In Real Life (20 page)

LAUREN

2014

‘
S
orry,
how
much is this?' a girl asked, holding up a small, pale blue typewriter, her top lip curled. The way she was dressed, she looked like she probably ran her own style blog, and each day she'd take a new photo of herself and upload it with a name for the style she'd created: Nautical Biker Gypsy from the Future or whatever. Today her look seemed to be Ungrateful Typewriter Wanker.

‘Twenty pounds,' I said, pointing out the stuck-on, handwritten price label.

‘Oh, right, so is that the actual price then?'

I nodded, and she huffed and put the typewriter back on the shelf. As I carried on hanging out an armful of shirts and blouses, I watched from the corner of my eye as she took out her phone and typed something into it.

‘They've got them on eBay for a tenner,' she called across the shop a moment later, approaching me with her held-out iPhone. ‘And that includes postage.'

‘Right,' I said. ‘Well, that one's twenty, I'm afraid.'

‘Think I'll leave it then.'

She left the shop and I finished hanging out the blouses and walked back to the counter.

‘Your phone made a noise,' Peter said, nodding at my phone, which I'd left, face down, by the till.

I turned it over. It was a text from Dad:
Happy Birthday sweetheart. Let me know if there's anything you'd like this year x
, which was, I suspected, almost word for word the message I got last year. I wondered what the time was, wherever he was in the world currently, and whether he'd just woken up when he sent it, or whether he'd been awake for hours already and only just remembered, and whether there really
was
‘anything I'd like' from him.

I put my phone back by the till, face down.

‘Are you on the internet?' Peter said, out of nowhere.

‘What, like Twitter and Facebook and things?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Me personally or the shop?'

‘The shop.'

It was a thing that Jenny, the area manager, had been hammering recently at all our regional meetings: about making sure we used social networks to promote our branches as much as possible. But I'd just never quite got round to it.

‘Not really,' I said.

‘Do you ever put things on eBay?'

‘No. We use it sometimes to price things, but I don't know. I'm not much of an internet person.'

‘I could do it, if you like? You know, set it up and things?'

‘Really? You wouldn't mind?'

‘I'd like to help,' he said, smiling.

‘That'd be great,' I said, feeling a hot sharpness at the corner of my eyes. His kindness had caught me off guard. Why wasn't he more self-absorbed? Why wasn't he busy taking selfies or downing goldfish or whatever it was the kids were doing these days?

‘How about you?' he said. ‘Are you on Facebook?'

‘No.'

‘Twitter?'

‘Nope.'

‘Instagram?'

I laughed.

‘Why not?'

I thought about it. It wasn't anything I'd ever had to explain to anyone before, but I knew it had to do with my mum. With how – even at the toughest, most horrible moments – she'd been so quiet and dignified about everything. She hadn't complained,
at all
, while all that was going on inside her. And yet every time I used the internet, there seemed to be this chorus of voices, this sort of deafening waterfall of misery, everyone complaining about
everything
, all the time: about the weather being a bit shit, or their coffee not being quite what they'd ordered, or their job being ever
so slightly annoying, or not having enough money to buy new earrings, or whatever, and it seemed like that was just what you
did
now, you complained about everything, and that that was what social networks were for, and I'd decided I didn't want to take part.

And then I thought about how worthy and over the top all that sounded, itself like some sort of
complaint
, and I gave up on explaining it, before I'd even tried to formulate it into a sentence.

‘I don't know,' I said instead.

IAN

2014

O
n Thursday afternoon, about half an hour before home time, Martin tells us to finish off whatever call we're on, then come through to the break room. We've hit the basic target a day early, and, true to his word, he's sent out for pizzas.

‘One slice each, yeah.'

I log out of the dialler and take off my headset and shut down my computer. Then I stand and stretch, trying to make the deep ache in my spine go away. Dalisay's head pops up from behind the partition wall.

‘Hey,' she says, taking off her headset, shaking out her hair.

‘Pizza,' I say.

‘Pizza,' she says.

‘Sorry about the other night. If it sounded like I was just complaining.'

‘Don't worry about it,' she says, gathering her bits and pieces.

To my right, Dean's finishing up the end of his call. He removes his headset, rubs his face and groans loudly into his palms.

‘Are you having pizza?' he asks.

‘I guess so,' I say.

I want to follow Dalisay, but Dean grabs my elbow.

‘Here you go, lad,' he whispers, slipping a small shiny object from his rucksack and fumbling it into my hand. ‘This might help wash it down.'

It's a hip flask.

‘Cheers, Dean,' I say, unscrewing the lid. I take a swig, much bigger than I'd planned. I was expecting whisky, but it's vodka. It makes me shudder. I pass it back and Dean glances around the room, then takes a big swig, too, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down in his thin grey throat.

‘Ah,' he says, smacking his lips.

Down the corridor, Martin's laid out three large margaritas on the break room tables and he's getting everyone to walk past him, one by one, with paper plates.

‘One slice only,' he shouts across the chatter.

Dean and I join the back of the queue. I swear I can feel the vodka working inside me already. My cheeks are tingling and my ears are buzzing. Dalisay's only a few people ahead of us in the queue. She's talking to Tall Boy again. He's moving his hands around and
leaning into her and she's gazing up at him and moving the hair from her ear and smiling.

‘Want a bit more?' Dean whispers, nudging me in the ribs.

I look around. We're right at the back. Everyone's focusing on the pizza.

‘Cheers, yeah,' I say, ducking my head a little as I take another, even bigger swig from the flask. I pass it back to Dean and he does the same. By the time we reach the front of the queue, we've emptied it.

‘One slice each, yeah,' Martin says to us.

‘Cheers, Martin,' I say.

Then everyone stands around in twos or threes, nibbling their pizza, not really saying very much. Some people are doing things on their phones. Dalisay is
still
talking and laughing with Tall Boy. Meanwhile Dean is leaning into me, going on about how rubbish the internet is. Something has shifted inside him now. He's become sweary and narrow-eyed. I feel worried. I look around the room for a way out.

‘All this fucking Facetube business,' he hisses. ‘What's it all
for
?'

‘I don't really go online that much, to be honest,' I say.

‘I mean, look at that muppet over there,' he continues, nodding towards Danny, who's leaning against the wall, tapping at his phone. ‘Fuckin' bragging in here the other day, he was, about how he'd got
over a thousand
friends online, right?
Right?
And then he just stands over there on his own, stroking his electronic penis. I mean, how does that even work?'

‘I really don't know what to say,' I say.

‘Fuckin' idiots, the lot of you.'

‘Are you drunk?' Carol asks when I get in.

I'm trying to stand normally but my knees keep buckling. She's over by the oven, stirring a big pan of pasta sauce.

‘Can I have some of your dinner?' I say.

‘You are,' she says. ‘You're rat-arsed.'

‘It's Friday night.'

‘It's
Thursday evening
.'

‘I'm going to my room.'

I close my door and sit on the end of my bed and pick
Ways of Happiness
up off the floor. I throw it hard at the wall. Then I go and get my laptop down from the top of the wardrobe and sit with it on the edge of the bed. Once it's booted up, I click the wifi pop-up and, before I can change my mind, I quickly select Rosemary's Wireless.

Back online, the first thing I do is log into Facebook. The little red dots at the top of the screen tell me I have forty-six unread messages and six hundred and twenty-three other notifications.

I type ‘Dalisay Rivera' into the search bar and hit return.

Four different Dalisay Riveras appear on my screen.

The one I'm searching for is right at the top of the list. I click on her thumbnail and it leads me to her profile page, which is almost blank unless we become friends.

I move my cursor over ‘+1 Add Friend' and click.

PAUL

2014

O
h dear, Paul thinks as he puts his pen down and swigs his last half inch of Kronenbourg. He's sitting at one of the back tables in the Wetherspoon's opposite Whitworth Park.

He'd printed off his ‘novel' – all forty-seven pages – and bought a brand new red Uniball gel ink pen for two pounds sixty-five from the student shop, but there's no way to make this any good, he realises, just halfway through the first chapter, no matter
what
he scribbles all over his manuscript.

He stands and buttons his coat.

Then he opens his laptop case, puts the pages of his novel inside, zips it up, and walks out through the pub, past a few florid old men drinking pints of real ale,
past a wild-haired mad woman whispering into the ear of a plastic baby, and back onto Oxford Road, where it's already gone dark. Great. Another day wasted.

Lately, Paul's been having these fantasies about stealing a car and driving it off a bridge. In the fantasies he's always pursued by a cop, played by Michael Douglas, and the whole thing takes place in America and, right at the end, Paul screams, ‘See you later, fuck-face!' and then floors the accelerator and his car swerves off a bridge and crashes into the sea.

On his way to the bus stop, he wonders how long he's got left.

How many days or weeks or months.

On the NaNoWriMo forum, people are writing their final chapters.

They're excited.