by David Szalay
‘Um, aren’t you supposed to be giving up today?’
‘No.’
Yes, a sense of progress. That was what he wanted. So why, when his thoughts turned to the things that he had to do tomorrow, did the questions keep putting themselves so insistently: Was it all worth it? What was the fucking point?
6
IT WAS NOT true that the past five years had seen no progress. The children had progressed immensely, and although they were not his own, their furious progress, their non-stop growth and development, their leaps of intellectual achievement, the regular obsolescence of their very clothes, had distracted him from the more plateau-like nature of his own life.
He remembers the first time that he met them – one Sunday afternoon, at Heather’s parents’ house in Hounslow, where she was living at the time. Nervous, he took the tube from Barons Court. The train galumphed past the yellow-brick backs of terraced houses. It intersected with major roads, and traversed spaces full of a summer’s green growth. The sky was low and overcast. From Hounslow Central the walk along the Staines Road was longer than he had expected (perhaps because, despite being late, he was walking slowly) and he had started to wonder whether he might have missed the turning when he found it – a quiet road of hawthorn bushes and speed humps. On one side, hidden behind trees and hedges, was the heath. From the other, from one of the cul-de-sacs that curved between the houses, he heard the crackling jingle of an ice-cream van, which was immediately obliterated by a heavy mass of aircraft noise as another plane went over.
Later he would sit tipsily in the garden, watching them. They were low enough for him to see the white eddies of turbulence on the trailing edges of their wings. Heather’s father, Mike Willison – an immigration officer at Heathrow – said that he could tell from its noise alone what sort of plane each was. Laughing, they tested him – he put his hands theatrically over his eyes. To Paul they all sounded more or less the same, except the jumbo jets. These seemed lower than the others, and to be moving more slowly – it was frightening when he first saw one, the way it seemed to hang over the houses as it hauled its palpably enormous weight into the cloud-blanket. Warm and fuzzy with wine, and swirling in its glass the whisky that Mike had pressed on him, Paul meditated on the sound of the planes as they went over at one-minute intervals. The sequence was always the same. Thunder, emerging quickly from the depths of the scale until it started the drinks tinkling on the tray, then the harsh sound of a circular saw set to sheet metal, and finally, when the plane was overhead, a loud whistle or wail or scream. ‘Amazing when you think of all those people off to America and God knows where, isn’t it?’ shouted Joan Willison, holding a cigarette and looking up – an observation that, like her husband’s aeronautical party trick, was offered to all first-time visitors.
Joan had answered the door – appearing to Paul first as a tall, wavering, marigold shape in its frosted-glass panels. Her smile was sunny and spontaneous, her hair pale greying gold, her face strong-featured and handsome – and Paul saw immediately where Heather took her slightly thick features from, though in her mother they were more successful, more well proportioned perhaps, or more fully and easily occupied. They shook hands in the narrow hall, and he took off his jacket. Perhaps her tallness had something to do with it – Heather had not inherited that. Mike Willison was shorter than his wife. A lively, paunchy man, with blue eyes, he came into the hall wearing a novelty apron, its design based on Michelangelo’s David, openly impatient to see his daughter’s ‘other half’. He shook Paul’s hand enthusiastically and said, ‘Hi, Paul. We’ve heard a lot about you.’ Then they went into the lounge. Paul had hoped that Heather would be there. She was not. There was only a small, blond child, hiding most of himself behind the settee’s low velveteen arm, and staring at them with eyes as blue as his grandfather’s. He did not say hello to Paul, despite Mike’s entreaties and the fact that Paul had said hello to him, addressing him, with awkward embarrassment, as if he were an adult – almost extending a hand for him to shake, and saying, ‘Hello, Oliver. How are you?’
‘He’s just shy,’ said Joan, smiling. ‘What do you want to drink, Paul? Heather’ll be down in a minute. She’s upstairs with Marie.’ Paul noticed that she was nervous, and when Mike said, in a loud voice, ‘I’ll get the drinks, I’ll get them,’ and went into the kitchen, she lit a cigarette and offered him one, which he took, though it was a Silk Cut Ultra and smoking it seemed to him like inhaling through a hollow tube. ‘Let’s go outside,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t smoke round the kids, should we?’ And she smiled again. With an uneasy look at Oliver, who had not moved and was still watching him, Paul followed her into the garden. Like the house, it was tidy and well arranged. ‘This is nice,’ he said, self-consciously taking in the minuscule lawn, the water feature, the table and chairs; a garden that refused to acknowledge its own smallness, adopting instead – to Lilliputian effect – the airs of a spacious acre. ‘Very nice.’ And it was at that moment that, visibly startling him, the first jumbo jet appeared, shockingly low in the sky overhead. Humbled by its noise, he stared at it in awe as it powered over. When it had passed, and no longer obliterated their voices, he found himself laughing nervously, and Joan smiled and shook her head, as if to say, ‘I know, I know.’
It was strange for him to see Heather holding Marie, who at the time was a pale, plump toddler, still in diapers. ‘Hi,’ he said, making an effort to seem normal. ‘We’re just having a look at the lovely garden.’ Heather nodded. He saw that she was much more nervous than he was, which immediately made him feel less nervous himself. ‘You must be Marie,’ he said. And smiling at the child, he took her tiny, dimpled hand and gave it a jocular shake. She seemed intrigued, but after a moment turned away from him and pressed herself into her mother’s breasts. Paul said, ‘I met Oliver a minute ago.’ Heather looked at him with a hard, intense expression, an expression that he did not understand – they had only known each other a few months – but what had been near-panic in her when she stepped into the garden was to some extent, it seemed, defused.
It was an English barbecue. There were sausages and burgers and minted lamb kebabs. Australian wine and Belgian lager. It was not cold, but the sky was solidly overcast. They talked about house prices. Mike was very pleased with how little the house had cost him because of its proximity to the airport – ‘I can drive to work in five minutes!’ – and insisted, quite hotly in the face of very tentative scepticism from Joan – scepticism anticipated in fact, because she had hardly started to speak when he interrupted her – that they did not mind the noise. ‘You just don’t notice it after a while. You really don’t.’ ‘Then why are there always those people going round with microphones?’ she asked. He waved this away. ‘The thing is,’ she said earnestly, turning to Paul, ‘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? You hear about people who just crack up.’ Paul nodded seriously, and wondered, with a sudden flutter of panic, if they knew of his own ‘crack-up’. The previous November he had met the hard floor of the plummet that had started with the dissolution of Northwood. He had stopped turning up to work, and then stopped leaving his flat entirely, when even a trip to the shops was full of indefinable terrors. And when his brother Chris, over from Rotterdam, found him behind the drawn, dusty velour of the living-room curtains, he had insisted on taking him to a doctor. The doctor had put him on Felixstat.
They were talking about the awfulness of public transport, and when Mike expressed surprise that Paul had come on the Piccadilly Line, Joan said, with motherly vehemence, ‘Don’t be silly! He wanted to enjoy a drink.’ They were all quite tipsy, even a bit squiffy – the Famous Grouse had been brought out for the gentlemen – by the time Mike started to show off his knowledge of aircraft noise. Later, he and Paul, Heather and Oli went for what he called a ‘yomp’ on the heath, which was low-lying, with cracked concrete paths and a derelict atmosphere. The planes went over steadily fro
m the airport’s implied location to the west. When Paul put his arm round Heather, she seemed to stiffen – perhaps aware that Oliver, who was walking with Mike a little way ahead, kept turning to look at them – and after a minute or two, without either of them saying anything, he let her go. Some people went past on horseback, and Mike, who was an enthusiastic student of local history, told Paul that in the olden days the major road into London from the west had struck across the heath, which was notorious for bandits and highwaymen – which is, he informed him, why one of the highwaymen in Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem is called ‘Hounslow’. People used to stop for the night, Mike went on, at a coaching inn nearby, the Crown, and continue on to London in the morning. They wandered through the nature reserve, and when they returned to the house – Joan was in the kitchen reading the Mail on Sunday – they had tea, and sat in the low-ceilinged lounge with the telly on.
Opposite Paul on the tube as it travelled through the long dusk of that Sunday in July were two JAL stewardesses, one Japanese, the other Scottish. They looked exhausted, had obviously just flown in from Tokyo or somewhere. Their suitcases were small, mere overnight bags; and their looks – the Japanese girl flat-faced, her legs short and plump, her hair pure black, and the Scot tall, blonde and pale-eyed, with a prominent nose – seemed designed to emphasise how far apart they had started life, how infinitesimally unlikely it was that they would one day sit together on a suburban train in London making tired small talk. Paul had been thinking about fate as he waited on the empty platform at Hounslow Central, and when, sitting down in the train, he noticed the stewardesses, they seemed set before him as a living embodiment of his thoughts. Made unusually pensive by the afternoon’s drinking, and the quiet melancholy twilight of the station platform (the lights had just flickered on, turning the surrounding sky a deeper evening blue), he had been thinking how easily he might not have been there, in the extreme west of London, where London finally ends, waiting for the train which eventually pulled in with a protracted sigh. He found it frightening to think how easily he and Heather might not have met; how easily either of them might have ended up somewhere other than Archway Publications. Nothing is fated, he thought, but most things are so improbable that once they have happened it seems they must have been.
His small flat was somewhere in the sleepy labyrinthine limbo south of Talgarth Road, where the horizon, showing through holes in stretches of terraced housing, was often low. There were derelict open spaces, insomniac highways, acres of rusting track. Private tennis clubs and municipal cemeteries. From his balconette he could hear the metallic mutter of the tube trains, down in their damp cutting two streets away.
7
THE HEAVY BEATS of the music from upstairs are only faintly audible in the Gents – and not at all when the automated rinsing of the urinal starts. It is Friday night in the Penderel’s Oak, and alone at the tin trough, Paul is drunk and feeling dissatisfied with himself. He has done nothing today. It had been his intention to get in early – say, eight o’clock – when he would find Li alone on the sales floor. This had not happened though. When the stuttering alarm had started to peck the quick of his head at five forty-five, the whole idea had seemed like nonsense, and he had ignored it. (Though he spent the next hour in a fretful, unsatisfying half-sleep.) Elvezia and Dave he had intended to speak to in the smoking room, as he had spoken to Wolé. This had not happened either. He would, he had thought, quietly arrange to meet Claire for a coffee somewhere, perhaps offer to take her to lunch, or for a drink. After a drink, he could suggest dinner … No, he had not spoken to Claire, though they had been alone in the smoking room for several minutes. He could simply have explained the situation to her there, of course – but then there would have been no reason to have lunch or a drink with her next week, and he had no intention of forgoing that. Presumably, then, he had at least made the arrangements for this little tête-à-tête? No, he had not. He had mistakenly, naively, presumed that it would be a nerveless matter to suggest such a meeting to her. It was not. In his mind he was now more or less asking her out on a date. And might it not look that way to her too, this mysterious invitation? And what would she make of that? He felt squeamish even to imagine such a misunderstanding on her side. Perhaps it would be better just to speak to her there, in the smoking room. That was what he was doing with the other smokers, wasn’t it? And he had been about to do this, to say something, when like a shoal of fish suddenly changing direction, and in doing so seeming to change colour (he has seen such things on TV), his thoughts reversed themselves – why pretend that she was not a special case? Why pass up this opportunity to spend some innocent time alone with her? That would be perverse. There was nothing wrong with it. He had done the same with Nayal. What he had not done in Nayal’s case was spend hours worrying over the precise form of words he would use to extend the invitation …
There is a sudden short surge in the volume of the music as the outer door of the Gents is opened. Paul zips himself up and turns to the sink. In the dull metal mirror, he sees Marlon enter the low room. ‘All right, Marlon?’ he says without turning.
‘All right, Paul?’
It is strange that Marlon should still be in the pub. Strange and, Paul feels, providential. Usually, if he comes to the Penderel’s after work on Friday at all, it is for a quick half, or even a soft drink of some sort, and yet here he is at nine, cheerfully whistling at the urinal. Casually, Paul checks the wet, graffitied stall. ‘I wanted to have a word with you actually, Marl,’ he says, looking in the metal mirror again.
‘Oh yeah?’ Marlon might even be drunk, which is unheard of. ‘What about?’
‘Don’t mention this to anyone, mate, but I’m leaving PLP.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘I’ve been offered a job at another place, a better place. I’m asking around a few people, seeing if they want to join me there.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Would you be interested at all?’
‘What’s the place?’
‘It’s a place –’
‘Excuse me.’ Marlon has finished, and wants access to the sink. Paul stands aside. ‘It’s a place called Delmar Morgan,’ he says.
‘I’ve not heard of it.’
‘It’s a top-quality place.’
Washing his hands, Marlon seems unenthused. ‘A lot better than PLP,’ Paul affirms throatily, looking at the pigeon grey of Marlon’s broad, suited back, and the dingy yellow ceiling light shining on his skin-coloured pate.
‘Who else have you asked?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Just curious.’
‘I’m not asking everyone.’
‘I’m sure you’re not.’
Arrogant sod, Marlon, Paul thinks. ‘Only the top people,’ he says. Without reacting to this, Marlon starts the hand dryer. Paul raises his voice. ‘PLP’s not in good shape, mate, that I can tell you.’
‘It’s not going to be in better shape when you take the top people, is it?’
‘No it’s not,’ Paul says, after a moment. ‘You should get out while you can.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘All right.’
For a few seconds the only sound is the shouting of the dryer. Paul is about to leave. Then Marlon says, ‘When would this happen?’
Paul smiles, very slightly, at the obvious buying signal – obvious not only in itself, but as an attempt to prolong a pitch that had seemed about to end. He had been worried by Marlon’s evasiveness. Now he sees that he simply considers himself too grand to say yes straight off, or even seem interested – the sort to savour, as if on principle, the power of the prospect. ‘Um, soon,’ Paul says. ‘In a few weeks.’
‘Oh. That soon.’
‘Yeah. We’ll start after Christmas basically.’
‘Okay.’ The hand dryer shuts up suddenly. ‘I’ll let you know in the next few days.’
‘Cheers, Marl,’ Paul says. ‘And keep it quiet, yeah?’
They leave together
and go up the dim, carpeted stairs. The pub is full – ‘heaving’ as Andy would say. The music thuds and the bar is four-deep. Marlon has some friends in, outsiders, not salespeople, which is why he is still there. Pushing through the mob with Paul in his wake, he moves towards them, but as he passes Murray and Andy and some of the others, he shouts over the music, ‘Paul just tried to proposition me in the toilet.’ Emerging from the thick press of people, Paul – who did not hear him – sees everyone smiling. ‘What?’ he shouts. ‘What did you say?’