London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  Lying in his tepid bed, wheezing shallowly, eyes shut, ticker fluttering, his head a tightening knot of pain, he is once more sentient of his self, and his situation. His life is exactly where it was at four o’clock yesterday afternoon when he hung up the phone and walked, stony-faced, off the sales floor. The escape was no more than a temporary oblivion. And now, like objects thrown up by the surf on the shifting pebbles less than a mile from where he is lying in the dark, he starts to find odd things littering his memory. The oddest sees him scrambling on a train track among the surprisingly large stones and heavy sleepers of the rail bed. Some people watching him, laughing, from the greenish light of a station platform. Him shouting at them to ‘fuck off’. Them pelting him with empty cider tins and half-eaten kebabs wrapped in greasy, sauce-smeared paper, scattering shredded cabbage everywhere – the memory squeezes his eyes more tightly shut, shoves his chin into his chest. And how did that situation end?

  How, for that matter, did it begin?

  Darkling, mortified, his memory feels its way. He had expected to find Murray in the Penderel’s Oak, but Murray was not there. The pub was fuller than it had been when he left it an hour earlier. He wandered up to the bar, hoping to see Michaela, but she had still not started her shift, and he leafed uninterestedly through an Evening Standard that someone had left there. He had just read something about house prices, and was searching through the sports section, looking for the snooker, when Murray appeared. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Paul asked. Murray answered in profile, staring at his own reflection in the dim mirror behind the bar. ‘Where d’you think?’ he said. ‘At the office.’

  ‘Did you see Marlon?’

  ‘That little shit?’ Murray paused. Then, offhand, ‘I think so.’

  ‘So it’s all sorted out?’

  Murray had still not made eye contact. ‘Is what all sorted out?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh aye.’

  ‘What did you agree?’

  ‘What did we agree?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We agreed that he should fuck off and stop whingeing.’

  ‘You agreed that?’

  ‘We did.’

  Implausible. Paul, however, did not press him; he would hear on Monday what had happened.

  The trail of his memory soon peters out in the sweat and thumping noise of the Penderel’s Oak. Then there are only little fragments of time. For instance, Murray – very full of himself once a few drinks had steadied his hands – performing his poems. Leaning towards Simona – a leathery old-school saleswoman in her fifties – and saying, ‘Get yur gums aroon’ mae plums!’ Simona billowing smoke into Murray’s equally leathery face and telling him, in a voice that was the product of more than a million cigarettes, to fuck off. Murray shouting, ‘Get yur lips aroon’ mae bits!’ In Murray’s opinion, these poems were simply more upfront than most other literature, with which they shared the same essential message. Later, he was heard saying, ‘Get yur larynx aroon’ mae phalanx,’ unsmilingly, to a young woman he did not know. And later still Paul has a memory of him saying, ‘Get yur nozzle aroon’ mae pizzle,’ to Michaela, whose response – ‘You’re disgusting. You’re really disgusting’ – he seemed to take as subtle praise, and smiled.

  And suddenly Paul remembers that he himself had been holding – holding! – her small hand, which she tugged away when Murray sidled up to them. They had been talking. What had they been talking about? More awake than he was, he stares into the darkness, trying to see.

  One thing is distressingly sure – he has nowhere near enough memory to fill the many hours that he must have spent in the pub. He has perhaps one hour of memory proper, and then some fragments, pseudo-memories with a dreamlike lack of edge and integrity. Even to use the word ‘fragments’ is to exaggerate the solidity of these episodes, to make them sound more substantial than they actually are. How much time, for instance, had he spent locked in a cubicle in the Gents? Or was that a dream? If it happened, it was potentially quite a long time – perhaps as much as an hour. Was that before or after he had spoken to Michaela and held her hand? Who had come into the Gents looking for him, knocking on the door? Had he really shouted at them to fuck off? And had Eddy Jaw been there, in the Penderel’s Oak? It is not that Paul has any memory, as such, of his being there – just a vague feeling that he was.

  Later, he remembers being at London Bridge station – it was probably between nine and ten o’clock, the time that he usually stumbles out of the pub and, without really knowing what he is doing, starts the long journey home. Michaela was prominent in his thoughts, and while he does not remember exactly what he was thinking, it is evident that he had, at the time, an exaggerated sense of the significance of a little hand-holding and slurred speech. And then, the incident on the rail bed. How had that happened? Where had it happened? How had he extricated himself from the situation? It occurs to him that the ladder of plum pains down his left side may have something to do with it. On the other side of the bed, Heather moves, asleep. Paul is strangely surprised that she is there. He has, needless to say, no memory whatsoever of arriving home last night, of taking out his lenses, of going to bed, and her presence – though it is her absence that would really have been strange – is somehow unsettling. It, more than anything, seems to emphasise the hole that has appeared in his head. Shutting his eyes, breathing through his nose to preserve what little moisture there is in his mouth, he hunkers painfully down to get through the next four or five hours of nothingness.

  Later still, he is sitting up in bed, mortifying himself with a foul cigarette. The curtains are open, and the windows white and untransparent with condensation. Only when the light had struggled up, and the noises from outside become more frequent, until they were more or less continuous, had he surrendered, at last, to the gravity of sleep. It was too late. The children were audible on the landing; and Heather sat up suddenly, sat puffy with sleep on the edge of the bed, squeezing first one small yellow foot, and then the other, with her hands. With a scraping scream, she opened the curtains – and Paul, pissed off at being woken from what seemed like one whole second of untroubled sleep, pulled the duvet over his hurting head. Having opened the curtain, Heather left the room – and she had opened it, of course, to express her anger at what had happened last night. She was not that angry – only so much anger can be expressed by opening a curtain – and nothing that extraordinary had happened; only that Paul had stumbled in unusually drunk and unusually late, at midnight, when she was watching the History Channel and drinking white wine, the kids long since upstairs in bed.

  When she comes back, twenty minutes later, to remind him of all the things they have to do this morning, he gives up trying to sink into the bed – fervent dreams and tired solid reality mingling in his mind – and sits up, and instinctively lights a cigarette. Heather stands in the doorway, in a pink dressing gown, which is tightly and neatly tied at her thick waist like a sturdy overcoat. She is quite heavy-featured, but with large blue eyes and curly blonde hair. (Someone once told her that she looked like Sarah Jessica Parker, and sometimes she nearly believes it.) Looking at Paul – his flabby ashen face, his round white shoulders, his downy tits – she worries. She worries that he is becoming less attractive from one week to the next, and the implications of that for a future she imagines in terms of years, but even more she worries about the damage that he must be doing to himself, the devastation he must be wreaking on his own poor frame. She does not like to think about it – still less about why he does it – and during the prosaic day, when there is always something else to do, it is usually easy not to – the moments of massive worry, of worry turning to fear, panic, terror, always find her at night. Then his wheezing, whistling breath as he sleeps beside her speaks of a self-destructiveness, a self-negation that she finds terrifying – and underlying it, of course, the fact that it is difficult to imagine that someone who lives the way he does is not unhappy. Has he always lived like this? When she forces herse
lf to look, she can see that things have been getting worse for a long time now, but slow decline is easy to ignore. Nothing dramatic has happened. He has been drinking more and more, but has always drunk too much. He seems depressed a lot of the time. Especially since he tried to stop the Felixstat. Then something dramatic had happened, and hurriedly, in a panic, he had snatched for the pills that he had been so determined to quit, saying they stole his energy and made him satisfied to live with mediocrity. Since then – it was six months ago – he has started to remind her, in ways she finds painfully sad, of the Paul she first met, fragile and self-destructive. And without the open-handed, kind, twinkling, funny qualities of that Paul, except in isolated moments, which nowadays she finds herself pathetically treasuring because of the way they make her feel that everything might be all right. Not this morning though. This morning he is ugly and sullen, and last night he was loud and stupid and not funny at all.

  The sound of two televisions showing the same thing – Paul can tell from the squeaky voices, and he knows anyway, that it is a cartoon – fills the narrow landing behind her. Oliver and Marie both have TVs in their rooms, though most of the time they watch the same thing. Oliver and Marie are not Paul’s children. They don’t call him ‘Dad’, they call him ‘Paul’. They haven’t seen their father (‘Dad’) – a Dr John Hall, formerly of Brighton, East Sussex, now of Sydney, New South Wales – for nine years, since Oliver was two and Marie two months, and only know what he looks like from photos. A few photos which Heather keeps hidden in a drawer. The manic, high-pitched voices of the cartoon remind Paul, with some nostalgia, of his university days, of watching Dangermouse and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds with a mug of tea, a spliff and a young woman called Geraldine, Doc Martens under her long, black, Victorian skirts, a pale face with round cheeks, fuzzy black hair, depressed and depressing poems. Dutifully, he had read these poems, and said that he thought that they were good. (Sometimes he wondered whether the ‘badger-headed thing’ was him – even then he had a tuft of prematurely white hair.) ‘Can you please ask the kids to close their doors please,’ he says, slowly and quietly. For a moment Heather considers this. She takes a small travel alarm clock from her dressing-gown pocket, looks at it, and says, ‘I want to leave in half an hour.’ Paul turns his gaze to the white windows. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s nine thirty. Half an hour, Paul.’ And when she goes there is a brisk barrage of door sounds as first Marie’s, then Oliver’s, then the bathroom door are closed. In the quietness, he queasily stubs out his less-than-half-smoked cigarette. Standing is a mistake. He sits down urgently on the edge of the bed. Then, with a look of intense concentration on his face, like someone walking a tightrope, very slowly, he descends the stairs and slips into the peach enclave of the downstairs loo (even the toilet paper is peach, and quilted, with little rosebuds on it) and throws up.

  Throughout the day, without looking for them, he finds little pieces of last night. In Sainsbury’s, for instance, being jostled by bad-tempered people and knocked by their trolleys in the non-foods aisle, waiting while Heather compares two oddly shaped bottles of something, one puce, the other aquamarine, he suddenly remembers stepping out of a stationary train into emptiness, and hitting the big stones of the rail bed. Yes. He had stepped out of the wrong side of the train – that had happened – a painful pratfall for the laughing young people eating kebabs on the opposite platform, a pratfall only possible because of the old slam-door rolling stock still in use on his commuter route. It didn’t even occur to him at the time, kneeling there and trying to work out what the fuck had happened, that he could have been killed by one of the fast expresses that occasionally howl along the line. Then what? He had been pelted with food … Heather drops the puce bottle into the trolley and they move a few metres along the aisle. And then some people, yes, some people had helped him onto the platform – the memories materialise. The platform, from the rail bed, had seemed very high, and the two men had taken a hand each and pulled, his scuffed shoes scraping at the wall. He had fallen back, onto the hard rail, with a clang. And lying there on his back, the men shouting at him, he had wondered whether he could be bothered to move. In the end, they had pulled him out like a dead weight, his ankle knocking against the platform edge. And where was that? And why had he tried to get off the train there anyway? The whole thing seems more and more dreamlike, and at the same time more disturbing. Where had he been? Waiting in the enormous queue, mesmerised by the song of dozens of checkout scanners, he remembers that he took the eight eleven train from London Bridge – remembers being astonished even then how early it was. He should have been home at nine thirty, at the latest, not twelve. Had he spent two and a half lost hours blundering around the SouthEast Trains network? Where had he been? Perhaps he got on the wrong train at Haywards Heath. That had happened before.

  And in McDonald’s, where they take the kids for lunch on Saturday after the shopping, the first bite of his Big Mac in his mouth, he finds with a small jolt of adrenalin something that Michaela said to him – that she was splitting up with what’s-his-name … On the other side of the table Oliver has ritually separated his Big Mac into two separate ‘sandwiches’, and Heather is munching a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, holding it with as few fingers as possible, her eyes empty, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin every few seconds. Marie has gone to the loo, leaving a small pile of mustardy gherkins. What else had Michaela said? What had he said to her? He remembers saying something … And during his driving lesson, moving slowly down Church Road towards an ethereal winter-afternoon moon, while his instructor, Graham – a gentle Christian with a little gold cross dangling from his ear lobe – is telling him something about orphanages in Romania and how he might help, he remembers that Eddy Jaw was in the Penderel’s Oak last night. He remembers seeing him talking to Murray, and walking up to him and saying, with an unintended edge of genuine belligerence to his voice, ‘You still drinking that fucking shit, Jaw, you poof?’ (Eddy, as usual, was swigging a Bacardi Breezer.) It was, on reflection, quite an aggressive thing to say to an old friend he had not seen in years – not since the sad demise of Northwood in ninety-seven. What was his surname? Not Jaw, that was just what everyone called him. Staring at some shabby rainswept Victorian villas, Paul squeezes his facial features together in an effort to remember. The name is not there. And what had Eddy whatever-his-name-is been doing in the Penderel’s Oak anyway? Had he said something important, something interesting? Even in the absence of a specific memory, the idea is teasingly persistent. Perhaps Murray would be able to tell him on Monday.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, he takes Oliver to the snooker club. It was once a bingo hall. The front entrance, the long row of glass doors through which the old foyer gathers dust, is permanently locked, and they walk down an alley at the side to an unpromising-looking metal door watched over by a security camera. Buzzed in, they climb winding, unheated, concrete stairs with iron banisters, up, up, Paul panting, until they emerge into the semidarkness of the hall. The bar glows in one corner, and here and there islands of green are illuminated in the huge, indefinite space. Oliver’s obsession with snooker is sufficiently intense, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently almost-worrying, for it to be possible that he will make it as a professional one day. He is not interested in anything else. The walls of his room are covered with pictures of Ronnie O’Sullivan, and in imitation of his idol, he wears an Alice band around the house, though not to school. His cue, a birthday present from Paul, is on permanent display in his room, and from Heather he has pestered permission to stay up late during tournaments. Paul is proud of all this, having introduced Oliver to the sport himself. These days, when they play, he is pleased if he beats him – it happens less and less. They don’t talk while they play. Oliver is a silent, serious child, and Paul’s attitude to snooker is solemn. ‘Set the balls up, will you, Oli?’ he says, and heads to the bar for a Foster’s and a Coke. He was himself introduced to the sport by his own father, and
their relationship, such as it is (and Paul, as much as anyone now, looks at these things with a critical eye), is still heavily dependent on snooker to give it any form or content at all. There are other things sometimes – other things that they talk about – but only in the context of playing snooker, or talking about snooker, and always safe in the knowledge that snooker is never far away. And although Oliver is not his son, Paul had felt it important, as the years went by – though he had never really articulated this, even to himself – that he should have some kind of individual relationship with him, and that snooker should be the basis of such a relationship seemed obvious and natural. (At a loss about what to do with Marie, he had included her in their early trips to the club, but she had not taken to it.)

  Paul himself had once harboured hopes – probably never realistic – of being a professional player; hopes which foundered in 1980, when at the age of fifteen he was knocked out in the second round of the National Youth Championship in Wolverhampton – not, from a wider perspective, an unrespectable achievement, but certainly not good enough for a would-be pro. Even then, Jimmy White – who had just turned pro himself and was unknown outside the world of snooker – was his hero. They were, in many ways, Paul often thought, so similar. Jimmy was simply a more high-profile, a more heroic, a more epic version of himself – a version of himself who appeared on television. What Paul might have been – who knows? – if he had beaten that flatulent Welsh boy in the second round of the tournament in Wolverhampton. If he had not missed that easy blue in the deciding frame … They do perhaps have points of similarity, Paul and Jimmy, though not most prominently the ones that Paul likes to point out (they are both, in his opinion, mavericks, flair players) – more a dingily raddled appearance and a perceived lack of ruthlessness and steel; and if it is hyperbolic to talk about ‘tragedy’, a sad sense, at least, of something squandered. It is probably these unacknowledged, and perhaps only subliminally noticed similarities, which underpin Paul’s long-standing admiration and affection for Jimmy White. An affection not shared by Oliver, incidentally, who when questioned describes Jimmy, with characteristic forthrightness, as ‘disgusting’. Paul’s other favourite players, Stephen Hendry and John Higgins (and their appeal is perhaps that they exemplify, in professionalism and solidity and steel, qualities that he finds lacking in himself), are also dismissed by Oliver as ‘annoying’ and ‘boring’ respectively.