In Real Life (27 page)

After a while, I excuse myself and go up the stairs to bed.

In the bathroom, while brushing my teeth, I look at my face in the mirror and think: Tomorrow morning you will throw your e-cig away. You will get a haircut and have a shave and start doing some sort of exercise. You will learn a new language. You will buy an acoustic guitar. You will do twenty sit-ups and twenty press-ups each morning and start reading poetry. You will try to do something that is not just for yourself, like volunteering, maybe.

I wish I'd brought my cardboard box.

I don't need it for a bedside table – there's a proper one here – but it would've been nice to read Andrew's letters again. Because for the first time since he sent them to me, I feel about ready to reply.

PAUL

2014

A
s Paul steps off the train and walks along the platform, he gets caught in a flood of nostalgia; he remembers his years at university, in particular a time when Lauren met him off the train holding a bit of card with his name written on it. In the departures lounge, he remembers the endless weeks after she'd broken up with him, when he'd come and sat here for hours drinking over-priced coffees at one of the little brass tables, watching the people coming and going, and hoping, ridiculously, that Lauren would be one of them even though he suspected she was at her mum's, then found out she was off to Canada for a year (a mutual friend let it slip in town).

Turning out of the station, he thinks about the shitty
student house in the Meadows that he and Ian and David shared. They each chose a poster for the living room from the sale in the student's union. Paul chose
Nighthawks at the Diner
, and Ian chose
Unknown Pleasures
and David chose
Beer: Helping Ugly People Have Sex Since 1862
.

This will be the first time he's seen any of them in six or seven years.

He wonders if they'll have anything left to say to each other.

He wonders what they'll think of him, touching the smooth skin of his scalp.

Amazon keeps recommending him caffeine shampoo but it's way too late for that.

The best lads past and present assemble at five in the Wetherspoon's opposite the Cookie Club. They sit around a large table and drink weak pints of lager, and at first the conversation is stilted and subdued and mostly about what cars people have. Paul sits at the edge of the table, sipping his Fosters, hoping no one will make him admit that he still can't drive. Luckily, before the question reaches him, someone starts describing a video they saw on the internet.

‘It's this fucking dog, right. No, wait, it's this kid. This lad. In America. And he starts getting attacked by this dog, right? This, like, wild dog. And it's dragging him off by the leg 'cause he's only small.'

‘I've seen it,' someone interjects.

‘And then this fucking
house cat
comes bolting up
out of nowhere, right, and chases the dog away! It's mental.'

Everyone nods.

They've all seen it.

‘What about that one of the girl dancing and then she goes upside down and falls through the coffee table?' someone else ventures.

They've all seen that one, too.

‘I saw one the other week of this drummer at this wedding, right,' a third voice begins, as Paul remembers a pornographic clip he watched last week, of a naked Japanese woman being molested by an unconvincing sci-fi monster with slimy, penis-like tentacles.

Once they've all described videos to each other for a while, the conversation turns to jobs. Paul shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

‘What're you up to these days?' asks a lad called Kareem, who Paul wonders if he's ever even met before.

‘I was teaching for a while,' Paul says, ‘at the uni. Then I did a bit of . . . promotional stuff. But now it's mostly freelance, writing gigs.'

‘Is that right?' Kareem asks, nodding enthusiastically, a lot more interested in this than Paul was hoping.

‘It's not that interesting,' Paul says.

But Kareem persists.

‘What kind of writing? Magazine stuff?'

‘It's more online, really.'

‘Not SEO?' Kareem almost shouts.

Paul nods.

‘No way! That's what I'm in, too! Not the writing of it, but the back-end stuff.'

‘What a coincidence,' Paul says.

He's only been bidding on freelancing websites for keyword-rich article-writing jobs for about a fortnight but already he hates it deeply. He's been doing all the actual writing on Sarah's netbook, too, and its miniature keyboard makes the shitty articles he has to compose seem even
more
trivial and banal and ridiculous than they already are. The absolute worst are the porn ones. Paul's latest assignment (he's still got half left to do when he gets back) is writing the bits of keyword-heavy copy for a group of extreme niche porn sites, all with names like Tentacle Rape and Sneaker Sniffers and Domgirls and Schoolbabe Hentai and The Toonporn Repository.

‘This horny tentacle monster is ready to fuck every gaping hole of this screaming nude glistening Japanese babe in this erotic and completely free gallery of 100% free hardcore Japanese tentacle rape movies.'

That's the kind of thing Paul's been writing recently.

And the worst part of all is that it's not even
writing
, not really. No one's actually reading any of it. It's just a way of pushing these websites to the front page of Google for the benefit of a small pocket of tentacle fetishists. Paul's copy doesn't need to be elegant. It doesn't need to make sense. It just needs to be a certain number of words long and stuffed with as many potential search terms as possible:

On top of all that, it pays pennies.

For the porn work, Paul's being paid 0.5 of a cent per word, weekly, into a PayPal account. Which means he needs to write about 3,500 words an
hour
, just to make minimum wage.

‘Whose round is it?' someone asks.

Paul decides to take the hit early, while they're still in Wetherspoon's and everyone's just on pints.

‘I'll get these,' he says, lifting himself out of his chair.

‘I'll give you a hand,' David – the stag – says, and after they've taken everyone's orders (Fosters, Fosters, Fosters top, Fosters, Stella, Fosters), the two wander over to the bar.

‘You know Lauren's going to be there, right?' David says.

Paul didn't know this, no. He wonders why she would, then remembers that David met his fiancée, Jenny, through them in the first place. Jenny was one of Lauren's friends from uni. Of course.

‘Yeah, I'd heard something,' he says.

He feels embarrassed, even now, of the public mess he made of himself after Lauren broke up with him. He still hates anything at all to do with Canada.

‘And where's Ian tonight?' he asks.

‘No one knows,' David says. ‘I sent him the Facebook invites to this and the reception, but he's not replied to any of them. I don't think anyone's heard from him in months.'

David looks more upset by this than Paul was expecting.

He wonders if it's strange that he doesn't really give that much of a fuck about any of them any more.

‘Hey, congratulations, by the way,' he forces himself to say, clapping David on the arm.

‘Cheers, mate. What about you? You've been with your bird for quite a while now, right? Think you'll ever tie the knot?'

Paul thinks about it seriously, possibly for the first time ever.

‘Yeah, maybe,' he says.

After the curry and a small pub crawl – Paul's had six pints of Fosters now; he's not drunk exactly, just bloated and ready for bed – the lads are meandering back towards the Cookie Club for the indie night. A couple
of them are singing football songs. One pissed in a shop doorway, and is just leaving his trousers round his ankles and waddling down the street because he thinks it looks funny. Just before they reach the club, Aiden, a man with big biceps and a Liverpudlian accent, drags them back out of the way of the doormen and down an alley near the Riley's.

‘I've got some Mitsubishis here, lads,' he whispers. ‘If anyone wants one?'

He gets someone to hold the bottle of Becks he smuggled out of the last bar while he rummages around in his coat, then pulls out a small plastic bag. He puts two small white pills on his tongue, takes the Becks and swigs it. ‘Any more for any more?' he grins, offering up the bottle and the little bag.

‘What are they?' Paul asks David beneath his breath. ‘E?'

Paul's never done ecstasy before. Somehow, the opportunity never really presented itself. It didn't seem to be such a big thing back at university, in 2002, at least not for Paul.

‘Yeah,' David nods. ‘Having one?'

Paul watches David take a pill and swig it down. All the other lads take one, too.

‘Oh, go on then,' Paul says.

In the indie club, one of Paul's favourite songs, ‘Cut Your Hair' by Pavement, a song he put on a mixtape for Lauren, comes on, but Paul's too worried about the pill to dance. He imagines it sitting in his stomach,
fizzing like an Alka-Seltzer. He thinks about a Dangers of Ecstasy assembly that they called in secondary school, years ago, featuring an overhead projector slide of a photo of a dead teenager. The image of that girl lying there on the floor of her kitchen will stay burned into Paul's brain for as long as he lives.

I should've just done a half, he thinks, and seen how I got on with that.

It's too late now, though.

I don't want to die, Paul thinks.

I don't want someone to take a photo of me bloated and dead on the floor of the Cookie Club.

I don't want my brain to pop out through my ears.

He looks at the lads, who are mostly sat around a large white booth, swigging bottles of lager and alcopops, deep in slurry, heartfelt one-on-one conversations that involve a lot of shouting in each other's ears and slapping each other on the back.

As Paul stands to go to the toilet, he feels a rush. It's not dizziness or drunkenness, though. It's a tingling, chemical feeling, in his fingertips, in his spine, in his skull. It's like a million buzzing electric pinpricks all over his body. He feels his mouth pulling itself involuntarily into a grin.

‘Eh? Eh?' David says, catching Paul's attention as he walks past the table, clapping him on the leg. ‘Enjoying it now then, are we?'

David's eyes are huge and black and his mouth is splayed in a massive, toothy grin.

‘Yeah,' Paul says, feeling a sudden love and nostalgia for David.

We went to
university
together, he thinks. We spent a million nights together in that cramped, shitty living room, smoking joints and watching telly, and we were real friends and we grew up together and now here we are going bald and getting married and all that's actually a pretty big deal.

‘Fucking shame Ian couldn't be here,' Paul shouts over the music, which has turned into ‘Debaser'.

David nods.

‘I love you, mate,' David says, sucking his bottom lip in and out of his mouth as he speaks.

‘I love you, too,' Paul says emphatically.

‘What?' Sarah says angrily, on the other end of the phone. It's half two in the morning and Paul's in the little roped-off smoking area out the front of the club.

‘I just wanted to say,' Paul shouts into the mouthpiece, ‘that I love you. I fucking
love
you. And I'm sorry for everything, you know?'

‘You're shouting,' Sarah says. ‘Why are you shouting?'

‘Because I love you,' Paul shouts.

‘I'm going back to sleep now. You're drunk.'

‘Sarah?' Paul shouts, but she hangs up on him.

Everything's going to be okay after all. Paul just
knows it
as he grinds out his fag with his shoe and turns and goes back into the club, up the glittering stairs, towards the flashing lights and the booming indie, pulsing in waves from the upstairs dance floor. There's a big group of them, all the lads, dancing on the stage at the back with their arms round each other, singing along to ‘Animal Nitrate'.

This is fucking
ace
, Paul thinks. I can't believe it's taken me this long to find out how good this feels. I'm going to get some more pills back in Manchester. I'm going to do them all the time. And Sarah will do one with me, and then we'll be fine. I'll take them while I'm writing, too, like the Beats did with amphetamine. Shit. I'm going to write the Great Ecstasy Novel of my generation. It's going to be like Jonathan Franzen meets Irvine Welsh meets . . . Who fucking cares? . . . I feel
fantastic
.

Paul climbs onto the stage and slings his arm round David's sweaty shoulders and starts to sing along.

Late the following afternoon, in the quiet carriage, Paul looks down at his cup of Virgin Trains black coffee, but can't quite bring himself to lift it to his lips. The occasional flashes of sunlight through the windows are painfully bright, but if he closes his eyes then his head starts to pound with apocalyptic booms and he sees skulls: actual melting skulls, like a death metal album cover.

This is not a normal hangover.

He feels shaky and gloomy and cobwebbed.

What the fuck am I doing? he thinks, closing his eyes, opening them again, not sipping his coffee, not writing a novel, not doing whatever it is he's supposed to be doing with his life.

He gets up and makes his way down the carriage, locking himself in the podlike toilet. He uses a square of toilet paper to close the lid, then sits and takes out
his phone. He scrolls through to Alison's number. He stands again, unzips his jeans, the phone still clutched in his hand as he scoops his dick and balls out the front of his boxer shorts. He thumbs through to the camera with one hand, while tugging at his flaccid penis with the other, looking at it first in the long, streaky mirror on the wall opposite, then on the screen of his phone. But he can't get hard.