David Szalay - London and the South-East

He tries Heather’s phone.

It is switched off.

Then, feeling a terrible need to leave the house, he walks out into the trembling streets. He does not see where he is going. Later, finding himself leg-weary, he waits for a bus on the Old Shoreham Road. He has walked as far as Mile Oak.

He is intensely impatient to hear what Heather will have to say for herself. What will she have to say for herself? In the lounge, still trembling a little, he punches her number into the phone.

She picks up immediately. ‘Hello?’ she says. She sounds frightened.

‘It’s me.’

‘Hello.’

‘I’ve spoken to Martin.’

Silence.

‘He told me everything.’

When she still says nothing, he says, matter-of-factly, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in town. I’ll come home. Paul …’

‘Okay, I’ll see you at home.’

And for the second time that day he indulges in the satisfying violence of putting the phone down on someone as they speak. For a long time, he does not move. He looks lost in thought. In fact, his mind is empty. The Claymore seems futile somehow, but he takes it out — with its underdesigned, over-Scottish label, thistles and fluttering tartan — and pours himself some anyway. It tastes of watery alcohol with sharp overtones of sour vomit and a desultory smokiness, its lukewarmth somehow slightly sickening in itself.

It is twelve o’clock. High noon in Hove. Hearing Heather come into the hall, Paul is immediately aware that she is sobbing. She seems to snatch at her sobs as she shuts the front door. ‘Paul?’ she says, and there is a plaintive, almost desperate, note to her voice. ‘Paul?’

He does not move, though his heart is sprinting, and his failure to answer seems to trigger a quiet doubling of her tears. He hears her go into the kitchen and put something down. There follows an odd delay, and he has started to wonder — with a smear of dark rage — whether she is actually going to join him in the lounge at all, when he hears the muffled flush of the downstairs loo. The sound of the flush, though diminishing, becomes more defined as the loo door opens, and he leans forward and starts to fiddle with his spliff-making materials. He does not look at her when she appears in the doorway.

She is blowing her nose on a square of toilet tissue. ‘Paul,’ she says.

And absurdly, he says, ‘Yes?’ as though he does not know what she wants to talk to him about.

‘What did he tell you?’ she asks.

‘Martin?’ The name, he hears, has an entirely new sound.

‘M-hm.’ She is nervously working a little plastic lighter.

He seems to think for a few seconds; then he says, ‘Why don’t you tell me yourself, then I’ll tell you what he said.’

When he looks up, however, she is staring at the carpet, using her upturned hand as an ashtray. Looking at her, she seems a stranger. He thinks of the first few times that he saw her — when he had still not steeled himself to speak to her, and did not know her name — in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, or peering through the Friday night mob in the Finnegans Wake — now he sees her like that again, sees what she looks like, her solid nose, powdery face, cornflower eyes. He notices her mannerisms, her posture. It is, for a moment, as though the intervening years have been unlived.

‘So?’ he says.

She still does not speak. She is staring at the carpet’s tired oatmeal nap.

‘Were you going to tell me yourself?’

They are both smoking. The room is full of slowly swirling smoke. His whole life of the past few months, perhaps longer, now seems like a fiction; something in which he was participating without understanding that it was not properly real. Perhaps this is partly why he has such a strangely theatrical sense of the situation. Leaving the room, he feels, will be like leaving a set. Slowly, he stands up. There are still so many questions, and he is leaving. The inquest has only just started and he is sick of it. It seems wearisome, pointless … He has forgotten to stub out his cigarette, and leaning down, he makes a quick, unthorough job of it — it is still smouldering in the ashtray when she says, ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to bed. I’m tired.’

‘Okay,’ she says softly. Then, ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

She is suddenly in tears. ‘Paul,’ she says, ‘I don’t think you’re well.’

‘Why not?’

Putting one hand over her face, she shakes her head. ‘What is it?’ He stands there. ‘What is it?’ She sniffs a few times. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’ She is wiping her face with what is left of the paper tissue. ‘All this crap …’

‘What crap?’

‘Working at the supermarket. It’s mad.’

‘Is it?’

She blows her nose. ‘I mean, it must be pretty awful.’

‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘I’m tired, Heather.’

She nods, and moves aside to let him pass. ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yeah, I’ll try.’

‘Paul, I’m sorry.’

Everything seems unsatisfactory. He does not think he will be able to sleep. He even wonders whether to go back downstairs. His head is still seething with weary, insistent questions — questions he has asked so many times in the last few hours that they seem tedious, even unimportant to him now. With nothing else to do, he lies down, still in his clothes, and as soon as he does this and shuts his eyes, he knows that he will be able to sleep — that sleep, surprisingly, is pouring in on him, erasing everything.

When he wakes, earlier than usual, for an hour or so he lies in bed, wondering where he stands. His placid assumption — it is eerily placid — is that Heather is going to leave him. He is not sure how he feels about this. As he lies there exploring the soft shadows of the ceiling with his eyes, there are moments — only moments — of intense sadness and anger. Mostly there is just a numbness. He hears Oliver and Marie, hears Heather stomping up and down the stairs, her supervisory voice impressively ordinary. These muffled sounds seem to find him from the past; they are like memories of an earlier part of his life, mysteriously fresh in his mind on waking. Swinging himself out of bed, in his underpants he tiptoes into the bathroom. The equanimity with which he has been outstaring the situation for the past hour has suddenly vanished and he wishes he were able to get it back. To this end, he fumbles with the box of Felixstat, and thumbs one of the pills from the blister sheet; each is labelled with the name of a day of the week. They are not fast-acting, but in moments of stress to take one is to know, at least, that psychoactive reinforcements are on the way, and having swallowed ‘Tuesday’ he feels less frightened.

Downstairs, Heather is waiting in the smoke-filled lounge, in the macabre sulk of the silence. Sitting in the kitchen, Paul seems to be doing nothing. In fact he is doing something — he is not going into the lounge; and this not going is so engrossing that he forgets his porridge until summoned to the odour of scorched milk. He is not hungry, and spoons it into the bin, wondering — dispassionately for the most part, with only occasional minor needles of pain — what the mechanics of the affair were, how they worked things. Then, stopping his imaginings when they wander too far — towards a vision of Martin, naked, pipe-cleaner limbs and mousy pubic hair — he washes out the saucepan in which he made his porridge, scouring the brown burn-mark with unexpected ferocity. Then he smokes a cigarette, and in a hurry now, pulls on his jacket in the hall. On his way out, as he passes the open door of the lounge — the fact that the TV is not on lends the house a miserable air of emergency — he says only four words to Heather. ‘Do the children know?’