In Real Life (13 page)

IAN

2014

M
y left ear's still tingling and sore from the earpiece of my headset as I walk towards the bus stop, the clatter of voices and typing and telephones still rattling round my head. I can hear something else, too – a kind of beeping – and when I turn to see where it's coming from, there's Martin's Audi pulling up to the kerb alongside me. The tinted passenger window rolls down as I approach.

‘Want a lift?' he says.

I don't have the energy left to think up an excuse.

I just open the door and get in.

Martin's car smells of boiled sweets and aftershave. The upholstery is cream leather and there's some sort of Ibiza chill-out music playing on the stereo, the kind
of music that I imagine he puts on whenever he wants to try and get laid. And then, before I can stop myself, I've accidentally imagined him having sex with my sister.

‘Good day?' he asks.

‘It was alright, yeah,' I say, trying to imagine anything except Martin and Carol doing it.

I imagine myself going back to the call centre tomorrow: sitting in that same seat, making that same phone call, again and again and again. I imagine myself going home. Going to work. Going home. Going to work. Going home. Going to work. One day completely losing it and writing
I hate it here
in wobbly black biro on the desk.

‘It's not rocket science,' Martin says.

‘Nope,' I say.

He drives like he's trying to impress me, revving the engine at red lights and lurching forward between gaps in the traffic at every opportunity. I want to hold the little handle on the passenger door, but I don't want him to think I'm a coward.

‘When do we get paid?' I ask.

‘Last Friday of the month.'

The last Friday of the month is still another three weeks away. It's also a week after my and Carol's birthday. Shit. I'd been hoping to buy her a big present to say thank you. I'll have to just make her something instead, or give her an I.O.U.

Just past the university buildings, we stop at a set of traffic lights, and as we wait for a group of pissed students to stumble over the crossing, I realise I've been
staring at a man dressed in some sort of puffy, black tube-like outfit, standing on the corner, handing out flyers. He's smoking a fag and bobbing his head along to the music on his headphones, singing cheerfully to himself. For a moment I can't work out what his costume's supposed to be, and then it hits me.

He's dressed as a big top hat.

At the top of the stairs, Martin holds the door for me like I'm the one who's visiting.

‘Hell-
o
-o?' he calls down the corridor in a cheesy, Fred Flintstone voice.

‘Hi, babe,' Carol calls back in her normal voice.

I don't say anything.

‘Look who I found,' he says as we both step into the kitchen.

Carol smiles up at us from the little table in the corner, where she's peeling carrots into a bowl.

‘So, how was your first day then?'

The way she says it, she sounds like Mum.

They're both staring at me now, and I feel my neck starting to itch and my left ear throbbing again and I hope it sounds like the truth when I say, ‘It was really good, yeah.'

‘I've not quite started on dinner yet,' Carol says to Martin, smiling apologetically.

Things have really stepped up a gear in their relationship over the past few weeks. Martin's been round most nights for dinner, which means I've been hiding in my room, either trying to read
Ways to Happiness
or playing
Snake II on my phone. (I'm doing pretty rubbish at both of them.)

‘That's alright, babe,' Martin says, shuffling towards her, groin first.

Carol gets up and holds her arms out towards him, and I get the feeling they're about to start openly snogging right in front of me, so I say, ‘I'll see you guys later,' and head down the hall to my room.

I close the door and take the laptop down from the cupboard. I have a new plan. I'm going to make Carol a mix CD for her birthday. I'm going to choose a selection of songs that remind her of things from when we were little. Songs we used to listen to on car journeys. Songs Dad played on his guitar. Songs Mum sang along to while she did the ironing. This is exactly the kind of thing Carol would like and, also, it won't cost me any money.

So I start typing up a list of all the songs I'll need: ‘Green Door' by Shakin' Stevens, and ‘Fire and Rain' by James Taylor, and ‘You Can Call Me Al' by Paul Simon. ‘Blue Moon' and ‘Waterloo Sunset' and ‘Do They Know It's Christmas?' Halfway through, I stop, remembering that I don't actually
have
any of these songs on my computer (they were all on an external hard drive which I wiped and sold on eBay for thirty quid) and if I wanted to put them on a CD, I'd have to download them again first.

Easy!
a voice whispers inside me.
Just go back online!

I click on the wifi icon in the bottom corner of my screen, and the pop-up window opens and I scroll down
the list of available networks, and there it is, unlocked as always: Rosemary's Wireless.

With great effort, I close the lid of my laptop and put it back up on top of the wardrobe. I take some big, deep breaths and do a few circuits of the room. Over by the window, I look down into the expensive-looking ground-floor flat opposite, at a woman sat at a kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea from a large red mug.

Rosemary?

Could this be you?

I'm half-heartedly imagining a scenario wherein I start a whirlwind romance with the woman in the flat opposite – just by waving at her – when I hear a familiar squeal come from the direction of the kitchen. It's the noise Carol always makes whenever an exciting or unexpected thing happens to her. I can picture her in the kitchen, eyes screwed shut, hands clasped together, and I think: Oh shit. It's happened. Martin's finally proposed.

She runs down the corridor and hammers on my door.

‘Coming,' I say.

The door bursts open and there she is, grinning widely, hands clasped in front of her, eyes large and black.

I wait for her to say it.

‘Martin's just asked me . . .' she says, out of breath and looking a little bit like she's about to cry, ‘to go away for the weekend with him.'

‘Oh,' I say. ‘Oh wow. That's great. That's really great. When?'

‘End of this month. You know, for my birthday.'

Hang on, I think. That's
our
birthday. Our thirty-first.

We'd already arranged to get pissed and order Domino's. She knows I don't know anyone here. And now I'm going to be spending it alone.

PAUL

2014

‘
W
hat's your novel about?' Alison asks. ‘Your new one.'

It's early afternoon, a Wednesday, and they're in bed again, in Alison's room. Right now Alison should be in an English lecture and Paul should be writing. He should be at the doctor's. He should be breaking up with Sarah and backpacking around Australia.

As Paul attempts to think of an answer, he reaches across Alison's body for the fags and lighter on the bedside table and his forearm casually brushes against her boob. Two months ago, if someone had told Paul that his forearm would be brushing against Alison Whistler's bare left breast, he'd have done a backflip in excitement. But now it makes him feel nothing. Nothing at all. Like my novel,
he thinks, which he'd spent about half his life wanting and wishing and yearning for, and then, when it finally
happened
and he actually got published . . . nothing.

Paul spends as long as he possibly can lighting his cigarette, trying to think of something impressive to say.

‘It's about . . .' he says.

But he has no idea.

The other day, after class, he'd glanced over the first chapter and realised just how slight and unexciting his prospective story was – how
unimaginative
it was. Because all he was doing was writing about the first serious relationship he'd ever had at uni with a girl called Lauren Cross and then changing the names round a bit.

Jesus.

Is that what Dostoevsky did?

Change the names round a bit?

I'm a fucking fraud, Paul thinks.

And to make matters worse, he's been keeping Julian at bay with a string of bullshit emails about how it's ‘coming along really well' and ‘just another week now!'

He should just quit.

No one's forcing him to do it.

He should just give up writing completely and go round the bars again, handing out his CV.

What will happen when I die? Paul wonders. Will I make it into that obituaries page at the back of the
Guardian
? Will anyone set up a tribute page on Facebook for me? Will Alison covertly attend my funeral?

‘It's about the dislocation between who we are and who we think we are,' he says finally.

‘Right,' Alison says, nodding seriously.

That actually sounded pretty good, he thinks. I should write a novel about that.

‘But I don't want to say too much more,' he says, ‘because I often find that when I'm right in the middle of working on a draft, there's always the danger I might damage it by talking about it too early. I hope you can understand.'

‘Sure thing,' Alison says, nodding.

‘That hole's still there,' Paul says, pointing at the ceiling with his cigarette.

‘Yep,' Alison says. ‘Hi, Mr Singh,' and she waves up at the hole and grins and pulls the duvet a little further down to flash the hole her tits.

‘Hold this,' Paul says, handing her his cigarette.

He stands up in bed.

‘What're you doing?' she says.

He grabs the spermy wad of toilet roll and condom from her bedside table, stands on his tiptoes, and plugs the hole with it.

‘There,' he says proudly.

‘Great,' Alison says. ‘Thanks. That's fucking disgusting.'

She makes no effort to remove it.

Paul climbs back into bed. Her laptop is playing very aggressive-sounding hip hop. When Paul first asked Alison whether she was a goth or not, she'd laughed and then replied, ‘I'm not really an anything,' and this had made Paul feel extremely old-fashioned and uncool.

Alison hands Paul his cigarette back, then picks up her phone.

Paul smokes it right down to the cardboard as Alison's chipped black fingernails tick against the glass of the touchscreen like miniature raindrops.

‘What're you doing?' he asks, when the ticking shows no sign of stopping. ‘Playing Snake?'

‘What's Snake?' she asks, distracted.

Like almost everything Alison says, Paul is unable to tell whether she's joking or not.

‘What
are
you doing?'

‘Writing.'

‘Writing what?'

‘My story. Jesus.'

‘Please put your phone away,' Paul says, as she continues pecking away at the screen with her fingernails and he suddenly feels extremely old and fucked and sorry for himself.