by David Szalay
‘What do you do?’ the young man asks immediately.
Fuck off, Paul feels like saying. However, in a hoarse voice, he says, ‘Media sales.’
‘Ah,’ says the young man.
‘What do you do?’
‘Media, what sort of media?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Just curious.’
When he sees that Paul is not going to volunteer anything further, is in fact staring furiously at him, the young man says, ‘Do you live near here?’
‘No, I don’t.’ Said with such obvious impatience that the young man’s smile wavers for a moment. Then he says, ‘Thanks for the light.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘See you.’
Paul just nods, and the young man returns to his table. When he sits down, there is an unnatural lull in the conversation – though in low voices they are talking – then loud laughter, which suddenly stops with an emphatic ‘Shh!’
Slowly Paul finishes his pint. He will not let them force him out. He feels, though, as if the whole pub, having witnessed the short exchange, is turning away from him to hide its knowing smirk. People seem to look at him slyly. Time itself seems to have slowed. When, at last, he has finished, he stands unsteadily and leaves. Outside in the wind, poised to walk down to Blackfriars, he pauses. The prospect of the train journey seems unusually onerous, and he turns and starts to walk down Fleet Street. He is heading for ‘Dr Johnson’s’, the quiet little courtyard where the erudite doctor lived, and where, in the Northwood days, they would smoke their spliffs in the white depths of the afternoon. Now, in the tousled darkness, he stands next to Hodge’s memorial, skinning up. There is no one around. No one at all. The elegant Georgian houses are all solicitors’ offices and barristers’ sets, and the whole area is empty in the evening. He is still smarting painfully from the incident in the King Lud. A strange misery fell on him when the Nordic young man, with his insolent tipsy smile, started to question him, a misery which will not be shaken off. He does not know why it made such an impact on him. He lights the spliff. The first inhalation triggers a volley of flinty coughing, doubling him over, squeezing water from his eyes. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he mutters, when he is finally able to. He fiddles with his lighter. Smoking the spliff makes him feel unpleasantly light – even a bit queasy – and he throws it away unfinished.
He starts to walk. Not, however, in the direction of the tube station – not Blackfriars, not Temple, not Chancery Lane. He is walking towards the Penderel’s Oak. Underestimating the distance, however, it takes him more than ten minutes, and he even starts to wonder whether it is worth it. Michaela might not even be working tonight, and he feels deeply fuddled, what with everything that has happened. Washed- and whited-out with drink and dope. He has allowed an idea to form in his mind, an idea of his status with Michaela which has little or no foundation in the observed world. While with Claire, for instance, his imaginings are tempered by the melancholy knowledge that nothing is ever going to ‘happen’, the idea that he has formed of something secret and mysterious involving Michaela and himself permits him to hope that, in spite of everything, something might. He has no memory of when exactly this idea formed – she had been working in the Penderel’s Oak for weeks, or even months, when it did – but it has been there, never far from his mind during his waking hours, and intense and immediate when he drinks, for over a year, a year in which she has split up with one man, and started to see another. (Paul’s smile, when she told him that particular piece of news, was probably the least expressive of happiness ever to shape his face.) Sometimes, in the bruised, unforgiving reality of a hangover, he sees the folly of his imaginings, sees that they are only imaginings – that she is fifteen years younger than him, and that her lovers (extrapolating from the two he has met on various occasions in the pub) seem typically to be handsome young men, strong-jawed outdoors types – not much like him. Usually, however, he manages to overlook these things. And if she sometimes sees, when he is very drunk, the intensity and scope of Paul’s preoccupation with her (once, worryingly, he squeezed her hand and would not let it go for several minutes), it may be unnerving, but she prefers not to dwell on it. She is able to pretend – very successfully to pretend, to herself – that she suspects nothing, that he is simply nice.
He peers through the windowed front of the Penderel’s Oak into the dim, carpeted interior. The pub is not very full. Quiet, even. She is there. He sees her behind the bar, and with a sudden sense of uplift, as well as an enjoyable nervous quickening of his pulse, he opens the door and goes in. She is talking to someone, someone sitting on one of the high stools … And suddenly recognising the squarish head with its dirty bronze hair, the shapeless back of the blue suit, Paul stops. He had not told Murray that he was meeting Eddy Jaw because Jaw had specifically told him not to. (It had seemed strange at the time.) He had said that he was tired, and going home. Murray, too, had said that he was going home, and yet here he is, at almost ten, in the Penderel’s Oak, talking to Michaela. Normally it is obvious to Paul that Murray, in his own preoccupation with her, is pitifully mistaken if he thinks that it might lead anywhere. She is obviously quite scared of him. (When, several hours earlier, Murray had entered the pub alone, she had watched him approach the bar with dread, which intensified when she asked if Paul would be in, and he said, ‘Not tonight, my love. It’s just you and me tonight.’) Paul’s shock at seeing him there unexpectedly, however, tips him into total paranoia – the idea that he and Michaela might actually be lovers suddenly takes on a sort of horrific plausibility. It is like a nightmare. From where he is standing in the shadows he watches Michaela’s face, small and white, slightly pinched, her ski-jump nose – she seems to be listening intently to what Murray is saying, staring into his eyes, nodding. He feels as if he is seeing something that has been specifically hidden from him. And he is sure that Murray must not see him, must not know that he is there – in his fuddled state he would be unable to explain why he is not in Hove. For a few minutes he watches them. Then suddenly sickened with himself, he leaves, lighting a cigarette as soon as his feet hit the pavement outside. Still in turmoil, he walks quickly away. He needs another drink, he needs to get his whirling thoughts together, so before descending to the tube at Chancery Lane, he goes into the Cittie of Yorke. The long, high, loud interior is surprisingly full. There is hardly room to move. Sweating, Paul struggles to the bar. Some sort of event – a graduation of some kind – seems to have taken place nearby because the pub is full of young people in black academic gowns and older people who are obviously their parents. Lots of photos are being snapped, and looking around disorientedly he is hit full in the face by a flash and dazzled. He shuts his eyes, squeezing them shut, and opens them again. ‘You being served?’ someone yells at him over the din. He orders a pint of lager, and only then notices that he has a headache.
5
IN THE GREAT grimy cavern of London Bridge station, facing a soiled wall, a finger in his left ear to block out the roar of bus engines, faintly aware of the smell of urine, Paul phones Eddy. It is five to nine on Tuesday morning, and he is not feeling well. He did not get home until nearly two o’clock, on the filthy, forlorn eleven fifty from London Bridge, stopping at East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, Three Bridges, Haywards Heath, Brighton and, at twenty-five past one, exhausted and empty, the silent little station at Hove, where Paul tumbled alone onto the ghostly platform. The air was sharp and cold. In their dark bedroom, Heather was already asleep (he had phoned, hours before, to say that he would be late), and he undressed as quietly as he could, losing his balance as he pulled his trousers off, dismally tormented by the knowledge that in five hours he had to get up and go back. And, of course, it was torment. Hypnotised by fatigue, he was in the train again – the train full now – as daylight started to appear through the drizzle, over the dark fields and estates and industrial parks. He knew now that he was going to take Eddy up on his offer. The decision seemed to have been made ov
ernight, while he slept. Or perhaps it had never really been in doubt. It seemed possible that his moral tussle of the previous evening had been nothing more than a hypocritical show, hastily staged at the insistence of his mouthy but ultimately ineffective conscience, and that having seen the show, it had been more or less satisfied – as if the show itself were enough, were all that was morally required. Distantly aware of this, in a detached, indifferent state, he had waited for the train, and sat slumped in a corner at the back of the carriage, with small lip movements husbanding the moisture of his mouth. His eyes closed, his bad head bumping lightly against a schematic representation of ‘London Connections’, he remembered, in a hazy, dreamlike way, walking in on Murray and Michaela in the Penderel’s Oak – and, with a pang of private embarrassment, the feelings and ideas that seeing them together had stirred up in him. In the sober morning light, he no longer thought it a serious possibility that they were lovers – though the awful idea would not now be entirely dispelled, and he was still angry with Murray for seeing her in secret, no matter how deluded and futile his intentions.
The train got in to one of the outlying platforms and he had to walk – part of a huge unspeaking herd – through a network of wet, dingy tunnels to the main station. There, he took out his phone, and Eddy’s number.
‘Hello, Eddy, s’Paul,’ he says, leaning into the foul wall in front of him.
‘Paul. Morning.’ Eddy sounds businesslike, perhaps slightly surprised.
‘I’ve thought ’bout what you, we, were saying yesterday.’
‘And?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Excellent,’ Eddy says, without excitement. ‘That’s good news, Paul.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Paul asks after a few moments. Eddy says they should meet again later in the week. He asks Paul how many people he thinks he’ll be bringing with him. Paul says he is not sure. Eddy says he’ll phone him to arrange a time to meet on Thursday or Friday.
Pocketing his phone – an old, heavy model – Paul lights a cigarette, his first of the day. He is shaking – he presumes with excitement, though it might, of course, be delirium tremens. It is not so much that his hangover has disappeared than that it has been pushed into the background. Feeling too energised to take the tube, he looks at his watch and then walks out, past the red rain-streaked logjam of buses, into the open air, towards the river. He is stopped, immediately, by the traffic of Tooley Street, and waits in the Scotch mist with a crowd of suits and umbrellas, sober raincoats and briefcases, for the lights to change. On the bridge the pavement is blustery. Spots of rain flick his face. The khaki river looks slow and old, but wherever it encounters an obstacle – the piers of bridges, the prows of moored vessels – its unsuspected momentum is visible in rushing vees of turbulent water. He walks with his head turned, looking downstream. The distant towers of Canary Wharf are little more than immense, pale silhouettes, illusive under their winking hazard lights in the poor visibility of the day.
He takes the tube from Bank, and arrives late at Park Lane Publications. It is very unusual for him to be late; everyone else is already there. Everyone, that is, except Murray, and seeing his empty seat, Paul experiences a short, unpleasant encore of the previous night’s paranoia, seriously fearing for a moment that the explanation for Murray’s lateness might lie in his having spent the night with Michaela. He feels relieved – and then immediately ridiculous – when in answer to his worried question, ‘Where’s Murray?’, Andy says, ‘In the smoking room.’ This sorted out, however, he is still tense. He is especially tense at the thought of Murray’s return to the sales floor, of the moment when they first see and speak to each other. Taking off his jacket, sitting down at his desk, he is desperate for a cigarette. Not wanting to meet Murray in the smoking room, though, he waits, purposelessly shuffling papers. Normally, he would have shouted ‘Get on the fucking phone’ more than once – only Nayal and Marlon are making calls – but the more time that passes without him having shouted it, the more he seems unable to do so; and the more, he feels sure, his team sense that something odd is happening. (In fact, they are used to his moodiness, and do not see much unusual in it today.) Sunk in this preoccupied lethargy, it suddenly occurs to him how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be even to pretend to care, for the next two weeks, about the fate of European Procurement Management. But he will have to pretend – and suddenly steeling himself, shunting Eddy’s proposal out of his still-hurting mind, he sits up and says, ‘Come on, you lot, get on the fucking phone.’ And as he says it, Murray walks onto the sales floor. There is, Paul thinks, picking him up in his peripheral vision, something shifty about him. He takes his seat without speaking. ‘All right, Murray?’
‘All right, Paul.’
‘Good night, was it?’
‘What?’
‘You look like you were out on the piss last night.’
‘No.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No, not at all,’ Murray says.
‘Oh, I thought you were for some reason.’
‘No.’
Surreptitiously, Paul spends the long morning watching the members of his team, his eyes moving from one to the next. There are a few definite ‘yeses’ – he knew immediately who they would be. Wolé, large and shambling, with a slowness and patience unusual in the profession, but nevertheless a natural salesman, possessor of a weighty, charismatic pitch, his voice almost hypnotically deep and imposing. Nayal, the precise technician, with his headset and smoke-blue sports jacket, also patient, quiet, unflappable, not a high-pressure merchant. That’s more Marlon’s style. All that standing on the desk stuff. ‘Power selling’. Paul doesn’t like it much, but Marlon somehow makes it work. Those three, the definite yeses. (And incidentally, Paul makes a mental note, the three hardest-working members of the team. The harder I work, he thinks, the luckier I get.) Then there are the noes. Andy. Murray. Dave Shelley, an odd, morose young man with lank, greasy hair and a motheaten suit, who never speaks to anybody and spends most of his time in the smoking room. Sami, the affable, smiling Saudi Arabian, who only joined a week ago, and is obviously destined for failure. And Richard, a small man in his mid-fifties who always latches on to the new people – Sami is the latest – and follows them everywhere, telling them how wonderful it is to work for John Lewis. On the phone, it is obvious that he is speaking from a script; so obvious that it seems to be his intention to sound like he is. And indeed Paul has known this to happen, known people who are just unable to stop sending signals to the prospect dissociating themselves from the words they are saying.
Finally there are the maybes. The women on the team. Claire he sets to one side; she is a somewhat special case. Which leaves Elvezia, and Li, a youngish Chinese woman – it is difficult to estimate her age – with horrible yellow teeth and alarmingly thinning hair. To Paul she doesn’t seem clean somehow, like she hasn’t washed for weeks. In spite of this, she is being assiduously courted by a ruddy nerd from another team, who comes to eat his sandwich at her desk every day. She pitches in Chinese, calling the Far East, and because of this she works unusual hours, getting in at five in the morning and leaving at lunchtime, after the visit of her suitor. She makes sales, but Paul is suspicious of them, of the strange ideogrammic signatures and notes on the agreement forms – those flimsy, non-legally binding bits of fax paper – of deals closed when no one else is there. He does not entirely trust her. She could be telling these people anything, he thinks, listening to the weird gurgling sounds that emanate from her as she pitches, half turned to the wall. It could all be some kind of scam. (A few years earlier, two well-dressed, polite young Russians had joined the sales force, and they had done well, making sales to Russian and Ukrainian companies. They earned thousands of pounds of commission. Then, one morning, they were gone. And when the companies were invoiced for the dozens of ads they had bought, they turned out not to exist.) Paul supposes that he will not involve Li in the move to Delmar; her English seems so poor that
he is not even sure he would be able to explain it to her.
Which leaves Elvezia. A stout, mannish Italian lady in early middle age, still known for the massive deal she made, over two years ago now, with Fiat (she sells in Italian), for a series of ads in a number of different publications. It was something of a sensation at the time, the talk of the smoking room, and Elvezia – to her flustered delight – became a company celebrity, an unlikely star salesman, like ‘Beer’ Matt Riley and Pax ‘the Fax’ Murdoch. Yvonne Jenkin, the managing director of PLP International Ltd, who the salespeople do not normally see, put in an appearance on the sales floor to present her with a magnum of champagne; it was the biggest single sale in the company’s history. Despite her denials, Elvezia had enjoyed all this, and was never entirely able to suppress an impish smile when people expressed wonder, as they often did, at her achievement. Her moment of fame did not last. Her successes since the Fiat deal have been numerous enough, though mostly very small – she is really a specialist of the micro-deal, the quarter-page ad, heavily discounted – and she has long since lapsed into the familiar, tetchy, plodding obscurity that was always her lot in the past. The photo of herself and Yvonne Jenkin and the magnum of champagne, still Blu-tacked up on the wall near her desk, is discoloured and starting to curl. Sic transit gloria mundi – it is the only Latin tag Paul knows. In his mind, he moves her halfway to the yeses. He is worried, though, what Eddy will make of her.
