ELEVEN

There was an empty seat next to me on the aeroplane, just as there had been the last time I’d crossed the Atlantic. I put the notebook there as soon as we reached cruising altitude. The economy cabin was not busy: a cluster of young men towards the back, couples dotted around talking quietly, the odd single person sitting silently alone. The engine drone was comforting, the red wine and aeroplane food numbing the ache in my chest. The beating I’d taken was suggested rather than broadcast: there had been no reaction from any of my fellow travellers or the airport staff. But I could still taste the blood, could still feel a sharp pain as I inhaled.

Bethany had once told me that she liked planes because they were magic: the kind of everyday magic we take for granted. She’d said that in my back garden, with my father standing beside us, turning sausages on the large barbecue he’d bought from the local garden centre.

‘There’s magic there all right,’ he said. ‘But a lot of hard work too. Did I ever tell you about the chickens? There’s this hangar they’ve got on the shop floor—’

‘You’ve told us about the chickens, Dad,’ I said. ‘You always tell us about the chickens.’ It wasn’t quite true. He had mentioned it once or twice, how they fired frozen chickens at aeroplanes to simulate birds hitting planes on take-off, and it was a story I loved as a child. But not then.

He made to say something but was distracted by another plane flying overhead. He did not call out its manufacturer or its model. He’d learned that much at least. It was one of the few times the three of us were together alone.

The video screen in front of me plotted our progress, the crude mapping as unconvincing as the video games O’Neil used to play: Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda. I put my finger on the screen and traced the line all the way to our destination. Even with the perspective skewed so that you could believe you were almost home, England looked so small, so crooked: an island where battles and puzzles and big bosses would have to be challenged. I thought about O’Neil safe in the arms of Edith, his look of confusion slipping slowly into anger, as the tiny plane moved a pixel every minute. I kept my finger on it, half-remembered lines from Joni Mitchell’s ‘This Flight Tonight’, one of Bethany’s favourites, repeating over and over.

When I woke it was light outside. I opened the blind and looked out onto the clouds, ice fields waving into the distance. I got a cup of water from the stewardess and drank it down, stiff and uncomfortable, and picked up the notebook. I read it, but none of it rang true. Joe’s memories were laboured; they wanted to retire. I turned to the last page and there was nothing there that gave me hope. It was a notebook, a life, written in optimism: it was not real.

It was only on the descent that I really thought about what I was doing. As we dropped incrementally – circling Manchester Airport, or Ringway as my father always called it – I saw the town, how it now was: how it should be. Risking the ire of the stewards, I got my bag down from the overhead locker and took a piece of paper ripped from the notes I’d made about Brooks and started to write.

I wrote about a town that still worshipped Bethany. That still mourned her. I imagined a place that had stayed black-clad and frozen in time, stopped just at the moment of my departure. I wrote until we taxied across the tarmac, and read it back as I waited to get off. It was the town to which I wanted to return. One that understood.

On the way out of the plane I said goodbye and thank you to the cabin crew. They said the same back. One of the men looked like someone I used to know, but I could not place him. He could have been from anywhere, any life I had cared to live. Outside, Manchester was bright and gleeful; no reservoir skies, just a perfect blue, as though refreshed from the night’s dark.

The queue for immigration was mercifully short. I looked at the passport, the name on it, my face looking back. How had it got me this far? It was a fake and holding it then it felt exactly that: counterfeited and illegal. At Vegas airport I hadn’t given it a thought, but in the quick-moving line in Manchester it seemed to lose all sense of authenticity. There would be conversations; I would be led to the white cubicles and asked awkward questions. Had that happened to the real Josef Novak? Had he even made it this far?

Uri, the fixer who’d organized my papers and everything else, had explained in a strangely formal, almost legalistic manner, that if I had any objections to the workmanship I should raise them there and then, because there were no refunds. At the time I didn’t think I was ever leaving. What did I care?

I handed over the passport and landing card. The woman behind the counter looked up at me and down at the desk, then back at me. Perhaps on another day she’d have noticed the alarm on my face, the slight shudder as I’d handed over the passport. On another day it might have been different. Maybe that morning she was hung-over, or tired, or broken-hearted, or maybe she just hated her boss and didn’t care. Whatever her reason, she waved me through, the security guards untroubled, the awkward questioning avoided. I put the passport in my pocket and walked quickly through security, looking at my watch as though late for something important and impending.

*

My father worked mainly on military aeroplanes but loved civilian aircraft. After Mum left he would drive us to the observation tower at Ringway and take photographs or look through his binoculars. I would sit on one of the hard seats and read a book or do my homework. He didn’t seem to mind so long as I shared his enthusiasm when something unusual occurred. We did that regularly for about a year, then there were some problems. A boss, a project that failed, I can’t remember. He was moved to the civil side of the business. He worked longer hours and saw enough tail fins and engine brackets to no longer care about those flying out from the airport. He asked me once if I missed it: the drive to the airport, the planes, the fast food on the way home, and I told him that I did. That I missed spending time with him. We were both satisfied with the lie and went back to watching the television, a mug of beer balanced on the armrest of his chair.

*

I was soon out into the cool morning air and in the taxi line. As I’d walked through the arrivals terminal I’d half hoped that someone would be waiting with a felt-tip written card with my name on it. No one knew that I was there, but I studied those cards for either one of my names anyway. I had perhaps got more used to my life in Las Vegas than I realized: there was no chauffeur, no limousine, just the taxi queue and the pull on the long-desired cigarette.

I got into a cab and told the driver where I was headed. He nodded and turned up the radio. Sunlight danced off advertising hoardings, the grass was muddy, the tarmac gummy with earlier rain. Out of the window, the landscape gave the lie to what I had written. No one was mourning Bethany. Nothing had stayed the same. Industrial parks had been replaced by shopping malls, American-styled and sprawling. The Little Chefs were Burger Kings; old pubs, McDonald’s. The cars were smaller, less corroded. The only familiar detail was the signposts, their whiteness and blueness as we swept up the M56.

‘Been on holiday?’ the driver said as we mounted the slip road.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said, you been on holiday?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes. No. Business actually.’

He nodded, whether in agreement or in time to the music I couldn’t say. He negotiated a roundabout and pulled into traffic. There was the sound of horns.

‘I’ve always liked the airport run,’ he said. ‘Been doing it years now. Hours are shite, but you get to see what folk are really like, y’know? Folk are funny when they get off a plane. Can’t explain it. True, though. There’s some blokes that won’t do it. Me, I like it. Tips are good and you always get to know about places. Makes you feel you don’t have to go to ’em yourself, y’know?’

The man had a shaved head, like a bullet covered in milky skin. I could see his sunglasses in the rear-view mirror, they were sepia-lensed and made him look somehow ill.

‘Been away long?’

‘Long enough,’ I said. ‘Long enough for things to change.’

‘Tell me about it,’ he said and indicated right. He opened his window and rested his arm along the door.

‘Got to say, though, I think it’s for the best after all. I know what folk think of cabbies, but I’m optimistic, you know? I’m a glass-half-full kind of a bloke. Always looking on the bright side and all that. People forget too quickly, that’s my point. People forget. Problem is that we think this is a new thing! That we all just invented it. Fact is it’s always been this way. Always. But you know, I believe in Blair. I do. Years from now they’ll look back on him and they’ll say he’s the reincarnation of Churchill. Though he was a cunt, if you’ll pardon my Français, ask any Irish.’

‘You’re Irish?’

‘Second generation, but the hurt’s the same, you know what I mean?’

A white van cut us up and the cab driver shouted out the window.

‘Like I said, things don’t change. Bastards still can’t drive. Women still run off with your best friend, your kids still think you’re fucking useless. But if you don’t look on the bright side, what chance have you got? Take my kid, Stevie. Seventeen he is, fucking stupid haircut, looks a right state, but he’s going go university. First of us lot to go. Both sides. You’d’ve told me old mum that one of us lot were going to university, she’d’ve laughed. Honestly. She’d’ve laughed until she’d wet her knickers.’

He took a very tight left bend and pointed to the dashboard.

‘That’s him there. Stevie. Back when he looked like a boy and answered to his father. I’m so proud of him. But I don’t tell him that. Might fuck him up even more, right?’

He laughed and I laughed with him. He continued to talk but I’d stopped listening.

We were in Wilmslow and the cinema where Bethany and I saw Beetlejuice was closed down, plywood covering its art-deco exterior. Her father had been invited to a business function at a nearby restaurant, so we watched the film and went to the pub afterwards, drank whisky and ginger ale and were eventually joined by Mike. He looked tired but had another drink with us anyway. He told me a joke that he’d heard on the radio and I imagined my own father there, rather than snoozing on the sofa. He would have bristled, at least initially, and then the two men would have talked work or football, my father quickly assuming a position of deference.

The cabbie finished his long monologue just as we approached the outskirts of the town. To the left was what should have been the Duke of Wellington hotel, now a retirement home. In the distance and to the right was another retail park, a large sign advertising Tesco and Halfords and some other outlets I didn’t recognize.

‘I don’t come here that often,’ he said. ‘But it seems a nice place. Kind of place you could retire in, you know?’

‘You should have been born here,’ I said. ‘This place is a hole.’

‘Where you’re from is important,’ he said. ‘I keep telling my lad that.’

‘He sounds like a good kid.’

We turned left, past what used to be a Chinese restaurant and was now a glass and aluminium fronted bar called Zeros.

‘Good kid, yes,’ he said. ‘But he still couldn’t put handle on a bucket.’

*

He dropped me at the Coach House Hotel. There was a small red sports car illegally parked outside. The barber’s, John’s, where you could get a haircut for under £3, was now a vintage sweet shoppe; the old video library an Italian restaurant with fishbowl windows, the travel agency a florist. The Coach House was the same, though. It was a renovated Tudor roadhouse, the white- and black-beamed exterior recently repainted. A chalkboard A-frame advertised a £10 lunch menu, and the steps were as steep as they always had been. I stood for a while, my bag at my feet. People walked past, but I did not recognize them, nor them me.

The Coach was where, ultimately, we spent most of our time, Hannah, Bethany and I. We had our usual seats by the jukebox and, for the most part, were left alone by the regulars. The hotel patrons rarely made it round to our side of the bar, which was angled into the corner of both rooms, the same staff pulling pints on one side and pouring wine and whisky on the other. We could see them, on the other side, but could not join them; at least not until last orders had been sounded and the barman – who had a long-standing and unreciprocated affection for Hannah – would usher us round and let us drink for as long as there were residents to serve.

I always wondered what it would be like to hire a room there, how decadent it would be to sleep with Bethany just ten minutes or so from our own beds. I always thought that if we ever came back from New York that was what we would do. One night in the Coach: the bridal suite with the four-poster bed, the stupidity of it all weighing against the defeat of return. One night, drunk and giggling, we’d stolen up the stairs trying to find an untaken room. A guest had heard us, opened his door and asked what the hell we were doing. Calmly Bethany explained that we were both so drunk we couldn’t remember our room number. The man went back into his room and we laughed with relief and made our way back down to the bar. Hannah was furious, sitting alone, the barman looking mooningly at her.

*

I pushed open the door and entered the small lobby and open-plan bar area. The atmosphere was still clubby and genteel, retaining the faded kind of sixteenth-century chic that had been fashionable in the 1980s. It was empty. On a small table there was an empty coffee cup. A copy of the Daily Telegraph was abandoned on the adjacent Chesterfield armchair. They were the only signs that anyone had been here recently. The reception desk had a service bell next to a display of flyers for local attractions. I rang it and waited, than rang it again. A woman in a burgundy waistcoat emerged from the back office, wiping her hands on a napkin. She was still holding a piece of toast as she approached the desk.

‘Hello, sir,’ she said. ‘Can I help?’

‘I hope so. I don’t have a reservation, but I wondered if you had a room for a few nights?’

She typed something into the computer and clicked the mouse a few times.

‘Well, I could squeeze you in. Single or double?’

‘Double.’

‘And is this for just yourself or—’

‘Just me.’

‘Thank you, sir. If you could fill this in for me.’ She passed me a registration card and went back to the computer. It should have felt strange, all of it, but instead it seemed normal: a pen on a piece of paper, a key fob handed over, a hotel lobby shorn of its residents. The rush of images and memories did not come flooding back as they had at the Valhalla. Since landing it was as though I was just a slightly bored observer, someone dragged along at the last moment. I registered the changes but it was all flat, unengaging. I looked down at the registration card and saw my name: I had written it as Joe Novak without a moment’s hesitation.

The receptionist gave me directions to my room and I wandered past the bar – a bored-looking man behind it, reading a magazine – then pushed open the double doors, where the olde worlde fixtures and fittings were replaced by the standard watercolour paintings and patterned carpets of a chain hotel. It smelled a little damp and some of the wallpaper peeled and flapped at the coving. At the top of the stairs, a chambermaid’s cart was blocking the corridor, her plump behind leant against it as she spoke on her phone.

‘I told him. I fucking told him last night. Put him on, Jermaine. Put him on now.’

I dodged the piles of towels and the miniature soaps and found room five. Inside it was tired, slightly grubby, the atmosphere fielding a battle between air freshener and cigarettes. The television was already on, welcoming me to the Coach House with classical music playing through its tinny speaker. The bathroom was small and plastered with health and safety notices, the bed surprisingly comfortable. I undressed and got under the sheets, then smoked a cigarette. I was glad that Bethany had never seen inside the rooms; she would have been bitterly disappointed.

At just before seven I woke and took a lukewarm shower. For a long time afterwards I sat on the bed, drip-drying. I had to see my father; this I knew. The place where Bethany had died; her father, too. Hannah. The thought of doing any of these things made doing nothing all the more attractive. I could sit there on the bed, simply sit and watch television, smoke cigarettes, order room service, drink a bottle of whisky and pass out. I looked at my bag, took out what I’d written on the plane and read the whole thing through, then threw it in the bin. I took out the notebook and tried to lose myself in Joe’s life for a while and then threw that to the floor. It was after eight and I got dressed slowly, the clothes smelling of the Valhalla, of the fabric softener the maids used. Inside my jacket pocket was a business card. I flipped it over, wondered where I had got it. The name was unfamiliar.

*

The detective is in his mid-forties. He is flanked by a WPC. His mouth droops like it has never learned to smile and he flashes me his badge. He asks me if my name is Mark Wilkinson and I say yes and he asks if he can come in and comes in anyway. He smells strangely like my father, his tie crooked over a shirt that has sweat blooms down its back and front. I ask what this is all about and he tells me to sit down. I sit on the sofa, the WPC beside me, and he sits in Dad’s armchair. I can’t imagine what it is that I am supposed to have done. I ask him again what’s up. The detective tells me his name is DI Simon Parks and that he has bad news, but that it is important that I am strong. He has a face that is some way between cruelty and kindness; a one man good-cop/bad-cop. Matter-of-factly, he tells me about Bethany. His voice is a steady monotone until he says that he is sorry. I see the WPC bite her lip. I want to tell them that they must be joking, that there must be some kind of mistake. But instead the WPC puts her arms around my shoulders. When I eventually look up, the detective is taking his glasses from his pocket. He wipes them on a thin piece of fabric. He does it absently, as though just marking time. Then he starts to ask me questions.

Bethany’s father had told him that if anyone knew Bethany’s mind, it was me. I answer as well as I can, but I can’t tell them why she went down to the secluded park at the back of Greenliffe Field. He skates around the questions he wants to ask, those that decency precludes him from saying out loud. He sighs and polishes his spectacles once again.

‘You will catch him,’ I say.

‘We’ve got him,’ he says, surprised. ‘It’s just he’s not talking. Anything we can do to understand what happened tonight might help.’

‘You’ve got him?’ I say.

He nods. ‘We’ve got him. He’s not going anywhere, don’t you worry about that. It’s just . . .’ – he puts on his spectacles – ‘I just wanted to make sense of it. Get it clear in my mind, you know? You’ve been most helpful at this difficult time, son. I appreciate it.’

He hands me his card; the first business card I’ve ever been given.

‘If anything comes to you, anything at all, you call me, okay?’

I hold it in my hand and flip it between my fingers for the rest of the night. The sun rises and I remain sitting on the sofa, watching the deep orange light warm the windows.

*

There were only a few people in the residents’ bar. I poked my head round the restaurant door, where a lone couple was eating soup. The menu was expensive and uninspiring, dotted with French words and heavy on cream and butter. A waiter paced the back wall, moving wine glasses and adjusting arrangements of cutlery. He looked at me and picked up a wine list and a menu. I turned quickly and headed towards the residents’ bar.

Through the opening I could see the public side. It had been refurbished in an unconvincing style. There was a brown suede sofa and a glass table. An unattended cigarette was smoking in an ashtray. Where the jukebox used to be was another watercolour. The barman took my order, set down my drink and went to smoke the unattended cigarette. I picked up the bar menu, its faux-leather binding creaking as I opened it.

‘If you’re wanting to eat,’ a voice to my right said, ‘I can recommend the nuts.’ The woman passed me the bowl from which she was eating. ‘Everything else is foul. The restaurant’s awful, the room service stinks and don’t even think about the bar snacks. Seriously. Take it from me.’

She was in her late twenties or early thirties, blonde hair tied back, a nose too large for her face, a book open in front of her. She wore business clothes and little make-up, her throat slender and her chin prominent. Her voice was not local, probably southern. I put down the menu and took a couple of nuts from the bowl.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, lighting a cigarette with a match. ‘There may be worse hotels in the world, but if there are I’ve yet to find them.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ I said. ‘I’ve stayed in much worse.’

‘I’ve been here for a month,’ she said. ‘I’ve probably lost all sense of proportion. Don’t mind me. It’s just been one of those days.’ She laughed. ‘Been one of those days since I got here. But the food? I feel like it’s my civic duty to warn you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

She nodded and went back to her book, crunching nuts from the bowl every now and then. I smoked and thought about what it had been like before, sitting on the other side, looking in at the residents, wondering where they’d come from and what on earth they’d done to deserve a night in the town. Had I been looking out, years ago, at Hannah, Bethany and me, I’d have asked the same question: what the hell are they doing there? Wasn’t there something, anything better that they could be doing?

‘Is there anywhere you’d recommend, then?’ I eventually said to her. ‘I haven’t eaten since the plane.’

She picked up her glass and looked thoughtful.

‘Well, the Indian is all right. The Italian over the road is edible, just about, and the pub down the road is okay. Best place is the Thai up on the other side of town. But it’s rammed on a Friday. Most nights I get a salad from the Tesco’s. Can’t go wrong.’

She put a beer mat inside the book to save her place and stubbed out her cigarette.

‘You here on business too?’

‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘No other reason to be here, is there?’

‘People like it. I’ve met people who’ve come here to see the park. To see the roundabouts. You’d be surprised. I know I was.’

The barman came back and picked up her glass.

‘Are you staying for another?’ she said. ‘It’s on expenses so if you are, I can buy. Like I said, shitty day.’

‘A drink would be good,’ I said. ‘I’m Joe, by the way.’

‘Ferne,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to meet someone else stuck here too.’

*

Ferne told me she worked for the architectural firm that was redeveloping the old mills, turning them into loft apartments for commuters. The hard hat she wore most days played havoc with her hair and the workmen were rude and sullen. She’d been staying at the hotel – with only short breaks back to her home in West London – for almost six weeks, and everything about the place made her mad. She knew no one and was tired of eating dinner alone. The days meshed into one another, weekends too.

‘I’ve stopped going home, though. It only makes it worse, you know?’ she said as we drank our wine. ‘When you’re here you sort of forget that other people’s lives go on while yours just falters and stagnates. Two weeks I was supposed to be here. No longer than that. Now it’s going to be two months, three probably.’

We ordered more peanuts and I let her speak. She talked about her ex, her best friend and her best friend’s newborn child, about the men at the site who at first had taken her for a soft touch, but were now a little frightened of her. I could see why: there was something hard about her, flinty. It was not unattractive.

‘You don’t talk much,’ she said after a pause.

‘I like listening,’ I said. ‘I prefer it. People don’t listen enough, I always think. Always jumping in at the end of a sentence, trying to sum up what you’ve been saying. My friend O’Neil says that one of the most important things to realize in conversation is that everyone’s always thinking what they’re going to say next. Which means if you’re properly listening you’ll understand what people are really saying, what they actually want you to know.’

‘But if the person you’re speaking to,’ Ferne said smiling, ‘is already preparing what they’re saying in their own head, they’re not listening to you and you can’t get across what you want to say, right?’

‘That’s sort of the point. O’Neil explains it better, though. He’s a better talker than me. Better at everything really. Apart from table tennis. I always kick his ass at that.’

Ferne laughed and lit another cigarette. There were a few people in the other bar now, though I recognized none of them. The three regulars, Stan, Tom and John Boxer, had probably moved on somewhere else, or perhaps were dead. Over those years I had got to know them slightly. Tom was, almost improbably, a former jazz drummer who had fallen on hard times and was working at a garage. Stan always stayed for four pints of best before heading home to his invalid wife, while John Boxer talked as though everyone was listening and everyone was in agreement with his views. He’d once told me I would amount to nothing, that I would never be a man, not really. He’d also once been barred for getting his cock out in the bar, for pulling out his trouser pockets and showing everyone his impression of an elephant. The owner had personally escorted him from the premises, but a week later Boxer was back as if nothing had happened. Beth thought him the only good thing about the whole town.

‘What’re you laughing at?’ Ferne said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You were laughing. Were you laughing at me?’

‘No, it’s not you . . . there was this guy I used to know, that’s all. Haven’t thought about him in years.’

She nodded and we both went silent, looking through the hatch at a group of women drinking cocktails on the sofa. They were loud, dressed in shiny fabrics, their hairdos fresh from the salon, their features smudged by make-up. They looked unaccountably happy; the way the same kind of girls looked when Bethany, Hannah and I lived there. ‘Can’t they see it?’ Bethany said once to me. ‘Can’t they see that they’re trapped?’

Watching these girls now, I saw that Beth, Hannah and I had seen nothing of life, just the town and the people within it, and the trap was one of our own making. One Thanksgiving at O’Neil’s parents’ house, his mother had ended a typical argument between O’Neil and his father by saying: ‘You can no more escape where you’re from than you can escape your shoe size or your age. So let it rest.’ She’d put the pie on the table and the conversation had wilted. I wanted to tell her that escaping was exactly what I had done.

‘They remind me of the girls from school,’ Ferne said. ‘It’s like regressing being here. Makes me feel like a teenager.’

‘I know people who’d like that.’

‘I hated being a teenager. Who would ever want to go through all that again?’

‘It’s the possibility of it all, isn’t it? A life still ready to be lived. I can see the attraction.’

‘So you’d go through that again? Really?’ she said.

I thought of lying in bed with Bethany, the aeroplane tail fins, the rickety bookshelf.

‘Good God no. I was just saying I can understand it, that’s all.’

Ferne nodded and looked at her watch. She had very thin wrists and downy arms.

‘I think that’s me done. Got to be up in the morning.’

‘Would you like to eat with me?’ I said quickly, knowing it was unfair. I just wanted company, someone to share the evening, someone to deflect from the crabbing sense of what I would have to do the following day. But I did not expect her to say no.

‘I have a salad,’ she said. ‘And I do need to be up in the morning.’ She drank down the last of her wine. ‘Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. Maybe.’

‘Your best bet is the Indian. Follow the road down and it’s on the left.’

‘Thanks. Goodnight, Ferne.’

‘Thanks, Joe. See you later.’

She got up unsteadily and headed for the stairs to the rooms. I watched her leave and looked again at the menu. The women in the other bar screamed at something. The barman took my glass and asked if I wanted another. I shook my head.

*

There had been women after Bethany. New York was easy that way, and there had been adventures and brief affairs. Those that lasted over a month were few and far between, ending usually with an awkward conversation and on one occasion with the words: ‘Just go ahead and fuck O’Neil.’ But mostly it was just the hand on the arm, saying that I needed help, that no one could be that cold and survive. I did not think of Joe as unfeeling, but all the evidence pointed to the contrary. I had constructed a persona incapable of love in any meaningful sense; a man for whom true intimacy was locked off like a bank vault. Joe had always assumed everyone was the same way; or at least that O’Neil was. I thought of Edith and O’Neil, the two of them in bed and wearing their nightclothes, talking in hushed voices about the mess I’d left behind. I imagined the conversations they’d had over the last few months, how many times my name had been mentioned.