David Szalay: London and the South-East

And suddenly Paul remembers that he himself had been holding — holding ! — her small hand, which she tugged away when Murray sidled up to them. They had been talking. What had they been talking about? More awake than he was, he stares into the darkness, trying to see.

One thing is distressingly sure — he has nowhere near enough memory to fill the many hours that he must have spent in the pub. He has perhaps one hour of memory proper, and then some fragments, pseudo-memories with a dreamlike lack of edge and integrity. Even to use the word ‘fragments’ is to exaggerate the solidity of these episodes, to make them sound more substantial than they actually are. How much time, for instance, had he spent locked in a cubicle in the Gents? Or was that a dream? If it happened, it was potentially quite a long time — perhaps as much as an hour. Was that before or after he had spoken to Michaela and held her hand? Who had come into the Gents looking for him, knocking on the door? Had he really shouted at them to fuck off? And had Eddy Jaw been there, in the Penderel’s Oak? It is not that Paul has any memory, as such, of his being there — just a vague feeling that he was.

Later, he remembers being at London Bridge station — it was probably between nine and ten o’clock, the time that he usually stumbles out of the pub and, without really knowing what he is doing, starts the long journey home. Michaela was prominent in his thoughts, and while he does not remember exactly what he was thinking, it is evident that he had, at the time, an exaggerated sense of the significance of a little hand-holding and slurred speech. And then, the incident on the rail bed. How had that happened? Where had it happened? How had he extricated himself from the situation? It occurs to him that the ladder of plum pains down his left side may have something to do with it. On the other side of the bed, Heather moves, asleep. Paul is strangely surprised that she is there. He has, needless to say, no memory whatsoever of arriving home last night, of taking out his lenses, of going to bed, and her presence — though it is her absence that would really have been strange — is somehow unsettling. It, more than anything, seems to emphasise the hole that has appeared in his head. Shutting his eyes, breathing through his nose to preserve what little moisture there is in his mouth, he hunkers painfully down to get through the next four or five hours of nothingness.

Later still, he is sitting up in bed, mortifying himself with a foul cigarette. The curtains are open, and the windows white and untransparent with condensation. Only when the light had struggled up, and the noises from outside become more frequent, until they were more or less continuous, had he surrendered, at last, to the gravity of sleep. It was too late. The children were audible on the landing; and Heather sat up suddenly, sat puffy with sleep on the edge of the bed, squeezing first one small yellow foot, and then the other, with her hands. With a scraping scream, she opened the curtains — and Paul, pissed off at being woken from what seemed like one whole second of untroubled sleep, pulled the duvet over his hurting head. Having opened the curtain, Heather left the room — and she had opened it, of course, to express her anger at what had happened last night. She was not that angry — only so much anger can be expressed by opening a curtain — and nothing that extraordinary had happened; only that Paul had stumbled in unusually drunk and unusually late, at midnight, when she was watching the History Channel and drinking white wine, the kids long since upstairs in bed.

When she comes back, twenty minutes later, to remind him of all the things they have to do this morning, he gives up trying to sink into the bed — fervent dreams and tired solid reality mingling in his mind — and sits up, and instinctively lights a cigarette. Heather stands in the doorway, in a pink dressing gown, which is tightly and neatly tied at her thick waist like a sturdy overcoat. She is quite heavy-featured, but with large blue eyes and curly blonde hair. (Someone once told her that she looked like Sarah Jessica Parker, and sometimes she nearly believes it.) Looking at Paul — his flabby ashen face, his round white shoulders, his downy tits — she worries. She worries that he is becoming less attractive from one week to the next, and the implications of that for a future she imagines in terms of years, but even more she worries about the damage that he must be doing to himself, the devastation he must be wreaking on his own poor frame. She does not like to think about it — still less about why he does it — and during the prosaic day, when there is always something else to do, it is usually easy not to — the moments of massive worry, of worry turning to fear, panic, terror, always find her at night. Then his wheezing, whistling breath as he sleeps beside her speaks of a self-destructiveness, a self-negation that she finds terrifying — and underlying it, of course, the fact that it is difficult to imagine that someone who lives the way he does is not unhappy. Has he always lived like this? When she forces herself to look, she can see that things have been getting worse for a long time now, but slow decline is easy to ignore. Nothing dramatic has happened. He has been drinking more and more, but has always drunk too much. He seems depressed a lot of the time. Especially since he tried to stop the Felixstat. Then something dramatic had happened, and hurriedly, in a panic, he had snatched for the pills that he had been so determined to quit, saying they stole his energy and made him satisfied to live with mediocrity. Since then — it was six months ago — he has started to remind her, in ways she finds painfully sad, of the Paul she first met, fragile and self-destructive. And without the open-handed, kind, twinkling, funny qualities of that Paul, except in isolated moments, which nowadays she finds herself pathetically treasuring because of the way they make her feel that everything might be all right. Not this morning though. This morning he is ugly and sullen, and last night he was loud and stupid and not funny at all.

The sound of two televisions showing the same thing — Paul can tell from the squeaky voices, and he knows anyway, that it is a cartoon — fills the narrow landing behind her. Oliver and Marie both have TVs in their rooms, though most of the time they watch the same thing. Oliver and Marie are not Paul’s children. They don’t call him ‘Dad’, they call him ‘Paul’. They haven’t seen their father (‘Dad’) — a Dr John Hall, formerly of Brighton, East Sussex, now of Sydney, New South Wales — for nine years, since Oliver was two and Marie two months, and only know what he looks like from photos. A few photos which Heather keeps hidden in a drawer. The manic, high-pitched voices of the cartoon remind Paul, with some nostalgia, of his university days, of watching Dangermouse and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds with a mug of tea, a spliff and a young woman called Geraldine, Doc Martens under her long, black, Victorian skirts, a pale face with round cheeks, fuzzy black hair, depressed and depressing poems. Dutifully, he had read these poems, and said that he thought that they were good. (Sometimes he wondered whether the ‘badger-headed thing’ was him — even then he had a tuft of prematurely white hair.) ‘Can you please ask the kids to close their doors please,’ he says, slowly and quietly. For a moment Heather considers this. She takes a small travel alarm clock from her dressing-gown pocket, looks at it, and says, ‘I want to leave in half an hour.’ Paul turns his gaze to the white windows. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s nine thirty. Half an hour, Paul.’ And when she goes there is a brisk barrage of door sounds as first Marie’s, then Oliver’s, then the bathroom door are closed. In the quietness, he queasily stubs out his less-than-half-smoked cigarette. Standing is a mistake. He sits down urgently on the edge of the bed. Then, with a look of intense concentration on his face, like someone walking a tightrope, very slowly, he descends the stairs and slips into the peach enclave of the downstairs loo (even the toilet paper is peach, and quilted, with little rosebuds on it) and throws up.