In Real Life (8 page)

I can hear
Bargain Hunt
on the TV.

‘What?' she says, when she notices me hovering in the doorway. She looks different somehow. She's done her hair up and she isn't in her normal work clothes.
Instead she's wearing a floral-print dress and a fancy necklace and there's a strong smell of perfume hanging in the air.

‘We gave this couple two hundred pounds to spend on antiques,' the man on
Bargain Hunt
says. ‘Let's see how they got on.'

‘
What?
' Carol says again, just as I realise who the stew and the clothes and the hair and the necklace are for.

‘Nothing,' I say. ‘I'm just off to the shops. See you in a bit.'

I make the mistake of pausing on the front steps of the building to roll a fag, and before I can safely make it out of the car park and onto the street, Martin's black Audi is pulling in through the entrance. He flashes his lights and beeps his horn and I can hear the muffled wub of house music.

I light my roll-up and walk over.

He gets out and locks the car with a big black key fob. He's wearing a tight-fitting pinstripe suit and his hair looks rock-solid with gel.

‘How we doing then, me old tiger?' he says in his fake Cockney accent. He slaps me hard on the shoulder. ‘So, how's things?' he says in his real voice.

‘Oh, you know.'

I wonder how much Carol's already told him about my current situation.

(Absolutely nothing, I hope.)

‘Any luck finding a job yet?' he says.

‘Not yet,' I say.

‘Fucking dead out there, right? Well, if you get really stuck, I could always use you at my place, yeah? It's not rocket science. Sure a bright lad like you could handle it.'

‘Cheers, Martin. I'll keep that in mind.'

‘Nice one,' he says, kicking an invisible football into the darkness of the car park. He turns to head up the front steps. ‘You going in too, yeah?'

‘Just popping to the shops.'

I drop my roll-up on the tarmac and grind it out with my trainer.

I will give up smoking on my thirty-first birthday, I tell myself.

‘See you in a bit,' I say to Martin.

‘Nice one,' Martin says, in his fake Cockney accent.

In Morrisons, nobody seems happy. A baby is screaming its head off and a tired-looking woman is having an argument on her phone and someone's knocked over a whole display of pasta sauce and left it there, a dangerous puddle of tomatoes and glass. Shania Twain is playing on the stereo. The bananas all have bruises on them. A woman at the cheese counter offers me a tiny cube of Cornish pasty on a cocktail stick.

I walk up and down the aisles very carefully, trying to pay attention to everything, trying not to make any mistakes with my shopping this time.

At the damaged items display, an old lady is attempting to get a box of teabags down from the top shelf, and
when I step in to help her, placing the dented box in her gnarled purple hands, the way she nods her head and says, ‘Thank you very much,' makes me want to put my arms around her and sob into her woolly hat.

In the tinned soup and vegetables aisle, I slow right down, lifting items carefully into my basket, as if I'm on a hidden camera game show and Carol is watching from a back room. I'm sure she'd be proud of my selection: I make no rash purchases, instead choosing only the absolute necessities and nearly all from the economy range. Chopped tomatoes, baked beans, soup. I add it up as I go along and so far I've still not quite spent a quid.

I'm trying desperately to feel good about the idea of saving money but it's hard to do.

For starters, my basket looks like a selection of things you might find in a nuclear fallout shelter.

Also, I'm worried that it's all going to taste like shit.

I turn the corner and walk down the meat and cheese aisle, mainly just to punish myself. I stop in the beef section and force myself to look at the biggest, juiciest sirloin steak on the shelf. I force myself to imagine frying it and then sticking a fork in it and lifting it to my mouth, whole.

Right now it feels like I'll never have enough money to buy anything nice, ever again.

By the time I reach the cheese, I'm about ready to faint.

My thoughts are swirling.

I'm not making much sense.

For some reason, I'm thinking about Rosemary again, patron saint of free wireless internet. I wonder what sort of person she is, and why she doesn't encrypt her network.

Maybe she's just really kind.

Maybe she's my age and one day we'll meet and fall in love and move in together.

As if in answer to this last thought, an insanely pretty girl turns the corner and begins walking down the aisle towards me. She's like someone from an American indie film: her hair is dyed black and shiny with a severe fringe and she's wearing big black glasses and a bright red duffel coat and listening to music on white Apple earbuds.

Rosemary, could this be you?

As she approaches, I look down at my shitty economy items and feel a deep wave of shame wash over me. I grab a large bag of Babybels off the shelf and drape them over the things in my basket like a camouflage net, just before she walks past.

Then I turn and follow her to the self-checkouts.

I join the queue directly behind her, feeling my heart thudding against my ribs, listening to the whispering tick of her iPod, wondering what she's listening to, and hoping pathetically that something miraculous will happen – that she will drop her shopping, perhaps, and I will have to help her pick it up – that in some way the elements of our lives will contrive themselves into a scenario where we will start talking and discover that we have loads in common and exchange phone numbers and fall in love, just like in the movies.

500 Days of Rosemary
, I think as the basket queue shuffles forwards.

I can't take my eyes off her.

Her hair's so black and shiny.

In fact I'm so busy watching her scan her shopping through the machine, I forget it's my turn next and the man behind me has to tap me on the shoulder and point out a machine that's become available.

‘This summer,'
a gravelly American movie trailer voice announces inside me,
‘the unexpected item in the bagging area turns out to be . . . LOVE.'

I scan my items and bag them up and stuff my pocketfuls of change into the plastic mouth of the self-service machine as quickly as I can. Then I snatch my receipt and grab my bags and dash out through the exit.

I look all around me, but Rosemary's long gone.

I'm already halfway home before I realise. I open my carrier bag and peer inside it. Sure enough, there they are staring back up at me: one large net bag of Babybels.

Fuck's sake.

I can't take them back into the flat.

If I put them in the fridge and Carol sees them, she'll have another go at me about wasting money. She'll think I'm taking the piss, directly challenging her after our talk the other night.

I could return them to the supermarket, but it seems so far away all of a sudden.

So I tear a hole in the netting and take out a Babybel,
peel off the wax coating, and stuff it whole into my mouth. As I'm chewing the first one, I peel open a second and force that in, too. By the time I reach the car park again, I've eaten almost half the bag. I want to throw the rest away but I think again about how much they cost. (
Two hundredths of my guitar!
) So instead I crouch by the bins, out of view of the windows to our flat, out of view of the house next door, and stuff the remaining Babybels into my mouth, one by one, until they're finished.

PAUL

2014

P
aul wakes up with a foggy, throbbing head and a dry, sour mouth. Last night I smoked, he thinks. And then he remembers chatting with Alison and feels even worse. And then he tongues his gum hopefully, but the lump is still there. It's grown, too, or else he's just made it more prominent with all the fiddling he's been doing. Either way, it's still there.

He takes his phone off the bedside table, wipes his thumb across the screen, and looks at his text messages, at ‘Missing you. Can't sleep. You still awake? xxx' that Sarah sent him, which he's still not replied to. ‘Sorry I didn't reply,' he types. ‘Had an early night. Missing you too. Love you x,' and presses send.

He checks his inbox.

Three new emails. The first is from one of his undergraduate students, Craig (a shy bespectacled boy with a soft Birmingham accent), who is submitting his story for Monday's workshop, a Word doc with the file name ‘Guardian of the Tombs.docx', the second is a notification telling him that a person called @sexwand52 is now following him on Twitter, and the third is an email from his agent, Julian, a follow-up to his question mark of a few days ago. This time there's a full sentence:

Why did I ever tell him it was almost finished? Paul thinks, remembering their last meeting, in that pub, The Dog and Something-or-Other in Soho.

The truth of it was that Paul had written one-and-a-half chapters and a few scattered, semi-legible notes about the rest, and he was still in that precarious first flush of excitement, when the enthusiasm for an idea could run cold at any moment, the way it had for all Paul's previous second novel ideas, and – oh god – he should've just kept his mouth shut, but instead he'd drunk one too many exotic lagers on the Conwin & Black expense account and attempted to convince Julian that he wasn't a failure, that all that hard work that Julian and everyone else had put into establishing Paul as an ‘extraordinary new voice' a couple of years ago hadn't gone completely to shit.

Paul reads ‘Anything to show me yet?' again, then flips off the covers, gets out of bed, and scuttles into the living room, where it still reeks of smoke even
though the windows are jammed open, cold air whistling into the room.

I don't
have
to write, he tells himself.

I could just work in a bar again. Or a shop.

At least when I was working in a bar there was no real pressure to do anything I didn't want to.

Maybe I was just a person with one novel inside them.

I should just stop.

Do something else.

Go to Australia.

Grow a beard.

Buy a car and crash it into the sea.

He picks up the packet of fags on the coffee table and shakes it, feeling the last three or four rattle inside.

He sits down on the sofa, teeth chattering, and picks up his laptop.

‘Hi Julian,' he types. ‘Almost there! I should have a pretty decent first draft to show you in, say, another week or two? Maybe a month, tops. Sorry for the delay but I just want to make sure it's all perfect. Sound okay?'

What the fuck am I doing? Paul thinks as he clicks send.

‘It's freezing in here.'

This is the first thing Sarah says when she gets in that evening. Then she sniffs the air and her face darkens.

‘Before you say anything,' Paul whimpers, ‘I haven't been smoking. It was Damon. Damon came round last
night and we got drunk and he ended up smoking in here before I could stop him.'

‘I thought you said you had an early night.'

‘I did. I mean, he came round and we got drunk, but it was still early when he left. I just went to bed at, like, ten. That's how drunk I was.'

‘Great,' Sarah says.

‘Hey,' Paul says. ‘Don't be like that.'

‘Like what?' Sarah says.

‘How were your parents?' Paul says.

Sarah leaves the room. Paul hears her stomp down the corridor and into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

He knows he should go after her.

He sits down on the sofa instead.

We should just break up, he thinks.

He stands, heads down the corridor, gingerly opens the bedroom door, and looks in at Sarah who is now untangling a huge black ball of tights.

‘I love you,' he says from the doorway.

Sarah doesn't reply.

‘How were your parents?'

‘Fine.'

‘What's the matter?'

Sarah turns to look at him.

‘Nothing's the matter.'

Something is definitely the matter. Her face is crumpled and sad-looking in a way that Paul hasn't seen before.

‘Have you eaten anything apart from pasties and
doughnuts and peanut butter on toast while I've been away?' she says.

‘I had some pizza too,' Paul says, wandering over to her, not really sure what he'll do when he gets there.

He stands behind her and slips his arms round her waist in a loose, awkward hug.

‘I love you,' he says again.

‘I'll do you a curry later.'

He wonders if her face is still all crumpled.

Why is she still going out with him?

‘You're too nice to me,' he says into her clean, pale neck.

LAUREN

2004

L
auren woke with a thick, sour taste in her mouth and an arm that wasn't hers hanging heavily against her hip. The air in the room was stale and clammy and when Lauren tried to slip herself out of the bunk and away from Per, she found that her ankles were tangled in her underwear and she had to cling to the bedframe to stop herself falling, face first, onto the floor.

She could only remember some of what happened last night, and she winced at what she did remember.

Fucking idiot, she chided.

Her head was throbbing and she needed water. Water, and a nice clean hotel bed.

Canada
.
You are in Canada now and you are a
fucking idiot and you are dehydrated and last night you did something incredibly stupid. You sat on the roof terrace of a hostel with a group of strangers and drank strange lagers and smoked some of an extremely strong joint that might have had something else in it too, and then you let a Norwegian boy fuck you
.

Did you use a condom at least?