David Szalay - London and the South-East

Taking the drinks, and tucking two packets of crisps under his arms, Paul returns to the table, where Oliver has finished setting up, and is knocking the cue ball the length of the now illuminated baize, trying to bring it to rest as close as possible to the baulk cushion. It is the sort of thing he would happily do for hours. Paul wins the toss, and taking off his jacket (his suit jacket, worn with a round-necked jumper and jeans and scuffed work shoes) he steps up to break. He overhits it, and leaves a red on for Oliver. Not an easy red, but Oliver has become the sort of intimidating opponent who punishes most lapses, and Paul sits down — partly to put pressure on the eleven-year-old, and partly because he assumes that the pressure will not tell. It doesn’t. With a sharp clock the ball drops into the pocket. The white scoots into the pack and — quite luckily, Paul thinks — positions itself for a simple black. All day he has had a voracious hunger that seems unsatisfied however much he eats, and he pulls open the pack of prawn cocktail crisps with a sort of urgency. Oliver sinks the black, and having to stand on tiptoe, replaces it on its spot. Paul lifts the pint of Foster’s to his lips and its smell sickens him for a moment. He soldiers on, sipping, scowling, stuffing the sweet-and-sour crisps into his narrow mouth. Even now it pains him to think of that easy blue he missed in Wolverhampton. On such small things our lives depend, he thinks. Fate. It may be the case that ever since that miss — and if he had potted it, he has to admit, he might have missed the next shot, or failed in the next round — it may be the case that he had given up on his life even then. Not entirely of course, but as a serious, wholly worthwhile undertaking. He remembers the way his legs shook as he returned to his seat, after the blue had rattled in the jaws of the pocket and rolled a little way over the table’s green plain, and the umpire saying, in a heartless voice, ‘Rainey, thirty-four.’ He remembers that he had tears somewhere near, though not actually in his eyes. He has no memory of the Welsh boy finishing the frame, only of standing in a light shower of applause to shake his damp hand …

Clock!

Oliver seems to be putting a break together. The most extraordinary thing about his game, Paul thinks, is not his precise and assured potting, nor his intimidating nerve and determination; it is his break-building. He has an amazingly mature ability to think several shots ahead, to plan ahead … So, after Wolverhampton, life had gone on, but maybe his attitude to it had changed. Nothing seemed worth full engagement. He had drifted — that was for sure. He had been drifting, it sometimes seems, ever since. He pulls the crisp packet taut and pours the last orange-pink crumbs into the palm of his hand. Then he lights a cigarette. With the hangover, he feels emotionally oversensitised, as well as intellectually dull and physically depleted — everything seems moving, seems full of mysterious significance. There is something savage about the way Oliver plays, a savage precision. Killer instinct. He has a winner’s attitude. He pots the black, and the white spins back turbulently to align itself with one of the few remaining reds. Paul knocks the rubber butt of his cue (he uses one of the dodgy club cues) twice on the floor in restrained appreciation. Oliver ignores this, his focus intent on the next task. It is sometimes difficult, watching him, to remember that he is still a child, who weeps when he is disappointed or prevented from doing what he wants. Like the time Paul promised to take him to Sheffield, to watch some World Championship matches at the Crucible. Heather vetoed that. While Oliver cried in his room, Paul had tried to reason with her in the kitchen, where she was doing the washing-up. As soon as he started to speak, she said, ‘Paul — no.’ He sat down at the table, and lit a cigarette. It was summer and outside the windows the garden — the damp rectangle of overgrown grass and old tennis balls and tangled washing lines and slugs — was still half sunny. He started again, but she turned to him, her hands in pink rubber gloves and said, ‘No!’ He knew there was no point pushing it, that her stomach for a fight over this was far stronger than his own. ‘I’m sorry, Oli,’ he had said stiffly, ashamed of being unable to deliver on his promise, ‘your mother doesn’t want us to go.’ He did not even ask her why she was so opposed to the idea (she later said it ‘wouldn’t have been fair on Marie’) — if he had it would only have made her angry, only have made her point out the obvious fact that Oli is her son, not his. And he is hers. Paul is not his father. (Though there are naturally times when she wants him to perform the part.) And Paul, it must be said, is pleased to be shielded from any sense of ultimate involvement, is pleased to feel that, theoretically, he is under no obligation, that he is simply filling in for someone else, informally, temporarily. That the whole domestic set-up is merely provisional — he feels safe with that, which is also why he never pushes her on it, why he sometimes seems so passive. He looks up. Oliver is standing there, surveying the table and chalking his cue the way he sees the professionals do on TV. Paul notices that the people at the next table, two old men, have stopped playing and are watching Oliver. It is quite a break he is on. He finesses the last red into the side pocket and, his chin still on his cue, watches as the white rolls against the end cushion, setting it up precisely to pot the black, which is stranded there. One of the old men nods, and lights a cigarette. Ned the barman is passing with a clutch of empty glasses. ‘Eh, Ned,’ says the other old man. Ned stops. ‘This boy’s got a maximum break on.’ And Ned, too, becomes a spectator. Now with four sets of eyes on him, but seemingly oblivious to them, Oliver sinks the black. Ned winces — the cue ball has not travelled far up the table and the shot for the yellow, which is still on its spot, is extremely difficult. Paul, who is resisting the urge to stand lest it put more pressure on Oli, watches in silence. He wishes the spectators — Ned is staring open-mouthed at the table — would all fuck off. And now more of them are emerging from the shadows, as word of what is happening spreads through the hall. In the middle of it, Oliver shows no sign of even noticing them. He seems as focused, as unflustered as if he were on his own. He takes his time. He pots the yellow. There is a short spate of applause and then the watchers, perhaps sharing Paul’s worry, stop their hands. What is left should be easy, were it not for the pressure, the immense forces of the pressure, which distort it. (And there is also the fact that everyone there has lost sight of — he is eleven years old.) When he pots the black — and he nearly underhits it — there is a strange, strangled exclamation, and then people are applauding and laughing and talking excitedly to strangers; except Paul, who is still and silent, and Oli himself, who had seemed the oldest of them all a moment ago, when the final ball fell with a quiet rustle into the rigging of the pocket, and is suddenly a child again, small, with an unsteady expression on his face — not a smile, exactly — as though stunned and scared by this moment of success, so often imagined (imagined uninterruptedly, in fact, for several years), so many times unsuccessfully attempted — and wondering, ‘What has happened?’ Or even, ‘Who am I?’

IT IS A perfect Monday morning. Late November. Cold grey gloom outside. And raining. On waking, in the dark, to the alarm’s infuriating high-pitched stutter, the first thing Paul does is fumble on the light. For a few moments it stings his eyes. It is not a day on which he expects anything significant to happen. Heather drops him off at the station on her way to the small solicitors’ firm, Gumley Rhodes, where she does part-time secretarial work. For an hour, he sits squashed against a wet window, someone else’s newspaper in his face, and a morsel of hashish under his tongue. When he arrives at London Bridge, he has a slow subtle floaty feeling in his limbs, a peaceful fug about his whole person. He takes the Northern Line to Bank, and there transfers to the Central Line. From the mighty escalator at Holborn, he watches the adverts slide down through his field of vision, until delivered by it, via the low ticket hall, into daylight and rain, he crosses Kingsway, and enters King’s House through the taupe glass door — tentatively, fearing some sort of fallout from the Flossman incident. He knows, however, that this is paranoid — there is no sign of fallout nor will there be.