David Szalay - London and the South-East

They went to a pub nearby. The Cardinal. Late Victorian in style, with funereal mahogany everywhere and elaborately frosted windows, it was full of office workers, and loud with their voices. Everyone was damp from the rain. ‘I don’t think there’ll be anyone from Delmar in here,’ Eddy said. ‘Discretion — you know.’ Paul nodded, looking around, without much hope, for an empty table. There was only one, occupying the short stretch of wall between the doors of the Ladies and the Gents, deep in the pub. He sat there, smoking, his back against the wall, studying the burgundy honeycomb of the ceiling, while Eddy got the drinks. ‘So, how’s it going?’ Eddy said, sitting himself down on the maroon leather seat of a stool. Paul was slurping his pint. ‘How’s what going?’ he asked.

‘You’ve been talking to people? Interesting them in making a move?’

When, after answering in the affirmative, Paul told him that he had so far signed up only one salesman to come with him, Eddy frowned and said, ‘One? What do you mean?’ Paul started to explain about Nayal’s talktime idea. Eddy interrupted him. ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, mate.’

‘There’s a couple of others,’ Paul assured him. ‘A couple of others I haven’t spoken to yet.’

‘A couple? Two?’

Paul nodded.

‘For fuck’s sake, mate! You’re supposed to bring a whole team. I was thinking eight or ten people.’

‘I thought you only wanted the best people,’ Paul said, reddening. He coughed.

‘Well, I was hoping you could get together eight or ten decent salespeople.’

Paul murmured, ‘There’s probably not eight or ten decent salespeople in the whole of PLP.’

‘You can’t come with two or three people, mate.’ Eddy was smiling with a kind of sorrowful incredulity. ‘I’m sorry. You must be able to do better than that. I wanted you to bring your own team — that was the whole fucking point.’

Paul nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. His voice was hoarse again. ‘What would be the minimum?’ he asked.

‘The minimum?’

Tapping the ash from his cigarette into the big glass ashtray, Paul nodded like a naughty boy. ‘Yeah.’

Eddy said he needed at least six people. On the way home Paul thought about this. If — if — Elvezia and Marlon agreed, that would make three. Li, four. Claire — under the circumstances there were no more doubts about whether to include her — five. And one more. Who? Dave? Paul frowned and shook his head. But it would have to be him. Andy had made one sale, months ago, and Sami and Richard had never sold a thing. As the squeaking train pulled out of East Croydon, he was suddenly aware of how stressed he was. The stress, the worry, the pressure, the subterfuge, he saw, were inevitable. And he started to wonder whether it was all worth it. What, after all, was the point? His job would still be to marshal muppets — the same muppets, for fuck’s sake, minus Andy, Richard, Sami (whose physical resemblance to a muppet was overwhelming) and Dundee. He thought about the line Eddy had mentioned from Taxi Driver on Monday night, and wondered whether he in fact sufficiently wanted whatever he was hoping to get from this move to make it worthwhile. And what was he hoping to get? He asked himself this as, rocking gently from side to side, the train whistled along its rails through the darkness between Croydon and Gatwick. He was not entirely sober. After only one drink Eddy had said he had to go somewhere, and they had parted, as on Monday, with him clambering into a black cab. Paul had walked to the station. There, impulsively, he had stopped in the Shakespeare, the transients’ pub opposite the main entrance, where he had had a pint or two while thinking things over.

Later, still thinking them over on the train, he wondered what he was hoping to get from this move. The extra money was not the main thing. Unusually for a salesman, he is not principally motivated by money. He needs it, of course. Quite a lot of it — he spends perhaps two hundred pounds a week on alcohol alone. For a long while, though, he has been living within his means. For all their ubiquitous efforts, for all the money they have thrown at him in an attempt to make him want things, modern marketing and brand management have ultimately failed with Paul Rainey. (Perhaps it is simply his alcoholism that makes him more or less immune to them.) No, what he hoped to get from this move, he thought — as the train slowed, and an automated female voice announced its imminent arrival at Gatwick Airport — was what he had imagined while waiting for Eddy: a more positive sense of himself. Money played an essential part in this, of course; money, however, not principally as something to be spent. Money as pure success points, as an ultimate index of personal progress, of his very own economic expansion. What other trustworthy indices did he have? What he hoped for — he spelled it out it to himself as the train slid away from the pinkish glow of the platforms at Gatwick, and once more into the darkness — what he hoped for was simply a sense of progress. That, surely, was what he wanted. It was frightening to think how little progress he had made in the past five years. That was what his doomed attempt to stop the Felixstat had been about. And also an even more ambitious September attempt to quit smoking, an attempt which had lasted one long — very long — Monday morning. As soon as he entered the Penderel’s Oak at twelve, he had known for sure that it would fail. And if failure was inevitable, what was the point of struggling? It did occur to him that this was sophistry, that failure need not be inevitable, that he was simply allowing himself to fail, but by then he was already sweatily feeding his quids into the machine, muttering the usual stuff about it not being a good week for it and, as the fine shiny pack dropped into the tray, promising himself to quit the following Monday. And the following Monday, on the point of lighting his first of the day, a terse interior dialogue had taken place:

‘Um, aren’t you supposed to be giving up today?’

‘No.’

Yes, a sense of progress. That was what he wanted. So why, when his thoughts turned to the things that he had to do tomorrow, did the questions keep putting themselves so insistently: Was it all worth it? What was the fucking point?

IT WAS NOT true that the past five years had seen no progress. The children had progressed immensely, and although they were not his own, their furious progress, their non-stop growth and development, their leaps of intellectual achievement, the regular obsolescence of their very clothes, had distracted him from the more plateau-like nature of his own life.

He remembers the first time that he met them — one Sunday afternoon, at Heather’s parents’ house in Hounslow, where she was living at the time. Nervous, he took the tube from Barons Court. The train galumphed past the yellow-brick backs of terraced houses. It intersected with major roads, and traversed spaces full of a summer’s green growth. The sky was low and overcast. From Hounslow Central the walk along the Staines Road was longer than he had expected (perhaps because, despite being late, he was walking slowly) and he had started to wonder whether he might have missed the turning when he found it — a quiet road of hawthorn bushes and speed humps. On one side, hidden behind trees and hedges, was the heath. From the other, from one of the cul-de-sacs that curved between the houses, he heard the crackling jingle of an ice-cream van, which was immediately obliterated by a heavy mass of aircraft noise as another plane went over.

Later he would sit tipsily in the garden, watching them. They were low enough for him to see the white eddies of turbulence on the trailing edges of their wings. Heather’s father, Mike Willison — an immigration officer at Heathrow — said that he could tell from its noise alone what sort of plane each was. Laughing, they tested him — he put his hands theatrically over his eyes. To Paul they all sounded more or less the same, except the jumbo jets. These seemed lower than the others, and to be moving more slowly — it was frightening when he first saw one, the way it seemed to hang over the houses as it hauled its palpably enormous weight into the cloud-blanket. Warm and fuzzy with wine, and swirling in its glass the whisky that Mike had pressed on him, Paul meditated on the sound of the planes as they went over at one-minute intervals. The sequence was always the same. Thunder, emerging quickly from the depths of the scale until it started the drinks tinkling on the tray, then the harsh sound of a circular saw set to sheet metal, and finally, when the plane was overhead, a loud whistle or wail or scream. ‘Amazing when you think of all those people off to America and God knows where, isn’t it?’ shouted Joan Willison, holding a cigarette and looking up — an observation that, like her husband’s aeronautical party trick, was offered to all first-time visitors.