David Szalay - London and the South-East

His standing as a ladies’ man did not suffer. Nor did it suffer the following summer, when word spread through the sales force that he was seeing two ladies simultaneously. The only person who did not know seemed to be one of the ladies in question — Lisa O’Rourke, known privately to Paul as ‘Weathered Statue’. Her head had a uniquely smooth, worn look. Her nose a mere nub, her lips practically not there. She had poor posture, and long thin undulating mashed-swede hair. Lashless blue eyes under low, weathered brows. She was on Murray’s team — an earnest, persistent pitcher — and it was she who gave Paul the nail-biting blow job in the smoking room one evening when they stayed late to call California. Murray was still there and might have walked in on them — until the very last moments, Paul’s eyes were intent on the blond wood of the institutional door. Lisa did not know, however, that he was also seeing Sharon. ‘Beaky’ was his secret name for Sharon — she was half-Lebanese and had a nose like a toucan. (Between the two of them, he often thought — averaged out, as it were — they would have had a normalish profile.) He and Lisa had had no more than a fling when she went to Ireland for a funeral. In the end, she was away for two weeks, and Paul presumed that that was that. Murray’s birthday fell in this fortnight, and the festivities ended in a dark, airless nightspot in King’s Cross. Murray hit on Sharon there; she went home with Paul. She was a secretary in the London branch of an immense Japanese bank — these were the days when the park of the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo was worth more, it was said, than the whole of California — and she took Paul to the Japanese restaurants where she went with Mr Kojima, for whom she worked.

Paul suspects that it was Murray — for whom he worked — who told Lisa what was happening; that when she did not pick up on the tittle-tattle he was so assiduously spreading, he just sat her down in the smoking room one morning and told her. So ‘Weathered Statue’ wiped her oddly lifeless blue eyes and left the sales force. (Murray tried to meet her for a drink the following week — she said yes, then stood him up.) And in September, more or less on a whim, Paul told Sharon that he did not want to see her any more.

In later years, when there was a lesser profusion of sex and money, he would wonder why he had been so nonchalant in leaving her.

He remembers how Eddy, when he heard how long it had been, marched him to the nearest phone box and told him to take his pick of the tom cards. The phone box was on Fleet Street, and standing in its packed sour odour, Paul had surveyed the festooned cards. Then, stepping out of the stuffiness, he had said, ‘No, mate …’

‘ Why not? ’ Eddy shouted on the pavement.

‘I just … I don’t know. I don’t want to. Do you?’

‘Me? I’m a married man. But no it’s true,’ Eddy had said, as they walked to the Chesh, ‘you want to know what you’re getting into. Here.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘Take this number. She’s in Bayswater. She’s good. Really sweet …’

‘No —’

‘ Just take it! You don’t have to call her.’

So Paul took it.

‘Her name’s Annette,’ Eddy said.

‘Annette’ worked out of a basement in a street of one-star hotels and youth hostels. The street was strange-looking because it was originally a mews of plain, pipe-disfigured house-backs which had been transformed into house-fronts with no more than the addition of narrow doors and a few half-hearted pilasters. The number in question seemed to be some sort of hostel, with a pine-panelled foyer where Paul made his way past a fridge and some CCTV monitors towards the stairs.

When she opened the door, he was surprised to see her wide, flat breasts. She was wearing forest-green knickers. ‘Annette?’ She nodded, and stood aside to let him in. She was short, solid, blondish, smiling. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ he said, stepping worriedly into the room. When she asked his name, she did not seem to be French, as ‘Annette’ was obviously intended to suggest; nor was she English. The room was quite large and smelt of cigarette smoke and air-freshener. It had a white, empty feel. He noticed a single plug-in electric hob, a sink, some bottles of household cleaning products. A small powder-pink stereo. The curtains were open and so was the window — it was summer — and passing footsteps were easily audible from the street overhead. She wanted a hundred pounds. He took out his wallet, and the five twenties that he had withdrawn on the way, and she put the money in a drawer. Then she pulled the thin curtains, stepped out of her knickers and asked him what he wanted. He just shrugged. Her doughy breasts swung forward slightly as she stooped to put her hand on his quiescent trouser front. Then, starting to unbutton the jeans, she licked her palm and went to work. Despite this slow start, once she had him out of half of his clothes, and onto the bed — and had fitted him with a condom, and lubricated herself — he finished very fast, within twenty seconds. She wiggled and slid off him, and for a few more seconds they lay there under a light sweat. Then she said, ‘Do you want to go again?’

He was staring at the orange pine of the bedstead, the grey wall. ‘No. Thank you.’

‘I don’t mean more money.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

He sat up. Once more, he was aware of footsteps and voices from the street outside. ‘Do you want to clean yourself?’ she said. Her eyes flicked to the little sink with its collection of plastic bottles. He stood up, naked from the waist down, and went to the sink. There he peeled off the condom and dropped it into a waste-paper basket, then tore off a square of paper towel and quickly wiped himself. He turned to look for his trousers. They were in a heap on the floor with his shorts and socks and shoes. He untangled them. Sitting on the wide bed, a sheet pulled up to her sallow face, ‘Annette’ smoked. ‘Right,’ he said, when he had his clothes on. ‘Thank you.’

‘M-hm.’

Walking to the tube station he felt fine. More than fine. The evening, the London streets, seemed vibrantly alive. There had — he thought — been something so kindly, so solicitous in the way she had offered to do it with him a second time for free; something so unlike the indifference of the city in which they lived, and which the thousand strangers of the mauve evening seemed to express.

Often — on tube-station escalators, for instance — he would think of her. And when, some time later, he saw Heather in the secretaries’ pool of Archway Publications, and then that Friday in the Finnegans Wake, he did not fail to notice similarities of blondish solidity, of thickset shortness. The similarities were more in the figure than the face, and struck him most the first time that he saw Heather naked. His memories of ‘Annette’, however, were shadowy, and the physical facts of Heather soon obliterated what was left of them, so that when he thought of her from then on it was simply Heather that he saw — though Heather herself had seemed a sort of shadow of ‘Annette’ when he had first seen her in the secretaries’ pool.

Jane is late.

Paul is staring at the roundel of lemon in his cloudy pint — wondering whether she has stood him up — when he lifts his head and sees a woman looking lost. Ned had said that Jane was ‘fortyish’; the woman in the Friday throng seems somewhat older. She is wearing an oriental padded jacket, pink on black, and her hair is tied tightly into greyish pigtails. Her face, though it shows signs of old-womanishness, a sag on the jawline and under the eyes, is somehow youthful — soft and small-toothed. She is wide-hipped, bosomless, with narrow full lips painted pink. Seeing her, Paul experences only disappointment. What had he expected though? His expectations were silly — he sees that. The facts of life never had a fair shot. And in fact she is not so bad. He stands — she is peering worriedly into the mass of people — and tentatively holds up his hand. When she sees him she hesitates, perhaps experiencing her own moment of melancholy disappointment; then she smiles nervously.