David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘Oh, is there?’ Paul said.

‘And we’ve got the brooms and barrows back.’ Malcolm smiled, and patted his equipment. ‘Machines are okay for some areas, but in the city centre they can’t get into corners. You know. Behind telephone boxes, for example.’ Paul nodded. He was experiencing a sort of joy. He felt that he had found — in this mild man, who, though intellectually vital, seemed satisfied with his simple honest life — a sort of ideal. The monks of Dharamsala had suggested how it should look. They, however, were no more than the flickers of his imagination and now here it was in flesh and grubby saffron overalls. ‘Shop doorways,’ Malcolm was saying — only one item in a long list of spaces inaccessible to street-sweeping machines. ‘Especially when they’ve got a step.’

‘Sure.’

There was a moment’s lull — the traffic went past, the waves hissed, the gulls mewled. The long dun beach stretched deserted between the two piers. Then Malcolm said, ‘There’s a hell of a lot of satisfaction in this job.’

‘Yeah, I bet.’ Paul was wet-eyed — was it only the wind?

‘You see the city wake up. You’re responsible for your patch. You feel part of the community. In spring, the birds are singing.’

‘Yeah,’ Paul said. ‘Yeah.’ He was smiling.

‘Mind you, in winter it’s cold, wet and depressing.’ Malcolm laughed. He had a shy, quiet laugh. ‘Your toes get cold and don’t warm up all day … But I couldn’t work indoors. And we’re the council workers most people meet. They like moaning to us about council services, just like they used to moan about British Rail.’

Paul chuckled. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

For a moment, Malcolm looked out over the wriggling, glittering sea. ‘There’s a new sense of optimism though.’

‘Is there?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘Why? How come?’

‘Well … we merged parks and street-cleaning last year.’

‘Parks and street-cleaning?’

‘Which means the crisp packet,’ Malcolm went on, ‘or the cigarette packet, which blows from the street into the park is our problem now, not someone else’s. Which means the gardeners can get on with the horticulture basically.’

‘Right.’

‘It makes sense.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘And one of the reasons it’s worked is because our director of services put a lot of effort into involving the staff in decision-making. In fact, we’re more involved in decision-making than ever before. And it was a real challenge integrating two separate sections that were working under — it was actually three different contracts …’

Paul was unsettled by the turn that things had taken, by the terms Malcolm was using, and the mental landscape they seemed to manifest. It was this mental landscape — which had appealed to him so exquisitely only moments before — that he thought of when he imagined what the job was . ‘Three?’ he said, trying to maintain his enthusiasm.

‘He’s very positive, our director of services,’ Malcolm was saying. Paul nodded. ‘He’s always trying to find solutions to take the staff with him. I really respect him a lot. Every month there’s a meeting between front-line staff — that’s myself and my colleagues — with Mr Woburn and the management team, to talk to the consultants. They’re validating the new process —’

‘Mr Woburn?’

‘He’s our director of services. Since the merger. Do you know him?’ Paul responded with a perfunctory shake of the head. ‘I really respect him a lot. He’s changed things since the merger. There are more teams in the city now — they’re based on the political wards now. We call them “tidy teams”. That was his idea.’ Malcolm smiled, somewhat feebly. ‘I know — it’s a bit corny. But it’s working well. We had an outside audit commission do a CPA a few weeks back, and the report was really positive. And we had a really constructive best-value review as well.’

Paul was about to drop his fag-end onto the pavement, but suddenly remembered who he was speaking to, and held onto it. ‘What’s that?’

‘Well, we spent two days, and created a framework that allows continuing dialogue. But some best-value reviews seem to be CCT all over again. I’m fed up with hearing about bloody Richard Branson!’ Malcolm laughed shyly, and Paul laughed too, and said ‘Yeah, right,’ though he did not understand the joke. He did not really know what Malcolm was talking about any more. He was suddenly struck, however, by his physical resemblance to Richard Branson — the same reddish hair, the same face, beard and blue eyes, even the same strange mingling of self-assuredness and diffidence in his manner; but of course, Richard Branson as he would look if — rather than having spent the past twenty-five years high-altitude ballooning and skiing in the nude — he had spent them sweeping the streets of Brighton in all weathers. That is, less silky, less in the pink, less like the cat that got the cream. A lot less.

‘You hear ministers talking about help for key workers, but they always mean teachers and nurses and so on …’ Paul was aware of Malcolm’s voice again. ‘And they all earn ten thousand pounds a year more than street sweepers, or dustmen, but we’re equally as crucial.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’m lucky — my wife works and we’ve got no children. We bought our house twenty years ago. But none of my younger colleagues can afford a house round here. One of them has to cycle twenty miles to work. Twenty miles! And remember we start at six a.m.’

‘You start at six a.m.?’

‘They need to include street sweepers and dustmen, otherwise the city’ll be buried in rubbish.’

‘Sure.’

‘Six a.m., yeah. It’s an early start. But it can be lovely early in the morning. In summer, that is.’ Timidly, Malcolm laughed. ‘In winter it’s not so good. Total darkness. Icy pavements. We just start gritting the pavements when we arrive — don’t wait for a manager to tell us — you can’t sweep an icy pavement.’

‘No.’

Even were it not for Woburn’s presence at the apex of the power structure in which Malcolm toiled — and that in itself put an end to his practical interest in the job — Paul now found that, in his mind, it no longer seemed to have anything to do with the monks of Dharamsala. The work had not changed, of course. However, his estimation of Malcolm had been in free fall for several minutes, and from the height of some sort of holy fool or idiot savant, he had plunged, in that short time, to the level of institutional brown-noser, stupidly infatuated with the pompous vapidity of management-speak. Paul thanked him, and when Malcolm said that he hoped to see him on a litter pick sometime soon, said, ‘Yeah, I hope so. See you, mate.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ Heather shouts from the kitchen as soon as he steps into the heated house, immediately starting to stew in his jacket. Her offer surprises him. He knows that something must have happened, because usually she welcomes him home with impatient questions about where he has been, and what he is doing to find a job. It had been his hope that she would still be at work; in case she was not, he had, as he walked from the bus stop, prepared a short statement. On entering the kitchen he starts to say it — something about the jobcentre. She seems uninterested. Then he notices the plate of biscuits and stops. ‘What’s up?’ he says.

‘What do you mean?’ She is in her work clothes, a grey trouser suit. Not very flattering — it makes her legs look shorter than they are. The top half is better, the wide cream collar of the blouse highlighting the freckled solarium-tan of her face.

He waves limply at the table. ‘I don’t know. The biscuits …’