Nicholas Royle - First Novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Look at that,’ I say. ‘747.’

‘You like planes?’ she asks, amused.

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

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

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

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

I notice Erica looking out of the window.

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

‘What pyramid?’

I sense her bristling slightly.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course not,’ I say.

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

‘Is everything all right?’ asks the waitress.

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

‘I can’t hear the planes,’ I say.

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

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

‘Just down the road.’

‘This side of the runway?’

‘Just.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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