London and the South-East by David Szalay

Author:David Szalay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448103249
Publisher: Random House

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He opens the front door with trepidation. Heather, he hears, is in the kitchen, doing the washing-up. He is tired, and the boots are hurting his feet. He sits down on the second carpeted step and eases them off, then hovers indecisively in the hall for a few moments, holding in one hand the milk he has bought, and in the other the cigarettes. When he finally goes into the kitchen – she ignores him. He puts the milk down on the table, and taking a tea towel, without saying anything, starts to dry the things that she has washed. This goes on for some time, the only sound the sloshing of the water in the sink. It goes on, in fact, until the washing-up is finished, almost an hour later. At which point, Heather pulls off the pink rubber gloves and, still without having spoken to him, walks out. ‘Heather,’ he says. She immediately turns in the doorway. She is wearing her dressing gown and slippers, her hair a Sunday-morning mess. ‘What?’

‘You all right?’

She seems undecided how to respond, and hesitates. Then she says, ‘I think we need to talk, Paul.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘I’m going to have a bath.’

‘Okay.’

She goes upstairs, and full of foreboding, he refills the kettle.

The talk takes place a little later, when Mike and Joan – who spent the night in a hotel in Brighton – take the children to McDonald’s for lunch.

At first, they seem to misunderstand each other. Paul assumes that the primary topic will be his offensive stunt of the previous day, his successful attempt to spoil Christmas, but, while Heather is angry about that, her main worry – and it makes sense to him as soon as he thinks about it – is the fact that he no longer has a job.

She is, he thinks, surprisingly sympathetic. However, when she asks him – her eyes serious, worried, yet full of a desire to understand, to take his side – why exactly he lost his job, he finds himself unable to tell her the truth. He says that the new job – the one he has been talking about for weeks – ‘unfortunately fell through’ (‘I thought it sounded too good to be true,’ she sighs), and that he was sacked from his old job for not making target on the publication. She looks at him – he looks wretched – and says, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. It is. I know you’ll find another job. And you’re brilliant at what you do.’ She says that they are ‘in this together’, and even that she will do a few more hours a week at Gumley Rhodes.

Her mood suddenly shifts, however, when he says that he does not want another job in sales.

She says, ‘But you always said one of the best things about your work is you can always find another job, just like that. Just walk in somewhere and start working.’

‘Yeah, I know …’

‘So you should just do that then.’

Her tone suggests that this should be the final word.

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