David Szalay - London and the South-East

For a moment Paul was silent. ‘This and that. You know. This and that.’ And Murray immediately started to talk about something else — something that he had ‘out there’. ‘There’s this goldfish breeder,’ he said. ‘Fucking Singaporean goldfish breeder. His name’s … It’s spelt … N G. How the fuck do you pronounce that?’ Paul shook his head slowly. ‘How the fuck do you pronounce that?’ Murray said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul. Murray said, ‘How the fuck do you pronounce that?’

‘Dunno,’ said Paul, staring at the green illuminated exit sign.

‘I said to him, I said to him, it’s the latest fucking big thing. Did you not know that? I’m talking about corporate HQs. Fucking fish tanks. Fucking aquariums …’

Paul was not listening.

Lying on the sofa, eyeing the off-white ceiling, he wonders what sort of friendship was expressed in that not untypical slice of time. Is it normal, he wonders — seeking the opinion of the silent house — for friendship to be such a mesh of irritations, of sly wounding stabs, of one-upmanships, of tedium? Surely not. There would seem to have been little, then, for either Murray or himself to traduce when they made their symmetrical pacts with Eddy Jaw. And there was a symmetry there. Though not a perfect one, of course. Nor, obviously, was the outcome symmetrical. But would he swap places with Murray now?

He imagines Murray, now, on — what is it? — Wednesday afternoon. Two thirty. Marooned on a wide grey sales floor, lying for a living. Struggling to sell space in pretend publications. Trying to talk impatient strangers into doing what is not in their interests. Losing sleep over notional sales targets. Smarting at the slap of blowouts. Marshalling muppets. Being bossed by Eddy Jaw. And seeing what a mistake he has made — two weeks into January, and not one sale — Eddy will be starting to lose it, starting to fly into eye-popping storms of anger, the veins on his neck standing up, his face the colour of sunstroke. And Murray sitting there, making small munching movements with his mouth, feebly trying to smile — trying to make light of it — while Eddy, in a plaid Hugo Boss suit, smashes the white plastic handset of Dave Shelley’s phone against the plasterboard wall.

Paul stands up — is woozy for a moment — then searches for his plastic pouch of tobacco and king-size papers. Once more sitting on the smooth floral fabric of the sofa, he starts to make a spliff. He had promised himself not to smoke one until five o’clock. However — he spells it out, though the house has made no objection — he has nothing to do, so there seems no point not being stoned. Stoned, everything seems further away, quite far away — as if seen from on holiday, or in hospital. And the tedium of the level afternoon is numbed. The house is tolerantly silent. Or does he — as he dusts the hash from his fingerprints — does he sense a hint of disapproval? A slight sad shake of the head? An almost inaudible sigh?

*

He is half asleep when a key scratching at the front-door lock prefaces the noisy ingress of Heather and the children. Oliver, in his school uniform, looks into the sitting room. He sees Paul lying on the sofa, like a hieroglyphic of a sleeping man — his legs tucked up, his hands under his head. Lazily, he opens his eyes. ‘All right, Oli?’ he mumbles. ‘Was just having a little nap.’

IN THE END it is Heather who finds him a job. From the kitchen, she hears him enter the hall — there is something exhausted about the way the front door shuts.

He has been in Brighton, talking to a street sweeper named Malcolm. It is mid-January — the 20th in fact — ‘almost February’ — and he had found, advertised in the Argus , ‘a vacancy in this high-profile operation for street sweepers’. The ‘operation’, once again, was Brighton and Hove Council. The only requirement of the job was ‘being able to stand up for eight hours a day’.

We are looking for hard-working, conscientious people who can work on their own with minimal supervision. Being able to stand up for 8 hours a day in all weather conditions is essential. Does this sound like you? If so, you could be who we are looking for .

The problem was that Paul was not sure if he could stand up for eight hours a day. And after his failures with Woburn and the Wyevale Garden Centre, he knew that he would not survive failure here. He had no experience of ‘cleansing’, had never undertaken a ‘litter pick’ — things which would surely weigh against him. The only other job he had even made enquiries about was a grave-digging post at Hove cemetery. Immediately excited by the possibilities of this — its rich nihilism, its ghoulish glamour, its echoes of Hamlet — he had phoned to ask if it was absolutely necessary that applicants be licensed to operate a mini excavator, and had been told that, yes, it was absolutely necessary. That was the job. Or at least the most important part of it. There would be some hand digging as well. Some of the other duties — they might have been off-putting to other people, or to himself at other times — positively attracted him. To work outdoors ‘to depths of seven feet in confined spaces’, to ‘lift grave shuttering boards’, to ‘locate graves for interments’, to ‘reopen graves’, to ‘assist at exhumations’. It had been disappointing about the mini excavator. Very disappointing. And moreover he was sure that it was Woburn he had spoken to when he phoned to ask about it. It was the same department — cemeteries, parks and open spaces.

Prudently, Paul decided to find an existing street sweeper and have a word with him. See what the job involved — there was no point trying for it if he did not think that he would be up to it, if it was pie in the sky. And it was thus that he found himself in conversation with Malcolm on the Brighton seafront opposite the conference centre — he had walked into town, where he wasn’t known — one sunny afternoon. ‘We don’t just sweep up chips and condoms,’ Malcolm was saying. ‘I picked up a bra the other day.’ He was leaning philosophically on his barrow, with stained fingers bringing the last damp, smokable centimetre of his roll-up to rocky lips. The exhaled smoke was accompanied, lower down, by a guttural shifting of phlegm. He cleared his throat. His face was delicate, russet-bearded, bespectacled, some grey hairs in the beard. There was something childlike about him, Paul thought. Also something of the intellectual — he had a self-conscious, thoughtful, measured way of speaking. ‘There’s this habit of public “grazing”, isn’t there?’ he said. Paul nodded sombrely. ‘When I started, twenty years ago, there was just the one fast-food outlet, a fish and chip shop in a back street. Now there’s takeaways everywhere.’

‘Yeah, there is,’ Paul agreed sadly.

For a few moments, the two of them stood there, looking out to sea, squinting, moist-eyed for the wind. The air was cold, brilliant.

Though his voice was frail, Malcolm obviously liked to talk, to muse aloud. Paul had told him that he was thinking of a street-sweeping job (he had expected Malcolm to find this surprising — he did not seem to) and wanted to know what it was like. ‘Well …’ Malcolm had said, still slightly wary. ‘You’ve got to keep your patch clean.’

‘Your patch?’ Paul said.

‘Your patch, yes. This is my patch.’ He outlined the limits of his patch — a stretch of seafront, and a hinterland of little streets. ‘It’s a good time to join, actually.’ Saying this with earnest enthusiasm, his narrow, smiling face seemed innocent and kind. ‘There’s more money coming into the service.’