David Szalay - London and the South-East

In the morning when she came downstairs her face was grey and immobile, her eyes a bloodshot mess in their hollows. He was still in the lounge, of course, reading the early edition of The Times , just emerging from the obits — fascinating , the obits — into the looser prose of the sport. He was surprised to hear her on the squeaky stairs — he had not expected her down so early, though in fact it was the usual time. He waited a few minutes, then folded the paper and went into the kitchen. She did not at first acknowledge that anything unusual had happened. He said, ‘You were quite drunk last night.’

‘I wasn’t that drunk …’

‘Yes, you were. You were …’ She interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said drily. And knowing that he was in no position to exercise any sort of sanctimony, he just shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Whatever. How did you get home?’

She seemed to sigh. ‘Martin drove me,’ she said.

‘Martin? Martin Short?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were with Alice.’

‘I was.’

‘So what was Martin doing there?’

‘He wasn’t there. I asked him to come and get me.’

‘You what, you called him?’

‘I know — it’s ridiculous.’

‘You called him, at one o’clock or whatever, and he came to get you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Some wine bar in town.’

‘Wasn’t he asleep?’

‘I think he was, yes.’ For a moment — nervously, naughtily — she laughed. Then she made a pain face.

That Martin would do this was not in itself surprising. His seemingly unlimited willingness to do things for her was a joke that even the children were in on. This, however, seemed excessive.

‘The poor fucker probably had to go to work today.’

‘I think he did.’

‘You can’t use him as a taxi service just because he’ll do it.’

‘I know,’ she said.

For a moment, Paul wondered whether to say the words. He had himself drunk next to nothing for weeks. ‘Well, you shouldn’t drink so much,’ he said.

Holding the mug over her mouth, she shot him a sharp look.

‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. And then, ‘I’ve more or less stopped drinking, Heather. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.’

‘No, I have,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’

‘It’d be a shame if just when I stopped, you started.’ He paused. ‘Why were you so pissed anyway?’

She shrugged. ‘We were just having a good time. You know.’

SINCE LEAVING PRISON, Rashid has been living with his aunt and her husband, an accountant — staying in their spare bedroom, and working four nights a week, for a tenth of what he used to make. It just isn’t worth it. What sort of life is that ? When he and Paul are alone he often expatiates on this subject. What sort of shit life is this? Why is a life like this worth living? What’s the point? In the dry air of the smoking room — greenish with neon light and bruised with exhaustion — Paul listens patiently.

More or less the whole shift is in the smoking room now — in ten minutes the lunch hour will be over — and the presence of the others subdues Rashid. He despises them. He does not understand why Paul puts up with them so tolerantly. Though he despises Paul too, it is a less pure feeling, and in fact he feels a sort of kinship with him — a kinship of misfortune, if nothing else. There is no misfortune involved in those others being here, he thinks — the blacks, the paedophiles — this is their natural element, what they were always destined for. He and Paul on the other hand — he and Paul should not be here, this is not for them. ‘Take it easy, yeah,’ he says.

‘Yeah, see you later.’

Rashid passes Gerald in the doorway and, standing aside to let him in, shakes his head with a sort of weary disdain. Gerald is the senior worker on the shift — the oldest and the longest-serving. He is trained to use the hydraulic pallet truck, and trusted with the cigarettes, and once Paul saw him, dressed startlingly like an arctic explorer, wheeling trolleys of meat from the misty frozen vaults of the warehouse. Sometimes he says strange, mystical-sounding things. One night, when Paul met him on the shop floor, for instance, and told him that he had been put on fresh produce, Gerald said, ‘Oh yeah? Goin’ out in the garden?’

And to be amid the fresh produce — the damp leaves of the lettuces, the cool scent of the soil in the punnets of cress — was a bit like being in a garden. As well as the presence of vegetable matter, the space was more open than the limiting narrowness of the aisles. If it suggested a garden, however, it did so extremely faintly — there was, after all, almost no soil in the punnets, and the lettuces were each in their own plastic bag. So faintly, in fact, that it was intermittently sweet and sharply frustrating. Nevertheless, Paul’s senses and imagination strained to enjoy what was there. Gerald had inspired this exercise, and at such times he seemed the purveyor of a subtle wisdom.

Most of the time, however, Paul thinks that years of nocturnal living have made him slightly mad. He is obsessed with the mineral waters. He often points out — with nostril inhaling exhilaration, as if he were actually in the Alps — the pictures of ‘nice clean mountains and stuff’ on their bluish bottles. He is obsessed too with supermarket politics, a subject on which he often holds forth in the smoking room. Paul usually ignores him — focusing his mind instead on the smouldering tobacco in his hand, staring at the grey wall, and shutting everything else out. So he was doing tonight — until he heard Gerald say, ‘… you know, that Martin Short .’ Then, still leaning forward wearily, with his elbows on his knees, he started to listen. Gerald is speaking mainly to Mark, a whey-faced forty-five-year-old with colourless hair and eyes who is sitting next to him. Mark’s eyes move furtively from Gerald’s face to the linoleum floor, he nods a lot, and sometimes, like someone taking instructions, he murmurs something to show that he is listening.’

‘Watt is going out his mind,’ Gerald says. With the exception of Mark, his listeners do not seem interested; they smoke in vapid silence. This despite the fact that the political situation in the supermarket is more interesting than usual, owing to the imminent stepping-down of Jock Macfarlane, the store manager. For a long time — for years — it has seemed obvious that his successor will be Roy Watt, his deputy. Gerald’s point seems to be that Watt’s inheritance is suddenly under threat. And the source of the threat — he has just said it — is the fresh-produce manager — ‘you know, that Martin Short ’.

It is a sort of seminar — with Gerald steering — and now he wonders, in his nasal Estuary English, why Martin is such a threat. Mark nods, as though it were a question that has been troubling him for some time. Gerald’s own theory is that it is the unusual profitability of fresh produce that makes Martin a threat. He says that with the exception of wines and spirits it is the most profitable section of the supermarket. (People are starting to leave, to wander downstairs, where Graham is waiting.) And this, of course, leads to the next question — why is fresh produce so much more profitable than one would expect? How does Martin do it?

Gerald, Mark and Paul are the only ones left in the smoking room. Gerald looks at his watch, and stands up with a sigh. He is extremely tall, with a small head the colour of wet coffee grounds. ‘So how does he do it?’ Paul enquires huskily as they leave. Strangely, though he spends so much time holding forth, whenever he is asked a specific question Gerald seems indisposed to speak. He laughs quietly, and shakes his head. ‘I don’t know ,’ he says, as though it were naive of Paul to have expected him to.