London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  He laughs. ‘Sorry for what, why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel I’ve let you down.’

  ‘Not at all. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you for a couple of weeks. I don’t know why I’ve kept putting it off.’ Her latest plan, formulated that very afternoon, had been to stay until Christmas, and then simply slip away in the new year. And instead she will slip away now. Today, it turns out, has been her last day, as he understands. He had not meant to precipitate this. ‘I gave it a try,’ she says, with a smile.

  ‘Yes.’

  They leave together, ride down in the lift, slightly uncomfortable in its dim, confined space. Together, they wait at the lights, and cross Kingsway. ‘Okay,’ she says, halting at the entrance to the tube.

  ‘Okay. Well …’

  ‘Good luck in your new job.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. And good luck with whatever you do.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Okay …’ There is a moment of slight confusion. ‘Well, don’t be a stranger, Claire.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she says, though they both know that they will never see each other again, and for a moment they wonder, both of them, whether a peck on the cheek would be appropriate here. In the end they shake hands quickly, and she turns and goes through the grey barriers.

  Wearing a pair of frameless glasses that do not suit his big face, Eddy Jaw looks over the list of names – Wolé Ogunyemi, Marlon Smith, Elvezia Buonarroti, Dave Shelley, Li Zhang, Justin Fellowes. It is Thursday again, and they are again in the deep red interior of the Cardinal in Victoria. Paul is drinking Ayingerbrau. ‘All right,’ Eddy says, putting the list down on the table’s dark mahogany. ‘Well done, Paul.’

  ‘No problemo,’ Paul mutters, and feeling pleased with himself – though also prickly at receiving such a condescending pat on the head from his old co-equal – he lights a cigarette. He has not yet really come to terms with the fact that Eddy is now – there is no ambiguity about it – his boss.

  ‘Tell me something about these people,’ Eddy says.

  Paul indicates the list. ‘About them?’

  Eddy nods. ‘Yeah.’ Taking his time, Paul sips lager while he looks through the names. ‘What do you want to know?’ he says. Eddy laughs. ‘Something about them. Who the fuck are they?’

  ‘All right. Um. Wolé, yeah, fucking brilliant. Really top salesman. Marlon too. Um. Elvezia – she pitches in Italian. She’s good. Reliable. Li pitches in Chinese. Mandarin, I think. Or Cantonese. The same – good, reliable …’

  ‘What about, you missed out …

  Dave Shelley?’ ‘Dave? Yeah, he’s good. Not as experienced as the others. But good. Yeah …’

  ‘And Justin Fellowes?’

  Paul wonders whether Eddy has had an equivalent list from the Pig, also featuring Justin Fellowes. Something about his smile, almost imperceptible – perhaps imagined – suggests that he might have. ‘I recruited him from another team,’ Paul says.

  ‘Oh?’ Eddy nods, apparently impressed. ‘Great.’

  ‘Yeah, there was nobody else good on my team.’

  ‘That’s great, Paul. Well done. So this Justin Fellowes is good, is he?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty good,’ Paul says.

  Eddy takes a pull of alcopop. The liquid – WKD Original – is a strange, fluorescent blue, and at this trigger, like some programmed Sirhan Sirhan, the strapline of an advert pops into Paul’s head: Have you got a WKD side?

  ‘So,’ Eddy says, ‘they’re all ready to go?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m ready. Of course.’ Paul stubs out his cigarette. He is not sure, suddenly, that he wants to work for Eddy Jaw – he has not until now, until this meeting, thought about it in precisely those terms. He has thought about it in terms of what he is leaving. Now he starts to think – in more specific, solid detail – about what he is going to. And he finds he is not sure about it.

  ‘And it’s all been kept quiet?’ Eddy says. ‘No one knows who’s not involved?’

  Paul shakes his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Not Murray?’

  ‘Definitely not Murray.’ He lights another cigarette. Eddy, sitting on the other side of the table, studies him almost sympathetically. ‘I know it’s a bit of a shit thing to do to a mate,’ he says.

  Paul says, ‘Well …’ Then stops, and shrugs, and looks Eddy in the face. The face is long, and despite some flab on the jowls, still quite youthful – narrow-mouthed, small-eyed, with fair brows and lashes. Eddy is smiling. ‘It’s business,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’ Paul says nothing. ‘He’ll understand that. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose.’ Though Paul does not think he would understand. Not in the sense that Eddy means, anyway – a sense which seemingly sought to isolate ‘business’ from everything else in life, as though it were an entirely separate sphere – as though, in each sphere, we were not the same person.

  ‘I want to make the move on Monday,’ Eddy says.

  Paul is stunned. ‘Monday?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘This Monday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s Thursday …’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘It’s just … I thought we were going after Christmas.’

  ‘No.’

  Paul shakes his head, as if trying to wake himself up. ‘Why?’ he says.

  ‘If everything’s ready, why wait?’ Eddy smiles. ‘Tomorrow’s your last day at PLP, mate. I thought you’d be pleased.’ Paul is speechless. While it was safely on the far side of Christmas, of the new year, it all seemed somehow hypothetical. Now it is Monday. And suddenly it is something that is actually happening. He is aware, in an entirely literal sense, of his feet turning cold under the table. In a sterner tone, Eddy says, ‘You said you were ready.’

  ‘Yeah, I am.’ He has had no time to prepare himself psychologically though.

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’ Eddy seems impatient.

  ‘There isn’t a problem.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So,’ Paul says hoarsely, ‘so what do we do?’

  8

  THREE THIRTY, AND Paul is standing in his cotton boxers outside the bedroom door – that centrally heated inky cave, smelling of human breath – having left the bed in protest at his brain’s obstinate refusal to close down. Aware of the carpet’s nap under the slightly sweaty soles of his feet, he stands there, in the sleepless stare of the street light, the window’s shadow on him like a cross hair, knowing that there is nothing for him to do. Nothing. He is itchy-eyed and headachy with fatigue. He has been standing on the same spot for several minutes, and it seems that he has more chance of falling asleep standing there – his head occasionally nods involuntarily – than in the hot darkness of the bed. This is always the way. He is not angry any more. That was an hour ago. The tears, too, have been shed. Poor, imploring tears. He moves silently down the stairs, and turns on the light in the lounge. It assaults his eyes, and he squints – and when that is not enough, covers them with his hand. He has not got his contacts in, and the room, when he can look at it, is soft-focused. It seems desolate, dishevelled. Sad. Especially the dour, coniferous shape of the unilluminated Christmas tree. Crouching on his white hams, he plugs in the coloured lights. (They bought the tree on Saturday. It was too tall for the room – as he had said it would be – and he had had to labour in the garden for an hour with a saw.) He snaps off the oppressive overhead light and sitting on the sofa wearily starts to make a spliff. His fingers are swollen. It is Monday morning.

  For Paul, Sunday is typically the least toxic day of the week, and this one was no exception. He had woken with an erection, an increasingly unusual occurrence, and inveigled Heather into sex for the first time in over a month. Then he had pulled on some clothes and gone out into the morning, which was frosty, to buy the paper and a pack of cigarettes. Returning to bed with tea and an ashtray, he and Heather had read the paper. He started with th
e sports section, studying every word of the snooker and taking a passing interest in some of the other sports, such as motor racing and rugby. Then he moved on to the business section. Not all of it – mostly pieces on companies whose products and services he purchases himself. Diageo, for instance, and BAT. J. D. Wetherspoon and SouthEast Trains. He started to read one of the economic analysis columns before noticing, halfway down, that he literally did not understand what it was about, let alone the specifics of what it was trying to say. He had started on it out of a sense of obligation – a sense that he ought to understand these things. But why? he wondered, untidily folding the business pages and dropping them onto the carpet. Why?

  He turned his attention next to the news section, which Heather had just finished with. (She was now reading the travel section.) Wearily, he ploughed through national and international news and various op-ed pieces. A lot about house prices. He liked the almost irreverent little graphics which this particular paper always uses to illustrate its news articles – little men jumping out of an exploding truck to show how an escape had occurred, statistics presented as a series of different-sized oil barrels, a picture to show exactly how, in several numbered stages, a light aircraft had become tangled in power lines and crashed in a field. Finishing the news, he hesitated between the News Review and the travel section, which Heather had discarded (she was now looking through the Culture magazine). Neither of them particularly appealed to him. In the end he decided on the News Review, but only after leafing quickly through travel. The News Review kept him occupied for quite a while, and he followed it with a flip through the glossy Lifestyle magazine (shite, he thought, as always) and a half-hearted study of the personal finance section, before searching through the mass of paper everywhere on the bed to make sure that he had not overlooked anything. He found a special property pull-out – an ‘Essential Guide to Buying and Selling’ – which he perused for a while. (‘Appointments’ and the kids’ section he never bothered with, and the Culture magazine, because it contained the TV listings, would be around all week – there was no hurry where that was concerned.) By this time it was dark outside. At various points during the day he had made trips to the kitchen for food – cheese toasties, crisps, biscuits, a French stick defrosted in the microwave, pâté. More tea. Later, in the waist of the afternoon, while he was reading the News Review, he had gone to get a beer. The detritus of all this surrounded them. Heather, smoking guiltily, wearing glasses and her dressing gown under the duvet, was reading the Lifestyle magazine. His head full of fresh information, most of which he was already forgetting, Paul went downstairs in his towelling dressing gown and socks, turning on the light in the dark hall. The measured sounds of televised snooker could be heard through the sitting-room door.

  The only other thing to happen on Sunday was that Martin Short came round. Sitting on the sofa, watching the snooker with Oliver, who for some reason had his cue with him, Paul was irked when the doorbell rang. Oliver had been there all afternoon. It was about five o’clock when Paul joined him, during the second frame of Ebdon’s third-round match against Lee, and sixish when the doorbell rang. For fuck’s sake, Paul thought. ‘You expecting someone?’ he shouted up the small stairs. ‘It’s probably Martin,’ Heather shouted back. ‘He said he might come round to do the drains.’ Paul opened the front door, and there was Martin Short, somewhat inappropriately six foot four, his breath vaporous in the evening’s iciness, holding clobber. The clobber, a mass of hoses and metal coils and pumps, was a professional drain de-blocking machine. What kind of fucking idiot, Paul found himself thinking – and he was aware of the implicit ingratitude – has his own professional drain de-blocking machine? ‘All right, Martin?’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Paul,’ said Martin, smiling warily. ‘And you?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’

  A manager at the West Hove Sainsbury’s, Martin lives a few houses down with his wife, Eleanor. She is eight years older than he is, and his lean and youthful thinness stand in ever more tragicomic opposition to her increasing obesity and evident middle age. Wearing a blue tracksuit that had obviously been ironed, he lugged his machine into the hall, while Paul mumbled, ‘Cheers, Martin. Lucky for us you’ve got this thing.’

  ‘Yeah it is,’ Martin said. ‘Well. Should we get started?’ Paul helped him move the machine into the kitchen, where the sink now took several hours to drain and the imperceptible slowness of the receding water left an unpleasant greasy scum on the stainless steel. ‘Let’s have a look.’ Martin opened the cupboard under the sink, where the cleaning products were kept, and clearing them out, knelt on the floor’s fake terracotta tiles and half crawled into the musty space. Feeling it his tiresome duty to stay there while Martin worked, Paul watched his fleshless tracksuited arse – the outline of his underpants visible – and the white soles of his trainers with unsmiling disdain. ‘Got a bucket?’ Martin said.

  ‘Um, yeah.’ Paul found it and put it into his waiting hand.

  ‘I’m just going to take the U-bend out.’

  ‘Fine.’

  There was a short sloshing sound, like someone being sick. Paul lit a cigarette and looked on, bored, while Martin backed out of the cupboard, his hands black with foul-smelling sludge, and started to set up his equipment. Kneeling again, he inserted the long flexible bladed rod of his machine into the waste pipe. ‘Give it a few minutes,’ he said. Paul nodded. ‘Do you want a beer or something, Martin?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You sure? I’m going to have one.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  In silence, Paul opened the fridge and took out a can of Foster’s and opened it. The disdain with which he regarded Martin was mirrored more or less exactly in Martin’s opinion of him, as he looked at him now, in his dressing gown and socks, unshaved, smoking, a slob. Neither of them quite suspected the extent to which the other looked down on him – it would have seemed an Escher-like impossibility. There was some tense silence, then deciding that he had to say something, Paul said, ‘Been watching the snooker, Martin?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘No? Fair enough.’

  A short conversation, and neither of them even tried to pretend that he had enjoyed it. After a few moments, though, Martin seemed to feel that it was his turn to make an effort, and said, ‘It’s very restful, isn’t it, though. The green. That’s what they say.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it is. I suppose it is,’ said Paul. And then the silence reasserted itself until, damp-haired and dressed, Heather joined them. ‘Hi, Martin,’ she said, smiling widely. ‘How are you? Do you want a cup of tea? Do you want a mince pie?’

  Martin did want a cup of tea, and a mince pie, and a cloth to wipe his hands.

  There are several hundred luxury mince pies in the house. Heather has already started to stock up on wine and champagne, brandy and port and cigars. The fridge and the freezer are overfilled, and the children are longing for objects they have seen on TV, or in the hands of envied mates at school. Their longing is clamorous, whiny, sometimes tearful. An ultra-hard sell. They have been brought up to long for objects, Paul reflects sleepily. To believe that having things brings happiness. Look around you, he thinks, holding the lighter flame to the brown hashish, turn on the TV, open a magazine, walk down a street – see the pictures of happy people. Paul himself is lukewarm on the subject of Christmas. It is expensive, of course – that’s the whole point – and this year both his parents and Heather’s are coming to Hove for the lunch. He knows that Heather has bought a new TV, an enormous flat-panel thing. It is hidden in the garden shed – he hardly ever goes in there, but he found it when he was looking for a saw. It must have cost thousands, that TV. It was covered with old blankets in a crude attempt to conceal it or keep out the damp, and at first he thought it was a piece of furniture, a massive flat-pack from IKEA. Oh well, he thinks, with weary tolerance. In two weeks it will all be over for another year. And Eddy’s promised ‘golden hello’ should take some of the strain off
the finances.

  In the warm gules of Christmas-tree light, Paul crumbles the fragrant hash. Yes, the ‘golden hello’. That should cover Chrimble, even if Heather seems determined to overwhelm her parents and in-laws with superfluous luxury. All the products she buys have that designation. And, it seems, anything with that designation, she buys. Questioning these arrangements would see Paul condemned – by Heather, with the tacit support of the children – as a kind of hateful Scrooge. A joyless puritan. Yes, an awful person. He knows this, and will not question them. And if he is worried about the amount of money she is spending, he probably ought not have told her that he was starting a new job at a place where they have bowls of fresh figs in the office and order in lunch from Carluccio’s. For two weeks, he has been telling her that he is on the point of being deluged with lucre, and now he frowns at his own foolishness.

  Briefly rubbing his fingertips across each other to remove the clinging residue of the hash, he feels, like a sudden blow, the leaden exhaustion in his head. After this spliff, he is sure, he will be able to sleep. Perhaps here on the sofa. He hates to think about what will happen at PLP in the morning – finds it almost literally unbearable to imagine. His imaginings focus on Murray. As he fashions the roach, he sees Murray arrive, take off his coat, and say something like, ‘Where the fuck is everybody?’ Only Sami, Nayal and Andy are there, uneasily occupying their desks. (Richard was sacked last week.) Sami shrugs. Nayal, of course, knows what has happened, but he too shrugs, and says nothing. Andy still has that stupid smile on his face. And Murray, sensing imminent humiliation, will be enflamed, tense, aggressive. He will phone Paul. And when he finds his phone switched off – Paul has already decided to have his phone switched off all morning – he will know, somewhere inside him, he will know what has happened. But at first he will not want to believe it. He will phone several times. Leave messages, terse and shaking with horror. Or perhaps he will be too horrified, too humiliated, to leave messages. That Dave Shelley, in particular, should have been included, and not him, will seem impossible. Just too insulting, too humiliating to be true. It will take him time to understand that it is true. And it will be a great sensation – like a huge heist. People will flock to peer at the empty desks – somehow sinister in their sheer normality. When Paul thinks of his fellow managers in particular – of Tony Peters, Simon Beaumont and Neil Mellor – he wishes that he were able to be there to take the plaudits of their hypocrisy. And Lawrence. When he imagines Lawrence, Paul experiences pity, of all things. And a strange sort of shame. But his imagination keeps focusing on Murray – on the moment when Murray understands what has happened. What he, Paul, has done.