David Szalay - London and the South-East

Well, good luck to them! Paul thought with joyful spite. He was out of it. And he felt a punch of elation. Yes, he was out of it. Out of the whole thing forever. He thought of the sinking feeling, the terrible obscure disappointment that he had experienced walking onto the sales floor in the morning, when he still thought that he would be working there. The sense of liberation was exquisite and heady. Time and space — the afternoon, the city’s thoroughfares — suddenly seemed opened to him. His . Wonderful. He stood and went to the bar. Standing in the pub’s warm mid-afternoon stillness — he and the Chelsea pensioner were the only ones there — he was almost euphoric.

GEOFF RAINEY, A heavy, saturnine man, stands alone in the lounge, holding a flute of effervescing champagne. He looks tired. For many years he worked for ICI, in the end managing a small plant in Buckinghamshire where nylon thread was manufactured. When it shut, it was difficult for him to find work, as a fifty-four-year-old with no experience of anything other than the textile industry, and for a decade now he has been a coach driver — mostly ferrying public schoolboys to and from sports matches and the theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Waiting in the hot coach, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, while the moneyed teenagers sit through King Lear , he eats his packed sandwiches, shaking the crumbs out of the Tupperware when he is finished, and reads the paper, or — for the last year or two — works on his poems. (One, ‘Sanatorium’, has been published in the Bucks Advertiser . Angela is threatening to read it out after lunch.) In two years, the mortgage will be paid off, and he will take the coach back to the depot in Aylesbury for the last time. From then on in, his ICI pension should suffice. He hears his wife’s loud voice on the stairs with Paul. Paul — as Geoff noticed when he opened the front door — looks tired and pale. He does not look well. Nor does he put much effort into the pretence that he is actually listening to what his mother is saying — an occasional nod or listless ‘Oh’ being the sum of it. When, a few minutes later, she stops speaking for a moment to take a sip of champagne, Geoff says, ‘So how are you, Paul? All right?’

‘Yeah, I’m well,’ Paul says. His mother smiles, her mouth drawn back from her long pink gums. She is a short woman, with a large head. Ever since the winter of his ‘crack-up’, questions such as ‘How are you?’ have become unpleasantly loaded — inescapably mementoes of that dark guilt-sodden episode, never openly spoken of — and to neutralise this they are put by his parents, especially his father, as now, in an exaggeratedly offhand tone. They still have a strange, spiky intensity. ‘Everything okay at work?’ Geoff follows up, his eyes fixed on the overdecorated Christmas tree, sadly lost under the weight of tinsel and empty boxes wrapped in gold paper and baubles. Under it there is a drift of presents, and standing apart — far too large to fit under the tree — a substantial oblong in shiny blue paper. On first entering, everyone notices this object, and wonders what it is.

‘M-hm,’ Paul says. ‘Um, I’ll just get the bubbly.’

Flushed with heat, sweating, Heather is heaving the huge half-cooked turkey from the oven. Paul smiles tensely, and opening the fridge, faces a wall of food. He stares at it for a few moments, in no hurry to return to the lounge. He has told no one, not even Heather, what happened. For a whole week, every morning at the usual time, she took him to the station. On Tuesday and Wednesday he actually went to London (Blackfriars, not Victoria) and spent the day in pubs there — indulging in a maudlin orgy of nostalgia and self-pity. On Thursday, he only got as far as Croydon, and on Friday he spent the morning at Gatwick Airport, boozing in the Red Lion, the pub-by-numbers in the departures area, before passing the afternoon in Three Bridges, mostly in the Snooty Fox. When Heather asked him about his new job, he was vague, but said it was going well. Unable to sleep, he spent much of the night smoking spliffs in the lounge. And in the morning had to haul himself out of bed and put on an otiose suit.

His thoughts turned uneasily to a news story he had once seen. It was set in France, and was about a man whose wife and children were under the impression that he was an eminent surgeon, when in fact he was unemployed and had no medical training whatsoever. And how had that situation started? Had he simply lied to a woman in a bar to impress her, and then, when they saw each other again, and started to go out, and later got married and had children, never told her the truth, found that it was too late to stop lying, just not possible because the lie was now an integral part of the very foundation of his life? He kept up the pretence for years, and in the end, when for some reason — probably something to do with money — it could no longer be sustained, he found it easier to kill his family, and then himself, than to admit the truth to them. Thus an apparently insignificant fib — perhaps even meant, in the first instance, as a joke, not intended to be taken seriously — ended in quadruple murder, in infanticide.

With the cold green champagne bottle, Paul returns to the lounge. He understands with unpleasant immediacy how a situation like that might turn into a living nightmare. When he got home on Monday, half sobered-up, and Heather asked him how his first day in the new job had gone, he hesitated for a moment. Then he smiled, and said, ‘Fine.’ He had not decided to hide what had happened from her. He had not decided anything. In that infinitesimal moment of hesitation things might have fallen either way. As it happened, they fell the way they did, and in just one week he has piled lies on lies — it is terrible the way they are proliferating. He has found it more and more difficult to keep track of them, to keep them in line. But at every point — and this was the truly pernicious thing — it was, in the short term, much easier to maintain the pretence than to admit the truth. Had it been thus for the unfortunate, foolish Frenchman? What extraordinary lengths he must have gone to to maintain the illusion. And how awful those years of pretence must have been for him. Paul remembers reading that while his family thought he was at work, the man simply spent all day sitting in his car. He did that every day for years . Sitting in his car. The stress of it. The boredom. The sense of waste. Of entrapment. A weird pretend life. And then, for everyone, death.

‘Well, merry Christmas,’ Paul says, with a wry, lopsided smile. Angela holds out her glass to be refilled. Her white hand is hard and fleshless. There are stony rings on some of her fingers. ‘Thanks, darling,’ she says.

Everything in the house has been altered in honour of the season. Even the windowpanes have had their corners sprayed white to suggest snow, though outside it is quite warm and grey and damp. And where did the money come from? (He is still thinking about the Frenchman, while his mother talks.) That was never properly explained. Perhaps an inheritance. Or stolen. Most probably just mountains of debt. And as has happened frequently over the past week, Paul suddenly sees with tilting vertiginous terror the depth of his own financial emergency. Most of the time, he is able to ignore it, but more and more frequently he is experiencing these moments of vertigo. When he does, his face becomes totally expressionless. ‘What is it?’ his mother asks worriedly. She must be worried — she was in the middle of telling him about Patrick’s new angora rabbit. ‘Oh, nothing,’ he says, smiling. She looks at him for a moment, and then, full of tedious zest, and as though nothing has happened, keeps telling him about Patrick’s rabbit. Patrick is a favourite of hers, a neighbour in Amersham, ‘openly gay’ — always the first thing she tells anyone about him. She is demonstrating how the rabbit wiggles its nose, while Geoff looks on impassively, holding his champagne. Paul’s smile is starting to get sore. He is trying to work out when, exactly, he will run out of money, when overdraft limits and credit-card limits will be hit, and how he will pay the January rent.