David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘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.

All these thoughts Paul had as he walked, still in his stale suit, back to the unfashionable part of west London where his flat was. A very long walk. He left Eddy at Old Street roundabout — silent at that hour — and made his way slowly down Old Street itself, and into Farringdon. Clerkenwell. Bloomsbury. When he passed Russell Square station it was open, just, and for a moment he paused. He decided that he would keep walking. He was in no hurry. Oxford Street was eerily empty — only a few delivery trucks and street sweepers, preparing for the day’s massed, shopping hordes — and preceded by his sharp shadow, starting to sweat in his suit, he walked its whole length. There was something strange and sad about entering his sunny flat, everything exactly as it was when he set off for work twenty-four hours earlier. It seemed totally indifferent to him. He pulled the curtains (it was still light enough to set the alarm for noon) and undressed, and went into the kitchen for a glass of tepid tap water. He remembers lying down, his mind still fizzing exhaustedly, his heart knocking. Yes that morning, which he remembers so vividly — with its sunlight and sense of impalpable menace — he thinks of as the first intimation of what happened next.

When Simon took the call from Alan at International Money plc, one fresh and open-windowed morning a few weeks later, it was immediately obvious from his prolonged silence on the phone that something serious had happened. ‘We’ve lost the contract,’ he said, and smiled, and they all went to the pub. Not the Chesh — it seemed inappropriate — another one, which they did not normally go to, down by Blackfriars. When he was asked why they had lost the contract, all Simon would say was: ‘I don’t know. Because they’re cunts.’ They stayed in the pub until it was dark outside — Simon’s gold card was behind the bar — and then, too drunk to stand or see properly, they dispersed. On his own, Paul was sick in the street. The next afternoon, Simon called them all individually and said that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he had ‘something exciting in the pipeline’ which he hoped they would be interested in working on. They never heard from him again. Paul didn’t anyway. For a while, with money in the bank, he did nothing and during this short sabbatical, sitting in the hot sun on the balconette of his flat (which was just large enough for a straight-backed chair and an ashtray), smoking spliffs, he thought about doing something that he positively wanted to do. Nothing in particular occurred to him, however, and in early September — the school time, summer’s end — he started to look for work. And work, of course, meant sales.