Still feeling unreal, he got up to go to the bathroom. The frosted glass above the washbasin trapped a layer of pinkish light, like the skin of an angel. He ran lukewarm water into the basin, while his reflection in the mirror ignored him. The inside of his mouth was coated with the taste of alcohol; he could feel it in his gut, cold like silver. He listened to the sound of his own breathing. He needed to piss, but he’d have to wait until his prick went down. What had he been dreaming about? Paul waited for a long time before touching the water in the basin. He was afraid to break its surface. In the end he washed with his eyes shut, and cut himself shaving.
As he dressed and left for work, Paul kept thinking of Alison. She wasn’t the first mistress he’d had, but she was the first who’d threatened his marriage. For Paul, these affairs were a kind of escape. He didn’t allow them to become real. It was the sense of danger that turned him on. He suspected that, without Carol to go back to, he wouldn’t have bothered with any of them. Alison had seemed just his type. She was young and easily controlled, and she drank even more than Paul did. He saw her once or twice a week, always parking his car some distance from the house where she lodged.
It had gone on for nearly a year. There was something in Alison he’d never found before, and couldn’t put into words. She came from the coast—the Isle of Wight—and city life was strange to her. She sometimes talked about swimming in the sea, the freedom and wildness of it. That had been the only good thing about her childhood. She’d left home at fifteen, gone to London, then drifted up into the Midlands like so many others. Her room was full of shells and flowers and old records; having developed a catlike adaptation to confined spaces, she didn’t like to go out. She had a good voice, but Paul didn’t like to hear her sing; it frightened him, for some reason. What did it mean to want what you were most afraid of? Or to fear what you most wanted?
He’d left Alison when she’d refused to have an abortion. It wouldn’t have been the first time for her, so Paul had felt justified in taking a firm stand. She’d asked him to divorce Carol, and he’d explained to her that divorce was wrong, and abandoning your family was more so. He shouldn’t even have had to explain these things to Alison. She’d called him a two-faced bastard, and that had been the end of it. He’d stopped calling on her, and was relieved when she didn’t try to find him. Months later he’d come across the story of her death, while flicking through a day-old copy of a rival newspaper on the bus. Alison’s landlord had broken her door down and found her dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was six months pregnant. The fetus inside her had died at the same time.
This morning, Paul felt as though he were committed to her. He felt displaced from his former life. Was that because of the trouble in his marriage, or the trouble in his job? Or the drink, which was having the same effect on both? Getting drunk was a way of remembering Alison, as well as of returning to his own childhood. Of course, getting drunk didn’t make you like a child; it just made you feel that you were. The bus into town was packed with fresh-faced office workers, just the wrong side of a nine o’clock start. He told himself he’d have the car back soon. It was only a three-month ban: clumsy driving, slightly over the limit; nobody had been hurt.
The brilliant sunlight shadowed him from New Street to the Messenger’s offices in Hockley. It glittered from car roofs and scaffolding and broken glass. The roadway between Snow Hill and the old Hockley flyover was all elevated above ground level. If you looked at the advertisement boards, you could forget where you were.
Inside his office, Paul felt more secure. His computer terminal was as reassuring as a piano, and much quieter. He edited on-screen, not bothering to mark corrections on a printout beforehand. The added eyestrain was compensated by the sense of potency. Suddenly he wished his own life story were on the screen. Then every morning, he could retrieve himself; correct himself; justify himself; save himself. The pun reminded him of something he couldn’t quite bring to mind. There was the usual scattering of civic events to deal with. Another story about the new science exhibition centre; and one about the new sports complex, designed with half an eye on some future Olympian Games. A handful of robbery, violence and accident stories; still nothing about the canal district.
He spoke to Kevin at lunchtime. The editor was looking tense and on edge, which struck Paul as a good sign. “Are you still ignoring what happened?” he asked. On a better day, Kevin might have pretended not to understand him. But he stared hard at Paul, then shook his head.
“The situation seems to be under control,” he said. “We don’t want to stir up public interest in the area. Or innocent people will get hurt. It’s not as though people don’t know what’s going on. But it’s in the sub-citizens’ interests to keep things quiet. Preserve calm. Most of them will be transported out of the districts where these communities are. Dispersed or jailed. The only alternative is what you saw. It’s got to happen, one way or the other.” He walked away before Paul could interpret the unease in his face.
For the next hour, Paul sat in the canteen and watched the reporters and ad men and typists come and go. Who could he talk to that might understand? The faces of the young men reminded him of the army recruits he’d seen in the city center on Tuesday. It was still easy for him to see the young as perfect versions, originals of which he was a defective offprint. But he knew from experience, they were bastards in embryo. Their apparent perfection was just immaturity. He’d never trusted men. Or women. Was that because he didn’t trust himself? He thought about Carol, and knew he’d have to patch things up this weekend. The decision gave him no comfort.
Quite suddenly, with no external jog to his memory, he knew what the joke about saving himself had reminded him of. It was a line of poetry—some Irish poet from the late twentieth century that his mother had liked. Seamus Heaney, that was it:
Where to be saved you only must save face.
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
In the afternoon, Paul started to fall asleep at his desk. The pile of typescripts under his hands made him dream about a bundle of newspaper. Three old women were sitting in a brick-walled alley somewhere beyond reach of the sun; they were passing the bundle back and forth between them. Each tore away a layer and passed on the rest of it, like a party game. Paul could still hear the chatter of printers from the office, but he refused to open his eyes. There was nothing inside the bundle, unless it was too dry and shrunken to tell apart from the last twisted-up pages, gray with newsprint. The wrinkled hands of the old women were covered with stories. Paul woke with a shock that felt like a magnesium flare in his head. He arranged the sheets on his desk into a logical order, scrambled them and rearranged them. How long could it be before someone noticed he’d done nothing?
Somehow he got through the bulk of work on his desk, half-aware of errors he was letting through or even creating. What did anyone care? If they were comfortable with lies, it was screamingly absurd for them to worry about spelling and punctuation. He could always give it a final check tomorrow morning. At five o’clock Paul unplugged his computer. Instead of catching the bus into town, he walked into the nearest pub. The beer was tepid and had a stiff head he could have shaved with. He drank three pints in half an hour. When he went to piss, the water streaming down the sides of the urinal paralyzed him; he couldn’t look away.