In Real Life (3 page)

Halfway down the stairs, Lauren heard the sizzle of bacon.

Don't be argumentative, she told herself as she entered the kitchen and took a seat (the nearest to the door) at the gigantic wooden table – a new addition to the room. Just say nice things. Do whatever your mum wants. Tell her about yourself. Don't act like a stroppy teenager for once. Finally become a grown-up.

‘You are eating meat at the moment, aren't you?' Lauren's mum said.

‘I've stopped again,' Lauren lied.

Why did you say that?

Lauren's mum turned off the hob and ran her fingers through her newly cut hair (a shiny, dyed-gold bob, the kind of thing you might see on daytime TV), then scratched at a fleck of burnt lasagne on the counter top. ‘What's your plan, then?' she said in a different, colder voice.

‘Dunno,' Lauren said.

‘Planning on getting dressed at all?'

Lauren pulled her dressing gown a little tighter around her waist, brought her feet up off the cold tiles and onto the chair.

‘I
am
dressed,' she said.

Her mum scraped the half-fried rashers of bacon into the pedal bin, then stuck the pan into the sink. It hissed like a cat.

Start again
.

Try to be nice this time
.

‘I guess I
could
have some bacon, actually?' Lauren said.

Her mum just sighed.

‘Look, I don't know what I'm doing yet, alright?' Lauren said. ‘With my life. Okay? And anyway, it's not as if . . .'

Oh dear
.

What are you about to say now?

There's still time not to say it, you know, to say something else
.

‘As if what?' her mum asked, plunging her hand into the sink, angrily rummaging around beneath the frying pan in the suds.

Say something else!

Anything!

Tell her how nice her new haircut is!

Ask her where she got the kitchen table from!

‘Well, it's not exactly as if
you
work either,' Lauren said, watching her mum's face twitch and flicker.

‘Fuck!' her mum cried – a strange thing to cry, Lauren thought, until her hand emerged from beneath the suds,
and Lauren saw the dark flower of blood pumping out from her clenched fist, curling quickly around her wrist, then beginning to drip from her elbow and spatter on the floor.

‘Shit, keep still, put your hand up,' Lauren instructed, trying to lift herself up out of her seat but feeling pinned by a woozy gravity, her own head spinning as the blood landed, too loudly, on the kitchen tiles. ‘I'll get a towel,' Lauren said, but she didn't. She couldn't get up.

Lauren hated anything at all to do with blood.

When she was little she threw a tantrum in the doctor's, during her one and only blood test.

She'd screwed her eyes shut and gripped her mum's hand, squealing just from the feel of the cold, wet swab of cotton wool, before the needle even went in, and then, when it did, she couldn't help herself: she opened her eyes and looked, even though it was the thing she was scared of most of all, and she saw the cylinder filling with bright red liquid and almost fainted.

‘We'd better call a taxi,' Lauren's mum said, holding her dripping elbow over the sink. ‘This is going to need stitches.'

‘Right,' Lauren murmured, still unable to stand.

She pushed out her chair and sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, closing her eyes, taking deep breaths, fighting back the nausea, as her mum took the large cordless phone from the table with her good hand and calmly thumbed through for the taxi number.

*   *   *

While Lauren was out walking around the village a few nights later, just as she used to do when she was a stroppy fifteen-year-old – just to the post box on the green and back – her phone began buzzing in her pocket.

Paul, she thought, but the display read EMILY T. Emily was a large, hippyish girl from her third-year post-colonial literature and theory module, who was always up for going for a drink afterwards, and who always wore bags and headbands with little circles of mirror sewn into them, and who Lauren could never quite work out if she was actually friends with.

‘Hello?' Lauren answered cautiously, one quarter of her suspecting that this was an accidental call, that all she'd hear on the other end of the line were the muffled swishes of the inside of Emily's mirrored handbag, full of joss sticks and tobacco-free cigarettes and dream catchers.

‘Hey,' Emily said, happily, friendlily, as if she was carrying on a conversation from last week. This, Lauren remembered, was one of the things that had annoyed her about Emily: a general lack of self-awareness. ‘I was just calling to say goodbye.'

‘Goodbye?'

When Lauren reached the post box, she stopped walking and touched the cold, dimpled top of it with her palm.

‘Yeah, I'm leaving Nottingham,' Emily said. ‘I'm going to Canada.'

‘Oh, wow, um, great,' Lauren replied.

‘Yeah, I got a year's working visa sorted out,' Emily
continued. ‘It just came through. Only applied last month.'

Why is she telling me? Lauren wondered. Is she just doing it to show off?

‘Great,' Lauren said again, as she looked at the sooty little houses hunched around the edge of the green, then back down the lane towards her mum's. The sun was dipping behind the trees and this view should be pretty and tranquil, but instead it just looked so miserably
small
, so depressingly
English
, so un-Canadian, where things would be large and spacious and new-built, probably.

‘How about you?' Emily asked. ‘What are you up to? How's Paul?'

‘I thought you might've heard,' Lauren said. ‘We broke up.'

‘Oh, so what are you doing now?' Emily asked.

Emily was like Lauren; her parents were rich, she didn't need a job. At uni, between semesters, she'd disappear off to places like Goa and Bali and Fiji and always come back with a dusty-looking tan and braids in her hair and anecdotes about bonking – who the fuck called it ‘bonking' in 2004? – boys in teepees.

‘I'm living at my mum's for a bit. Just until I know what I'm doing next.'

‘Oh shit,' Emily said. ‘Sorry, Lozza.' (She was the only person who ever called Lauren that.) ‘That's rubbish.'

‘Yep.'

‘So what
are
you doing next?'

‘All I've got pencilled in,' Lauren said, ‘are a few more
weeks of moping around in my dressing gown and a few more arguments with my mum.' She was hoping it would sound funny, but it didn't. It just sounded depressing.

‘Come to Canada, then.'

‘What?'

‘Come with me. Why not?'

Lauren ran her hand back and forth over the cold dimpled top of the post box and tried to come up with a good reason.

Three weeks later, Lauren showed her mum how to use the computer, the once-top-of-the-range Dell that had been sat yellowing in the study, gathering dust and static, for the past three and a bit years, ever since she'd insisted on keeping it during the divorce. It creaked and groaned like an old person when they turned it on.

‘Does it
always
make noises like that?' Anne asked.

Ignore her, Lauren told herself.

She's just playing up her uselessness, her fear of technology.

Lauren told her to sit down, in Dad's old office chair.

‘I'm warning you, by tomorrow I won't remember any of this,' Anne muttered as she slid into the creaky Aeron chair and Lauren stood behind her.

Once the computer had finished booting up, Lauren guided her, step by step, through the process of connecting to the internet, ignoring her when she winced at the dial-up noises, then showed her which icon to click on (which she insisted on calling ‘The Earth' even
though it clearly said Internet Explorer beneath it), her still-bandaged right hand pushing the mouse cautiously around its mat, as she navigated herself awkwardly towards the Hotmail sign-up page.

To reach this point took almost half an hour.

Everything about it was a struggle.

It was like some sort of awful failed sitcom pilot (
Net Mums
: ‘Mothers and Daughters Attempt to Surf the Web Together with Hilarious Consequences').

‘I really don't see the point of all this,' Anne muttered as she filled in her personal details.

‘The point,' Lauren said, ‘is that in a few weeks' time I will be on the other side of the world, where it will be too expensive and too late at night to just phone you all the time, and at least this way we'll be able to keep in touch. Alright?'

Anne just nodded and clicked submit.

IAN

2014

M
y alarm goes off and I press snooze, then snooze again, and then, finally, I just turn it off and lie on my back, unable to get out of bed. I hear Carol go into the bathroom. I hear the flush of the toilet and the buzz of her electric toothbrush and the hum of her hair-dryer, and then, a little later, the slam of the front door.

On my way to the bathroom, I stick my head into the living room, which I didn't really get a chance to look at properly last night. It's just a small cream-coloured room with a leatherette sofa and an Ikea coffee table and a non-flatscreen TV in it.

I squat down in front of the little bookcase in the corner. There's a shelf of DVDs (
Along Came Polly, When Harry Met Sally, Bridesmaids
) and below that,
a shelf of self-help books (
The Alchemist, Ways to Happiness, The Secret
, etc.).

When we were teenagers, Carol used to listen to Sonic Youth and Nirvana. She used to read William Burroughs and have her nose pierced.

When did she get into all this shit? I wonder, sliding out one of the books and reading the back cover.

Are you lost?
it says.

(Yep, I think.)

Are you seeking more purpose and direction in your life?

(Yep.)

Do you sometimes feel that you have perhaps strayed from your original path?

(Yep.)

If you have answered ‘yes' to any of the above questions, then this book is for you! Simply carry on reading and let Jennifer McVirtue (PhD) be your guide on the path back to happiness
.

I turn the book over and look at the front cover, a badly photoshopped image of a garden path with wispy fairies dancing up and down it.

I want to go home now, I think, not knowing quite where that is any more.

Before I leave the flat, I look at myself for a long time in the bathroom mirror, wondering what to do about my beard. Should I just trim it a bit with Carol's nail scissors, or shave it off completely using the purple ladies' razor on the side of the bath?

I make a growling face at myself and think: Would you employ this person?

(Probably not.)

So I pick up the nail scissors and start snipping.

As I'm doing my chin, I find six bright white hairs hiding amongst the black ones.

I keep thinking about what Carol said in the car: ‘Makes you look about fifty.'

I'm thirty.

I feel about a hundred.

In the city centre, there's an even bigger HMV than the one I used to work for. Its shutters are down and there's a big red ‘RETAIL UNIT TO LET' poster tacked in the window. I stand outside it for a long time, smoking roll-ups and pretending to be waiting for someone.

When our branch closed, it was chaos.

On the last day, everyone left with handfuls of CDs and DVDs stuffed in their backpacks. I got home with mine and looked them up on eBay. Even brand new they were only worth about a penny each.

A little further down the street, a crowd has gathered round a small break-dancing boy. They clap and cheer as he spins on his head, then pops himself back up onto his feet. Still in time to the beat, he flips the baseball cap off his head and moonwalks around the front row of the crowd with it, flashing a gappy, milk-toothed grin as the hat fills with change.

I try to imagine myself busking: standing in the middle of this street, playing ‘Wonderwall' or ‘Hey Jude' or
whatever it is the people of Manchester might want to listen to, and just the idea of it makes a queasy knot appear in my stomach. My guitar hasn't been out of its case in almost two years. It's been even longer since I actually played it and sang in front of anyone.

I start walking back towards the bus stops in Piccadilly Gardens. I dodge past the charity muggers and the phone-card people, pretending I don't see them waving at me, almost all the CVs I printed out this morning still sitting at the bottom of my rucksack.

‘You sound tired,' Mum says, on the phone that afternoon. ‘Are you sure you're okay?'

I'm back in the spare room again, sitting on the bed, feeling sorry for myself. Earlier on, I tried to start
Ways to Happiness
, but I felt too sad to concentrate properly.

‘Don't worry about me,' I say, as not-tired sounding as I can. ‘I'm fine.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I'm good. I feel good about things.'

Maybe it's a bad connection, but Mum sounds older than normal on the phone today. She sounds like she's made from bits of cobweb and flannel, and as I speak I can feel my throat swelling painfully.

‘Well, take care of yourself,' she says.

I'm sorry, Mum, I think. I'm sorry I've not yet done anything in my life to make you proud of me. I'm sorry I've never been able to see anything through to the end. Don't worry. Hopefully this is just a phase I'm going
through and soon I'll be absolutely fine, honestly. I really and truly feel like I'm right on the cusp of finding something good and rewarding that I want to do with the rest of my life, and right now is just a strange blip that we'll soon be able to look back on and laugh about, or better still forget about completely, just you wait . . .