by David Szalay
They have left the rutted bridleway, its long brown puddles, and are pushing into the wood. Mature trees. Ferns everywhere, starting to turn on top, some of them. Keeping up with his son, wading through the damp ferns, leaves him short-winded. ‘Tom,’ he calls out. ‘Tom! Oi. Wait for me.’
Eight chalets, ten apartments.
Five million to do it all? More? Utilities need sorting. Access. Just a track now. Yes, more, probably.
Noyer won’t have that kind of money. Maybe one or two million he can put in.
So need say four or five million from somewhere. Leave Noyer with about – plus the land – about forty per cent. Will he be happy with that? With nearly half the profit? Double his money, pretty much. Should be happy: not doubling his money on Chalets du Midi, that’s for sure.
He has lost sight of Tom. ‘Tom!’ he shouts.
He will have to, on Monday, tomorrow, start thinking seriously about who he might go to for money. He is already thinking about it. He has some old names. Starting points. Tristan Elphinstone, for one. (Number still work? Will soon see.) He pocketed some cards, that evening at the Gherkin with Air Miles. Time to find those. The thing is, he should leave Esher first, if he goes to Air Miles’s people, probably. Shouldn’t he? Something dishonest, otherwise.
Or worse – to be sued by Air Miles would not be fun.
Leave Esher.
That would be a major step.
So many overheads these days, that’s the thing. Mortgage. School fees. Laima’s salary – the Lithuanian nanny.
He has not even told Miranda about Noyer yet. The Esher job is something she likes. It is quite well paid. It seems secure. She thinks he likes it too – all those jaunts out to the mountains. Once or twice, in the early days, she went with him. Skiing weekends. Pre-kids, of course. He started there at almost the same time they got together, that summer.
Leave Esher. The thought frightens him. Firm things up with Noyer first. Send him a plan – see what he says.
And suddenly the whole thing seems totally speculative, insubstantial. Talk.
Lost Tom again.
Panting slightly, James stands on the trunk of a fallen tree, the huge trunk half-submerged in the ferns. He sees Tom in the midst of them, inspecting something. He is aware of neglecting his son, of not even talking to him much, too preoccupied with his own stuff. His own plans.
This is his life, these things that are happening.
‘Tommy,’ he says.
The boy’s face looks pale, looking up at him from the sea of green ferns.
He has the clear blue eyes of his mother, not his father’s more troubled blue.
The day is windless.
It’s not a joke.
Life is not a joke.
7
1
Pearl Dundee, Murray’s mother, died, finally, on Sunday afternoon. The funeral was the following Friday.
Murray himself was late. Heads turned in the pews when he opened the cumbersome door of the crematorium chapel. It was bleak and pale in the chapel. Outside it had started to rain again. The minister, who had been speaking, had been saying something about ‘a long, full life’, waited for Murray to find a place.
Afterwards, while they stand outside, he explains to his sister Beckie that his flight from London was delayed.
‘Well, I told you,’ she says, impatient with him, ‘you’d’ve done better to come up last night.’
They are both dressed as if for the office, in dark suits. Murray in a murky tie. He offers her a cigarette and she takes one, and then they accept the condolences of some old lady – a friend of their mother’s, he thinks she must be, who Beckie seems to know. Mauve-hatted, the old lady tells him, as he lights his cigarette, that his mother was ‘a wonderful woman’.
‘Aye, thanks,’ he says, and sees his brother, Alec, emerging into the last day of September, the falling leaves, the shining wet tarmac. He has not spoken to Alec yet.
He has not spoken to Alec for years.
It seems he doesn’t own a suit, Alec – over his white polyester shirt, his black polyester tie, he is wearing a dark blue Puffa jacket. He’s almost unrecognisable, he’s lost that much hair since Murray last set eyes on him.
‘How’s young Alec?’ he says to Beckie. He says it with a smile, trying to be nice. ‘He’s put on a pound or two, anyway.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ she suggests.
Murray is still smiling, sort of, as she moves away, to talk to someone else.
Alec is talking to someone else as well, is filling the doorway of the chapel in his Puffa jacket so that the last few people left inside are having to wait. No one seems to want to ask him to move, to step aside to let them leave. It’s his mother’s funeral, that’s probably why.
Smoking hard, Murray turns to the road. The taxis are arriving, to take them to Beckie’s house for the drinks.
He shares a taxi with some old people.
One of them, an old man with smelly breath, old man breath, seems to know him.
‘So how are you, Murray?’ he asks, tightly holding the moulded plastic handle of an aluminium walking stick.
‘I’m okay, fine,’ Murray tells him. ‘Well, you know,’ he adds, ‘it’s a sad day and all.’
‘It is,’ the old man agrees. ‘Pearl,’ he says, ‘was a lovely creature.’
Murray moves his black leather shoes, and his eyes shift nervously to the sliding streets, the grey faces of the houses. Motherwell. It has been a long time since he was up here. Motherwell? No, actually. She passed away. The old man asks him something.
‘No, I don’t live in the UK now,’ he says.
‘Croatia,’ he says, in answer to another question from the old man.
‘Yugoslavia, it used to be part of,’ he says, in answer to another.
In his sister’s small house, even with all the people there, he is unable to avoid an encounter with Alec.
He is in the kitchen, tearing open another lager, when Alec is suddenly there – he’s helping out, seeing to it that everyone has a drink, passing round the peanuts. ‘Hello, Murray,’ he says.
‘Alec. Hello …’
‘You still voting Tory?’ Alec wants to know. His face has an upsetting fullness, a middle-aged quality. The shiny pink forehead is huge.
‘Tory?’ Murray says, and slurps from his lager. ‘Nah, those fuckers are too left wing for me now.’
Alec smiles extremely thinly. ‘How are ya anyway?’ he asks, without much interest.
‘I’m okay,’ Murray says. ‘I’m well.’ Then, for want of anything else to say – ‘You still with the union?’
‘I am. What about you?’
‘This and that,’ Murray offers. ‘I’m not based in this country any more.’
‘No, I heard.’
‘Not for a few years.’
‘Some sort of tax exile, are ya?’
Murray smiles, liking the sound of that – liking the sneer in Alec’s voice when he says ‘tax exile’. He has another slurp of lager. ‘Something like that,’ he tells him.
He spends the night in Beckie’s spare room. It was her son’s. He’s left home now, is in Australia or somewhere. (What was his name again?)
‘Why don’t we try and stay in touch?’ Beckie suggests the next morning, early, as they drink tea in the kitchen and he waits for his taxi to the airport.
‘Definitely,’ he says, trying not to look at her. When he does, he thinks – Fuck, she looks haggard.
‘You’re sure you don’t want any breakfast?’ she asks.
‘No.’ Less than two years older than me, and look at her. She looks like an old lady.
She says, ‘You look tired.’
‘Do I?’
‘I suppose you didn’t sleep well,’ she says, ‘in Ewen’s room.’
Ewen – that’s it. ‘I slept okay,’ Murray says, thinking greyly of the hours he endured during the night, turning and turning under the Spider-Man duvet in his Y-fronts and vest. The heating turned
up too high. The sound of the rain on the window, like someone muttering unpleasant truths. And the photo. In a frame in the upstairs hall. Himself, Murray, at about ten years of age, with Max, the Alsatian they’d had then, that he’d loved so much. Seeing that photo last night, of himself and the dog, had upset him somehow.
‘I slept okay,’ he says again.
‘Lucky you,’ Beckie says. ‘I didn’t.’
Milky tea. Too milky. The dregs, not even tepid, disgusting him.
‘I couldn’t stop thinking,’ she says.
Murray puts down the mug, and tries to swallow what is in his mouth. He is in his suit again, tie in his pocket.
Beckie is in her dressing gown.
‘I just couldn’t stop thinking,’ she says.
Yesterday, when everyone had left, she told him about their mother’s last days. She hadn’t shed a tear then, telling him the hospital stories – the meetings with doctors, the small-hours vigils, the hopeless dawns. She told him about them in the dry voice she probably uses in her office at the town hall. And he had listened without emotion, without feeling anything.
Now it seems she might break down.
Her mouth wobbles.
Murray, instinctively, looks away.
He looks at the window, straight out through that window with mould in its corners, to the dull morning.
And aye, Beckie is in tears now. Holding a dishcloth over her face.
Where the fuck, Murray thinks, looking at the fake Rolex that hangs too loosely on his sallow wrist, is that fucking taxi?
*
Twenty-four hours later, on Sunday morning, he is on a train to Stansted airport, and he feels very much worse.
Rainey was involved. Once they had worked together in telephone sales, him and Paul Rainey – they had spent years together on sales floors, under the strip lighting. Working the phones. The Pig worked with them for much of that time, and he was with them on Saturday night as well. They started in the Penderel’s Oak in the middle of the afternoon. Ended up at the Pig’s flat in Whitechapel about twelve hours later. Murray had slept for an hour or two on the floor of the Pig’s sitting room, on the sofa cushions, in his suit. Then it was up at six – with an implausible pain in his skull – to make the lonely walk to Liverpool Street, and the train to Stansted.
Fucking obese, Rainey was now. It had been a shock to see him. He and the Pig still worked at Park Lane Publications, the office just off Kingsway. Lunchtime in the Penderel’s. Everything the same.
And when they asked Murray what the fuck he was doing, he said, ‘I’m just taking it easy. Enjoying life.’
‘Where you doing that then?’ the Pig said.
‘Croatian Riviera,’ Murray answered. ‘I’m semi-retired,’ he told them.
‘Semi-retired? What’s that mean?’
‘Means no one’ll give him a job,’ Rainey quipped, adding an empty to the many on the table and turning his head towards the bar.
Murray tried to smile. ‘I’ve had no end of offers,’ he said quietly, as if out of modesty.
‘Bollocks,’ Rainey said.
And Murray felt that his old friend had still not forgiven him for the events involving Eddy Jaw, the things that had happened some years back.
They had worked together again since then, of course. When Murray was sacked by Jaw he had found his way, inevitably, to the taupe glass door of Park Lane Publications, had found Paul Rainey working there again – at the same desk even, as if nothing had happened, lifting the same white handset to his sweating head.
Murray had been sacked from that job too. He seemed to have lost his touch, whatever touch he might once have had. It was then that he had decided to explore other options. In a way, the Pig was his inspiration. The Pig, notoriously, had once spent two years in Thailand, ‘enjoying life’, living off the money he had saved. Though Murray hadn’t saved any money, he did have a small house in Cheam – a sixties bungalow in a place called Tudor Close. He had acquired it in the glory days, around 1990. Twenty years later, the mortgage was negligible. So a tenant was installed and Murray set off to look for somewhere where he would be able to live on that small income.
The Croatian Riviera.
His flight to Zagreb is at ten thirty in the morning.
He is sitting in the departures lounge, with a headache. Outside, planes move silently. Sunlight torments him. He feels sick.
He had not told Rainey and the Pig why he was in the UK, about the funeral. He had not mentioned that at all, or even thought of it himself, as they went from pub to pub, moving east from Holborn.
Now, staring out at the planes through the shell of his hangover, he is surprised by a memory, a memory of a hand on his forehead, feeling for his temperature perhaps.
Sunlight throws shadows on the terminal floor.
Ma, says a small, frightened voice in his head, his own voice.
Ma, where are you now?
And finally, sitting there in the departures lounge, staring at the planes moving in the weak October sunlight, he finds the tears in his eyes.
2
Actually, the ‘Croatian Riviera’, the Adriatic seashore, even its least fashionable stretches, had turned out to be too expensive for Murray. He had ended up some way inland, over the hills and far away, in a town on a fairly arid plain, surrounded by dusty vineyards and fields of sunflowers and maize. The Turks had once been defeated there, in fifteen-something, and a monument in the main square memorialised the event. It was the last thing of any importance to happen in the town. In one of the streets leading off the square, there was a youth hostel, the Umorni Putnik, and it was there that Murray had lodged for a while when he arrived.
More than a year ago now.
The first person he had met, on the stairs, that first day, was Hans-Pieter, a Dutchman, and a long-term inmate of the hostel.
Hans-Pieter, Murray had immediately thought, was obviously a total fucking loser.
He was also, these days, his only friend.
The day after Murray’s return from the UK, the two of them are passing the afternoon at a pub called Džoker. They are sitting outside, where there are a few tables under umbrellas advertising a local marque of mineral water – though already October, it is very hot. Murray is wearing white shorts that fall to just below his knees, overhanging his violet-veined and hairless lower legs which in turn taper down to dark office socks and large white trainers. Sweat oozes out of his manly face.
‘It’sh hot,’ Hans-Pieter says.
It’s the kind of thing Hans-Pieter will say – the kind of fascinating conversational gambit he comes out with.
Murray just grunts.
Hans-Pieter is probably about ten years younger than Murray – somewhere in his mid-forties. He is unusually tall, obviously shy.
‘I suppose,’ he says, taking a quick, almost furtive, sip of his lager, ‘it’sh global warming.’
Murray, sweating, scoffs. ‘What the fuck you talking about?’
‘Global warming,’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘What – you believe in that?’
Hans-Pieter looks worried, as if he might have made some elementary mistake. Then he says, ‘You don’t believe it?’
‘Do I fuck.’ With the hem of his white T-shirt Murray towels his face of freely flowing sweat. ‘Don’t tell me you believe in that?’ he says, resettling his glasses on his nose.
‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter looks down at his flip-flops. ‘I don’t know. It’sh October,’ he points out.
People are eating ice creams. Pigeons are wetting their wings in the fountain.
Murray is still staring at him. ‘And?’
‘Well.’ Hans-Pieter sounds doubtful. ‘Is this normal? This … this weather …?’
‘There is no evidence,’ Murray tells him, ‘for global warming.’
‘Well, but I thought …’
‘There’s no fucking evidence.’ Murray takes off his glasses to towel his face again. The front of his T-shirt is sodden.
&n
bsp; Hans-Pieter’s pale eyelashes flutter humbly. ‘I thought there was,’ he says, ‘some evidence.’
Murray laughs again. ‘You’ve been had.’
Shyly Hans-Pieter says, ‘What about the Shtern report?’
Murray makes an exasperated sound.
‘It says if there’s no action taken on emissions …’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Murray shouts at him. ‘There’s other reports, there’s reports that say just the opposite.’
‘Aren’t they paid for by dee oil companies?’
Murray sighs. He has heard this shit before, and he won’t have it. The fact is, Murray feels a profound sympathy for ‘the oil companies’. He feels, somehow, that he and ‘the oil companies’ are on the same side. That is, they are the successful ones, the winners of this world, and therefore envied no doubt by losers like Hans-Pieter – Hans-Pieter, who still lives in a youth hostel, while Murray, like some fucking oil company, occupies a well-appointed flat in one of the most elegant Habsburg-era streets of the town. It is his understanding, in fact, that Hans-Pieter is on the Dutch equivalent of the dole, which stretches a lot further here than it does in Amsterdam or wherever he’s from.
‘Do you not understand,’ he says, taking a more indulgent tone with his slow-witted friend, ‘that the whole thing’s a plot against the oil companies? A left-wing plot. Against the market economy. Against individual freedom.’
‘You think that?’ Hans-Pieter says.
‘I know that, pal. They lost the Cold War,’ Murray explains. ‘This is their next move. It’s fucking obvious when you think about it.’
A large drop of sweat falls from the end of his nose.
Hans-Pieter says nothing. He turns his head to the hot square. He has a little earring in his left ear.
‘Anudder one?’ he asks, noticing Murray’s empty glass.
‘Go on then,’ Murray growls.
