David Szalay - London and the South-East

For Paul, Sunday is typically the least toxic day of the week, and this one was no exception. He had woken with an erection, an increasingly unusual occurrence, and inveigled Heather into sex for the first time in over a month. Then he had pulled on some clothes and gone out into the morning, which was frosty, to buy the paper and a pack of cigarettes. Returning to bed with tea and an ashtray, he and Heather had read the paper. He started with the sports section, studying every word of the snooker and taking a passing interest in some of the other sports, such as motor racing and rugby. Then he moved on to the business section. Not all of it — mostly pieces on companies whose products and services he purchases himself. Diageo, for instance, and BAT. J. D. Wetherspoon and SouthEast Trains. He started to read one of the economic analysis columns before noticing, halfway down, that he literally did not understand what it was about , let alone the specifics of what it was trying to say. He had started on it out of a sense of obligation — a sense that he ought to understand these things. But why? he wondered, untidily folding the business pages and dropping them onto the carpet. Why?

He turned his attention next to the news section, which Heather had just finished with. (She was now reading the travel section.) Wearily, he ploughed through national and international news and various op-ed pieces. A lot about house prices. He liked the almost irreverent little graphics which this particular paper always uses to illustrate its news articles — little men jumping out of an exploding truck to show how an escape had occurred, statistics presented as a series of different-sized oil barrels, a picture to show exactly how, in several numbered stages, a light aircraft had become tangled in power lines and crashed in a field. Finishing the news, he hesitated between the News Review and the travel section, which Heather had discarded (she was now looking through the Culture magazine). Neither of them particularly appealed to him. In the end he decided on the News Review, but only after leafing quickly through travel. The News Review kept him occupied for quite a while, and he followed it with a flip through the glossy Lifestyle magazine (shite, he thought, as always) and a half-hearted study of the personal finance section, before searching through the mass of paper everywhere on the bed to make sure that he had not overlooked anything. He found a special property pull-out — an ‘Essential Guide to Buying and Selling’ — which he perused for a while. (‘Appointments’ and the kids’ section he never bothered with, and the Culture magazine, because it contained the TV listings, would be around all week — there was no hurry where that was concerned.) By this time it was dark outside. At various points during the day he had made trips to the kitchen for food — cheese toasties, crisps, biscuits, a French stick defrosted in the microwave, pâté. More tea. Later, in the waist of the afternoon, while he was reading the News Review, he had gone to get a beer. The detritus of all this surrounded them. Heather, smoking guiltily, wearing glasses and her dressing gown under the duvet, was reading the Lifestyle magazine. His head full of fresh information, most of which he was already forgetting, Paul went downstairs in his towelling dressing gown and socks, turning on the light in the dark hall. The measured sounds of televised snooker could be heard through the sitting-room door.

The only other thing to happen on Sunday was that Martin Short came round. Sitting on the sofa, watching the snooker with Oliver, who for some reason had his cue with him, Paul was irked when the doorbell rang. Oliver had been there all afternoon. It was about five o’clock when Paul joined him, during the second frame of Ebdon’s third-round match against Lee, and sixish when the doorbell rang. For fuck’s sake , Paul thought. ‘You expecting someone?’ he shouted up the small stairs. ‘It’s probably Martin,’ Heather shouted back. ‘He said he might come round to do the drains.’ Paul opened the front door, and there was Martin Short, somewhat inappropriately six foot four, his breath vaporous in the evening’s iciness, holding clobber. The clobber, a mass of hoses and metal coils and pumps, was a professional drain de-blocking machine. What kind of fucking idiot, Paul found himself thinking — and he was aware of the implicit ingratitude — has his own professional drain de-blocking machine? ‘All right, Martin?’ he said.

‘Thanks, Paul,’ said Martin, smiling warily. ‘And you?’

‘Yeah, I’m all right.’

A manager at the West Hove Sainsbury’s, Martin lives a few houses down with his wife, Eleanor. She is eight years older than he is, and his lean and youthful thinness stand in ever more tragicomic opposition to her increasing obesity and evident middle age. Wearing a blue tracksuit that had obviously been ironed, he lugged his machine into the hall, while Paul mumbled, ‘Cheers, Martin. Lucky for us you’ve got this thing.’

‘Yeah it is,’ Martin said. ‘Well. Should we get started?’ Paul helped him move the machine into the kitchen, where the sink now took several hours to drain and the imperceptible slowness of the receding water left an unpleasant greasy scum on the stainless steel. ‘Let’s have a look.’ Martin opened the cupboard under the sink, where the cleaning products were kept, and clearing them out, knelt on the floor’s fake terracotta tiles and half crawled into the musty space. Feeling it his tiresome duty to stay there while Martin worked, Paul watched his fleshless tracksuited arse — the outline of his underpants visible — and the white soles of his trainers with unsmiling disdain. ‘Got a bucket?’ Martin said.

‘Um, yeah.’ Paul found it and put it into his waiting hand.

‘I’m just going to take the U-bend out.’

‘Fine.’

There was a short sloshing sound, like someone being sick. Paul lit a cigarette and looked on, bored, while Martin backed out of the cupboard, his hands black with foul-smelling sludge, and started to set up his equipment. Kneeling again, he inserted the long flexible bladed rod of his machine into the waste pipe. ‘Give it a few minutes,’ he said. Paul nodded. ‘Do you want a beer or something, Martin?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘You sure? I’m going to have one.’

‘Thanks.’

In silence, Paul opened the fridge and took out a can of Foster’s and opened it. The disdain with which he regarded Martin was mirrored more or less exactly in Martin’s opinion of him, as he looked at him now, in his dressing gown and socks, unshaved, smoking, a slob. Neither of them quite suspected the extent to which the other looked down on him — it would have seemed an Escher-like impossibility. There was some tense silence, then deciding that he had to say something, Paul said, ‘Been watching the snooker, Martin?’

‘Not really.’

‘No? Fair enough.’

A short conversation, and neither of them even tried to pretend that he had enjoyed it. After a few moments, though, Martin seemed to feel that it was his turn to make an effort, and said, ‘It’s very restful, isn’t it, though. The green. That’s what they say.’

‘Yeah, I suppose it is. I suppose it is,’ said Paul. And then the silence reasserted itself until, damp-haired and dressed, Heather joined them. ‘Hi, Martin,’ she said, smiling widely. ‘How are you? Do you want a cup of tea? Do you want a mince pie?’

Martin did want a cup of tea, and a mince pie, and a cloth to wipe his hands.

There are several hundred luxury mince pies in the house. Heather has already started to stock up on wine and champagne, brandy and port and cigars. The fridge and the freezer are overfilled, and the children are longing for objects they have seen on TV, or in the hands of envied mates at school. Their longing is clamorous, whiny, sometimes tearful. An ultra-hard sell. They have been brought up to long for objects, Paul reflects sleepily. To believe that having things brings happiness. Look around you, he thinks, holding the lighter flame to the brown hashish, turn on the TV, open a magazine, walk down a street — see the pictures of happy people. Paul himself is lukewarm on the subject of Christmas. It is expensive, of course — that’s the whole point — and this year both his parents and Heather’s are coming to Hove for the lunch. He knows that Heather has bought a new TV, an enormous flat-panel thing. It is hidden in the garden shed — he hardly ever goes in there, but he found it when he was looking for a saw. It must have cost thousands, that TV. It was covered with old blankets in a crude attempt to conceal it or keep out the damp, and at first he thought it was a piece of furniture, a massive flat-pack from IKEA. Oh well, he thinks, with weary tolerance. In two weeks it will all be over for another year. And Eddy’s promised ‘golden hello’ should take some of the strain off the finances.