In Real Life (26 page)

Wandering along Oxford Road, past the groups of students, wondering where Alison was and three times almost calling her from his almost-iPhone, Paul stopped to pick up a flyer off the pavement. He squinted at the blurry, neon-purple text and was only able to read the name of the club (
VODKA L@GOON
). Then he noticed there was something smeared on the flyer, and sniffed his fingers, and realised it was dog shit.

Then he was sick down the side of the precinct centre.

Then he fell asleep on the bus home.

(He's still not washed his hands.)

After chugging down a pint and a half of tap water, Paul steps over the smashed teapot and carries a plate of toast through to the living room.

He sits down on the sofa, turns on the telly, flicks through the channels, and stops on
Babestation
, where an almost naked, baby-oiled woman squirms and gyrates on a silky purple bedspread, her lips moving but no sound coming from them as she gives a tit-wank to a cordless phone.

Paul leans forward and squints at the small print
crawling across the bottom of the screen:
£2.20 per minute from a landline, prices from mobile networks may vary
.

He takes his phone out of his pocket, wipes his shitty thumb across the screen, and taps the Facebook app.

He and Alison are still friends.

He's waiting for her to delete him. On her wall, she's uploaded a new set of photos, titled ‘Peaks and Trofs', which turns out to be twenty-three photos of Alison outdoors, somewhere in the Peak District, hiking with a group of grinning, fresh-faced, racially diverse kids about the same age as her, and then later, the whole bunch of them larking around in a bar, playing a game with the beer mats, mugging for the camera, then starting a Scrabble tournament. It looks so wholesome and fun and youthful, Paul has to quickly exit out of the photos, feeling for the first time like he shouldn't be looking at them, like he's intruded on a private, intimate moment, a day which Alison and this group of goons will recall with real fondness, maybe, when they're all thirty-one and a half years old, eating toast on a sofa.

He lifts the last bite to his mouth, licks the crumbs off his fingers, then looks at the time.

The babe on
Babestation
flutters her eyelashes at him, flicking her tongue up and down the oily plastic shaft of the phone.

He types in the number on the screen and presses call.

*   *   *

‘The absolute main thing,' Terry says, a week and a half later, ‘is that you don't go wandering off too far from your designated area. I know it's cold, but just stay roughly where I drop you, okay?'

Paul nods as much as he's able, stuffed into the passenger seat of the grubby, dog-smelling Ford Focus.

‘And make sure you look like you're enjoying yourself, yeah?'

‘Yep,' Paul says.

‘I'll be back about lunchtime, to top your flyers up and let you grab a bit of grub.'

Terry pulls up to the kerb outside the Subway in Fallowfield.

Oh god, Paul thinks, as he wrestles himself out of the car. Why does it have to be here? As he reaches back into the footwell for his sack of flyers, the top part of his costume gets caught in the doorframe and he has to shimmy his body to get it free. He hears it tear a little.

‘Careful,' Terry hisses.

‘I'm fine,' Paul says, standing up and brushing himself down.

Underneath the main tube part, he's wearing a black Lycra onesie. The flyers in his sack are for
Supraprint Commercial Printing and Dissertation Binding Services!

Terry beeps his horn, revs the engine, then pulls away into the busy morning traffic.

Only eight hours to go.

This is the Tesco Express nearest to Alison's house,
the same one Paul bought that box of twelve Durex Fetherlite from. She could walk past at any moment. And if she did, would she recognise him? Paul reminds himself that he is mostly just a foam tube: that, apart from his blacked-up face sticking out from a hole three quarters of the way up, he's disguised.

A group of student lads walk past. Paul offers them flyers. Two of the three lads accept them, and Paul turns to watch them walk off in the direction of the uni. A few paces away, about equidistant from Paul and the nearest bin, they all drop their flyers on the ground. Terry has already gone over this a number of times: every few minutes, Paul must retrieve any large quantities of discarded flyers and throw them away himself, otherwise Terry will get into trouble and, as a consequence, Paul won't get paid. For his shift today, Paul stands to make forty-five quid before tax (it's up to him if he wants to declare it).

He's stopped carrying the leather document wallet around with him.

He's just a top hat now. An anonymous, blacked-up top hat.

He offers a flyer to a student girl and she shakes her head and doesn't look him in the eye.

Paul hears his phone whistle – a cheeky, suggestive noise, which means ‘text message' – somewhere deep in the sack of flyers that's dangling from his shoulder. He gets the flap open and tries to find it, knowing his actions are useless: the stretchy synthetic fabric of the bodysuit would stop his fingers from being recognised
on the phone's touchscreen, anyway. He'll have to wait until Terry comes back at lunchtime.

The other option, Paul thinks, is to stuff the flyers in that bin over there and do a runner. In costume. To Didsbury.

Pacing up and down the small strip of shops, he mostly hangs around outside the tanning salon because their wall clock is visible from the street. He still has seven hours and ten minutes to go. Is this really his job now? He wonders if he'll even be able to last a
day
, let alone the three-to-four-days-a-week that Terry's looking for.

Paul steps out into the path of a thin, hunched-over student boy and thrusts a flyer into his bespectacled face.

‘No thanks,' the boy says in a soft Birmingham accent, swatting it away.

Oh shit.

Paul turns quickly, but it's too late.

Craig's face crumples in a mixture of embarrassment and dismay.

On Sarah's tiny, metallic turquoise netbook, there's a full list of her search history. Paul discovers it accidentally one afternoon, after a furtive wank in the living room with the curtains drawn. He opens the Chrome history, about to get rid of the entry for ‘
xvideos.com
– tattooed emo teen brunette' when he sees the list. It probably goes all the way back to when she first bought the computer, two and a bit years ago.

‘Home fertility test,' it says, between ‘Kristen Stewart Oscars dress' and ‘vegetable recipe cauliflower beetroot'.

Oh, Sarah, Paul thinks when he reads it.

He scans down the list:

‘cost fertility treatment manchester'

and

‘chances of conception 35'

and

‘ovarian cyst 1 ovary removed as teenager chances of conception'.

Why didn't you feel you could talk to me about this stuff? he asks her in his head.

He deletes the
xvideos.com
entry, closes the lid of the netbook and looks at his flaccid, spermy penis.

I'm going to become someone better, he thinks. Just you wait.

LAUREN

2005

‘
I
didn't want to worry you,' Anne explained, unable to look Lauren in the eye, her scalp visible through her fluffy, patchy hair.

They were both sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of cold tea and plates of untouched toast, and Michael had taken himself out for a long walk around the village to give them both a bit of time alone, and the kitchen felt huge and icy despite the Aga.

‘You should have said,' Lauren said, ‘when you first found out.'

It's breast cancer, Stage 3C, which means it's spread.

She was diagnosed four months ago, in December. They'd spoken just twice that month, once on her birthday, Lauren using the payphone in the café and
calling England via an international phone card after missing three calls from her mum, and then again, briefly, on Christmas Day. And then, in early January, she'd received a longish email from her mum which was mostly about the garden, and described a new friend she'd made who, a few paragraphs later, was revealed to be a squirrel. It transpired that she'd
still
not told any of her friends or her sister or any other members of their family yet. She'd not told Lauren's dad and said she had no intention of doing so, even though it would be a fantastic way to burst his gleeful little post-divorce bubble.

‘I thought,' Anne said, then stopped.

‘What?' Lauren croaked.

‘I thought I could try and get it all sorted out, before you got home.'

And then she began to cry, which Lauren had only ever seen her do twice before, and both times there had been someone else there to comfort her, too. Lauren lifted herself out of her chair and put her arms gently around her mum as she sobbed, feeling how much thinner and smaller her body was beneath her jumper.

In bed that night, Lauren pleaded with Michael to hold her tighter.

‘I don't want to crush you,' he said.

She wanted him to crush her completely.

‘I don't know what to say,' he said. ‘I'm so sorry, Lauren. It's rubbish, it's a rubbish situation. I'm sorry.'

She felt no comfort from this.

In fact, she felt absolutely nothing towards Michael whatsoever as she sobbed into his T-shirt in the dark. She wiped her nose on it. She pleaded with him to hug her tighter, to hug her as hard as he could. When he asked if she'd got anyone else she could talk to, any other close friends or relatives or anything, she thought of Ian then shook her head.

‘Please don't go to sleep,' she pleaded as his breathing began to slow.

‘I won't,' he promised, his grip loosening a little on her shoulder.

I don't know who you are, she thought as he began to snore.

IAN

2014

‘
O
kay, are you ready?' I ask.

It's just gone six, and everything is blue and luminous and the roads are almost completely deserted as we drive through the suburbs somewhere outside Stockport. It's so cold inside the car that you can see your breath.

‘Go for it,' Carol says.

So I stick the CD in the car's stereo and press play.

There's a long pause as the machine quietly whirrs and then, loud and clear, ‘Green Door' by Shakin' Stevens starts up.

Carol's wearing her weird purple driving glasses. She cocks her head and listens closely to the music, unsure what it is at first.

Come on, I think. You can't have forgotten this one.

Then her face breaks out in a grin.

‘Oh wow,' she gasps.

On the chorus, we both sing along.

Next comes ‘Fire and Rain'. It's only halfway through ‘You Can Call Me Al' when I notice a large teardrop sliding out from under her glasses and down her right cheek, followed quickly by a second, then a third.

‘He might have been a miserable sod at times,' she says, ‘but I still miss him.'

‘Me, too,' I say.

At home, Carol parks in the space where Dad's blue Ford Escort used to go. When we knock on the door, Mum opens it almost immediately. She looks really, really old – much older than I remember her. She smiles widely and puts her arms out and hugs us both at the same time.

I walk back out to the car and start carrying our bags into the hall.

‘Look at all this,' I say.

The skirting boards are a much brighter white and the carpets are different and there's a fancy-looking cordless phone on the table by the door and, next to it, a brand-new, blinking wireless router.

‘I've updated things a bit,' she says. ‘I've entered the twenty-first century.'

Carol laughs.

‘I'm on the internet now, too. If either of you want to use it. I'll write you down the password for the thingy after tea.'

I carry my things up the stairs to my room, which has transformed into a small, plain guest room at the end of the hall. I dump my bags on the carpet in the middle then walk over to the little window on the far wall and look down at the overgrown back garden and the frost-covered, corrugated iron of the garage roof, which probably still contains that old Triumph that Dad never quite got round to doing up.

I turn round and Mum's standing there, looking at me from the doorway.

‘Nice to have you back,' she says.

‘Nice to have me back, too,' I say.

‘You know you can stay here for as long as you want.'

‘I know.'

She heads down the small, creaking staircase and I hear the faint murmur of her and Carol's voices in the living room. In the corner of the room is the single bed I slept on all through my childhood and teenage years, the one I lost my virginity on. I close the door to my room, then lie down on it, still in all my clothes.

After dinner, we move over to the sofas and Mum brings out a big bottle of port and pours us each a large glass. A plate of mince pies appears.

‘Happy Christmas,' she says.

‘Happy Christmas,' we say.

‘What do you need the internet for, anyway?' Carol says.

‘You sound like your dad,' Mum says.

‘It's a waste of money,' Carol says.

‘I've joined a forum,' Mum says. ‘It's just a glorified book group, really, except there's people from all over the world on it. I've got friends in Australia now, and, um, America. And there's a man from Birmingham. It's good fun. You should try it.'

‘Good for you,' I say.

Carol shakes her head, baffled.

‘And there's this website called YouTube. Have you heard of it?'

We both nod, trying to keep the smiles off our faces.

‘It's just for funny videos really. Have you seen that one of Fenton? The naughty dog?'

Port tastes much nicer than White Label rum. The gas fire is turned up to full and the curtains are pulled shut and the room quickly becomes so warm and fuzzy that I start to feel myself nodding off occasionally, even though it's not yet ten o'clock.