David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘What you up to anyway?’ Neil says.

‘Oh … Working.’

‘What — with Murray and the Pig and that lot?’

‘No.’

There is a pause. Then Neil says, ‘Well. Hope you find someone, mate …’

‘You’re sure you’re not interested?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure. Cheers. Take it easy, yeah?’

‘Yeah. You too, mate.’

Slightly disconsolate, still in his blue nightshift uniform, Paul switches off his phone and pads through to the kitchen. Fuck it , he thinks. Fuck Watt and the whole fucking thing .

Exactly twenty-four hours later, however, he is speaking to Watt in person. ‘Hello? Is that Paul Rainey?’

‘Yeah, it’s me.’

‘Ah. Morning. How are you?’

‘I’m okay.’

There is a short silence.

‘Yes, I’m okay,’ Watt says. ‘Oh, by the way, did Hazel see you the other night?’

‘Hazel?’

‘That young woman … That member of staff we saw in the pub.’

‘Oh.’ Paul hesitates. ‘No.’ This is not true. When he stood up to leave, two minutes after Watt himself had left, Paul’s eyes had for a moment met Hazel’s. She looked slightly puzzled — as if she was unable to place him …

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well …’ Watt laughs nervously. ‘How do you know ? How do you know she didn’t see you?’ When Paul says nothing, Watt makes a dissatisfied, sceptical noise. He has found himself the subject of some very strange looks since the weekend; some very significant smirks in the supermarket. ‘So,’ he says, ‘any news?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

There is a long pause. ‘You mean you’ve not found anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just haven’t been able to.’

‘Have you tried ?’

‘Of course I’ve tried.’ Somehow, Paul is aware of Heather listening to what he is saying — perhaps it is the sheer intensity of the silence — and he lowers his voice. ‘I’ve tried a few people,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing more I can do —’

‘Look, Rainey —’ Watt’s tone is that of someone finally taking a firm line with a plumber who has been messing him around for months — ‘You’re going to have to do better than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want me to get Jock involved?’

‘No, I don’t want you to get Jock involved. But what do you want me to do ?’

‘ Find someone.’

‘ Who? ’

‘Anyone. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m telling you, it’s not that easy —’

‘You’ve got until Friday,’ Watt says. ‘You’ve got until Friday, all right? If you’ve not found someone to do this by then, I’m going to Jock. I’m sorry. It’s what I should have done in the first place. Do you understand?’

‘Do I understand what?’

‘That you have until Friday, or I’m going to Jock?’

‘Yes,’ Paul says, eventually, ‘I understand.’

When Heather enters the kitchen, he is staring stonily at his phone. It is one of the unusual, uneasy weekday mornings when she is not at work. ‘You all right, Paul?’ she says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Who was that?’ She puts the question very indifferently, with her head in the fridge, and when Paul murmurs, ‘No one,’ she does not press him further.

AND HE HAS other worries. His Friday-night date, for instance. A schoolteacher, someone Ned knows. Within minutes of Paul telling him that he and Heather were packing it in, Ned was pressing him to phone Jane. He was insistent, pestering. A balloon-bellied Pandarus wiping foam from his mouth. ‘Call her,’ he said, sliding the scrap of paper on which he had written her number across the bar. ‘Call her. I’ve told her you’re going to call.’ And then, a week later, ‘Have you called her yet? No? She’s expecting you to call. She wants you to. She’s waiting. If you don’t call she’ll be disappointed .’ On the phone, she sounded jolly. She was surprisingly well spoken, for a friend of Ned’s. Sweating, out in the garden, Paul said, ‘So … Should we have a drink or something?’

And now he is in the Ancient Mariner, a newish pub on Coleridge Street. He was here with Heather once; their local, the Kendal Arms — a corner building of peeling green paint with several knackered pool tables on the dusty old carpet, a dartboard and live sport on TV — she refuses to go into. The Ancient Mariner, however, has leather sofas. Despite these sofas, it had been a depressing evening. Entering the loud, smoky interior of the pub more or less straight from his porridge, Paul was still half asleep, and did not feel — really did not feel — like drinking beer and chain-smoking cigarettes. Shy and intimidated in the fashionable milieu, Heather had struggled with his obvious malaise. On the table in front of him was a lurid vodka Red Bull, which hurt his teeth every time he tentatively sipped it. She had a vase of white wine. There was also a saucer of olives. Whenever she spoke, his lips formed themselves, for a moment, into a tight little smile. ‘That’s a nice picture,’ she said. They had been sitting in silence for several minutes. He half turned to inspect it. ‘Yeah,’ he said, without seeing it. He was having trouble getting through his vodka Red Bull, and would not want another cigarette for a while. He lit one anyway.

No, it had not been an enjoyable evening. Nevertheless, when he needed somewhere to meet Jane, the Ancient Mariner seemed the place. And now he waits for her there, waits with his pint of white beer, his knees jiggling and his eyes on the door. Though it is many years since he has found himself in this situation, in his youth Paul was something of a ladies’ man. A fluent talker with a winning smile; with a finely transparent line in faux knavery. Nor was he overweight then. His self-esteem, in those early salesman years, was spry, was whippet-like. On the sales floor he was one of the top men, which thrilled him for a while. The money itself — and for a year or two there was lots of it — had made him feel strong. It had made him feel self-important. He took taxis everywhere; when he left work, he would wave down a black cab and stroll unhurriedly to where it waited. Such things were tonic to his self-esteem, and he made a name for himself as a minor ladies’ man. Murray was envious, for one.

Young women who joined the sales force at Burdon Macauliffe tended — if they were single, which they usually weren’t; and if they mixed with the other salespeople, which they usually didn’t — to fall into the hands of shambling, handsome Pax Murdoch, or of Paddy, a lean Irishman with eloquent sky-blue eyes. Paul was a sort of junior partner to these two, and enjoyed what was left over. Lucie, for instance, vivacious and pudding-faced with straw curls. With a boxer’s nose. Or Valentina, sickly-looking and unable to speak in a voice louder than a mumbled whisper — she was hopeless at selling and quickly left; she and Paul went out for more than a year. Somewhat unusual was Lorna. Raven-haired Lorna was pretty — pretty enough to make Paul wonder what she was doing with him. In her, his self-esteem found its limits, and he wondered why he merited such a woman; wondered whether she was perhaps unstable, nuts, a nymphomaniac. If he had had more money he might have understood. She was the one to initiate their short affair, practically pulling him into a taxi outside the Café de Paris, where the Burdon Macauliffe Christmas party had taken place. He presumed that he had his standing as a minor ladies’ man to thank for this. From the start, though, he had been ill at ease. He was troubled by things that had not troubled him in the past. Aspects of his physique and wardrobe, for instance. In public, he felt threatened by other men. In private, he worried inordinately about his performance. When it ended, it was like a liberation. She immediately took up with Paddy. Paul did not mind — he was flattered, in fact; felt a new parity with the pale-eyed Irishman, whose friendliness towards him increased markedly from then on. And he felt too that he had had a sort of escape; that head-turning Lorna might have led him into a total failure of self-esteem — the way that being married to Brit Ekland turned poor Peter Sellers into a paranoid schizophrenic.