In Real Life Page 4

  How can she be happy? he wonders. This is awful.

  ‘Can you put the light out?’ she says.

  ‘Sure,’ Paul says.

  I’ll say it tomorrow night, he thinks. Sarah needs her sleep.

  She turns her back to him and curls herself into a ball at the edge of the mattress, which is the only position she can ever get to sleep in.

  Paul reaches over and puts the light out, then lies on his back for a long time in the dark with his eyes open.

  LAUREN

  2004

  On the aeroplane, Lauren closed her eyes and pressed her balled hands into her lap and waited for the noisy, shuddering part to finish. As she waited, she tried not to think about Paul. She tried not to feel guilty about The Notebook Incident, or to picture him shuffling around sadly in his BHS dressing gown, left like an abandoned pet in the house which, she guessed, her mum was still paying half the rent on.

  As the screeching got louder instead of quieter, she began to convince herself that the plane was going to crash. She began to imagine – as the cabin lights flickered and the plane’s body dipped very slightly and a lady a few rows behind made a small oh sound – one of the engines exploding in a shitty, mid 90s Die Hard-style flash of superimposed flames and sparks. What a corny way to die, she thought as her heart began to thump.

  Then, very suddenly, all the screeching stopped, and Lauren trained her vision on a small hinged rectangle of the plane’s wing, flapping away above other larger rectangles of boring brown field, before everything tilted and span, and then was hidden beneath a solid-looking layer of cloud.

  The seatbelt lights blinked out.

  The captain made a crackly announcement about cabin pressure and altitude.

  The pastel-pink old lady in the next seat over smoothed a few invisible creases from her trousers, and then turned and gave Lauren such a forlorn, biscuit-yellow grin it forced Lauren’s heart to break just a tiny bit.

  When the drinks trolley finally appeared, Lauren asked in her most grown-up voice for a vodka and Coke, please, even though it said six a.m. on the clock inside her body. (She’d planned to ask for a double, but chickened out at the last minute.)

  And then, once she’d had a few sips, she began an argument with Paul in her head:

  I’m not just doing all this to bum you out, she told him sulkily. I was feeling miserable, too. It just wasn’t working, and deep down you know that.

  Things sometimes just don’t work.

  People don’t work together.

  And you and I were two of those people, okay?

  Okay?

  Paul?

  But he didn’t reply.

  She put down her drink and rummaged through her hand luggage, amongst the lipsticks, ChapSticks, boiled sweets, and The Rough Guide to Vancouver, for The Second Sex, which she’d been intending to read for the past year and a half, and opened it, finally, at page one.

  She forced her eyes along the sentences, even though she knew nothing was going in. And eventually – a whole three pages later; good going! – closed the book again and rested it on the tray next to her drink, unable to remember a word.

  She looked out of the window.

  She drummed her fingers against the grey plastic armrest.

  Finally, she unwrapped her complimentary headphones, plugged them in, turned on the little seat-mounted TV and, from everything on offer, selected Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde.

  In Vancouver International Airport, she attempted to feel excited, reminding herself that this was a Once In A Lifetime Experience. A few feet ahead, a group of tanned-legged, overly giggly female backpackers were all snapping away at the large Native Canadian totem pole at the bottom of the escalator, and when Lauren passed it, she forced herself to stop and take out the brand new Pentax her mum had bought her and do the same.

  During a long, shuffling wait at passport control, she considered listening to her iPod, but realised that all the music loaded onto it was music that Paul had loaded onto it.

  Paul, she thought.

  Paul would recover.

  Paul would be fine.

  Paul would write a short story about this.

  Paul would write a whole novel, probably.

  Paul would sit for hours in the Broadway café and smoke a million roll-ups and drink pints of continental lager in funny-shaped glasses and write copious notes about what a total fucking bitch she was in one of his pretentious little Moleskine notebooks.

  Oh Paul, I’m sorry, she thought just as the man in the passport booth beckoned her forward with a small wave.

  I wonder how many miles apart we are, right at this exact moment.

  IAN

  2014

  In the Jobcentre, an extremely tall man in a shiny grey suit tells me that his name is Rick and shakes my hand and smiles at me. There’s something wrong with his skin. Little bits of his face look so dry that they might flake off at any moment. It’s especially bad around his mouth. He gestures me into the seat opposite, then starts typing on his computer. Occasionally he stops to glance up at me. I wonder how old he is. It’s impossible to tell.

  ‘Right, then,’ Rick says, finishing his typing. ‘It says here that you worked in a music shop for the last six years, yeah? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?’

  ‘We sold CDs and DVDs and games and books,’ I say. ‘I just worked behind the till. I wasn’t a manager or anything.’

  Rick nods and types a few words.

  I don’t feel like I’m selling myself particularly well.

  ‘Then it closed down,’ I say.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘And why was that? Nothing to do with you, I hope?’

  He smiles at me.

  I can’t quite bring myself to join in.

  Maybe his mouth might heal up quicker if he stopped smiling quite so much.

  ‘Things were cheaper online,’ I say.

  ‘Right, right, of course,’ he says, nodding so vigorously that a little flake of his cheek detaches from his face and flutters, snowflake-like, towards the desk. It lands on a leaflet about depression counselling. ‘Amazon?’ he says.

  Amazon, I nod.

  He clicks his mouse a couple of times, then frowns at his screen, fiddling with a small patch of stubble on his chin and making a soft clacking noise with his tongue.

  If I had to guess, I’d say he was in his mid thirties, about three school years above me.

  ‘And what were you doing before that job?’ he says.

  ‘Just bar work.’

  ‘No other skills?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘And you’ve got a degree in . . . in media studies, is that right?’

  ‘Yep. A two-one.’

  ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a bakery here. In Sale. Think you could handle working in a bakery?’

  I try hard to imagine myself working in a bakery: I’m wearing an apron and one of those net hat things, and I’m carrying a tray of sickly, uncooked sausage rolls towards an industrial-sized oven.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll print it out anyway,’ Rick says.

  He clicks his mouse and the printer begins to whirr and it sounds, very slightly, like the end of the world.

  In the music shop, I spend a long time by the door, reading all the adverts on the Musicians Wanted notice board: Bass player needed for funk/soul/rock combo. Drummer required to complete British r’n’r/blues band. Energetic frontman/lyricist seeks full backing band. Influences: COUNTING CROWS, BLACK CROWES, BLACK SABBATH, ROLLING STONES, STONE ROSES, STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, OASIS, COLD-PLAY, KEANE . . .

  Eventually, I shuffle over to the plectrums and maracas at the counter.

  ‘Need any help there, mate?’ a large bearded man with a deep voice asks when he notices me.

  You don’t need to do this, I tell myself. There’s still time to change your mind. You could just say, ‘No thanks,’ and smile and walk away.

  ‘I was just wondering how much
I might get for a guitar, second-hand?’ I say, nodding down at the case in my hand.

  ‘Follow me.’

  He leads me towards the back of the shop, past the bass guitars and the P.A. systems and a teenage boy playing a Queens of the Stone Age song on one of the Gibsons.

  ‘Right, let’s have a look then,’ he says, dragging up a couple of stools.

  His beard is big and black and greasy-looking with grey and white bits in it, and, just like mine, the fingertips of his strumming hand are nicotine-yellowed, the nails bitten back to the quick. I hand him my guitar case, feeling a twinge of embarrassment at the large black-and-white Postcards sticker on it, and he lays it on the floor in front of him, pops the locks, lifts the lid.

  ‘Very nice,’ he says, his tongue doing a quick, slimy swoop of his chapped bottom lip.

  Then he lifts my guitar out of the case and up onto his lap.

  ‘You in a band?’ he says.

  ‘Not any more,’ I say.

  He plugs the guitar into one of the practice amps, adjusts a few knobs, then strums some clean-tone blues riffs. I watch his stubby fingers go up and down the fretboard. He plays in a very different way to how I play. To how I used to play. He changes channels on the amp and starts doing some technical, widdly, Steve Vai-y stuff, the tip of his tongue peeping out from between his lips as he does a few bends and hammer-ons.

  I feel sick.

  I want to go home.

  I want to get into bed and pull the covers over my head and never come out again.

  ‘Nice axe,’ he says, lifting my guitar up to his face to inspect the pick-ups, then the bridge. He rests it against the amp and rests his hands in his lap and looks at me sternly.

  ‘I’ll give you four twenty for it.’

  On eBay, on a good day, it could fetch double that.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘So?’ Carol asks when she gets in from work. ‘How’s it going, jobseeker? Any luck?’

  She’s dressed in the kind of smart black clothes you might wear to an office. I still don’t know what she does, and it’s gone on too long now to just straight-out ask her. All I know is that it probably has something to do with accounting, because accounting was what she studied at uni.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Went into town again, handed out a few more CVs.’

  She takes off her coat and kicks off her shoes and sits down next to me on the sofa. I’m watching a programme about a middle-aged couple renovating their house. They keep complaining about things and then spending too much money and then complaining about things and then spending too much money. I’m waiting for them to have an argument or start crying.

  ‘I’ve got your rent money, by the way,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t have to give it to me now,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll just spend it, otherwise,’ I say.

  I go back to my room and count out two hundred and twenty pounds (which is how much we’ve agreed for a month’s rent, including bills) from the four hundred and twenty in the envelope.

  My plan is not to tell Carol I sold my guitar.

  She’ll just freak out.

  And anyway, I’m planning to buy it back again as soon as I get a job.

  ‘Want me to ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre?’ she says as I hand her the roll of notes.

  I look over at the mantelpiece, at a framed picture of her and Martin together. I look at his piggy, too-close-together eyes and his thick red lips, his ruddy pink cheeks and Neanderthal brow, and try to imagine him as my boss.

  (It still seems like the worst thing ever.)

  ‘Alright, yeah,’ I say, unable to hurt her feelings. ‘That’d be great, thanks.’

  PAUL

  2014

  In bed one night, on his own, Paul closes Chrome, and hiding behind it is a pop-up window. Meet horny local single girls online for sexy camchats in your area, it urges him. It’s sometime in the early hours of the morning and Sarah has taken a week off work to visit her parents in Surrey and Paul has finally managed to get up off the sofa and climb into bed with his laptop, where he’s spent the last hour and a half poring through Alison Whistler’s Facebook photos (he accepted her friend request), then watched pornography.

  Would any horny local single girls really be online at three thirty-eight a.m. on a Wednesday? Paul wonders. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen is a live feed of a thin, pale woman in a bright blue bikini. She stares blankly from her little window, then smiles and waves in Paul’s general direction. There’s a glistening pink dildo and a bottle of lube on the bed next to her. She doesn’t look local to Paul. She looks Eastern European, maybe. She’s blue-eyed and bleached-haired and scarily, skeletally thin. Paul closes the pop-up, shuts the lid of his laptop and puts it on the floor next to the bed.

  He removes a tasteless wad of nicotine gum from his mouth and places it on the bedside table next to his charging iPhone, a sticky clump of toilet roll, and a paperback copy of his own first novel.

  He’s been flipping through it, trying to remember what was in it, trying to look at it from the imagined perspective of Alison Whistler.

  There’s a slightly miserable scene in it where a couple try to have sex in a train toilet, and another, a little later, which is supposed to be erotic, where a girl describes an awkward threesome in minute detail while her boyfriend masturbates.

  He wondered, as he read back over these scenes, what Alison thought when she reached them, whether they changed her opinion of him at all, whether they turned her on or just made her think he was creepy . . .

  He picks up the phone and wipes his thumb across the screen.

  No new texts, or emails, or anything.

  He types ‘Goodnight x’ in a message to Sarah and hits send.

  Then he turns off the light, takes a pillow from the empty side of the bed and starts to spoon it.

  When Paul closes his eyes, he finds himself looking once again at that glossy, harshly lit webcam cabinet. The thin, pale girl in her tiny blue bikini smiles and waves at him. Jesus. Paul swipes her away to the back of his brain with a big, imaginary thumb. And now, instead, sitting a little awkwardly at the other end of the webcam chat is Alison Whistler. ‘Take off your top,’ Paul commands in a computery Stephen Hawking voice. But Alison Whistler gives him the finger, then lifts a bottle of Jägermeister to her lips and chugs it, just like she did in that Facebook video from a student house party in Fallowfield. She pulls the bottle away, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, ‘I read your book this weekend, btw.’

  Paul’s phone buzzes and he picks it up and looks at it.

  ‘Goodnight x,’ Sarah’s message says.

  We really need to break up, Paul thinks, shifting onto his other side and throwing his leg over the pillow now, too, sort of dry-humping it in an effort to get comfortable. Sarah can move back in with her parents and I can stay here, or maybe I’ll get the deposit back from the flat and go travelling instead; India, or Australia, or somewhere warm anyway, where I can grow a massive beard and walk around barefoot and not talk to anyone about writing for a wh—

  He moves his tongue to brush what feels like a small bit of food away from his gum, but it’s not food, Paul realises, as his tongue continues to scrub across it. It’s a lump. Maybe I burned my mouth earlier on, he thinks, hopefully. Except Paul can’t remember burning his mouth on anything and anyway, the more he tongues it, the less it feels like a burn and more just like a hard, scary, not-going-anywhere lump. Oh shit. It feels massive against his tongue, sitting there on the inside of his lower gum on the right-hand side of his mouth. Paul worries it with his tongue, flicking the tip against it, then pressing his whole tongue against it, as hard as he can, in an attempt to make it go away or soften. Which it doesn’t.

  His heart’s thudding now and a cold sweat is prickling out all over his body.

  Mouth cancer, a voice whispers inside him.

  Fucking hell.

  This is the result of
all those years smoking, from when you were fifteen years old until about eight months ago.

  Fucking hell.

  You were a smoker, a full-time, twenty-a-day smoker for close to sixteen years. Of course this has happened. Mouth cancer at thirty-one.

  Fucking hell.

  His T-shirt becomes damp at the armpits as he reaches into his mouth and touches the lump with his fingertip.

  What will he tell his parents?

  They’re getting old, they’ve just retired; the last thing they need is their only son phoning them up to announce that he has mouth cancer.

  He presses the lump hard with his fingertip but it doesn’t go away, and as he tongues it, he makes an involuntary whimpering sound. The bed sheets twist around him, pinning him, and he wrestles himself free and props himself upright, gasping, yanking at the neck of his T-shirt.

  He grabs his phone and swipes his thumb across the screen. It illuminates the room like a cold blue candle. He checks his emails, his messages, his Facebook, but there’s absolutely nothing online – not even a folder of Alison Whistler’s photos from three years ago titled ‘Pyjama Lolz’ – that can distract him now.

  He opens the Google app, types ‘mouth ca’, then stops.

  Because if I write it down, Paul thinks, then it becomes real.

  LAUREN

  2004

  At the baggage claim, as Lauren waited for her gigantic suitcase to pop from the flapping mouth of the carousel, she felt a gentle tap on the shoulder. She turned and looked up into the bright, tanned face of a tall blond boy. He looked German, possibly, or Scandinavian.

  ‘Are you going on to Whistler? For snowboarding?’ he asked in a hesitant Swedish(?) accent. His teeth were extremely square and white, and he had one of those ridiculous little triangular patches of hair beneath his bottom lip, which waved at her as he spoke.

  Be nice, Lauren told herself.

  It took almost every single fibre of her being not to just tell him to fuck off.

  Instead, she politely shook her head and said, ‘Just Vancouver. Sorry.’