David Szalay - London and the South-East

IN THE GREAT grimy cavern of London Bridge station, facing a soiled wall, a finger in his left ear to block out the roar of bus engines, faintly aware of the smell of urine, Paul phones Eddy. It is five to nine on Tuesday morning, and he is not feeling well. He did not get home until nearly two o’clock, on the filthy, forlorn eleven fifty from London Bridge, stopping at East Croydon, Gatwick Airport, Three Bridges, Haywards Heath, Brighton and, at twenty-five past one, exhausted and empty, the silent little station at Hove, where Paul tumbled alone onto the ghostly platform. The air was sharp and cold. In their dark bedroom, Heather was already asleep (he had phoned, hours before, to say that he would be late), and he undressed as quietly as he could, losing his balance as he pulled his trousers off, dismally tormented by the knowledge that in five hours he had to get up and go back. And, of course, it was torment. Hypnotised by fatigue, he was in the train again — the train full now — as daylight started to appear through the drizzle, over the dark fields and estates and industrial parks. He knew now that he was going to take Eddy up on his offer. The decision seemed to have been made overnight, while he slept. Or perhaps it had never really been in doubt. It seemed possible that his moral tussle of the previous evening had been nothing more than a hypocritical show, hastily staged at the insistence of his mouthy but ultimately ineffective conscience, and that having seen the show, it had been more or less satisfied — as if the show itself were enough, were all that was morally required. Distantly aware of this, in a detached, indifferent state, he had waited for the train, and sat slumped in a corner at the back of the carriage, with small lip movements husbanding the moisture of his mouth. His eyes closed, his bad head bumping lightly against a schematic representation of ‘London Connections’, he remembered, in a hazy, dreamlike way, walking in on Murray and Michaela in the Penderel’s Oak — and, with a pang of private embarrassment, the feelings and ideas that seeing them together had stirred up in him. In the sober morning light, he no longer thought it a serious possibility that they were lovers — though the awful idea would not now be entirely dispelled, and he was still angry with Murray for seeing her in secret, no matter how deluded and futile his intentions.

The train got in to one of the outlying platforms and he had to walk — part of a huge unspeaking herd — through a network of wet, dingy tunnels to the main station. There, he took out his phone, and Eddy’s number.

‘Hello, Eddy, s’Paul,’ he says, leaning into the foul wall in front of him.

‘Paul. Morning.’ Eddy sounds businesslike, perhaps slightly surprised.

‘I’ve thought ’bout what you, we, were saying yesterday.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘Excellent,’ Eddy says, without excitement. ‘That’s good news, Paul.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Paul asks after a few moments. Eddy says they should meet again later in the week. He asks Paul how many people he thinks he’ll be bringing with him. Paul says he is not sure. Eddy says he’ll phone him to arrange a time to meet on Thursday or Friday.

Pocketing his phone — an old, heavy model — Paul lights a cigarette, his first of the day. He is shaking — he presumes with excitement, though it might, of course, be delirium tremens. It is not so much that his hangover has disappeared than that it has been pushed into the background. Feeling too energised to take the tube, he looks at his watch and then walks out, past the red rain-streaked logjam of buses, into the open air, towards the river. He is stopped, immediately, by the traffic of Tooley Street, and waits in the Scotch mist with a crowd of suits and umbrellas, sober raincoats and briefcases, for the lights to change. On the bridge the pavement is blustery. Spots of rain flick his face. The khaki river looks slow and old, but wherever it encounters an obstacle — the piers of bridges, the prows of moored vessels — its unsuspected momentum is visible in rushing vees of turbulent water. He walks with his head turned, looking downstream. The distant towers of Canary Wharf are little more than immense, pale silhouettes, illusive under their winking hazard lights in the poor visibility of the day.

He takes the tube from Bank, and arrives late at Park Lane Publications. It is very unusual for him to be late; everyone else is already there. Everyone, that is, except Murray, and seeing his empty seat, Paul experiences a short, unpleasant encore of the previous night’s paranoia, seriously fearing for a moment that the explanation for Murray’s lateness might lie in his having spent the night with Michaela. He feels relieved — and then immediately ridiculous — when in answer to his worried question, ‘Where’s Murray?’, Andy says, ‘In the smoking room.’ This sorted out, however, he is still tense. He is especially tense at the thought of Murray’s return to the sales floor, of the moment when they first see and speak to each other. Taking off his jacket, sitting down at his desk, he is desperate for a cigarette. Not wanting to meet Murray in the smoking room, though, he waits, purposelessly shuffling papers. Normally, he would have shouted ‘Get on the fucking phone’ more than once — only Nayal and Marlon are making calls — but the more time that passes without him having shouted it, the more he seems unable to do so; and the more, he feels sure, his team sense that something odd is happening. (In fact, they are used to his moodiness, and do not see much unusual in it today.) Sunk in this preoccupied lethargy, it suddenly occurs to him how extraordinarily difficult it is going to be even to pretend to care, for the next two weeks, about the fate of European Procurement Management . But he will have to pretend — and suddenly steeling himself, shunting Eddy’s proposal out of his still-hurting mind, he sits up and says, ‘Come on, you lot, get on the fucking phone.’ And as he says it, Murray walks onto the sales floor. There is, Paul thinks, picking him up in his peripheral vision, something shifty about him. He takes his seat without speaking. ‘All right, Murray?’

‘All right, Paul.’

‘Good night, was it?’

‘What?’

‘You look like you were out on the piss last night.’

‘No.’

‘You weren’t?’

‘No, not at all,’ Murray says.

‘Oh, I thought you were for some reason.’

‘No.’

Surreptitiously, Paul spends the long morning watching the members of his team, his eyes moving from one to the next. There are a few definite ‘yeses’ — he knew immediately who they would be. Wolé, large and shambling, with a slowness and patience unusual in the profession, but nevertheless a natural salesman, possessor of a weighty, charismatic pitch, his voice almost hypnotically deep and imposing. Nayal, the precise technician, with his headset and smoke-blue sports jacket, also patient, quiet, unflappable, not a high-pressure merchant. That’s more Marlon’s style. All that standing on the desk stuff. ‘Power selling’. Paul doesn’t like it much, but Marlon somehow makes it work. Those three, the definite yeses. (And incidentally, Paul makes a mental note, the three hardest-working members of the team. The harder I work , he thinks, the luckier I get .) Then there are the noes. Andy. Murray. Dave Shelley, an odd, morose young man with lank, greasy hair and a motheaten suit, who never speaks to anybody and spends most of his time in the smoking room. Sami, the affable, smiling Saudi Arabian, who only joined a week ago, and is obviously destined for failure. And Richard, a small man in his mid-fifties who always latches on to the new people — Sami is the latest — and follows them everywhere, telling them how wonderful it is to work for John Lewis. On the phone, it is obvious that he is speaking from a script; so obvious that it seems to be his intention to sound like he is. And indeed Paul has known this to happen, known people who are just unable to stop sending signals to the prospect dissociating themselves from the words they are saying.