In Real Life (14 page)

‘I think I'm dying,' he says.

‘Lol.'

‘I'm being serious.' Paul feels his heart quicken as he speaks. He's finally talking about it. It's becoming real. ‘I've got this lump in my mouth, on my gum.'

‘Show me,' Alison says, dropping her iPhone on the duvet.

‘Really?' Paul says, surprised at her reaction.

‘Sure.'

She climbs onto Paul so that she's straddling him, and he opens his mouth and she peers in.

‘Where is it? I can't see anything.'

‘There,' Paul says, as much as he can with his mouth open, sort of pointing the lump out with his tongue.

‘Move your tongue out of the way then.'

He moves his tongue out of the way, and as she's examining him he fixes his gaze on the wonky little pizza-slice tattoo on her shoulder.

Why would anyone get a pizza tattoo?

Last week she shaved off a huge patch of hair on the left side of her head, to reveal a professional tattoo she had done last year, the thing he thought was a snake or a rose, which turned out to be a massive curling lizard. She's fearless, in a way that Paul has never been. She does not give one single, solitary fuck about the future.

When Paul was twenty, all he ever
did
was worry about the future.

He'd tie himself in knots, wishing he was not in the current moment, whatever it happened to be, yearning instead for some indistinct, far-off point when he could say with confidence, ‘I, Paul Saunders, am a published novelist.'

And look where that's got him.

His gaze drifts down to Alison's left nipple, which is an extremely pale pink, almost the same colour as the rest of her skin. There are two small oval scars either side of the teat, from where it used to be pierced. She has these little scars, from previous piercings, almost everywhere.

She takes her hands away from his face and gets back into bed. He waits for her to speak. She picks up her phone and looks at the screen then drops it on the duvet and kicks her feet impatiently.

‘Well?' Paul says.

‘It's probably nothing.'

‘But you saw something?'

‘There's a very small sort of skin-coloured lump there, yes. But I'm not a doctor.'

‘So you
saw
something then is what you're saying?'

‘Yes, I saw something.'

Okay, it's real, Paul thinks. I'm actually dying.

Oh fuck.

I need to write my novel.

I need to write my novel really, really quickly.

‘You should just get it checked out at the doctor's,' Alison says. ‘It's probably nothing.'

‘You're right,' Paul says. ‘I'll get it checked out.'

I need to go to the veggie café and write my novel.

Whenever Paul gets home from Alison's, he sprays the clothes he's taken off with Febreze before stuffing them deep in the washing basket. In the shower, he scrubs his body so hard it turns a blotchy, sore-looking pink. He cleans his teeth twice and washes his hands three times and sniffs his fingers repeatedly, trying to convince himself that they just smell of soap. Finally, he makes sure to delete all new text messages to and from Alison (who, as an extra precautionary measure, has been saved as ‘Craig' on his contacts list).

I'm not actually doing this, Paul thinks, whenever he does it, because I am not the kind of person who would have an affair.

There have been two more tweets from @jfgkdfjdlsjf:

and

Paul is starting to suspect that it's Alison sending them.

He's looked back through her @AliWhistle account and it uses the same kinds of grammar and is also all written lowercase.

Or is that just how everyone under twenty writes things these days?

Who is this? he tweeted back, once.

No reply.

He's spent hours searching through Alison's whole life online, dredging up accounts for Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, YouTube, Blogger, Vine, Instagram, Ask.fm, Last.fm, looking for clues, but all he ever finds are reblogged gifs of rotating neon-pink sunglasses and screencaps of foreign films with non sequitur subtitles and purposefully kitsch vector animations and strings of puzzling acronyms and cutesy misspellings and lowercase poems which aren't really poems and ironic comments about wanting to become the wife of Kanye West.

LAUREN

2014

I
finally managed to get Jamaal to come inside and stand behind the till, which he was more than capable of operating, and I persuaded Nancy to take a break from her sorting and hang out some clothes, so that I could price up the books in the back room. At least that was what I said I was doing. What I actually did was just sit on the carpet and – after checking over my shoulder (in case what? he came in and saw me?) – look at Paul's book. PAUL SAUNDERS it said in bold black capitals on the neon-yellow spine.

I'd sort of forgotten he'd published a book; I'd sort of forgotten Paul completely, to be honest.

I leafed through to the back page where, on the inside cover, there was a large black-and-white photo of him,
his mouth fixed in a serious expression and his nose longer and more crooked than I ever remembered it being. I'd seen this picture once before, on the back flap of the hardback edition, in a Waterstone's when it first came out. When was that? Four years ago? I'd taken Alyssa in with me, for moral support. I'd only known her a few months at that point, but we were close, right from the start. We stood there in the entrance and flicked through it, trying to get a sense of the story – to make sure it wasn't, you know, about anything to do with
me
– and when it wasn't (I'm embarrassed to tell you this), I actually felt disappointed.

Ha.

How does that even make sense?

And then, when we finally turned to the back inside flap, and Alyssa saw that photo of Paul for the first time, his weird overly long nose and sombre pout, all in over-saturated black and white, the picture cropped so you could only see his face, intensely staring out of the frame like he thought he was Ernest Hemingway, well, when Alyssa saw it, she burst out laughing, spitting the last bite of her Boots Meal Deal all over the pyramid of new release hardbacks.

‘Bloody hell,' she'd said. ‘He's not much of a looker, is he?'

I flipped to the dedication at the front.

To nobody
, it read.

Nice one, Paul, I thought. Just as bitter as always then.

‘Lau-
ren
?'

Nancy again. I got up and stuck my head into the shop.

‘What's up?' I asked.

‘I'm going,' Jamaal said. He was right by the door, one foot already through it, rain and wind whistling in, and Nancy had stationed herself behind the till. Apart from the two of them, the shop was deserted.

‘Come on,' I said. ‘Please don't do that. What am I going to tell Jeanne on Friday?'

‘Tell her whatever you want, Miss. This is bullshit. I'm off.'

I glanced across at Nancy, who couldn't handle even the mildest of swearwords, and sure enough she'd begun worriedly rubbing the corner of the counter with her thumb, blushing and looking as if she might burst into tears.

‘Just stay till one at least?' I pleaded. ‘Please?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Fuck this. It's not like you even care about this charity anyway, Miss.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?' I said, genuinely confused.

‘Well, you get
paid
to work here, don't you?'

He waited for me to answer, his eyes burning.

‘That's not the point,' I said quietly.

‘No, it isn't. The point is that this is a waste of fucking time and I'm off. So, bye.'

He slammed the door so hard it rattled and bounced open again, and Nancy and I stood in the shop for a long moment without speaking, collecting ourselves.

‘Shall I put some Justin Bieber on?' I said eventually.

Nancy shook her head.

IAN

2014

A
s the days roll on, it takes all my willpower not to just click the Internet Explorer icon on my desktop. I'm being a hardliner: no internet. Not until I feel better. Between each routed call, there's a thirty-second gap to fill, which most other Quiztime Solutions employees seem to be using to look at Facebook. I'm taking a leaf out of Dean's book: in between calls, I'll play a hand or two of Solitaire or do a few clicks on Minesweeper. And tomorrow, I tell myself, I'll bring in a book or a crossword. Anything to distract me from the urge to go back online, which is low-level but continuous, like toothache.

Go ahead
, a voice whispers between calls.

Reactivate your Facebook account
.

What's the harm?

How much damage can it do?

I don't listen, though.

I know exactly what will happen.

If I go back online, I'll just make myself even more miserable than I am at the moment. I'll look up certain people I used to know, and stare for whole evenings at a time at certain old Facebook photos and I will wander around certain streets in Nottingham again via Google Street View, and most of all, I will tie myself up in knots again over a certain person whose name I don't want to say, even in my own head, wondering what would've happened if only I'd handled things differently.

There's a list of names in the bottom right-hand corner of my monitor at all times. My name is about halfway down it. There's a clock, too, which is constantly timing exactly how long it takes me to do various things throughout the day. If my name turns blue, for instance, this means that I'm on an active call. If it turns green, it means I'm available to receive calls. And if it turns red, it means I am on a ‘personal comfort break'.

Sometimes, I'll read down the list of names – Dean Fossgill, Esther Wu, Hayleigh Forrester, Jade Goodwin, Dalisay Rivera, Lewis McAndrews, etc. – and find it so strange that here we all are, sitting in this same cramped, weird-smelling room together, talking all day, just not to each other.

At lunch we slope off in different directions in silence.

So far, my lunch routine is: go for a piss, smoke a
roll-up in the entrance, then do a circuit of the Tesco Express. By the chillers, I'll stare in at the various Meal Deal items and promise myself that I'll come back and fill my basket with them the very moment I get paid. Then, back upstairs, I'll take my homemade sandwich out of my rucksack and carry it into the break room and sit down at the long table and eat it in silence.

No one ever really talks in the break room.

Most people just silently do things on their phones.

Today, for instance, there are three of us: me, The Lad With The Pearl Earring, and The Girl Who Always Wears The Same Pink Top.

The Lad With The Pearl Earring is eating a Tesco Meal Deal and silently doing something on his phone. He's in his early twenties and could easily beat me in a fight. The earring isn't actually pearl; it's one of those David Beckham sparkly ones.

The Girl Who Always Wears The Same Pink Top is eating noodles from a small Tupperware box. She's a bit younger than me, and is from an Asian country, I'm just not sure which one. She has long black hair and her skin is a pale brown colour. As she eats, she leafs through a crinkly, tea-stained copy of yesterday's
Metro
. It's only when she looks up from the paper and catches my eye and smiles a small, pained smile at me, that I realise I've just been flat out
staring
at her for the last few minutes. I quickly look down at the empty bread bag that I carry my sandwiches around in and feel my cheeks flush with heat and my ears begin to tingle.

When lunch break finishes, I go and sit down at my computer, put on my headset, and change my name from red to green. Then I lift myself back out of my chair a little in order to subtly look around the room and find out which way The Girl Who Always Wears The Same Pink Top has gone.

Turns out she's sitting almost directly across from me, just behind the
I hate it here
scribble.

At exactly one forty we click ourselves back off break, and the room once more fills with the sound of chattering and typing and chirping phones and people apologising and people hanging up. In the gaps between my own calls, I strain to catch The Girl Who Always Wears The Same Pink Top's voice, and when I finally make it out, it's very soft and musical and accented in a way I can't quite place.

‘My name's Dalisay,' she says, ‘and I'm calling from a company called Quiztime Solutions . . .'

I scan down the list of names on my screen, and when I read hers – Dalisay Rivera – something tinkles inside me like a bell.

In the early hours of the morning, I crouch down by my bed and unpeel the Sellotape around the top of my bedside table box. I lift the lid and peer inside at my collection of sentimental objects. I stick my hand in and rummage around amongst the cinema stubs and Fuji Film packets and pin badges and gig flyers and home-made greetings cards until I find the thing I'm looking for: a bulging brown envelope containing six
long and as yet unanswered letters from my friend Andrew in Japan.

Andrew is my best friend.

He's very thoughtful and serious.

He's Canadian, although I met him back in Nottingham, when I was working in HMV and he was a customer.

Andrew always seems to know the right thing to do with himself.

For example: after Nottingham he moved to Japan forever.

I get back into bed and prop myself up with pillows.

As I read back through Andrew's letters in chronological order, I feel a ball of guilt slowly grow inside me.

At the start of Andrew's first letter, it's around the size of a marble, but by the ‘hope you're okay' at the end of letter six, it's as big as a bowling ball.