David Szalay: London and the South-East

Throughout the day, without looking for them, he finds little pieces of last night. In Sainsbury’s, for instance, being jostled by bad-tempered people and knocked by their trolleys in the non-foods aisle, waiting while Heather compares two oddly shaped bottles of something, one puce, the other aquamarine, he suddenly remembers stepping out of a stationary train into emptiness, and hitting the big stones of the rail bed. Yes. He had stepped out of the wrong side of the train — that had happened — a painful pratfall for the laughing young people eating kebabs on the opposite platform, a pratfall only possible because of the old slam-door rolling stock still in use on his commuter route. It didn’t even occur to him at the time, kneeling there and trying to work out what the fuck had happened, that he could have been killed by one of the fast expresses that occasionally howl along the line. Then what? He had been pelted with food … Heather drops the puce bottle into the trolley and they move a few metres along the aisle. And then some people, yes, some people had helped him onto the platform — the memories materialise. The platform, from the rail bed, had seemed very high, and the two men had taken a hand each and pulled, his scuffed shoes scraping at the wall. He had fallen back, onto the hard rail, with a clang. And lying there on his back, the men shouting at him, he had wondered whether he could be bothered to move. In the end, they had pulled him out like a dead weight, his ankle knocking against the platform edge. And where was that? And why had he tried to get off the train there anyway? The whole thing seems more and more dreamlike, and at the same time more disturbing. Where had he been? Waiting in the enormous queue, mesmerised by the song of dozens of checkout scanners, he remembers that he took the eight eleven train from London Bridge — remembers being astonished even then how early it was. He should have been home at nine thirty, at the latest, not twelve. Had he spent two and a half lost hours blundering around the SouthEast Trains network? Where had he been? Perhaps he got on the wrong train at Haywards Heath. That had happened before.

And in McDonald’s, where they take the kids for lunch on Saturday after the shopping, the first bite of his Big Mac in his mouth, he finds with a small jolt of adrenalin something that Michaela said to him — that she was splitting up with what’s-his-name … On the other side of the table Oliver has ritually separated his Big Mac into two separate ‘sandwiches’, and Heather is munching a Quarter Pounder With Cheese, holding it with as few fingers as possible, her eyes empty, wiping her mouth with a paper napkin every few seconds. Marie has gone to the loo, leaving a small pile of mustardy gherkins. What else had Michaela said? What had he said to her ? He remembers saying something … And during his driving lesson, moving slowly down Church Road towards an ethereal winter-afternoon moon, while his instructor, Graham — a gentle Christian with a little gold cross dangling from his ear lobe — is telling him something about orphanages in Romania and how he might help, he remembers that Eddy Jaw was in the Penderel’s Oak last night. He remembers seeing him talking to Murray, and walking up to him and saying, with an unintended edge of genuine belligerence to his voice, ‘You still drinking that fucking shit, Jaw, you poof?’ (Eddy, as usual, was swigging a Bacardi Breezer.) It was, on reflection, quite an aggressive thing to say to an old friend he had not seen in years — not since the sad demise of Northwood in ninety-seven. What was his surname? Not Jaw, that was just what everyone called him. Staring at some shabby rainswept Victorian villas, Paul squeezes his facial features together in an effort to remember. The name is not there. And what had Eddy whatever-his-name-is been doing in the Penderel’s Oak anyway? Had he said something important, something interesting? Even in the absence of a specific memory, the idea is teasingly persistent. Perhaps Murray would be able to tell him on Monday.

Towards the end of the afternoon, he takes Oliver to the snooker club. It was once a bingo hall. The front entrance, the long row of glass doors through which the old foyer gathers dust, is permanently locked, and they walk down an alley at the side to an unpromising-looking metal door watched over by a security camera. Buzzed in, they climb winding, unheated, concrete stairs with iron banisters, up, up, Paul panting, until they emerge into the semidarkness of the hall. The bar glows in one corner, and here and there islands of green are illuminated in the huge, indefinite space. Oliver’s obsession with snooker is sufficiently intense, sufficiently single-minded, sufficiently almost-worrying, for it to be possible that he will make it as a professional one day. He is not interested in anything else. The walls of his room are covered with pictures of Ronnie O’Sullivan, and in imitation of his idol, he wears an Alice band around the house, though not to school. His cue, a birthday present from Paul, is on permanent display in his room, and from Heather he has pestered permission to stay up late during tournaments. Paul is proud of all this, having introduced Oliver to the sport himself. These days, when they play, he is pleased if he beats him — it happens less and less. They don’t talk while they play. Oliver is a silent, serious child, and Paul’s attitude to snooker is solemn. ‘Set the balls up, will you, Oli?’ he says, and heads to the bar for a Foster’s and a Coke. He was himself introduced to the sport by his own father, and their relationship, such as it is (and Paul, as much as anyone now, looks at these things with a critical eye), is still heavily dependent on snooker to give it any form or content at all. There are other things sometimes — other things that they talk about — but only in the context of playing snooker, or talking about snooker, and always safe in the knowledge that snooker is never far away. And although Oliver is not his son, Paul had felt it important, as the years went by — though he had never really articulated this, even to himself — that he should have some kind of individual relationship with him, and that snooker should be the basis of such a relationship seemed obvious and natural. (At a loss about what to do with Marie, he had included her in their early trips to the club, but she had not taken to it.)

Paul himself had once harboured hopes — probably never realistic — of being a professional player; hopes which foundered in 1980, when at the age of fifteen he was knocked out in the second round of the National Youth Championship in Wolverhampton — not, from a wider perspective, an unrespectable achievement, but certainly not good enough for a would-be pro. Even then, Jimmy White — who had just turned pro himself and was unknown outside the world of snooker — was his hero. They were, in many ways, Paul often thought, so similar. Jimmy was simply a more high-profile, a more heroic, a more epic version of himself — a version of himself who appeared on television. What Paul might have been — who knows? — if he had beaten that flatulent Welsh boy in the second round of the tournament in Wolverhampton. If he had not missed that easy blue in the deciding frame … They do perhaps have points of similarity, Paul and Jimmy, though not most prominently the ones that Paul likes to point out (they are both, in his opinion, mavericks, flair players) — more a dingily raddled appearance and a perceived lack of ruthlessness and steel; and if it is hyperbolic to talk about ‘tragedy’, a sad sense, at least, of something squandered. It is probably these unacknowledged, and perhaps only subliminally noticed similarities, which underpin Paul’s long-standing admiration and affection for Jimmy White. An affection not shared by Oliver, incidentally, who when questioned describes Jimmy, with characteristic forthrightness, as ‘disgusting’. Paul’s other favourite players, Stephen Hendry and John Higgins (and their appeal is perhaps that they exemplify, in professionalism and solidity and steel, qualities that he finds lacking in himself), are also dismissed by Oliver as ‘annoying’ and ‘boring’ respectively.