David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘I have.’

‘ Have you?’

‘Yeah, I have.’

‘In Sainsbury’s?’

‘Yeah.’

He explains how all the products she sees in the supermarket are pulled out onto the shop floor on wheeled pallets, and how he and a dozen others spend all night putting them on the shelves. ‘It takes all night ?’ she says. ‘Just to do that?’

‘Yeah, it does,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of products. A lot of products …’ Oliver is showing no interest. ‘All right, Oli?’ Paul says.

And though he says, ‘Yeah,’ he will not look him in the eye.

To finish work at eight in the morning was, in a way that was difficult to define, quite depressing. In the sunny, suddenly vacant house — silent, except for the liquid drops of the kitchen tap, dripping into the crockery of three breakfasts that had been hurriedly dumped in the sink — Paul would sit on the sofa, still in his uniform, and start to make a spliff. The first morning — the morning of Oli’s sullen silence — as soon as he lay down he had plummeted into unconsciousness, waking four or five hours later in the early afternoon and a state of total disorientation. The bland daylight was hateful — he felt like a vampire; eventually, though, turning his back to it, he managed to sleep, on and off, until the others got home at fiveish. Half waking from this shallow slumber, he heard them come in, shouting and crashing about downstairs. And with a ringing in his ears, resigned to getting no more rest, he had pulled on his jeans. It was not like getting up in the morning — it was less wholesome — and though, over the weeks, it did start to seem more like that, it never entirely shook off the sense of something amiss. Sometimes he thought of Gerald, who had been working nights for years — for as long as Paul had worked in sales — and wondered what it was like for him. He, surely, no longer suffered from this sense of being out of sync with the world. How could he survive otherwise? Perhaps he lived on his own — that might be easier (though of course not without its own tribulations) — because Paul’s vague sense of displacement was forcefully verified when, mooching downstairs with a fuzzy morning head, he found, not only the sad, late-afternoon light, but beings with a whole day of wakeful incident behind them. He was unable to communicate with these beings. He ate his breakfast — he had started to eat Highland Porridge Oats for breakfast, a bowl of porridge every day at about five p.m. — while the children, still in their school uniforms, watched TV, and Heather started to think about supper. Though they inhabited the same physical space, through some sort of temporal slippage they seemed aware of each other only as phantoms, with whom it was impossible to interact. So Paul sat there, eating his porridge like a ghost, while Heather, still in her work clothes, waited for some burgers to defrost in the microwave.

On a positive note, he was drinking less than he had for years. (One effect of which was the sudden, startling resurgence of his libido. Heather — though she had for a long time placed its sluggishness high on the list of reasons why he should stop drinking — seemed impatient with this development, turning over with a tsk when, on his nights off, he took up her morning tea with a hard-on, and shooing him away when he surprised her towelling herself after her bath.) Perhaps he was inhibited by a sense that, no matter what hours he was keeping personally, the morning was off-limits to alcohol. There had been one testing night during his first week on the shift when he was assigned to the wines and spirits aisle. To be surrounded by all that liquor, to handle it for hours, had been hard; his thirst — his desire to open one of those bottles and have a swig, a taste at least — had been increasingly urgent. Hour after hour. The heavy glass bottles. The bright liquids. He came very close to pilfering something — a quarter-bottle of Scotch, rum, anything — and slipping off to the Gents to add it to his dumbly hungering blood. As he worked, he imagined in extraordinary detail the way the seal of the cap, its frail connections, would break with a soft crunching click. He imagined that over and over again. The taste of the auburn liquor, the mild fire in his throat … Yes, that had been hard. When he finally finished the aisle, his jaw was so tightly clenched that he could not open his mouth, and his temples throbbed. Perhaps, though, it was his successful emergence from that ordeal — into the morning light — that persuaded him that he would be able to do without alcohol after work. Whatever the reason, he was able to do without it, and that pleased him.

Heather, on the other hand, seemed to be drinking more and more. Paul noticed, from the way the bin filled up with bottles, that she was putting away an unprecedented quantity of wine. And she was going out more than she used to. In the past, she had not had much of a social life. She went out perhaps once a fortnight. Now she was out twice a week. She was usually tipsy when she got home, and sometimes worse. On one occasion in particular, she was so drunk that she was unable to open the front door. For several minutes, while he finished making his spliff, Paul listened to her scraping at it with the key. When he finally went to open it himself, she more or less fell into the hall, her face a glassy mask of confusion. It was half past one, and he had been worried — he had even phoned her. She had not picked up. When he asked her where she had been — he was himself entirely sober, if quite stoned — she just shook her head and pushed past him, moving with inept purpose towards the kitchen. He watched irritably as she walked into the wall. She did not look well. Her face was unpleasantly chop-fallen, and blotchily red, as if it had been rouged by a blindman; there were particularly handsome crimson flares on either side of her nose. ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ he said. She did not seem to hear. Apparently losing interest in the kitchen, or perhaps simply forgetting where she was going, she sank down onto the floor in the hall, still in her coat, as if she intended to sleep there. ‘Where were you?’ Paul said. She was curling up on the floor. For a few moments he stared at her, wondering what to do. Was he like this, he wondered uneasily, when he got home at the oblivious end of a big session? Surely he was never this drunk. She was blotto. It was, he thought, incredible that she had made it home. ‘How did you get home?’ he asked, without much hope of an answer. ‘Did you take a taxi?’ Surprisingly, she seemed to shake her head. ‘You didn’t take a taxi?’ Another ambiguous head movement, most probably a shake. ‘So how did you get home? Did Alice drive you?’ It seemed unlikely. ‘Did Alice drive you home?’ he said. He was keeping his voice down — the kids were asleep upstairs.

Heather murmured something.

‘What?’

She mumbled something.

‘I can’t hear, Heather. What did you say? “Nothing”?’

She made the noise again, a sort of two-syllable moan.

‘Marvin?’

‘Muh’n.’ What? Martin? ’

At this she seemed to pull herself into a ball — a coat ball about her hips, only her dry leonine hair spilling onto the carpet and oxblood booted feet protruding.

‘Martin drove you home?’ Paul said, not sure whether he had understood. When he tried to make her stand up (‘You can’t sleep here, Heather’) she fought him off with misdirected fisticuffs, until he muttered, ‘Suit your fucking self,’ and went into the kitchen to make his lunch. He was puzzled, and fractious. Later, passing through the hall to empty the ashtray — it must have been about four — he saw that she had gone.