In Real Life (7 page)

‘O–kay,' Rick says, peering at his computer screen, double-clicking his mouse. ‘Call centre. I've got a call centre here.'

‘Alright,' I say.

‘We need dynamic, self-motivated individuals to work in this unique and exciting new business opportunity,'
he reads, not very dynamically, off the screen. ‘Sound any good?'

‘What would I be selling exactly?'

He rests his chin on his hand. His little finger dabs at the blistered corners of his mouth as his eyes dart hopelessly round the screen.

‘It doesn't say,' he says.

‘I don't know,' I say.

‘I'll print it out,' he says.

PAUL

2014

O
n Saturday night, Paul goes for a pint with his friend Damon at the bar down the road. They sit at one of the small circular tables in the busy pavement seating area, where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and baking hot from the overhead heaters.

‘It's this bloke, right,' Damon says, ‘and he's shouting at this busker, this trumpet player, telling him how shit he is. But he's, like, really, really intelligent.'

‘I've definitely not seen it,' Paul says.

‘It's great,' Damon says, trying to find the YouTube clip on his phone. ‘Fuck. It's not buffering. I'll send it to you when I get in.'

‘Cheers,' Paul says.

Damon is one of Paul's only friends in Manchester.
They met six years ago, when they were both working on the fiction desk in Waterstone's, while Paul was still writing his first novel. And now Paul's teaching and writing full time and Damon is working in telesales. Sometimes Paul can tell how envious Damon is of his lifestyle – how, from the outside, it must look to everyone like he's just swanning around in his own clothes, making things up all day – and as such Paul finds it almost impossible to ever really complain, at all, about anything: about how he wasted the whole of today watching videos of Jonathan Franzen interviews, for instance, or how yesterday he wrote two and a half thousand words of seemingly good prose, only to come back to it this morning to discover it had transformed into a fucking piece of shit overnight. And so whenever Paul hangs out with Damon, Paul has to just pretend that everything is completely, totally fine.

‘I almost handed in my notice the other day,' Damon says. ‘I wrote it in between calls and printed it out on my morning break. And then I carried it round in my pocket, you know, waiting for the right time to give it to my manager. But I found that, just by having it on me like that, I felt a bit better, you know? A bit more in control of things . . .'

‘Right,' says Paul, not really listening.

‘. . . so I've decided to just carry on like that for a while and see how it goes . . .'

Paul tongues the lump in his mouth.

‘. . . I'm not like you. I don't have a
thing
that I'm good at . . .'

Paul moves his tongue backwards and forwards over the lump, wishing it would go away. The skin around it has become sore and rough, due to all his recent tonguing. It has the same kind of sting as an ulcer, and as he tongues it, his mouth fills with a thin, sour fluid.

He considers telling Damon about the lump, but he doesn't know quite how to phrase it. Also, he doesn't want to say it out loud. He's very nearly Googled ‘lump on inside lower gum' six or seven times now. He's stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his mouth open, peering inside it at the visible pinky-white bump, feeling his heart quicken and needle-pricks of cold sweat break out on his skin.

It's nothing, he's told himself.

It will go away.

It's just . . .
mouth cancer
.

‘I think I'm dying, Damon,' Paul (almost) says, there at the wobbly little outdoor table. And he knows what Damon would say, too, if he
did
actually tell him. He'd say what anyone in their right mind would say: ‘Go and get it checked out at the doctor's, you fucking idiot.'

But the thing is, as long as Paul
doesn't
get it checked out, it could still be benign.

He watches Damon chugging away on a full-strength B&H, complaining about how much he hates his job but doesn't know quite what he wants to do instead, his lips all chapped, his huge forehead beaded with sweat, his ginger hair sticking up in brittle tufts, his eyes small and round and angry, and thinks: You lucky, lucky bastard.

Take a big swig of your pint, Paul. It's Friday night. You should be enjoying yourself. Relax. Take a few deep breaths. Just focus on what Damon is saying.

Paul's gaze drifts to the twenty-pack of B&H on the table between them.

He takes his phone out of his pocket, checks it, puts it back, then looks at the fag packet again.

‘Can I have a cig?' he says.

‘Is that really a good idea, mate?'

But before Damon can stop him, Paul opens the pack, sticks one in his mouth and lights it.

A little later, Paul stumbles up the stairs to his flat, fumbles with the key, gets the door open after three attempts, stumbles inside. He's bought a pack of ten Marlboro Lights from the garage on the way home. Sarah's not back until Sunday evening, he reminds himself as he forces the living-room windows open as wide as they'll go, then heads into the kitchen for something to use as an ashtray.

He comes back in with an old saucer and a fridge-cold can of lager and sits down on the sofa, turns on his laptop, lifts it onto his knees. He lights a Marlboro Light and sucks deeply, then exhales a plume of smoke towards the ceiling.

Sarah would go mental if she saw him.

Her uncle died of emphysema.

Her whole family are extremely anti-smoking.

That was one of the things that got Paul off on the wrong foot with her mum in the first place: he'd sneaked
downstairs to have a roll-up in her back garden and then left the stub in one of her plant pots.

The whole family went nuts at him.

On the train back afterwards, he'd promised Sarah he would give up, right there and then.

He opens Facebook, ignoring the ‘Trumpet Fight' video that Damon has already posted on his timeline, instead going straight to Alison Whistler's profile.

She's changed her profile pic to a photo of a cat wearing sunglasses, and her cover photo is now a neon-pink, galactic-looking background.

The first post on her wall is a rant about how the server in Starbucks was rude to her this morning:

Idgi
, it concluded.
Why do ppl think it's alright to treat you that way? 0_o

Paul types ‘what does idgi mean' into Google.

Takes another swig of his lager.

Lights a cigarette.

Tabs back to Facebook.

He turns on chat, not actually intending to
chat
to her, let's get this clear, just to see if she's online, and looks down the list of names (mostly people he went to school with, who he never really talks to any more), and when he sees her name with a small green circle next to it, his heart does a little cartwheel.

He swigs his lager and chain-smokes three more cigarettes, all the while looking at Alison Whistler's name, wondering what would happen if he just clicked on it.

I could do it, he thinks.

It would be so easy.

I could just type ‘hi'.

‘Hi,' he types.

But I'm not actually going to press return, he thinks, taking a deep drag on his cigarette, feeling drunk and dizzy and for one brief moment like the Paul he used to remember being: the Paul who wrote that novel, mostly very late at night and a bit drunk, pretending he was Charles Bukowski, the Paul who didn't have mouth ca—

He presses return.

Oh shit, he thinks, as soon as he's done it.

Oh shit, oh fuck. What have I done?

‘hi' Alison messages back, almost instantaneously.

Oh god, Paul thinks. Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit.

He considers just quickly closing the chat box, shutting the laptop down, going straight to bed. Instead he takes a big swig of his can, then a long drag on his cigarette.

‘Hi,' he types again.

‘how are you?' Alison messages back, almost instantaneously.

‘OK,' Paul types. ‘You?'

‘cant sleep,' Alison types.

‘Me neither,' Paul types.

There's a pause.

What the fuck am I doing? Paul thinks.

‘I'd better go to sleep,' he types, but doesn't send.

‘theres a lot of sex in your book lol,' Alison types.

A moment later a little picture appears, of a blushing cartoon face.

Paul deletes ‘I'd better go to sleep' and types ‘What did you think?'

He is about to send it when his mobile buzzes.

It's Sarah.

‘Missing you. Can't sleep. You still awake? xxx,' it says.

Fucking hell.

Paul deletes ‘What did you think?' and retypes ‘I'd better go to sleep', quickly hitting send before he can change his mind.

‘lol,' Alison Whistler types.

‘Bye,' Paul types.

‘see you monday,' Alison types.

Paul doesn't reply.

He waits.

A winking cartoon face appears.

Alison Whistler has gone offline
, the chat box tells him.

LAUREN

2004

T
hey ended up on a small roof terrace, which was still part of the hostel. One of the Norwegians went off somewhere and came back a few minutes later with ice-cold cans of beer. They were small, like Coke cans, and Lauren felt dreamy and spaced out as she sipped from hers. It was not unpleasant, this feeling, and she finally felt herself unwind and begin to have a good time.

You are here in Canada, finally
.

The Norwegians were laughing and talking amongst themselves, and there were other groups up on the roof, too: a tanned kissing couple in the corner nearest to them, both with ratty white-person dreadlocks; and she could hear other voices behind her, English accents and Canadian accents and maybe French ones.

‘Smoke? Smoke?' Per was saying.

He'd snaked himself right in close on the low wooden bench that ran around the edges of the terrace. Down below, she could hear cars beeping and swishing along the street, headed, she assumed, into downtown Vancouver. It was dark but not cold – she was only wearing a T-shirt – and the lights of the nearby buildings glittered and twinkled. How pretty, she thought as she took a large gulp of beer then accepted the joint from Per.

She took a long blast, held it in.

She passed it along to the stranger on her left.

‘So how long you here for?' Per asked.

‘I'm on a working visa. So . . . a year, I guess? You?'

‘We are just here as tourists,' he said, smiling. ‘Just one week here. Then America. Seattle. You like Seattle?'

‘I don't know. I've never been.'

‘You like grunge music?' he said, miming playing a guitar.

‘It's okay.'

Pretty much all music made Lauren think of Paul now; of his meticulous, tiny handwriting on the compilation tapes he used to make her, of the way he would very seriously put on a CD in his room and then quickly pad back to the bed and just sit there in silence next to her, listening to it, wanting desperately for her to hear whatever it was he was hearing in it.

‘What were you doing back in England?' Per said, and as he spoke, his Adam's apple bobbed wildly in his throat. His voice was soft, but it was also deeper, more
manly than Paul's, and Lauren wondered if, perhaps, she fancied him. Not really, she decided, but there was definitely something very clean and pure about him, if only he'd shave that bit of hair beneath his lip.

What did they call it? A soul patch?

‘Sorry, what did you say again?' she said, lurching back into the present, realising that Per was staring at her, waiting for an answer.

‘What were you doing?' he repeated. ‘Back home?'

‘Oh, nothing much.' She could feel her scalp tingling, just from that single toke, and her head tugged at her neck as if it wanted to float off her body and up into the sky. ‘I just graduated from university.'

‘You have a boyfriend back home?'

‘Yep,' she lied.

She could feel his arm moving in behind her, his hand gently brushing that tingly inch of bare skin between her jeans and top.

‘If you have a boyfriend,' Per said, enunciating each word in his soft, slow way, ‘then why have you come away from him for a year?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I don't think you have a boyfriend,' he continued, smiling broadly like he'd just solved a cryptic crossword. ‘I think you're lying.'

‘Maybe,' Lauren said, feeling herself smile too, against her control. ‘Maybe I am.'

‘And maybe then I could be your boyfriend?'

The sheer brazenness and absurdity of the idea made her laugh out loud, laugh so hard in fact that she began
coughing violently. Per laughed, too, but when she didn't stop he began patting her back, and when she sat back up again he didn't move his hand away. He left it there, his fingers tracing up and down the bumps of her spine, scooting back and forth over the clasp of her bra, and Lauren discovered that she was completely unable to say anything about this or attempt to move his hand, or herself, away.

I'm on holiday, she thought fuzzily.

I'm single.

I can do what I want.

IAN

2014

I
look in at the contents of my kitchen cupboard: three Jaffa Cakes, one jar of Marmite, two thirds of a bottle of squeezy ketchup. Carol's right. I'm bad at shopping. I need to start saving money. There's a pot of stew bubbling on the hob, filling the kitchen with a warm, hearty smell. Oh god, I think, my stomach growling. If I could just eat a bowl of Carol's stew, just one small bowl of it, then I might finally gain the necessary energy to turn my life around.

I head down the hall to the living room, to ask her.