‘Left. Maybe they’re right?’ he says as I change down into second and my hand knocks his knee.
‘In one or two cases, maybe, but then what are they doing on the course? The best ones might know they’re doing something right but they’re keen to take on board any advice, whether it’s from me or anyone else in the group.’
‘Straight on,’ Lewis says. ‘Anyway. It’s not like anyone buys books any more.’
We drive in silence for a while. Salteye Brook is on our left — the old course of the River Irwell — hidden behind a long line of redbrick houses with white PVC window frames and the shortest front paths in Manchester.
‘It does sometimes seem,’ I say finally, in response to his last comment, ‘as if there are more people studying creative writing than there are people buying books. Even some of those who want to write can hardly be bothered to read.’
‘Turn right here,’ Lewis says, pointing across my chest.
I turn into the car park and pull into a free space at the end, killing the engine.
‘Ta,’ says Lewis as he opens his door and gets out.
‘You’re welcome,’ I mutter as I open my own door.
Barton Aerodrome was opened in 1930, the first purpose-built municipal airport in the UK. It was intended to be the Manchester airport but within a short time it became obvious that the boggy terrain would not support the heavier aircraft coming into service, and plans were drawn up for Ringway to the south of the city. Renamed City Airport Manchester in 2007, it remains a busy airfield for general aviation. Some eighty or so private owners keep their Pipers and Cessnas there, paying fees to the airfield authority for the privilege.
Lewis leads me through the little gate on to the airfield itself. No security here. Apart from the CCTV cameras that I see bolted to the brickwork of the control tower and affixed to a couple of free-standing poles.
To our left, fifty or sixty planes are parked in neat rows, all facing the same direction — west. Ahead of us, the grass runway that I recognise from the DVD runs from left to right, west to east. And to the right, a few more planes, scattered more randomly than the larger group.
I experience a strange sense of temporal displacement as I scan the endless green for a glimpse of the red dress or the little yellow hat. I realise I don’t know what colour dress the woman was wearing. I can picture her walking away from the camera — I look up for the right camera to orient myself within the field of that shot — but I can’t remember what colour dress she was wearing.
Lewis is a little way ahead of me. I catch up with him.
‘His plane was just over there,’ he says, pointing to the right. ‘She will have parked where we parked and walked in here through the gate we came through. She probably looked around, wondering where to find him. Although, knowing him, he’d have given her very precise directions.’
He stands upright, his head thrust slightly forward. There’s a breeze, sufficient to fill the orange windsock. Then he turns to look at me. I almost look away, but I know this is a challenge, so I hold his stare. His eyes are cold, red-rimmed. It could be the wind, but it might not be. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. There are lines around his mouth I’ve not noticed before.
‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’
‘Then what happened?’ I ask him.
‘You’ve seen the DVD.’
‘It’s not conclusive.’
‘She walked towards the plane with the girls,’ he says, as he takes a step in that direction himself. ‘He was standing by the plane, as you know.’ He looks at me at this point, a slight curl to his lip.
‘And the next shot,’ I say, taking up the narrative, ‘is of him standing by the plane looking beseechingly, imploringly back at the woman and the two girls, although mainly at the girl in the little yellow hat, because the woman and the girl in the red dress are walking away. They have their backs to him.’
‘They’re walking away,’ he agrees. ‘And they should have carried on walking away.’
‘But the girl in the little yellow hat stops and looks back,’ I say.
‘Anna,’ he says with a hairline crack in his voice.
‘And because he looks so pathetic, because he looks like a broken man, she takes a step back in his direction.’
‘She used to cry over dead birds,’ Lewis says. ‘In the spring, when you’d occasionally find fledglings in the garden fallen out of their nests, she’d be in floods of tears. She couldn’t bear anything dead or broken. She felt exactly the same when she looked back and saw that cunt extending his fucking hand to her. She couldn’t walk away like Mel and Emily. She had to go to him.’
‘Mel was your wife.’
‘And Emily was my other daughter. She was a bit harder. Not hard. She was just, you know…’
‘Older?’ I guess.
He shakes his head as he watches a small plane flying overhead, presumably taking a pass over the airfield before coming in to land.
‘They were the same age,’ he says.
‘Twins?’
‘Not identical.’
The plane turns in the distance and describes a wide semicircle with the airfield at the centre of the diameter. Having reached a certain point, in the west, it turns again and comes in on a straight line towards the airfield. I remember Lewis using the phrase ‘extended runway centre line’ at Carol and AJ’s barbecue.
Lewis has walked away from me. He stops by a plane thirty yards away. I see him touching the fuselage with his hand. I walk over to him.
‘This is not…?’
‘Ksssh-huh-huh.’ He looks at me. ‘You’ve not been paying attention,’ he says.
He’s wearing a linen shirt, similar to the one he wore at the barbecue, but without a pattern. A simple white linen shirt with an open neck. Grey hair emerges in little tufted spirals at the throat. I can see his chest rising and falling beneath the material.
‘They went up in the plane,’ I say.
He doesn’t reply. I don’t know whether to push it. Either I push it or I leave it. Let it drop.
‘These small planes,’ he says after a while, ‘there are two main types. Cessnas and Pipers. This is a Cessna. Cessna 172. It has a high wing. See, the wing joins the fuselage at the top so that you can see the ground when you look down from the cockpit, when you’re doing navs, as they call them. Navs.’
He looks at me and I raise my eyebrows.
‘Navigation flights,’ he says. ‘It would seem to make sense, wouldn’t it, sticking the wing up there so that you can see down, see what’s beneath you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Piper owners disagree, of course.’
‘What did he fly?’
‘What do you think? A fucking Piper Cherokee. Piper owners are like Mac users. Absolutely fucking convinced their more expensive, cooler machine is somehow better than the more commonly used alternative. Cessnas are like PCs. Reliable, safer — given the position of the wing — the obvious choice. They’re the standard. Maybe if he’d been flying a Cessna 172 like this…’
This is all new to me and sounds suspiciously like bullshit. ‘How is the Piper different?’ I ask him.
‘The wing is lower, so it’s harder to see the ground. The wing comes in below where you’re sitting. It’s so fucking obviously fucked up.’ A tiny bubble of spittle flies from his lips on the final plosive. ‘When did you ever see a low wing on a bird?’ His hand forms a fist and I wonder if he’s going to take out his bitterness on whatever’s to hand. Me, for example. Or this Cessna 172. More quietly, he repeats the line: ‘When did you ever see a low wing on a bird?’
His fist opens like a flower on a passage of speeded-up film and he turns away from the plane.