by David Szalay
Only on the pavement did things seem lifelike again. He was shaking, and unable to remember much of what had been said in Eddy’s office. Without thinking where he was going, he started to walk. It had all been done to secure PLP’s contracts, Eddy had said. He said that he had been negotiating with the various contractors for a while – if PLP did not make target on them they were going to withdraw them. ‘And they’re not going to make target now, are they?’ he had said, unable to hide his exultation. ‘Half the fucking company’s just walked out.’
Amid the Albert’s faded Victoriana, fortified by a drink or two, Paul turned his phone on. There were three messages – not as many as he had expected. The first was from Eddy. He sounded embarrassed, fumbling, as he explained that the job had ‘unfortunately fallen through’. The next message, from Lawrence, made it very plain that if Paul had been thinking of a return to PLP, he would not be welcome. It was unpleasant, especially today, after what had happened – and moreover in a fervent, suggestible, sleep-deprived state – to hear such a message, to get such an earful of poisonous hatred, to know that someone out there really hated you. The final message, which he had expected to be from Murray, was Lawrence again. More of the same. There was no message from Murray. He had not even tried to call, and it was this, more than anything, that seemed to verify – though Paul had never actually doubted it – what Eddy had said. Suddenly he felt very low.
He started to smoulder when he thought of his performance in Eddy’s office. How pathetic he must have seemed, sitting there, putting quiet, polite questions, seeming to take what had happened as if it were simply his due. He did not understand why he had acted like that. Why had he not shouted, smashed, hit? And as if to make up for it, he imagined himself – silently, as he sat in the Albert – he imagined himself trashing Eddy’s commodious, battleship-grey office. And then, when Eddy tries to stop him, he transfers the violence – more fantastically – to Eddy himself, hitting him, unleashing on him a wild savagery of infinite strength. He snapped out of this only when a member of the pub staff, entering his field of vision, said, ‘Excuse me’, and emptied the ashtray. Lighting another cigarette, he was ashamed of his fantasy. Not of the fantasy per se. Not at all. What he was ashamed of was the vast discrepancy between it and what he had actually done. And if he pretended, for a moment, to think that he might go back and mete out some real violence, he was still undrunk enough to see, from the start, that that was simply not going to happen. Instead, he meandered to the bar and asked for another pint of lager.
While he was waiting, he noticed a Chelsea pensioner, sitting on his own with a thrifty half. There is a man, he thought, who has probably known mortal danger, machine-gun fire, shelling. Who has waded ashore past the bobbing dead bodies of his friends, into a storm of bullets and explosions and seemingly endless barbed wire, and slithered up an open beach towards thousands of heavily armed men whose only implacable aim was to kill him. How would he have reacted to what had happened to Paul? With immediate surrender, as Paul had? With polite questions? It seemed unlikely. Had he punched Eddy in the face (and quite possibly Eddy would have punched him back, much harder – that didn’t matter), had he punched Eddy in the face he would undoubtedly have been feeling less venomous and self-pitying now, even nursing a flattened nose. But perhaps the pensioner, he thought, still waiting for his pint, perhaps the pensioner would talk about violence never being the answer – these pensioners often did, in TV interviews. When they said that, though, they meant wars, surely, not smacking a man in the face who had purposely wrecked your life with lies. The set of the old man’s mouth, his hard eyes on either side of his great nose, were not such as would lead anyone to believe he was against that sort of violence. As a sergeant (he still wore the three stripes on his soft, scarlet sleeve) he must have dealt out plenty himself, in feral bars from Portsmouth to Singapore.
It made Paul sick to think how Jaw had spoken of Murray as if he were some kind of saint. He knew Murray. Paul thought of a seagull swallowing a hatchling duck alive, gulping it down, its eye a staring orange horror. And a fresh sense of injustice flooded him with silent fury. He had been drinking for a few hours, and in a fierce mood he suddenly stumbled on a sense of pure righteousness – everything else, he felt sure, was just sophistry – nothing more than ploys to lure him into a moral murk, where everyone was equally sullied. The truly sullied always tried to do that. In fact, it was simple – he had been wronged, lied to, tricked into professional suicide in someone else’s selfish interests. That was what had happened. And Murray, supposedly his friend, had been fully involved. Impulsively, he tried for the first time to phone him. Murray’s mobile, though, was switched off. ‘Hello,’ the familiar, nasal voice intoned, ‘this is Murray Dundee. I cannot take your call at the present time. Because I’m busy. Please leave a message. Er. Cheerio.’ The high-pitched note invited Paul to speak, but he did not. He realised that he had nothing to say. Unlike Lawrence, his fury seemed insufficient to sustain such a one-sided showdown. What he had wanted was to hear Murray’s voice – to listen for the guilt. Murray had always been bitter about working for him, his former protégé. Bitter, bitter, bitter. He had worked for Paul at Park Lane Publications for two years. Had he spent all that time plotting something like this? Waiting for an opportunity like this? It was entirely possible. Murray, let us not forget, is a shit.
Paul noticed that it was two o’clock – the time he had told the others to arrive at Delmar Morgan. Vengefully, he imagined intercepting them outside, telling them that the whole thing had ‘unfortunately fallen through’ … But it was too late for that. By the time he got there it would be five, ten past. They would already be in a meeting room with Eddy Jaw, being told that unfortunately he, Paul, would not be joining them. Essentially, he thought, settling in his chair, in some ways pleased that it was too late, essentially it had been a coup d’état – after Christmas they would start work on the new, June edition of European Procurement Management, but instead of Paul, Murray would be managing the team. That was all that would really have changed – everything else, from Murray’s point of view, if not Eddy’s, was just mechanics. And what would the salespeople make of it, the overthrow of their erstwhile manager? Would they mourn? He found it difficult to think that they would. Would they even pity him? Probably not. They would be surprised, then shrug, and start their new jobs. What else can the little people do? They have their own livelihoods to worry about. Only Elvezia, perhaps, would spare him another thought. Secretly, silently, she might give him a single sad, pitying thought. They had worked together for several years, and got on quite well. He had once asked her to help him find a birthday present for Marie – he had had no idea what to get – and they had gone to Superdrug and picked out some sparkly hair clips for her. She had been delighted with them.
And would Murray be in that meeting room? Stationed up by the flip chart, sitting with his arms folded in his shapeless suit? Of course he would. That would take them by surprise, to see him sitting there – their new manager! He knew for a fact that they all disliked him. What would Marlon make of it, for instance? The thought led Paul to laugh out loud in the sun-filled pub. And Wolé, Elvezia – neither of them could stand Dundee. There would be dismay when they saw him sitting there, with that frozen smile on his grey face, squinting at them, unable to hide his nervous tension. He was not a likeable person, the Croc. And the salespeople, Paul thought, would hold him in contempt. Would they refuse to work for him? Not immediately. But they would soon be restive, resentful, openly disrespectful. Marlon would simply not be able to stomach Murray in a position of authority for long. And he would fall, like many another usurper, to popular anger, hung up by the heels, his face pissed on. Eddy would soon understand what a mistake he had made. With deep satisfaction, Paul lit a cigarette. No, Eddy would not be pleased with Murray’s performance. He had been sold a pup, and he would soon realise it.
Well, good luck to them! Paul thought with joyful spite. He was out of it. And
he felt a punch of elation. Yes, he was out of it. Out of the whole thing forever. He thought of the sinking feeling, the terrible obscure disappointment that he had experienced walking onto the sales floor in the morning, when he still thought that he would be working there. The sense of liberation was exquisite and heady. Time and space – the afternoon, the city’s thoroughfares – suddenly seemed opened to him. His. Wonderful. He stood and went to the bar. Standing in the pub’s warm mid-afternoon stillness – he and the Chelsea pensioner were the only ones there – he was almost euphoric.
10
GEOFF RAINEY, A heavy, saturnine man, stands alone in the lounge, holding a flute of effervescing champagne. He looks tired. For many years he worked for ICI, in the end managing a small plant in Buckinghamshire where nylon thread was manufactured. When it shut, it was difficult for him to find work, as a fifty-four-year-old with no experience of anything other than the textile industry, and for a decade now he has been a coach driver – mostly ferrying public schoolboys to and from sports matches and the theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Waiting in the hot coach, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, while the moneyed teenagers sit through King Lear, he eats his packed sandwiches, shaking the crumbs out of the Tupperware when he is finished, and reads the paper, or – for the last year or two – works on his poems. (One, ‘Sanatorium’, has been published in the Bucks Advertiser. Angela is threatening to read it out after lunch.) In two years, the mortgage will be paid off, and he will take the coach back to the depot in Aylesbury for the last time. From then on in, his ICI pension should suffice. He hears his wife’s loud voice on the stairs with Paul. Paul – as Geoff noticed when he opened the front door – looks tired and pale. He does not look well. Nor does he put much effort into the pretence that he is actually listening to what his mother is saying – an occasional nod or listless ‘Oh’ being the sum of it. When, a few minutes later, she stops speaking for a moment to take a sip of champagne, Geoff says, ‘So how are you, Paul? All right?’
‘Yeah, I’m well,’ Paul says. His mother smiles, her mouth drawn back from her long pink gums. She is a short woman, with a large head. Ever since the winter of his ‘crack-up’, questions such as ‘How are you?’ have become unpleasantly loaded – inescapably mementoes of that dark guilt-sodden episode, never openly spoken of – and to neutralise this they are put by his parents, especially his father, as now, in an exaggeratedly offhand tone. They still have a strange, spiky intensity. ‘Everything okay at work?’ Geoff follows up, his eyes fixed on the overdecorated Christmas tree, sadly lost under the weight of tinsel and empty boxes wrapped in gold paper and baubles. Under it there is a drift of presents, and standing apart – far too large to fit under the tree – a substantial oblong in shiny blue paper. On first entering, everyone notices this object, and wonders what it is.
‘M-hm,’ Paul says. ‘Um, I’ll just get the bubbly.’
Flushed with heat, sweating, Heather is heaving the huge half-cooked turkey from the oven. Paul smiles tensely, and opening the fridge, faces a wall of food. He stares at it for a few moments, in no hurry to return to the lounge. He has told no one, not even Heather, what happened. For a whole week, every morning at the usual time, she took him to the station. On Tuesday and Wednesday he actually went to London (Blackfriars, not Victoria) and spent the day in pubs there – indulging in a maudlin orgy of nostalgia and self-pity. On Thursday, he only got as far as Croydon, and on Friday he spent the morning at Gatwick Airport, boozing in the Red Lion, the pub-by-numbers in the departures area, before passing the afternoon in Three Bridges, mostly in the Snooty Fox. When Heather asked him about his new job, he was vague, but said it was going well. Unable to sleep, he spent much of the night smoking spliffs in the lounge. And in the morning had to haul himself out of bed and put on an otiose suit.
His thoughts turned uneasily to a news story he had once seen. It was set in France, and was about a man whose wife and children were under the impression that he was an eminent surgeon, when in fact he was unemployed and had no medical training whatsoever. And how had that situation started? Had he simply lied to a woman in a bar to impress her, and then, when they saw each other again, and started to go out, and later got married and had children, never told her the truth, found that it was too late to stop lying, just not possible because the lie was now an integral part of the very foundation of his life? He kept up the pretence for years, and in the end, when for some reason – probably something to do with money – it could no longer be sustained, he found it easier to kill his family, and then himself, than to admit the truth to them. Thus an apparently insignificant fib – perhaps even meant, in the first instance, as a joke, not intended to be taken seriously – ended in quadruple murder, in infanticide.
With the cold green champagne bottle, Paul returns to the lounge. He understands with unpleasant immediacy how a situation like that might turn into a living nightmare. When he got home on Monday, half sobered-up, and Heather asked him how his first day in the new job had gone, he hesitated for a moment. Then he smiled, and said, ‘Fine.’ He had not decided to hide what had happened from her. He had not decided anything. In that infinitesimal moment of hesitation things might have fallen either way. As it happened, they fell the way they did, and in just one week he has piled lies on lies – it is terrible the way they are proliferating. He has found it more and more difficult to keep track of them, to keep them in line. But at every point – and this was the truly pernicious thing – it was, in the short term, much easier to maintain the pretence than to admit the truth. Had it been thus for the unfortunate, foolish Frenchman? What extraordinary lengths he must have gone to to maintain the illusion. And how awful those years of pretence must have been for him. Paul remembers reading that while his family thought he was at work, the man simply spent all day sitting in his car. He did that every day for years. Sitting in his car. The stress of it. The boredom. The sense of waste. Of entrapment. A weird pretend life. And then, for everyone, death.
‘Well, merry Christmas,’ Paul says, with a wry, lopsided smile. Angela holds out her glass to be refilled. Her white hand is hard and fleshless. There are stony rings on some of her fingers. ‘Thanks, darling,’ she says.
Everything in the house has been altered in honour of the season. Even the windowpanes have had their corners sprayed white to suggest snow, though outside it is quite warm and grey and damp. And where did the money come from? (He is still thinking about the Frenchman, while his mother talks.) That was never properly explained. Perhaps an inheritance. Or stolen. Most probably just mountains of debt. And as has happened frequently over the past week, Paul suddenly sees with tilting vertiginous terror the depth of his own financial emergency. Most of the time, he is able to ignore it, but more and more frequently he is experiencing these moments of vertigo. When he does, his face becomes totally expressionless. ‘What is it?’ his mother asks worriedly. She must be worried – she was in the middle of telling him about Patrick’s new angora rabbit. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he says, smiling. She looks at him for a moment, and then, full of tedious zest, and as though nothing has happened, keeps telling him about Patrick’s rabbit. Patrick is a favourite of hers, a neighbour in Amersham, ‘openly gay’ – always the first thing she tells anyone about him. She is demonstrating how the rabbit wiggles its nose, while Geoff looks on impassively, holding his champagne. Paul’s smile is starting to get sore. He is trying to work out when, exactly, he will run out of money, when overdraft limits and credit-card limits will be hit, and how he will pay the January rent.
He notices that his mother’s mood has changed. She seems tetchy, and he listens for a moment. ‘There’s just not much in it compared to before,’ she is saying. ‘And if the local press aren’t providing local news, where else are we going to find out what’s going on around us? This week they didn’t even print the Amersham Community Voice column. Or Little Chalfont. It’s all about Wycombe. Apparently, the head office for the Advertiser is in Uxbridge, which is why there’s so ma
ny adverts for the Uxbridge shops, but since they joined forces, there’s been sweet Fanny Adams about Amersham …’
‘There is an Amersham edition,’ Geoff mutters impatiently.
‘Yes but it’s usually exactly the same! Only the front page is different. Sometimes. And not very different.’
Geoff shrugs and turns his old rugby-player’s head to the window. Someone is parking in the street outside.
Mike and Joan look nervous. Their jollity is a little tense and overplayed. Mike is wearing a Father Christmas hat. When Angela sees it she smiles snowily. She and Geoff have never met Mike and Joan, and Paul makes the introductions while Heather goes to get the children, who are upstairs. The men shake hands warily. Fleetingly, the woman kiss each other. It then takes about five minutes for the Willisons to unload their presents, Joan taking out the wrapped parcels and handing them to Mike, who squats by the tree, placing them on the papery pile already there. Paul notices his parents look at each other in alarm when Joan takes out a bottle-shaped thing and, handing it to Mike who is waiting impatiently, says, ‘And this is for, um … Geoff.’ Angela, flushed and agitated, whispers something to her husband, who touches his tonsure and purses his lips. Paul says he is going to get more champagne. In the kitchen, he lights a cigarette and starts to remove the heavy foil from the next bottle. His hands are shaking. He does not feel well. When he returns to the lounge, his mother is speaking, everyone else listening in silence. ‘And it’s because all the reporters, I think there are four of them, work out of Chalfont St Peter or Uxbridge. Not a single one in Amersham …’ That she is nervous is obvious from the speed and volume of her voice, and the flushed points in her slack cheeks. Joan and Mike look tired. His father, Paul notices, keeps glancing at Joan, who is listening with a patient, though increasingly strained, smile. Mike, if he was smiling before, has stopped. Seeing Paul come in with the bottle, though, he perks up. ‘All right, Paul?’ he says. ‘How’s tricks?’
