London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  ‘Yeah,’ Paul shouts, without stopping or turning.

  ‘What you doing then?’

  ‘Supermarket. You know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Supermarket …’

  The snooker hall is in darkness – velvety darkness, with a mouldering smell. Paul and Oliver wait while Ned walks into the void. A few seconds later neon tubes flicker where the bar is. Even when they have established themselves, their unwholesome bluish light is very localised. Most of the hall is still invisible. In this sickly light, Ned is stirring. He switches on the illuminated taps – Foster’s, Guinness, Carlsberg, Coca-Cola – and then a warmer tungsten filament in the bar. ‘What you say you were doing?’ he asks, putting the pint of milk that he has with him into the fridge with the alcopops and bottled beers. Paul, who was hoping that the subject had been dropped, says, ‘What?’ Now leaning on the bar, he seems engrossed in rolling a cigarette.

  ‘What you doing nights?’

  What is irritating is that Ned, still preparing for the day’s trading, is obviously not that interested in what Paul is doing nights. When he asks the question he is hidden from sight, fiddling with something at floor level.

  Oliver seems to have wandered off into the darkness.

  ‘You know. Supermarket work.’ Paul says this simultaneously with licking the cigarette paper, and it seems unlikely that Ned would have heard it. Nevertheless, standing up and dusting off his hands he says, ‘Oh yeah.’ And then, ‘Too early for a pint?’

  ‘Not for me, mate,’ Paul laughs hollowly.

  ‘No, I s’pose not.’

  Ned starts to pour a Foster’s – the tap quickly sputters, spitting out only foam. He sighs, and withdraws.

  Sleepily, Paul turns to the hall – now that his eyes are more used to the darkness, it is full of shapes. The tables and the large hooded lights that hang over them. ‘Oli?’ he says.

  Oli’s voice, from somewhere out in the hall – ‘Yeah?’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ned’s just changing the barrel.’

  Paul tries to shrug off his sleepiness. The darkness and dusty silence of the hall do not help. He wishes that he could lie down under one of the tables, on the filthy, mildewed carpet – its colour is something of a mystery – and sleep. He empties his throat, loudly – as if to startle himself into wakefulness – and steps over to the rack where the club cues are kept. They are a miserable, motley crew – some grotesquely warped, some unweighted, their tips knocked down to splintery mushrooms. One is even cracked. Surely no one ever uses it, yet it is still there in the rack …

  He hears Ned return from his ‘office’ saying, ‘Sorry about that.’ It is nice to see Ned – he has not seen him for two months. And with all that has happened, old Ned for one is still the same. ‘No problemo,’ Paul says.

  Ned transfers several pint pots of foam to the little stainless-steel sink before the lager starts to flow. ‘As fresh as it gets,’ he says, pushing the pint towards Paul.

  ‘And a Coke for Oli.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’ Ned has just poured himself a quarter pint of Foster’s and slung it down his throat. He wipes the foam from his mouth. ‘Which table you want?’ he asks, taking a can of Coke from the fridge.

  ‘Whichever,’ Paul murmurs, still yawning in front of the cues.

  ‘Whichever. Right.’

  When he has poured the Coke into a pint glass, Ned turns to a panel of sixteen brown light switches with a marker pen number next to each one. ‘Number eight then.’

  And suddenly the table is there.

  Staring at the cues, Paul wishes that he had not smoked that last spliff, an hour ago. That had been a mistake. It had flattened him, made him want to slither upstairs and lie face down on the bed. That was what he would normally be doing at this time – and tomorrow, tomorrow would be the same as today – they were going up to London to have Easter lunch with Heather’s parents. It would be hell for him, of course – sitting down to a steaming roast dinner in the middle of the night – but Heather was insistent. He takes one of the cues and weighs it in his hand. Then he shuts one eye and looks down it. It is fucked. He is faintly troubled by something that happened at about eleven thirty last night, when he was on his way home from the twenty-four-hour shop. Turning into Lennox Road, he saw Heather emerging from Martin’s car. She had been out with Alice. When he walked over, she explained that Martin had been meeting someone in the same place, and had offered her a lift. ‘Where was that?’ Paul had asked. They were standing next to the yellow Saab. Martin was still strapped into the driver’s seat, with his hands on the wheel. When she told him where it was – the bar of the Metropole – Paul said, ‘Oh, very swish,’ and stooping to peer into the car, he had thanked Martin for driving her home …

  ‘Here the balls,’ Ned says, wiping some foam from his mouth.

  Without exchanging the fucked cue, Paul walks to the bar for the pitted plastic tray. Oli has emerged from the darkness and is waiting in the penumbra of the table’s light, swinging his cue impatiently from side to side. ‘Set the balls up, will you, Oli,’ Paul says, putting the tray down on the baize. It is what he always says – a sort of liturgical utterance, words that hallow what follows and set it apart from the usual fare of life.

  He has met Martin several times over the past two months. None of these meetings has been pleasant. Leaving the supermarket one morning, he walked into him – muttering, ‘Sorry, mate,’ and only then seeing who it was.

  ‘Oh, Paul,’ Martin said.

  ‘Yeah. All right, Martin?’

  Peering past him into the shop, Martin said, ‘Um … How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Great. That’s great!’

  ‘And you?’

  Martin nodded. ‘Fine.’

  ‘All right, well …’

  ‘Yes, I …’

  ‘See you soon I hope, Martin.’

  ‘Of course. See you soon, Paul.’

  He had been immensely troubled by this meeting. It had upset him for a week; sent him scurrying for whisky, ending the era (how short it had been!) of teetotal Paul. It seemed to pop open questions that he had hoped were shut and put his small, private sense of satisfaction under strain.

  The doorbell sounds – the snooker players have started to arrive – and Ned, wiping foam from his mouth, switches on the security camera’s grey-and-white screen.

  It sometimes happens that, when unusually tired or stoned, Paul produces snooker of a semi-professional standard. On these occasions – his muscles strangely limp, his mind vacant – he somehow makes the balls move exactly as he wants them to.

  So it is today.

  Initially, however, while Oli starts (and is at the table for some time), Paul – sitting under the brass score sliders – struggles just to stay awake. Several times, Oli has to tell him to keep up with the scoring, and once his cue slips from his hand and smacks the carpet – just as Oli is taking on a tricky black. He misses. Paul tells him to take it again. Oli shakes his head – he looks displeased. With a sigh, Paul stands. Oli sits with his arms folded, frowning. When he sips his Coke, it is with a furrowed brow. He does not feel that Paul is taking it seriously – with a sort of negligent laziness, he stoops to the first shot he sees, one that does not require him to move from where he is standing. It is not an easy red. It is as if he wants to miss it, Oliver thinks, so that he can sit down again, and sleep.

  Slapdash, nonchalant, Paul pots it.

  And yawns.

  *

  Oliver is a sulky loser, and vanishes from the hall while Paul is settling up with Ned. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, actually,’ Ned says.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He lowers his voice. ‘I’ve had a word with Jack Oakshott.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Jack Oakshott, the president of the Brighton and Hove Snooker Association. Paul has met him once or twice.

  ‘About young Oliver.’
r />   ‘Sure.’

  ‘Jack thinks he could go far,’ Ned says, wiping foam from his lip. ‘He’s very enthusiastic.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About putting him in for the Youth Championship. It’s in Bristol, in September –’

  ‘The Youth Championship? At his age?’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Ned says. ‘You’re thinking –’

  ‘What about the Juniors?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be more realistic?’

  ‘Listen.’ Ned is whispering. Why, Paul does not know. ‘Jack’s thought this out. If we put him in for the Juniors, he might win. Sure. But winning the Juniors – it’s no big deal. Listen. Jack can reel off a list of Junior winners that never went on to go pro. It’s a sort of kiss of death. The Juniors. That’s what Jack says. Now the Youth Championship. Well, I don’t need to tell you all the big names have won it in their time. It is the number-one springboard to professional status.’

  ‘But he’s not going to win the Youth Championship,’ Paul says tiredly.

  ‘Not this year.’

  ‘And not next year.’

  ‘Not next year. But in three or four years, when he comes up against lads his own age, he’ll have three or four years’ experience of the tournament. And they’ll be coming from the Juniors. D’you see?’

  ‘Well,’ Paul says, ‘yeah.’

  ‘Jack’s seen this done with other players. He knows what he’s talking about.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I want to get you two together for a drink sometime – have a chat about it.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’

  ‘I’m excited about this boy,’ Ned says. He taps Paul – who does not look excited – on the arm. ‘Aren’t you excited, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, course.’

  Suddenly solicitous, even worried, Ned says, ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m tired, that’s all.’

  ‘Jack’s thinking about the Argus for sponsorship.’

  ‘The Argus?’

  ‘Well, they know him, don’t they?’ They do know him – he was in the paper last November, in an article headlined HOVE SCHOOLBOY MAKES MAXIMUM BREAK.

  ‘Where is he, by the way?’

  ‘He’s gone. He’s left.’

  ‘Why? What’s his problem?’

  ‘Dunno. He doesn’t like losing.’

  ‘Who does? And he’s a winner.’

  ‘He is indeed.’

  Paul finds him loitering sulkily in the alley outside. ‘All right?’

  ‘When can we play again?’ he says.

  ‘Dunno. Next week?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay?’

  In silence – one sullen, the other sleepy – they walk back to Lennox Road.

  17

  STARING FIXEDLY AT the oncoming motorway, Paul is trying to stay awake. The swishing hum of the engine as it toils, the monotony before him, the fact that it is more or less his bedtime – quarter to twelve, a.m. – all weigh heavily on his eyelids. In the back of the car, the children have stopped making noise, are probably asleep. Nor is Heather in a talkative mood – she has said hardly a word since they set out. And next to Paul, at the wheel, Martin’s jaw – like the air in the Saab’s cramped cabin – is tensely, nervously tight. It is Easter Day, and they are off to Heather’s parents’ house for lunch.

  She did not mention to Paul until last night that Martin had offered to drive them. She told him as she was going up to bed, leaving him to spend the next few hours in uncomfortable wonderment at the lengths to which Martin would go to be of service to her. Was there anything he would not do?

  ‘What, he’s coming to the lunch?’ Paul had said in disbelief.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘What’s he going to do then – wait in the car?’

  She was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown. She yawned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And they both laughed uneasily.

  ‘But he can’t do that!’ Paul said, suddenly feeling that it was in fact too much. For Martin to regrout the shower, to unblock the drains was one thing. To do this though … ‘Come on …’ There was something weird about it. Was it not slightly insane? And should Martin not be dissuaded from such insane actions? Paul was surprised, even shocked, at Heather’s willingness to make use of him.

  ‘He wants to,’ was all she said.

  For a few moments Paul was speechless. Then he said, ‘It’s not right.’

  The doorbell’s urgent exclamation sounded on the stroke of eleven. Heather was still upstairs. She seemed unusually on edge, was yelling impatiently at Marie. The doorbell sounded again. Though it was, of course, too late – he was able to see Martin’s tall shape splintered in the frosted glass panels of the door – Paul wished, as he went to open it, that he had done something to forestall this situation. He found that he was humming to himself, out of nervousness. Nobody’s dignity, he thought, twisting the mortise, is going to survive this intact. Martin was wearing a blouson jacket of greenish-blue suede, jeans and moccasins. Also sunglasses – iridescent teardrop mirrors – which he whipped off as Paul opened the door. He was blushing, his grey-blue eyes subtly evasive. ‘Morning, Martin,’ Paul said.

  ‘Paul.’

  ‘It’s really very good of you to offer to do this.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  Paul laughed – a single, flinty Ha! ‘I’m glad you think so. I’m glad you think so. Come in.’

  Martin stepped warily into the hall, looking around with the air of someone who had never seen it before; with the strange air, in fact, of someone entering a famous space, the Sistine Chapel say, for the first time – there was something of the well-behaved tourist in the way he moved his head from side to side, systematically taking in his surroundings – the beige hall, the small steps, the framed print of Salisbury cathedral. ‘Um, come through,’ Paul said, holding out a hand in the direction of the sitting room. There they stood in the residual haze of the spliff smoke; and there too Martin seemed to think that he was in a museum, piously inspecting Heather’s knick-knacks, and keeping his hands safely in his pockets. ‘Coffee?’ Paul said. He hoped that Martin would want one, if only to give him an excuse to leave the lounge, where the atmosphere stung with discomfiture, with a kind of dumb imbroglio, the social ineptitude of a botched and sinking date. Martin shook his head immediately and said, ‘No, thanks.’ There followed perhaps a minute of silence, and then, unable to think of anything else to say, Paul asked him what he was planning to do while they had lunch. Martin just shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know.’ Paul was still nodding, as if weighing up this answer, his lips held in a thoughtful moue, when – preceded by the children with their newly brushed hair – Heather tumbled down the stairs. ‘Hi, Martin,’ she said, with the merest skimming look in his direction. (Paul thought her embarrassment entirely understandable.) Martin did not even say hello to her. Excited by the prospect of travelling in the yellow Saab, it was the children who did most of the talking.

  Low in the sporty leather seat, Paul struggled to stay awake as they sped up the A23, through its innumerable chalky cuttings, towards London.

  The traffic is light, and the sun shines through intermittently, dumping its metallic brightness on the monochrome hues of the road. Martin stares straight ahead. In the back, the children are quiet, as if drugged by the scent of leather and – used to the sluggishness of Heather’s old Vauxhall – the smooth impulsive acceleration of the vehicle. Near Reigate, still in uneasy silence, they join the M25. The stiffly generous banter of the first fifteen minutes of the journey, as they disentangled themselves from Brighton – Paul had made a particular effort, Martin was more monosyllabic – is a distant memory now. No one has said a word for an hour. At some point between junctions eight and nine, Paul finally nods off – and wakes with a start in a quiet, residential street, to the patient, measured tick of the indicator. Aware of him in his peripheral vision,
he wonders how Martin must feel. Their presence in Hounslow makes the situation seem even stranger than it did in Hove. They are on the Staines Road … His head flops loosely on his exhausted neck as the synthetic voice of the GPS system says, ‘Turn. Right.’ And Martin turns the wheel. He lets them out in front of the house. Standing on the pavement, Paul fears for a moment that Heather will invite him to join them for lunch. She does not. She says she will phone him when they have finished, and – still strapped into his seat – he smiles tensely (feeling quite foolish, Paul imagines) and drives away with a defensive brusqueness, a dash of turbo, as if he has things to do.

  It is the first time that Paul has seen Mike or Joan since starting his new job – initially its precise nature was kept from them – and he finds, to his irritation, that they now treat him as if he were seriously ill. ‘I’ve worked nights,’ Mike says sympathetically, sad-eyed, as they sip their aperitifs. ‘It’s not as bad as all that. It’s not so bad.’

  ‘That wasn’t in a supermarket, Dad.’

  ‘No,’ he says, judiciously. ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  And it is not mentioned again, even when Paul dozes off over his crescent of melon and rag of Italian ham.

  In the sweltering room, everything seems so slow. The successive procedures of the meal. There is an extended, inexplicable lull between the starter and the main course, during which he goes out into the garden for a cigarette to try and wake himself up. On his own, watching the planes scream over, he sees them all sitting there one cloudy Sunday, Mike with his hands over his eyes, smiling; Heather holding Marie; himself, somewhat younger, listening politely to Joan. ‘The thing is,’ she is saying, ‘you just can’t let it get to you. If you let it get to you, if you become obsessed with it, it becomes a nightmare. Doesn’t it?’

  He falls asleep with a plate of roast lamb in front of him, and it is then that he is told to leave, and wanders upstairs. And he wakes, several hours later, in Heather’s old room, on her old single bed, wondering what time it is. Through the window the sky is listlessly ambiguous. Descending the stairs in his socks, he hears voices indistinctly from the lounge. And then, when he is halfway down, he hears Martin’s voice. He stops. The drive from Hove – though he knows of course that it happened – had seemed, when he woke and sat for a few fogged minutes on the edge of the bed, like an unpleasant dream. Now Martin is there – he is in the house – and Paul feels that this finally is too much.