London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  Heather, on the other hand, seemed to be drinking more and more. Paul noticed, from the way the bin filled up with bottles, that she was putting away an unprecedented quantity of wine. And she was going out more than she used to. In the past, she had not had much of a social life. She went out perhaps once a fortnight. Now she was out twice a week. She was usually tipsy when she got home, and sometimes worse. On one occasion in particular, she was so drunk that she was unable to open the front door. For several minutes, while he finished making his spliff, Paul listened to her scraping at it with the key. When he finally went to open it himself, she more or less fell into the hall, her face a glassy mask of confusion. It was half past one, and he had been worried – he had even phoned her. She had not picked up. When he asked her where she had been – he was himself entirely sober, if quite stoned – she just shook her head and pushed past him, moving with inept purpose towards the kitchen. He watched irritably as she walked into the wall. She did not look well. Her face was unpleasantly chop-fallen, and blotchily red, as if it had been rouged by a blindman; there were particularly handsome crimson flares on either side of her nose. ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ he said. She did not seem to hear. Apparently losing interest in the kitchen, or perhaps simply forgetting where she was going, she sank down onto the floor in the hall, still in her coat, as if she intended to sleep there. ‘Where were you?’ Paul said. She was curling up on the floor. For a few moments he stared at her, wondering what to do. Was he like this, he wondered uneasily, when he got home at the oblivious end of a big session? Surely he was never this drunk. She was blotto. It was, he thought, incredible that she had made it home. ‘How did you get home?’ he asked, without much hope of an answer. ‘Did you take a taxi?’ Surprisingly, she seemed to shake her head. ‘You didn’t take a taxi?’ Another ambiguous head movement, most probably a shake. ‘So how did you get home? Did Alice drive you?’ It seemed unlikely. ‘Did Alice drive you home?’ he said. He was keeping his voice down – the kids were asleep upstairs.

  Heather murmured something.

  ‘What?’

  She mumbled something.

  ‘I can’t hear, Heather. What did you say? “Nothing”?’

  She made the noise again, a sort of two-syllable moan.

  ‘Marvin?’

  ‘Muh’n.’ What? Martin?’

  At this she seemed to pull herself into a ball – a coat ball about her hips, only her dry leonine hair spilling onto the carpet and oxblood booted feet protruding.

  ‘Martin drove you home?’ Paul said, not sure whether he had understood. When he tried to make her stand up (‘You can’t sleep here, Heather’) she fought him off with misdirected fisticuffs, until he muttered, ‘Suit your fucking self,’ and went into the kitchen to make his lunch. He was puzzled, and fractious. Later, passing through the hall to empty the ashtray – it must have been about four – he saw that she had gone.

  In the morning when she came downstairs her face was grey and immobile, her eyes a bloodshot mess in their hollows. He was still in the lounge, of course, reading the early edition of The Times, just emerging from the obits – fascinating, the obits – into the looser prose of the sport. He was surprised to hear her on the squeaky stairs – he had not expected her down so early, though in fact it was the usual time. He waited a few minutes, then folded the paper and went into the kitchen. She did not at first acknowledge that anything unusual had happened. He said, ‘You were quite drunk last night.’

  ‘I wasn’t that drunk …’

  ‘Yes, you were. You were …’ She interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said drily. And knowing that he was in no position to exercise any sort of sanctimony, he just shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Whatever. How did you get home?’

  She seemed to sigh. ‘Martin drove me,’ she said.

  ‘Martin? Martin Short?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you were with Alice.’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘So what was Martin doing there?’

  ‘He wasn’t there. I asked him to come and get me.’

  ‘You what, you called him?’

  ‘I know – it’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You called him, at one o’clock or whatever, and he came to get you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Some wine bar in town.’

  ‘Wasn’t he asleep?’

  ‘I think he was, yes.’ For a moment – nervously, naughtily – she laughed. Then she made a pain face.

  That Martin would do this was not in itself surprising. His seemingly unlimited willingness to do things for her was a joke that even the children were in on. This, however, seemed excessive.

  ‘The poor fucker probably had to go to work today.’

  ‘I think he did.’

  ‘You can’t use him as a taxi service just because he’ll do it.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  For a moment, Paul wondered whether to say the words. He had himself drunk next to nothing for weeks. ‘Well, you shouldn’t drink so much,’ he said.

  Holding the mug over her mouth, she shot him a sharp look.

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. And then, ‘I’ve more or less stopped drinking, Heather. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.’

  ‘No, I have,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’

  ‘It’d be a shame if just when I stopped, you started.’ He paused. ‘Why were you so pissed anyway?’

  She shrugged. ‘We were just having a good time. You know.’

  16

  SINCE LEAVING PRISON, Rashid has been living with his aunt and her husband, an accountant – staying in their spare bedroom, and working four nights a week, for a tenth of what he used to make. It just isn’t worth it. What sort of life is that? When he and Paul are alone he often expatiates on this subject. What sort of shit life is this? Why is a life like this worth living? What’s the point? In the dry air of the smoking room – greenish with neon light and bruised with exhaustion – Paul listens patiently.

  More or less the whole shift is in the smoking room now – in ten minutes the lunch hour will be over – and the presence of the others subdues Rashid. He despises them. He does not understand why Paul puts up with them so tolerantly. Though he despises Paul too, it is a less pure feeling, and in fact he feels a sort of kinship with him – a kinship of misfortune, if nothing else. There is no misfortune involved in those others being here, he thinks – the blacks, the paedophiles – this is their natural element, what they were always destined for. He and Paul on the other hand – he and Paul should not be here, this is not for them. ‘Take it easy, yeah,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, see you later.’

  Rashid passes Gerald in the doorway and, standing aside to let him in, shakes his head with a sort of weary disdain. Gerald is the senior worker on the shift – the oldest and the longest-serving. He is trained to use the hydraulic pallet truck, and trusted with the cigarettes, and once Paul saw him, dressed startlingly like an arctic explorer, wheeling trolleys of meat from the misty frozen vaults of the warehouse. Sometimes he says strange, mystical-sounding things. One night, when Paul met him on the shop floor, for instance, and told him that he had been put on fresh produce, Gerald said, ‘Oh yeah? Goin’ out in the garden?’

  And to be amid the fresh produce – the damp leaves of the lettuces, the cool scent of the soil in the punnets of cress – was a bit like being in a garden. As well as the presence of vegetable matter, the space was more open than the limiting narrowness of the aisles. If it suggested a garden, however, it did so extremely faintly – there was, after all, almost no soil in the punnets, and the lettuces were each in their own plastic bag. So faintly, in fact, that it was intermittently sweet and sharply frustrating. Nevertheless, Paul’s senses and imagination strained to enjoy what was there. Gerald had inspired this exercise, and at such times he seemed the purveyor of a subtle wisdom.

  Most of the time, however, Paul thinks that years of noct
urnal living have made him slightly mad. He is obsessed with the mineral waters. He often points out – with nostril inhaling exhilaration, as if he were actually in the Alps – the pictures of ‘nice clean mountains and stuff’ on their bluish bottles. He is obsessed too with supermarket politics, a subject on which he often holds forth in the smoking room. Paul usually ignores him – focusing his mind instead on the smouldering tobacco in his hand, staring at the grey wall, and shutting everything else out. So he was doing tonight – until he heard Gerald say, ‘… you know, that Martin Short.’ Then, still leaning forward wearily, with his elbows on his knees, he started to listen. Gerald is speaking mainly to Mark, a whey-faced forty-five-year-old with colourless hair and eyes who is sitting next to him. Mark’s eyes move furtively from Gerald’s face to the linoleum floor, he nods a lot, and sometimes, like someone taking instructions, he murmurs something to show that he is listening.’

  ‘Watt is going out his mind,’ Gerald says. With the exception of Mark, his listeners do not seem interested; they smoke in vapid silence. This despite the fact that the political situation in the supermarket is more interesting than usual, owing to the imminent stepping-down of Jock Macfarlane, the store manager. For a long time – for years – it has seemed obvious that his successor will be Roy Watt, his deputy. Gerald’s point seems to be that Watt’s inheritance is suddenly under threat. And the source of the threat – he has just said it – is the fresh-produce manager – ‘you know, that Martin Short’.

  It is a sort of seminar – with Gerald steering – and now he wonders, in his nasal Estuary English, why Martin is such a threat. Mark nods, as though it were a question that has been troubling him for some time. Gerald’s own theory is that it is the unusual profitability of fresh produce that makes Martin a threat. He says that with the exception of wines and spirits it is the most profitable section of the supermarket. (People are starting to leave, to wander downstairs, where Graham is waiting.) And this, of course, leads to the next question – why is fresh produce so much more profitable than one would expect? How does Martin do it?

  Gerald, Mark and Paul are the only ones left in the smoking room. Gerald looks at his watch, and stands up with a sigh. He is extremely tall, with a small head the colour of wet coffee grounds. ‘So how does he do it?’ Paul enquires huskily as they leave. Strangely, though he spends so much time holding forth, whenever he is asked a specific question Gerald seems indisposed to speak. He laughs quietly, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he says, as though it were naive of Paul to have expected him to.

  Then, however, turning away, he mutters, ‘I only know what I been told.’

  Paul follows him to the water cooler.

  ‘What have you been told?’

  Gerald slowly swallows two cups of water. ‘What have I been told,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Perhaps not used to people taking such an interest in what he has to say, he seems suspicious. He and Paul are alone in the canteen – Mark has vanished. Gerald peers at Paul for a moment, perhaps wondering what his motives are.

  ‘If you don’t want to tell me …’ Paul says, with a shrug, and pours himself a cup of water, tilting the cooler’s blue plastic tap. ‘Is it a secret?’

  ‘I don’t know, my friend. I don’t know.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  And in silence, side by side, they descend the stairs to the shop floor.

  In the morning, Paul is waiting for the bus. Suddenly aware of someone standing near him, he turns. It is Gerald, trussed up in his donkey jacket. He is wearing his woolly hat even though it is not cold. ‘Oh, all right?’ Paul says. And in a quiet voice, looking off to one side, Gerald says, ‘’Cos of the perishable and seasonal nature of the produce, the fresh-produce manager’s got a certain degree of autonomy in purchasing matters.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Starting to fear that Gerald is a muddled and lonely man looking for someone to latch on to, Paul is not listening properly. He tries to seem uninterested. His eyes fixed emptily on the horizon, he hears only isolated phrases. ‘Budget for discretionary purchases … To take advantage of short-term availability … Temporary price troughs … Unexpected surges in local demand … You’re talkin’ about produce that’s decayin’ all the time … Once it’s gone its value is nil, right?’ Paul says nothing. ‘Fink of the stock as perishable money … Everyfing happens fast … That’s why he’s got to have more autonomy.’

  A bus is approaching, and Paul squints to see the number. Half a dozen different buses stop there. It is not his, and he stands aside to let people on. They jostle him, and he hears Gerald say, ‘He’s supposed to go through the approved suppliers only.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘That means from the list. To add a supplier to the list takes time. He’s got to send the information up to head office. They got to investigate …’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So he’s got some autonomy, but he can only use the approved suppliers.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, what I heard …’

  Paul sees his own bus, pulling in behind the one that is there. ‘Sorry, that’s my bus.’ He starts to move towards it, and is surprised – and perturbed – when Gerald follows him and waits while he pays for his ticket. He is even more perturbed when Gerald purchases a ticket himself, and sits down next to him. Paul, squashed in the window seat, stares through the soiled glass as the bus pulls out into the road. ‘What I heard,’ Gerald says, steadying himself.

  ‘Is this your bus, mate?’

  He waves the question away. ‘S’okay. I can take it. What I heard is –’ his voice sinks to a whisper – ‘Short’s been usin’ suppliers who’ve not been approved.’ More preoccupied with the possibility that someone mentally ill is following him home, Paul says, ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘That’s the question.’

  Still staring out the window, Paul says nothing as the bus turns onto the Old Shoreham Road, and the low morning sun hits it full in the face. ‘Could be the suppliers we’re talkin’ about wouldn’t be approved,’ Gerald says, in an offhand sort of way, turning to look out of the windows on the other side of the bus. Wheezing, it stops at the lights.

  ‘Why not?’ Paul’s voice is equally offhand. He is wondering whether to get off in Portslade. ‘Why wouldn’t they be approved?’

  Gerald just shrugs.

  The bus has started to move again. It is turning into Boundary Road, the streaming low sun showing its filthy windows for what they are, when he says, ‘Might be they use illegal immigrant labour. Might be they don’t pay taxes. Who knows.’

  ‘So why does he use them?’

  Gerald laughs. ‘Why d’you fink?’

  They cross the railway line, and for a moment, with the sun in his eyes, Paul looks straight up the white tracks. ‘Dunno,’ he says.

  ‘’Cos they’re cheaper, innit.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Course. And if they’re cheaper …’ For the first time he looks at Paul, with a small teacherly smile of encouragement.

  Paul says, ‘Fresh produce makes more profit?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The bus is scudding down Portland Road, towards the sun. Perpendicular streets flash past on either side – down some of which, in the distance, it is possible to glimpse a small glitter. The sea. ‘Exactly,’ Gerald says again, tapping his foot. Paul turns to the window. He jumps off two stops too soon, and is thankful when Gerald stays on the bus.

  They wait in the alley, Paul and Oliver, in the stare of the security camera, outside the metal door. Paul yawns. One evening the previous week, he was eating his porridge in the kitchen. Oliver was there, in his pyjamas. ‘How’s your job, then?’ he said, with his face in the fridge. The question was surprising because since Paul started his job Oliver has never mentioned it. There has in fact been a frostiness between them since the morning when Paul got in from his first shift and Oli, staring into his Coco Pops, seemed to ign
ore him. It is something that has quietly depressed Paul for the past two months. ‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ he said. Working through his porridge, he tried not to show how pleased he was. ‘It’s fine.’ And a few moments later – ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Oli said.

  They talked snooker for a while, and Paul suggested a visit to the club. ‘How about Saturday?’

  ‘Won’t you be too tired?’ Oliver – not one to be fobbed off with empty promises – was openly suspicious.

  ‘Nah,’ Paul said, ‘I’ll be all right.’

  And so they wait on Saturday morning until Ned shows up, whistling, with the keys. He seems surprised to see them. ‘All right, Paul?’ he says. ‘All right, mate? All right, Oli? You’re here nice and early.’ It is ten past twelve. ‘Yeah, well …’ Paul says. Ned smiles. His small, friendly eyes seem to search Paul’s face – which is, he thinks, unusually pale and tired-looking, with several days’ stubble. ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Bit tired.’

  ‘Are you? Are you? Big night, was it?’ He starts to unlock the door. It takes him a minute – there are four stiff locks. ‘Not seen you two for a while.’

  Oliver says nothing, so after a few moments Paul mumbles, ‘No, not been around for a while.’

  ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Just … Been busy. You know.’

  ‘Busy?’ The door opens, and Ned stands aside for them to enter.

  ‘Well, I’m working nights at the moment,’ Paul says, starting up the damp concrete steps. In the echoic stairwell, his voice sounds huge.

  ‘Nights?’ Ned shouts, following. The word is drowned out by the boom of the door as it closes. ‘You’re working nights?’