David Szalay - London and the South-East

He sees Watt on the shop floor two mornings later. Their eyes meet for a moment. They never speak again. Of course he hears from Gerald, holding forth in the night-time smoking room, his version of events. (This is a few days further on.) Gerald says that the fresh-produce manager was called to HQ in London, that he went there expecting to be told that he would be succeeding Macfarlane, and was told instead that there was evidence he was using unlisted suppliers. He was, Gerald said — and even he seemed slightly sceptical — shown a video of himself doing so, and sacked. Freckled Hazel Ledbetter was made fresh-produce manager in his place …

From the night-shift, it seems like thunder over the horizon, someone else’s storm. Paul inspects Heather’s face for signs of it. He sees none. One morning, however, he is watching TV when the doorbell rings. He drops his spliff into the ashtray and stands wearily. Fucking estate agents , he thinks. He inspects himself for a moment in the hall mirror. Then he opens the door.

‘Martin …’

Martin does not look well. He looks like he has had a sleepless night — perhaps more than one. His face is bloodless — all the blood seems to have found its way into his grey-blue eyes. Smiling mildly, with mild perplexity, Paul says, ‘What …?’

‘I know it was you,’ Martin says.

‘What was?’

‘You know what.’

Paul shakes his head innocently. ‘What?’

‘Andrew Smith.’

‘What are you talking about? Who’s Andrew Smith?’

‘You’re just a fucking …’ Martin seems to search for the word. ‘ Worm .’

‘What are you talking about?’ Paul says again.

‘An envious little worm.’

‘What?’

‘I know it was you, worm.’

‘Yeah, okay …’ Paul starts to shut the door. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Hazel Ledbetter saw you in the Stadium with Watt.’

‘Who’s Hazel Ledbetter?’

‘I knew I’d seen that bag somewhere,’ Martin says. ‘That bag. You had it with you when I saw you.’

‘What bag? What are you talking about?’

‘How can you deny it?’

‘Deny what?’

‘That you and Watt were in it together!’

‘In what together?’

‘You know what!’ He shoves the door open, forcing Paul two steps into the narrow hall. ‘Don’t come in … Don’t!’ Martin hesitates on the threshold. He is wearing his blue tracksuit. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Paul says. He is surprised himself how wounded he sounds. He is shaking. Staring at him, Martin says, ‘Why are you such a shit?’

Paul notices the cold sore on Martin’s lip, the reddish stubble on his jowls. ‘What?’

‘I said — why are you such a shit?’

Paul sighs, and says, in a sort of whisper, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and shuts the door. For a moment, Martin’s tall blue shape lingers on the front step. Then he presses the doorbell. Presses it in. Filling the house with furious livid urgent noise.

He is looking for something in Portslade, south Hangleton or Shoreham. One morning, he looks over some properties — the sort of properties where lonely people die alone; one-bedroom flats in Victorian villas honeycombed with loneliness. Even the estate agents do not try too hard to talk up the small rooms they show him, with single electric hobs, and bathrooms housed in plasterboard boxes, over which dusty sleeping spaces wait at the top of ladders. They study the ceiling, the brown carpet, while Paul steps to the window to inspect the view — train tracks, ivy-filled ex-gardens, allotments.

‘Look, Heather …’ he says. He is hesitant, solemn. They are in the kitchen on Lennox Road. ‘Is there any way …’

She waits for him to finish his sentence, and when he does not, she says, ‘Paul …’ Then, failing to finish her own, she sighs.

‘I think,’ he says, ‘I think these things happen to everybody. Don’t they? I know I’ve been selfish. I see that now.’ She is staring past him, into the garden. It is May. ‘I mean … I can forget about what happened with Martin. I understand. I let you down.’

Looking at him — sober, afraid, unshaved, pale — she worries. Worries that if she surrenders — to herself, not to him — they will soon find themselves exactly where they were. Her sadness — which once seized her with something like fear in the clamorous solitude of Martin’s shower — is intensified by her sense of Paul’s fragility; it pained her physically, when she stepped from the vaporous stall and pulled Martin’s unfamiliar towel towards her, to think of him at that moment, on his own, preparing his porridge. Martin was waiting downstairs in a kimono, opening packs of Madagascan crevettes and a bottle of champagne. The more she thinks about Martin, the more he seems to be something unknown, a vague outline only, a worrisome shadow. He wept when she did not see him for a few days, when she punished him for phoning Paul. Since then, she has found a peevish, wheedling, even threatening side to him, a side new to her, which has made her realise how little she knows him; his emails and voice messages — several a day — seem veined with impatience, with irritation, with self-pity. And now, in the last week, with a sort of hysteria. Something seems to have happened to him. He has started to talk of quitting his job, of taking up gardening. He has stopped shaving. And he wants her to move in with him. Whatever happens, she has made up her mind not to do that . Where will she live then? With her parents? Will she sleep in the single bed from which she once set out for school, through grey suburban streets, through swirling orange chestnut leaves? Will she live as she once did, a sort of asylum seeker in her parents’ house? Everything the same as it was then? Thinking of the house in Hounslow, she finds herself thinking of a younger Paul — it was there that she was living when they met; there that she first spoke to him on the phone, taking it into the hall for privacy. Thinking of this younger Paul — this fusion of hope and nostalgia, memory and imagination — has often made her tearful these last few months.

He is waiting for her to speak.

She says, ‘I think I’m going to take the children to London this weekend.’

He nods, very sombrely. ‘Okay,’ he says.

On Sunday night, she returns to Hove with her terms. There are three of them. The first is that he stop drinking. He seems to think about this for a moment. Then he says, ‘All right.’

‘I’m serious,’ she says.

‘I know. So am I. I want to.’

She stares at him with open scepticism. ‘I mean completely .’

‘I understand. I’ll do my best.’

‘No, that’s not good enough,’ she says, shaking her head.

‘I’ll stop drinking, Heather.’ She holds him in her serious gaze. ‘I’ll stop drinking.’

The second is that he get ‘help’.

‘What do you mean “help”?’

‘Help,’ she says. ‘Professional help.’ And then, ‘I don’t know what exactly. There must be something — some sort of help you can get.’

He shrugs.

‘And you know … I thought you wanted to stop taking those pills,’ she says.

‘I do.’

‘Then you’ll need help.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘Will you get help?’ she wants to know, still unnervingly serious.

‘Yes,’ he says after a pause, ‘I will.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

The last of her terms is that he find a job in sales. In fact, she says ‘a proper job’. There is, however, only one ‘proper job’ that he is able to do.

The second of these terms fares the worst. He has a short conversation with Dr Marlowe, who prescribes his Felixstat, and who advises him that, while it might be desirable in principle, in practice he should probably not stop taking it. Especially not now. He finds a few phone numbers on the Net, and sets up a single appointment with some sort of mental-health professional, which he postpones twice and then fails to turn up for. This takes a few weeks and by then — perhaps because he is making progress elsewhere — Heather seems willing to let it lie.