London and the South-East

15

ALONE IN THE bedroom, under the yellowing ivory scattered by the ceiling bulb, light the colour of his teeth, Paul pulls on the blue trousers of his uniform. He tugs the polo shirt over his head, and shoves his arms through its little sleeves. He is nervous. It is twenty-five to ten. Seeing the light still on in Oliver’s room, he slips over the landing and tiptoes downstairs. In her coat, Heather is sitting on the sofa, with a magazine. ‘Should we go?’ Paul says quietly. The car has a damp smell, and seems irked when she wakes it with the key. They drive in silence to the Old Shoreham Road. Heather’s silence is so weighty, so pointed — she sometimes holds her lower lip in her teeth, as if something were imminent — that Paul says, ‘You all right?’

‘M-hm,’ she nods, staring straight ahead through the wipers’ sleepy to and fro.

‘Thanks for driving me, by the way,’ he says a few minutes later.

There are few other people out — unsurprising on a rainy Sunday night in January — and it only takes five minutes to get there. It seems to take no time. Paul leans over, his left hand opening the door — the kiss is a formality — and says, ‘See you in the morning,’ with a weary shot at a wry smile. He is early, and sitting alone at a table in the staff canteen, he feels odd in his ill-fitting uniform. He is also surprisingly tired — and it is only ten o’clock. Downstairs, he identified himself to Graham, the nightshift manager — a short, obese black man with a medicine-ball-sized head and fat-lensed spectacles that magnified his eyes. Wearing a leather jacket, he sat on the rubber conveyor belt of a dormant checkout, singing quietly to himself, and tapping his clipboard with a biro.

Paul cleared his throat. ‘Hi, um. I’m Paul Rainey?’

‘All right, Paul,’ Graham said, with unwavering, wide-awake smiliness. ‘Why don’t you go and wait upstairs with the others? Do you know where the canteen is?’

‘No,’ Paul said.

Graham looked around, his jacket creaking as he twisted his squat trunk. One of his feet — in a petite leather shoe with two buckles — maintained tenuous toe-contact with the floor. ‘Someone’ll be along in a minute,’ he said. Unselfconsciously, he resumed his singing, while Paul stood there. The last stragglers of the day shift were trickling out in their coats, going home to late dinners and TV.

‘Gerald,’ Graham shouted. ‘Gerald!’

A tall, espresso-skinned man of about forty-five lifted the headphones from his ears with leisurely slowness, a sloth-like absence of haste. They were very old-fashioned, the headphones, linked by a narrow steel band over the crown of his woolly hat, and padded with orange foam. ‘This is Paul,’ Graham said. ‘He’s starting tonight.’

The two shelf-stackers nodded at each other.

‘All right,’ Gerald said.

‘All right, Gerald.’

‘Gerald’ll show you where to go,’ said Graham.

In silence, Paul followed Gerald over the shop floor. Pushing through some heavy translucent rubber strips, they were suddenly in a grey, utterly functional space. The walls, undressed breeze blocks. The floor, concrete. The lighting, high overhead, greenish and cold. They went through fire doors, and up the linoleum stairs. Most of the shift were present in the canteen. Paul seated himself at an empty table — and was sitting there, moronically ogling its grey surface, when a voice at his shoulder said, ‘What the fuck you doing here?’

Whose is that voice? He knows it. He looks up.

Rashid.

Paul says, ‘What …’

He remembers going to Rashid’s fairly magnificent pad — it was in a brilliant, high-ceilinged Regency terrace — to pick up freezer bags of grass. The palatial appointments of the flat were a little worn and knocked about, but there was, nevertheless, always a sense of turning up at court. Rashid’s courtiers were various male relatives, all shorter, hairier, fatter and uglier than he was; and there were always a few (usually quite unattractive) girls hanging around. Charlie — Rashid’s burly, ochre dog — was always sprawled somewhere, taking the weight off his stubby legs, and panting with a pink, smile-shaped mouth. Rashid himself never answered the door — one of his cousins always did that — and he was often not in the sitting room when Paul came in, murmuring salutations to the courtiers, who murmured them back. Towards him, the cousins were deferential, the ugly girls haughtily indifferent. In no hurry, Rashid would emerge, presumably from some sort of boudoir, always wearing, if it was before eight p.m., a short silk dressing gown — so short that it did not reach his knees — and after some friendly, informationless small talk, business would be transacted in gentlemanly fashion — no counting of money, no checking of merchandise — and one of the cousins would show Paul out.

Now, seeing Rashid, Paul is mystified. He says, ‘What …’ And then, ‘What are you doing here?’

Rashid is smiling; his face shows no sign whatever of his own surprise and mortification. ‘What happened to you, man?’ he says. ‘Why you working here?’

Paul shrugs. ‘I … I am. I don’t know … What happened to you?’

‘What you talkin’ about?’ The question is put in an intimidating tone, and the message is obvious. Rashid pulls up a brown plastic chair and sits. ‘So what the fuck you doing here?’ he says. Paul fobs him off with a vague suggestion of personal tragedy. ‘Oh, I don’t know, mate,’ he says. ‘Things have just been … You know.’ Unhelpfully, Rashid shakes his head. ‘Things have not been great.’ Paul does not want to elaborate any more than that. He does not think Rashid would understand. Suddenly desperate for a cigarette, he feels in his pocket for his tobacco, and at that moment, Graham’s voice summons them to work over the PA system.

As they troop down the stairs, someone — Paul does not see who — shouts out, ‘Oi Rashid! Apparently you’ on pet foods again.’

Rashid half turns, continuing to descend, and says, ‘Pet foodz? Pet foodz? No way, man! I did that yesterday. How d’you know that?’

‘That’s what I heard. Apparently.’

‘What, Graham told you?’ Rashid shakes his head. ‘No way. Not fuckin’ pet foodz. No way.’

Graham does not seem to have moved. When he reads out their postings for the night, Rashid is indeed on pet foods. ‘Aw, man,’ he wails. ‘Not pet foodz! I did them yesterday!’

‘Do them properly this time, all right,’ Graham says, without lifting his goggled eyes from the list.

‘I did do them properly!’

But Graham is already saying, ‘Mark, non-foods. Alex, refrigerator compartments. Dewayne, wines and spirits …’

And Rashid, in his Timberlands, stomps away sighing to pet foods.

‘How was it?’ Heather says when he enters the kitchen in the morning, self-conscious in his uniform. It has been a long night. Two hours into the shift, Graham’s wide shape had appeared at the end of the cereals aisle, where Paul was working. ‘How’s it going — all right?’ he said. He seemed displeased about something.

‘Yeah, fine,’ Paul said. ‘Fine.’

Graham nodded fatly. He was about to move on when he added, apparently as an afterthought, ‘Try and hurry it up, will you?’

‘Oh. Yeah, sure.’

Paul had stowed about half the cereal on the shelves when Graham appeared for a second time and, without hesitating, waddled purposefully into the aisle. ‘Look, mate, you’re going to have to get a move on,’ he said. He looked impatiently at the shelves that Paul had already done. ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect,’ he said. ‘Just neat and tidy, you know.’ And with surprising swiftness, and a cavalcade of creaking from his leather jacket, he suddenly dealt with a crate of All-Bran. It took him about twenty seconds, and his exertions brought out a bright sweat on the dark, porous surface of his forehead. ‘There, you see,’ he said, out of breath. Paul nodded sleepily. It was quarter to one, and he was very tired.

From two o’clock onwards he did not understand how he was still working. The worst hour was six to seven a.m.. This hour nearly left him a sobbing, head-shaking wreck, talking nonsense as he was led away. Then, suddenly, things no longer seemed so hopeless. For one thing, people started to arrive from the outside world. And these people — first the bakery staff, then others — seemed to resecure the supermarket, which in his mind had slipped its moorings, in time and space. Their faces pink from the cold air outside, they seemed to him like rescuers. He felt like kneeling and tearfully plastering their newspaper-holding hands with kisses. Then there was daylight — he saw it first from the smoking-room window, off to the left on the rim of the sky, like a ship on the horizon.

In the last minutes leading up to eight o’clock, the duty manager — a Mr Watt — started to fret about the presence of the night shift on the shop floor, as though they were stage hands and the show was about to start. There was a final frenzy of activity. And then it was too late — the shop was opening — they had to disappear. And they disappeared. They went upstairs to the locker room, put outer garments on over their uniforms and slipped out, unnoticed by the money-spending public as it poured in. Outside, it was blearily sunny. Grey splinters of sun stuck in his shrinking eyes, coming at him off puddles, distant roofs. The drone of the A270 was overlaid by the temporary clattering of a train. And in shapeless blue trousers, black leather jacket, Paul Rainey lit a pre-rolled cigarette in the numb morning air.

Heather is still waiting for an answer to her question.

‘Yeah, fine,’ he says, trying to sound upbeat. ‘It was fine.’ Seeing the kitchen table, however, he has an unsettling flashback to the small hours, to the breakfast cereals aisle, its dry odour, its garish topography, its absurd fauna — Honey Monster, Tony the Tiger, the chocolate-addled monkey on the Coco Pops … In fact, for the first hour the cereals had fascinated him. There were cereals for the would-be athlete, for the weight-conscious, for the sophisticate, the nature lover, the hedonist, the Spartan. Each seemed to be striving to transcend its simple, essentially standard flakes of starch, and offer a short cut to a whole way of life, of self-definition.

Marie is examining him with intense interest. (Oliver, though, is staring into the chocolate milk of his Coco Pops; and there seems to Paul to be something sullen in his not looking at him.) ‘Have you been working all night?’ Marie asks, with a sort of wonderment.

‘I have.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yeah, I have.’

‘In Sainsbury’s?’

‘Yeah.’

He explains how all the products she sees in the supermarket are pulled out onto the shop floor on wheeled pallets, and how he and a dozen others spend all night putting them on the shelves. ‘It takes all night?’ she says. ‘Just to do that?’

‘Yeah, it does,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of products. A lot of products …’ Oliver is showing no interest. ‘All right, Oli?’ Paul says.

And though he says, ‘Yeah,’ he will not look him in the eye.

To finish work at eight in the morning was, in a way that was difficult to define, quite depressing. In the sunny, suddenly vacant house — silent, except for the liquid drops of the kitchen tap, dripping into the crockery of three breakfasts that had been hurriedly dumped in the sink — Paul would sit on the sofa, still in his uniform, and start to make a spliff. The first morning — the morning of Oli’s sullen silence — as soon as he lay down he had plummeted into unconsciousness, waking four or five hours later in the early afternoon and a state of total disorientation. The bland daylight was hateful — he felt like a vampire; eventually, though, turning his back to it, he managed to sleep, on and off, until the others got home at fiveish. Half waking from this shallow slumber, he heard them come in, shouting and crashing about downstairs. And with a ringing in his ears, resigned to getting no more rest, he had pulled on his jeans. It was not like getting up in the morning — it was less wholesome — and though, over the weeks, it did start to seem more like that, it never entirely shook off the sense of something amiss. Sometimes he thought of Gerald, who had been working nights for years — for as long as Paul had worked in sales — and wondered what it was like for him. He, surely, no longer suffered from this sense of being out of sync with the world. How could he survive otherwise? Perhaps he lived on his own — that might be easier (though of course not without its own tribulations) — because Paul’s vague sense of displacement was forcefully verified when, mooching downstairs with a fuzzy morning head, he found, not only the sad, late-afternoon light, but beings with a whole day of wakeful incident behind them. He was unable to communicate with these beings. He ate his breakfast — he had started to eat Highland Porridge Oats for breakfast, a bowl of porridge every day at about five p.m. — while the children, still in their school uniforms, watched TV, and Heather started to think about supper. Though they inhabited the same physical space, through some sort of temporal slippage they seemed aware of each other only as phantoms, with whom it was impossible to interact. So Paul sat there, eating his porridge like a ghost, while Heather, still in her work clothes, waited for some burgers to defrost in the microwave.

On a positive note, he was drinking less than he had for years. (One effect of which was the sudden, startling resurgence of his libido. Heather — though she had for a long time placed its sluggishness high on the list of reasons why he should stop drinking — seemed impatient with this development, turning over with a tsk when, on his nights off, he took up her morning tea with a hard-on, and shooing him away when he surprised her towelling herself after her bath.) Perhaps he was inhibited by a sense that, no matter what hours he was keeping personally, the morning was off-limits to alcohol. There had been one testing night during his first week on the shift when he was assigned to the wines and spirits aisle. To be surrounded by all that liquor, to handle it for hours, had been hard; his thirst — his desire to open one of those bottles and have a swig, a taste at least — had been increasingly urgent. Hour after hour. The heavy glass bottles. The bright liquids. He came very close to pilfering something — a quarter-bottle of Scotch, rum, anything — and slipping off to the Gents to add it to his dumbly hungering blood. As he worked, he imagined in extraordinary detail the way the seal of the cap, its frail connections, would break with a soft crunching click. He imagined that over and over again. The taste of the auburn liquor, the mild fire in his throat … Yes, that had been hard. When he finally finished the aisle, his jaw was so tightly clenched that he could not open his mouth, and his temples throbbed. Perhaps, though, it was his successful emergence from that ordeal — into the morning light — that persuaded him that he would be able to do without alcohol after work. Whatever the reason, he was able to do without it, and that pleased him.

Heather, on the other hand, seemed to be drinking more and more. Paul noticed, from the way the bin filled up with bottles, that she was putting away an unprecedented quantity of wine. And she was going out more than she used to. In the past, she had not had much of a social life. She went out perhaps once a fortnight. Now she was out twice a week. She was usually tipsy when she got home, and sometimes worse. On one occasion in particular, she was so drunk that she was unable to open the front door. For several minutes, while he finished making his spliff, Paul listened to her scraping at it with the key. When he finally went to open it himself, she more or less fell into the hall, her face a glassy mask of confusion. It was half past one, and he had been worried — he had even phoned her. She had not picked up. When he asked her where she had been — he was himself entirely sober, if quite stoned — she just shook her head and pushed past him, moving with inept purpose towards the kitchen. He watched irritably as she walked into the wall. She did not look well. Her face was unpleasantly chop-fallen, and blotchily red, as if it had been rouged by a blindman; there were particularly handsome crimson flares on either side of her nose. ‘Why didn’t you answer your phone?’ he said. She did not seem to hear. Apparently losing interest in the kitchen, or perhaps simply forgetting where she was going, she sank down onto the floor in the hall, still in her coat, as if she intended to sleep there. ‘Where were you?’ Paul said. She was curling up on the floor. For a few moments he stared at her, wondering what to do. Was he like this, he wondered uneasily, when he got home at the oblivious end of a big session? Surely he was never this drunk. She was blotto. It was, he thought, incredible that she had made it home. ‘How did you get home?’ he asked, without much hope of an answer. ‘Did you take a taxi?’ Surprisingly, she seemed to shake her head. ‘You didn’t take a taxi?’ Another ambiguous head movement, most probably a shake. ‘So how did you get home? Did Alice drive you?’ It seemed unlikely. ‘Did Alice drive you home?’ he said. He was keeping his voice down — the kids were asleep upstairs.

Heather murmured something.

‘What?’

She mumbled something.

‘I can’t hear, Heather. What did you say? “Nothing”?’

She made the noise again, a sort of two-syllable moan.

‘Marvin?’

‘Muh’n.’ What? Martin?’

At this she seemed to pull herself into a ball — a coat ball about her hips, only her dry leonine hair spilling onto the carpet and oxblood booted feet protruding.

‘Martin drove you home?’ Paul said, not sure whether he had understood. When he tried to make her stand up (‘You can’t sleep here, Heather’) she fought him off with misdirected fisticuffs, until he muttered, ‘Suit your fucking self,’ and went into the kitchen to make his lunch. He was puzzled, and fractious. Later, passing through the hall to empty the ashtray — it must have been about four — he saw that she had gone.

In the morning when she came downstairs her face was grey and immobile, her eyes a bloodshot mess in their hollows. He was still in the lounge, of course, reading the early edition of The Times, just emerging from the obits — fascinating, the obits — into the looser prose of the sport. He was surprised to hear her on the squeaky stairs — he had not expected her down so early, though in fact it was the usual time. He waited a few minutes, then folded the paper and went into the kitchen. She did not at first acknowledge that anything unusual had happened. He said, ‘You were quite drunk last night.’

‘I wasn’t that drunk …’

‘Yes, you were. You were …’ She interrupted him. ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ she said drily. And knowing that he was in no position to exercise any sort of sanctimony, he just shrugged. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Whatever. How did you get home?’

She seemed to sigh. ‘Martin drove me,’ she said.

‘Martin? Martin Short?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were with Alice.’

‘I was.’

‘So what was Martin doing there?’

‘He wasn’t there. I asked him to come and get me.’

‘You what, you called him?’

‘I know — it’s ridiculous.’

‘You called him, at one o’clock or whatever, and he came to get you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Some wine bar in town.’

‘Wasn’t he asleep?’

‘I think he was, yes.’ For a moment — nervously, naughtily — she laughed. Then she made a pain face.

That Martin would do this was not in itself surprising. His seemingly unlimited willingness to do things for her was a joke that even the children were in on. This, however, seemed excessive.

‘The poor fucker probably had to go to work today.’

‘I think he did.’

‘You can’t use him as a taxi service just because he’ll do it.’

‘I know,’ she said.

For a moment, Paul wondered whether to say the words. He had himself drunk next to nothing for weeks. ‘Well, you shouldn’t drink so much,’ he said.

Holding the mug over her mouth, she shot him a sharp look.

‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. And then, ‘I’ve more or less stopped drinking, Heather. I don’t know if you’ve noticed.’

‘No, I have,’ she said. ‘It’s good.’

‘It’d be a shame if just when I stopped, you started.’ He paused. ‘Why were you so pissed anyway?’

She shrugged. ‘We were just having a good time. You know.’