London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  It is twelve o’clock. High noon in Hove. Hearing Heather come into the hall, Paul is immediately aware that she is sobbing. She seems to snatch at her sobs as she shuts the front door. ‘Paul?’ she says, and there is a plaintive, almost desperate, note to her voice. ‘Paul?’

  He does not move, though his heart is sprinting, and his failure to answer seems to trigger a quiet doubling of her tears. He hears her go into the kitchen and put something down. There follows an odd delay, and he has started to wonder – with a smear of dark rage – whether she is actually going to join him in the lounge at all, when he hears the muffled flush of the downstairs loo. The sound of the flush, though diminishing, becomes more defined as the loo door opens, and he leans forward and starts to fiddle with his spliff-making materials. He does not look at her when she appears in the doorway.

  She is blowing her nose on a square of toilet tissue. ‘Paul,’ she says.

  And absurdly, he says, ‘Yes?’ as though he does not know what she wants to talk to him about.

  ‘What did he tell you?’ she asks.

  ‘Martin?’ The name, he hears, has an entirely new sound.

  ‘M-hm.’ She is nervously working a little plastic lighter.

  He seems to think for a few seconds; then he says, ‘Why don’t you tell me yourself, then I’ll tell you what he said.’

  When he looks up, however, she is staring at the carpet, using her upturned hand as an ashtray. Looking at her, she seems a stranger. He thinks of the first few times that he saw her – when he had still not steeled himself to speak to her, and did not know her name – in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, or peering through the Friday night mob in the Finnegans Wake – now he sees her like that again, sees what she looks like, her solid nose, powdery face, cornflower eyes. He notices her mannerisms, her posture. It is, for a moment, as though the intervening years have been unlived.

  ‘So?’ he says.

  She still does not speak. She is staring at the carpet’s tired oatmeal nap.

  ‘Were you going to tell me yourself?’

  They are both smoking. The room is full of slowly swirling smoke. His whole life of the past few months, perhaps longer, now seems like a fiction; something in which he was participating without understanding that it was not properly real. Perhaps this is partly why he has such a strangely theatrical sense of the situation. Leaving the room, he feels, will be like leaving a set. Slowly, he stands up. There are still so many questions, and he is leaving. The inquest has only just started and he is sick of it. It seems wearisome, pointless … He has forgotten to stub out his cigarette, and leaning down, he makes a quick, unthorough job of it – it is still smouldering in the ashtray when she says, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going to bed. I’m tired.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says softly. Then, ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

  She is suddenly in tears. ‘Paul,’ she says, ‘I don’t think you’re well.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Putting one hand over her face, she shakes her head. ‘What is it?’ He stands there. ‘What is it?’ She sniffs a few times. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She is wiping her face with what is left of the paper tissue. ‘All this crap …’

  ‘What crap?’

  ‘Working at the supermarket. It’s mad.’

  ‘Is it?’

  She blows her nose. ‘I mean, it must be pretty awful.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘I’m tired, Heather.’

  She nods, and moves aside to let him pass. ‘Sleep well.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

  ‘Paul, I’m sorry.’

  Everything seems unsatisfactory. He does not think he will be able to sleep. He even wonders whether to go back downstairs. His head is still seething with weary, insistent questions – questions he has asked so many times in the last few hours that they seem tedious, even unimportant to him now. With nothing else to do, he lies down, still in his clothes, and as soon as he does this and shuts his eyes, he knows that he will be able to sleep – that sleep, surprisingly, is pouring in on him, erasing everything.

  When he wakes, earlier than usual, for an hour or so he lies in bed, wondering where he stands. His placid assumption – it is eerily placid – is that Heather is going to leave him. He is not sure how he feels about this. As he lies there exploring the soft shadows of the ceiling with his eyes, there are moments – only moments – of intense sadness and anger. Mostly there is just a numbness. He hears Oliver and Marie, hears Heather stomping up and down the stairs, her supervisory voice impressively ordinary. These muffled sounds seem to find him from the past; they are like memories of an earlier part of his life, mysteriously fresh in his mind on waking. Swinging himself out of bed, in his underpants he tiptoes into the bathroom. The equanimity with which he has been outstaring the situation for the past hour has suddenly vanished and he wishes he were able to get it back. To this end, he fumbles with the box of Felixstat, and thumbs one of the pills from the blister sheet; each is labelled with the name of a day of the week. They are not fast-acting, but in moments of stress to take one is to know, at least, that psychoactive reinforcements are on the way, and having swallowed ‘Tuesday’ he feels less frightened.

  Downstairs, Heather is waiting in the smoke-filled lounge, in the macabre sulk of the silence. Sitting in the kitchen, Paul seems to be doing nothing. In fact he is doing something – he is not going into the lounge; and this not going is so engrossing that he forgets his porridge until summoned to the odour of scorched milk. He is not hungry, and spoons it into the bin, wondering – dispassionately for the most part, with only occasional minor needles of pain – what the mechanics of the affair were, how they worked things. Then, stopping his imaginings when they wander too far – towards a vision of Martin, naked, pipe-cleaner limbs and mousy pubic hair – he washes out the saucepan in which he made his porridge, scouring the brown burn-mark with unexpected ferocity. Then he smokes a cigarette, and in a hurry now, pulls on his jacket in the hall. On his way out, as he passes the open door of the lounge – the fact that the TV is not on lends the house a miserable air of emergency – he says only four words to Heather. ‘Do the children know?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she says.

  He waits alone at the bus stop on Portland Road. The spring evening is mild; ink-blue with cold, wet depths. Only in the last week have vestiges of daylight still lingered in the sky as he makes his way to work. The road is quiet, the shops shut, the many takeaways seemingly untroubled by customers. A few preoccupied cars whizz past. He takes a pre-rolled cigarette from his pocket and lights it – and as soon as he has done so, he sees the lights of the bus as it crests the rise, and snags briefly on each of the two stops visible higher up the road. In the dry peace of the non-foods aisle it is easy to imagine that nothing has happened – that nothing is happening. There, even when it occurs to him – as it frequently does, unpacking dishcloths or spray-headed bottles of shower cleaner – that they might be together, he is strangely untroubled.

  A week later, things seem suspended in a sort of limbo – since they do not use the bed at the same time, it has not even been necessary for someone to move to the sofa; since they seldom see each other, the new situation has had little scope for showing up in the transactions of everyday life. It has started to seem as though things might go on as they are indefinitely.

  Then one morning Heather suddenly opens final settlement negotiations. She has the bruisy circles under her eyes, the queasy pallor, the long-haul look of someone who has been up all night with her troublesome thoughts. ‘The house,’ she says. It is ten a.m. – Paul is microwaving a curry for his supper. ‘What about it?’

  She sighs, slightly impatient. ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you planning to keep it?’ she says.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, nor am I. We’ve got to write
to Norris.’

  Norris Jones – the landlord. Paul nods. He wants to ask her where she is planning to live …

  ‘Where are you planning to live?’ she says.

  He just shrugs.

  ‘You must have thought about it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You haven’t?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  This is true.

  There is a sad pause. ‘Do you want me to write to him?’ Heather says. ‘Norris.’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘It’s not what I want …’

  ‘Yes, write to him. Where are you planning to live?’

  ‘I don’t know. Martin wants me to live with him.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ she says. And then, ‘I’ll write that letter.’

  Slumped in the blue flicker of the twenty-four-hour news, Paul wonders whether to write a letter of his own.

  When he woke up, he had not moved for a while, spat out by oblivious sleep, and unwilling to leave the limited warmth of the bed. (Which was very stale and human-smelling – discoloured, discomposed, with sulphur-grey shadows on the pillows.) It was only his need to urinate that eventually pulled him into a sitting position – stage one of his self-extraction from the sweaty sheets; the heating was turned up too high, and he had been sweating into his sleep all afternoon. He was on the verge of performing stage two – standing shakily – when he was suddenly aware of an engine ticking over in the street outside. The sound had been discreetly present for some minutes. Standing shakily, he twitched the drape and looked out. The yellow Saab was waiting in the road. As he watched, Heather walked into view – she had shut the front door so quietly that he had not heard it. He saw Martin’s head turn in the shadowy interior to follow her with his eyes. Then he leaned over and opened the door; she said something as she lowered herself into the seat. The door slammed. With a snarl the car surged forward, and was immediately out of sight.

  Silence.

  Silence except for the low muffled noise of the television from Oli’s room.

  Paul let the drape swing shut, wiping the street light from his face. He wondered why he was so painfully stunned. He had seen nothing surprising. It was, however, the first time that he had seen them together. He slipped into the bathroom. He has upped his dose of Felixstat, and taken the subsequent dopiness, the mothballing of most of his mind, without demur. Having swallowed the pills, he turned to the toilet, and making water stared at his face in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet. It was expressionless, yet somehow the despair – which did not seem too strong a word – was obvious; it seemed to seep out through the pores, through his dead, sad eyes. He flushed the toilet. On his way downstairs he knocked on Oliver’s door, and said, ‘Time for bed, Oli.’ The thought of being separated from the children hurts him surprisingly. Though he and Heather have not spoken of it, there seems no question of his seeing them in the future – why would he? – yet she implicitly expects him to babysit while she is out with Martin. Sometimes – on his own in the lounge while they sleep upstairs – this seems an emasculating imposition. More often, though, he finds himself holding onto the illusion of normality that it lends things. However, what he saw from the window, on top of Heather’s writing to Norris Jones, seems to have kyboshed that illusion, and in the blue flicker of the small hours he wonders whether to write anonymously to Watt; to set in front of him what Gerald said, and see what happens. While he is wondering what to write, he hears the Saab stop in the street outside. He waits, motionless, for several minutes until he hears one of its doors open and slam; it does not move on until Heather is inside, and the squeaky step squeaks under her weight.

  19

  IN HIS BLUE uniform, Paul is towing a pallet of products onto the shop floor. The pallet is wrapped in cling film, so thickly that the whole thing is shiny, white, opaque. It crashes and rattles as he pulls it over the uneven concrete of the warehouse – then is suddenly quiet, only whispering on the smooth shop floor. He shoves it into its aisle, and wanders unhurriedly back to the warehouse. Passing from the shop floor to the warehouse always feels to him like exiting a stage; it must be even more like this, he supposes, during the day when the shop is open and the customers, like an audience, are there.

  The warehouse is parky enough to turn olive oil opaque in its bottles. In the loading bay it is parkier still. The four-metre-high folding doors are open to the night sky, and outside a fine drizzle is falling through the orange light. The pallets, unloaded from the lorry, stand around and quickly Paul tries to estimate their weight. He does not want one full of pet foods, or detergent, or bleach. Heavy things. (The heaviest ones, of course – the wines and spirits, the mineral waters – cannot be moved without the hydraulic pallet truck, which makes them light work, like pulling an empty; but only Gerald is trained to use that.) Through a tear in its film wrapping, he sees that one of the pallets is loaded with packet soups and noodles – not too bad. His gloved hand grasps the side grille, and with a brief strong tug to start it moving, walking sideways with his pulling arm outstretched, he steers it noisily out of the warehouse. The shop floor seems warmly lit by comparison. Temperate, and almost plush. Posters over the aisle tops show pictures of tasty-looking food and happy-looking people. Everything here is presentation, and precisely fabricated effect.

  On Wednesday morning Watt is on duty. From seven o’clock, Paul spies him on the shop floor, wearing a grey suit – a suit the colour of a dark miserable dawn. Looking harassed and slightly irate, he prowls the aisles with one hand stuffed into his suit pocket. Watt never speaks to the night-shift staff himself; whatever he has to say he says to Graham, who passes it on in his squeaky voice. Paul is not in non-foods – he has been sent to help a novice in trouble with the pasta. And he is there, slinging penne onto the shelves, when Watt and Graham walk into the aisle, Graham’s leather jacket shining like wet tar. Watt whispers something to him, and Graham shouts, ‘Move it, move it.’ Looking up, Paul nods – and for a moment, his eyes meet Watt’s. Stuck in his irritable stare, Paul is suddenly unsure of himself. The letter is in his hip pocket – it was dawn when he finished it, and switched off the electric light, leaving the lounge ashen. Watt moves on. Of course he moves on. Why wouldn’t he move on? Nevertheless, the moment unsettles Paul. Watt does not seem the sort of man to take seriously improbable tip-offs; nor to suffer nonsense sympathetically. He seems an unimaginative institutional type to his sturdy bones. Most probably, he would pass the letter straight to Macfarlane, and suggest a thorough investigation to unmask the sender.

  Mounting the linoleum stairs on eight o’clock, Paul is more or less persuaded of the wisdom of taking it home and disposing of it. Then he notices who he is following. Ten steps further up, he sees the square heavy-seated form, one hand still stuck in his suit pocket. Quietly, Paul follows him along the windowless corridor – past the locker room, where he had been headed. Past the notice-boards. Past two girls, teenagers, laughing in their blue uniforms, smelling of cigarette smoke. Watt mutters good morning to them. Then he pushes through the swing door into the staff canteen. Paul stops. Through the pane of strengthened glass in the door, he can see that the canteen is quite full. Watt goes over to the managers’ table – it is exactly the same as all the other tables, and its status is entirely unofficial, but no one except managers ever sits there. And managers never sit anywhere else. Taking off his suit jacket, Watt places it over the back of one of the moulded plastic chairs. Then he moves to the food servery, takes a brown tray, and in an egalitarian spirit joins the line of staff queuing for breakfast. There is no one else sitting at the managers’ table, which is in the sun, near the windows.

  Paul waits outside in the corridor. He does not know what to do. (In the queue, Watt is laughing with some hair-netted girls from the bakery.) The jacket is there – he simply has to stuff the letter into one of its pockets. There will never be a more propitious opportunity. (Now Watt is talking to the
serving woman, telling her not to give him too much scrambled egg.) Paul seems unable to move. Some people – men from the meat counter with brown bloodstains on their aprons – stand up from a table, tucking their tabloids under their arms, and walk towards him. He will have to move, one way or the other … The door swings open. The men are pushing past him, and at the same time, without thinking what he is doing, he is pushing past them, into the canteen. It is the first time that he has been in there in the morning and it feels foreign to him, the levels of light and noise much higher than he is used to. Taking the letter from his pocket, he forces himself towards the managers’ table. The thing is not to try and be too subtle about it – is just to do it quickly. Quickly, and then walk – at an ordinary pace – straight to the smoking room. No one will notice if he does it like that. He is already there. He feels very prominent in the white sunlight. And already he is fucking it up. He has stopped. He is standing next to the jacket, looking out of the window. Why? No one ever looks out of the canteen window; there is nothing to see except car park and sky. And then into the car park slides the yellow Saab.

  With quickening urgency, Paul turns, and sweating freely starts to fumble with the jacket. He cannot find the pockets … He cannot find the pockets! How is that possible? How is it …

  He finds one – it is heavy with objects – and shoves the damp letter in.

  Then he sees Watt. Preceded by his tray, he is only a few metres off, his face fixed in an expression of incredulity. No longer smiling, standing stock still in the warm sunlight, Paul is mute. ‘What are you doing?’ Watt says. ‘What have you taken?’

  Paul shakes his head.

  There is a strange quiet in the canteen.

  Watt puts his tray down on the table, and with his eyes still on Paul stoops slightly and pulls his jacket from the back of the chair. Still staring at Paul he searches slowly through the pockets. ‘What did you take?’ he says again.