‘How badly did you hit him?’ I ask.
‘Depends how you mean. I tried to give him a right good smack, but it was soft as shit. He went down, because there was nothing to him, streak of piss; most men would have stayed on their feet.’
‘Did you hit him again while he was down?’
‘What is this? Am I on trial?’
‘Thought you’d be grateful if I showed an interest. You seem so keen for me to hear all this.’
This shuts him up for a while and we walk in silence. At one point the path narrows and he goes in front again. I look at the back of his head. His hair needs cutting. It’s only half a centimetre long, but if you’re going to keep it short you might as well keep it short, especially with male-pattern baldness. The regrowth emphasises the baldness, and straggles of curly grey hair run down his neck at the back in two lines towards his shoulders. Men who cut their own hair with electric clippers, as I assume he does, always seem to forget you need to take a wet razor to those lines. They grow quickly and become unruly and unsightly like epicormic growth on the trunks of lime trees.
‘You said you were away,’ I say in an attempt to restart the conversation. ‘Where were you?’
‘Just away.’
I remember him at AJ and Carol’s talking about having been in the Far East. Did he go to the Far East and leave his wife and girls in Manchester? Or had he come back from the Far East and gone away somewhere else, somewhere closer to home? Was he away a long time or only a few days? The thing was, even if he told me, I wouldn’t necessarily believe him. But his story lacked detail. It was imprecise, like the pilot’s confession. What was his name, the pilot?
‘What was his name?’
‘Trevor something.’
‘Trevor?’
‘Yeah.’
Now I remain silent.
Trevor.
‘Fancy losing your wife to a guy named Trevor, right? Just makes it worse, doesn’t it? Fucking Trevor.’
I look at the ground as I walk, the name Trevor going around in my head.
‘Look!’ Lewis says, pointing towards a change in the landscape in the distance. The moor starts to climb again and falls away on the left-hand side. ‘That’s where we’re going.’
He starts walking again.
‘She wasn’t that into him,’ he says, picking up his thread. ‘She went to the aerodrome to finish it.’
As we continue walking, the topographical feature up ahead acquires more definition. A small hill rises from the plateau, which itself falls away, surprisingly, on one side.
‘He told me he’d sensed she was losing heart and so he invited her to bring the girls to the aerodrome and promised he’d take them all up in his four-seater. As soon as she arrived, he said, she told him it was over. So he challenged her, asked her why she’d brought the girls if that was the case? Did she really think he would take them up if she’d just dumped him? She said none of them had any desire to go in his plane and that it had been over in her mind on the way out to the aerodrome and it was twice as over now.
‘He begged her to change her mind, said he was in love with her and without her he didn’t know how he would carry on. He told me all this. It was as if he thought by telling me, he was somehow making it better. But, you know, there was no making it better.
‘He claimed he told her that if she didn’t relent, he would kill himself and how would she like to live with that? She, at this point, according to him, told him to fuck off. I kind of admire that, whether in front of the girls or not. And she walked away — as you saw on the DVD. She’s walking away holding Emily’s hand. But Trevor sticks his own hand out and calls after Anna, because he’s picked up on the fact that she’s more sensitive than her sister. He plays on her emotions, making it look as if he’s simply offering a spin in his plane, while subtly letting her know that if she doesn’t help convince her mum to come back and at least talk to him, he’ll be as broken as the dead birds he knows she cries over in the garden. That was Mel’s fault for telling him that stuff.’
We’re at the base of the hill now and there’s a clear choice either to go around it or to start climbing. Lewis stops and stands with his hands on his hips.
His story is almost over.
‘So that’s how he tricks them into his plane. They take off and Mel is still telling him it’s over, even as she’s looking out and enjoying the view, or what she can see of it out of a Cherokee with the bloody wing in the way. He says he’s not saying much at this point, whether that’s because he’s hoping the experience will do his talking for him or because he believes her and has decided upon his course of action. He told me the latter, but I wasn’t convinced. I think he was trying to dig himself an even deeper hole than he was already in. Punishing himself as harshly as he could.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They flew over the centre of town and then out here. Takes about fifteen minutes with a decent westerly wind behind you. He told me that he spotted this hill from two or three miles away and just made a beeline for it. Didn’t deviate from his path for a second, even when Mel and the girls started screaming. The subsequent investigation suggested otherwise, that a couple of vital components failed at the same time and the crash was much more likely to have been a tragic accident. That was the official finding, anyway, whatever he said. The thing was, there was compelling evidence for both propositions, expert evidence on the one hand and possibly unreliable testimony on the other.’
‘They crashed into this hill?’ I ask him.
‘On the other side. I come up here once a month or so.’
‘He was the only survivor?’
Lewis gives a small nod.
‘But they found the wreckage, presumably, and the bodies?’
‘Of course, but I keep hoping, you know. Have you ever read The Bell Jar? There’s a line in it I find comforting. Gives me hope. “It worked around in the back of my mind like a needle in the body.”’
Lewis looks up at the hill, his eyes scanning the regular brush strokes of green grass blown in the same direction by the wind, looking for a glimpse of red or yellow. A scrap of material, a fragment of bone.
The Sniper
‘If someone said the tragic will always be the tragic, I wouldn’t object too much; every historical development takes place within the embrace of its concept.’
NICHOLAS WON A place to read languages at university.
At Queen Mary College, University of London.
He had talked to his nana and grandad about his desire to apply to London and they had said it was his decision. They were proud that he was going to university at all. He wanted to tell them he didn’t want them to think he was rejecting them by going to college in the city where his father was living, but he didn’t. He wanted to tell them that he loved them very much and that he appreciated all the sacrifices they had made for him. He knew that his father sent small amounts of money whenever he could, but he also knew that those contributions had been paid into a separate account to be made available to him when he needed it, and that all the cost of bringing him up had been borne by his nana and grandad. He knew that neither his nana’s part-time position as a dinner lady at a nearby school nor his grandad’s job working for SELNEC, one of the local bus companies, would have paid all that well, but he had never worn a dirty school shirt or a pair of socks with holes in them.
He was offered a place in an inter-collegiate hall of residence, Hughes Parry Hall in King’s Cross, so that he found himself mixing with medics and dental students and civil engineers as well as arts students like himself. London was so big and so full of different sources of excitement and amazement and entertainment and enlightenment, he couldn’t take it all in. Whatever he sampled, he knew there would be more of it and a hundred different choices besides. College was only part of what was on offer. He went to hear live music, to repertory cinemas that ran double bills and all-night shows, to exhibitions in art galleries you could have fitted his grandparents’ whole estate in, never mind their house.