David Szalay - London and the South-East

How happy it makes him to see her arrive every morning. To see her take off her coat. To hear her husky voice. To see her blush. To sit next to her, listening in on her calls, making helpful suggestions. To defend her from Lawrence, and make sure that she continues to receive her stipend of a hundred pounds a week long after it should have been stopped … He has become increasingly aware of some people sitting at a table near his own. There are four or five of them, young, all in dark blue or black office clothes. He has noticed in particular the way that the two of them not facing him occasionally turn, smiling mirthfully. Once, his eyes met the aquamarine eyes of a very blond, white-skinned young man. Once there was muffled laughter. These things are making him unpleasantly self-conscious. And for the last hour and a half he has been sitting there without even a newspaper to hide his solitude. He has even, it occurs to him, been muttering to himself. He starts to work through his pint hurriedly, in big cold gulps, telling himself that he is being paranoid, that their laughter probably has nothing to do with him. He is unpersuaded by this, however, and when the blond boy stands up and starts to walk towards him — it is obvious that the others are watching — he is painfully unsurprised. Stiff-necked, holding his pint, he waits. The blond boy is very tall and thin, probably in his early twenties, with a bony face and pale eyes. He looks Nordic. He has an unlit cigarette in his hand, and is smiling. ‘Sorry, have you got a light?’ he says. The flimsiness of this pretext is underlined by the fact that one of his friends is actually lighting a cigarette at that moment. Nevertheless, Paul says, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and hands him his lighter. When he has lit the cigarette, the young man stays standing there loosely for a second. Then he says, ‘Do you work round here?’ He is still smiling, and there is something insolent about this question, put under the laughing eyes of his friends. ‘Yes, I do,’ Paul says.

‘What do you do?’ the young man asks immediately.

Fuck off, Paul feels like saying. However, in a hoarse voice, he says, ‘Media sales.’

‘Ah,’ says the young man.

‘What do you do?’

‘Media, what sort of media?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Just curious.’

When he sees that Paul is not going to volunteer anything further, is in fact staring furiously at him, the young man says, ‘Do you live near here?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Said with such obvious impatience that the young man’s smile wavers for a moment. Then he says, ‘Thanks for the light.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘See you.’

Paul just nods, and the young man returns to his table. When he sits down, there is an unnatural lull in the conversation — though in low voices they are talking — then loud laughter, which suddenly stops with an emphatic ‘Shh!’

Slowly Paul finishes his pint. He will not let them force him out. He feels, though, as if the whole pub, having witnessed the short exchange, is turning away from him to hide its knowing smirk. People seem to look at him slyly. Time itself seems to have slowed. When, at last, he has finished, he stands unsteadily and leaves. Outside in the wind, poised to walk down to Blackfriars, he pauses. The prospect of the train journey seems unusually onerous, and he turns and starts to walk down Fleet Street. He is heading for ‘Dr Johnson’s’, the quiet little courtyard where the erudite doctor lived, and where, in the Northwood days, they would smoke their spliffs in the white depths of the afternoon. Now, in the tousled darkness, he stands next to Hodge’s memorial, skinning up. There is no one around. No one at all. The elegant Georgian houses are all solicitors’ offices and barristers’ sets, and the whole area is empty in the evening. He is still smarting painfully from the incident in the King Lud. A strange misery fell on him when the Nordic young man, with his insolent tipsy smile, started to question him, a misery which will not be shaken off. He does not know why it made such an impact on him. He lights the spliff. The first inhalation triggers a volley of flinty coughing, doubling him over, squeezing water from his eyes. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he mutters, when he is finally able to. He fiddles with his lighter. Smoking the spliff makes him feel unpleasantly light — even a bit queasy — and he throws it away unfinished.

He starts to walk. Not, however, in the direction of the tube station — not Blackfriars, not Temple, not Chancery Lane. He is walking towards the Penderel’s Oak. Underestimating the distance, however, it takes him more than ten minutes, and he even starts to wonder whether it is worth it. Michaela might not even be working tonight, and he feels deeply fuddled, what with everything that has happened. Washed- and whited-out with drink and dope. He has allowed an idea to form in his mind, an idea of his status with Michaela which has little or no foundation in the observed world. While with Claire, for instance, his imaginings are tempered by the melancholy knowledge that nothing is ever going to ‘happen’, the idea that he has formed of something secret and mysterious involving Michaela and himself permits him to hope that, in spite of everything, something might. He has no memory of when exactly this idea formed — she had been working in the Penderel’s Oak for weeks, or even months, when it did — but it has been there, never far from his mind during his waking hours, and intense and immediate when he drinks, for over a year, a year in which she has split up with one man, and started to see another. (Paul’s smile, when she told him that particular piece of news, was probably the least expressive of happiness ever to shape his face.) Sometimes, in the bruised, unforgiving reality of a hangover, he sees the folly of his imaginings, sees that they are only imaginings — that she is fifteen years younger than him, and that her lovers (extrapolating from the two he has met on various occasions in the pub) seem typically to be handsome young men, strong-jawed outdoors types — not much like him. Usually, however, he manages to overlook these things. And if she sometimes sees, when he is very drunk, the intensity and scope of Paul’s preoccupation with her (once, worryingly, he squeezed her hand and would not let it go for several minutes), it may be unnerving, but she prefers not to dwell on it. She is able to pretend — very successfully to pretend, to herself — that she suspects nothing, that he is simply nice.

He peers through the windowed front of the Penderel’s Oak into the dim, carpeted interior. The pub is not very full. Quiet, even. She is there. He sees her behind the bar, and with a sudden sense of uplift, as well as an enjoyable nervous quickening of his pulse, he opens the door and goes in. She is talking to someone, someone sitting on one of the high stools … And suddenly recognising the squarish head with its dirty bronze hair, the shapeless back of the blue suit, Paul stops. He had not told Murray that he was meeting Eddy Jaw because Jaw had specifically told him not to. (It had seemed strange at the time.) He had said that he was tired, and going home. Murray, too, had said that he was going home, and yet here he is, at almost ten, in the Penderel’s Oak, talking to Michaela. Normally it is obvious to Paul that Murray, in his own preoccupation with her, is pitifully mistaken if he thinks that it might lead anywhere. She is obviously quite scared of him. (When, several hours earlier, Murray had entered the pub alone, she had watched him approach the bar with dread, which intensified when she asked if Paul would be in, and he said, ‘Not tonight, my love. It’s just you and me tonight.’) Paul’s shock at seeing him there unexpectedly, however, tips him into total paranoia — the idea that he and Michaela might actually be lovers suddenly takes on a sort of horrific plausibility. It is like a nightmare. From where he is standing in the shadows he watches Michaela’s face, small and white, slightly pinched, her ski-jump nose — she seems to be listening intently to what Murray is saying, staring into his eyes, nodding. He feels as if he is seeing something that has been specifically hidden from him. And he is sure that Murray must not see him , must not know that he is there — in his fuddled state he would be unable to explain why he is not in Hove. For a few minutes he watches them. Then suddenly sickened with himself, he leaves, lighting a cigarette as soon as his feet hit the pavement outside. Still in turmoil, he walks quickly away. He needs another drink, he needs to get his whirling thoughts together, so before descending to the tube at Chancery Lane, he goes into the Cittie of Yorke. The long, high, loud interior is surprisingly full. There is hardly room to move. Sweating, Paul struggles to the bar. Some sort of event — a graduation of some kind — seems to have taken place nearby because the pub is full of young people in black academic gowns and older people who are obviously their parents. Lots of photos are being snapped, and looking around disorientedly he is hit full in the face by a flash and dazzled. He shuts his eyes, squeezing them shut, and opens them again. ‘You being served?’ someone yells at him over the din. He orders a pint of lager, and only then notices that he has a headache.