest lists and if you had been invited into his humble Earls Court bedsit at any point from the turn of the decade you would have seen a number of invitations on stiff card leaning against the mirror above his mantelpiece. He was the first person to suggest, in a series of poems published in London Magazine, that Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionist, was perhaps not so abstract after all. The large black and grey paintings of 1969 and 1970 were pictures of the moon, Ray argued. The poems were well reviewed in the TLS and Ray began to feel as if he belonged, although he had yet to broach the subject of sexuality in his work.

In 1971, feeling restless, he requested permission to visit Dunstan in Pentonville Prison, but this was denied. Instead he took the train to Manchester. He had continued to make regular trips to the north-west to see Nicholas. His parents were entering their sixties yet still seemed more than up to the job of rearing his son. They appeared neither to enjoy life nor find it an intolerable burden. But that had always been the case. Ray tried to raise the subject of Nicholas’ continued care without being overly explicit. Partly he feared offending his parents by suggesting that they might like to offload the responsibility. Yet he knew that taking over parenting duties would hardly sit well with his lifestyle. The status quo persisted by default.

An only child with elderly guardians, Nicholas was a bright and reasonably self-sufficient eight-year-old. He had been told the facts about his mother and he knew who his father was.

At the end of any one of his visits, Ray would stand at the gatepost and look back. Nicholas would be standing just in front of his grandparents on the path by the front door, his nana’s hand resting on the top of his head.

Returning to London, Ray would throw himself into the life he was living with even more gusto, enthusiasm and hedonistic abandon. He divided his time between the Tate Gallery, the Cross at Vauxhall and the cruising grounds of the West Heath. At the same time, the work seemed to pour out of him. Someone from one of the magazines had a word with a small independent publisher and almost without Ray having to lift a finger a collection appeared in the next catalogue. As publication neared, Ray needed to be around more. The gaps between the trips to Manchester got longer until it was little more than an annual visit at Christmas. Nicholas’ birthday was difficult for Ray. For all his living life to the full as a single man, Ray was still and would always be a widower. That pain never went away. It just became duller and then would flare up again at certain times or when prompted by events.

Ray’s debut collection, The Beach, was published in autumn 1978. Ted Hughes was among those present at the launch party. Ray was introduced to the future Poet Laureate and he shyly confessed that without Hughes’ example he might never have attempted to marry nature with humanity. He said that his poem ‘The Mynah Bird’ had been intended as a tribute to Hughes’ ‘Crow’. During a lull, Ray found himself at the drinks table taking small gulps from a glass of champagne in readiness for another that was in the process of being poured when a man in a wide-lapelled velvet jacket and flared jeans approached him, placing a hand on his arm.

‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’ said the newcomer.

‘I certainly don’t, no,’ said Ray as he turned to look at the man, whose reddish-brown hair was styled in a wiry bouffant that had been fashionable a year or so before. The straggly moustache had never really been in vogue. Ray himself had shaved off his own moustache when he had acquired a crew cut in 1977. It was the man’s eyes that struck Ray. They were deep-set, wary, suspicious, even hostile. This was a man who had had good looks and lost them, a man who had deliberately shed them. Good looks in prison were a burden.

‘Squadron Leader Dunstan,’ said Ray.

‘Just Bill nowadays,’ said Dunstan.

‘Bill.’

‘So, you seem to be doing well for yourself, Corporal.’

‘Bill, I…’

‘What? You’re sorry? You don’t know what came over you?’

‘How long have you been out?’

‘A while.’

Dunstan took the glass of champagne from Ray’s hand and downed its contents in one. He held it out to the waiter to get it refilled, then sipped at his second glass.

‘How did you find me?’ said Ray.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Cross. I go to all the launch parties.’

‘Was it hard?’ Ray asked.

‘What, prison? You get used to it. If you don’t, you go under.’

‘That boy had his whole life ahead of him,’ Ray said, pre-empting Dunstan.

‘I didn’t tell him to climb on top of that truck.’

‘You were flying the plane that cut off his head.’ Ray stared hard into Dunstan’s dark, quick little eyes. Emboldened by drink, he went on. ‘All for your own entertainment and to impress a couple of nurses.’

‘I seem to remember you being present,’ Dunstan said, adding slyly, ‘with your own unsavoury agenda.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘Quite the poet, aren’t we?’

‘If you’ll excuse me…’

‘If you’ll excuse me. You’d never have lasted in my squadron if I’d have known your dirty little secret. You’d have been out on your ear.’

Ray was aware of a gap having opened up between the two of them and the rest of the celebrants, almost as if a space had been cleared in which they would fight.

‘There was no dirty little secret, as you put it. I had just lost my wife.’

‘Your family. That’s an interesting topic of conversation. How interested would they be in the sordid details of your so-called lifestyle?’

‘You know nothing about me or the way I live my life.’

‘It’s amazing how chatty some people get when you’re maintaining their habit.’

Ray stared into the black holes of Dunstan’s eyes.

A third person joined them. Ray’s editor brought an immediate calming influence.

‘Everything all right, Ray?’ asked his editor with a smile.

‘This gentleman was just leaving,’ Ray said.

‘He’s right,’ said Dunstan. ‘I was just leaving. I’ve got what I came for.’ From the pocket of his velvet jacket he slid out a copy of Ray’s book.

‘I hope you signed it, Ray,’ the editor said, placing his hand on his author’s shoulder.

‘His signature’s all over it,’ said Dunstan before turning his back and walking in a straight line towards the exit.

‘Funny chap,’ said the editor. ‘Friend of yours, Ray?’

‘Not exactly, no,’ Ray said, watching the space Dunstan’s disappearing back had filled. ‘Someone I used to know. Or thought I used to know.’

The encounter with Dunstan at the launch party had left Ray troubled, in particular the former squadron leader’s mention of Ray’s family. To reassure himself more than anything, Ray took the train to Manchester and followed the by now familiar route out to Hyde.

Everything appeared normal in the Cross household. Nicholas, now fifteen, was as tall and broad as Ray and took a bigger shoe size. Ray suggested a game of snooker in Gee Cross, where he bought his son a half of bitter. Nicholas surprised him by buying the next round. It seemed to Ray that they were more like uncle and nephew than father and son, but there was no denying their actual relationship. It just wasn’t a subject for conversation.

The idea that Dunstan might show his face around Manchester and seek to cause trouble was a worry, but in the end it was the TLS that broke some difficult news to Ray’s parents.

They were sitting in the lounge. The television was on but no one was really watching it. Maybe Ray’s parents were, but neither Ray nor Nicholas were paying it much attention. Nicholas was finishing off some homework on the floor — he was doing well at school — and Ray was missing London. From his position on the settee, at the other end of which his mother was sitting, he could just reach the magazine rack with his feet. He pulled off his sock and went fishing among the contents of the rack with his toes. Radio Times, Manchester Evening News, TLS, Woman’s Weekly.

TLS.

What were his parents doing with the Times Literary Supplement? Where had they even got hold of it? In other circumstances a proud son might have sent his parents a copy of the issue containing a generous review of his first collection of poems, but the reviewer in this case had interpreted a number of the poems in terms of the author’s presumed sexuality. Presumed around literary London, perhaps, but not in east Manchester. And even then only presumed or guessed at. Ray had never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, but he wasn’t a fool. He had known that people would talk and that talk had a way of spreading from one community to another. But from Bloomsbury to Hyde? He had feared the intervention of an embittered ex-con, but Dunstan had been beaten to it — at least as far as putting Ray’s parents in the picture was concerned.

Ray turned to look at his father, ensconced in the armchair across the narrow room. His face didn’t leave the television, but he gave what Ray interpreted as a tut of disapproval.

Ray returned to London the following day without having had that conversation with his mother and father. He imagined they would have said nothing to Nicholas and he also guessed they would have removed the TLS from the magazine rack and either used it to light a fire or — and here he knew he was pushing it a little — perhaps his mother might have hidden it away somewhere or, at the very least, used it to line a drawer.

The way Veronica found out about Susan Ashton was stupid and regrettable and avoidable and all my fault. We were having a rather pointless conversation about dashboard displays in different makes of car. Particularly the colours used. We were bored with orange. The idea of getting a new car had been proposed some weeks earlier, since ours was not in great shape and we could probably just about afford to replace it. Each time the subject came up, we discussed a different aspect of design or specifications. On this occasion we were talking about dashboard design. I said I liked the red and the blue of a VW dashboard. I even used the phrase ‘jazz-club blue and traffic-light red’.

Veronica asked when I had ever seen the inside of a VW and instead of quickly inventing this or that owner of a Passat or Polo whom I knew well enough for them to have given me a lift, or whatever other plausible explanation might have come to mind if I had been able to think a little faster on my feet, I hesitated, and that hesitation was what caught Veronica’s interest. Maybe it was her lawyer’s training, her hours of cross-examination, or maybe it would have been obvious to just about anybody that I had taken an unnecessary pause before answering. And then there was the answer itself.

‘I don’t know, someone gave me a lift once.’

‘At night?’

‘I don’t know. Why at night? What do you mean?’

I could hear my voice getting whiny.

‘When the headlights are on,’ she said, ‘the dashboard will glow.’

I could feel myself getting flustered.

‘What’s the big deal?’ I said.

I could feel blood rising to my face.

She questioned me for an hour. Whose car was it? Where was I going? How many times was I driven in this car? I protested feebly, but with horrible self-righteousness, that I was not in a court of law, that I should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. But that clearly was another mistake on my part. I was in a hole and I couldn’t seem to stop digging. We established an uneasy truce and slept on it, but in the morning she was cold and distant. She went off to work and I took the children to nursery and then I went to work as well.

When I came home I saw that, unusually, she had got home before me. She was in my study going through my desk drawers, picking books on the shelves and flicking through them before dropping them on the floor.

I didn’t feel the hesitation had been sufficient to provoke this level of suspicion. I wondered what subtle changes to my behaviour there might have been during the week the affair lasted. Perhaps I’d given the game away long before the hesitation over the VW dashboard, but Veronica had had no reasonable provocation. Maybe the mad cleaning session on the Saturday after returning from Feltham and finding that Veronica and the twins had gone out? Maybe that had sowed the seed?

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked her.

‘Evidence,’ she said. ‘It’ll be here somewhere. It always is.’

‘Don’t you think you ought to be picking up the children, not going through my private stuff?’

‘You see, if anyone had asked me, I wouldn’t have said you had any private stuff.’

‘This!’ I gestured at the mess she had made. ‘My desk, my books. It’s my property.’

‘Oh don’t be so fucking pompous!’ she snapped. ‘And why don’t you get the kids, since they obviously mean so fucking much to you?’

I said I wasn’t leaving her there to destroy my room, which she said was a further indication of my guilt. I did go and get them and once they were in bed she went to work again — on me. And eventually, under further pressure, I cracked. I knew, of course, that a confession at this stage was of very little value to me, but I felt a compulsion to be entirely honest now that the secret was out.

I told her about Susan Ashton, that it had started at the staff development weekend, and had finished a week later, and that during that period we had had sex twice.

Entirely honest, but not entirely forthcoming.

Veronica wanted details.

‘Where?’

I stared at the floor; I held my head in my hands; I wanted to travel forward to a time however distant when Veronica might have forgiven me and we might have moved on.

I told her about the Golf GTI at Hatton Cross Underground station car park. I felt like a kid caught sneaking his first cigarette. And then I told her about the Saturday morning in Feltham and I felt even worse, because if the episode in the car had been spontaneous, the visit to Feltham had clearly been planned and executed with complete disregard for either the consequences or the feelings of Veronica, should she ever find out. I considered telling her that I had set out for Feltham with the intention of informing Susan Ashton that it was over, over almost as soon as it had begun, that I had felt I owed it to her to tell her in person rather than over the phone. But it was easy to see how that would be received. I was going out of my way to show respect and consideration to a woman who was virtually a stranger while I demonstrated nothing but contempt for the woman I had married.

I remained silent.

Veronica, too, fell quiet. Too quiet. She withdrew into herself. She continued to speak to the twins in a normal voice, determined to try to protect them from what had happened. She spoke to me only when absolutely necessary, but, after a week or so, without any detectable bitterness. There was, instead, a cadence of indifference in her tone that crushed my unrealistic hopes of an early rapprochement. I offered apologies; I didn’t try to justify what I had done. I told her I hoped she would forgive me in time and not just for the sake of the children, but also because I loved her and I knew I had done a stupid thing and I regretted it.

‘I don’t know, Paul,’ she would say in response to these approaches. ‘I don’t know.’

It wasn’t until four or five months later that Veronica did know how she would react to my unfaithfulness — and it wasn’t with forgiveness. Maybe she knew sooner and spent some time planning it? Or maybe it wasn’t planned? Although it was hard to believe there was any spontaneity involved.

She started going on trips to the north-west, taking the children with her. I offered to look after the twins for the weekend if she wanted to get away on her own or with friends, but she insisted on taking them with her. The impression I formed was that I was so bad — or at least had done such a bad thing — that she didn’t want them left in my sole charge for a whole weekend and preferred the inconvenience of taking them with her.

I didn’t know what she was doing or whom — if anyone — she was meeting. I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask. On one occasion I did ask and she told me to mind my own business.

‘I have a right to know where my children are,’ I said.

‘You gave up your rights to your children,’ she screamed at me, ‘when you fucked that bitch in her car!’

I recoiled from the venom of that attack and retreated to my study where I sat hunched over on the floor with my back to the door. In truth, I was a little frightened of her, and that made me feel less of a man — less of a human being — than she had already made me feel, in direct response, of course, to my completely indefensible act. I stared into the glass eyes of the mannequins. I gazed blankly at the books on my shelves, running my fingers over the spines. I would take out the odd volume and smell the pages and gently press the pads of my fingers against the covers, as once I might have touched a woman. Veronica, of course, but I even started to feel nostalgic for Susan Ashton, and that only served to make me feel worse.

For the first week, I had slept on the floor of my study with only the mannequins for company. There was not enough room even for a single mattress, so I folded up a double duvet and used that to lie on. Veronica had moved the twins into our room with her and on the only occasion that I suggested I be allowed to sleep in the twins’ room she shot me a look that was perfectly clear in its meaning and intent. I was careful not to do anything — on top of what I had already done — that might push Veronica into leaving me and taking the children. I couldn’t even raise the subject — I couldn’t beg her not to — in case somehow it tipped the balance and what she had been holding in reserve as the last possible and most vindictive course of action suddenly seemed to become the only path open to her.

I didn’t want to lose her. I still loved her and I harboured an increasingly desperate hope that we might one day reach some kind of neutral ground across which we both might walk, with predictably extreme slowness, until we met in the middle.

Above all, I didn’t want to lose the children.

In my lowest moments, when I faced the prospect of never achieving reconciliation with Veronica, I concentrated on the twins. I held their tiny faces in my mind, their eyes as wide and trusting and innocent as ever.

Veronica and I were both from the north-west. We had met in London and come together as exiles. She had no family left up there, so I knew she was not visiting relations. I thought about following her. Hiring an anonymous saloon and trying to keep at least three vehicles between us on the motorway, on the occasions that she strapped the twins into the car seats and went by road. Sitting in the next carriage when she took them on the train. But just as both methods of pursuit seemed doomed to failure, so too I feared her reaction should I be spotted.

Then she started dropping his name into conversation. Trevor this, Trevor that.

‘Who’s Trevor?’ I asked.

‘An old friend.’

‘Do you see him when you go to Manchester?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘It’s my business if you’ve got the children with you.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s really, really not.’

These conversations tended to take place in front of the children and so were conducted in an uninflected tone. I doubted the children were fooled. At other times, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. But the name-dropping was clearly deliberate.

Whenever I had the chance, I took the children out on my own. We went for walks using the buggy and I talked to them endlessly. I wanted them to remember the sound of my voice. I told them all about me and my life and my family, my background, which was their family, their background, I told them, and they should always remember that. Whether any of it went in, I didn’t know. I took them to the London parks and to patches of waste ground by abandoned stretches of inner-city motorway. When they both slept at the same time, I sat and watched them breathing. The almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest, the tiny tremor of the squiggly blue vein at Laura’s temple. When Jonathan woke first, as he invariably did, I talked to him in a low voice until his sister woke too. I didn’t try to poison their minds against Veronica and nor did I presume that she was doing that to them against me, although with regard to Trevor, I feared the worst.

Veronica tried to limit the opportunities I had to be alone with them and her trips to Manchester became more frequent. I decided I had to force the issue.

‘I know you’ve told me it’s not my business,’ I said, ‘but I would very much like to know — and I do think I have a right to know — what is going on with this Trevor.’

She tapped her cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. She had started smoking, or taken it up again, but was careful to do it only downstairs after she had put the twins to bed.

I had asked her if it was just to spite me and she had scoffed.

‘Not everything is about you,’ she had said. ‘It’s not the case that every decision I make is influenced by what you might think or say or do. You really are terribly self-centred, you know, Paul. You have this solipsistic approach to life that, really, is a little bit paranoiac.’

I thought about correcting her English, but decided against it.

Whenever she took a deep drag on her cigarette, her lips contracted around it creating a kind of Japanese naval ensign of tight little lines radiating out from the burning tip that I knew she would one day regret and blame me for. She also winced as she drew the smoke into her lungs. I wondered about the cost to her of this new habit, which she showed very little sign of enjoying.

‘We fucked a few times,’ she said.

I looked at her in shock. Although it had been obvious that something was going on, I was taken aback by the fact that she had used the past tense. It wasn’t like it had just happened. This had taken place, on several occasions, some time ago and I hadn’t known about it.

‘A revenge fuck?’ I said, feeling cold and bitter.

‘It was a bit more than that, and like I said, it was a few times.’

‘How many times? Are you still sleeping with him?’

‘Do you honestly think you have any right to ask me these questions? Any right to an answer?’

I watched a vein throbbing at her temple, the same side as Laura’s.

‘I do wish you wouldn’t smoke in the house,’ I said weakly.

She immediately lit up another, closing her lips around it and sucking.

‘I think he wants it to be a bit more serious than I do,’ she said.

I couldn’t tell if this was intended as a concession or a taunt.

Early in the new year, the visits to Manchester having become far fewer, she declared that she had told him it was over. She still had told me nothing about him, other than that he lived in south Manchester somewhere because it was handy for the airport. I had given up asking questions, renounced my spurious ‘right to know’.

If he had ever called the house, I had been unaware of it. Occasionally, I entertained the possibility that while he probably existed she had invented the relationship between them. I had no evidence to back this up, but nor was there any proof that they had, as she had put it, ‘fucked a few times’.

I was hopeful, then, that our marriage would survive. Whether the Trevor thing had actually happened or not, it didn’t appear that anything was happening now, and perhaps this might mean we could get on with our lives. Was it hopelessly naïve of me to think in terms of us now being equal?

Veronica moved the twins back into their own room. She said it was so that she could get a decent night’s sleep, but I couldn’t help hoping that it might be the prelude to her allowing me to return to our bedroom. Since she was hardly likely to ask me, I dropped a hint by complaining of a bad back from sleeping on the floor.

‘You should have thought of that,’ she said.

I asked myself what I felt about her having slept with another man and I found that I felt a deep, dismaying sense of disappointment, if it was true, but that I was just glad it was over, if indeed it had ever begun. It would not be a bar, for me, to the resumption of sexual relations between the two of us.

And then she did get a call, not from Trevor, but from the police.

The effect of Trevor’s suicide was like a bomb going off.

Two detectives came down from Manchester to interview Veronica at Paddington Green Police Station. The circumstances of the death were such that suicide was by far the likeliest verdict, but this still meant that the police were obliged to rule out every other possibility.

Trevor had been found hanging by a dressing-gown cord from a heavy-duty hook screwed into a false beam concealing an RSJ that ran across the ceiling of his bedroom. The RSJ had been there since the house had been converted into flats and the hook had been screwed into it by a previous tenant who had needed it to get a grand piano in through the windows (which had been temporarily removed for the purpose).

‘Had the former tenant not been a concert pianist, Trevor might still be alive today,’ Veronica said to me, before blowing her nose.

‘He would have found another way. Suicides are extremely resourceful,’ I said in an unconvincing attempt to comfort her.

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said. ‘I think suicide is like robbery. Opportunity is as important as motive.’

Trevor had lived in a two-bedroom flat on the first floor of a converted Cheshire lock semi in south Manchester. A former pilot based at Manchester Airport, he had been fired for alcohol abuse. His first officer had raised the alarm when he had noticed, walking behind Trevor to board an early morning flight to Kalamata, that his captain appeared incapable of walking in a straight line. A failed breath test meant Trevor was taken into police custody and subjected to a blood test, which he also failed. He lost his licence, his airside pass and his job, exchanging them for a criminal record.

Trevor’s life had suffered an immediate contraction and diminishment. He would ever after be found in only one of two places, either drunk in his flat or flying a model plane in the nearby park. It emerged that he and Veronica were not old friends, as she had told me, but had encountered each other when she had answered an ad he had placed in the personal columns. She felt sorry for him, she told the police, but of course the truth was somewhat different. She had been looking for a way to move back to Manchester with our children and at the same time had jumped at the opportunity for, as I had crudely put it, a ‘revenge fuck’.

‘I still don’t understand why the police would send two detectives down from Manchester to interview you,’ I said to Veronica, ‘when everything about the case points to suicide.’

‘Apparently,’ she said, ‘he was found in a locked room — his bedroom — and for a suicide verdict you would normally expect an upturned chair or a table or a stepladder. A window ledge if the rope is near the window, which it wasn’t. It was nowhere near the bed either. They’ve got high ceilings those houses. They couldn’t rule out the possibility of him having had help.’

In the end, the coroner recorded an open verdict.

Initially, his death seemed to bring me and Veronica closer to each other. I regained my place in the marital bed. We went out to places as a family. But Veronica suffered very black moods and we would have long, bitter arguments that started in various ways but always came back to the same thing — my affair with Susan Ashton. If I tried to argue that Veronica’s relationship with Trevor had squared things up between us, she became quite violent with rage, throwing things at the wall and hitting me, her fists raining down on my chest like hailstones against a window.

A month later she informed me she had put the house on the market and had started divorce proceedings. In the circumstances — not least that the case would be handled by a friend and colleague of hers — she expected a swift settlement and there could be no doubt that it would be in her favour. Her retaliatory fling with Trevor would be portrayed as merely that, while my two sex sessions with Susan Ashton would be characterised as a premeditated affair, partly conducted in a public car park.

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.

‘He begged her to change her mind, said he was in love with her and without her he didn’t know how he would carry on. He told me all this. It was as if he thought by telling me, he was somehow making it better. But, you know, there was no making it better.

‘He claimed he told her that if she didn’t relent, he would kill himself and how would she like to live with that? She, at this point, according to him, told him to fuck off. I kind of admire that, whether in front of the girls or not. And she walked away — as you saw on the DVD. She’s walking away holding Emily’s hand. But Trevor sticks his own hand out and calls after Anna, because he’s picked up on the fact that she’s more sensitive than her sister. He plays on her emotions, making it look as if he’s simply offering a spin in his plane, while subtly letting her know that if she doesn’t help convince her mum to come back and at least talk to him, he’ll be as broken as the dead birds he knows she cries over in the garden. That was Mel’s fault for telling him that stuff.’

We’re at the base of the hill now and there’s a clear choice either to go around it or to start climbing. Lewis stops and stands with his hands on his hips.

His story is almost over.

‘So that’s how he tricks them into his plane. They take off and Mel is still telling him it’s over, even as she’s looking out and enjoying the view, or what she can see of it out of a Cherokee with the bloody wing in the way. He says he’s not saying much at this point, whether that’s because he’s hoping the experience will do his talking for him or because he believes her and has decided upon his course of action. He told me the latter, but I wasn’t convinced. I think he was trying to dig himself an even deeper hole than he was already in. Punishing himself as harshly as he could.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They flew over the centre of town and then out here. Takes about fifteen minutes with a decent westerly wind behind you. He told me that he spotted this hill from two or three miles away and just made a beeline for it. Didn’t deviate from his path for a second, even when Mel and the girls started screaming. The subsequent investigation suggested otherwise, that a couple of vital components failed at the same time and the crash was much more likely to have been a tragic accident. That was the official finding, anyway, whatever he said. The thing was, there was compelling evidence for both propositions, expert evidence on the one hand and possibly unreliable testimony on the other.’

‘They crashed into this hill?’ I ask him.

‘On the other side. I come up here once a month or so.’

‘He was the only survivor?’

Lewis gives a small nod.

‘But they found the wreckage, presumably, and the bodies?’

‘Of course, but I keep hoping, you know. Have you ever read The Bell Jar? There’s a line in it I find comforting. Gives me hope. “It worked around in the back of my mind like a needle in the body.”’

Lewis looks up at the hill, his eyes scanning the regular brush strokes of green grass blown in the same direction by the wind, looking for a glimpse of red or yellow. A scrap of material, a fragment of bone.