In Real Life (12 page)

Outside it's incredibly bright, and weirdly sunny for November, and Alison's musty bedroom already seems like something from a long time ago, maybe even something he's imagined.

At the bus stop, he jams his tongue against the
lump and takes out his phone. It tells him that he has one new Facebook notification and two new Twitter notifications.

On Facebook, David Hastings has tagged him in a set of scanned-in photographs from the early 2000s. Paul thumbs through them. They're all taken in their old student house, in the kitchen and the living room. One of him and Lauren sitting on the sofa, her legs resting over his. One of him and Ian talking at a party. Christ. They all look so young and thin.

He opens Twitter and feels a spear of panic pierce his gut.

A little later, on the top deck of the bus, Paul tries to find out more about @jfgkdfjdlsjf, but it turns out the account has been protected. All he can tell is that it doesn't follow anyone and that the tweet to him is its only tweet so far.

It's probably some sort of phishing thing, he reassures himself, looking uneasily around the bus to make sure there's no one following him.

That evening, after dinner, halfway through an episode of
Grand Designs
, Sarah picks up the remote and turns off the TV. A flower of silence blooms between them in the small, pale blue living room. Something is wrong. Something has been wrong ever since Paul got home.
He holds his breath and waits for her to speak, to say whatever it is she's been working herself up to say.

‘I know what you're doing,' she says in a quiet, steady voice.

Okay, Paul thinks, feeling the floodgates open on a panic so intense it makes his head spin. This is it. Everything's over, she's found me out.
She's
the one who sent me that Twitter message. She's going to break up with me. And – Paul discovers, his hands jammed between his trembling knees – this might not be what he wants after all. Because Paul doesn't know what the fuck he wants any more. He doesn't know anything except: a) he's dying and b) he's making a right dog's dinner of his life.

‘I found a lighter in the washing machine,' Sarah says, in the same slow, wounded voice.

Oh! Paul thinks. Oh! Okay!

And sheer relief makes him laugh out loud, just once, a single involuntary, ‘Ha!'

‘I'm glad you find it funny,' Sarah says, getting up off the sofa.

‘Wait. . .' Paul says.

He follows her into the kitchen.

He knows how seriously she takes smoking. How much she hated him doing it. How much she wanted him to stop the first time round, and how much misery he put her through, those endless months he was quitting.

‘I've just been stressed,' he says. ‘You know, with my writing and everything. I mean, I'm making good
progress with the novel now,' (he's written nothing usable in getting on for three months) ‘and it's just been putting me in this weird mood. I know I need to give up again, I
know
I do. I'm sorry. I've only been on two or three a day anyway,
if that
,' (he's currently on about ten to twelve), ‘but yeah, you're right, you're absolutely right, and I am so,
so
sorry, I really am, look at me,' (Sarah's turned to run water into the sink and Paul suspects she might be crying but when she turns to face him her eyes are cold and dry), ‘it's such a fucking stupid thing to do, I was doing so well, and I'll stop again, I promise, I
promise
, starting right now, okay?'

He waits for Sarah to nod.

To look at him warmly.

He wants, more than anything, for Sarah to make him feel like he is not a terrible human being.

‘Do what you want,' Sarah says. ‘I don't care any more.'

He can't tell if she's talking about the smoking or something else.

‘I don't know what I want,' Paul says after a long pause.

He walks slowly back into the living room and turns the TV on. From this moment onwards, he thinks, I'm going to have nothing more to do with Alison. Because the guilt of it sits in his stomach, heavy and undigested, like how it might feel if you ate a shoe.

It's finished, Paul tells himself. It's over. It was a mistake and you've learned from it. Tomorrow you are going to change. You are going to book a doctor's
appointment. You are going to start being a good boyfriend. You are going to buy Sarah flowers or chocolates or both. This is a new start, Paul, right here. This is ‘the first day of the rest of your life'.

He presses his tongue against the lump.

He changes the channel from
Grand Designs
to
The One Show
.

LAUREN

2014

N
ancy, the first of my volunteers, got in a little before ten. Nancy was small and shy and childlike, even though she was well into her sixties. She'd kept her hair long – it was a very thin, dark grey and kind of damp-looking – and she always wore these floral print blouses and thick brown cords that looked like they came straight from the seventies. I liked her a lot.

‘Sorry, I'm late,' she whispered.

I looked at my phone; she was three minutes early.

‘You're not late,' I told her and she tugged at her hair and muttered to herself then scurried into the back to hang up her duffel coat. Nancy's first job was to get started sorting through the new bags. It was what she
liked doing best. She was scared of the till; the till got her in a flap.

The old man had left without buying anything, and there were no more customers, so I stuck my head through the doorway to the back room and asked Nancy if she wanted to put a CD on. She'd sat down cross-legged on the floor, and she nodded and struggled to her feet, stepping around the piles of toys and books and VHS cases to get to the stereo in the far corner. I went back out into the shop and took my place behind the till. I waited to see what she'd put on. Lately, she'd been getting into Justin Bieber. She'd picked out his first album one afternoon from the music section, and said she liked him because he was ‘such a nice little boy'. She thought he was ‘polite'. I didn't have the heart to tell her he was growing up to be a dickhead.

If she puts on Justin Bieber, I told myself, then something good will happen today.

The speakers buzzed and I waited for the music to start, but it wasn't Justin Bieber. It was one of my CDs:
XO
by Elliott Smith. I must have left in the machine on Saturday night while closing up. I waited for Nancy to stop and change it, but she didn't.

Jamaal didn't get in for another fifteen minutes.

‘What?' he asked, the moment he stepped through the door, his eyes wide and wired. There was a scab at the corner of his mouth that hadn't been there on the Friday afternoon, and he had what looked like a fading black eye, too.

‘Good morning to you, too,' I said.

He didn't take his coat off. It was large and black and shiny and he just stood there in it near the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Oh Jamaal, I thought. He looked like a schoolboy still, although according to his caseworker Jeanne, he was almost twenty-one.

‘Cup of tea?' I said.

He shook his head.

‘Miss? Can I go outside and make a quick phone call please?'

‘You've only just got here.'

‘It's important, Miss.'

It always made me feel weird when he called me that. It made me feel old and spinsterish. To Jamaal, I was just a grown woman of indeterminate age. An adult. I wasn't
young
, not like him.

‘Sure,' I said and watched him go back outside, lighting a cigarette in the strange, cupped-handed way that teenagers often do. He began talking on his phone, but he was doing it in such an over-the-top way, it made me suspect he was just pretending. ‘Is it?' he kept saying, too loudly, glancing back through the glass of the door to see if I was still watching, pulling his coat around his chest instead of just doing up the zip.

I'd been told by Jeanne that Jamaal was second-generation Somalian, and sometimes, like this morning, when he came in brimming with anger, I wondered if it was the shitty state of his country that he was angry about: how it'd forced his parents to come and settle
here instead. And then I'd feel embarrassed about how little – almost nothing – I knew about Somalia, or anywhere, really, that wasn't England or the United States or Canada, and I would promise myself to go home that evening and look Somalia up on the internet; to do
more
somehow than what I always did when I got home, which was to just turn the TV on or fiddle with my phone, then go to bed.

Or, maybe, Jamaal was just an angry person.

Maybe Jamaal just didn't like me.

Hadn't
I
woken up this morning feeling shitty, too?

Was it too simplistic and presumptuous – a little bit racist, even – to assume that Jamaal's anger had anything to do with his heritage?

I knew nothing about him.

I walked over to the front door, tapped on the glass and waved at him, smiling, trying to coax him in with friendliness, with a sort of gentle feeling of ‘You're not in trouble, just please come inside and do something nominal, so I don't have to lie to Jeanne about you on Friday.'

But he turned his back and carried on talking.

I was about to go out and get him when I heard the landline ringing in the back. And a few seconds later, Nancy's sheepish, sing-song voice began calling me: ‘
Lau
-ren?
Lau
-ren?' Nancy never answered the phone, you see, even though I'd told her numerous times that she could, that she was totally allowed, that nothing bad would happen on the other end of the line. But, like the till, the phone got her in a flap.

I went into the back, stepping over the piles she'd made of books and CDs and cuddly toys and clothes and things we couldn't sell like electrical items and VHS tapes, to get to the little ‘office' area in the far corner, where I usually sat tearing my hair out over the accounts. I moved slowly, knowing that if the phone was still ringing by the time I reached it, it would most likely be some sort of PPI scam. I reached the phone. It was still ringing. I picked up.

‘Hello?'

‘
Gooood
morning, madam,' a man's voice said. He sounded like a radio DJ. ‘My name's . . .'

I could hear the chatter of other voices in the call centre around him, and I hung up quickly, dropping the phone back into its cradle a little too dramatically.

‘Just another cold call,' I told Nancy, who'd been watching nervously.

She nodded to herself then went back to sorting. She had a Marks & Spencer bag full of paperbacks open in front of her and she was trying to divide them into their various categories. Even from over by the phone, I could see she was messing it up – Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell were mixed in with fiction. And as my eye ran further down the spines, one in particular stood out. It was a lurid yellow. I tilted my head to read the spine:
Human Animus
.