David Szalay - London and the South-East

And as if to underline this, he imagines — framing the horrors to himself with the energy of a medieval painter depicting hell — what would happen if he were to walk out, and stay out. What would he do? Wander around. Shelter from the rain somewhere — a bus stop, the station, under some trees. And as night fell, and the temperature dropped? What then? A bench? A doorway? And in the morning? He would want coffee, food. He would be hungry. Would he sit outside Churchill Square, then, with a cardboard face, an angry plea written clumsily across it? What other options were there? Still, the idea of passing each day in meditative inaction, watching the busy legs stride past, amassing a few quid for a bun, a sausage roll, a cup of tea, is not without appeal. (He thinks of the Buddha, sitting under his tree, waiting for wisdom.) Perhaps it would be possible to find a bed in a hostel somewhere … But, of course, it would be far, far more vicious and desperate than that. A pitch outside Churchill Square, he knows, is highly prized — as is any prime stretch of pavement. (And in winter the places where warm air pours out of office buildings.) It is not possible simply to show up with your cardboard announcement and start soliciting coins. Someone else would already be in possession of that spot, and almost certainly prepared to fight for it. It would, after all, be the only thing they were in possession of, apart from the filthy togs they were standing up in. And the strangled shouts of fighting tramps speak of a life in which the mundane material struggle, though simplified, is not in any way eluded.

And there is another problem. He knows that he would not be able to walk out on Heather and the children. In this there seems to be little positive volition on his part. He even finds it slightly shameful. And thinking about it, he experiences one of his periodic storms of jealousy and ill-will towards the man who did walk out, and stay out — though presumably never homeless — Dr John Hall. Still a potent absence after so many years. He can never be forgotten, of course — through the children he maintains his profile in the household; literally maintains it in Oli’s high forehead, in Marie’s wide inelegant mouth and curly black hair. It troubles Paul sometimes, this ineradicability of Dr John Hall.

He knows little of him, or of Heather’s life with him. What he does know is that in her early twenties Heather was a healthcare assistant at the West Middlesex Hospital in Isleworth. This hospital job was, he thinks, her father’s idea; and it was there that she met John Hall. When he finished his internship and said that he was moving to Brighton, where he had a job lined up, she went with him. They lived in a flat on the top floor of a shabby Victorian villa (Paul has seen it from the outside) on a steep street near the station. They went on holiday to Turkey one summer, and Italy the next, on that occasion with another doctor from the surgery and his wife. They had a second-hand car — it was then, Paul knows, that Heather learned to drive. She did some secretarial work. He knows that they moved house once or twice, once while Heather was pregnant with Marie. Oliver was named after John Hall’s father.

Paul does not know exactly what happened next. The way he understands it, one day Dr John Hall just disappeared.

So many years later, however, he is, inevitably, still here. It is even possible that Heather is still in touch with him — Paul suspects that he sends her money for the children. It is probably piling up in a savings account somewhere, or invested in sound financial products — Heather would be sensible like that. She has never spoken to him about this money. She has never really spoken to him about John at all, and he has only seen a few photos of him, stumbled on when searching for something else in an obscure drawer.

Paul often supposes that, in spite of everything, Heather is still in love with John Hall, or with an idealised memory of him. (It was her idea, for instance, that they move to Brighton, where he had left her — and troubled by its associations with him, Paul, though wanting to leave London, had insisted on Hove.) And during these periods of jealousy especially, he finds himself objecting to the way in which he helps to support the doctor’s children, while at the same time never being allowed in any way to supplant him as their acknowledged father. There is, Paul sometimes feels, something humiliating about this. And far from improving with time, it seems to have become worse.

When he goes downstairs, once more in stockinged feet, the rain is falling steadily through the twilight outside, puddling the old tarmac and uneven pavements of Lennox Road. Soon Heather will be home from work, and the children from school. And while, standing at the window, he is thankful to be inside, out of the weather, this is tempered — more than tempered, almost entirely undermined — by the depressing, inescapable sense that he is a prisoner, unable to walk out, and stay out.

HE HAS NOT hitherto been used to having the house to himself. They have not, that is, spent much time alone together — Paul and the house — and soon they sit in awkward silence, the small talk exhausted, the situation odd. The house, in particular, is a shy, taciturn presence, and just to lift the hush that hangs so heavily in its interiors, Paul finds himself telling it whatever pops into his head. He has hardly thought, since the week of make-believe when Heather dropped him at the station every morning and he had no work to go to, of his former fellow salesmen, his erstwhile mates. The Christmas holidays ensued, and he never thought of them when he was on holiday. So it was not until well into the second week of January — when the sense of an extra-long Christmas was slowly shading into something else, something disquietingly shapeless and open-ended — that, lying on the sofa somewhere in the level afternoon, he found himself telling the empty house about them. About Murray, for instance — Murray Dundee, the Croc. Paul explains to the house that Murray’s nickname in fact predates the 1986 film usually taken to be its inspiration. (Though, of course, a new and extraordinary element of hilarity was added when posters for something called Crocodile Dundee suddenly started to appear.) No, the nickname was inspired, he understands, by Murray’s smile — a long, cold, crocodilian thing. His memories of Murray in the early days, when he worked for him at Burdon Macauliffe, are murky. It is strange, though, to think that Murray was younger then than Paul is now. He has a memory — he tells the empty house — of watching a rugby match in a pub on the river somewhere. Putney or somewhere. Rain falling into the grey river. The terraces of the pub wet and deserted. Raindrops beading the outdoor furniture. Murray was there, and Lawrence, and Eddy Jaw … The house seems unimpressed by this plotless little fragment, and Paul moves on.

Years later. Northwood. Fucking dial-a-deal. It was fun — everyone making so much money in the smart little office overlooking Fleet Street. To listen to the men who were there, you would think that every pitch was a deal. It was not like that, of course. Still, there were undoubtedly more deals than usual. Made twelve thousand pounds in a single month, Paul says proudly. (Perhaps the house is impressed, perhaps not.) Murray had had enough money to find four thousand for a personalised number plate for his Sierra. What was it?

M56 RRA .

And Paul remembers laughing — farting with laughter in the shadowy interior of the Chesh — and Eddy screaming in Murray’s unsteadily smiling face, ‘You could have got a better fucking car for that!’ There was — though it was obviously something to do with the money, there seemed to be more to it than that — there was an air of insouciance about that time. They could do what they wanted — that was the prize of success. There were long liquid lunches in the Wine Press, and later spliffs in Gough Square, in the vibrant stillness of the shade.