David Szalay - London and the South-East

She goes upstairs, into the bedroom, where the lights are off. In the dark, she can see Paul lying on his back, with his hands behind his head. ‘What are you doing?’ she says sharply. ‘Your parents are leaving.’ He does not move or speak. She turns on the light. Though it has slipped back on his head, he is still wearing the mauve paper crown, and seeing it, she puts her hand up and snatches off the yellow one that she had forgotten she was still wearing herself. ‘Your parents are leaving,’ she says again. ‘What should I tell them? You’re not coming down to say goodbye?’

‘How much was that TV?’ Paul asks, still staring at the ceiling.

‘What?’

‘How much was the TV? How much did it cost?’

She frowns. ‘Um. About two thousand pounds.’

‘Can we take it back?’

‘What do you mean? Why?’

‘To get the money back.’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘Shut the door.’

‘What is it?’ She looks worried now. She shuts the door. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m in trouble, Heather.’

‘What trouble?’ She is not entirely surprised. He has been behaving strangely for weeks. And there was — this she especially noticed — there was something odd about his answers whenever she questioned him about his new job. She feels sure it must have something to do with that. ‘What trouble?’ she says again. He seems unable to speak. His eyes are fixed on the off-white ceiling, where the light-shade is surrounded by perforated, concentric shadows. Irritated by his stalling, and starting to panic, she says, ‘ What —’

This time he interrupts her: ‘I’ve lost my job.’ After he has said it, moving only his head, so that the paper crown almost slips off, he turns to look at her. He seems to look out of simple curiosity, to see what her reaction will be. Initially, she shows no reaction, except that her nose seems to twitch. Once, twice. Her large blue eyes stare at him. Her face is perhaps pale. She is shocked, despite all the premonitions. ‘Why are you telling me this now?’ she says. And he notices that she is trembling with a strange intensity of feeling. A sort of fury. It startles him. ‘I know I should have told you before. I wanted to. I tried.’ He sits up, inelegantly, with an effort of his muscleless trunk, eventually having to use his arms. ‘Sweetheart, I tried.’

‘Your parents are leaving,’ she says. And she leaves herself, and goes downstairs.

VAGUELY PAUL REMEMBERS kissing his mother, shaking hands warmly with his father in the hall.

The next morning he wakes very early. It is only just starting to get light outside, and Heather and the children are still asleep. The silence is so strong, so settled that the house itself seems to be asleep. He feels strangely clear-headed, though shivery and fragile, and wonders what time he went to bed. It cannot have been later than eight or nine. Perhaps earlier. He does not remember Heather’s parents leaving. What he does remember, suddenly, sharply, standing amidst the piled-up, encrusted wreckage of the kitchen, is his own performance, and from that his mind instantly flinches. Did he …? Surely not. Yes. Yes . Searching the lounge for cigarettes, assailed by an urgent need to atone, he knows that he will have to do something. Private sorrow, even sincere words, will not be enough. Something will have to be done . Of course, he has been in this situation before. Innumerable times. It is almost a weekly event — the grey-faced penitent in his terrycloth dressing gown, engaged in psychic self-flagellation. That is easy — essentially painless. Nothing more, in fact, than self-indulgence, self-pity. No, that will not be enough … And how many times has he said that ! How many times has he said solemnly to himself, ‘ That will not be enough ’? It is simply part of the hypocritical show, a well-established element of the snivelling self-disgust, something which he quickly permits himself to forget, usually by mid-afternoon, as soon as the physical pain recedes, and even in the worst, the grimmest cases, within twenty-four hours. It is not easy, therefore, for him to take these feelings seriously. Their very familiarity is deeply demoralising and, like the ashy half-cigarette he is smoking, makes him feel significantly worse. That he is not actually in physical pain, and yet still has such feelings is, however, a positive sign. So perhaps is his unusually intense and moody awareness of his failure to follow through on previous occasions.

He is impatient for it to be light outside, so that he can leave the house. He does not want to be there when Heather wakes up. A soft greyness is in possession of the street when he sneaks upstairs to dress. He takes some clothes — whatever is to hand — and puts them on downstairs.

Outside the uncertain grey has hardened into daylight — white and flat, cloud-light — and unsurprisingly, the streets are empty. They are sound asleep.

The Hove seafront is prosaic — modest blocks of flats peep over the weathered line of locked swimming huts to the waves, the pebbled shore. Pausing for a lone lorry to sweep past towards Brighton, Paul crosses the road and goes down the brick steps to the beach. It is only now that he smells the sea — wet wool, salt, sodden wood, mussel shells. The beach rises in a steep hump. There are bald patches of sand further down. The air is cold, and the sky, though still clear over the Channel, is starting to cloud over, as it often does in the morning. Orange buoys are dark dots on the tinfoil water. He stands there, his hands in his pockets, while the wind inflates his jacket and flutters his trouser legs. The waves fall lazily, unhurriedly, each looking for a moment like an imperfect barrel of green glass until it falls and expends itself in a sigh of the shifting flints and shingles. Hugging the wall of the esplanade, making slow progress over the pebbles underfoot, he starts to walk towards Brighton, and its grander line of seafront wedding cakes.

*

He opens the front door with trepidation. Heather, he hears, is in the kitchen, doing the washing-up. He is tired, and the boots are hurting his feet. He sits down on the second carpeted step and eases them off, then hovers indecisively in the hall for a few moments, holding in one hand the milk he has bought, and in the other the cigarettes. When he finally goes into the kitchen — she ignores him. He puts the milk down on the table, and taking a tea towel, without saying anything, starts to dry the things that she has washed. This goes on for some time, the only sound the sloshing of the water in the sink. It goes on, in fact, until the washing-up is finished, almost an hour later. At which point, Heather pulls off the pink rubber gloves and, still without having spoken to him, walks out. ‘Heather,’ he says. She immediately turns in the doorway. She is wearing her dressing gown and slippers, her hair a Sunday-morning mess. ‘What?’

‘You all right?’

She seems undecided how to respond, and hesitates. Then she says, ‘I think we need to talk, Paul.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘I’m going to have a bath.’

‘Okay.’

She goes upstairs, and full of foreboding, he refills the kettle.

The talk takes place a little later, when Mike and Joan — who spent the night in a hotel in Brighton — take the children to McDonald’s for lunch.

At first, they seem to misunderstand each other. Paul assumes that the primary topic will be his offensive stunt of the previous day, his successful attempt to spoil Christmas, but, while Heather is angry about that, her main worry — and it makes sense to him as soon as he thinks about it — is the fact that he no longer has a job.

She is, he thinks, surprisingly sympathetic. However, when she asks him — her eyes serious, worried, yet full of a desire to understand, to take his side — why exactly he lost his job, he finds himself unable to tell her the truth. He says that the new job — the one he has been talking about for weeks — ‘unfortunately fell through’ (‘I thought it sounded too good to be true,’ she sighs), and that he was sacked from his old job for not making target on the publication. She looks at him — he looks wretched — and says, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. It is. I know you’ll find another job. And you’re brilliant at what you do.’ She says that they are ‘in this together’, and even that she will do a few more hours a week at Gumley Rhodes.