by David Szalay
By this time, it is almost twelve. ‘Coming to the Penderel’s?’ Paul says to Murray, standing and pulling on his jacket. Surprisingly, Murray responds as if this suggestion were something unexpected. After a moment of strange puzzlement, he says, ‘Aye.’ But with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
The pub is deserted when they arrive. Paul’s phone had started to ring as he was leaving the sales floor, and though he had hesitated, and half turned, he had not answered it. He is still wondering who it might have been. He wonders if it might have been Mr Bannerjee, whose long, supercharged spiel has left him exhausted and muddled, and oddly inspired. He is even starting to wonder whether perhaps he should have agreed to meet him at the Hotel Henry VIII, whether perhaps something might have come of such a meeting. ‘Like what?’ he asks himself, derisively, as he stands at the bar. And in answer summons the examples of Angus MacMilne, who so impressed one of his prospects that they offered him a job in the City, and of Pax ‘the Fax’ Murdoch, another former fellow salesman, who went out to Bangkok to set up a telesales business there – which turned out, extraordinarily, to be an international scam run by the North Korean intelligence service, though Pax did not realise who he was working for, or why, until it was too late.
‘Morning, Paul,’ Michaela says.
‘Morning? I think you mean afternoon. Never in the morning, Michaela.’ It is two past twelve. She laughs, and without waiting, starts to pour three pints. She likes Paul. He is ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ in a way that Murray – who makes her uneasy – is not. Setting his cigarette in the glass ashtray on the bar, Paul reaches into his pocket and fishes out the exact amount of money for the pints – he knows it well. He finds he is irritatingly shy with Michaela today, after what happened on Friday – the more so when, standing there, he suddenly remembers telling her that he and Heather were on the point of separation, which just isn’t true. ‘Good weekend?’ he says, smiling softly. Michaela shrugs her small shoulders. Andy is at the fruit machine, and they hear the metal of his winnings yocker into the trough. Scooping out the coins, he looks at Michaela, a cigarette stuck sexily – so he thinks – to his lower lip. And from the table, Murray stares, his face set in a virile scowl that he hopes she will see. All three of them find the unspoken hopes of the other two – of which they are all more aware than any of them think – contemptibly ridiculous, evidence of a comical degree of self-delusion. Paul puts the pints on the table, and he and Murray watch suspiciously as Andy wanders to the bar and says something to Michaela which makes her laugh. Murray mutters a few poisonous-sounding words, and Paul wonders if his unusually taciturn and preoccupied mood has something to do with his car, his Mercedes S-Class. It seems impossible that it will not be repossessed at some point this winter. The next payment, Paul knows, is due on Wednesday, and for the second consecutive month Murray will be unable to meet it.
Murray has always thought of himself as a Mercedes driver, the S-Class in particular – a serious, manly car for serious, manly men. (Sir Alex Ferguson, for example, drives such a car, and Murray sees many similarities between himself and Sir Alex – both working-class Glaswegians who have made their way in the world; both hard men, generous and just, with a gritty inborn nobility.) But as fifty approached and he was still driving the second-hand Sierra, Murray had started to worry. He had started to lose sleep over the thought that he might never drive an S-Class – might never be an S-Class driver. Why it happened exactly when it did, he is not sure, but one ordinary day in July, on his way home, he stopped at Tony Purslow Ltd, the Mercedes-Benz dealer in Epsom. He was determined not to think about what he was doing – not until it was done – and everything was therefore slightly dreamlike. The salesman’s smart suit and friendly, serious welcome. The shiny Mercs. The heated seats and leather-covered steering wheels and illuminated vanity mirrors. Forms were filled out, credit checks run, hands shaken. If the salesman was surprised at the impatient urgency of his client, he was too experienced a professional to let it show. And less than an hour after entering the showroom, Murray was motoring home in a long, wide S-Class – smiling down the A24 towards Leatherhead in its fragrant, insulated hush. The following week was one of the happiest of his life. At work, he was dreamy and absent-minded. He spent a lot of time staring out the window, or sitting on his own in the smoking room. At night, unable to sleep, he would get out of bed, and twitch the drapes, and look down at the car’s silver bodywork in the steady greenish illumination of the street light. He would spend evenings sitting alone in the stationary car, occasionally going for a short drive. One night, he slept in the car, waking on the anthracite leather in the bright silence of the very early morning, surprisingly cold, a terrible pain in his immobilised neck, the windows frosted with condensation. He opened the heavy door – startling some crows who were strutting on the tarmac – and stiffly swung his legs out. The steering wheel seemed to have bruised his knees during the night …
‘You all right, Murray?’ Paul says. Murray nods. Paul starts to tell him about Mr Bannerjee. He does not seem interested – though he murmurs occasionally, he obviously isn’t listening.
Leaving the pub at ten past two, they make their way back through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its massive trees, and the noise of Kingsway. The afternoon passes slowly (though less slowly than it would were he sober) until, when it is starting to get dark outside, just when he is standing up to go to the smoking room, feeling in his jacket pocket for fags and lighter, his phone rings.
It is Eddy Jaw.
‘Hello – Rainey?’ his blunt voice says.
‘Yeah.’
‘Where the fuck were you?’
The Old Cheshire Cheese is on Fleet Street, halfway from the High Court to Ludgate Hill. It is possible that Shakespeare frequented the old pub (it was rebuilt in 1667, following the setback of the previous year), a possibility somewhat oversold on the sign outside. It was, however, Dr Johnson’s local, and Dickens knew its dark, creaking, wooden interior and cramped stairs. More recently, from the end of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth – until they decamped to less dear offices where the docks used to be – it was usually full of journalists. Now the only newsmen are from Reuters, over the road; the others have been replaced by investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, and lawyers from the Middle Temple, and tourists – lots of tourists – and salesmen.
Entering the narrow brick passageway where the pub’s entrance is – under a huge old lantern with ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Gothic letters on its milky glass – Paul remembers, with some nostalgia, how he and Eddy Jaw used to work together in offices nearby, the offices of Northwood Publishing, and themselves spend long afternoons in the Chesh. That was some years ago, and it came to a sudden end when the contract they were working on was withdrawn. Which was a shame, because things had been very prosperous – ‘fucking dial-a-deal’ in the argot of the salesmen – and pushing open the pub’s broad door, Paul smells again, in the distinctive woody scent of the interior – similar to that of a Wren church – the spectacular success that the withdrawal of the contract had interrupted.
He remembers where they used to sit, in the square, skylit room – himself, Eddy, the Pig, Murray and the others. This part of the pub, he is disappointed to see, has been divided into smaller spaces, now full of people, so he makes his way to where the wooden stairs go down, and steadying himself with a hand on the low ceiling, descends to the vaulted rooms below – the former cellars – and down yet more stairs, stone this time, into the loud, high-ceilinged basement bar. It is half past five and every part of the pub is packed. Eddy is not there, so Paul goes back upstairs to his favourite place, the snug on the other side of the panelled entrance hall from the Chop Room restaurant (which does not seem to have changed much since the late eighteenth century, except that the waiting staff are now mostly Antipodean), where there is a fireplace with orange coals in a black grate, and a muddy painting of a man wearing a wig, and a window of thick, imperfect glass – he used to while away whole
afternoons under that window – and wealthy American bankers talking shop. He decides that he should settle somewhere, or he and Eddy will spend the whole evening wandering through the pub, saying ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’, without ever seeing each other, so he goes back downstairs to a sort of mezzanine between the two subterranean levels, where a few small tables are squeezed into the painted brick alcoves formed by the ceiling vaults. One of these tables is vacant, and there he sips his pint of Ayingerbrau, lights a cigarette, and looks over the laminated menu, as if it were something utterly mysterious.
‘You’re not going to eat, are you, Rainey? That would really fucking throw me.’
Eddy Jaw has not changed. Stooping more than necessary under the low vault, he is wearing, as he always used to, a three-piece Hugo Boss suit with very short, stubby lapels – he looks buttoned-up, encased in olive cloth. His big face is perhaps fleshier than it used to be, but it was always fleshy. His hair is blond and cropped. ‘All right, Eddy,’ Paul says.
‘How the fuck are you, Paul?’
‘I’m all right. How are you, Eddy?’
‘I’m fucking brilliant. Do you want anything from the bar, another one?’ Paul glances at his three-quarters-full pint glass. ‘Course you do. What are you drinking?’ Eddy smiles significantly. ‘Prinz, is it?’
‘No, it’s Ayingerbrau.’
‘For fuck’s sake! What’s the matter with you?’
‘I’ll have the same again.’
‘No you won’t. You’ll have a fucking Prinz.’
Paul smiles, for a moment sincerely happy. ‘All right then.’ And Eddy’s broad back disappears down the stairs into the clamour of the bar. It is strange to see him again. He looks full of himself, thriving – very different from how he looked when Paul saw him last. Excluding Friday, that is. It was a few months after Northwood had lost the contract with International Money Publications in the summer of ninety-seven – they had all scattered, at the height of that summer, and gone their separate ways. Eddy had come to Murray’s barbecue, but after that he had disappeared, and none of them knew what had happened to him. Then, one wet November morning, Paul had seen him in Tottenham Court Road tube station. On his way to work at Archway Publications, Paul had been on the up escalator, and Eddy, a desolate face in the crowd, on the down, so it had been impossible to speak to him, and he had not noticed Paul. Paul has always remembered that sudden apparition of Eddy’s face in the crowd, the undisguised wretchedness of its expression, as the escalators shunted them past each other. It had been a low point in Paul’s own life – perhaps the lowest – and on the basis of nothing more than that glimpse, he has always assumed that for Eddy too that dank winter had been some sort of nadir. Perhaps it had not, but for Paul there is nevertheless a sense of shared experience – a sense sharpened to poignancy by their presence here in the Chesh; ensconced underground, unaware of the dark November evening above and able instead to imagine Fleet Street on a fierce July day. The taste of Prinz super-strength lager – unpleasantly spirituous and metallic – intensifies this effect. It was what they always drank then – except Eddy, of course. A Bacardi Breezer in his big fist he sits down opposite Paul, and clinks the neck of the bottle peremptorily on his pint glass. ‘Good to see you, Paul,’ he says.
‘Yeah, good to see you, Eddy.’
From his long-cheeked face, Eddy’s small eyes peer out, pale blue and smiling warily. Eddy is bluff and coarse, even brutal, but there is something else in his eyes – a slyness, for sure. Even an unexpected intelligence. He sits hunched forward, surrounding the Bacardi Breezer with his hands. ‘Sorry about lunchtime, by the way,’ Paul says. ‘I completely forgot about that.’ Eddy smiles. ‘I thought you might, state you were in Friday.’
‘Yeah, fucking hell …’ Embarrassed, Paul sips Prinz. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here since we left Northwood,’ he says.
‘No, me neither.’ Eddy looks around. ‘Those were the days, eh?’
‘They were.’
His smile widening, Eddy says, ‘Fucking dial-a-deal.’
‘Yeah, right.’ And for a few minutes they unshutter a friendship with familiar stories about people they both know – Murray, Simon, who was their boss, the Pig – and about Northwood, the small company where they worked for a few summer months, and where everything seemed easy and exhilarating. Paul finds it strange that they worked there for only a few months. It seems like longer.
‘You know why Simon lost the IM contract?’ Eddy says.
Paul shakes his head. ‘No.’
‘He was trying to launch his own yearbooks. In competition with IM.’
‘Was he?’
‘Yeah. Trying to set up his own titles. They found out, and he lost the contract.’ Simon. His empurpled face and loudly pinstriped bulk whelm into Paul’s mind. His wavy white-and-grey hair, port-and-stilton accent, and habit of tapping the desk with his signet ring when under stress. It was all affectation, apparently. He was from the East End, though in the Northwood days he lived in Surrey. Or said he did. ‘And what happened to him?’
‘Topped himself,’ Eddy says.
‘He killed himself?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘Why? When?’
Eddy shrugs. ‘When he lost the contract, I suppose. He had kids in private schools,’ he says, as though it explained everything. ‘I heard he got really tanked up and drove the Jag over a quarry. Kaboom.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Paul says thoughtfully. They observe a moment’s silence, then Eddy says, ‘Saw Glengarry Glen Ross last night.’ He says it with a strange, shy half-smile.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘It was on telly.’
‘Was it?’ Paul lights a cigarette. ‘Haven’t you got it on video or something?’
‘On DVD. I always watch it when it’s on telly though.’
‘Fair enough.’ Paul has never understood why some of the others, and Eddy especially, are so obsessed with that film. He remembers the first time that he saw it; not the film (he has seen it since) so much as the occasion – the end of a long night, one of those nights that has particularly stuck in his mind, though nights like it were normal in the Northwood days. The stalwarts were Eddy, Murray and the Pig, and with them there was always, in the end, a gravitational pull to the east – the Pig lived near Brick Lane, and Eddy in Islington – and at about one o’clock, having stomped around Soho for a while looking for somewhere else to go, they shouted down a cab on the Charing Cross Road and piled in, telling the faceless driver to take them to Shoreditch High Street, where there was a lap-dancing place which Eddy and the others liked to go to. The cab rattled through the hot night. On the door, the bouncers had Eastern European accents. Inside, the young – and not so young – women performed on their little stages with the swift, precise movements of product demonstrators on the shopping channel. After each act someone went through the crowd of standing men with a pint glass, collecting pound coins. Later, Eddy and the Pig had the Yellow Pages out, and were leafing through it, looking for escort agencies. Paul was slouched, smoking, in the La-Z-Boy chair. Murray hovered by the door. They were in the Pig’s flat, in a newish, hutch-like, secure development between Brick Lane and Bethnal Green. The idea of getting some escorts had been Eddy’s, but it soon became clear that they had nowhere near enough cash for one girl each – not even enough for one girl between them – and when someone (Murray probably) asked the Pig where the nearest cashpoint was, and the Pig said it was at Tesco’s on Bethnal Green Road, the idea was quietly dropped. Extraordinarily, there was still some cocaine left, and for some reason the Pig had about ten litres of unchilled sweet cider, and then Eddy, who was looking through his video collection, found Glengarry Glen Ross.
Its depiction of their work is not, in Paul’s view, inspiring, though some of the others seem to think it is. For him, the film’s final line – ‘God I hate this job’, spoken by a salesman dialling a prospect’s number – is not one which sends him out happy into the night, or in this
case the deserted streets of Spitalfields at five o’clock on a cloudless summer morning. He and Eddy left the Pig’s place together, and walked towards Islington. ‘God I hate this job.’ It is especially uninspiring in view of one of the film’s other important lines – ‘A man is his job.’ On the other hand, it has to be admitted that Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Ed Harris and Alec Baldwin were not assembled to make a film about, say, supermarket shelf-stackers; even depicted as sweatily desperate, duplicitous and soul-destroying, salesmanship is somehow made mythic by the film – stands in as a metaphor for a whole world’s modus operandi – and some of its lines have come to define what many of Paul’s fellow salesmen, and often Paul himself, like to see as the savage ethos of their profession. Their unmediated acquaintance with the stubborn realities of economic life is epitomised in the film by the terms of the monthly sales contest – ‘First prize, a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize, a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.’ Of course, most of them prefer to identify with Alec Baldwin’s character – ‘I made nine hundred eighty thousand dollars last year, how much you make?’ – who delivers the terms of the contest, rather than the poor bastards listening to him. And – Paul has sometimes thought – it may be significant that he himself never has identified with Alec Baldwin, but always with the poor bastards, the losers, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, that other one – anonymous, not even played by a Hollywood star, the most loserish of them all in his unremarkable mediocrity. Murray, Eddy, he feels sure, do not identify with these men (and it is a film which smells intensely of men – there is only one woman in it, standing in the shadows behind a bar with no lines to say) even if the facts of their lives suggest that they should.