Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

We went to the pub at five o’clock, a big, shabby crowd of us, looking conspicuously pale and also more awkward together outside the office. Derek Braddock bought an enormous round of drinks and clapped me on the back.

‘You’re a mystery man,’ he said. ‘Ten years I’ve known you and this is the first time we’ve had a drink together.’

‘That’s not true,’ I told him. ‘We had a drink after the US elections.’ Secretly, I was rather flattered that Derek had spared my private life any thought at all.

‘One drink in ten years! Oi, Wendy — he’s a mystery man, isn’t he?’

‘I’m sure it was more than one drink,’ I said.

‘Damien is very … self-contained.’ Wendy laughed. She looked much prettier outside work; her eyes were bright from drinking.

‘You’re making me self-conscious,’ I said. ‘Can’t you wait until I’ve left to have this conversation?’

Derek paused before his pint of lager reached his lips. ‘I’ve always wondered about your secret life,’ he said.

‘Secret life? I don’t have one, Derek. I don’t have a life. I go home to an empty flat.’

‘What about that girlfriend of yours?’

I shook my head. ‘Didn’t work out.’

‘Pity. She was a looker.’ Derek took a sip of his drink and stared down at the floor, jingling the coins in his pocket with his spare hand. ‘Well, then.’

I had never been able to dislike Derek properly since I had taken his notebook home one day instead of mine and found a brochure for a holiday home in Spain taped inside the front cover as though it was a talisman of another, better life. ‘Wend your way along the road from Puerto Pollença, while the lights of the porch glimmer in the gloaming.’ Glimmer in the gloaming : you knew that the copywriter who came up with that thought he was Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I gave the book back to him the next day without mentioning it, but I still felt he had shared a confidence with me, and I experienced a pang of guilt whenever I found myself thinking that he was an arsehole. I said, ‘I’ll miss you, Derek,’ as a kind of penitence. Then he winked back at me as he swallowed his drink and squeezed my arm, and I felt marginally worse. I had an overpowering sense of all the small disappointments that wear you away over the years. I thought of work as a rhythm that marched Derek out of the house in the morning and back into his bed at night. And I remembered how quickly the employees in our department — men, particularly — died after retirement. Because that rhythm had gone, and it was too late for them to find another. Derek was about fifty-five; if he retired now, he would probably have two, three years at most, in which to wend his way back from Puerto Pollença in the gloaming. That was as much of the good life as his body would be able to take.

‘Best of luck,’ said Derek. ‘It was nice knowing you — almost.’

I had to leave early because I had people arriving at nine. I felt miserable slipping away from my colleagues for the last time. Outside the pub it was raining, and I waited under its awning for a couple of minutes. I suppose the alcohol generated a false bonhomie, but looking back at them, flushed and laughing inside the pub, I felt strangely cut off from them. Derek was right; in the time I’d worked there, I hadn’t got close to any of them. I think I just wasn’t that good at making friends.

*

I had rented my flat through an agency on a six-month lease to a stockbroker called Platon Bakatin who strode around the place in his Gucci loafers, chatting in Russian on his mobile phone. He liked it, he said, but wanted me to redecorate and was sniffy about the furniture. I guessed that he wanted something more impressive than my worn-out sofa-bed and kilims. I thought of putting my stuff into storage, but it hardly seemed worth it, so I let a furniture dealer come round and take it all away for about seventy pounds. When he named his price I was initially reluctant. I remembered that Laura and I had bought one of the kilims on holiday in Turkey and I didn’t want to part with it. Then I thought, Fuck it; and helped carry the furniture out to the van.

Repainted, the empty flat seemed like a stranger’s when I got home to it. It was Platon’s home now, I thought. His new sofa stood in the living room, still wrapped in plastic. There was an unfamiliar echo to my footsteps as I walked around the flat. All that was left of me were my clothes, a few crates of books, lamps, an old computer, my records, and me. And soon, all that would be gone. I felt like I was erasing my presence in the world.

It was odd how many people I ended up inviting to the party. The list of guests was a long one. There’s a big discrepancy between the number of people you feel obliged to invite to a party, and the number of people you feel able to confide in when the sky falls on your head. At least there is in my case. Perhaps other people have a more healthy ratio between the two. I had invited a big crowd of craps who might or might not turn up. And I had invited my friends. More precisely, I had invited Stevo and Lloyd.

Stevo came early, full of effusiveness, and with half a bottle of vodka tucked into the pocket of his long smelly coat. He sat himself down on the crackling plastic sofa cover and started rolling a joint. He was crumbling bits of hash on to the tobacco when Lloyd arrived, straight from work, looking rumpled and tired, and collapsed on the seat next to him. ‘Heather sends her apologies,’ said Lloyd.

‘What happened? Her broomstick break down again?’ Stevo spoke out of the corner of his mouth. He had his lips clamped around the joint while he frisked his pockets for the lighter that lay on the floor in front of him. ‘By the way, Damien, mate, where are the honeys?’

‘Did you say “honeys”?’ Lloyd asked him, in a voice that managed to be both weary and incredulous.

‘I most definitely did. Damien, where are they? You promised me pretty girls.’

I opened a bottle of sparkling wine. I had bought thirty-five, so there were just over ten for each of us. The evening had begun to take on the atmosphere of a doomed stag party. ‘Get your laughing gear round that,’ I said halfheartedly, handing them each a glass.

Stevo was not to be distracted from his theme. ‘Seriously, Damien. Where are they?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, Stevo? Crisp, anyone?’

Lloyd took a bite of a crisp and said in a thoughtful and deliberate voice: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that you actually hate women.’

‘Who, me?’ I said.

‘You probably do as well, but I was talking about Stevo.’

‘Only the ones that won’t shag me,’ said Stevo, and he took an enormous inhalation of his joint. He let it out in little gasps and then offered Lloyd a puff.

Lloyd took the spliff but didn’t put it to his lips. Instead, he passed it on to me. ‘Here you go. Take some of Stevo’s cold sores to your home in the New World.’

I turned up the music to drown out the two of them bickering and make it seem like there were more of us. I told myself that after two or three drinks, things wouldn’t look so bad.

Lloyd lit a cigarette. ‘What are you actually going to do when you get out there?’

I could tell Lloyd was doubtful about the wisdom of going. As we had all got older, caution had overwhelmed all his other characteristics. It was surprising if you had known him as long as I had that this had emerged as his dominant trait, like the most unlikely candidate in a thriller turning out to be the murderer. But then two years ago, who would have thought Stevo would become this raddled parody of a skirt-chasing hedonist?

‘I don’t know really. Read, paint …’

‘I didn’t know you could …’