In Real Life (5 page)

‘What's the matter?' Sarah says.

‘Nothing's the matter,' Paul says, quickly closing Chrome.

‘You just looked all . . . shifty.'

‘Shifty how?'

‘Just
shifty
,' she grins. ‘Like you were doing something you shouldn't be doing. Were you writing another sex scene?'

He knows she's just trying to joke around with him, but he can't join in.

‘No,' he says, slamming the lid of his laptop. ‘I mean, I was writing but it was just . . . you know,
writing
. Nothing sexy, I'm afraid.'

Paul and Sarah have not had sex in almost four months. At moments like this, it dangles between them like a cobweb. Sarah takes off her shirt and reaches behind her back to unclasp her bra and the no-sex cobweb flutters a little in the breeze.

‘Carry on writing if you want,' she says. ‘You don't need to stop just because I'm here.'

‘It's fine,' Paul says. ‘I think I'm done for the evening, anyway.'

His heart's pounding and his hands are trembling as
he puts the laptop on the floor next to his side of the bed.

He gets up and starts undressing, too.

‘You sure you're okay?' Sarah asks.

‘I'm fine,' Paul says, a little too quickly, as he fumbles with the clasp of his belt.

About half an hour before Sarah came in, he'd received a Facebook notification – a friend request from Alison Whistler (0 mutual friends) – and he had stared at it, at Alison Whistler's thumbnail photograph, feeling confusion and disbelief and perhaps a little too much excitement, as he debated whether or not to accept it. There were probably rules at the university about lecturers being Facebook friends with students, even part-time, single-semester-contract lecturers, and so he'd just sat there, staring at Alison's picture and conducting a daydream about the two of them sitting on the warm, digitally green grass outside Jonathan Franzen's house and passing a bottle of ice-cold Perrier back and forth as the smell of Johnny's barbecue (he was cooking them all some low-fat turkey steaks for lunch; ‘Mama's secret recipe!') drifted over gently on the breeze – the dream shattered, suddenly, by Sarah's appearance in their bedroom.

Sarah carefully lays out her outfit for tomorrow on the little chair by her dresser, then gets into bed.

Paul sits on the edge of it, peeling off his grey M&S socks and throwing them, one by one, into the gloomy corner of the bedroom. Before getting into bed, he quickly goes back into the corridor and rattles the bolt on the front door to their flat, just to make sure that
nobody is able to burst in during the night and attack them. Then Paul gets into bed, imagining actually talking about their relationship; asking Sarah if she's really happy, hinting abstractly towards the possibility of them breaking up.

How can she be happy? he wonders. This is awful.

‘Can you put the light out?' she says.

‘Sure,' Paul says.

I'll say it tomorrow night, he thinks. Sarah needs her sleep.

She turns her back to him and curls herself into a ball at the edge of the mattress, which is the only position she can ever get to sleep in.

Paul reaches over and puts the light out, then lies on his back for a long time in the dark with his eyes open.

LAUREN

2004

O
n the aeroplane, Lauren closed her eyes and pressed her balled hands into her lap and waited for the noisy, shuddering part to finish. As she waited, she tried not to think about Paul. She tried not to feel guilty about The Notebook Incident, or to picture him shuffling around sadly in his BHS dressing gown, left like an abandoned pet in the house which, she guessed, her mum was still paying half the rent on.

As the screeching got louder instead of quieter, she began to convince herself that the plane was going to crash. She began to imagine – as the cabin lights flickered and the plane's body dipped very slightly and a lady a few rows behind made a small
oh
sound – one of the engines exploding in a shitty, mid 90s
Die
Hard
-style flash of superimposed flames and sparks. What a corny way to die, she thought as her heart began to thump.

Then, very suddenly, all the screeching stopped, and Lauren trained her vision on a small hinged rectangle of the plane's wing, flapping away above other larger rectangles of boring brown field, before everything tilted and span, and then was hidden beneath a solid-looking layer of cloud.

The seatbelt lights blinked out.

The captain made a crackly announcement about cabin pressure and altitude.

The pastel-pink old lady in the next seat over smoothed a few invisible creases from her trousers, and then turned and gave Lauren such a forlorn, biscuit-yellow grin it forced Lauren's heart to break just a tiny bit.

When the drinks trolley finally appeared, Lauren asked in her most grown-up voice for a vodka and Coke, please, even though it said six a.m. on the clock inside her body. (She'd planned to ask for a double, but chickened out at the last minute.)

And then, once she'd had a few sips, she began an argument with Paul in her head:

I'm not just doing all this to bum you out
, she told him sulkily.
I was feeling miserable, too. It just wasn't working, and deep down you know that
.

Things sometimes just don't work
.

People don't work together
.

And you and I were two of those people, okay?

Okay?

Paul?

But he didn't reply.

She put down her drink and rummaged through her hand luggage, amongst the lipsticks, ChapSticks, boiled sweets, and
The Rough Guide to Vancouver
, for
The Second Sex
, which she'd been intending to read for the past year and a half, and opened it, finally, at page one.

She forced her eyes along the sentences, even though she knew nothing was going in. And eventually – a whole three pages later;
good going!
– closed the book again and rested it on the tray next to her drink, unable to remember a word.

She looked out of the window.

She drummed her fingers against the grey plastic armrest.

Finally, she unwrapped her complimentary headphones, plugged them in, turned on the little seat-mounted TV and, from everything on offer, selected
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde
.

In Vancouver International Airport, she attempted to feel excited, reminding herself that this was a Once In A Lifetime Experience. A few feet ahead, a group of tanned-legged, overly giggly female backpackers were all snapping away at the large Native Canadian totem pole at the bottom of the escalator, and when Lauren passed it, she forced herself to stop and take out the brand new Pentax her mum had bought her and do the same.

During a long, shuffling wait at passport control, she considered listening to her iPod, but realised that all the music loaded onto it was music that
Paul
had loaded onto it.

Paul, she thought.

Paul would recover.

Paul would be fine.

Paul would write a short story about this.

Paul would write a whole novel, probably.

Paul would sit for hours in the Broadway café and smoke a million roll-ups and drink pints of continental lager in funny-shaped glasses and write copious notes about what a total fucking bitch she was in one of his pretentious little Moleskine notebooks.

Oh Paul, I'm sorry, she thought just as the man in the passport booth beckoned her forward with a small wave.

I wonder how many miles apart we are, right at this exact moment.

IAN

2014

I
n the Jobcentre, an extremely tall man in a shiny grey suit tells me that his name is Rick and shakes my hand and smiles at me. There's something wrong with his skin. Little bits of his face look so dry that they might flake off at any moment. It's especially bad around his mouth. He gestures me into the seat opposite, then starts typing on his computer. Occasionally he stops to glance up at me. I wonder how old he is. It's impossible to tell.

‘Right, then,' Rick says, finishing his typing. ‘It says here that you worked in a music shop for the last six years, yeah? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?'

‘We sold CDs and DVDs and games and books,' I
say. ‘I just worked behind the till. I wasn't a manager or anything.'

Rick nods and types a few words.

I don't feel like I'm selling myself particularly well.

‘Then it closed down,' I say.

‘Oh dear,' he says. ‘And why was that? Nothing to do with you, I hope?'

He smiles at me.

I can't quite bring myself to join in.

Maybe his mouth might heal up quicker if he stopped smiling quite so much.

‘Things were cheaper online,' I say.

‘Right, right, of course,' he says, nodding so vigorously that a little flake of his cheek detaches from his face and flutters, snowflake-like, towards the desk. It lands on a leaflet about depression counselling. ‘Amazon?' he says.

Amazon, I nod.

He clicks his mouse a couple of times, then frowns at his screen, fiddling with a small patch of stubble on his chin and making a soft clacking noise with his tongue.

If I had to guess, I'd say he was in his mid thirties, about three school years above me.

‘And what were you doing before that job?' he says.

‘Just bar work.'

‘No other skills?'

‘Not really.'

‘And you've got a degree in . . . in media studies, is that right?'

‘Yep. A two-one.'

‘Alright,' he says. ‘I've got a bakery here. In Sale. Think you could handle working in a bakery?'

I try hard to imagine myself working in a bakery: I'm wearing an apron and one of those net hat things, and I'm carrying a tray of sickly, uncooked sausage rolls towards an industrial-sized oven.

‘I'm not sure,' I say.

‘I'll print it out anyway,' Rick says.

He clicks his mouse and the printer begins to whirr and it sounds, very slightly, like the end of the world.

In the music shop, I spend a long time by the door, reading all the adverts on the Musicians Wanted notice board:
Bass player needed for funk/soul/rock combo. Drummer required to complete British r'n'r/blues band. Energetic frontman/lyricist seeks full backing band. Influences: COUNTING CROWS, BLACK CROWES, BLACK SABBATH, ROLLING STONES, STONE ROSES, STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, OASIS, COLD-PLAY, KEANE . . .

Eventually, I shuffle over to the plectrums and maracas at the counter.

‘Need any help there, mate?' a large bearded man with a deep voice asks when he notices me.

You don't need to do this, I tell myself. There's still time to change your mind. You could just say, ‘No thanks,' and smile and walk away.

‘I was just wondering how much I might get for a guitar, second-hand?' I say, nodding down at the case in my hand.

‘Follow me.'

He leads me towards the back of the shop, past the bass guitars and the P.A. systems and a teenage boy playing a Queens of the Stone Age song on one of the Gibsons.

‘Right, let's have a look then,' he says, dragging up a couple of stools.

His beard is big and black and greasy-looking with grey and white bits in it, and, just like mine, the fingertips of his strumming hand are nicotine-yellowed, the nails bitten back to the quick. I hand him my guitar case, feeling a twinge of embarrassment at the large black-and-white Postcards sticker on it, and he lays it on the floor in front of him, pops the locks, lifts the lid.

‘Very nice,' he says, his tongue doing a quick, slimy swoop of his chapped bottom lip.

Then he lifts my guitar out of the case and up onto his lap.

‘You in a band?' he says.

‘Not any more,' I say.

He plugs the guitar into one of the practice amps, adjusts a few knobs, then strums some clean-tone blues riffs. I watch his stubby fingers go up and down the fretboard. He plays in a very different way to how I play. To how I
used
to play. He changes channels on the amp and starts doing some technical, widdly, Steve Vai-y stuff, the tip of his tongue peeping out from between his lips as he does a few bends and hammer-ons.

I feel sick.

I want to go home.

I want to get into bed and pull the covers over my head and never come out again.

‘Nice axe,' he says, lifting my guitar up to his face to inspect the pick-ups, then the bridge. He rests it against the amp and rests his hands in his lap and looks at me sternly.

‘I'll give you four twenty for it.'

On eBay, on a good day, it could fetch double that.

I take a deep breath.

‘So?' Carol asks when she gets in from work. ‘How's it going, jobseeker? Any luck?'

She's dressed in the kind of smart black clothes you might wear to an office. I still don't know what she does, and it's gone on too long now to just straight-out ask her. All I know is that it probably has something to do with accounting, because accounting was what she studied at uni.

‘Oh, you know,' I say. ‘Went into town again, handed out a few more CVs.'

She takes off her coat and kicks off her shoes and sits down next to me on the sofa. I'm watching a programme about a middle-aged couple renovating their house. They keep complaining about things and then spending too much money and then complaining about things and then spending too much money. I'm waiting for them to have an argument or start crying.

‘I've got your rent money, by the way,' I say.

‘You don't have to give it to me now,' she says.

‘I'll just spend it, otherwise,' I say.

I go back to my room and count out two hundred and twenty pounds (which is how much we've agreed for a month's rent, including bills) from the four hundred and twenty in the envelope.

My plan is not to tell Carol I sold my guitar.