In Real Life (11 page)

As he continues speaking, I feel myself zoning out.

My gaze floats around the room for a while, resting finally on a small black squiggle on the MDF partition that separates Dean's monitor from mine. It's handwriting, I realise. I lean in a little closer to examine it. In tiny, wobbly, childlike biro it says:
I hate it here
.

After a while, I'm given a spare headset and a script so I can follow along. The script is a snaking maze of boxes and arrows that tells you what to say in any possible situation. It seems that the gist of the job is to convince old people to fill out online questionnaires by promising them entry to a (possibly imaginary?) competition. In the three and a half hours that I sit listening in, Dean convinces eleven different old people to fill in the questionnaire.

He really knows what he's doing.

The questionnaire takes about twenty minutes to complete, and all the questions are about how satisfied you are with your current situation in life, what you might possibly do to improve it, how happy you are in general on a scale of one to ten, etc. Dean asks the old people the questions and the old people tell him their answers and he then clicks the corresponding boxes on his on-screen questionnaire.

Occasionally the noise in the room reaches a kind of crescendo; for a few seconds all fifty or sixty voices will be speaking simultaneously, and the sheer volume of it causes my heart to quicken and I have to grit my teeth and grip the arms of my swivel chair and wait for it to stop.

I wonder how I will possibly get through doing this every day, nine till six, five days a week.

It seems impossible.

Each call is almost identical; it's just you saying, ‘Hello, sir/madam,' and then someone saying, ‘Not interested,' and then that person slamming the phone down on you. If you're lucky, something interesting happens, like they'll tell you to fuck off.

Just before one, Martin reappears. He claps his hands and tells us to break for lunch. On my way out of the room, I try to keep my head down and my body buried amongst the crush of people all heading for the doorway at the same time, but he manages to spot me and taps me on the shoulder.

‘So?' he asks, once we're the only ones left. ‘Reckon you can handle it?'

Here it is, I realise. My opportunity to just say no. To open my mouth and say, ‘I'm really sorry, Martin, but I don't think this is the job for me . . .'

I take a deep breath.

‘Sure thing,' I say instead.

What the fuck am I saying?

When Martin grins, I see bits of egg stuck between his teeth. There's a smear of brown sauce at the corner of his mouth, too, and I have the sudden, unshakeable conviction that he's been sat in his comfortable air-conditioned office all morning, eating a Tesco breakfast sandwich and looking at pictures of cars on the internet.

*   *   *

It's raining outside so I stand beneath the arched entrance to the building. As I smoke my roll-up, I watch a steady stream of businesspeople bobbing along the pavement, all headed in the direction of the Tesco Express.

I will give up smoking on my thirty-first birthday, I tell myself as I grind my fag out with my shoe, then immediately start rolling another one.

There's a miserable-looking woman in a saggy black cardigan stood at the other side of the doorway, smoking a kingsize. I feel ninety per cent sure that she also works in the call centre. We both seem to be pretending that the other person isn't there. I don't blame her. Talking's probably the last thing you'd want to do on your break.

Just as I'm lighting my second fag, Dean steps into the doorway, too. He has a slight stoop when he stands, his head jutting forward as if it's a bit too heavy for his neck.

‘Alright, Sue,' he says, shuffling up to the miserable-faced woman and taking a box of Mayfair out of his jeans pocket. ‘Got a light, darling?' Dean's normal speaking voice is much sadder and quieter and a lot less musical than his phone voice.

Sue hands him her lighter.

‘Cheers, duck,' he says.

‘Slow morning,' Sue says, then coughs.

When Sue coughs it sounds like someone shaking a biscuit tin full of gravel.

‘How you doing, matey?' Dean says, nodding at me from across the doorway.

‘Not bad,' I say, trying my hardest to smile politely and look enthusiastic.

‘I'll ask you again in a few days.'

Sue coughs and I drop my roll-up on the ground even though it's only half smoked and the business-people go past the doorway and I look at the time on my phone, and somehow there's only five minutes left until the end of lunch break.

I don't want to go back up the steps.

I don't want to go back up the steps.

I turn and go back up the steps.

In the afternoon, Martin gets Dean to come off his computer and show me how to use mine. So Dean logs off and waddles his swivel chair even closer towards me, extinguishing all remaining inches of personal space between us.

‘Bloody computers, eh?' he says.

Up close, Dean's breath is almost unbearable, a sour mixture of coffee and emptiness.

‘I remember when this was all paper and pen,' he says.

I nod politely at everything Dean says, taking shallow breaths through my mouth, as he begins to methodically show me what each of the buttons on my screen do, how to log in and out, how to clock all my breaks and toilet trips, how to see a list of how many calls I'd made so far, how to accurately catalogue everything, etc. Then he goes over the script, explaining that it's all in the wording, you see, that you have to say that the
person
may
be eligible for our fantastic competition, that that's one of the words that you're absolutely unable to change, no matter what.

I nod my head emphatically in the hope that it might make Dean stop breathing all over me.

‘That's about everything,' he says. ‘I think you're ready to have a go.'

He plugs an extra headset into my phone so he can listen in while I make my first call. Then points to the button on-screen that I have to click to start the automatic dialler. I move my mouse pointer over it and double-click.

A long, ominous pause, and then my phone chirps, just once, and then I hear ringing in my headset. After a while someone picks up.

‘Hello?' an old woman says. ‘Who is this?'

When I open my mouth to speak, the voice that comes out of it isn't mine.

‘
Gooood
afternoon, madam,' it says. ‘And how are we today?'

‘Sorry, who is this?' she says.

She sounds like Mum: very old and very far away, as if she's standing at the other end of a dusty brown corridor, past endless shelves of carriage clocks and old photos.

I look down at my script, following the snaking arrows and clipart bubbles to a section that says:

I open my mouth but the pause drags on.

‘Hello?' the old woman says.

I'm going to take off my headset and stand up and tell Dean and Martin that I'm really sorry, but this just isn't the job for me, that it makes me feel uncomfortable.

As Dean nudges me on the elbow and taps his biro against the next bubble of script and breathes his horrible breath all over me, I begin to lift myself out of my chair. But as I do so, I think about Carol. I think about Rick from the job centre. I think about a sentence in an email that someone once wrote me. I think about my dad.

I let myself drop back into the chair and begin to speak.

PAUL

2014

T
he ceiling of Alison Whistler's bedroom has a small hole in it. Alison's downstairs, in the toilet. Her room is small and candle-lit, and right now it smells of incense sticks and sex and unwashed clothes. Paul wonders what the time is, but he doesn't want to check his phone, in case the spell is broken by some sort of message – a query from one of his students, or an email from Julian asking why he's still not received the novel yet, or worse still, an out-of-the-blue nice email or text from Sarah. If I could just stay here, Paul thinks, in this bed with the curtains drawn and whatever music this is that's playing and never have to go back out into the real world again then maybe I could be happy.

Just then his tongue shifts, automatically, to the lump.

Try not to think about it, he tells himself.

You're shagging a nineteen-year-old.

Try to think about that instead.

This is the third time Paul's been up to Alison's room, which is on the top floor of a five-bedroom student house.

She had to sneak him up the stairs.

He'd been taken aback, the first time he saw her room, by just how
bare
it was. He'd wondered where all her books and CDs and DVDs were. Then he'd realised. If you're a young person with an iPhone and a Kindle and a MacBook and a wifi connection, that's all you really need these days. Also: you don't have to pay for anything either.

Like what happened after the second or third time they had sex.

They were lying in bed, smoking, and Paul was secretly enjoying how cinematic and over-the-top it all seemed – the affair between the student and the teacher, with him playing the role of the older man for the first time in his life (Alison considers thirty-one and a half
ancient
) – and Paul found he was viewing himself from above, in widescreen, in grainy black and white, like a scene from a French film.

‘Have you ever seen any Godard?' he'd asked.

‘No, why?'

‘I feel like I'm in a scene from a Godard film,' he explained.

And then Alison had asked which was his favourite, or which he recommended she start with.

‘
Breathless
,' he'd said. ‘For definite.'

She'd sat up in bed and started typing and clicking on her MacBook, and then less than four minutes later there it was on her hard disk, completely free: a 699MB mp4 of
Breathless
.

‘You mean, you don't torrent stuff?' she'd asked when he raised his eyebrows.

‘I just sort of
rent
things,' he'd replied. ‘So, did you download my book, too?'

He asked it as a joke but Alison didn't smile. She just said, ‘Maybe.'

Paul hears the toilet flush one floor below, then her footsteps on the stairs. The door opens and she enters the room in a red towelling dressing gown, carrying a pint of tap water, her hair all messed up and knotted at the back.

‘What time is it?' Paul asks.

‘Don't know,' she says, putting the pint glass on her dresser, then shrugging off the dressing gown. She's wearing nothing beneath it. She's plump around the stomach and the tops of her thighs, plumper than Paul had imagined when masturbating. There are stretch marks on her belly, and she has lots more weird little tattoos, too. Her mate is learning how to do a kind of home tattooing technique called ‘Stick N' Poke' and she'd let him do some on her as practice. So she has an almost-circle on her ankle, a wonky star on her thigh, an Illuminati triangle on her forearm, and what looks like a tiny slice of pizza on her left shoulder.

‘There's a hole in your ceiling, you know,' Paul says,
pointing up at it, sure he can hear shuffling sounds above them.

‘Oh yeah, that,' Alison says, nodding like a hole in your bedroom ceiling is normal, then getting back into bed and curling up against him.

‘What's up there?' Paul says. ‘Above your bedroom?'

‘Dunno,' Alison says. ‘Pigeons?'

‘You should probably cover it up, anyway.'

‘What for?'

‘Well, what if your landlord's put a webcam up there? What if he's up there right now, wanking?'

‘He wouldn't do that. He's sweet. And anyway, he's, like,
sixty
.'

‘Just cover it up,' Paul says, beginning to play out a nightmare scenario in his head where a video of him and Alison doing it somehow goes viral. Simultaneously, his tongue touches the lump again, causing his brain to send a triangular sliver of worry pinging around his body.

To distract himself, Paul sniffs his fingers.

They smell like a mixture of Alison and smoking.

They're developing a faint orange tinge.

He needs to quit again. He needs to sort himself. He needs to break up with Sarah and book himself a doctor's appointment and very, very quickly write a novel. Jesus. He needs to sort his whole fucking life out.

Last night he spent about half an hour lurking on the NaNoWriMo forum, that thing where people write whole 50,000-word novels during the month of November.

It's already four days in.

Paul's running 6,666 words behind schedule.

‘I'd better go,' he says.

‘Don't,' Alison says, her hand twisting around his ankle, then rubbing up his calf, his knee, his thigh.

‘Sarah . . .' Paul says.

Alison's hand stops moving.

‘. . . she'll be back soon.'

This is a lie. Sarah won't be back for another few hours.

‘Fine,' Alison says.

‘Don't be like that,' he says.

‘I'm not being like anything,' she says, sticking her bottom lip out in a sulky pout, pulling the duvet up to cover herself, folding her arms tight across her chest. ‘Honestly, I don't give a shit.'

Paul fights back the urge to stay in bed and apologise. He dresses quickly, both of them filling the room with a broody, awkward silence, and then he says, ‘Bye,' and hurries off – not even waiting for Alison to check the coast is clear – down two flights of raggedly-carpeted stairs, stepping round the unwashed mugs and plates like a contender in some sort of low-budget TV assault course, then dashes along the hall, his breath clutched painfully in his lungs until he finally hears the slam of the front door behind him.