In Real Life (2 page)

So I don't. I rest my forehead against the window and watch the wet black streets flick past as we drive in the direction of her flat, wherever it is, somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester.

‘It's not the Hilton,' she says outside the front door, up on the third floor of a converted redbrick house. The winding communal staircase smells of damp and take-away dinners, and the light above my head is fluttering like a moth. From somewhere down the hall comes the muffled hum of Sunday night telly.

‘I'm sure it's great,' I say, as she turns the key and then leads me down a grim once-white corridor with institutional carpet and no pictures on the walls. There's an odd, sour smell coming from somewhere, too.

‘Have you got a cat?' I ask.

‘No,' she says. ‘How come?'

‘Never mind.'

She pushes open the door to a box room at the far end of the corridor.

‘Wow,' I say. ‘It's perfect.'

It looks like the kind of room you might decide to end your life in. Blank white walls, threadbare carpet, a tiny, steel-framed single bed. I drop my bags in the doorway and walk towards the single-glazed window
on the wall opposite. A view of the car park and the recycling bins and, beyond that, another large redbrick house. From where I'm standing I can see all the way in: into its brightly lit, expensive-looking living room. I try to will my body out through the window and over the car park towards it.

‘Are you sure it's okay?' Carol asks from the hallway. ‘I've not really got round to doing it up yet.'

‘It's great,' I say.

The only other thing in the room is a large brown wardrobe, the gloss flaking off it in long translucent splinters. As I touch it with my finger, I feel something like a candle go out inside me.

A little later, we sit facing each other at the two-seater kitchen table. Carol watches me eat my beans on toast like I might try and spoon it out the window if she left me alone. It's only just gone ten in the evening but my eyes have already started to buzz and sting at the edges.

The salt shaker in the middle of the table is in the shape of a little white ghost-person, its arms outstretched, but the pepper is just a thing from Morrisons.

‘What happened to his friend?' I ask, pointing at the shaker person with my knife.

‘They must've had an argument,' Carol says, ‘because one night she jumped off the table and committed suicide.'

‘Oh dear,' I say.

I try to think of something else to say.

‘How's Martin?' I say.

Martin is Carol's boyfriend. They've been together for years now, but he still refuses to move in with her. I only ever see Martin occasionally, at Christmases and family parties, but I really don't like him. Martin makes me feel uncomfortable and useless and like I'll never quite fully grow up; he's physically bigger and makes lots of money and speaks, sometimes, in a fake Cockney accent.

‘He's alright,' Carol says, picking at a bobble of cotton on her cardigan. There are small creases around the edges of her mouth when she talks; little lines I've not seen before. ‘He's on a lads' holiday at the moment, actually.'

‘Nice,' I say.

‘So what's the plan, then?'

‘I don't know. Find a job? I shouldn't need to stay here too long.'

Please don't make me pay rent, I think.

‘I could ask Martin if there's anything going at the call centre,' she says. ‘He gets back next week.'

‘Yeah, maybe.'

(I can think of almost nothing worse than working at a call centre with Martin as my boss.)

‘Have you spoken to Mum yet?' she says.

‘Yep,' I say quietly.

‘Well, you haven't, because I called her just before I came to collect you and she knew nothing about all this.'

‘I'll give her a ring later on.'

‘You're going to have to help with rent and bills, you know.'

‘I know.'

‘And if you want to smoke, you'll have to do it outside.'

I can hear it in her voice, just how much she's enjoying telling me what to do. I keep quiet and nod my head as she continues, listing all the rules of the flat: how I have to try to keep all the doors closed to save the heat, and how I can't have baths, just showers, and how I mustn't run the taps unnecessarily while cleaning my teeth.

She is only six and a half minutes older than me but she's always been the one in charge.

‘Is there internet?' I say.

‘No.'

This takes a few seconds to fully sink in.

Who doesn't have the internet? I think.

‘Who doesn't have the internet?' I say out loud.

‘I don't,' Carol says. ‘It's a waste of money,' and the way she says it reminds me of Dad.

I'm about to tell her, then stop myself.

I get in under the blankets, still in all my clothes, and curl myself into a ball. I close my eyes but suddenly I'm not tired any more.

I've unpacked most of my things – my two pairs of jeans and my three jumpers and my one smart shirt and trousers – into the wardrobe, and I'm using the taped-up cardboard box as a makeshift bedside table. There's nothing useful inside it, anyway. It's just full of sentimental things that I can't quite bring myself to throw away: an envelope of letters, a collection of worn-down plectrums, a printed-out photo of a person holding a birthday cake, about a thousand gig tickets.

I've stuffed my guitar case as far as I can beneath the bed and set the alarm on my shitty Nokia for half-seven in the morning, and my plan is to find somewhere in the city first thing to print out copies of my CV and then spend the rest of the day walking around, handing them out.

I stretch my legs, and my feet touch a cold patch of blanket.

I turn onto my back.

I feel an email-shaped ache appear inside me, somewhere around my stomach.

It begins flashing on and off, but I ignore it as best I can.

Please leave me alone, I tell it.

All you've ever done is make me unhappy.

Earlier on, when I first unpacked and opened my laptop, a dialogue box popped up in the corner of the screen, asking if I wanted to view available wireless networks.

So I clicked OK and scanned down the list, and they all appeared to be locked and I was about to give up when I noticed one right at the bottom, open to anyone, called ‘Rosemary's Wireless'.

As I watched my cursor begin to float towards it, I made my decision:

No more internet for a while.

And then, very quickly, before I could change my mind, I closed my laptop and put it away, right up on top of the wardrobe.

PAUL

2014

S
omehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to write something on a whiteboard. There are nineteen students in Paul's class, a mixture of second- and third-year undergraduates, and as they all look up from their horseshoe of desks, waiting for him to speak, whatever it was that Paul had planned on saying disappears completely from his head.

It's like
Quantum Leap
. He feels beamed-in. He feels like a stranger, suddenly, in his own body. He takes his
hand away from the whiteboard and slips the marker back into his jeans pocket, as if that was what he'd meant to do with it all along.

‘Okay,' he says, turning to face the class. ‘Let's have a look at, um, at Rachel's story. Did everyone print out Rachel's story and read it through, yeah?'

The class give no indication that they've heard him.

‘Okay, who wants to go first?' Paul says.

Nothing.

Each week, after about twenty minutes of Paul's stuttering and mumbling on an aspect of creative writing, they will critique the first draft of a short story by someone in the group, and no one will ever say anything much about it except, ‘I liked it, I guess.'

This week it's Rachel's turn.

Rachel's story is called ‘The House'.

Nothing happens in it.

There are no characters.

It's just this three-page description of a house.

Paul glances across at Rachel, who's looking down at her desk, puffing out her cheeks in mock embarrassment, her scrappy, disorganised ring binder spilling open in front of her.

‘Alison?' Paul asks the girl with the pale moon face and thick black eyeliner, seated directly to Rachel's left. ‘Do you want to start us off? What did you think of Rachel's story, Alison? Alison?
Alison
?'

Alison looks up from her iPhone, startled, then opens her plastic folder and takes out the three sheets of paper
that Paul had asked them to print out and gives them a once-over.

‘I liked it, I guess,' she says.

Eventually, class finishes and everyone closes their folders and puts away their tablets and laptops and zips up their rucksacks and starts drifting out of the room. It's protocol for the person whose story has just been workshopped to have an extra ten minutes alone with the tutor afterwards, in case there's anything else they need to go over in private. So as the class disperse, Rachel hangs around by Paul's desk, chatting to Alison.

‘Right, let's head down to my office,' Paul says, once they're the last three in the room.

‘Is it alright if Alison comes, too?' says Rachel.

‘Well, she'll have to wait outside,' Paul says.

They're both looking at him now: Rachel in her unflattering Rip Curl hoodie and baggy jeans, Alison in a translucent whitish T-shirt that hangs off her shoulder and a pair of those shiny black leggings.

They're so
young
, Paul thinks. They can only be nineteen, if that.

Don't look at Alison's bra, he tells himself, as his eyes drift down towards it, completely visible beneath her T-shirt.

He still can't work out if she's a goth or not. Do you even get goths any more? Her hair is dyed black and her fingernails are painted black and her eyes are always heavily made up in thick black eyeliner, but unlike the goth girls Paul knew as a teenager, she's always wearing
these aggressively tight clothes, and whenever she walks around, at the start and end of class, she causes something to coil, a little inappropriately, in Paul's stomach. There's a small tattoo on her forearm, a black triangle which – for the first few weeks of class – he thought was drawn on, and another (a rose? a snake? a rose
and
a snake?) curling mysteriously in the hair behind her left ear.

‘Alright, let's go,' Paul says, bundling up his notes and pens and nodding towards the door. Rachel exits first, then Alison, then Paul. He feels himself hanging back a little in order to sneak a quick glance at the smooth round curves of Alison's buttocks beneath her shiny leggings as she swishes along the corridor ahead of him.

Jesus, he thinks, stop being such a cliché.

Outside the door to ‘his' office (which is actually just a spare office room that Paul and all the creative writing PhDs have been sharing this semester) Alison announces that she's gonna go downstairs and get a coffee actually, and that she'll wait for Rachel in the café bit.

As she turns to leave, she catches Paul's eye and says, ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw.'

‘Oh . . . right,' Paul says, taken aback, wanting to carry on speaking but not quite sure what to say.

‘See ya,' she says, possibly to Paul but much more probably to Rachel, spinning on the rubber heel of her low-rise Converse and heading off down the corridor, her leggings stretched so tight that Paul can just about make out the tiny strips of her knicker elastic beneath them, digging into her hips.

And then he and poor old dowdy Rachel Steed go into the office, a cramped grey room with an old computer desk in the far corner and a couple of brown plastic chairs which Paul sets out for them.

‘How do you feel that went?' he says.

Rachel examines the end of her stubby fingernail, picks at it, then looks up at him with an intensity he wasn't expecting. ‘My story's
shit
, isn't it?' she says. ‘Admit it.'

Paul glances at the printout on the desk in front of him, at the parts he's underlined, his handwritten notes in the margins, things like:
Where are the characters?
and
What's this
about
, exactly?

He looks back up at her and she's still staring at him.

‘Oh, I wouldn't say
that
exactly,' he says, feeling a bit scared of her all of a sudden.

‘It's good,' he hears himself say, which was definitely not what he'd planned on saying last night as he read it over for the first time and groaned, inwardly, not just about how shit Rachel's story was but about almost everything in his life: his writing, his flat, his relationship, his diet, his bank account, his baldness . . .

‘I mean, it needs more work,' he says, ‘but as a first draft, it's actually kind of great.'

LAUREN

2004

L
auren woke in her old pyjamas, in her old bed, in her old room, and felt a frustration so acute it was like a needle jabbing at her heart. She lifted her phone from the bedside table, brought it to her face, and squinted at the display, where a tiny envelope symbol flashed on and off. Paul, she guessed, correctly, before clicking through to her messages. Without opening it she held down a button on the phone, until it asked her if she wanted to delete this message.

Yes, she selected.

Oh, if only she could also delete the memory of the one time he came here, and slept in this bed with her, his bony elbows digging in her back. And then, the next morning, he'd crouched down by her bookcase and slid
her battered copy of
Ariel
off the shelf (the one with all her embarrassing, well-intentioned A-level annotations in it), even though she'd already told him she didn't want him looking through her things. And then, that same night, he'd fallen out with her mum over seemingly nothing, maybe it was for smoking in the garden, and the whole time he'd had that same dazzled, gawping face on him which was the face almost everyone made the first time they came here and saw her mum's house and commented on how
big
it was, and realised just how well off they must be.