First Novel

Lumb Bank

IT WAS EITHER going to be all right or it wasn’t. In fact, no, it wasn’t. It was never going to be all right.

It wasn’t all right.

I woke up in hospital under police guard. Once the medical staff informed them that I was good to go, officers removed me to the police station where I was formally charged with the murder of my daughter Laura and the attempted murder of Jonathan, my son.

Some days passed.

I had been assigned a lawyer called Arnold, a tall, well-built Yorkshireman with a gruff, friendly manner. He had dark hair cut very short at the back and sides, just beginning to go grey at the temples, and rimless glasses with red plastic arms. He walked a difficult line between seriousness appropriate to the alleged crimes and off-the-cuff jokey remarks, including disrespectful references to certain police officers. I asked him at one point why no one had mentioned my attempted suicide.

‘If they ignore the attempted suicide angle, it should be easier for them to make the murder charges stick.’

‘Murder charge.’

‘Murder charge and attempted murder charge.’

‘But how can there be any doubt?’

‘We need to argue you didn’t know what you were doing. The emotional upheaval caused by the impending divorce and probable loss of your children upset the balance of your mind.’

‘Temporary insanity.’

‘It’s our best shot.’

It took a long time for the case to come to trial. Jonathan had made a full physical recovery. I had requested permission to see him, which had been denied. According to Arnold, we could have challenged that decision, but it would not have looked good. A great deal seemed to rest on what looked good and what didn’t.

‘It’s the way the law operates,’ Arnold said.

Arnold also reported some chat that Veronica was coping very badly and that it couldn’t be assumed that Jonathan would necessarily end up with his mother in the long term.

‘Where would he end up in that case?’

‘There are different options.’

‘None of them involving me.’

‘That would be unlikely, even given a good outcome.’ Arnold looked at me. ‘So how would you feel about Jonathan ending up in the system somewhere?’ he asked me.

It was a strange question, coming from him. He had not previously asked me about my feelings. I told him I didn’t have any.

He reminded me — he said he was reminding me — that when I had been informed of the charges against me, having been told nothing of what had happened prior to my arrest when I had regained consciousness in hospital, I had broken down and the investigating officer had suspended the interview. I was locked in my cell and a suicide watch was maintained. On the third day, by which time I was quiet and withdrawn, they made the decision to continue questioning me.

‘Did you know what you were doing when you attached the hosepipe to the exhaust of the car?’ Detective Inspector Huxtable asked me.

‘You don’t have to answer that,’ Arnold advised me.

‘Either I did or I didn’t,’ I said.

‘Do you feel any remorse over your actions and their consequences?’ asked Huxtable, rubbing at the bags under his eyes with nicotine-stained fingers.

‘My client chooses not to answer that,’ said Arnold.

‘Either I do or I don’t,’ I said.

Arnold requested a temporary halt to the interview and we ended up back in my cell.

‘I strongly advise you to answer “No comment” to all further questions,’ he said.

I tried to follow his advice, but the fact was I didn’t care enough about the outcome.

The case eventually went to trial and despite Arnold’s best efforts I was convicted and handed a life sentence for murder and a further five years for attempted murder, but given the nature of the case the two sentences could be served concurrently and the amount of time I had spent on remand would be credited to my account, as it were.

In 1993, I began my sentence, in prison rather than hospital, the temporary insanity argument having failed to impress the judge.

Arnold had asked me if I wanted to go on Rule 43 to protect me from other inmates. In prison, if you’re a certain class of offender, they stab you with a knife in the showers first and ask questions later. I refused, saying either I’d be attacked or I wouldn’t. But one morning in my second week I was standing on the upper landing in a line of men waiting to slop out, when I realised the man standing next to me had received a sharp nudge in the back once he had drawn level with the stairs. I watched him tumble down two flights of metal stairs, hitting his head several times on the way. Word had got out that he was in for the rape of a minor. I decided to try to take control of my own destiny.

People didn’t tend to ask you straight to your face what you had done. They were more likely to ask someone else. My cellmate, Joel, who was known to be reliable in one way only, as a gossip, had told me what had led him inside: he had thrown a punch at a debt collector’s chin and while Joel, who had apparently always been as thin as a reed, even before becoming addicted to smack, had dealt him a feeble blow it had caused the debt collector to take a step back, lose his footing and hit the side of his head on the sharp edge of a brick wall. Blood everywhere. So Joel told it.

One night, I waited for Joel to fall asleep and then threw a pen at the stainless-steel toilet bowl in the corner. The noise woke him up. Disorientated and flustered, he asked what was going on. I said I didn’t know. Nothing. But that I was lying there thinking about what I’d done to end up in a jail cell with a man who’d murdered a debt collector by doing little more than breathe on him.

‘No offence,’ I said.

‘None taken.’

I lay there in silence waiting for him to pick up the baton.

‘So, what did you do?’

‘I killed a man,’ I said. ‘I suppose you could say it was in cold blood, or you could argue it was a crime of passion, as my lawyer did, not very successfully.’

‘Why did you kill him?’ Joel’s voice, with its strangulated Glaswegian accent, sounded vulnerable and needy in the dark.

‘His name was Trevor.’

‘Reason enough,’ Joel cut in.

I grunted. ‘He was an airline pilot who’d been sacked for being drunk on the job. Anyway, I found out my wife was having an affair with him. She tried to end it. She took my two daughters up to see him to end it, thinking that if he saw she’d got two little girls with her—’

‘Twins?’

‘What?’

‘Are they twins?’

I hesitated. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They were twins. She thought if she turned up with the twins and told him it was over he’d just accept it. He wouldn’t make a fuss.’

‘What do you mean “were twins”?’

‘I’m coming to that.’

‘Sorry, pal.’

‘So, anyway, he made them go up in his four-seater plane. He was allowed to fly small planes. The plane crashed and they all died.’

‘Except Trevor, right?’

‘Yes, except Trevor.’

‘So you killed the cunt.’

‘I tracked him down and I killed him with my bare hands. I throttled him. Strangled him. Somehow I even managed to break his neck.’

‘Fair play. The cunt deserved it.’

After the visit to the hill where his wife and children died, I don’t see Lewis for a couple of weeks. The Residential is looming and I have to make certain preparations for it. The days will be structured, the mornings around exercise-based workshops, while the afternoons will be given over to one-to-one tutorials. During the evenings there will be readings.

Helen emails me and suggests we go on a research trip together, as previously discussed. Helen is from Bristol (I checked the information the department holds on file) and is renting a place in Fallowfield, so I suggest I pick her up one evening and we go for a drive. As we head down Kingsway, an Emirates flight passes over the road ahead of us from left to right. We come off at Cheadle Royal.

‘So are we going to John Lewis?’ Helen says. Playing with her ponytail, which she has pulled over her right shoulder, she looks very relaxed in the passenger seat of my car.

I smile, but don’t answer, as I drive past the exit for John Lewis and past the exit for Heald Green before turning left into the business and leisure park. The plane is very low now, just visible in the distance, perhaps as it passes over Ringway Road.

‘I guess that’s where you play tennis, right?’ she says, nodding at David Lloyd.

‘If I played tennis, maybe I would play there,’ I say.

‘My dad plays at David Lloyd,’ she says. ‘A different one, obviously.’

I laugh. ‘Do I remind you of your dad?’

‘He’s older than you.’

I negotiate the roundabouts and enter the parking area behind an office building of blond brick and smoked green glass.

‘You like places like this,’ she says.

I’m not sure if it’s a question or a statement.

‘Their anonymity is interesting,’ I say. ‘The very blandness that should make them boring makes them interesting. They could be anything. The people who work here by day could be doing anything at all.’

‘What about the people who come here by night?’

‘Security guards?’

‘Isn’t this the kind of place you write about where people go dogging and piking?’

‘Do I?’

‘You gave a reading at uni, remember?’

‘What’s piking?’ I ask, looking at the bright white lights of an approaching plane in the darkening sky over the Stockport Pyramid.

‘Isn’t it watching? Dogging’s doing it and piking’s watching people do it?’

‘Sounds like you know more about it than I do.’

‘I doubt it,’ she says, pulling her fingers through her ponytail.

A car enters the parking area and drives slowly by.

‘What do you think they’re up to?’ she asks.

‘I think it’s a bit early — it’s only dusk — but you tell me.’

Helen tosses her ponytail back over her shoulder.

I start the engine and we drive out of the car park and back into the network of wide empty roads and roundabouts that serves the business and leisure park. I take the road for Heald Green and slip the Rachel’s CD into the CD player — Full on Night. I turn right into Ringway Road and slow down as we pass the Moss Nook. I try to spot another ponytail through the tiny square panes of the restaurant’s windows, but there’s a car behind us. I press my foot lightly on the accelerator, but the driver behind overtakes me with an angry sidelong glance. We’re now beyond the restaurant, but, while there’s no longer anyone behind me, I slow down again as we approach the layby on the left. I turn the wheel sharply and pull on the handbrake.

‘What’s this?’ Helen asks.

I show her the runway lights and tell her how it would once have been a good spot to sit and watch planes landing. I look over my shoulder to see the lights of an approaching airliner.

‘If the police come by?’

‘They’ll move us on.’

‘Just that?’

‘Depends what kind of mood they’re in.’

‘Have you ever spent time in a cell?’

‘Why do you ask me that?’ I snap.

‘All right, all right,’ she says, palms in the air. ‘I have, that’s all. And I’m in no hurry to do it again.’

I turn to look at her.

‘What did you do?’ I ask her.

‘I was on a demo. A load of us got rounded up and spent a night in the cells.’

I look out of the window. The plane is almost on top of us. I reach out my left arm and grab hold of something and squeeze.

‘What the fuck?’ she says.

‘Sorry,’ I say, withdrawing my hand just as quickly. ‘Must have missed the handbrake.’

Helen seems to shrink back against the door.

‘We’d better go,’ I say.

On the way back up Kingsway I point out Tesco at East Didsbury and tell her about Richard Madeley.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard about that. You would barely have been born.’

‘Very funny. I’m doing my project about book clubs, so I’m very interested in Richard and Judy.’

‘In that case,’ I say, ‘there’s somewhere we can have a quick look at on the way back.’

I turn left into Fog Lane and a couple of minutes later I’m turning right off Wilmslow Road into Old Broadway. This wide avenue, its only exit at the far end by foot into Fog Lane Park, is lined by large Victorian houses. Trees run down the middle. I drive up the left-hand side and stop outside number 23.

Helen looks first out of her window, then at me, eyebrows raised.

‘They lived here,’ I say. ‘Richard and Judy. When they were doing their show from Liverpool.’

‘Really?’ She is impressed.

‘Really.’

With her right hand she finds my left and gives it a little squeeze.

Grace emails and asks if we can schedule a tutorial. I tell her it’s now so close to the Residential, we might as well wait until then. The truth is I have been avoiding Grace. If she has been happy to agree to a phoner instead of a tutorial in person, that’s what we have done. I have tried to limit my feedback to highlighting clichés and any loss of verisimilitude in her dialogue. There are not a lot of problems with her work, but from time to time she fails to meet her own high standards.

I have no control over who attends the Residential; the departmental office handles such matters. Nor can I back out of it, having agreed to do it some months ago. I will just have to see how it goes. Invariably on these residential courses there is one nutjob. There is rarely more than one, but there is always, always at least one.

Lumb Bank, an old rambling house where Ted Hughes once lived, is located on the north side of a wooded gulley in a valley above Hebden Bridge. It is operated by a charitable organisation, which runs week-long residential writing courses with two tutors and a guest reader, all three published writers. Some weeks are set aside for groups from universities or other institutions with creative-writing schools, which hire the centre and its staff, and bring in their own students and writers.

My institution’s Residential is one of those weeks.

In previous years our department has assigned two tutors to the Residential. But with staffing problems at the university, the department has decided to see if the week can be run by a single tutor. Either that or none of my colleagues wanted to spend a week at Lumb Bank with me.

I arrive on the Monday afternoon. Climbing out of my car, I am greeted by Nikki, one of the three administrators. She shows me around — the main house, the woodshed, the barn and the garden — and leaves me at the door to my room on the first floor of the main house. The room has a double bed, a chest of drawers, a writing desk and chair, and a view over the garden and valley. Below the house is a large field patrolled by a pheasant with a cry that is a harsh metallic squawk. There are also two rams and a heavily pregnant ewe. Beyond this field another one runs down to the river. The far side of the valley rises steeply and is thickly wooded. Here and there, criss-crossing paths can be made out. At the top of the valley side, fifty feet higher than my vantage point, a sandstone bluff stands proud of the mixed woodland; it and the scrubby ridge either side form the horizon.

The students begin turning up around 6 p.m. Grace is one of the first to arrive. Nikki brings a tray of tea, coffee and cake into the main room, a low-ceilinged, white-walled snug with an open fireplace and mismatched chairs and sofas. Grace perches on the edge of a low armchair in one corner where she can look through the poetry magazines and other journals stored on shelves in the alcove next to the chimney breast. The silence is broken only by the sound of Nikki pouring tea. She hands a cup to Grace, who mutters thanks, and then we all hear the sound of more arrivals and Nikki bustles off to welcome them, leaving me and Grace alone.

‘So,’ Grace says after a moment.

‘So,’ I say. ‘So.’

In the field below the house, the pheasant gives its industrial croak.

Within an hour, all the students are gathered in the snug. Every square inch of space on the sofas and armchairs is taken. Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — sits cross-legged on the floor. Helen sits at the end of the green sofa with her legs drawn up on to the cushion and her shoes removed. I know one or two of the other students — there’s Kieran, who’s writing an experimental novel about a bear that shaves off its fur and joins human society; Greg, an American student who has already published a collection of stories in the US and is now writing a novel; Geeta, whom I have advised to abandon her historical novel of Ancient Greece and concentrate instead on a voodoo mystery set in her native Trinidad — but several students I’m meeting for the first time because they are taught or supervised by my colleagues.

Nikki runs though her housekeeping announcements, then I remind the students how the week will be structured. I tell them I’ve made a grid on the flip chart in the dining room, dividing the afternoon sessions into half-hour slots, and I ask them to sign up for a one-to-one tutorial.

Grace asks if people can have more than one tutorial and I say that if everyone signs up, it’s unlikely there will be enough time. She wears a look of slight disgruntlement and I add that I hope everyone will get all the face-to-face time they think they need.

The evening proceeds with drinks, dinner and more drinks. Before anyone gets too drunk I make my excuses and retire to my room, where I keep the light off and sit by the window watching the smokers who have gathered outside in the garden. Grace, who doesn’t appear to be smoking and never seems to smell of cigarettes, sits with the smokers yet slightly apart from them. Her broad shoulders seem tense, hunched. It strikes me I have never seen her looking relaxed.

I pull the curtain and switch the light on. I am reading Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold. Thirty pages in, I have a strange sense of déjà vu as if I have read it before and know what’s coming next, and yet I’m certain I have never read it and in fact I have no idea what’s going to happen. When I start the second part of the novel it takes me a while to accept that it does not follow on from the first part, yet it seems inevitable that the different parts are obscurely connected.

In the morning, I am sitting outside looking across at the sandstone bluff on the other side of the valley when Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — comes and sits next to me.

‘Dude,’ he says.

‘Hiya.’

‘How’s it going, man?’

‘OK.’

‘Coolio. Nice view.’

‘Yes.’

‘You reading to us tonight, then?’ he asks.

‘That’s the plan.’

A small bird with a red face and yellow and black bars on its wings alights on the railing in front of us.

‘Do you know what that is?’ I ask him.

‘It’s a bird, innit?’

I smile. ‘It’s a goldfinch.’

‘Cool.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I say. ‘They used to represent death.’

‘Wicked.’

‘Mind you,’ I say, ‘most birds have represented death at one time or another.’

‘What about tomorrow night?’ he asks.

‘What about it?’

‘Who’s reading then? Who’s, like, the guest reader?’

‘Oh right. Lewis Harris. Writes crime novels. Independent publisher. That kind of thing.’

‘Cool.’

After breakfast we all sit around the large table in the dining room and I get the students to do a couple of ice-breaker exercises. First some automatic writing and then I ask them to pair off and interview each other about their novels-in-progress and to be prepared to feed back whatever they’ve learnt to the whole group once we have reassembled.

‘Pretend you are Kirsty Wark,’ I say. ‘It can be helpful for the interviewee to describe their own novel. Very often you find out stuff about your work you hadn’t been aware of.’

When they come back I get people to make a little presentation to the group based on what they’ve discovered about their partner’s novel. Greg partnered off with Grace and he comes back and announces that her novel is about a girl who kills a tramp and that it can be pitched as L’Etranger meets The Bell Jar. I glance at Grace and see that she is staring right at me.

‘Is that all you found out about it, Greg?’ I say. ‘It doesn’t sound a lot like the novel I’ve been supervising.’

One or two people laugh.

‘Well,’ Greg says, ‘it kicks off in Zanzibar in the 1960s. Or should that be on Zanzibar? Like Stand on Zanzibar? Whatever. It kind of tells the story of this kid, how she comes into the world and what happens to her in it and how she ends up trying to leave it.’

‘What does that mean, Greg?’ I ask him.

‘Suicide attempts,’ he says. ‘Hence The Bell Jar.’

‘Sounds pretty intense,’ interjects one of the other students.

A few more people comment and we move on.

After the session, while people are getting lunch, I look at the flip chart and see that Grace has signed up for one of the afternoon tutorials. I get The Blindfold from my room and sit in the garden and read.

Grace comes to find me at 3.30 p.m. We stay outside.

‘I like all this stuff about Ray’s career,’ I say, ‘the way it develops. And I like the way you tell that story at the same time as telling the story of his relationship with his son, Nicholas. You interweave the two successfully. We’re never in any doubt as to which is the more important, yet keeping the story of his career just as prominent helps to ground the bigger story, make it more believable.’

‘Thanks.’

We’re sitting on the step outside the barn. The garden is wide but shallow and it’s just a few feet from where we’re sitting to the railing and then there’s the drop to the field with the pheasant and the sheep. I spend most of the half-hour tutorial staring across the valley at the woods and the sandstone bluff on the other side while talking to Grace or listening to her, very aware of her virtually uninterrupted stare drilling into the side of my head.

‘Is it still a bit clichéd?’ she asks.

‘Not the set-up or the plot, no, but every now and then you let a line get through that’s not really worthy of the rest of it. Like, er…’ I flick through the manuscript pages in my lap. ‘Or just a phrase, like this, “brushing shoulders”, when you’re talking about the other writers Ray encounters at book launches and so on.’

‘Is “brushing shoulders” a cliché, then?’

I pull a face. ‘I don’t know. Is it? It struck me as one when I read it. Mind you, I’m not even sure if it’s right, now I come to think about it. Is it brushing shoulders or rubbing shoulders? I’m not sure.’

‘Well, whichever one is the cliché, I can use the other one, right?’

I laugh. ‘I suppose so,’ I say. I’m looking at the manuscript again. ‘This, here. “This gentleman was just leaving.” It’s TV dialogue. Casualty. Holby City. You know, like “I’ll see myself out.” Phrases you never hear in real life, only on the telly. And not very good telly.’

‘Very popular telly, though.’

‘Yes, but your novel doesn’t feel like a commercial novel.’ I turn to look at her. ‘And L’Etranger meets The Bell Jar certainly doesn’t sound like it’s describing a commercial novel.’

‘Greg came up with that.’

‘It’s a good pitch for what sounds like a pretty serious novel.’

We both look out across the valley.

‘Meursault in L’Etranger,’ she says, ‘he kills an Arab.’

‘Yes.’

‘In my novel, it’s a tramp rather than an Arab.’

I hesitate. Then: ‘Like the workshop piece on campus, written by someone in your group. Was that your inspiration for that element of your novel? Did you borrow it, or was that your piece?’

She doesn’t answer. I turn to look at her.

‘I think my time’s up,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to keep you from whoever’s next. Thanks… Paul.’

I note the hesitation.

That night we all gather in the snug after dinner. I read to them about the Moss Nook and the runway lights and the waitress with the ponytail and Erica and the Stockport Pyramid and the idea that this life is just a blink in eternity, that what really matters is some kind of eternal survival, if only on the outside, if only by appearance, that appearance is the same as reality, that there’s no difference between the inside and the outside, if there’s nothing inside, like in a stuffed animal where all the insides have been taken away, leaving only the skin and the appearance of the animal as it was before, how that’s no less authentic than the alternative, how you can live a life without feelings, without thoughts almost, if you have to. I read to them about how you can live without regret if you lack the capacity for regret, how you can live without distinguishing between this and that if neither this nor that has any meaning for you, how you can be either alive or dead and it makes no difference, how something can be either true or false and it makes no difference, how a story can be either yours or somebody else’s, how you can be either you or another person, how there can either be someone watching you have sex in your car or no one watching, how you can be either the man or the woman, or the man or the other man, or the woman or the other woman, how it can either make sense or not make sense, how you can be either male or female. I read to them about how you can watch either surveillance videos or amateur porn, how you can fly either a Piper or a Cessna, how you can travel either east or west, how you can go in either this direction or that direction, how you can choose either right or wrong, how you can either choose or not choose, how you can be either sane or crazy, how you can either go straight on at the junction without looking or stop at the white line, how it can all either be very important or not make a fuck of a lot of difference.

Though, arguably, most of that is subtext.

They clap when I’m done because that is the convention. I ask them if anyone has any questions and for a moment it looks as if no one has, but then someone asks me who is my favourite writer and I say I don’t think I have favourites any more. I used to avoid saying writing was either good or bad and would just say instead whether I liked it or not, whereas now I don’t know what I like and what I don’t like, nor even if I have the ability or the capacity to like or not like someone’s writing, and I think instead in terms of good and bad. There’s good writing and there’s bad writing. Someone either has it or they don’t. This is a line I’ve heard myself use before — you’ve either got it or you haven’t — in response to the perennial question ‘Can you really teach creative writing?’ If someone has it, maybe I can help them develop it and write a little bit better; if they don’t have it, I can’t give it to them or teach it to them and neither can any of my colleagues or any other creative-writing tutors anywhere in the world. If you can’t write, you can’t write, period. If your writing is bad it will always be bad. If it’s good, it could perhaps get better.

There is a pause. Then Helen asks a question.

‘We’re all writing first novels,’ she says, looking around for confirmation and receiving a few nods around the room. ‘And we know you have a particular interest in first novels because you selected all first novels for the lit course. What is it about first novels that appeals to you so much? And,’ she goes on, deadpan, ‘why is your own so difficult to get hold of?’

A few laughs greet Helen’s question; a smile seems to be in order.

‘I suppose I think first novels are important because it’s the first thing the author says about the world. People say they are autobiographical, and many are, but they’re not all. Just as often I would say that they are a mistake, or are viewed as a mistake later in an author’s career, retrospectively, either by readers and critics or by the author himself. Or herself. Sometimes they’re the best thing an author will ever write. They don’t know this at the time, of course, and in some cases maybe they’ll never see it. In others, maybe they think their first was the best and they never manage to surpass it, but in fact they do. And as for my first novel, it was published by a very small press and it went out of print. Simple as that. I haven’t done a Philip Pullman or a John Banville and either disowned or tried to suppress it. Few copies were sold and even fewer remain.’

Helen smiles and nods and then opens her mouth to speak again.

‘Well, in that case,’ she says, ‘I’m even more pleased I managed to find a copy.’

From her lap she produces a trade paperback: orange, black and white on the cover, a stylised photographic image of an Egyptian mummy, a vague geometrical hint of a pyramid in the background. The orange spine with black type: Rites by Paul Taylor.

Her trick produces a reaction from the group. One or two jaws hang down; there are even small gasps. It seems Helen is not the only student who has been looking for a copy, but she is almost certainly alone in having found one.

‘Would you mind signing it?’ she asks, thrusting it forward.

I accept the book and study the cover. The bottom corner has been folded over at some point. The spine is unbroken, but the book looks as if it has been read. It has that slightly loose look about it, the edges of the pages not quite bookshop-sharp. I look at the front cover again, the crease on the corner. A picture enters my mind of my hand returning a copy of the novel to my own bookshelf, back in another life, and doing it too hastily and catching the corner. I open the copy that Helen has handed to me. There’s no second-hand dealer’s price pencilled on the first page. Copies come up for sale extremely rarely, in any case. Not that they’re worth anything. Those that I have located and bought, I’ve tended to pay more for the postage than for the book itself.

I write ‘For Helen, Lumb Bank’, then sign and date it.

Her eyes widen as I hand the book back to her.

‘Right,’ I say, ‘I need a drink.’

Wednesday morning, everyone is seated around the large table in the dining room. I announce that we’re going to do an exercise about place. The importance of place in fiction. I tell them that I want them to imagine a place that’s important to them. It could be somewhere they’ve known since childhood. Equally it could be somewhere they went for the first time only last week. But it must be a place that has a real resonance for them, for whatever reason. I tell them I want them to write a scene set in this place featuring themselves and one other character. It could be based on a real event or entirely fictitious. It’s up to them.

While they’re off working on their submissions, I sit outside looking up the valley, instead of across it. Rising out of the trees are two huge chimneys, evidence of the march of industry up the river valleys of this part of the world in the nineteenth century. I have walked along the wooded paths that go up the valley, but I don’t remember seeing the bases of the chimneys, although I suppose I must have done.

We regather around the large table and Geeta reads first, a haunting and ultimately very effective piece about attraction and jealousy set in Trinidad. Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — reads a short but powerful scene set in a club where he tells us he has DJ’d; the action takes place the morning after a big party and features the DJ and a traumatised clubber suffering from delusions. Helen sticks her hand up next. I stop doodling on the pad in front of me and sit back and fold my arms.

Dave picks me up in his car and we drive around for a bit. He points out this and that and I smile and nod like I think he wants me to. We stop and watch the planes landing, until we’re moved on by the police, who make a big deal of searching Dave’s car, saying, Remember the Yorkshire Ripper, we don’t want to get caught out like that again. We turn into the car park of a fancy restaurant near the airport and I wonder what Dave’s got on his mind. Carpaccio of beef or a roll in the back seat. But we just sit there while Dave’s hand hovers over the gearstick and eventually he selects first gear and we are back out on the road.

It’s a world of chain-link fences and tatty scrub, razor wire and gravel. The leonine roar of aircraft engines and screech of high-pressurised rubber on runway tarmac. A world of epaulettes and wheeled suitcases and aviator sunglasses and pull on the straps to inflate.

Dave’s picturing all this as we drive slowly by, hugging the airport’s perimeter. He’s thinking ahead to the next workshop, formulating exercises. A sense of place. This is Dave’s place. I want him to take me to mine, only I don’t know what mine is. We drive north, away from the airport, pull in to the car park of a supermarket on the A34. Dave backs into a space away from the store, pulls on the handbrake and switches off the engine. The heat rising from the bonnet reminds me of a burning car I once saw in a supermarket car park, maybe this one, yes, it was this one, and it had only just caught fire because it had yet to attract a crowd of gawkers and the fire brigade were not in attendance and no one from the store was standing by speaking urgently into a mobile phone. As I watched the thick orange and yellow flames leaping from the windows of the car, windows that were either open or had blown out, flames that reminded me of graphics in a computer game, I saw an apparition through the heat haze rising from the bonnet of the vehicle. I saw a breakfast TV presenter standing alone on the far side of the flames, the only other person apart from me watching the burning car. I tried to see into the car to see if there was anyone trapped inside it, but the flames danced around too much, and when I looked up again, the TV presenter had gone.

Dave starts the engine and we roll out of the car park, heading north again. Wide roads, traffic, cars parked in driveways, stop lights, takeaways, bridges over dismantled railways lines. Nowhere that’s ever been anywhere. Street lights come on. Night falls. We turn left, go right, turn second right. We stop outside a large semi-detached Victorian house. I see the number 23 on the gatepost. There are trees in the middle of the road, more large houses on the other side. At the end of the road is a park. It’s a road of million-pound houses occupied by music producers, university professors, property developers, celebrity lawyers and TV presenters. I could live in this road, one day in the far future.

Dave puts his hand on my leg, moves it slowly up and down. I turn to look at him.

‘It goes on,’ Helen says, looking up from her notebook, ‘but I don’t want to hog the time. Lots of people have to read.’

There are murmurings of protest.

‘Aw, what’s going to happen?’

‘Come on.’

‘We want to hear all of it.’

‘Great stuff,’ I say, ‘nicely done. But as Helen says, there are lots of people to read and not much time left.’

I silence the persisting grumbles and ask Kieran to share his piece with the group. Kieran opens up his laptop and prepares to read.

Once the session is over and people are helping themselves to lunch, I check out the grid on the flip chart to see if Helen is booked in for the afternoon. She is not. She has reserved a slot on Thursday.

Instead of getting lunch, I leave Lumb Bank, taking the path that leads up the valley. I pass through deciduous woodland, the path gradually drawing closer to the river on my left. All I can hear is the tumble of the river and the occasional snippet of birdsong. A packhorse bridge takes me across the river and I start walking downstream on the other side. The path climbs away from the river and soon splits. I stand at the Y-junction and consider my options. They are few. Either left or right. Down or up. Or back. I take the right fork that leads diagonally up the hillside through the forest. After ten or fifteen minutes I realise the path is petering out. I face another choice. Either I go on or I go back. I check my watch: there should be enough time. I decide to go on. Straight ahead, the way looks difficult: outcrops of rock and increasingly dense tree cover with tangles of sharp dead growth low down on the pine trunks that would impede my progress as effectively as barbed wire. If I take a more direct approach to reaching the ridge, it will mean tackling a very steep slope, probably having to go on all fours at certain points. This is what I decide to do. Soon I am hauling myself up the steepest section by grabbing handfuls of tussocky grass and clambering the best I can. Eventually I exit the treeline and the gradient falls away. I am at the ridge. I walk for a further five minutes and I reach the sandstone bluff. I climb on to the top of this and look down across the valley to Lumb Bank on the far side. I shield my eyes; I can see a couple of people in the garden. It’s a long way, but one is almost certainly a woman, with long hair in a ponytail. Is Helen the only female student who wears her hair in a ponytail? I don’t know. The other person I’m less sure about. The size suggests it’s a woman, but there’s a mannish quality to the stance. I watch the two figures from this considerable distance, obviously without any idea what’s going on between them, but they are standing on the little rectangle of lawn, close enough to each other that they must be talking.

The afternoon’s tutorials pass off without incident and then everyone is waiting for the guest reader, who normally arrives some time between 4 and 6 p.m. Three students are in the kitchen on cooking duty; most of the others are scattered around the house and grounds writing or reading. I sit in the garden staring across the valley at the sandstone bluff, remembering standing on top of it only hours before. Out of the corner of my eye I see Grace enter the garden and immediately I slip my phone out of my pocket and hold it up to my ear.

I walk further down the garden pretending to be engaged on a call. At the end of the garden is a cottage, where the administrators are provided with accommodation, and beyond that a path leads off the property, through the woods and down the valley. As I step into the shade of the broadleaf wood, a large dark-brown bird takes off from nearby and flies away from me in a straight line between the trees going downhill. I have heard owls here at night.

When I return to the garden, Grace has disappeared but a few of the students have started drinking. Geeta asks me what time the guest reader will be arriving and I check my watch, see that it’s not far off 5 p.m. and say I’m surprised he’s not already here. By six he still hasn’t turned up and I walk up the lane to the main road with a couple of the more restless students, to see if we can see some sign of him. When we get back to the house, Nikki asks me if I have tried to call or text him. I tell her I don’t have his number. Dinner is served a little bit late, the expectation being that he will show up while we are eating. He doesn’t. By 8 p.m., everyone is gathered in the snug. It’s clear Lewis is not coming. One or two people voice their dissatisfaction. Helen asks if any of Lewis’ books are in the Lumb Bank library, in the adjoining room, and Stephen, who is writing a novel about vampires on Income Support in south Manchester, goes off to check. He comes back empty-handed and says there’s no one between Joanne Harris and M. John Harrison.

‘Shame,’ says Helen, turning to me, ‘you could have read to us from his work.’

There is some kind of inflection in her delivery, but it’s hard to say what it is. A short collective discussion ensues about Lewis Harris and the possible reasons why he has failed to turn up. Soon small groups form and numerous conversations are held at the same time. While chatting to Stephen about his vampire novel I overhear Helen telling someone else she’d tried to check out Harris and get hold of one of his books but had been unable not only to locate any of his titles, but to find any evidence that a writer of that name existed at all.

Later that night I finish The Blindfold. I immediately go back and reread the first page and only then do I realise how clever and sly the author has been.

Thursday morning. I set the group an exercise that requires them to go off and find an object somewhere in the house or garden, or a view that they can photograph, that should inspire a scene in their novel-in-progress. We are to reconvene in half an hour, after they have written as much as they can.

I walk up the lane to the road. By the time I reach the top, my heart is pumping fast and there is a light sheen of sweat clinging to my forehead and the back of my neck. I look one way — the road winds off towards the moors — and then the other. If I started walking to the right I would be in the village in five minutes, and half an hour later I could be down in the town waiting for a train to Manchester. I look at my watch. There are twenty minutes remaining. My scalp prickles. I look down the road. A car approaches slowly. It slows down even further as it reaches the crest of the hill. The driver peers through the windscreen at me. He has a shaved head, a goatee. I swivel and hold the man’s gaze while his car comes alongside and then passes me as he drives on towards the moors. I watch the car become smaller and smaller. It turns a corner and is gone.

I walk slowly back down the lane.

In any case, my car is parked by the house.

Once everyone is reassembled in the dining room, I ask who would like to go first. I look around the group. Helen is playing with her ponytail and sitting back from the table. Stephen is bent over his notebook. Grace has her elbows on the table and is either biting her fingernails or removing dirt from under them with her teeth. Her eyes flick up and lock with mine and she removes her fingers from her mouth. She is about to speak, to volunteer to go first. I look away quickly and see Geeta doing some last-minute editing to the page in front of her.

‘Geeta?’ I say, aware that Grace has raised her hand. ‘Geeta, would you like to go first?’

Geeta hesitates as she looks at Grace, who is saying she wants to read.

‘Geeta, you go first,’ I say.

She collects herself, offers a conciliatory glance in Grace’s direction.

‘It’s very short,’ she says. ‘And a bit rushed.’

‘Please,’ I say. ‘Everyone’s in the same boat.’

Geeta begins to read.

‘The clock had stopped just after 9.15 a.m., just after my mother made a funny little croak. She lay back with her mouth slightly open. I had felt then as if a transparent butterfly or dragonfly had emerged from her throat, hovered for a second, then flew to a place where I could not follow. I felt betrayed that she would die just two months after I had come back. That she would not wait. I was just easing into things, trying to ask her about that time when I was sixteen, when I was abruptly changed into a woman, a woman who immediately sustained a terrible loss. I wanted to ask her why she didn’t say something, why she would let her own flesh go to strangers. I wanted to ask her about the nature of shame and why was it so important to glue our faces together so the cracks won’t show. I wanted to tell her that in Japan, they deliberately made beautiful porcelain with crackled surfaces. I took the clock in my hands and stared into its round face, the long hand just after a quarter past. I wondered at time being stopped for her. For me too.’

There is a hush around the table. Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — breaks the silence.

‘That’s well cool.’

There are murmurs of agreement.

Someone asks Geeta what her object was and someone else says it’s the clock above the fireplace and she nods her agreement at this.

Grace anticipates my asking who wants to read next by raising her arm. The loose sleeve of her hooded top yields to gravity and then it seems as if everyone around the table is staring at the pale flesh of Grace’s inner forearm criss-crossed with red weals. A battle between defiance and embarrassment is fought silently inside that strange, square head. Eventually she lowers her arm and pulls the sleeve back into place. She looks down at the pages on the table in front of her and I am not alone in inspecting the white trails of exposed scalp revealed by her somewhat stringy hair. They remind me of the paths visible in the woodland on the far side of the valley.

Grace starts reading: ‘One occasion the following year, Nicholas and Jonny travelled to Hyde without Liz, who was on call and therefore couldn’t leave London. Nicholas had tried to increase the frequency of their visits. It was important to him to give Jonny a real sense of his adoptive family, a firm grounding in its history.’

Grace glances up and has a quick look around the table before continuing.

As Nicholas and Jonny were arriving, slightly out of breath after the uphill walk from the railway station, a man was just leaving the house. He was short and stocky, thickening around the middle, with dark hair and a silver-white beard. He wore round glasses and a sleeveless, green quilted jacket and carried a bag. He seemed preoccupied and didn’t reply when Nicholas spoke to him. With a distracted air he got into a Renault Espace that was parked outside the house and drove off.

Nicholas rang the bell, but nobody came to the door.

‘Maybe Nana Grandad gone out,’ Jonny said.

‘They don’t go out that much,’ Nicholas said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose they’re old. It’s difficult. Maybe Grandad’s gone out and Nana’s asleep. Or the other way around.’ Nicholas smiled at Jonny. ‘Let’s go round the back.’

They let themselves in via the kitchen door. The house was quiet. Nicholas could hear a clock ticking in another room. The kitchen smelt as it always did, of lemon curd and Bovril and potted meat and vegetables that were just beginning to turn. He opened a cupboard and found a bottle of orange squash so he could make Jonny a drink. The boy sat at the kitchen table while Nicholas went into the front room, but there was no sign of his grandad, who had perhaps nipped out for supplies, knowing that Nicholas and Jonny were due. There was a line of cards on the mantelpiece. Two weeks previously it had been his nana’s birthday. He picked each card up in turn and read inside. Seeing his own handwriting made him feel self-conscious. He briefly wondered how old she was and worked out that she was eighty-six. He read his grandad’s card, which said ‘To my darling wife, with my love.’ Nicholas swallowed as he stood the card back on the mantelpiece.

He returned to the kitchen, but the plastic cup sat unaccompanied on the table. From upstairs he heard a voice.

‘Daddy?’

‘Yes?’

He started walking into the hall and towards the foot of the stairs.

‘Nana’s asleep.’

‘Well, don’t wake her,’ he said in a loud whisper as he climbed the stairs.

‘She’s sleeping with her mouth open.’ Jonny’s voice grew slightly shrill. ‘She won’t wake up.’

Nicholas climbed the stairs and entered Nana’s bedroom to find Jonny holding her by the shoulder and shaking her. He grabbed Jonny’s arm and pulled him back, roughly, too roughly. The boy started crying. Nana lay on her back, her bottom jaw hanging open. She looked small, doll-like. Jonny was still crying. Nicholas reached out and gathered him into a fierce embrace.

‘I’m sorry, Jonny. I’m sorry.’

They waited downstairs and Nicholas didn’t call anyone. He found something for Jonny to play with while he listened for the sound of the front gate. Instead, what he heard was the scrunch of tyres on gravel. He went to the door to see his grandad climbing effortfully out of the car.

‘I went to fetch you,’ Grandad said.

‘I’m sorry, Grandad. You must have just missed us. We walked. Grandad?’

Grandad stopped and looked at Nicholas.

‘Come inside.’

‘What is it? What have you got to tell me?’

Nicholas took his grandad into the front room and told him what they had found. The old man’s face crumpled, his features disappearing, and Nicholas saw tears sprouting from rhinoceros-like folds of skin. He placed an awkward hand on his grandad’s shoulder.

‘We need to call someone,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t know who to call.’ And as he said this he remembered the man they had seen leaving the house.

‘We need to call the GP, Dr Shipman,’ Grandad said.

‘If you give me his number I’ll call him.’

Within twenty minutes, a car could be heard pulling up outside the house. Nicholas looked out of the window. The same man was walking up the garden path as they had seen leaving the house on their arrival. Nicholas went to open the door. The man looked surprised to see him, but merely muttered something unintelligible and insinuated his bag into the space between Nicholas and the door jamb in order to gain entry. Nicholas watched the doctor’s back as he walked upstairs, then went into the front room to wait with Grandad.

Eventually, they heard the doctor making his way downstairs. Nicholas went to open the door and the doctor entered the front room. Grandad tried to stand, but Nicholas went over to him and encouraged him to stay seated.

‘She was all right when I left her earlier,’ the doctor said, as if it were merely annoying that the timing was awry.

Grandad frowned.

‘The doctor was here earlier,’ Nicholas explained. ‘He was just leaving when we arrived.’

‘Her heart gave out,’ the doctor said, scratching his chin through his scruff of white beard.

‘Her heart gave out? She was fine. She was perfectly fit and well,’ Grandad said.

‘How can her heart just give out?’ Nicholas asked.

‘She was eighty-odd.’

‘Eighty-six. Just,’ Nicholas said, profoundly irritated by the doctor’s manner.

‘We all have to go sometime,’ he said.

‘What?’ Nicholas shouted. ‘Is that the best you can do? We all have to go sometime?’

The doctor’s face twisted into a self-pitying grimace.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ he muttered.

He turned to go but the doorway was blocked. Jonny was standing there.

Jonny said: ‘When’s Nana going to wake up? Daddy? Daddy? Why won’t Nana wake up?’

There is silence when Grace finishes. She keeps her head down, so it isn’t immediately clear that she has indeed finished. Also, because she read for so long, much longer than one would normally read during such an exercise, many of those around the table got so used to the sound of her deep, cracked voice, even became mesmerised by it, that they were no longer waiting for it to stop.

But then someone claps and another person follows and soon the whole room is applauding. Finally she looks up — at me. I look away and smile at those faces around the table that are turning towards mine. Slowly the clapping dies down.

‘Quite a substantial piece,’ I say. ‘Hardly half an hour’s work.’

‘What was your object, Grace?’ someone asks.

Resting one of her elbows on the tabletop and picking at her lip with her fingers, she looks at me again.

‘My object was Paul,’ she says. ‘And you’re right, Paul. I didn’t write all of that this morning. But you are my inspiration. There’s no question about that.’

There’s a pause while people take this in, each interpreting it, presumably, in their own way.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I say, reaching for a smile and not quite getting there. ‘Does anyone have a question?’

Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — signals that he wishes to speak. I give him a nod.

‘I’m just kind of like playing devil’s avocado here, dude,’ he says to Grace, ‘but what you’ve done there, mixing up the real and the fictional, you know, bringing a real person into your novel, is that OK? How does that play? I mean, in terms of, like, taste?’

‘You mean, is it in bad taste?’ With the fingers of one hand she is still picking at dry skin on her lower lip.

‘I guess.’

‘I don’t think so, because it really happened.’

‘Right.’ He nods, and then his eyes grow wide. ‘Really? Shit.’

‘Yeah, really.’

‘You mean it really happened to someone you know?’

Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — is like a man trying to keep hold of a bar of soap. Grace, meanwhile, appears to be carefully considering her answer.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It happened to someone I know.’

There is an interesting discussion to be had here about morality and taste, but I’m not about to encourage it. Plus, there are a lot of people with pieces to read and only a limited amount of time. I suggest we move on. I notice that Grace finally removes her fingers from her mouth and as her hand returns to the tabletop it is shaking.

After lunch, I get through the first two tutorials on autopilot. I dish out my standard advice. Carry a notebook. Read your work out loud. Go for long walks.

The third slot — the last one of the day — is Helen’s. She comes to find me — I’m sitting outside staring at the far side of the valley — and says, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

‘Good idea,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she says.

‘Er, OK,’ I say, shooting her a glance, to which she responds with a breezy smile.

I unlock the car as we approach it and she jumps in. I reverse out of the cobbled area in front of the house and drive slowly up the steep lane in first gear.

‘Where shall we go?’ I ask when we reach the road.

‘Which way are you familiar with?’ she asks.

‘That way,’ I say, pointing to the right.

‘Go left then.’

I go left.

‘So shall I just drive?’ I ask after a couple of minutes of listening to the rushing sound of the tyres on the road.

‘Whatever you like,’ she says, playing with her ponytail. ‘You can do whatever you like.’

I turn to look at her. She gives me a lopsided smile.

When I see a turning, I take it, and when I see another I take that as well. Five minutes later we are parked in a field, tucked in behind a hedge. I switch off the engine and release my seat belt. I barely have time to register the sound of birdsong from the hedgerow before Helen climbs across and straddles my lap, hitching up her skirt. I put my hands up to the back of her head. I release her hair from the bobble that she uses for the ponytail and she shakes her head, laughing, so that her hair goes everywhere. I have never seen her with her hair down before. There suddenly seems so much of it. She places her mouth against mine. Our teeth clash. Her mouth tastes citrusy. I can hear the birds singing. I trace the outline of her breast through her cotton top. She leans into me with her hips and runs a hand under my T-shirt, over the small soft mound of my stomach. Her other hand goes to my belt. I lift her top at the back so I can undo her bra. With a shrugging motion, she removes this from her sleeve and I stroke her breasts through the top and then underneath the top and she undoes my jeans and I press back in my seat until I can push them down and she helps me and I remember the last time I parked my car in a field and she kisses me harder and her teeth catch my upper lip and I taste blood and I hear birdsong and she removes her top and her breasts rise and fall in front of my face and she presses them into my face and there’s blood on her breast and the sound of birdsong is constant and I now know what sound it was I could hear that time above the low growl of the engine and the chug of the exhaust and the increasingly faint protests of the children. That sound that I couldn’t put a name to at that time. A sound that should be beautiful both in itself and by association. It’s not, though, it’s not for me. But then nothing is. Nothing is beautiful. Nothing makes me feel anything. Everything either exists or it doesn’t. Everything either has a physical presence or it doesn’t. Everything — everyone — is either alive or dead. And that’s about all I can say.

Helen climbs off me, still laughing or laughing again. I don’t know what is funny.

‘Look,’ she says.

The car is surrounded by cows. At the windscreen, the driver’s window, the back passenger window and the rear windscreen, cows stand with their great heavy heads pointed towards the interior of the car.

‘How long have they been watching us?’ Helen asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, as I study their long eyelashes, their indifferent gaze.

‘It’s like yesterday morning,’ says Helen, ‘when I read my piece about me and you in your car and everyone around the table was staring.’

‘Were they?’ I say, looking at her and then back at the cows surrounding the car, their huge jaws sliding from side to side like machines made of flesh.

‘You know Grace?’ she says.

I look at Helen again.

‘Is she for real?’ she says. ‘Is she authentic?’

‘One might ask you the same question,’ I say.

Thursday evening. Everyone is gathered in the snug. It’s Grace’s turn to read. Half the students are reading tonight, the other half tomorrow. Of those who are reading tonight, all but two have already read and their performances have been received with due warmth and enthusiasm, but there’s an obvious tension in the air, a sense among the students that Grace is not done yet.

She has been sitting slightly apart, in a corner of the room. It’s a small room and there are a lot of people; someone has to sit in the corner. But still.

She slides forward to the edge of her seat and looks up. Having secured the attention of everyone in the room, she looks down and starts to read.

Most people never meet a murderer. Jonny met two.

At the time when Harold Frederick Shipman was committing his crimes, no one knew he was a killer. One or two had their suspicions; eyebrows were raised and checks were made, followed by more checks, but Shipman went on killing. And although Jonny’s nana died almost certainly at the hands of her doctor, that’s another story, one that would begin to be told three years later in court. Convicted in January 2000, of fifteen murders, Shipman was told he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

He did.

On 13 January 2004 he hanged himself in his cell using bed sheets tied to the bars of his window. He was fifty-seven, just a day shy of fifty-eight.

Jonny was fourteen.

The first report of the Shipman Inquiry, which followed the trial, had already concluded that the former doctor had killed 215 people. Jonny’s nana was not named among them, but that figure would later be revised upwards. The thing was, no one would ever know for sure how many killings could be attributed to Shipman.

Jonny kept files. He had an ever-growing collection of box files filled with press cuttings on the Shipman case. His copy of Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie’s Prescription For Murder: The True Story of Mass Murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman fell apart through overuse.

Puberty hit Jonny like a train. Nicholas or Liz would often find themselves knocking timidly on the bathroom door to ask Jonny if he was all right, he’d been inside for so long. But shaving your legs and your chest and your armpits took a while and so did deliberately cutting your arms and then waiting for the bleeding to stop.

There were no girlfriends. There were no boyfriends. There was a crush on a rather butch English teacher called Miss Fletcher that was never really going to go anywhere, but Jonny took up all her recommendations for books to read. He was behind in some subjects (science, maths), but he excelled in English.

Nicholas and Liz were determined not to spoil Jonny, but what harm could it do to let him have a laptop and a broadband connection in his bedroom? Like any fourteen-year-old boy, Jonny used the Internet to look at porn, but his consumption of it was not straightforward. He didn’t especially like looking at pictures — or videos — of naked women unless they were accompanied by men, and soon he started to wonder if it was the men he actually wanted to look at. So he tried gay sites, but that didn’t make the issue any clearer. He didn’t know what he liked and he felt he ought to like one or the other. But something inside him was stopping him from developing a preference. He wondered if it was grief or anger, but it didn’t seem as direct as that. If he felt desire it was a desire for change, a need to put something right that felt wrong. His dissatisfaction and confusion were linked to what had happened to him, he was sure of that, not so much tied to Nana’s death but to an earlier tragedy that was never spoken of in his adoptive family.

One of Jonny’s box files contained press cuttings on Shipman just like all the others, but only on top. If he delved a little way down, he would find his secret collection of cuttings on the murder of Laura Taylor and the attempted murder of Jonathan Taylor, twins, aged three. There were blurry pictures of his natural father, whom he hadn’t seen since the tragedy. Jonny had been in touch with the Probation Service and found out that his father had spent time in Strangeways and Parkhurst, but since 1999 he had been incarcerated in Wakefield Prison, coincidentally where Shipman ended his days.

When the news broke about Shipman’s suicide, Jonny thought for the hundredth time about his father being within the same prison walls as the mass murderer. Had he and Shipman known each other? Had they ever eaten together or folded sheets in the laundry at the same time? But then Shipman was gone and Jonny found that his interest in his nana’s killer waned. He kept the files only to conceal the one he maintained on his father.

There was love in Jonny’s life; he knew that his adoptive parents were doing their best in difficult circumstances. They cared for him in every sense of the word. They offered affection, which he found impossible to accept. It was like being handed a piece of machinery he didn’t know how to use. He felt nothing. Still there was no attraction to other girls — or boys. His flickerings of desire for Miss Fletcher guttered and died. He had an idea, which he’d had for some time and not expressed to anybody. It bubbled away in the back of his mind like a spring in a cavern. He frequented chatrooms, called helplines, saw the family GP, who refused Jonny’s initial request point-blank and offered to refer him instead to a psychologist. Pragmatically, Jonny took up the referral. He told Nicholas and Liz that he had issues around grief, trauma and bereavement, which of course was true and would always be true, but when he got to see the psychologist he told her what was in his mind and he reminded her that she was bound by the Hippocratic oath. When she looked doubtful, he insisted that he was Gillick competent. In just over a year’s time, he said, he would be sixteen. He had similar discussions with the GP, who said there would be no question of acting before Jonny’s sixteenth birthday, with or without the written consent of his adoptive parents.

What had been an idea became a plan, a project, an obsession. It began to seem to Jonny to represent his only chance at any kind of a life. Not just for him, either. That was the point, really. For his sister.

Why should he have been the one to survive? Why not Laura? Maybe if she had survived and he had not, she would have felt the same as he did, that it wasn’t right, that what had happened wasn’t itself survivable, even for the survivor, without drastic action, fundamental change. Maybe, maybe not. Either or. Either him or her, or her or him. Either one or the other. This was how the cards had fallen — one face up, one face down. All he knew was he couldn’t go on the way things were. There was just a chance that by acting now, he could achieve a kind of resurrection, the twins reunited in a single body, in a state of grace.

Jonny kept up the pressure on his GP and at sixteen, after submitting to endless assessments, he — or she — was accepted on to the gender-reassignment programme.

She — Grace — knew how it would go down. Three months of psychotherapy before even taking the first hormones, and then up to two years spent living in her desired gender role before surgery, a period known as the Real Life Experience (RLE). The NHS liked a two-year RLE, since the evidence showed that while many patients made it through the first year, the dropout rate increased during year two. It was the NHS’ insistence on the two-year RLE, they believed, that resulted in such a high satisfaction rating among the post-op transgender population.

Even with the two-year RLE, Grace was hopeful she would be able to complete the process and embark on her new life before her father was released from prison, which he would be, she was confident, after a minimum of fifteen years. Life rarely meant life for parents who killed their own children. They were not thought to represent a danger to members of the public. Whatever impulse had driven them to murder their offspring had most likely been smothered, certainly when the prompt for the impulse was the banal, tedious one her father would presumably have cited — the threat of losing one’s children through the break-up of one’s marriage. Big yawn. Big, big yawn. Little more than an extreme form of midlife crisis, it was in danger of becoming a cliché. An item in brief on page four, relegated to the news ‘where you are’. Had it really become boringly common or was it just that Grace — that I — was oversensitive to such stories?

Whether Grace continues reading when I leave the room, I don’t know. As I’m packing my bag I can hear a murmur of voices from down below. The layout of the rooms is such that I am able to walk downstairs and leave the house without being seen. The car starts first time and I reverse out. At the top of the lane, a sudden flash of white at the windscreen startles me. I brake and the engine stalls, almost causing me to crash into the drystone wall. Quick, shallow breaths steam up the windscreen, but the barn owl is gone.

Careering down the A646 towards Todmorden, I have to fight an impulse to drift over to the wrong side of the road on blind corners. When I reach the M62, I’m lucky the traffic is light, since my lane discipline is non-existent. I know that if I were to be stopped by the police I could end up back inside. A murderer is only freed on licence. At this moment I don’t care if I go back to prison. I join the M60, come off at junction 1 and park the car just off the one-way system in front of a rollover door marked ENTRANCE IN USE 24 HOURS.

The glass sides of the Stockport Pyramid glow blue and green in the purply-orange night. I walk stiffly across the road and force my way through dense foliage, coming up against a blue fence only a little taller than me. I could climb it, but I decide not to. Instead I back away and lean on the parapet over the river. There’s a drop of twenty or thirty feet and the water is as flat as a mirror, any turbulence hidden within. A little way downstream the river turns shallow over scattered rocks and debris brought down by flood waters, but where from? Where do the shopping trolleys and old tyres get tipped in? Whose old clothes are those?

I hear the approach of jet engines and turn around. In the sky to the north-east hangs a pair of white lights, close-set as a spider’s eyes, quickly increasing in size and brightness. By the time the plane passes above my head, it is 1,500 feet from the ground.

I walk around to the path between the river and the road. It leads down to the river’s edge. The bank is heavily overgrown, colonised by Himalayan balsam, its sickly sweet scent invading my nostrils. Bats swoop low over my head. I follow the path down into a dip and then up the other side. A series of steps on the left leads down to a wooden platform over the river. I walk down and stand on the platform, swaying slightly. The river is not especially high, as there’s been little rain, but at this point the waters swirl and eddy. You can drown in an inch. You’d probably die of exposure just wading out in this. All I can see in my mind’s eye is Grace — her face from various angles, the scars on her arms, her forest-trail scalp. I try to see Jonathan’s features in hers and I tell myself that I can, but I don’t know if that’s only because of what I now know (assuming she is telling the truth).

After an indeterminate length of time I climb back up the steps and continue down the riverside path away from the Pyramid. I know that on the flat land beyond the fence on my right, which I have heard referred to more than once as the Valley of the Kings, there have in the past been plans to build two more pyramids, but the money ran out. The path narrows and darkens as trees close over my head. The drop to the river is steep and long. I pass a tubular metal pedestrian bridge and keep going. There are gaps here and there in the wooden fence on my left. Brambles and rowan contest the available space; rosebay willow herb appears among the nettles and shrubs on the right-hand side of the path.

I pass beneath the motorway, the concrete bridge low above my head, graffiti adding sparkle to the supporting wall. Beyond the motorway the path curves and descends, following the course of the river. Bats are my only companions, guiding me. Another aircraft slips by away to the left. The path widens. Horses stand motionless in a field on my right. Erect on the remains of a railway bridge, a heron’s profile is as still as the slender weeds that sprout from the brickwork. I come to a complicated gate with different access points for cyclists and horse riders. I walk a little way along a metalled road and then encounter another similar gate, after which the path rises and winds through high blackberry bushes and low rowan trees. Power lines approach on the right, strung between enormous bristling pylons. A large bird forms an interrogatory silhouette perched on top of one of these. My blind pursuance of this path cannot silence the questions in my head. How long has Grace known who I am — if indeed she does? (She must.) Was it a coincidence that she applied to the institution where I was teaching or was she several steps ahead of me? Why is she writing what she is writing in her novel? What did she hope to achieve by exposing me at Lumb Bank? Did she expose me? Would it have been clear to the other students whom she was talking about? Did my sudden exit confirm suspicions or remove any doubts? What is her motivation? What does she want?

I collapse on a humped rise on the left-hand side of the path overlooking the dark ribbon of the river. The bird on the pylon — its neck in the shape of a question mark identifies it as a cormorant — has not moved.

What does Grace want? What do I want? What are my choices? That they are fewer now is the only thing I feel certain of. Do I have any at all? Is it up to Grace what happens next? Do I stop or go on? Either or. Do we achieve reconciliation or do I let her destroy me (once again, assuming that is what she wants)? Everything is either or, and inside each either or is another either or, like Russian dolls.

I move off the mound and take a couple of steps down towards the river, unsure what I am doing but feeling impelled to do it. Not really thinking beyond the next few seconds. The river is a channel of black ink. With it I will write the rest of my story. I picture my head going under, unseen by anybody. There is a tree on my right, a thicket of brambles, nettles and Himalayan balsam between me and it. A bird sings. Not the cormorant; a songbird, hidden in the tree. The notes slip out on to the soft night air like some kind of benign alarm or unknown signal. My foot slides on a flattened frond of bracken. I put my arms out for balance, look down and see a corner of gabardine emerging from the vegetation. The tail of an overcoat.

I hear a different sound and look up. A beating of black wings. The cormorant has left its perch.

I bend down, lift the corner of gabardine and see more overcoat material underneath. I drop it and straighten up, prod with a toe, meeting resistance. I sit down again, my previous course of action interrupted. I look at the power lines, at the procession of pylons across the fields on the other side of the river. I watch a plane sideslip towards the airport. I listen to the bird singing from somewhere in the blackness of the tree, its song a repeated pattern of descending arpeggios.

I have never used this path before, but it can’t be long before it reaches the playing fields at the back of Parrs Wood High School and then, beyond the playing fields, Wilmslow Road. The Parrs Wood end of the same dismantled railway line that I can access from the humpback bridge near my house can be no more than a third of a mile away. Either Overcoat Man walked here, lay down and fell asleep, never to wake up, or was carried here and his body dumped in the undergrowth.

I find a recently fallen branch still festooned with foliage and lay it over the exposed area of gabardine before returning to the path and walking on, more quickly now, downstream. I turn right up a path perpendicular to the river that runs between the golf course and the school playing fields, and when I reach the top I cut across the Green Pastures housing estate and reach the end of the dismantled railway line. From here it’s a straight line; I can be home in ten minutes.

The dismantled railway line will soon be cleared so that the tram system can be extended along it. A line will run from Trafford Bar via Chorlton to East Didsbury. It will take years for the line to be constructed and for all that time, once they have been down here and cleared the way, the path will be fenced off to the public. I think about the crowd of young people I saw jostling Overcoat Man on the humpback bridge. I picture them carrying his body down this path in the same thick, knotted darkness through which I am currently advancing in the opposite direction. They could have done it the night after I discovered the body. I picture Overcoat Man making his own slow, painful way down here instead, either in daylight or at night. I had assumed he was dead when I found him lying in the nettle bed, but he may very well not have been. Maybe he was still alive even now, down by the river? Although I doubt it. I could have been wrong once, but not twice, and in this case I doubt that I was wrong at all.

When I get home, I stand at the window of my study, panting slightly from the exertion. I’m looking down at the humpback bridge over the dismantled railway line and the beginning of the path that leads down to the old trackbed from which I emerged only a couple of minutes ago. When my breath steams up the window and I can no longer see, I allow myself to fall forward until my forehead presses against the cool glass. The misty grey field in front of my eyes swims in and out of focus.

Only when I am too tired to remain upright do I go to bed.

In the morning I walk down the dismantled railway line as far as the bottom of Burnage Lane, where I stop and listen to the sound of my own breathing. I face a choice. Either I go left up to Didsbury Road and catch a bus to Stockport in order to pick up the car, or I go straight on through the little tunnel and then down to the river and Overcoat Man.

Either or.

Either I’ll walk up to Didsbury Road and sit and wait for a bus to Stockport and I’ll pick up the car and call Helen and meet her somewhere and either we’ll have sex again in the car or we won’t but either way I’ll never see her again after that. She won’t quit the course, but she’ll stop attending and it won’t be long before someone talks to the university and an investigation is carried out and I will be relieved of my position. It may be impossible to get rid of staff who underperform or who complain about this or that injustice while taking sick leave at the first sign of sniffles, but failure to disclose a previous identity and by extrapolation a criminal record will be reason enough. I’ll be out of a job. I’ll email Grace, but she won’t reply. I’ll give it a few days, I’ll give it a week, but she still won’t reply. I won’t know if I expect her to. I suppose I’m not surprised, I’ll think to myself.

One afternoon I’ll drive down Kenworthy Lane in Northenden. I’ll knock on Erica’s door, but she won’t answer. I’ll wait outside in the car. An hour will pass and finally she’ll walk down the street, coming home from work. I’ll open the car door. She won’t want to get in, but I’ll persuade her. I’ll tell her we’ll go for a drink, for a meal, whatever she wants. I’m depressed and confused, I’ll tell her, I don’t know who else to turn to. With obvious reluctance she’ll get in. I’ll start the engine and drive the car to the end of the road, where it turns into footpaths and cycle paths that go off into the woods and under the motorway. While I’m in the middle of executing a three-point turn I’ll look at the line of four concrete bollards that I’ll remember from the last time I saw Erica. I’ll remember specifically thinking about driving into them at speed. I’ll picture the moment of impact.

I’ll still be thinking about the bollards as I’m driving back down Kenworthy Lane towards the main road with Erica in the passenger seat. We’ll take a meandering route over to Stockport. There won’t be much conversation in the car. I will try, but Erica will resist. We’ll reach the roundabout over the river and I’ll take the exit for the Pyramid. I’ll pull in to the side of the road and Erica will stiffen in the seat alongside and I’ll try to reassure her that I don’t mean any harm. I’ll tell her, I just want to know about the Pyramid. I’ll ask her, How can I get inside? Can’t you get me inside? What’s that window there on the east wall, why is it different? See, one window on the east wall is different. It’s not a different size or anything, the windows are all the same size, but it’s a different colour. It’s kind of blank or opaque, while the others are semi-reflective. What’s special about it? I’ll ask her.

It’s the body door, she’ll say. I’ll say, What? What’s the body door? But she won’t say any more about it, just that it’s the body door. Perhaps it’s something she’s heard someone say. It’s not even an Egyptian pyramid, she’ll remark. It’s more Aztec or Babylonian. I’ll wonder if she’s right. I’ll look up at the steps near the summit. Two steps. The clear glass of the apex. An interior ladder goes right to the very top, but you’d climb it on your own. A pyramid is a house for one. Only one person can occupy the highest point at any one time. It’s narcissistic, solipsistic; it’s about power and the individual. I guess that’s why I’m drawn to it.

I’ll ask Erica if she can get me inside the building. This will be the last time I will ask her. Either she’ll say yes, in which case I will go in there and climb to the second floor and throw myself out of the body door. Or she’ll say no, and I’ll turn the car around and return to the roundabout. I’ll take Didsbury Road and drive in silence right through Heaton Mersey and East Didsbury and Didsbury Village with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on my leg, ready to change gear. When I look down, I’ll notice Erica’s leg. I’ll notice its constant tremor.

I’m not dangerous, I’ll tell her. She’ll look at me briefly, then back at the road ahead; she’ll be like a porcelain figure, fragile, brittle. I’ll turn left into Victoria Avenue and I’ll drive past the house where they filmed Cold Feet while I was in prison and then past the house of Elizabeth Baines and once I’m past the next junction the houses will get bigger and I’ll turn right, driving past even bigger houses belonging to doctors and lawyers and drug company executives until I turn left into Holme Road and right at the bottom into Dene Road West and I’ll skirt the speed bumps with the nearside wheels as I floor the accelerator. The stop sign will be obscured by the overgrown bush, the white line hidden by the last of the speed bumps. I’ll drive straight across Palatine Road. A car travelling from north to south will pass behind me so close it will feel as if it’s passed right through the back of the car. The woosh of air, the shriek of the engine. The scream of the horn, the explosion of brake lights — once we’ve missed each other and it’s too late for a warning, but not for a rebuke. I’ll turn to look at Erica as the car’s suspension reacts to the change in camber by bouncing into Mersey Road. She’ll be looking at me, eyes wide, mouth moving, but no sound coming out, or none that I’ll be able to hear. She’ll attack me, blows raining down on my arm as I continue to drive one-handed. I won’t feel a thing, but then I haven’t felt a thing for more than fifteen years. Under assault I’ll be unable to change gear and when the road bends to the right I’ll have to slow down and the engine will grumble. I won’t be able to hear it but I’ll feel the car begin to shiver and shake and I’ll have to brake and come to a halt and Erica will open her door and get out and run back down Mersey Road towards Palatine Road, where she will turn right and continue running and walking back to Northenden. I’ll take a deep breath and reach across to close her door, then I’ll turn the car around and drive to and fro across Palatine Road between Mersey Road and Dene Road West without stopping or even looking. I’ll do it five times each way, ten times. I’ll do it until I hit someone or until I’ve had enough, whichever comes sooner.

There will be a period of time spent figuring out what to do, trying to see Grace and trying to get back in touch with Helen. Neither will return my messages. I’ll walk the streets. I’ll see Dog Man without his dog, looking lost, bewildered, but still leaning forward. I’ll work on my novel, but it won’t come. Everything I try will seem forced. I’ll turn to my author’s copies of Rites. I’ll flick through each one, noticing that I no longer seem to have a copy with a folded corner. A picture will enter my mind of Helen at Lumb Bank handing me her copy for me to sign.

I’ll spend hours looking at my other books — the white-spined Picadors, the orange and green Penguins — taking them off the shelf, blowing off the dust, smelling the pages, putting them back. I’ll take the remnants of Veronica’s collection and distribute them among the charity shops in the village as I become increasingly aware of a need to get away somewhere, somewhere different, a long way away. Eventually I’ll book a flight to New York.

Landing at JFK in the early afternoon, I’ll jump in a cab to Brooklyn and I’ll notice that most of the houses we pass have pumpkins outside them, often as many as two or three sitting on different steps, all elaborately carved. I’ll be wearing a simple dark jacket and white T-shirt and I’ll wonder if it will be enough to keep me warm. I’ll either walk around Park Slope hoping to catch sight of either him or her and if I do I’ll follow them home and inveigle my way into their house, or I’ll hang around the Community Bookstore on 7th Avenue, their local bookshop, their favourite one apparently, which will have a Halloween-themed window display with plastic spiders and fake cobwebs, and maybe one or both of them will bob in and I’ll introduce myself. I’ve come all this way, I’ll say, and they’ll have to invite me back. He’ll be politely affable in a reserved kind of way and she’ll be more outgoing, friendlier. She’ll be wearing the black and white striped cardigan and the dangly earrings that I’ll recognise from the magazine articles; he’ll look relaxed in a grey zip-up cotton jacket over a soft brown shirt tucked into belted black jeans. His eyes will be hidden behind aviator-style sunglasses; hers will shine like opals from their deep settings. They’ll walk with me back to their house, which will have a pumpkin with an evil-looking grin sitting on the stoop, and we’ll go in and I’ll find myself standing in the living room with the olive-green leather sofa and the shiny round coffee table stacked with books. The stacks will look slightly less neat than in the photographs. Conjunctions 49: A Writers’ Aviary will still be there, although it will have migrated to the left-hand pile. Joe Brainard’s The Nancy Book will be lying open, as if in the middle of being read. Paul will mutter something about having to make a call. He will shake my hand and withdraw to another room and Siri will smile and lead me to her study on the fourth floor.

Standing in front of Siri’s desk, with its silver Apple laptop, assorted knick-knacks of sentimental value and a half-full bottle of San Pellegrino (but no glass — does she swig it from the bottle?), I’ll find my eye drawn to the shelves above, to the top right, but there’ll be no sign of the orange-spined book previously spotted in the Writers’ Rooms picture. Perhaps she is reading it, I’ll think to myself. Perhaps it’s lying on her nightstand.

I have one of these, you know, I’ll say to her, resting my hands on the back of her Herman Miller Aeron chair. Really? she’ll say. Yes, did you know that Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton and Francesca Simon all have one as well? She’ll say, I didn’t know that. I’ll ask her what she’s working on and she’ll tell me a little about the memoir she’s writing, The Shaking Woman. She’ll tell me about her mother and her migraines. I’ll say it sounds fascinating, that it explains a lot about The Blindfold. I’ll tell her what I thought of The Blindfold. I’ll tell her about the strange déjà vu experience I had while reading it. She will look at the floor and then up at me and say, I am delighted by your déjà vu experience because when I set out to write the novel, many years ago now, I was guided only by the thought that I wanted to write an uncanny book — unheimlich, as Freud said — and your reading falls squarely into that category.

And then either she’ll ask me what I’m working on or she won’t, and if she does, I’ll tell her I’m working on a novel but that it’s taken a funny turn and is threatening to fall apart. It’s beginning to remind me, I’ll tell her, of a first novel by David Pirie called Mystery Story, which held my attention all the way through and remained plausible, indeed strangely compelling, spellbinding in fact, and then right near the end the action shifted to America and it just seemed to go off-key somehow. Pirie must have thought so himself, too, because twenty-one years later he published another novel and on the jacket it said, This is his first novel.

There will be a silence and I will say that I should go, they must be busy. She will escort me downstairs and as we pass what I imagine to be Paul’s study I will hear the low murmur of a one-sided conversation. Siri will smile at me in the hallway and I will thank her for her kindness. She will hold out her hand and I will hold it briefly in mine.

Outside, the sky will have darkened a shade as afternoon edges towards evening. On the streets, a lot of people will be in Halloween costume. There will be zombies and vampires and Dead Barbies and people wearing red plastic horns and carrying tridents with flashing lights inside them. It will still be a little early for trick-or-treating, but people will be getting in the mood.

As I approach Bergen Street subway station, I will notice a man in a devil mask coming directly towards me. I’ll think he might be drunk and that it would be wise to get out of his way. Being unable to see his eyes will mean I can’t be sure of his intentions. His mask will be red with strong black markings and two small rubber horns. He’ll open his arms and force me to enter into his embrace. Still I won’t know if he’s intoxicated or murderous. I’ll sniff for alcohol fumes creeping out from behind the mask but all I’ll be able to smell will be the man’s sulphurous cologne. I’ll feel something cold in my stomach and then hot — and then, as he releases me and steps back, cold once more. There will be blood pulsing out of a wound in my stomach rapidly turning my white T-shirt red.

I will collapse to my knees, remembering the last line of a short story by Daphne du Maurier. Oh God, I’ll think, what a bloody silly way to die.

Or I’ll keep on going and pass through the tunnel under Didsbury Road and I’ll slip across the narrow waist of the Green Pastures housing estate and get back on to the path that runs downhill through a small patch of woodland until the school playing fields are revealed on one side and the golf course on the other. Down at the bottom will be the river, where I’ll turn left. It won’t be especially high, but the combed fringe of vegetation on both banks will reveal that it has been higher. On the far side, in a sandbank, I’ll notice a number of holes like tiny caves: nests for sand martins, which will have flown south at the end of summer. I will approach the first pylon and pass under the power cables. Shortly after the path turns to the left, I will leave it, going to the right, towards the river itself, using a small tree as my landmark. The tree will have seemed bigger in the dark. Something — a dog, the wind — will have moved the fallen branch so that the corner of gabardine is once again visible. I’ll check the path in both directions. Either there’ll be a man walking an Alsatian or there won’t be. When the coast is clear I’ll move a few yards away from the body and take a tentative first step into the brambles. I’ll take long strides towards the river, thorns catching in my jeans, until I’m beyond a line level with the body, then I’ll turn right. I’ll sting myself on a nettle and curse quietly.

Eventually, still keeping an eye out for runners or cyclists, I’ll lower myself into a crouch between river and tree. I’ll feel the muddy bank beginning to slope away beneath my feet. I’ll wonder why I didn’t bring gloves. As I extend them through the undergrowth, my hands and lower arms will be etched with red scratches, reminding me of the marks on Grace’s arms, but finally I’ll catch hold of a scrap of coat and I’ll work out — from a hard, bony protuberance and the arrangement of the coat — that I’m touching a shoulder. Reaching for the other shoulder, my fingertips will alight on a surface as damp as the coat but colder. My hand will shrink back from the contact and the edge of my palm will snag on something sandpapery and I’ll remember reading somewhere that it’s a myth that hair and fingernails continue to grow, post-mortem, for up to seventy-two hours. Instead it’s shrinkage in the skin and the flesh — hair follicles, nail housings — that’s to blame.

As I get my hands under the arms and start pulling the body further down towards the river, into the concealment of thicker, taller undergrowth, I’ll notice, for the first time, the smell. It will remind me of the time I emptied the salad drawer of contents that had been left in there far too long. I’ll leave the body close to the lip of the bank, the legs anchored by tough brambles, and retreat, doing my best to leave the vegetation looking as undisturbed as possible.

Back on the path, I’ll start walking upstream. When I reach the Pyramid, I’ll look up at it and wonder, as I’ve wondered before, about the window in the middle of the east wall that’s a different colour from all of its neighbours. I’ll cross the roundabout at the lights and retrieve my car and drive to the university, where I’ll look up an address. I’ll get back in the car and drive to Fallowfield or Oldham or Blackley or Swinton, wherever her records show her as living. The house will be a little redbrick terraced two-up two-down with a landlord living in Didsbury or Prestwich or Altrincham or Ellesmere Park who’ll have several places like it on his books, but either there’ll be no answer to my knock on the door or it will be opened by a girl in denim shorts over black tights who’ll say she hasn’t seen Grace in over a week and I’ll leave and drive around aimlessly for a while before heading back home and parking not outside my house but outside a house a couple of streets away with scaffolding climbing up the walls.

I’ll bang on the door until he answers it and I’ll walk into his house without being asked. What the fuck? I’ll say to him. What the fuck? Ksssh-huh-huh, he’ll go, in his lounge surrounded by his world movie DVDs and his Neil Roland photographs and his seven copies of Straight to Video published by Strangeways Books. What? What the fuck, I’ll say again and then I’ll smack him. And then I’ll either leave him lying on the cheap, lumpy wooden floor, rubbing his stubbly jaw, or I’ll pull him up to his feet and suggest that we go out to the car and we’ll drive out to the Peaks and I’ll drag him up the hill and dig and dig and dig and show him that nobody’s coming through that fucking mountain. The remains of his family were cleared up years ago with the wreckage of the plane. Crashed aircraft do not move through solid earth. The dead do not come back to life. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is a work of fiction. Pyramids are nothing but monuments to obscene power and colossal vanity. And he’ll go, What the fuck?

That night, after driving back and dropping Lewis outside his scaffolding-clad house, I’ll stay up drinking until I succeed in numbing the pain or until I replace the pain with a new pain in a different place but that’s acute enough to distract me from the original pain and then I’ll go to bed and I’ll fall into a fitful sleep and I’ll be woken by the rain. I’m not normally woken by rain unless it’s particularly heavy rain and then I hear it in my dreams as it’s blown against the windows and as it pours out of the gutters and splashes on to the ground at the front of the house. I’ll exit my dreams and lie there thinking about the body perched on the edge of the riverbank, albeit tethered by thorny stems. I’ll try to get back to sleep, but I’ll be unable to and I’ll know from experience that it’s hopeless, so I’ll get up and dress in the dark and make a cup of tea that I’ll sit and drink in the kitchen staring at the rain lashing against the windows.

Dawn will break without my being aware of its happening. One moment it will still be night, the next the sky will have turned a uniform misty grey. At the same time the rain will have eased off. I’ll leave the house and walk down the dismantled railway line through a fine drizzle. I’ll pass through the tunnel under Didsbury Road without hesitating and across the middle of Green Pastures and then I’ll be down on the riverbank and the rain will have stopped, but the water will have risen by an appreciable amount. The sand martins’ nests will not only have filled with water but the force of the flow will have swept away parts of the bank. The pylon will be emitting a strange buzzing noise as if affected in some way by the rain. A thin grey tablecloth of mist will have been laid over the field on the far side of the river.

There’ll be no one on the path, no cyclists, no horse riders, no trans-Pennine ramblers. I’ll step off the path into the brambles, which will resist my progress as staunchly as if I had never before penetrated them, but I’ll finally reach the spot where I expect to find the body and I won’t immediately see it and I’ll have visions of it having been dislodged by the fiercest of the flood and dragged into the flow and carried downstream until arrested by some obstacle and left hanging in a grotesque tableau to be discovered, with awful, clichéd inevitability, by a dog walker, but then I’ll smell it and I’ll suddenly see it and I’ll realise I’d hidden it better than I thought I had. I’ll make sure the body is still secure and I’ll check the height of the water and I’ll observe that it’s unlikely to rise much higher than it is at the moment and I’ll slowly and carefully extricate myself from the brambles and nettles and return to the path. I’ll stand there for a moment and sniff the air, but I won’t be able to smell anything, and so I’ll start walking back towards Parrs Wood.

When I get home I’ll find the model aircraft that I salvaged from the garden beyond the back fence and I’ll get the broken pieces of red plastic and I’ll put them all on the kitchen table. From the drawer I’ll take a tube of superglue and I’ll fix all the pieces back together and then I’ll sit and look at the aircraft. I’ll turn it this way and that, examine every angle. I’ll allow most of the morning to go by in this fashion and when I feel the first pangs of hunger, instead of getting some lunch, I’ll go outside and get in the car and drive round to Carol and AJ’s and I’ll park outside on the opposite side of the road and sit and watch their house. I’ll sit there for a long time and either I’ll see Carol at one of the windows or I won’t. And if I do, either I’ll wave or I won’t. And if she sees me she’ll either wave back or she’ll ignore me because she doesn’t recognise me, and if she waves back I’ll get out of the car and I’ll walk up the drive to her front door and she’ll come down and let me in, and I’ll smile at her and either she’ll invite me in or she’ll ask me what’s up and if she invites me in I’ll go in and she’ll close the door behind us and I’ll walk into her kitchen and I’ll ask if AJ is there and she’ll say, No, he’s at work. Some of us have jobs to go to. And I’ll laugh and she’ll look a little uneasy and either I’ll say, Look, this was a mistake, and leave, or I’ll tell her that it doesn’t matter that AJ’s not in because it’s her I’ve come to see. I’ll start to tell her how I feel about her, and it will occur to me that I don’t know how I feel about her. It will occur to me that I don’t actually feel anything about her apart from a basic, almost animalistic attraction that I might feel for anyone but that I just happen to feel for her, and she’ll either slap me across the face or look away and start picking at the cuticle of her thumb. I’ll tell her I’m sorry and that I had to see a friendly face and there was no one else I could think of. I’d have gone and seen Lewis, I’ll say, except I saw him last night and I’m sick of seeing him, to be honest, and she’ll say Who? and I’ll repeat his name and she’ll say, Who’s Lewis? And I’ll say, You remember, and she’ll say, I think you should leave now.

I’ll drive home past Elizabeth Baines’ house, past the second-hand bookshop, through the centre of the village, where I’ll see Umbrella Lady waiting at the lights for the green man to appear so she can cross over and begin the long, slow trek down School Lane. I’ll park outside my house and sit in the car for a few minutes listening to the ticking of the cooling engine and looking at the front of the house. Staring, really; watching, gazing. Thinking, calculating. The front door will close behind me. I’ll look in the kitchen and see the red model aircraft standing on the kitchen table. I’ll walk upstairs and enter my bedroom. Expending considerable effort, I’ll pull the bed away from the wall into the middle of the room. I’ll do the same with the chest of drawers and the wardrobe, rucking up the carpet. I’ll be sweating by the time I stand back and survey my work, trying to summon up ghostly diagonal lines coming up through the floor from the four corners of the house. In the bathroom the adjustable feet of the wooden cabinet will squeal in protest, leaving dirty marks on the tiles. I’ll look at the fixed items ruefully — the bath, the toilet, the washbasin. Will I have to stop using them, make do with the toilet in the cellar? I’ll run upstairs, to my study, where I’ll find Cleo curled up on my Herman Miller Aeron chair. I’ll kneel down on the bare floorboards next to the chair and stroke her sleek black fur and very soon she’ll start purring. And then I’ll stand up and grab hold of my desk and yank it away from the wall. Power cables will reach their full extent and drag various pieces of kit on to the floor. I’ll gather them up and stuff them under the desk in the middle of the room. I’ll start pulling the books off the shelves and stacking them on the floor next to the desk and then I’ll take hold of the Herman Miller chair and lift it up on to the desk. I’ll climb up on to the desk myself and then, taking care to keep the chair steady, I’ll lever myself up on to the chair. Cleo will shift resentfully, so I’ll gather her up into my arms as I balance on the chair and I’ll ask her if she knows who else has one of these chairs and she’ll say, Geoff Dyer, Alain de Botton, Francesca Simon and Siri Hustvedt, and I’ll say, That’s right, Cleo, that’s right. Good girl. And then she’ll wriggle out of my arms and like a streak of tar she’ll leap down to the desk and then on to the floor and she’ll run out of the door, leaving me, crouched on the chair, alone, lifting my head to the pyramid roof.

In the end, I walk on through the tunnel under Didsbury Road. I cross Green Pastures and join the path down to the river, where I turn left. Above the power lines, a medium-size jet is making its final approach to Manchester Airport, undercarriage down, ready to land. The branch is still in place. Without moving it, and making sure first that no one is coming from either direction, I find more fallen branches from the other side of the path, where, beyond the pylon, there is a nature reserve. I lay these down over the makeshift grave to create more of a barrier to inquisitive dogs and then I walk back along the river towards Parrs Wood. I turn right up the path between the playing fields and the golf course. I cross Green Pastures and head back down on to the trackbed of the dismantled railway line.

When I get home I write an email to Grace suggesting we meet. The cursor hovers over the send button. I reread it and click back in the body of the email instead and rewrite it, asking if we can meet, doubting that she will agree or even get back to me. I hit send.

I open the folder marked ‘Novels’ and reread the last few thousand words of my work-in-progress to see if I can get going again, but I can’t. I check my emails to see that nothing has arrived. I take out my phone and call the university and get Grace’s contact details. She lives in West Didsbury, less than a mile away. I key in the number, but there’s no answer and apparently no voicemail service. I send her a text. I check my emails again.

I leave the house and walk for five minutes to a quiet street just around the corner from Lewis’ house where there are always a couple of minicabs sitting waiting for jobs. I ask one of the drivers to take me to Stockport. He says he’s not insured unless the job is booked through the office. I shake my head and walk to the other car and repeat my request and get the same response. So, I pull my phone out of my pocket and call the number of the cab firm. The controller asks where I want to go and I tell him and he asks me where I am and I tell him that too. He tells me his drivers can’t pick up passengers on the street, so I ask if they can pick me up from the address of the house outside of which we’re standing and he says, No, that’s not where you live, that’s just where you happen to be standing. So I say, Right, and give him Lewis’ address and ask to be picked up from there. He asks when I want to be picked up and I say in two minutes. He says, Sure, no problem, and I hang up. I give the driver of the cab a humourless smile and walk to the end of the street and turn right. After a hundred yards I reach a house covered in scaffolding and walk up the drive. The windows are dirty and it’s hard to see inside, but the place looks dead. By the time I’ve turned around to face the street, the cab has arrived and is pulling up at the side of the road. It’s one of the two cars from around the corner. I walk back down the drive and open the rear door and the driver says, Hiya mate. Stockport, yeah? And I say, Yeah.

Throughout the journey I check my phone for texts and emails and I look out of the window. When I see the Pyramid sliding into view I ask the driver to let me out. He says, What, here? And I say, Yes, here. I pay him and get out. I cross Didsbury Road and make my way towards the system of footpaths and subways that negotiates the roundabout suspended over river and motorway. I pass close to the Pyramid and think about scaling the fence and seeing if I can get inside, but I’m not sure there’s much point. Instead I walk on and eventually reach the spot where I left the car. It’s still there and no one has clamped it or taken a half-brick to the windscreen. I get in, start the engine and drive back to the roundabout, giving the Pyramid another look as I get on to Didsbury Road and head for home.

I leave the car outside my house and walk over to West Didsbury. The address I’ve been given for Grace is on one of the roads that run from north to south between Lapwing Lane and Barlow Moor Road. These are narrow roads with cars parked on both sides; tall, narrow Victorian houses mostly divided into flats. I stand outside hers and look up at the windows, which give nothing away. Because of the age of the house, any windowsills on the inside will be too shallow for anything to stand on — plants, ornaments, a row of books — that might reveal something about the residents. In the front room of the raised ground-floor flat I can see men’s shirts on hangers hooked over the picture rail.

There is a strange fluttering in my stomach, an odd lightness contrasting with a heaviness somewhere higher up. It’s so long since I’ve felt anything like this, I don’t recognise it. It feels alien to me. But it feels. It is a feeling.

I walk up to the door and ring the bell for flat C. I hear a faint, intermittent buzz somewhere in the house, presumably the top floor, but that is all I hear. I press it again, but there is no response. I step away from the door and return to the street. I look back up at the windows, but there is nothing to see.

The feeling inside me has not gone away.

I walk through the streets. Leaves are beginning to fall; they form wide circles on the road and the pavement below the lime trees that line Parkfield Road South. I don’t know what time it is when I’m finally standing outside Lewis’ house, but the light is different: there’s a softness to it, an amber hue, a sense of liquidity. It feels as if the world could become trapped in this moment. My hand lifting the door knocker, striking the door, once, twice, three times. Lewis doesn’t answer. I peer through the stained glass, but it’s hard to see anything clearly. The windows of his front room are streaked with dirt. I knock again and a moment later find myself pulling open the garage door, which scrapes on the tarmac. I slip into the garage and move past some bits of old junk to reach the side door, which is unlocked.

I step into Lewis’ kitchen, my shoes crunching on grit. If I didn’t know this was Lewis’ kitchen I wouldn’t immediately guess it from what I see around me. The cupboards and cabinets have gone. The floor, too. I’m standing on bare cement. Everything has gone. It looks as if it has been stripped, or abandoned halfway through building. There’s a business calendar hanging on the wall, some dates ringed with red pen, scribbled notes that are impossible to read. On the floor, something catches my eye. I bend down to pick it up. A creased photograph of a woman with flaming red hair and two little blonde girls. I go to put it down somewhere, but there’s nowhere, so I drop it on the floor again and walk out of the kitchen into the hall, which looks similar. I enter the rear living room. More of the same. No furniture, no big plasma-screen TV, no Neil Roland framed picture on the wall. No carefully chosen DVD collection.

I’m about to go back into the hall to go and explore upstairs when I hear a sound coming from outside, possibly the garage. Then gritty footsteps in the kitchen. I look around for somewhere to hide. There’s nowhere. A figure appears in the doorway.

‘Grace!’ I say.

She enters the room. Her squat body seems packed with unpredictable intent. Her hair has been tied back, emphasising her square jaw.

‘What are you doing here?’ I ask.

‘I followed you,’ she says, stopping a few feet away and thrusting her hands into her jeans pockets. ‘I don’t know what to call you. Paul? Dad? Neither feels right.’

‘I keep wanting to call you Jonathan,’ I say.

‘Jonathan’s dead,’ she says.

She looks at me, as if challenging me, then lowers her head to the floor.

‘What do you want me to say?’ I ask her. ‘I don’t know what to say. Do you want me to say I’m sorry?’

‘It would be a start.’

I pause, then say, ‘I am. I’m sorry. If I don’t say it easily or often enough, it’s because it isn’t adequate. I know it isn’t adequate.’

‘Do you think,’ she asks with sudden bite, ‘that saying that makes it all right? Do you?’

‘No. Nothing will make it all right. I know that.’

Neither of us speaks for several seconds. Half a minute. I breathe out; she looks around.

‘What are you doing here anyway?’ she asks.

‘I know the guy who lives here.’

‘Doesn’t look to me like anyone lives here.’

‘I reckon he’s done a bunk.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she says, twisting her face up as she looks at me. ‘No one lives here — or has lived here for years.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look around you. Look at the dust. At the desolation. The abandonment. It’s, I don’t know, a refurbishment put on hold. They ran out of money. Absent owner. Whatever. But no one’s lived here for a long time.’

‘How do you explain the calendar in the kitchen, in that case?’

She rocks back on her heels. ‘What calendar?’

‘Calendar in the kitchen.’

Grace turns and walks into the hall and I follow her. She enters the kitchen and the calendar is still there hanging on a nail. As she approaches it, she brushes the photo of the redhead and two blonde girls to one side with her shoe, without noticing it. I bend down and pick it up while she’s inspecting the calendar.

‘See?’ she says.

‘What?’ I say as I fold the photograph in half and slip it in my back pocket.

‘Check the date, Daddy-o.’

She points and stands aside and I see that the calendar dates from 2006. I wonder how I had failed to notice that before. I turn and walk out of the room. In the hall I look at the pile of junk mail on the floor behind the front door. I crouch down. Pizza delivery leaflets, Indian takeaway menus, flyers for cleaning firms, drive-layers and gutter-clearers. Free newspapers, plastic bags for charity donations. A small handful of franked letters in window envelopes addressed to a variety of names, none of them Lewis’.

I stand up and turn to the door to the front room. It is as bare as the main living room at the back of the house. I step back into the hall and look at the stairs. I think about what I’m doing as I climb the stairs and I think that if there was any point at all in my checking every room downstairs, there’s surely no point in my even going upstairs. I’ve never been upstairs in Lewis’ house. How will I know whether what I see is the same as it was during the times I visited Lewis’ home or is any different? And what difference would it make? A box room at the top of the stairs is empty. The next bedroom looks larger than it is only because there’s nothing in it — no bed, no wardrobe, nothing. The main bedroom, at the front of the house, is the same. I enter it nevertheless and walk across to the window and look out at the street. I take my phone out of my pocket and find Lewis’ number. I dial it and get a message saying the number has not been recognised. I put the phone away and stare out of the window, past the scaffolding poles, at the street. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there when I hear a light tread on the stairs and I’m aware of Grace entering the room behind me. For a while she doesn’t say anything and I continue looking out of the window.

Finally, she says, ‘Who’s your imaginary friend, then?’

‘Lewis Harris,’ I say.

‘So who is he? Or, should I say, who was he?’

‘Just a guy, a guy with an annoying laugh. A writer. He lives round here. He lives here,’ I say, gesturing at the house itself as I turn to face her.

‘Yeah, right. Has anyone else ever met him?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re a fantasist. Always have been.’

‘Lots of people have met him. I met him at a mutual friend’s barbecue.’

‘That woman you had your affair with, she was never going to be with you. You destroyed your marriage for nothing. And the lives of your children. For nothing.’

‘I slept with her twice and then I called it off. It was a mistake, but your mother made mistakes as well.’

‘Yeah, marrying you.’

Grace is looking at me. I look at her briefly, but I can’t hold her gaze.

‘Why?’ she says, in a low voice. ‘Why did you do it?’

I look up. I can see she doesn’t mean why did I marry her mother, nor why did I sleep with Susan Ashton.

‘Do you think I haven’t asked myself that question every day?’

‘And?’

I stare at the floor.

‘Your wife leaving you,’ I say, ‘is one thing. When she says she’s going to take the children and you’ll never see them again, that’s another. Part of you dies.’

‘Don’t try to universalise it,’ she says, her voice full of scorn and venom. ‘You did this, not some universal archetype.’

Neither of us speaks for a moment. I turn and look out of the window. A breeze stirs the fallen leaves. On the other side of the street, a man walks past. When I was young I used to look at other people and think how strange it would be to be them.

‘The part of you that died,’ she says, ‘what was that? Your conscience? Your humanity?’

I don’t respond. The scaffolding poles moan in the wind. Between us in the empty bedroom the silence spreads like water. I do have something to say, but I have never said it. I have thought it to myself, but there has never been anybody to say it to. It has never been spoken out loud. I don’t know how weak it will sound. Or how wrong.

‘It’s like it’s already happened,’ I say. ‘It’s like something inside you goes — cracks, snaps, dies, whatever — and then it’s like it’s already happened. Like you’ve already done it. There’s an inevitability about it, a feeling that you don’t have a choice. It’s going to happen, because in a way it already has. You become an instrument, nothing more.’

‘Bollocks,’ she says. ‘Pretentious, self-serving bollocks.’

‘I thought it might be,’ I say. ‘It’s the best I can do. Why would I want to kill my children? Why would anybody want to kill their children? The answer is you don’t. You don’t want to kill your children. You’re consumed by a compulsion to hit out, to punish. What punishment could be worse? It’s not the suicide — that’s nothing. If someone does that to you, leaves you thinking you’re responsible for their death, they’re beneath contempt, not worth bothering about. But taking the children, that’s unforgivable, the ultimate punishment. That is contemptible. There can be nothing more contemptible. You’re leaving me? Threatening to take the kids? Well, how about this, I’m leaving you and everything else and taking the kids with me.’

‘Don’t you dare make this my mother’s fault.’

‘I’m not. I did it. I’m the one who’s to blame. All I’m saying is, it happens without you deciding it should happen. Those thought processes, you don’t go through them. You work them out afterwards, trying to make sense of what you’ve done. Not make sense of it, but trying to understand how you could have done it.’ I pause. ‘Where is she, though?’ I ask her. ‘Your mother. You didn’t write about that, did you? She just seemed to disappear.’

‘She wasn’t perfect. She couldn’t handle it. But there’s no comparison.’

‘No. I know that.’

I realise I’m tired of standing and I sit down on the dusty floor. Grace does the same. Between us the pool of silence expands and becomes deeper. We don’t say anything for several minutes. I think about Lewis, about meeting him at AJ’s barbecue. Had others interacted with him or had he only ever spoken to me? Ksssh-huh-huh. I picture him at the pub. Did he speak to the other guys? Did he get a round in? I reach into my back pocket and bring out the folded photograph. I unfold it and look at the woman and the two blonde girls.

‘What’s that?’ Grace asks.

I look up and see her sitting on the other side of the black pool that lies between us. I reach across it, offering her the photograph. She stretches out an arm, then holds up the photograph to her eyes in the darkening room.

‘Who’s this?’ she asks.

‘Lewis’ wife and daughters?’ I say, my intonation rising at the end of the sentence. Grace, being a young person, won’t necessarily hear it as a question.

She gets to her feet and walks around the black shadow in the middle of the floor until she reaches the window, where there’s more light. She holds the photograph up for a closer look. I get up also and stand a foot or so away from her. While she’s studying the photograph, I take another step towards her, holding my breath. The dying light falls across her face and a tiny pool of shadow collects in the little round scar at the corner of her eye. She looks up and I raise my hand to take the photograph back and as I do so our fingers touch and I feel a sudden stab of emotion like an electric shock. I grab hold of her hand and the photograph falls to the floor. She looks at me, mistrust and confusion in her eyes. I pull her towards me and wrap my arms around her. She struggles and she’s strong, but I’m stronger and I use all the strength in my arms and upper body to hold her close and not let her go. Her struggles become less frequent and when she’s not trying to make me release her she stands rigid as a statue. Her face is pressed into my chest. I wonder if she can breathe. Her hair smells of grapefruit. We stand like that for half a minute, forty-five seconds, a minute, maybe longer, until I become aware that one of us is shaking. Either it’s her, or it’s me. Maybe it’s both of us. I think, after a short while, it is both of us. Eventually, I feel her relax her muscles and a moment later I release my hold and let her go. She remains where she is for a few seconds, then steps back.

I offer her a tissue, but she pulls out one of her own. She turns away to blow her nose.

‘There’s something I have to ask you,’ I tell her, my voice slightly unsteady. ‘That piece about the tramp that was read out in class, was it yours? Did you write it?’

She blows her nose again before answering. ‘That was an anonymous exercise.’

I wait, in case she might add something, but she doesn’t.

‘Right,’ I say.

I watch her back. She stands tense and hunched over her tissue. After a short while she puts the tissue away and walks towards the door.

‘Grace?’ I say, but she doesn’t answer, just keeps walking. I hear her feet on the stairs and then noises from downstairs. I turn to the window and watch her walk down the drive and turn left. I wonder if I will ever see her again.

I walk over to Grace’s road and push an envelope through her door. I hear it land on the hard floor, the keys inside it clinking together. Briefly I look up at the top-floor window, but there’s nothing to see. I turn and walk away. I start walking back to my house, but then stop and change direction. This time — the last time — I won’t take the path along the trackbed of the dismantled railway line. I join the river at West Didsbury instead, via a stile at the bottom of Stanton Avenue.

It’s early, an hour after dawn. A thin layer of mist lies above the river, which sits low in its channel, greenish-grey in colour. I walk upstream, due south, for a quarter of a mile. The river starts to meander and soon the only clue to orientation is a steady stream of planes coming in to land at Manchester Airport. I stop and watch a heron picking its way along the opposite bank, using its spindly, anglepoise legs to find the best footholds in the mud. When it draws level with me, it stops and looks back upstream. It stands very still. I also stand very still watching it. It doesn’t twitch or move even a fraction. When it does move again, I will carry on walking upstream. I will watch the planes coming in to land as I walk, my shoes damp from the dew. It will take me at least half an hour to get there, maybe longer, and when I get there I will call the police and I will wait there until they arrive and then I will go with them.