In Real Life Read online

  Also by Chris Killen

  The Bird Room

  CANONGATE

  Edinburgh · London

  Published in Great Britain in 2015 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Chris Killen, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 262 9

  eISBN 978 1 78211 444 4

  Typeset in Sabon LT Std by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  This novel was written with assistance from a grant from Arts Council England.

  for Jessica

  Contents

  Part One Age Sex Location

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2004

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2004

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Part Two First World Problems

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Ian 2014

  Lauren 2014

  Part Three Be Right Back

  Lauren 2005

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2005

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2005

  Ian 2014

  Paul 2014

  Lauren 2005

  Ian 2015

  Acknowledgements

  part one

  age sex location

  LAUREN

  2004

  One night, while Paul was at work, Lauren turned to a blank page in her notebook and drew a line down the middle. PROS, she wrote, on the left side of the page, then CONS on the right. And then she stared at the empty PROS column, hovering the nib of her biro above it. After a couple of minutes, she shifted her attention across to CONS.

  Anxious/paranoid, she wrote, almost immediately.

  Bad breath

  Never plans ahead

  Pretentious

  Unimaginative

  Works in a bar

  Has never given me an orgasm

  And then she stopped, feeling a sudden lurching guilt, as if Paul was right there in the room with her, looking over her shoulder. She turned back to PROS. She stared at the empty rectangle. She tapped the bitten end of the biro against her front teeth and looked around the tiny living room of their rented two-bed terrace for inspiration: at Paul’s framed Breathless poster, at the unhooverable red Ikea rug beneath it, at a giant cream candle that had never been lit.

  Would never cheat, she wrote, eventually.

  Lauren woke a few hours later to the sound of the bedroom door slamming against the wall. The main light went on and there was Paul in the doorway, his mouth all sour-looking and his cheeks flushed like someone had slapped them.

  ‘What the fuck!’ he shouted, flapping something at her.

  The thing he was flapping, Lauren realised, was her notebook.

  (Occasionally, in the ensuing weeks, she would wonder if she left it lying open on the coffee table on purpose, subconsciously, for Paul to discover at three in the morning when he got in from work.)

  ‘Oh shit. I’m sorry . . .’ she began.

  ‘Anxious,’ Paul interrupted, his voice quavering as he read. ‘Paranoid . . . Bad breath. Bad breath? Fucking hell. Couldn’t you have just said something. Told me to get some mints or something?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into her hands, which smelled of Kiehl’s moisturiser (a birthday present from his parents), too afraid now to look into his slapped, miserable face.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he spat.

  And then he groaned, as if a plug had been pulled somewhere inside him, all the anger gurgling away as he collapsed onto the edge of the bed.

  Lauren felt herself resisting the urge to get out from under the covers and put her arm around him, maybe kiss him on the neck.

  ‘I didn’t mean for you to find it,’ she said, not moving, not doing anything.

  ‘Then why did you leave it out like that on the fucking coffee table?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Which was the truth.

  That night Paul slept on the sofa and Lauren didn’t sleep at all, and as soon as it was even slightly light outside she got out of bed again and began padding around the bedroom in wonky circles, opening the wardrobe doors in horror-film slow motion in case they made the slightest creak. She slipped her gigantic green-and-brown wheeled suitcase from beneath a pile of coats she now hated and began emptying her chest of drawers into it: knickers, teenage love letters, a pair of Mickey Mouse socks with a hole in the heel.

  What exactly am I doing? she wondered a few hours later as she wheeled the squeaking suitcase past the lump of Paul’s body, rising and falling beneath his dark blue parka. Over by the front door, she got the distinct feeling that he wasn’t actually asleep. To test this theory out, she stood there for a bit, one hand on her suitcase, the other on the front-door handle, like an advert for someone leaving a relationship.

  She was waiting, she realised with a kind of foggy embarrassment, for Paul to leap up and plead with her not to go.

  But Paul was not that kind of person.

  Paul was quiet and bitter and calculating – add those to the list! – and exactly the kind of person who would just stay there beneath a coat, pretending.

  Lauren waited a full five minutes, counting down the seconds like a game of hide-and-seek, and then she let herself out into the street, which was a luminous milky blue and completely deserted, birds chirping madly in the trees, full milk bottles standing on the doorsteps.

  ‘I think I’m breaking up with Paul,’ she told her mum, as soon as it reached a suitable time in the morning to make a phone call. There was an especially long pause on the other end of the line, during which Lauren listened to a boiled sweet clacking against her mum’s teeth as – Lauren imagined – she tried to wrestle the smile off her face. Lauren’s mum had never really liked Paul.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said finally. ‘Oh love, I’m sorry to hear that. Has he done something? He’s done something, hasn’t he?’

  ‘No,’ said Lauren quickly, feeling that same tight, choking, collar-y feeling she got whenever they tried to talk about Paul. ‘It’s me. I just . . . I don’t know, I don’t think I’m happy any more.’

  ‘Well, you can always come and stay with me if you need a little time to think things over. Or you know, just for a break.’

  ‘That’s what I was hoping you’d say,’ Lauren said.

  She was calling from the train station.

  She’d already bought her ticket.

  IAN

  2014r />
  Carol isn’t there to meet me at the platform, so I drag my things through the busy departures hall and down a not-working escalator. Outside it’s pissing down. I roll a fag beneath the glass lip of the entrance and watch the black cabs pulling in and out of the rank as I smoke it.

  This is the first time I’ve come to visit since she moved here for university, over ten years ago. I’m sorry, Carol, I think. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’m sorry for being such a selfish dickhead all the time. Now please let me come and live in your spare room for a while.

  On the phone, we didn’t talk about how long I might be staying.

  I’m hoping for a month or two.

  Just as I’m stubbing my fag out, a faded red Corsa pulls into one of the slots in the short-stay car park, just a few metres away. The door yawns open and there she is: Carol, except with weird glasses and shorter hair.

  ‘Ian!’ she calls, waving at me even though I’ve already spotted her.

  I wave back, feeling my mouth pull itself into a grin.

  I begin carrying things over from the pile on the kerb, slinging them two at a time into the boot. First my rucksack and holdall. Then my guitar case and a bin bag. Then my taped-up cardboard box and another, smaller rucksack.

  ‘Is that everything?’ Carol asks.

  Yep, I nod.

  It’s everything I own in the world.

  There’s no radio playing in the car so I listen instead to the sound of an empty Fanta Zero can rattling around in my footwell as we drive out of the city centre, past boarded-up shop fronts with bits of unimaginative graffiti sprayed on them. For some reason, I’d imagined things would look different here. I want to touch the buttons on the stereo, but I must be careful not to piss Carol off. I must remain on my best behaviour.

  ‘What’s with the beard?’ she says, not taking her eyes off the road. ‘Makes you look about fifty.’

  ‘I’ve just . . . not shaved,’ I say.

  ‘You need a haircut, too.’

  ‘I know,’ I say.

  I hold myself back from saying how strange her new short hair looks.

  ‘Thanks for all this, by the way,’ I say, just as she flicks the indicator and we turn a sharp left.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she says.

  So I don’t. I rest my forehead against the window and watch the wet black streets flick past as we drive in the direction of her flat, wherever it is, somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester.

  ‘It’s not the Hilton,’ she says outside the front door, up on the third floor of a converted redbrick house. The winding communal staircase smells of damp and take-away dinners, and the light above my head is fluttering like a moth. From somewhere down the hall comes the muffled hum of Sunday night telly.

  ‘I’m sure it’s great,’ I say, as she turns the key and then leads me down a grim once-white corridor with institutional carpet and no pictures on the walls. There’s an odd, sour smell coming from somewhere, too.

  ‘Have you got a cat?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘How come?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  She pushes open the door to a box room at the far end of the corridor.

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘It’s perfect.’

  It looks like the kind of room you might decide to end your life in. Blank white walls, threadbare carpet, a tiny, steel-framed single bed. I drop my bags in the doorway and walk towards the single-glazed window on the wall opposite. A view of the car park and the recycling bins and, beyond that, another large redbrick house. From where I’m standing I can see all the way in: into its brightly lit, expensive-looking living room. I try to will my body out through the window and over the car park towards it.

  ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’ Carol asks from the hallway. ‘I’ve not really got round to doing it up yet.’

  ‘It’s great,’ I say.

  The only other thing in the room is a large brown wardrobe, the gloss flaking off it in long translucent splinters. As I touch it with my finger, I feel something like a candle go out inside me.

  A little later, we sit facing each other at the two-seater kitchen table. Carol watches me eat my beans on toast like I might try and spoon it out the window if she left me alone. It’s only just gone ten in the evening but my eyes have already started to buzz and sting at the edges.

  The salt shaker in the middle of the table is in the shape of a little white ghost-person, its arms outstretched, but the pepper is just a thing from Morrisons.

  ‘What happened to his friend?’ I ask, pointing at the shaker person with my knife.

  ‘They must’ve had an argument,’ Carol says, ‘because one night she jumped off the table and committed suicide.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I say.

  I try to think of something else to say.

  ‘How’s Martin?’ I say.

  Martin is Carol’s boyfriend. They’ve been together for years now, but he still refuses to move in with her. I only ever see Martin occasionally, at Christmases and family parties, but I really don’t like him. Martin makes me feel uncomfortable and useless and like I’ll never quite fully grow up; he’s physically bigger and makes lots of money and speaks, sometimes, in a fake Cockney accent.

  ‘He’s alright,’ Carol says, picking at a bobble of cotton on her cardigan. There are small creases around the edges of her mouth when she talks; little lines I’ve not seen before. ‘He’s on a lads’ holiday at the moment, actually.’

  ‘Nice,’ I say.

  ‘So what’s the plan, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Find a job? I shouldn’t need to stay here too long.’

  Please don’t make me pay rent, I think.

  ‘I could ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre,’ she says. ‘He gets back next week.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  (I can think of almost nothing worse than working at a call centre with Martin as my boss.)

  ‘Have you spoken to Mum yet?’ she says.

  ‘Yep,’ I say quietly.

  ‘Well, you haven’t, because I called her just before I came to collect you and she knew nothing about all this.’

  ‘I’ll give her a ring later on.’

  ‘You’re going to have to help with rent and bills, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And if you want to smoke, you’ll have to do it outside.’

  I can hear it in her voice, just how much she’s enjoying telling me what to do. I keep quiet and nod my head as she continues, listing all the rules of the flat: how I have to try to keep all the doors closed to save the heat, and how I can’t have baths, just showers, and how I mustn’t run the taps unnecessarily while cleaning my teeth.

  She is only six and a half minutes older than me but she’s always been the one in charge.

  ‘Is there internet?’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  This takes a few seconds to fully sink in.

  Who doesn’t have the internet? I think.

  ‘Who doesn’t have the internet?’ I say out loud.

  ‘I don’t,’ Carol says. ‘It’s a waste of money,’ and the way she says it reminds me of Dad.

  I’m about to tell her, then stop myself.

  I get in under the blankets, still in all my clothes, and curl myself into a ball. I close my eyes but suddenly I’m not tired any more.

  I’ve unpacked most of my things – my two pairs of jeans and my three jumpers and my one smart shirt and trousers – into the wardrobe, and I’m using the taped-up cardboard box as a makeshift bedside table. There’s nothing useful inside it, anyway. It’s just full of sentimental things that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away: an envelope of letters, a collection of worn-down plectrums, a printed-out photo of a person holding a birthday cake, about a thousand gig tickets.

  I’ve stuffed my guitar case as far as I can beneath the bed and set the alarm on my shitty Nokia for half-seven in the morning, and my plan is to find somewhere in the city first thing to print out copies of my
CV and then spend the rest of the day walking around, handing them out.

  I stretch my legs, and my feet touch a cold patch of blanket.

  I turn onto my back.

  I feel an email-shaped ache appear inside me, somewhere around my stomach.

  It begins flashing on and off, but I ignore it as best I can.

  Please leave me alone, I tell it.

  All you’ve ever done is make me unhappy.

  Earlier on, when I first unpacked and opened my laptop, a dialogue box popped up in the corner of the screen, asking if I wanted to view available wireless networks.

  So I clicked OK and scanned down the list, and they all appeared to be locked and I was about to give up when I noticed one right at the bottom, open to anyone, called ‘Rosemary’s Wireless’.

  As I watched my cursor begin to float towards it, I made my decision:

  No more internet for a while.

  And then, very quickly, before I could change my mind, I closed my laptop and put it away, right up on top of the wardrobe.

  PAUL

  2014

  Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to write something on a whiteboard. There are nineteen students in Paul’s class, a mixture of second- and third-year undergraduates, and as they all look up from their horseshoe of desks, waiting for him to speak, whatever it was that Paul had planned on saying disappears completely from his head.

  It’s like Quantum Leap. He feels beamed-in. He feels like a stranger, suddenly, in his own body. He takes his hand away from the whiteboard and slips the marker back into his jeans pocket, as if that was what he’d meant to do with it all along.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, turning to face the class. ‘Let’s have a look at, um, at Rachel’s story. Did everyone print out Rachel’s story and read it through, yeah?’

  The class give no indication that they’ve heard him.

  ‘Okay, who wants to go first?’ Paul says.

  Nothing.

  Each week, after about twenty minutes of Paul’s stuttering and mumbling on an aspect of creative writing, they will critique the first draft of a short story by someone in the group, and no one will ever say anything much about it except, ‘I liked it, I guess.’