In Real Life Read online

  I try to imagine myself busking: standing in the middle of this street, playing ‘Wonderwall’ or ‘Hey Jude’ or whatever it is the people of Manchester might want to listen to, and just the idea of it makes a queasy knot appear in my stomach. My guitar hasn’t been out of its case in almost two years. It’s been even longer since I actually played it and sang in front of anyone.

  I start walking back towards the bus stops in Piccadilly Gardens. I dodge past the charity muggers and the phone-card people, pretending I don’t see them waving at me, almost all the CVs I printed out this morning still sitting at the bottom of my rucksack.

  ‘You sound tired,’ Mum says, on the phone that afternoon. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  I’m back in the spare room again, sitting on the bed, feeling sorry for myself. Earlier on, I tried to start Ways to Happiness, but I felt too sad to concentrate properly.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say, as not-tired sounding as I can. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m good. I feel good about things.’

  Maybe it’s a bad connection, but Mum sounds older than normal on the phone today. She sounds like she’s made from bits of cobweb and flannel, and as I speak I can feel my throat swelling painfully.

  ‘Well, take care of yourself,’ she says.

  I’m sorry, Mum, I think. I’m sorry I’ve not yet done anything in my life to make you proud of me. I’m sorry I’ve never been able to see anything through to the end. Don’t worry. Hopefully this is just a phase I’m going through and soon I’ll be absolutely fine, honestly. I really and truly feel like I’m right on the cusp of finding something good and rewarding that I want to do with the rest of my life, and right now is just a strange blip that we’ll soon be able to look back on and laugh about, or better still forget about completely, just you wait . . .

  ‘I’d better go,’ I say.

  ‘Make sure you’re eating well,’ she says.

  ‘Love you,’ I say, quickly hanging up the phone before she can say anything else.

  ‘Can I have a quick word?’ Carol asks, appearing so suddenly in the kitchen doorway that it makes me jump.

  I’m halfway through the washing up. I’ve been trying my best to be helpful around the house, to not do anything to piss her off. I turn around and she’s holding the carrier bag we use as a bin in one hand and what looks like a food-stained till receipt in the other.

  ‘What’s up?’ I say.

  ‘Twelve mini chocolate croissants,’ she reads from the receipt. ‘Six raspberry jam doughnuts, one packet of Jaffa Cakes, three The Best ready meals, one bottle of Heinz brand tomato sauce, squeezy style . . .’

  ‘So?’ I say.

  She raises an eyebrow.

  ‘What?’ I say, honestly confused.

  ‘So, do you know how much all this came to?’

  I have no idea.

  ‘Twenty quid?’ I guess.

  ‘It came to thirty-six pounds sixty-eight.’

  ‘I don’t quite see what your point is,’ I say.

  I’ve stopped doing the washing up now.

  I’m just standing there with my hands in the water.

  I imagine myself taking a plate out of the sink and smashing it against the counter top.

  ‘My point,’ Carol says, ‘is that you need to start saving money and stop buying brand names like a dickhead. How much do you have left in the bank, in total? Three hundred quid?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  (It’s actually closer to thirty, but I don’t know the exact figure because I’ve been too scared to check my balance.)

  ‘You really need to start being more careful,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m just a bit of a mess at the moment. I’m not really thinking straight.’

  I can feel my eyes becoming blurry and a buzzing warmth creeping up from my collar, so I turn back to the sink and pretend to do more washing up, but really I’m just putting my hands in the water and swishing them around to make noises.

  I hear her screw up the receipt and stuff it back in the bin bag, then walk across the kitchen towards me. She rubs my arm and rests her head gently against my shoulder and I remain very still, like a rabbit. Beneath the water, I press my fingertip against the ridged blade of a bread knife.

  ‘You’ll be okay, you wally,’ she whispers.

  PAUL

  2014

  Paul spends two distracted hours, wandering around the university library, unable to find a suitable table to work at. Then he sits, finally, in the Herbivores vegetarian café and doesn’t write anything anyway, just sips a cup of tea and attempts – vaguely, frantically, unsuccessfully – to come up with a better idea for a novel than the one he’s currently writing. Then he takes the bus home, to the one-bed flat in Didsbury, South Manchester, which he shares with his girlfriend Sarah.

  During the journey, he takes his phone out of his jacket pocket and looks at his emails. There’s two: one from LinkedIn, telling him a person whose name he doesn’t recognise wants to connect with him, and one from his agent Julian:

  From: Julian Miechowicz

  To: ‘Paul Saunders’ ([email protected]) [email protected]

  Date: 06 Oct 2014 16:57pm

  Subject: Novel

  ?

  Sent from my iPhone

  Julian Miechowicz | Conwin Black Associates

  [email protected]

  Julian is a transplanted American, a few years older than Paul, with a thick black beard and a pained, disinterested way of speaking. Every time Paul’s met Julian, Julian has at some point or other touched his beard and squinted and said a variation of the statement, ‘The publishing industry is a sinking ship; in ten years’ time people won’t be reading books any more.’ At their last meeting, which took place in the back room of a small pub in Soho, Paul promised Julian that he’d start a Twitter account, even though, deep down, he suspects that Twitter is for arseholes. He also promised that he’d have a draft of his novel ready for Julian to read ‘very, very soon’. That was almost two months ago, and Paul’s getting worried that Julian might drop him if he doesn’t deliver soon.

  Paul stares at the floating question mark.

  He begins to compose a reply on his phone – Sorry. Almost there. Just a few more – then gives up and exits Gmail, and taps his Facebook app instead, scrolling down the feed for something to distract him. He scrolls past a post about someone losing weight, a post about executions in Iran, a post about what film someone should stream tonight, and then taps, finally, on a shared link to an old Guardian interview with Jonathan Franzen about his writing method.

  When you get home, Paul thinks as he begins to scan through the article, you are going to develop a new writing method, which is where you just sit down and actually write. No more dicking around on the internet. No more watching Come Dine With Me in the living room. Not until you have a full novel draft to show for yourself. When you get home, Paul, you are going to shut yourself away in the bedroom and work hard, for the first time in your life.

  He stops reading the Jonathan Franzen article – turns out he’s read it before – and puts his phone back in his pocket and looks out of the window at a kid on a bike/a woman tying a dog up outside a cornershop/a man closing the boot of a Ford Fiesta/a plastic bag floating around in the wind like that bit in American Beauty.

  Alison Whistler, Paul thinks.

  In his head, she’s sat in class again, not paying attention to him, tapping away at her iPhone. She had a 5, which is two models up from Paul’s. She’s . . . what? Thirteen years younger than me? He wonders what she’s up to tonight. Whether she goes to those Vodka Island foam parties that he always sees the flyers for, littered up and down Oxford Road. He wonders whether she has a boyfriend.

  (‘I read your book at the weekend, btw.’)

  Paul’s book is called Human Animus.

  It’s the
reason he got the job at the uni in the first place, the reason he’s not working in a bar any more.

  When Paul thinks about the Paul who wrote it: a thin, single man in his mid twenties, who still had all his hair and smoked twenty-five to thirty cigarettes a day, it’s as if he’s remembering someone else, a character in a film, maybe.

  He removes a stale piece of nicotine gum from his mouth and rummages around in his coat pocket for a bit of paper to wrap it in. He takes out a small Moleskine notebook (which he paid over a tenner for at the university shop, and which he has decided to carry around with him, since about three weeks ago, in order to reignite his creativity), tears out the first page (still blank) and wraps up the gum. Then he takes a packet of Wrigley’s Extra from his other coat pocket and pops a pellet into his mouth. Since Paul gave up smoking almost eight months ago, at Sarah’s strong insistence, he’s been chewing gum – both nicotine and regular – like a maniac. He’s on about two packs a day.

  Is Jonathan Franzen on Twitter? Paul wonders, remembering hazily that in another interview he had possibly spoken out against it.

  As the bus creeps home, Paul imagines Franzen standing in a gigantic, air-conditioned kitchen, stretching his back a couple of times (it’s morning, he’s just woken up), then cracking the top on a bottle of ice-cold Perrier and walking with it, barefoot on cool blue tiles, down a long white corridor, through a set of sliding glass doors and out onto a warm green lawn, somewhere in America, where the sky above him is bright and still and endless and he is able to lie down gently beneath it and concern himself only with matters relating to the creation of Art.

  ‘Good day?’ Sarah asks, when Paul gets in.

  Paul stands in the doorway to the living room and thinks about his day: the hours spent preparing his creative writing mini lecture in the morning, almost all of which evaporated from his head the moment he actually needed to say it, his shitty overpriced chicken tikka sandwich for lunch, his class in the afternoon, then Alison’s ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw’, his complete inability to tell Rachel her story was dreadful, the wasted hours wandering around Blue 2 with his head swimming and buzzing, for some reason unable to just choose a table and sit at it, and then this: coming home to a small, damp living room and the smell of drying washing and not even feeling bad or angry or fucked off about it, just nothing, absolutely nothing, like he’s trapped in a Paul-sized envelope of fog, maybe, and thinks: no, I’ve not had a good day.

  ‘Yeah, pretty good,’ he says. ‘You?’

  ‘Not bad,’ Sarah says. ‘There’s some soup in the freezer if you like. I’m not eating anything this week.’

  So Paul walks into the kitchen, takes an ice cream tub from the freezer, opens it, and tips the contents – a speckled orange brick of frozen carrot soup – into a pot on the hob. As it begins to hiss, he turns on the little radio on the countertop.

  ‘We live in a culture now,’ an angry-sounding person says, ‘where people simply don’t want to pay for and support the arts any more.’

  Paul nudges the sizzling brick of soup around the pan with a stained wooden spoon.

  ‘I’m sorry but that’s rubbish,’ another angry-sounding person on the radio says. ‘People always shared things. They lent each other books, records, CDs. Digital piracy is just a new form of borrowing. We have more access to culture than ever. And I think people are still willing to pay for that culture, if it’s something they really—’

  Paul turns off the radio.

  According to his last royalty statement, only four hundred and twenty-one people were willing to pay for his novel in paperback.

  He thinks again about his new thing, whatever it is, about how impossible it seems to just decide on a single idea and see it through to a satisfying, meaningful conclusion. He doesn’t seem to have a brain that can think in a straight line any more. In its current incarnation, Paul’s new ‘novel’ is actually just a straight retelling of his first serious relationship at university. Oh dear, he thinks. Who the fuck would want to read that?

  He feels sick suddenly. A spinning, dizzying sickness, like the one he gets whenever he tries to smoke weed. He turns off the hob and tips the mostly-still-frozen brick of soup back into its ice cream tub and returns it to the freezer. He takes a few deep breaths – in, hold, maybe I should start a Twitter account, release – and waits for the panic to subside. Then he goes and stands in the doorway, looking at the back of Sarah’s head.

  ‘I’m going to do some writing in the bedroom for a bit,’ he says.

  ‘Okay,’ Sarah says, not taking her eyes off the TV.

  On his way to the bedroom, Paul passes the BT wireless router. I should just turn it off, he thinks. I should just unplug it and ask Sarah to hide it somewhere.

  He doesn’t, though.

  He carries on down the hall to the bedroom and climbs onto the bed. No slacking off tonight, he thinks as the laptop boots up. Once it’s running, Paul just sits looking at his desktop for a long time. He feels completely numb. He thinks about Alison Whistler. He thinks about Jonathan Franzen. He thinks about a person called Lauren Cross who was his first ever girlfriend and who is one of the two main characters in his latest novel (the other being himself).

  No slacking off tonight, he thinks again.

  He looks at the icon for Word.

  He looks at the icon for Chrome, sitting just to the right of it, like Alison Whistler sitting just to the right of dowdy Rachel Steed in class.

  He double clicks on Chrome and it opens on the Google homepage. Paul types ‘Twitter’ into Google. He clicks the link to Twitter. On the homepage, he begins filling in the sign-up form, wondering what shitty username he’s going to choose. Even just writing ‘Paul Saunders’ makes him feel a little depressed. If I had a better name, Paul thinks, a more interesting, unusual name, like ‘Franzen’ for instance, then all the other things in my life would probably be more interesting, too, as a consequence.

  Paul fills in his email address and types in a password (Lauren500, the password he still, automatically, unthinkingly types for everything), and then, wearily, hits return.

  On the next page, Twitter has suggested his username for him: paulsan62904936.

  He selects and deletes paulsan62904936 and enters PaulSaunders.

  This username is already taken! it says.

  He tries ‘PaulSaundersNovelist’ but it only lets him type as far as PaulSaundersNove.

  He types ‘Iamadickhead’.

  This username is already taken! Twitter tells him.

  A few hours later, Sarah comes into the bedroom. It’s half-ten, which is her usual bedtime on a weeknight. She has to get up at six in the morning, to commute an hour and a half on public transport to an admin job in Liverpool. Paul wonders why she never complains, about anything, even though, for the last year or so, since Paul’s royalties dried up, she’s been covering almost all of their rent and bills, never quite leaving enough money remaining to go out or buy anything other than ‘essentials’ (toilet paper, rice, etc.). She’s had to cancel her Virgin Active membership and her subscription to Marie Claire. (‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll just read things on my phone.’)

  This teaching job is a positive new development; it might only be a single-semester contract right now, but Paul’s hoping it will lead to other similar work, because it’s not like he’s about to finish his novel anytime soon, despite what he’s been telling everyone.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Sarah says.

  ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ Paul says, quickly closing Chrome.

  ‘You just looked all . . . shifty.’

  ‘Shifty how?’

  ‘Just shifty,’ she grins. ‘Like you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing. Were you writing another sex scene?’

  He knows she’s just trying to joke around with him, but he can’t join in.

  ‘No,’ he says, slamming the lid of his laptop. ‘I mean, I was writing but it was just . . . you know, writing. Nothing sexy, I’m afraid.
’

  Paul and Sarah have not had sex in almost four months. At moments like this, it dangles between them like a cobweb. Sarah takes off her shirt and reaches behind her back to unclasp her bra and the no-sex cobweb flutters a little in the breeze.

  ‘Carry on writing if you want,’ she says. ‘You don’t need to stop just because I’m here.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Paul says. ‘I think I’m done for the evening, anyway.’

  His heart’s pounding and his hands are trembling as he puts the laptop on the floor next to his side of the bed.

  He gets up and starts undressing, too.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Paul says, a little too quickly, as he fumbles with the clasp of his belt.

  About half an hour before Sarah came in, he’d received a Facebook notification – a friend request from Alison Whistler (0 mutual friends) – and he had stared at it, at Alison Whistler’s thumbnail photograph, feeling confusion and disbelief and perhaps a little too much excitement, as he debated whether or not to accept it. There were probably rules at the university about lecturers being Facebook friends with students, even part-time, single-semester-contract lecturers, and so he’d just sat there, staring at Alison’s picture and conducting a daydream about the two of them sitting on the warm, digitally green grass outside Jonathan Franzen’s house and passing a bottle of ice-cold Perrier back and forth as the smell of Johnny’s barbecue (he was cooking them all some low-fat turkey steaks for lunch; ‘Mama’s secret recipe!’) drifted over gently on the breeze – the dream shattered, suddenly, by Sarah’s appearance in their bedroom.

  Sarah carefully lays out her outfit for tomorrow on the little chair by her dresser, then gets into bed.

  Paul sits on the edge of it, peeling off his grey M&S socks and throwing them, one by one, into the gloomy corner of the bedroom. Before getting into bed, he quickly goes back into the corridor and rattles the bolt on the front door to their flat, just to make sure that nobody is able to burst in during the night and attack them. Then Paul gets into bed, imagining actually talking about their relationship; asking Sarah if she’s really happy, hinting abstractly towards the possibility of them breaking up.