In Real Life (15 page)

I'm sorry, Andrew, I think, folding the letters and slipping them back into their envelopes. Just hang on, please. I will reply as soon as something good happens.

I close the lid of the cardboard box and shuffle down in bed and close my eyes.

I think about Dalisay.

I imagine us walking along a garden path past swirling, photoshopped fairies. We're holding hands, and the sun is shining, and she's wearing her best pink top and smiling at me with her calm brown eyes, and the bell is ringing again in my stomach, loud as a fire alarm.

Then the daydream begins to shift around on itself,
slowly transforming into something else, a feeling I've not experienced in a long time, the feeling of wanting to write a song.

First I hear a soft, ascending melody, which I'd most likely play finger-picked.

Then I hear a second counter-melody which would probably become the vocal part.

I even hear a few of the lyrics.

I lie there, very still, the duvet tight across my chest, and wait – as if standing on the front porch of myself, holding the door open – for the feeling to leave my body.

PAUL

2014

P
aul looks at the knobbles of Sarah's spine beneath her pale pink nightie as she curls away from him, over on the other side of the mattress. The top of her head is outlined by the bluey-white glow of light emitted from her iPhone as she reads an article on Jezebel or The Huffington Post or one of the many other American websites she always seems to be looking at.

Lately, Sarah's not been sleeping.

Lately, all Sarah ever seems to do in bed is lie on her side and read articles, sideways, on her phone, facing away from him, the nightie stretched tight across her back.

When they're in bed together like that, Paul tries not to think about Alison – to keep his mind as empty as
he can, like a meditation technique – because he worries that his brain might give him away otherwise, that it might make a small, whirring, Alison-Whistler-pitched motor noise that Sarah will pick up on and challenge him about.

He shifts onto his back and his eyes drift up to the shadowy, hole-less ceiling of their bedroom.

‘I'm not smoking any more,' he says into the darkness.

A pause, just long enough for Paul to wonder if Sarah's drifted off to sleep.

‘Good for you,' she says.

‘You don't believe me.'

‘It's not that, exactly.' Her voice is cold and very faraway sounding, as if it's coming from somewhere deep inside her. ‘It's more that I don't give a shit any more.'

She presses a button on her phone and then they're both in the dark.

‘I want a baby,' she whispers.

This was not what Paul was expecting at all. He shuffles himself up to her and slides one arm around her, resting his hand very gently on her hip. Sarah doesn't move.

‘I'm thirty five,' she says, still facing away from him.

‘We could have a baby,' Paul says, inching even closer towards her and brushing a wisp of hair from her neck in order to gently kiss it.

Doctor's appointment, Paul thinks. Doctor's appointment, Jonathan Franzen, mouth cancer, Australia, Rachel, Alison, baby.

‘We could have a baby,' he says again.

Sarah doesn't reply.

She just shifts a little away from him and curls herself into a ball.

Sarah takes the second half of the week off work and goes to her parents' house in Surrey, again, leaving Paul to wander aimlessly round their flat wondering if she's ever going to come back. She seems sad, almost constantly now. She knows, Paul thinks. It's obvious. She knows what I'm doing and it's breaking her heart. I should just finish with her. Tell her the truth. Oh god, what the fuck am I doing with my life.

Right now he's standing in their bedroom, rooting through Sarah's knicker drawer.

What exactly is he expecting to find in there?

Sarah's knickers are different to Alison's. Sarah's knickers come in five-packs from Marks & Spencer and are bigger and more sensible and don't have any bows or see-through bits on them.

Paul's hand touches an object that definitely isn't knickers.

He pulls it out.

It's a Polaroid of Sarah.

She looks much younger, about twenty, Paul guesses, and her hair is longer and darker and shinier. She's posing in a pastiche of one of those Bettie Page 50s pin-up girls, and she's wearing stockings and suspenders and high heels and nothing else.

He tries to work out who might have taken this picture,
tries to remember the various bits and pieces she's told him about previous boyfriends, his brain buzzing around uselessly within the choppy, fragmentary chronology of it all.

The Sarah in the picture looks so much happier than Sarah now, and Paul knows that it's
him
that's making her feel this way; him who's sucked all the life out of her.

For a moment, he remembers a thing in perfect clarity: a thing she told him on one of their first dates, in the Cornerhouse bar. She was drinking a gin and tonic and she leaned in across the table towards him, wearing a black dress and gold hoop earrings, and said that she'd always wanted to be a dancer when she was younger, that she took classes as a teenager and was planning to get back into it, actually, that she was going to join the gym again and get into shape, and then pick up from where she left off, because when she was dancing it felt like ‘nothing else mattered'. And then she'd laughed, saying she realised how corny that sounded, and he'd said, ‘No, no, that's good. You should do that.'

Paul slips the photograph back beneath the knickers and shuts the drawer.

LAUREN

2014

A
fter Jamaal left, I expected a sudden rush of customers, but it stayed dead quiet all morning, just a student couple who didn't buy anything and, a little before midday, The Man Who Always Buys One CD, whose choice for today was
Permission To Land
by The Darkness (a steal at £1.25). I was standing behind the till with Nancy, trying –
again!
– to show her how the receipt roll worked, when Peter, the new boy, came in.

I'd forgotten about him starting.

He'd dropped his form in towards the end of last week and I'd told him to come in for a half shift today, just a few hours over lunchtime, to see how he got on. I'd had a good feeling about him straight away. He
seemed nice. He said he was taking a year out, before he went off to uni the following September, and he reminded me of someone but I couldn't think who.

‘Hey,' he said from the doorway, waving awkwardly, the sleeve of his hoodie pulled down over his knuckles so just the tips of his fingers poked out.

‘Hi, Peter,' I said. ‘Come in. This is Nancy. Nancy, Peter.'

He had one of those haircuts where the fringe is all long and swoopy across his forehead, and there were a few bright red patches of acne on his cheeks and chin.

‘Hi,
Pe
-ter,' Nancy said, rubbing the spot by the till again. ‘I might . . .' she said to me, quietly, gesturing behind her.

‘Sure,' I said, and she almost ran out from behind the till and off into the back room.

‘Is she alright?' Peter asked.

‘She's just a bit shy,' I explained. ‘She probably thinks you look like Justin Bieber,' I whispered (immediately feeling bad afterwards for making a joke at Nancy's expense).

‘Right,' Peter said, a little embarrassed. ‘So, shall I, um . . .' He motioned towards the till.

‘Yep, come round,' I said.

Just then the speakers crackled and the music started up.

Sure enough, it was ‘Baby' by Justin Bieber.

‘See?' I said, and Peter grinned.

Isn't it weird how some people can immediately put you at ease like that? It was as if there was this warmth coming from him and I felt like I could just say
whatever I wanted, that I didn't have to hold back or tone myself down or whatever.

I wondered again; who
was
it he reminded me of?

And then I realised: it was you.