In Real Life (6 page)

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

I
n 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

A
t 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.'

‘Hey, me too,' he said, smiling and nodding too excitedly as he flashed his ridiculously white teeth at her again.

I bet nothing bad has ever happened to him in his entire life, Lauren thought, before remembering that nothing bad had ever really happened in her life, either.

‘Are you taking a taxi, yes?'

‘I guess so.'

‘And you already have a hostel booked, yes?'

Lauren considered lying, then shook her head.

‘Then you should come with us,' he said, turning and gesturing to another two identical, possible-Germans who were both smiling and waving at her, looking full of energy and not like they'd just come out of a nine-and-a-half-hour Reese-Witherspoon/feminist essay marathon.

Is this actually what happens in other countries? Lauren wondered. Is everyone else really just as friendly as those cartoon teenagers in foreign language textbooks, as soon as you step outside England?

Just then the familiar brown and green of Lauren's suitcase caught her eye, about to sail past them on the conveyor belt.

‘That's my . . .' she said, pointing it out but making no real effort to move towards it, instead feeling an immobilising tiredness sweep through her.

The blond boy smiled and bounded towards it, plucking it off the belt with one hand.

‘Okay, great,' he said breathlessly as he placed it at her feet, as if something had been decided.

The boy, it turned out, was called Per (pronounced ‘pear'). He was Norwegian, and so were his two friends, Leif (like ‘leaf') and Knut (‘nut'). As in salad, thought Lauren, as they crammed themselves into the back of a rattling, synthetic-pine-smelling taxi. She stayed quiet and let the three of them do the talking, pretending to be Norwegian too.

As they drove towards the city, the Rocky Mountains rose up from behind the concrete loops of the highway, and the Norwegians gasped and pointed them out, and one of them even tapped her on the shoulder, trying to jog her into excitement, too.

Be happy, she told herself.

The clock on the dashboard said 3:56, late afternoon, but it felt like no time at all.

The hostel Per had earmarked (The Flying Dog) looked, from the outside, more like a nightclub: just a large entranceway, set between a shuttered-up sports bar and a shuttered-up bookstore in what, Lauren guessed, was a slightly seedy, possible red-light area, just past the bridge into downtown. She kept her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, letting Per lift her bag from the taxi's boot and carry it, along with his, up the sticky, glittery stairs and into the large, brightly painted, blue and white, first-floor reception area, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers'
Californication
album was playing in full
on the stereo and groups of backpackers were lounging around the edges of the room on beanbags and the floor.

They trudged slowly towards the reception desk, and Lauren hung back, again letting the Norwegians do the talking. When it was finally her turn to check in, she showed the girl her passport, filled out her form and paid for a week's stay using stiff, sharp new fifties, still in the Post Office wallet her mum had pressed into her hand at Milton Keynes. She felt a ripple of surprise flutter around the Norwegians
re
the amount of money she was carrying. Then each of them received a tight roll of hard, starchy sheets and a room key with a grubby, green plastic handle.

Here were a few questions that Lauren asked herself as she climbed the much less glittery, much more piss-smelling concrete stairs at the back of the hostel, up past the vending machines and the shared toilets and a row of industrial laundry baskets, to room 464:

Am I really doing this?

Am I enjoying myself?

Is this an exciting and valuable new life experience?

Am I making a massive mistake?

Are the Norwegian boys all staring at my arse?

She could, she knew, just get a real hotel room: a clean one, with just her in it.

The fourth-floor corridor smelled of a mixture of rotting vegetables, dirty washing and – possibly – marijuana. Their room was even worse; a wave of warm, rancid air attacked Lauren the moment she opened the door.
The others didn't seem to mind or notice it, claiming their beds and talking in Norwegian. They laughed loudly in unison, then turned to look at her, grinning.

‘What?' Lauren said.

But they just carried on chattering, and she felt her cheeks begin to burn.

There were three bunks in the room – six mattresses in total – two of which had already been claimed by strangers; by their stained hiking rucksacks and their balls of dirty socks and their damp, dangling sports towels.

Lauren held her breath and wished she'd never agreed to this.

She wished again that she was in a hotel room instead, a proper one.

You could do it, you know
.

You have the money
.

You could say, ‘Fuck this,' and leave, right this second
.

‘You smoke? Drink?' Per asked softly, tapping her on the arm, miming taking a swig from a bottle with one hand and then puffing on something with the other.

She looked down at her horrible bottom bunk, at the thin roll of bluey-grey sheets that she couldn't quite bring herself to fit onto it, and nodded.

IAN

2004

A
s I wait for my name to be called, I have a go on one of the Jobsearch machines. I tap through the listings on the greasy, smudgy touchscreen, but there's almost nothing that I can realistically see myself doing. Either you have to already have a specific qualification like animal care or a foreign language or a PGCE, or else you have to be prepared to do something really, really awful, like harass people in the street or clean their offices at five in the morning. I print out only two listings: one seeking someone willing to dress up as a large top hat to advertise a city-centre printing company, and the other for a part-time general assistant in a funeral home. I fold the long waxy printouts and put them in my jacket
pocket, making sure to leave the edges poking out far enough so that Rick will see them. Then I wander back over to the seating area.

The Jobcentre is open plan, and from where I'm sitting I can see Rick chatting enthusiastically to a woman in a burka. He's leaning across his desk and smiling at her, occasionally tonguing the sore red corners of his mouth. The whole place is heaving. It's like a really depressing Argos. There must be over a hundred people milling around this large grey-and-red room.

Eventually I hear my name (‘Ian Wilson?') and I look up, and there's Rick waving me over.

‘So how are we doing today then, mate?' he says once I'm sat down.

Up close, his mouth looks even worse than before. I almost want to ask him about it.

‘Not bad,' I say.

‘Any luck on the old job front?'

‘Not really,' I say, feeling my mind suddenly shed itself of all the fake information I'd stuffed it with. I'd spent all morning going over my story, making sure I'd filled in a decent number of boxes on the What I've Been Doing To Look For Work booklet and then memorising all the things I'd made up.