David Szalay - London and the South-East

In the warm gules of Christmas-tree light, Paul crumbles the fragrant hash. Yes, the ‘golden hello’. That should cover Chrimble, even if Heather seems determined to overwhelm her parents and in-laws with superfluous luxury. All the products she buys have that designation. And, it seems, anything with that designation, she buys. Questioning these arrangements would see Paul condemned — by Heather, with the tacit support of the children — as a kind of hateful Scrooge. A joyless puritan. Yes, an awful person. He knows this, and will not question them. And if he is worried about the amount of money she is spending, he probably ought not have told her that he was starting a new job at a place where they have bowls of fresh figs in the office and order in lunch from Carluccio’s. For two weeks, he has been telling her that he is on the point of being deluged with lucre, and now he frowns at his own foolishness.

Briefly rubbing his fingertips across each other to remove the clinging residue of the hash, he feels, like a sudden blow, the leaden exhaustion in his head. After this spliff, he is sure, he will be able to sleep. Perhaps here on the sofa. He hates to think about what will happen at PLP in the morning — finds it almost literally unbearable to imagine. His imaginings focus on Murray. As he fashions the roach, he sees Murray arrive, take off his coat, and say something like, ‘Where the fuck is everybody?’ Only Sami, Nayal and Andy are there, uneasily occupying their desks. (Richard was sacked last week.) Sami shrugs. Nayal, of course, knows what has happened, but he too shrugs, and says nothing. Andy still has that stupid smile on his face. And Murray, sensing imminent humiliation, will be enflamed, tense, aggressive. He will phone Paul. And when he finds his phone switched off — Paul has already decided to have his phone switched off all morning — he will know, somewhere inside him, he will know what has happened. But at first he will not want to believe it. He will phone several times. Leave messages, terse and shaking with horror. Or perhaps he will be too horrified, too humiliated, to leave messages. That Dave Shelley, in particular, should have been included, and not him, will seem impossible. Just too insulting, too humiliating to be true. It will take him time to understand that it is true. And it will be a great sensation — like a huge heist. People will flock to peer at the empty desks — somehow sinister in their sheer normality. When Paul thinks of his fellow managers in particular — of Tony Peters, Simon Beaumont and Neil Mellor — he wishes that he were able to be there to take the plaudits of their hypocrisy. And Lawrence. When he imagines Lawrence, Paul experiences pity, of all things. And a strange sort of shame. But his imagination keeps focusing on Murray — on the moment when Murray understands what has happened. What he, Paul, has done.

He has stopped making the spliff, and is simply sitting on the couch, his spine a dejected curve, his white forearms resting on his white knees. The possibility of sleep seems to have been driven away by his dwelling on these things.

He did not tell them, his six recruits, until Saturday afternoon that the move was on for tomorrow — today. He phoned them when he had finished with the tree, still out in the cold, dying garden, with wet sawdust on his shoes. His forehead was frosted with sweat. There was an excitement about it. He felt like Hannibal, or whatever his name is, in The A-Team — the one who loves it when a plan comes together. He had intended to phone them on his way home after seeing Eddy in the Cardinal, but at Jaw’s suggestion had waited until the weekend. As Eddy pointed out, if he told them on Thursday, some of them might not show up for work on Friday, which would have led to unnecessary suspicion. He licks the adhesive strip of the paper and, without finesse, rolls the joint. This done, he compacts its contents with the blunt point of a plastic chopstick kept specifically for the purpose, and twists the paper at the end. He snips off the resulting bow with a pair of nail scissors.

Though he has been doing so sporadically all weekend, he has still not entirely sifted his memories of Friday night — the Pig’s birthday, and inevitably, under the circumstances, a strange occasion. Murray, in particular, had been grotesquely drunk. All afternoon in the Penderel’s Oak he had been drinking determinedly and, too far gone for anything else, he kept trying to start renditions of ‘Happy Birthday’. For a while people sang along, but eventually they just stopped joining in, and on the final occasion — perhaps the fifth — he found himself singing solo. Once he had started, it would have been more embarrassing to stop — that was obviously what he thought — but it was painful, unpleasant, to watch him press on alone, slurring and out of tune, in spite of the horror of the situation, which was visible in his eyes, though his mouth was still trying to smile.

Later he vomited on the floor of the toilets in the Indian. Paul saw him suddenly white out, and stagger from the table. When he sat down again, he was a more normal colour. ‘That’s fucking disgusting,’ he said, not making eye contact with his curry. ‘Someone’s sicked up in the toilets. On the floor.’ Everyone must have known it was him. They had all, surely, seen the urgent way he staggered to his feet, felling his chair. But the Pig was still engrossed in his food, mopping out a metal bowl with a naan, and his wife Angel, who was almost as drunk as Murray, seemed to take what he said at face value, expressing voluble, almost hysterical disgust. Andy did not seem to hear, seemed to be thinking about something else. They had been in the restaurant — a small, old-style Indian, dark, with barely audible sitar music, and a heavy, soporific atmosphere — for a long time. It seemed like hours. They were practically the only people there, and their conversation, what little there was of it, could be effortlessly overheard by the two unoccupied waiters standing near the kitchen door. The obvious weary boredom of these waiters did nothing to enliven the atmosphere. When Murray announced that ‘someone’ had thrown up on the floor of the Gents, Paul saw them glance at each other. Then one of them went into the toilet. A moment later he emerged, looking shaken.

Paul did not feel well himself. He felt bloated with beer and curry. No longer drunk, though not sober either. Quite downcast, in fact. To be there, at the end, with Murray and Andy, both of them oblivious to what was looming, was not what he had wanted. He wished that Murray was not so drunk. Why was Murray so drunk? There was something dark and miserable about his drunkenness. Andy, too, was strangely silent and withdrawn — smoking sullenly, he stared at the exit. And Paul was aware that he himself must have seemed preoccupied and morose. (It had appalled him how he had been unable, all morning in the office, to act normally — people had been asking him if he was okay.) Only the Pig and Angel seemed their ordinary selves. The Pig untalkative and indifferent, and Angel, wearing a pink T-shirt with Angel picked out in rhinestones, her face pockmarked, motor-mouthing on her own for minutes at a time. She had an American accent with a tangy Hispanic twist. The Pig had brought her back from the Philippines, and must — Paul thought, as she talked and talked — weigh several times more than her. What were those monstrous things he had seen on television? Elephant seals … The celebrations, the festivities, had begun hours before, in daylight, in the Penderel’s Oak, and she had been drinking vodka Red Bulls since noon — at one point flirting drunkenly with Andy, sitting in his lap, unbuttoning his shirt and putting her hand inside it. This was not unusual. Embarrassed, Andy tried to stop her, while the Pig looked on with apparent indifference.