London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  ‘All right, mate …’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, phoning us up here.’ It is said with a sort of smile – even so, it is not very friendly. They are still exchanging these pleasantries when Neil suddenly says, ‘Look, Lawrence is about. Can I call you back later?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll call you back later.’

  When, the next morning, Neil has still not done so, Paul tries him again.

  This time he seems to be in the smoking room, and Paul gets as far as saying that he has an ‘offer’ for him. Neil evidently assumes that this ‘offer’ will involve joining Paul at whichever outfit he is now working for, and is nonplussed when Paul starts saying that he needs someone to pretend to be a fruit wholesaler. ‘Sorry?’ he says, as though he must have misheard.

  ‘I said, I need someone to come down to Brighton for a day or two –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I got that. And do what?’

  ‘And … Well, you’d have to meet this bloke and pretend you were a sort of fruit wholesaler …’

  Neil laughs. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the job.’

  ‘What is? I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’d have to meet this bloke, right, and pose as a fruit wholesaler.’ More laughter. Paul laughs slightly himself. ‘What? That’s all. It’s simple.’

  ‘I’d have to sell him some fruit?’

  ‘No … Well, not exactly. You’d have to pretend … I mean – are you interested at all?’

  ‘I don’t think so, mate. What is it? Some kind of scam?’

  ‘No, no, nothing like that. It’s two hundred quid for doing not much –’

  ‘Two hundred quid isn’t much. And anyway, I’ve got a job to do as it is –’

  ‘We could do it at the weekend. Or you could take a day off –’

  ‘Thanks for thinking of me, mate, but I’m not interested.’

  ‘It’ll probably be a laugh.’

  ‘I’m sure it will …’

  ‘A day out by the sea …’

  ‘No, mate. Seriously. I’ve got other priorities at the moment.’

  Neil, it turns out, is now Lawrence’s number two, and the myriad problems of Park Lane Publications press down heavily on his shoulders. (Since his nervous breakdown, Lawrence himself has been little more than a figurehead.)

  ‘What you up to anyway?’ Neil says.

  ‘Oh … Working.’

  ‘What – with Murray and the Pig and that lot?’

  ‘No.’

  There is a pause. Then Neil says, ‘Well. Hope you find someone, mate …’

  ‘You’re sure you’re not interested?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure. Cheers. Take it easy, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. You too, mate.’

  Slightly disconsolate, still in his blue nightshift uniform, Paul switches off his phone and pads through to the kitchen. Fuck it, he thinks. Fuck Watt and the whole fucking thing.

  Exactly twenty-four hours later, however, he is speaking to Watt in person. ‘Hello? Is that Paul Rainey?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  ‘Ah. Morning. How are you?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  There is a short silence.

  ‘Yes, I’m okay,’ Watt says. ‘Oh, by the way, did Hazel see you the other night?’

  ‘Hazel?’

  ‘That young woman … That member of staff we saw in the pub.’

  ‘Oh.’ Paul hesitates. ‘No.’ This is not true. When he stood up to leave, two minutes after Watt himself had left, Paul’s eyes had for a moment met Hazel’s. She looked slightly puzzled – as if she was unable to place him …

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well …’ Watt laughs nervously. ‘How do you know? How do you know she didn’t see you?’ When Paul says nothing, Watt makes a dissatisfied, sceptical noise. He has found himself the subject of some very strange looks since the weekend; some very significant smirks in the supermarket. ‘So,’ he says, ‘any news?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  There is a long pause. ‘You mean you’ve not found anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just haven’t been able to.’

  ‘Have you tried?’

  ‘Of course I’ve tried.’ Somehow, Paul is aware of Heather listening to what he is saying – perhaps it is the sheer intensity of the silence – and he lowers his voice. ‘I’ve tried a few people,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do –’

  ‘Look, Rainey –’ Watt’s tone is that of someone finally taking a firm line with a plumber who has been messing him around for months – ‘You’re going to have to do better than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you want me to get Jock involved?’

  ‘No, I don’t want you to get Jock involved. But what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Find someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anyone. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I’m telling you, it’s not that easy –’

  ‘You’ve got until Friday,’ Watt says. ‘You’ve got until Friday, all right? If you’ve not found someone to do this by then, I’m going to Jock. I’m sorry. It’s what I should have done in the first place. Do you understand?’

  ‘Do I understand what?’

  ‘That you have until Friday, or I’m going to Jock?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paul says, eventually, ‘I understand.’

  When Heather enters the kitchen, he is staring stonily at his phone. It is one of the unusual, uneasy weekday mornings when she is not at work. ‘You all right, Paul?’ she says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who was that?’ She puts the question very indifferently, with her head in the fridge, and when Paul murmurs, ‘No one,’ she does not press him further.

  20

  AND HE HAS other worries. His Friday-night date, for instance. A schoolteacher, someone Ned knows. Within minutes of Paul telling him that he and Heather were packing it in, Ned was pressing him to phone Jane. He was insistent, pestering. A balloon-bellied Pandarus wiping foam from his mouth. ‘Call her,’ he said, sliding the scrap of paper on which he had written her number across the bar. ‘Call her. I’ve told her you’re going to call.’ And then, a week later, ‘Have you called her yet? No? She’s expecting you to call. She wants you to. She’s waiting. If you don’t call she’ll be disappointed.’ On the phone, she sounded jolly. She was surprisingly well spoken, for a friend of Ned’s. Sweating, out in the garden, Paul said, ‘So … Should we have a drink or something?’

  And now he is in the Ancient Mariner, a newish pub on Coleridge Street. He was here with Heather once; their local, the Kendal Arms – a corner building of peeling green paint with several knackered pool tables on the dusty old carpet, a dartboard and live sport on TV – she refuses to go into. The Ancient Mariner, however, has leather sofas. Despite these sofas, it had been a depressing evening. Entering the loud, smoky interior of the pub more or less straight from his porridge, Paul was still half asleep, and did not feel – really did not feel – like drinking beer and chain-smoking cigarettes. Shy and intimidated in the fashionable milieu, Heather had struggled with his obvious malaise. On the table in front of him was a lurid vodka Red Bull, which hurt his teeth every time he tentatively sipped it. She had a vase of white wine. There was also a saucer of olives. Whenever she spoke, his lips formed themselves, for a moment, into a tight little smile. ‘That’s a nice picture,’ she said. They had been sitting in silence for several minutes. He half turned to inspect it. ‘Yeah,’ he said, without seeing it. He was having trouble getting through his vodka Red Bull, and would not want another cigarette for a while. He lit one anyway.

  No, it had not been an enjoyable evening. Nevertheless, when he needed somewhere to meet Jane, the Ancient Mariner seemed the place. And now he waits for her there, waits with his pint of white beer, his knees jiggling and his eyes on the door. Though it is many year
s since he has found himself in this situation, in his youth Paul was something of a ladies’ man. A fluent talker with a winning smile; with a finely transparent line in faux knavery. Nor was he overweight then. His self-esteem, in those early salesman years, was spry, was whippet-like. On the sales floor he was one of the top men, which thrilled him for a while. The money itself – and for a year or two there was lots of it – had made him feel strong. It had made him feel self-important. He took taxis everywhere; when he left work, he would wave down a black cab and stroll unhurriedly to where it waited. Such things were tonic to his self-esteem, and he made a name for himself as a minor ladies’ man. Murray was envious, for one.

  Young women who joined the sales force at Burdon Macauliffe tended – if they were single, which they usually weren’t; and if they mixed with the other salespeople, which they usually didn’t – to fall into the hands of shambling, handsome Pax Murdoch, or of Paddy, a lean Irishman with eloquent sky-blue eyes. Paul was a sort of junior partner to these two, and enjoyed what was left over. Lucie, for instance, vivacious and pudding-faced with straw curls. With a boxer’s nose. Or Valentina, sickly-looking and unable to speak in a voice louder than a mumbled whisper – she was hopeless at selling and quickly left; she and Paul went out for more than a year. Somewhat unusual was Lorna. Raven-haired Lorna was pretty – pretty enough to make Paul wonder what she was doing with him. In her, his self-esteem found its limits, and he wondered why he merited such a woman; wondered whether she was perhaps unstable, nuts, a nymphomaniac. If he had had more money he might have understood. She was the one to initiate their short affair, practically pulling him into a taxi outside the Café de Paris, where the Burdon Macauliffe Christmas party had taken place. He presumed that he had his standing as a minor ladies’ man to thank for this. From the start, though, he had been ill at ease. He was troubled by things that had not troubled him in the past. Aspects of his physique and wardrobe, for instance. In public, he felt threatened by other men. In private, he worried inordinately about his performance. When it ended, it was like a liberation. She immediately took up with Paddy. Paul did not mind – he was flattered, in fact; felt a new parity with the pale-eyed Irishman, whose friendliness towards him increased markedly from then on. And he felt too that he had had a sort of escape; that head-turning Lorna might have led him into a total failure of self-esteem – the way that being married to Brit Ekland turned poor Peter Sellers into a paranoid schizophrenic.

  His standing as a ladies’ man did not suffer. Nor did it suffer the following summer, when word spread through the sales force that he was seeing two ladies simultaneously. The only person who did not know seemed to be one of the ladies in question – Lisa O’Rourke, known privately to Paul as ‘Weathered Statue’. Her head had a uniquely smooth, worn look. Her nose a mere nub, her lips practically not there. She had poor posture, and long thin undulating mashed-swede hair. Lashless blue eyes under low, weathered brows. She was on Murray’s team – an earnest, persistent pitcher – and it was she who gave Paul the nail-biting blow job in the smoking room one evening when they stayed late to call California. Murray was still there and might have walked in on them – until the very last moments, Paul’s eyes were intent on the blond wood of the institutional door. Lisa did not know, however, that he was also seeing Sharon. ‘Beaky’ was his secret name for Sharon – she was half-Lebanese and had a nose like a toucan. (Between the two of them, he often thought – averaged out, as it were – they would have had a normalish profile.) He and Lisa had had no more than a fling when she went to Ireland for a funeral. In the end, she was away for two weeks, and Paul presumed that that was that. Murray’s birthday fell in this fortnight, and the festivities ended in a dark, airless nightspot in King’s Cross. Murray hit on Sharon there; she went home with Paul. She was a secretary in the London branch of an immense Japanese bank – these were the days when the park of the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo was worth more, it was said, than the whole of California – and she took Paul to the Japanese restaurants where she went with Mr Kojima, for whom she worked.

  Paul suspects that it was Murray – for whom he worked – who told Lisa what was happening; that when she did not pick up on the tittle-tattle he was so assiduously spreading, he just sat her down in the smoking room one morning and told her. So ‘Weathered Statue’ wiped her oddly lifeless blue eyes and left the sales force. (Murray tried to meet her for a drink the following week – she said yes, then stood him up.) And in September, more or less on a whim, Paul told Sharon that he did not want to see her any more.

  In later years, when there was a lesser profusion of sex and money, he would wonder why he had been so nonchalant in leaving her.

  He remembers how Eddy, when he heard how long it had been, marched him to the nearest phone box and told him to take his pick of the tom cards. The phone box was on Fleet Street, and standing in its packed sour odour, Paul had surveyed the festooned cards. Then, stepping out of the stuffiness, he had said, ‘No, mate …’

  ‘Why not?’ Eddy shouted on the pavement.

  ‘I just … I don’t know. I don’t want to. Do you?’

  ‘Me? I’m a married man. But no it’s true,’ Eddy had said, as they walked to the Chesh, ‘you want to know what you’re getting into. Here.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘Take this number. She’s in Bayswater. She’s good. Really sweet …’

  ‘No –’

  ‘Just take it! You don’t have to call her.’

  So Paul took it.

  ‘Her name’s Annette,’ Eddy said.

  ‘Annette’ worked out of a basement in a street of one-star hotels and youth hostels. The street was strange-looking because it was originally a mews of plain, pipe-disfigured house-backs which had been transformed into house-fronts with no more than the addition of narrow doors and a few half-hearted pilasters. The number in question seemed to be some sort of hostel, with a pine-panelled foyer where Paul made his way past a fridge and some CCTV monitors towards the stairs.

  When she opened the door, he was surprised to see her wide, flat breasts. She was wearing forest-green knickers. ‘Annette?’ She nodded, and stood aside to let him in. She was short, solid, blondish, smiling. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said, stepping worriedly into the room. When she asked his name, she did not seem to be French, as ‘Annette’ was obviously intended to suggest; nor was she English. The room was quite large and smelt of cigarette smoke and air-freshener. It had a white, empty feel. He noticed a single plug-in electric hob, a sink, some bottles of household cleaning products. A small powder-pink stereo. The curtains were open and so was the window – it was summer – and passing footsteps were easily audible from the street overhead. She wanted a hundred pounds. He took out his wallet, and the five twenties that he had withdrawn on the way, and she put the money in a drawer. Then she pulled the thin curtains, stepped out of her knickers and asked him what he wanted. He just shrugged. Her doughy breasts swung forward slightly as she stooped to put her hand on his quiescent trouser front. Then, starting to unbutton the jeans, she licked her palm and went to work. Despite this slow start, once she had him out of half of his clothes, and onto the bed – and had fitted him with a condom, and lubricated herself – he finished very fast, within twenty seconds. She wiggled and slid off him, and for a few more seconds they lay there under a light sweat. Then she said, ‘Do you want to go again?’

  He was staring at the orange pine of the bedstead, the grey wall. ‘No. Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t mean more money.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  He sat up. Once more, he was aware of footsteps and voices from the street outside. ‘Do you want to clean yourself?’ she said. Her eyes flicked to the little sink with its collection of plastic bottles. He stood up, naked from the waist down, and went to the sink. There he peeled off the condom and dropped it into a waste-paper basket, then tore off a square of paper towel and quickly wiped himself. He turned to look for his trousers. They were in a heap on t
he floor with his shorts and socks and shoes. He untangled them. Sitting on the wide bed, a sheet pulled up to her sallow face, ‘Annette’ smoked. ‘Right,’ he said, when he had his clothes on. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘M-hm.’

  Walking to the tube station he felt fine. More than fine. The evening, the London streets, seemed vibrantly alive. There had – he thought – been something so kindly, so solicitous in the way she had offered to do it with him a second time for free; something so unlike the indifference of the city in which they lived, and which the thousand strangers of the mauve evening seemed to express.

  Often – on tube-station escalators, for instance – he would think of her. And when, some time later, he saw Heather in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, and then that Friday in the Finnegans Wake, he did not fail to notice similarities of blondish solidity, of thickset shortness. The similarities were more in the figure than the face, and struck him most the first time that he saw Heather naked. His memories of ‘Annette’, however, were shadowy, and the physical facts of Heather soon obliterated what was left of them, so that when he thought of her from then on it was simply Heather that he saw – though Heather herself had seemed a sort of shadow of ‘Annette’ when he had first seen her in the secretaries’ pool.

  Jane is late.

  Paul is staring at the roundel of lemon in his cloudy pint – wondering whether she has stood him up – when he lifts his head and sees a woman looking lost. Ned had said that Jane was ‘fortyish’; the woman in the Friday throng seems somewhat older. She is wearing an oriental padded jacket, pink on black, and her hair is tied tightly into greyish pigtails. Her face, though it shows signs of old-womanishness, a sag on the jawline and under the eyes, is somehow youthful – soft and small-toothed. She is wide-hipped, bosomless, with narrow full lips painted pink. Seeing her, Paul experences only disappointment. What had he expected though? His expectations were silly – he sees that. The facts of life never had a fair shot. And in fact she is not so bad. He stands – she is peering worriedly into the mass of people – and tentatively holds up his hand. When she sees him she hesitates, perhaps experiencing her own moment of melancholy disappointment; then she smiles nervously.