by David Szalay
‘Had a heart attack.’
‘Shit …’
‘He’s still alive. Just can’t work.’
‘Oh. Is he …? What’s he going to do?’
‘Don’t know. This is quite funny actually,’ Neil says, ‘because you know what he was going to be working on?’
‘No.’
‘European fucking Procurement Management.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your mate fucked it up, didn’t he. I heard about that. Delmar Morgan fucked it.’ The name draws from Paul a delicate qualm of depression. ‘They totally fucked it,’ Neil is saying, ‘and the federation sent it straight back to us. We started on the January edition last week.’
‘I thought Simon did the in-flight magazines,’ Paul says.
‘He did. Till the fuckers took them away from us. World Alliance.’
‘They took them away?’
‘They did. So … Up for it? European Procurement Management? Only because I’m desperate, you understand.’
‘Well. Yeah. I need something.’
Neil sighs. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll have to talk to Yvonne about it. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Yvonne?’
‘Yvonne Jenkin. The MD …’
‘Yeah, I know who she is. Why do you have to talk to her?’
‘You’re quite controversial, mate. She might not appreciate you being rehired.’
‘All right. Well …’
‘I’ll get back to you, yeah.’
‘Thanks, mate.’
Neil does not get back to him that day, or the next, and Paul starts to suspect that Yvonne has vetoed his appointment, and to wish – in view of this – that he had not phoned Neil at all. He went to PLP first, despite what had happened, for the simple reason that it seemed easier to be somewhere he knew, with people he knew, than to start again at an unknown place with strangers. There was, of course, something humiliating about it. It was the idle, the fearful, the easy option, and he almost hopes that it will not work out.
It does work out, though. He phones Neil two days later and is told that he has spoken to Yvonne and that there is a job for him there if he wants it, starting on Monday. ‘Oh, and another thing,’ Neil says, pleased with himself. ‘You can have young Andy back on your team.’
‘Andy?’
‘Yeah. Andy. I hear he’s been doing some freelance stuff for you anyway.’ Neil laughs. ‘See you on Monday, Rainey.’
It is a strange, quiet, somehow melancholy weekend. They spend most of Saturday in the presence of predictably smarmy estate agents. The houses they see are all more or less the same, Hove being a town of a thousand two-storey Victorian terraces. Though Norris Jones has not found new tenants and would have let them stay, they have decided to move – to escape from Martin, who has not taken things very well, and to make a new start themselves.
Emerging, with a dozen others, from the evening suntrap of Portslade station – two open platforms on a line running due west – Paul steps out into Portland Road. Waiting on the traffic island, he wonders whether to pop into the Whistlestop for a quick one. The pub sits at the junction of Portland and Boundary roads, where the former ends, outstaring its wide, low-lying, desolate length – desolate under November rain, of course, but also under the heavy stare of this July sun. At this time of day there is no shade on Portland Road. He decides against the pint. He had a few in the Penderel’s Oak with the others after work, and now, seventy minutes of rammed train later, he has a lurking, indefinite headache; it is hardly perceptible, merely a shimmer of pain as he turns his head to look for further traffic, and seeing none, steps onto the tarmac. His new shoes – bright black Churches – pinch his hot feet, and as he walks he looks forward to easing them off, to peeling off his black undertaker’s socks, and waggling his blind toes in the warm shade of the garden. Summer evenings, the sun is shut out of the garden, the new sun umbrella – cream canvas and solid wood – unnecessary. He knows that Heather drinks coffee under it in the morning, and on Sunday mornings when the weather is fine he reads the papers there. Occasionally he looks up from the acres of text and surveys his square of lawn – pleasingly wider than the narrow space of the Lennox Road house – with its flagstones set into the turf to form a serpentine path (true, only two stubby turns) and a displeased-looking, spiky palm at the end – the sort of palm you see outside hotels and in front gardens all over Hove. The house has a proper front garden, with some tall beige feather-dusters of grasses. The neighbours in the other half of the semi have rose bushes in theirs. The next house along has a monkey-puzzle tree.
He passes the the pink-brick cube of Martello House (‘HM Customs & Excise, VAT Office’) – with few windows, it looks like some sort of prison – and turns into the wide street that is Portland Villas. He wishes it were shadier – that is his only problem with the street on which he now lives. The sun glares off the expanse of tarmac, off the exposed pavements, blindingly off the parked cars. Now, even on the west side of the street there is almost no shade, what little there is falling into the gardens in front of the houses, which are mostly semi-detached, and grouped in stretches of eight or ten to the same pattern.
As he approaches his house, already feeling the jacket on his arm for his keys, he squints warily at the parked cars. After what happened in June, there is, of course, no yellow Saab; he knows, however, that Martin has been around since then – once he saw him (he is pretty sure) in a nondescript grey Ford. He stared at the car for several minutes, until its occupant started the engine and moved off. Even that was a month ago now. The phone calls, the text messages, the emails, the letters (some put through the door in the dead of night) have petered out. Yes, since the police had a word with him – it was traumatic to involve them – things have quietened down. Seeing no sign that the house is under surveillance, Paul opens the freshly painted gate and pulls the keys from the pocket of his tangled jacket. Since then, there have been only two messages. The first, an email full of foul-mouthed abuse, was followed, only a few days later, by an invitation to a barbecue – a photocopied invitation with Hope you can make it! added in a flourish of blue biro. Under the circumstances, this invitation was far more disturbing, seemed far more insane, than the abusive email that immediately preceded it. Yes, there had been something terrifying about that barbecue invite. On meat-red paper, there was a cartoon – so crudely drawn it seemed to have been done with a marker pen – of some meat sizzling over coals, and a knife and a long barbecue fork … Portland Villas throbs with the dusky peace of wood pigeons. The moon floats up pale and ethereal in the sky. Tired, Paul half turns for a last sweep of the quiet street, then unlocks the door – it has panes of glass frosted to look like silk – and enters his house.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people, for all their efforts, and for their enthusiasm most of all: Alex Bowler, Sam Edenborough, Will Francis, Dan Franklin, Jago Irwin and, last but not least, Anna Webber.
Of course many other people have also had a hand in this book, in many different ways. I want to thank them too.
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Copyright © David Szalay 2008
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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Jonathan Cape
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