London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  ‘Only because you’re never here. Always pissed,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Well, don’t try and pretend the fucking TV’s a present for me then!’

  ‘It’s pathetic.’

  ‘You’re pathetic. You are. Buying a TV for yourself and then pretending it’s a present for me. I don’t mind. Fine. But don’t expect me to be fucking grateful.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t? You seem to. You seem to. Why did you come upstairs then? Why this fucking scene?’

  ‘Because you were being a twat.’ Her voice is level and quiet. ‘As usual. I should be used to it by now. Excuse me.’ She has finished, and he is in the doorway. He stands there, twisted with fury. ‘Excuse me,’ she says again.

  Downstairs the TV – the old TV, itself not small – is on. Geoff and Angela, Mike and Joan, are watching it – some fifty-year-old film with matt, artificial-looking colour and mannered acting. Sentimental orchestral music. Their faces are expressionless. Geoff keeps yawning. Mike has finally taken off his Santa hat. ‘Do you want a hand clearing the table?’ Joan says quietly when Heather comes in.

  ‘No, it’s all right. I’ll do it later.’ She sits down on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Where’s Paul?’ Mike says.

  ‘I don’t know. Upstairs.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  Heather seems distracted. ‘I don’t know.’ Despite what she has just said, she stands up and starts to clear the table. Joan immediately starts to help her. ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ Heather says impatiently. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘I’ll just give you a hand.’ Joan is stacking dessert plates.

  ‘It’s okay.’ Joan seems not to hear this. ‘Mum!’ Two annoyed syllables. ‘Go and sit down. I can do it. You sit down.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ Heather says emphatically.

  She takes the stack of plates to the kitchen. There, in the pasty neon light she puts them down, and lights a cigarette. Was it inevitable, she wonders, that the day would end like this? If so, what was the point? And she had been truly looking forward to today. When she sees the fine cigars that she picked out, still in their aluminium tubes – she had imagined presenting them after dessert, with the port, part of her perfect Christmas meal – for a moment her vision fogs with tears. She shuts her eyes to squeeze them out, and wipes her face with a tea towel. Then she pours the dregs of a bottle of wine into a used glass, and drinks them down. The straw-yellow wine, though warm, is rich and buttery – much better than the stuff she usually drinks. It is all so sad. When she has finished her cigarette, she stubs it out in the little foil base of a half-eaten mince pie, finally sinking it into the dark mincemeat with a tiny hiss.

  Though still apparently watching the film through the open door of the lounge, Geoff is standing in the hall, with his hands in his trouser pockets. He is wearing a dark blue round-necked jumper with the lump of a tie knot just visible at the throat. He seems to be waiting for something, and Heather says, ‘Do you want a coffee or something, Geoff?’

  He looks at her as if startled. ‘What? No, no thanks, Heather. I think we’re off actually,’ he adds vaguely, after a moment.

  ‘Yes, we’re going,’ Angela says, emerging from the downstairs loo, adjusting the belt of her high-waisted trousers. ‘We’ve got to drive back and everything. Thank you so much, Heather. It’s been a wonderful Christmas.’

  ‘I’ll just get Paul,’ Heather says. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  She goes upstairs, into the bedroom, where the lights are off. In the dark, she can see Paul lying on his back, with his hands behind his head. ‘What are you doing?’ she says sharply. ‘Your parents are leaving.’ He does not move or speak. She turns on the light. Though it has slipped back on his head, he is still wearing the mauve paper crown, and seeing it, she puts her hand up and snatches off the yellow one that she had forgotten she was still wearing herself. ‘Your parents are leaving,’ she says again. ‘What should I tell them? You’re not coming down to say goodbye?’

  ‘How much was that TV?’ Paul asks, still staring at the ceiling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How much was the TV? How much did it cost?’

  She frowns. ‘Um. About two thousand pounds.’

  ‘Can we take it back?’

  ‘What do you mean? Why?’

  ‘To get the money back.’

  ‘I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘Shut the door.’

  ‘What is it?’ She looks worried now. She shuts the door. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m in trouble, Heather.’

  ‘What trouble?’ She is not entirely surprised. He has been behaving strangely for weeks. And there was – this she especially noticed – there was something odd about his answers whenever she questioned him about his new job. She feels sure it must have something to do with that. ‘What trouble?’ she says again. He seems unable to speak. His eyes are fixed on the off-white ceiling, where the light-shade is surrounded by perforated, concentric shadows. Irritated by his stalling, and starting to panic, she says, ‘What –’

  This time he interrupts her: ‘I’ve lost my job.’ After he has said it, moving only his head, so that the paper crown almost slips off, he turns to look at her. He seems to look out of simple curiosity, to see what her reaction will be. Initially, she shows no reaction, except that her nose seems to twitch. Once, twice. Her large blue eyes stare at him. Her face is perhaps pale. She is shocked, despite all the premonitions. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ she says. And he notices that she is trembling with a strange intensity of feeling. A sort of fury. It startles him. ‘I know I should have told you before. I wanted to. I tried.’ He sits up, inelegantly, with an effort of his muscleless trunk, eventually having to use his arms. ‘Sweetheart, I tried.’

  ‘Your parents are leaving,’ she says. And she leaves herself, and goes downstairs.

  11

  VAGUELY PAUL REMEMBERS kissing his mother, shaking hands warmly with his father in the hall.

  The next morning he wakes very early. It is only just starting to get light outside, and Heather and the children are still asleep. The silence is so strong, so settled that the house itself seems to be asleep. He feels strangely clear-headed, though shivery and fragile, and wonders what time he went to bed. It cannot have been later than eight or nine. Perhaps earlier. He does not remember Heather’s parents leaving. What he does remember, suddenly, sharply, standing amidst the piled-up, encrusted wreckage of the kitchen, is his own performance, and from that his mind instantly flinches. Did he …? Surely not. Yes. Yes. Searching the lounge for cigarettes, assailed by an urgent need to atone, he knows that he will have to do something. Private sorrow, even sincere words, will not be enough. Something will have to be done. Of course, he has been in this situation before. Innumerable times. It is almost a weekly event – the grey-faced penitent in his terrycloth dressing gown, engaged in psychic self-flagellation. That is easy – essentially painless. Nothing more, in fact, than self-indulgence, self-pity. No, that will not be enough … And how many times has he said that! How many times has he said solemnly to himself, ‘That will not be enough’? It is simply part of the hypocritical show, a well-established element of the snivelling self-disgust, something which he quickly permits himself to forget, usually by mid-afternoon, as soon as the physical pain recedes, and even in the worst, the grimmest cases, within twenty-four hours. It is not easy, therefore, for him to take these feelings seriously. Their very familiarity is deeply demoralising and, like the ashy half-cigarette he is smoking, makes him feel significantly worse. That he is not actually in physical pain, and yet still has such feelings is, however, a positive sign. So perhaps is his unusually intense and moody awareness of his failure to follow through on previous occasions.

  He is impatient for it to be light outside, so that he can leave the house. He does not want to be there when Heather wakes up. A soft greyness is in possession of the street when he sneaks upst
airs to dress. He takes some clothes – whatever is to hand – and puts them on downstairs.

  Outside the uncertain grey has hardened into daylight – white and flat, cloud-light – and unsurprisingly, the streets are empty. They are sound asleep.

  The Hove seafront is prosaic – modest blocks of flats peep over the weathered line of locked swimming huts to the waves, the pebbled shore. Pausing for a lone lorry to sweep past towards Brighton, Paul crosses the road and goes down the brick steps to the beach. It is only now that he smells the sea – wet wool, salt, sodden wood, mussel shells. The beach rises in a steep hump. There are bald patches of sand further down. The air is cold, and the sky, though still clear over the Channel, is starting to cloud over, as it often does in the morning. Orange buoys are dark dots on the tinfoil water. He stands there, his hands in his pockets, while the wind inflates his jacket and flutters his trouser legs. The waves fall lazily, unhurriedly, each looking for a moment like an imperfect barrel of green glass until it falls and expends itself in a sigh of the shifting flints and shingles. Hugging the wall of the esplanade, making slow progress over the pebbles underfoot, he starts to walk towards Brighton, and its grander line of seafront wedding cakes.

  *

  He opens the front door with trepidation. Heather, he hears, is in the kitchen, doing the washing-up. He is tired, and the boots are hurting his feet. He sits down on the second carpeted step and eases them off, then hovers indecisively in the hall for a few moments, holding in one hand the milk he has bought, and in the other the cigarettes. When he finally goes into the kitchen – she ignores him. He puts the milk down on the table, and taking a tea towel, without saying anything, starts to dry the things that she has washed. This goes on for some time, the only sound the sloshing of the water in the sink. It goes on, in fact, until the washing-up is finished, almost an hour later. At which point, Heather pulls off the pink rubber gloves and, still without having spoken to him, walks out. ‘Heather,’ he says. She immediately turns in the doorway. She is wearing her dressing gown and slippers, her hair a Sunday-morning mess. ‘What?’

  ‘You all right?’

  She seems undecided how to respond, and hesitates. Then she says, ‘I think we need to talk, Paul.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘I’m going to have a bath.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She goes upstairs, and full of foreboding, he refills the kettle.

  The talk takes place a little later, when Mike and Joan – who spent the night in a hotel in Brighton – take the children to McDonald’s for lunch.

  At first, they seem to misunderstand each other. Paul assumes that the primary topic will be his offensive stunt of the previous day, his successful attempt to spoil Christmas, but, while Heather is angry about that, her main worry – and it makes sense to him as soon as he thinks about it – is the fact that he no longer has a job.

  She is, he thinks, surprisingly sympathetic. However, when she asks him – her eyes serious, worried, yet full of a desire to understand, to take his side – why exactly he lost his job, he finds himself unable to tell her the truth. He says that the new job – the one he has been talking about for weeks – ‘unfortunately fell through’ (‘I thought it sounded too good to be true,’ she sighs), and that he was sacked from his old job for not making target on the publication. She looks at him – he looks wretched – and says, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. It is. I know you’ll find another job. And you’re brilliant at what you do.’ She says that they are ‘in this together’, and even that she will do a few more hours a week at Gumley Rhodes.

  Her mood suddenly shifts, however, when he says that he does not want another job in sales.

  She says, ‘But you always said one of the best things about your work is you can always find another job, just like that. Just walk in somewhere and start working.’

  ‘Yeah, I know …’

  ‘So you should just do that then.’

  Her tone suggests that this should be the final word. For a few moments, he says nothing. And he might, at this point, have simply nodded, and said, ‘Yeah. Okay.’ It is what she expects, and her implicit scorn for the idea that he should do anything other than sales seemingly having worked, she is about to stand up and ask him if he wants some tea, when he shakes his head.

  She stays on the sofa. ‘Why not?’ Her voice is quiet. The tone of the question, though, throws the onus on him entirely to justify himself, makes it more or less impossible for him simply to say, ‘I don’t want to.’ So first he hesitates, and lights a cigarette, and looks at her. Her face is very still. ‘I just don’t want to,’ he says.

  ‘Paul,’ she says, ‘the January rent is due in about a week.’

  ‘I know. I’ve got money for that.’

  ‘You’ve got money for that?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘There’s … I’ve got … An old savings account.’

  For a moment, she seems flustered by the existence of this deus ex machina, this ‘old savings account’, and she stares at him. ‘How much have you got in it?’ she says. She seems suspicious, displeased.

  ‘Enough for the January rent.’ Though he is not even sure there is that much.

  ‘And after that? What’s going to happen after that?’

  ‘I’ll get another job.’ His voice, however, is limp and uninspiring – low on steely will.

  Hers is not. ‘What other job?’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Pau-aul! This is ridiculous.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This.’

  ‘Heather,’ he says.

  ‘How can you be so selfish?’ She seems furious suddenly. ‘You can’t just do what you want. Selfish! What about me? What about the children? You’re not on your own. You can’t just do what you want as if other people don’t exist.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I’m not saying I’m not going to work.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? And don’t say “I don’t know”!’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re worried I won’t be able to pay the rent. I know –’

  ‘Not just the rent! The council tax, the bills …’

  ‘I’ll pay them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, the January rent’s covered –’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because it’s due in about a week.’

  ‘It’s covered. I told you.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘It is,’ he says impatiently. ‘And I’ll start looking for another job straight away.’

  ‘WHAT job?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.’ He is well aware that this is not a satisfactory answer. ‘Anything, initially.’

  ‘You haven’t really thought about it?’ She wails the words. ‘Paul,’ she says, as if imploring him, ‘I don’t understand. Really.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  She does not understand why he would want to leave sales.

  He does not fully understand it himself. It is a job that has served him well, more or less, on and off, for over fifteen years. It is all he knows, the only thing on his CV, aside from a lower second in English language and literature from the University of East Anglia. He is a salesman – ‘a man is his job’. And it is his job. Yes, he is tired of it. And yes, there is the hypocrisy of being an advertising salesman whose interior monologue increasingly fulminates against advertising whenever he sees it. And yes, lately he has not been doing well. Lawrence had been losing patience with him. And not without reason. These ups and downs, though, are simply part of what it is. He knows that he could walk into any of the major commission-only outfits – Silverman, for instance, or Oliver Burke Clarke – and, as Heather said, just start working. Sit down at a desk and pick up the phone. The new scenery would probably freshen him up, and the sales would be there. He would make money. So why not? Why is there such an immovable bar of
opposition to it in his mind? And there is. He himself is surprised at the strength of it.

  It has been there since his afternoon in the Albert, when it occurred to him that he was able to leave sales. He had simply to walk out. And stay out. The immediate sense of freedom had been overwhelming. It was something intensely felt, and utterly unthought-through – something thus not unusual in the throes of drunkenness. What was unusual was his endorsement of the idea when he was next sober. And even now, when it is hopelessly occluded with practical problems, he feels that whatever else he might do, he must not ignore it and professionally pick up a phone. Faced with Heather’s intransigence, however, he might well have done so, were it not for the fact that only that morning, sitting in the lounge, he had seen – or thought he had – that no process of self-improvement he might initiate would have any hope of success, would fail like all its predecessors, unless it involved him leaving sales. His way of life – he had thought, using an overlooked wine glass as an ashtray – was embedded in sales. ‘A man is his job.’ It forms his way of thinking, of living. If he quit sales, it seemed to him, everything else would become unfixed, malleable, able to be re-formed in a more satisfactory way – an idea which seemed to bring moral and intellectual respectability to the beery rapture of the Albert.

  He is unable, or unwilling, to explain this to Heather. ‘I just can’t do it any more,’ is all he says, slumped, his head nodded forward, as if he were pushing onto his posture the unwelcome weight of explanation.

  ‘But I thought you liked it.’

  It has been years since they have spoken seriously about his work. He sees that now. ‘I used to,’ he says. ‘I suppose. Not any more.’

  ‘And do you think I like working at Gumley Rhodes?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think I like it?’

  ‘I’m going to get another job. I don’t see what the problem is. Why is that a problem?’

  ‘What other job? What job?’

  That is the question.

  And he does not have an answer for her. He has not thought about it himself. He had been too taken up with maintaining last week’s masquerade. He offers her this – if he has not found another job ‘soon’ … ‘What do you mean “soon”?’