David Szalay - London and the South-East

The two shelf-stackers nodded at each other.

‘All right,’ Gerald said.

‘All right, Gerald.’

‘Gerald’ll show you where to go,’ said Graham.

In silence, Paul followed Gerald over the shop floor. Pushing through some heavy translucent rubber strips, they were suddenly in a grey, utterly functional space. The walls, undressed breeze blocks. The floor, concrete. The lighting, high overhead, greenish and cold. They went through fire doors, and up the linoleum stairs. Most of the shift were present in the canteen. Paul seated himself at an empty table — and was sitting there, moronically ogling its grey surface, when a voice at his shoulder said, ‘What the fuck you doing here?’

Whose is that voice? He knows it. He looks up.

Rashid.

Paul says, ‘What …’

He remembers going to Rashid’s fairly magnificent pad — it was in a brilliant, high-ceilinged Regency terrace — to pick up freezer bags of grass. The palatial appointments of the flat were a little worn and knocked about, but there was, nevertheless, always a sense of turning up at court. Rashid’s courtiers were various male relatives, all shorter, hairier, fatter and uglier than he was; and there were always a few (usually quite unattractive) girls hanging around. Charlie — Rashid’s burly, ochre dog — was always sprawled somewhere, taking the weight off his stubby legs, and panting with a pink, smile-shaped mouth. Rashid himself never answered the door — one of his cousins always did that — and he was often not in the sitting room when Paul came in, murmuring salutations to the courtiers, who murmured them back. Towards him, the cousins were deferential, the ugly girls haughtily indifferent. In no hurry, Rashid would emerge, presumably from some sort of boudoir, always wearing, if it was before eight p.m., a short silk dressing gown — so short that it did not reach his knees — and after some friendly, informationless small talk, business would be transacted in gentlemanly fashion — no counting of money, no checking of merchandise — and one of the cousins would show Paul out.

Now, seeing Rashid, Paul is mystified. He says, ‘What …’ And then, ‘What are you doing here?’

Rashid is smiling; his face shows no sign whatever of his own surprise and mortification. ‘What happened to you, man?’ he says. ‘Why you working here?’

Paul shrugs. ‘I … I am. I don’t know … What happened to you?’

‘What you talkin’ about?’ The question is put in an intimidating tone, and the message is obvious. Rashid pulls up a brown plastic chair and sits. ‘So what the fuck you doing here?’ he says. Paul fobs him off with a vague suggestion of personal tragedy. ‘Oh, I don’t know, mate,’ he says. ‘Things have just been … You know.’ Unhelpfully, Rashid shakes his head. ‘Things have not been great.’ Paul does not want to elaborate any more than that. He does not think Rashid would understand. Suddenly desperate for a cigarette, he feels in his pocket for his tobacco, and at that moment, Graham’s voice summons them to work over the PA system.

As they troop down the stairs, someone — Paul does not see who — shouts out, ‘Oi Rashid! Apparently you’ on pet foods again.’

Rashid half turns, continuing to descend, and says, ‘Pet foodz? Pet foodz? No way, man! I did that yesterday. How d’you know that?’

‘That’s what I heard. Apparently.’

‘What, Graham told you?’ Rashid shakes his head. ‘No way. Not fuckin’ pet foodz. No way.’

Graham does not seem to have moved. When he reads out their postings for the night, Rashid is indeed on pet foods. ‘Aw, man,’ he wails. ‘Not pet foodz! I did them yesterday!’

‘Do them properly this time, all right,’ Graham says, without lifting his goggled eyes from the list.

‘I did do them properly!’

But Graham is already saying, ‘Mark, non-foods. Alex, refrigerator compartments. Dewayne, wines and spirits …’

And Rashid, in his Timberlands, stomps away sighing to pet foods.

‘How was it?’ Heather says when he enters the kitchen in the morning, self-conscious in his uniform. It has been a long night. Two hours into the shift, Graham’s wide shape had appeared at the end of the cereals aisle, where Paul was working. ‘How’s it going — all right?’ he said. He seemed displeased about something.

‘Yeah, fine,’ Paul said. ‘Fine.’

Graham nodded fatly. He was about to move on when he added, apparently as an afterthought, ‘Try and hurry it up, will you?’

‘Oh. Yeah, sure.’

Paul had stowed about half the cereal on the shelves when Graham appeared for a second time and, without hesitating, waddled purposefully into the aisle. ‘Look, mate, you’re going to have to get a move on,’ he said. He looked impatiently at the shelves that Paul had already done. ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ he said. ‘Just neat and tidy, you know.’ And with surprising swiftness, and a cavalcade of creaking from his leather jacket, he suddenly dealt with a crate of All-Bran. It took him about twenty seconds, and his exertions brought out a bright sweat on the dark, porous surface of his forehead. ‘There, you see,’ he said, out of breath. Paul nodded sleepily. It was quarter to one, and he was very tired.

From two o’clock onwards he did not understand how he was still working. The worst hour was six to seven a.m.. This hour nearly left him a sobbing, head-shaking wreck, talking nonsense as he was led away. Then, suddenly, things no longer seemed so hopeless. For one thing, people started to arrive from the outside world. And these people — first the bakery staff, then others — seemed to resecure the supermarket, which in his mind had slipped its moorings, in time and space. Their faces pink from the cold air outside, they seemed to him like rescuers. He felt like kneeling and tearfully plastering their newspaper-holding hands with kisses. Then there was daylight — he saw it first from the smoking-room window, off to the left on the rim of the sky, like a ship on the horizon.

In the last minutes leading up to eight o’clock, the duty manager — a Mr Watt — started to fret about the presence of the night shift on the shop floor, as though they were stage hands and the show was about to start. There was a final frenzy of activity. And then it was too late — the shop was opening — they had to disappear. And they disappeared. They went upstairs to the locker room, put outer garments on over their uniforms and slipped out, unnoticed by the money-spending public as it poured in. Outside, it was blearily sunny. Grey splinters of sun stuck in his shrinking eyes, coming at him off puddles, distant roofs. The drone of the A270 was overlaid by the temporary clattering of a train. And in shapeless blue trousers, black leather jacket, Paul Rainey lit a pre-rolled cigarette in the numb morning air.

Heather is still waiting for an answer to her question.

‘Yeah, fine,’ he says, trying to sound upbeat. ‘It was fine.’ Seeing the kitchen table, however, he has an unsettling flashback to the small hours, to the breakfast cereals aisle, its dry odour, its garish topography, its absurd fauna — Honey Monster, Tony the Tiger, the chocolate-addled monkey on the Coco Pops … In fact, for the first hour the cereals had fascinated him. There were cereals for the would-be athlete, for the weight-conscious, for the sophisticate, the nature lover, the hedonist, the Spartan. Each seemed to be striving to transcend its simple, essentially standard flakes of starch, and offer a short cut to a whole way of life, of self-definition.

Marie is examining him with intense interest. (Oliver, though, is staring into the chocolate milk of his Coco Pops; and there seems to Paul to be something sullen in his not looking at him.) ‘Have you been working all night ?’ Marie asks, with a sort of wonderment.