David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘Sorry, I don’t understand,’ Paul says. He shakes his head, squinting. ‘Mechanical problem with a plant ?’

‘With a piece of plant. A lawnmower, for instance.’ There is a tiny edge of impatience in Woburn’s voice.

‘Oh, plant, yeah.’ Paul laughs. ‘Sorry. Um. Well. If there was a mechanical problem …’ He wonders what to say. ‘I would inform my supervisor?’

At first Woburn says nothing. Then, ‘You wouldn’t attempt to repair the problem yourself?’

For some reason — perhaps something odd in Woburn’s tone — Paul thinks that this is a trick question, that he is being set up to say that he would, only to be told that it is against the health and safety procedures. This would obviously undermine his earlier suggestion that he was familiar with them — thus, of course, undermining everything that he has said. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well …’ He is hesitant, terribly unsure now.

‘You wouldn’t even perform a preliminary investigation?’ Woburn says. Paul is uneasily silent. ‘To establish whether it is a minor difficulty before referring it to the workshop?’ He seems to be quoting from something.

‘I suppose, I would, yes,’ Paul says. ‘I mean, I thought you meant, once I had established that. Yes.’

He tries to see what Woburn is writing on the form, but Woburn is left-handed and writes with his wrist wrapped secretively around the pen. ‘Would you say you were physically fit?’

‘Quite. Yes. Quite.’

Woburn seems unconvinced. He does not even nod. ‘I’m going to read you a list of things,’ he says. ‘I want you to tell me, in each case, whether you think they’d present a problem for you.’

‘Sure.’ Paul clears his throat.

‘Walking,’ Woburn says.

‘Walking?’

‘Up to ten miles a day.’

‘Fine. No problem.’

‘Okay …’ There is no doubting the scepticism in Woburn’s voice. ‘Digging,’ he says. ‘For example, bedding. Or graves.’

‘Graves?’

‘Or bedding.’

‘I don’t think that would be a problem.’

In the same sceptical tone, Woburn says, ‘Okay.’ He presses on: ‘Spraying. For example, carrying twenty litres of pesticides.’ And he looks at Paul, looks him in the face, as if defying him to say that he would be able to do that without difficulty.

‘In a kind of backpack?’ Paul says. ‘Sure. That would be okay.’

‘Lifting small plant and machinery. For example, hedge trimmers, mower boxes, bags of fertiliser, tree branches ’ — he seems to emphasise that — ‘et cetera.’

Paul nods. ‘M-hm.’

‘You wouldn’t have any problem with those sorts of activities?’

‘No.’

Once more, Woburn pauses pointedly. And Paul thinks that he detects a snide amusement in his voice — is sure that he sees a mocking smile quiver on his dainty mouth — when he says, ‘Climbing trees.’ He looks up for a moment. ‘Climbing trees with ladder or hoist.’

Paul nods. ‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘Yes?’ Woburn’s eyebrows — which are still dark despite the white mop — have actually ascended.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Okay. Do you do regular physical exercise?’ Woburn says, offhand, writing something down. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking.’

‘I don’t mind. Yes I do.’

He is looking quickly through Paul’s CV. ‘And you don’t have a driving licence?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’ For a few moments he says nothing, scanning the CV, one hand loosely holding his turquoise tie. ‘And your date of birth is 12th of June ’65? That is right?’

‘Yes.’

Woburn nods. He seems to suspect Paul of being a man well into his forties trying to pass himself off as thirty-nine. ‘Okay,’ he says with an insincere smile on his soft pink face. ‘Well, thank you very much for coming in.’

‘That’s all right.’

They stand up. Woburn’s handshake is limp. He starts to follow Paul upstairs, so Paul says, ‘It’s okay, thanks. I can find my own way out.’

‘No, I have to meet someone else in reception.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

The awkward silence in which they walk slowly up the stairs does not suggest that the interview has been a success.

‘Bye,’ Paul says.

‘Yes, bye,’ says Woburn.

A young man is waiting there. His head is a mass of bright piercings — nose, ears, eyebrows, lip, tongue. He is dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie and sturdy trainers. ‘Michael Fry?’ Woburn says.

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

They shake hands.

(And months later Paul happens to see Michael Fry in Hove Park, on a ride-on mower, smoking what appears to be a spliff as it drones slowly over the lawn.)

It never occurred to Paul that he might not be able to work as a gardener. Even after such an obviously unsatisfactory interview, it is a shock to him. And having allowed himself to become infatuated with an idea of professional horticulture, he is uninterested in anything else. In desperation, he applies for a job at the Wyevale Garden Centre — thus violating his own ban on the retail sector in the interests of spending the day among plastic sacks of compost and terracotta planters. He does not even get an interview. And for several days after that he does nothing — spends much of the time in bed, or asleep on the couch under lingering blue veils of cigarette smoke, Heather increasingly freaked by his lapse into total inertia. And it is then, in mid-January, that he flirts one dark afternoon with the idea of becoming a tramp. It seems to him, as he lies on the couch, nothing more than a logical extension of his failed plan to become a gardener, inasmuch as that had grown out of a wish to secede from sales, money, status. Well, if he wished to secede, why not do it properly? And lying on his back in the dim room, he experiences a surge of dark, fizzing excitement, a sudden twinkling sense of freedom. Part of the appeal, of course, is simply that it is possible — always possible. All he has to do is walk out. And stay out. He can transform everything, his whole life, as simply as that. He will relinquish all his possessions except for the clothes he is wearing, and wander the streets, seeking wisdom … His mind sparkles with excitement at the thought of this. He has recently started to take an interest in ascetic and anti-materialist figures — St Francis of Assisi, Sundar Singh, Michael Landy, men who embody notions of success specifically opposed to the piling-up of pelf — and as he muses on his, perhaps quixotic, understanding of their tenets (essentially, that it is only by possessing nothing, nothing , that we can hope to see, to understand, who and what we are), the idea of simply walking away from the burden of his material and financial problems seems irresistible. Why not? Why not just walk out — and stay out? And with a sudden energetic movement, he sits up.

He is upstairs, sitting on the edge of the bed to tie his bootlaces, when it starts to rain. He has slept outside twice in the past. Once as a student, when he and some friends went to Amsterdam for the weekend, and too tired and stoned to sort out somewhere to stay, had simply lain down on the floor of the station, where Dutch policemen kept prodding them with their steel-toed footwear. It had been a sort of torture — especially as they had spent the previous night on a coach, and partly on a ferry, watching with itchy, exhaustion-fogged eyes as obese truck drivers ate roast dinners in the seesawing ship’s hot canteen. When dawn started to seep through, they were back on the coach, moving slowly north through a flat agricultural landscape. So by the time they lay down on the stone floor of Centraal, they had been up for forty hours. Yes, a memorably bad night. But not as bad as the other one. It was not so much the discomfort that made this one undoubtedly worse — it was how he had felt in the morning. It was very cold, and he had woken many times during the night — possibly every five or ten minutes — instinctively pressing himself further into the soft rubbish that kept him slightly warm. When he woke for the last time, it was daylight and he had never felt so cold. He did not understand why he was there. A refuse truck was approaching along the street — a street of the blind backs of buildings. He could hear the coarse shouts of the men, and the hissing and crunching of the machine’s operation. Never has he embarked on a day more unhappily, and with less hope, than he did then.