by David Szalay
Martin interrupts his musing – Paul is actually quite stoned – to say, ‘What, what can I do for you, Paul?’ He still seems nervous.
‘Oh, it’s just about this job,’ Paul says, snapping out of his stupor. ‘The job you told Heather about, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, um.’ Martin seems to flounder for a moment. Why is he so flustered? ‘On the night shift.’
‘Yeah,’ Paul says.
And Martin, embarrassed, says, ‘Yeah.’
It strikes Paul how pathetic, how humiliating his situation might seem – must seem – to Martin, from whose perspective the shelf-stackers of the night shift are down in the murk somewhere, so low as to be out of sight. They do not even have names. Martin in fact finds it painfully distressing even to imagine himself in Paul’s position. And suddenly understanding this, Paul is dry-mouthed with embarrassment himself. It happens instantaneously, strikes him suddenly – Martin’s dismay is on account of …
HIM.
This dismay, this embarrassment of Martin’s – which overwhelms, without quite obliterating, his well-meaning struggle to hide it – is infinitely worse than the sort of sly sneering that Paul had prepared himself for. It has such sincerity – a naturalness which sneering, any sort of nastiness, would never be able to have. It is involuntary. And it is not without sympathy, which is perhaps what makes it so peculiarly painful. As soon as he sees this, Paul wishes that he was not there. ‘So …?’ he says, feeling the heat flaring in his face.
‘So, um …’ Martin is making an effort to be ordinary, level, his hands trapped in the tiny pockets of his jeans. ‘Did …’ He hesitates on the name. ‘… Heather give you Sally’s number?’
Paul nods. ‘She did, yeah.’
‘You should just call her,’ Martin says. ‘Just call her.’
‘Sure. And …’
But there is no ‘and’. There is nothing else to say. There never was anything to say.
‘And you reckon they’re looking for people?’ Paul says.
‘They are. I know they are.’
‘Okay.’ It is obviously time for him to leave, but Paul feels he has to explain. ‘I just need some money to tide me over,’ he says.
Martin smiles. ‘Sure. Of course. I understand.’
And as if it were his duty, Paul looks again at the lofty space of the extension. Only for a second or two. ‘Well, cheers, Martin,’ he says, turning.
‘That’s okay.’
Martin leads him to the front door and holds it open for him.
‘And say to hi to Eleanor from me,’ Paul says, stepping into the cold. Did he say it, he wonders, out of spite? Or just unthinkingly? He is not thinking straight.
‘I will,’ Martin says.
Paul hesitates, expecting him to reciprocate and offer his regards to Heather, but he does not.
15
ALONE IN THE bedroom, under the yellowing ivory scattered by the ceiling bulb, light the colour of his teeth, Paul pulls on the blue trousers of his uniform. He tugs the polo shirt over his head, and shoves his arms through its little sleeves. He is nervous. It is twenty-five to ten. Seeing the light still on in Oliver’s room, he slips over the landing and tiptoes downstairs. In her coat, Heather is sitting on the sofa, with a magazine. ‘Should we go?’ Paul says quietly. The car has a damp smell, and seems irked when she wakes it with the key. They drive in silence to the Old Shoreham Road. Heather’s silence is so weighty, so pointed – she sometimes holds her lower lip in her teeth, as if something were imminent – that Paul says, ‘You all right?’
‘M-hm,’ she nods, staring straight ahead through the wipers’ sleepy to and fro.
‘Thanks for driving me, by the way,’ he says a few minutes later.
There are few other people out – unsurprising on a rainy Sunday night in January – and it only takes five minutes to get there. It seems to take no time. Paul leans over, his left hand opening the door – the kiss is a formality – and says, ‘See you in the morning,’ with a weary shot at a wry smile. He is early, and sitting alone at a table in the staff canteen, he feels odd in his ill-fitting uniform. He is also surprisingly tired – and it is only ten o’clock. Downstairs, he identified himself to Graham, the nightshift manager – a short, obese black man with a medicine-ball-sized head and fat-lensed spectacles that magnified his eyes. Wearing a leather jacket, he sat on the rubber conveyor belt of a dormant checkout, singing quietly to himself, and tapping his clipboard with a biro.
Paul cleared his throat. ‘Hi, um. I’m Paul Rainey?’
‘All right, Paul,’ Graham said, with unwavering, wide-awake smiliness. ‘Why don’t you go and wait upstairs with the others? Do you know where the canteen is?’
‘No,’ Paul said.
Graham looked around, his jacket creaking as he twisted his squat trunk. One of his feet – in a petite leather shoe with two buckles – maintained tenuous toe-contact with the floor. ‘Someone’ll be along in a minute,’ he said. Unselfconsciously, he resumed his singing, while Paul stood there. The last stragglers of the day shift were trickling out in their coats, going home to late dinners and TV.
‘Gerald,’ Graham shouted. ‘Gerald!’
A tall, espresso-skinned man of about forty-five lifted the headphones from his ears with leisurely slowness, a sloth-like absence of haste. They were very old-fashioned, the headphones, linked by a narrow steel band over the crown of his woolly hat, and padded with orange foam. ‘This is Paul,’ Graham said. ‘He’s starting tonight.’
The two shelf-stackers nodded at each other.
‘All right,’ Gerald said.
‘All right, Gerald.’
‘Gerald’ll show you where to go,’ said Graham.
In silence, Paul followed Gerald over the shop floor. Pushing through some heavy translucent rubber strips, they were suddenly in a grey, utterly functional space. The walls, undressed breeze blocks. The floor, concrete. The lighting, high overhead, greenish and cold. They went through fire doors, and up the linoleum stairs. Most of the shift were present in the canteen. Paul seated himself at an empty table – and was sitting there, moronically ogling its grey surface, when a voice at his shoulder said, ‘What the fuck you doing here?’
Whose is that voice? He knows it. He looks up.
Rashid.
Paul says, ‘What …’
He remembers going to Rashid’s fairly magnificent pad – it was in a brilliant, high-ceilinged Regency terrace – to pick up freezer bags of grass. The palatial appointments of the flat were a little worn and knocked about, but there was, nevertheless, always a sense of turning up at court. Rashid’s courtiers were various male relatives, all shorter, hairier, fatter and uglier than he was; and there were always a few (usually quite unattractive) girls hanging around. Charlie – Rashid’s burly, ochre dog – was always sprawled somewhere, taking the weight off his stubby legs, and panting with a pink, smile-shaped mouth. Rashid himself never answered the door – one of his cousins always did that – and he was often not in the sitting room when Paul came in, murmuring salutations to the courtiers, who murmured them back. Towards him, the cousins were deferential, the ugly girls haughtily indifferent. In no hurry, Rashid would emerge, presumably from some sort of boudoir, always wearing, if it was before eight p.m., a short silk dressing gown – so short that it did not reach his knees – and after some friendly, informationless small talk, business would be transacted in gentlemanly fashion – no counting of money, no checking of merchandise – and one of the cousins would show Paul out.
Now, seeing Rashid, Paul is mystified. He says, ‘What …’ And then, ‘What are you doing here?’
Rashid is smiling; his face shows no sign whatever of his own surprise and mortification. ‘What happened to you, man?’ he says. ‘Why you working here?’
Paul shrugs. ‘I … I am. I don’t know … What happened to you?’
‘What you talkin’ about?’ The question is put in an intimidating tone, and the message is obvious. Rashid pulls up a brown pla
stic chair and sits. ‘So what the fuck you doing here?’ he says. Paul fobs him off with a vague suggestion of personal tragedy. ‘Oh, I don’t know, mate,’ he says. ‘Things have just been … You know.’ Unhelpfully, Rashid shakes his head. ‘Things have not been great.’ Paul does not want to elaborate any more than that. He does not think Rashid would understand. Suddenly desperate for a cigarette, he feels in his pocket for his tobacco, and at that moment, Graham’s voice summons them to work over the PA system.
As they troop down the stairs, someone – Paul does not see who – shouts out, ‘Oi Rashid! Apparently you’ on pet foods again.’
Rashid half turns, continuing to descend, and says, ‘Pet foodz? Pet foodz? No way, man! I did that yesterday. How d’you know that?’
‘That’s what I heard. Apparently.’
‘What, Graham told you?’ Rashid shakes his head. ‘No way. Not fuckin’ pet foodz. No way.’
Graham does not seem to have moved. When he reads out their postings for the night, Rashid is indeed on pet foods. ‘Aw, man,’ he wails. ‘Not pet foodz! I did them yesterday!’
‘Do them properly this time, all right,’ Graham says, without lifting his goggled eyes from the list.
‘I did do them properly!’
But Graham is already saying, ‘Mark, non-foods. Alex, refrigerator compartments. Dewayne, wines and spirits …’
And Rashid, in his Timberlands, stomps away sighing to pet foods.
‘How was it?’ Heather says when he enters the kitchen in the morning, self-conscious in his uniform. It has been a long night. Two hours into the shift, Graham’s wide shape had appeared at the end of the cereals aisle, where Paul was working. ‘How’s it going – all right?’ he said. He seemed displeased about something.
‘Yeah, fine,’ Paul said. ‘Fine.’
Graham nodded fatly. He was about to move on when he added, apparently as an afterthought, ‘Try and hurry it up, will you?’
‘Oh. Yeah, sure.’
Paul had stowed about half the cereal on the shelves when Graham appeared for a second time and, without hesitating, waddled purposefully into the aisle. ‘Look, mate, you’re going to have to get a move on,’ he said. He looked impatiently at the shelves that Paul had already done. ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ he said. ‘Just neat and tidy, you know.’ And with surprising swiftness, and a cavalcade of creaking from his leather jacket, he suddenly dealt with a crate of All-Bran. It took him about twenty seconds, and his exertions brought out a bright sweat on the dark, porous surface of his forehead. ‘There, you see,’ he said, out of breath. Paul nodded sleepily. It was quarter to one, and he was very tired.
From two o’clock onwards he did not understand how he was still working. The worst hour was six to seven a.m.. This hour nearly left him a sobbing, head-shaking wreck, talking nonsense as he was led away. Then, suddenly, things no longer seemed so hopeless. For one thing, people started to arrive from the outside world. And these people – first the bakery staff, then others – seemed to resecure the supermarket, which in his mind had slipped its moorings, in time and space. Their faces pink from the cold air outside, they seemed to him like rescuers. He felt like kneeling and tearfully plastering their newspaper-holding hands with kisses. Then there was daylight – he saw it first from the smoking-room window, off to the left on the rim of the sky, like a ship on the horizon.
In the last minutes leading up to eight o’clock, the duty manager – a Mr Watt – started to fret about the presence of the night shift on the shop floor, as though they were stage hands and the show was about to start. There was a final frenzy of activity. And then it was too late – the shop was opening – they had to disappear. And they disappeared. They went upstairs to the locker room, put outer garments on over their uniforms and slipped out, unnoticed by the money-spending public as it poured in. Outside, it was blearily sunny. Grey splinters of sun stuck in his shrinking eyes, coming at him off puddles, distant roofs. The drone of the A270 was overlaid by the temporary clattering of a train. And in shapeless blue trousers, black leather jacket, Paul Rainey lit a pre-rolled cigarette in the numb morning air.
Heather is still waiting for an answer to her question.
‘Yeah, fine,’ he says, trying to sound upbeat. ‘It was fine.’ Seeing the kitchen table, however, he has an unsettling flashback to the small hours, to the breakfast cereals aisle, its dry odour, its garish topography, its absurd fauna – Honey Monster, Tony the Tiger, the chocolate-addled monkey on the Coco Pops … In fact, for the first hour the cereals had fascinated him. There were cereals for the would-be athlete, for the weight-conscious, for the sophisticate, the nature lover, the hedonist, the Spartan. Each seemed to be striving to transcend its simple, essentially standard flakes of starch, and offer a short cut to a whole way of life, of self-definition.
Marie is examining him with intense interest. (Oliver, though, is staring into the chocolate milk of his Coco Pops; and there seems to Paul to be something sullen in his not looking at him.) ‘Have you been working all night?’ Marie asks, with a sort of wonderment.
‘I have.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yeah, I have.’
‘In Sainsbury’s?’
‘Yeah.’
He explains how all the products she sees in the supermarket are pulled out onto the shop floor on wheeled pallets, and how he and a dozen others spend all night putting them on the shelves. ‘It takes all night?’ she says. ‘Just to do that?’
‘Yeah, it does,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of products. A lot of products …’ Oliver is showing no interest. ‘All right, Oli?’ Paul says.
And though he says, ‘Yeah,’ he will not look him in the eye.
To finish work at eight in the morning was, in a way that was difficult to define, quite depressing. In the sunny, suddenly vacant house – silent, except for the liquid drops of the kitchen tap, dripping into the crockery of three breakfasts that had been hurriedly dumped in the sink – Paul would sit on the sofa, still in his uniform, and start to make a spliff. The first morning – the morning of Oli’s sullen silence – as soon as he lay down he had plummeted into unconsciousness, waking four or five hours later in the early afternoon and a state of total disorientation. The bland daylight was hateful – he felt like a vampire; eventually, though, turning his back to it, he managed to sleep, on and off, until the others got home at fiveish. Half waking from this shallow slumber, he heard them come in, shouting and crashing about downstairs. And with a ringing in his ears, resigned to getting no more rest, he had pulled on his jeans. It was not like getting up in the morning – it was less wholesome – and though, over the weeks, it did start to seem more like that, it never entirely shook off the sense of something amiss. Sometimes he thought of Gerald, who had been working nights for years – for as long as Paul had worked in sales – and wondered what it was like for him. He, surely, no longer suffered from this sense of being out of sync with the world. How could he survive otherwise? Perhaps he lived on his own – that might be easier (though of course not without its own tribulations) – because Paul’s vague sense of displacement was forcefully verified when, mooching downstairs with a fuzzy morning head, he found, not only the sad, late-afternoon light, but beings with a whole day of wakeful incident behind them. He was unable to communicate with these beings. He ate his breakfast – he had started to eat Highland Porridge Oats for breakfast, a bowl of porridge every day at about five p.m. – while the children, still in their school uniforms, watched TV, and Heather started to think about supper. Though they inhabited the same physical space, through some sort of temporal slippage they seemed aware of each other only as phantoms, with whom it was impossible to interact. So Paul sat there, eating his porridge like a ghost, while Heather, still in her work clothes, waited for some burgers to defrost in the microwave.
On a positive note, he was drinking less than he had for years. (One effect of which was the sudden, startling resurgence of his libido. Heather – though she had fo
r a long time placed its sluggishness high on the list of reasons why he should stop drinking – seemed impatient with this development, turning over with a tsk when, on his nights off, he took up her morning tea with a hard-on, and shooing him away when he surprised her towelling herself after her bath.) Perhaps he was inhibited by a sense that, no matter what hours he was keeping personally, the morning was off-limits to alcohol. There had been one testing night during his first week on the shift when he was assigned to the wines and spirits aisle. To be surrounded by all that liquor, to handle it for hours, had been hard; his thirst – his desire to open one of those bottles and have a swig, a taste at least – had been increasingly urgent. Hour after hour. The heavy glass bottles. The bright liquids. He came very close to pilfering something – a quarter-bottle of Scotch, rum, anything – and slipping off to the Gents to add it to his dumbly hungering blood. As he worked, he imagined in extraordinary detail the way the seal of the cap, its frail connections, would break with a soft crunching click. He imagined that over and over again. The taste of the auburn liquor, the mild fire in his throat … Yes, that had been hard. When he finally finished the aisle, his jaw was so tightly clenched that he could not open his mouth, and his temples throbbed. Perhaps, though, it was his successful emergence from that ordeal – into the morning light – that persuaded him that he would be able to do without alcohol after work. Whatever the reason, he was able to do without it, and that pleased him.