In Real Life

by Chris Killen

  ‘Hey, me too,’ he said, smiling and nodding too excitedly as he flashed his ridiculously white teeth at her again.

  I bet nothing bad has ever happened to him in his entire life, Lauren thought, before remembering that nothing bad had ever really happened in her life, either.

  ‘Are you taking a taxi, yes?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And you already have a hostel booked, yes?’

  Lauren considered lying, then shook her head.

  ‘Then you should come with us,’ he said, turning and gesturing to another two identical, possible-Germans who were both smiling and waving at her, looking full of energy and not like they’d just come out of a nine-and-a-half-hour Reese-Witherspoon/feminist essay marathon.

  Is this actually what happens in other countries? Lauren wondered. Is everyone else really just as friendly as those cartoon teenagers in foreign language textbooks, as soon as you step outside England?

  Just then the familiar brown and green of Lauren’s suitcase caught her eye, about to sail past them on the conveyor belt.

  ‘That’s my . . .’ she said, pointing it out but making no real effort to move towards it, instead feeling an immobilising tiredness sweep through her.

  The blond boy smiled and bounded towards it, plucking it off the belt with one hand.

  ‘Okay, great,’ he said breathlessly as he placed it at her feet, as if something had been decided.

  The boy, it turned out, was called Per (pronounced ‘pear’). He was Norwegian, and so were his two friends, Leif (like ‘leaf’) and Knut (‘nut’). As in salad, thought Lauren, as they crammed themselves into the back of a rattling, synthetic-pine-smelling taxi. She stayed quiet and let the three of them do the talking, pretending to be Norwegian too.

  As they drove towards the city, the Rocky Mountains rose up from behind the concrete loops of the highway, and the Norwegians gasped and pointed them out, and one of them even tapped her on the shoulder, trying to jog her into excitement, too.

  Be happy, she told herself.

  The clock on the dashboard said 3:56, late afternoon, but it felt like no time at all.

  The hostel Per had earmarked (The Flying Dog) looked, from the outside, more like a nightclub: just a large entranceway, set between a shuttered-up sports bar and a shuttered-up bookstore in what, Lauren guessed, was a slightly seedy, possible red-light area, just past the bridge into downtown. She kept her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, letting Per lift her bag from the taxi’s boot and carry it, along with his, up the sticky, glittery stairs and into the large, brightly painted, blue and white, first-floor reception area, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication album was playing in full on the stereo and groups of backpackers were lounging around the edges of the room on beanbags and the floor.

  They trudged slowly towards the reception desk, and Lauren hung back, again letting the Norwegians do the talking. When it was finally her turn to check in, she showed the girl her passport, filled out her form and paid for a week’s stay using stiff, sharp new fifties, still in the Post Office wallet her mum had pressed into her hand at Milton Keynes. She felt a ripple of surprise flutter around the Norwegians re the amount of money she was carrying. Then each of them received a tight roll of hard, starchy sheets and a room key with a grubby, green plastic handle.

  Here were a few questions that Lauren asked herself as she climbed the much less glittery, much more piss-smelling concrete stairs at the back of the hostel, up past the vending machines and the shared toilets and a row of industrial laundry baskets, to room 464:

  Am I really doing this?

  Am I enjoying myself?

  Is this an exciting and valuable new life experience?

  Am I making a massive mistake?

  Are the Norwegian boys all staring at my arse?

  She could, she knew, just get a real hotel room: a clean one, with just her in it.

  The fourth-floor corridor smelled of a mixture of rotting vegetables, dirty washing and – possibly – marijuana. Their room was even worse; a wave of warm, rancid air attacked Lauren the moment she opened the door. The others didn’t seem to mind or notice it, claiming their beds and talking in Norwegian. They laughed loudly in unison, then turned to look at her, grinning.

  ‘What?’ Lauren said.

  But they just carried on chattering, and she felt her cheeks begin to burn.

  There were three bunks in the room – six mattresses in total – two of which had already been claimed by strangers; by their stained hiking rucksacks and their balls of dirty socks and their damp, dangling sports towels.

  Lauren held her breath and wished she’d never agreed to this.

  She wished again that she was in a hotel room instead, a proper one.

  You could do it, you know.

  You have the money.

  You could say, ‘Fuck this,’ and leave, right this second.

  ‘You smoke? Drink?’ Per asked softly, tapping her on the arm, miming taking a swig from a bottle with one hand and then puffing on something with the other.

  She looked down at her horrible bottom bunk, at the thin roll of bluey-grey sheets that she couldn’t quite bring herself to fit onto it, and nodded.

  IAN

  2004

  As I wait for my name to be called, I have a go on one of the Jobsearch machines. I tap through the listings on the greasy, smudgy touchscreen, but there’s almost nothing that I can realistically see myself doing. Either you have to already have a specific qualification like animal care or a foreign language or a PGCE, or else you have to be prepared to do something really, really awful, like harass people in the street or clean their offices at five in the morning. I print out only two listings: one seeking someone willing to dress up as a large top hat to advertise a city-centre printing company, and the other for a part-time general assistant in a funeral home. I fold the long waxy printouts and put them in my jacket pocket, making sure to leave the edges poking out far enough so that Rick will see them. Then I wander back over to the seating area.

  The Jobcentre is open plan, and from where I’m sitting I can see Rick chatting enthusiastically to a woman in a burka. He’s leaning across his desk and smiling at her, occasionally tonguing the sore red corners of his mouth. The whole place is heaving. It’s like a really depressing Argos. There must be over a hundred people milling around this large grey-and-red room.

  Eventually I hear my name (‘Ian Wilson?’) and I look up, and there’s Rick waving me over.

  ‘So how are we doing today then, mate?’ he says once I’m sat down.

  Up close, his mouth looks even worse than before. I almost want to ask him about it.

  ‘Not bad,’ I say.

  ‘Any luck on the old job front?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say, feeling my mind suddenly shed itself of all the fake information I’d stuffed it with. I’d spent all morning going over my story, making sure I’d filled in a decent number of boxes on the What I’ve Been Doing To Look For Work booklet and then memorising all the things I’d made up.

  ‘O–kay,’ Rick says, peering at his computer screen, double-clicking his mouse. ‘Call centre. I’ve got a call centre here.’

  ‘Alright,’ I say.

  ‘We need dynamic, self-motivated individuals to work in this unique and exciting new business opportunity,’ he reads, not very dynamically, off the screen. ‘Sound any good?’

  ‘What would I be selling exactly?’

  He rests his chin on his hand. His little finger dabs at the blistered corners of his mouth as his eyes dart hopelessly round the screen.

  ‘It doesn’t say,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll print it out,’ he says.

  PAUL

  2014

  On Saturday night, Paul goes for a pint with his friend Damon at the bar down the road. They sit at one of the small circular tables in the busy pavement seating area, where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and baking hot from th
e overhead heaters.

  ‘It’s this bloke, right,’ Damon says, ‘and he’s shouting at this busker, this trumpet player, telling him how shit he is. But he’s, like, really, really intelligent.’

  ‘I’ve definitely not seen it,’ Paul says.

  ‘It’s great,’ Damon says, trying to find the YouTube clip on his phone. ‘Fuck. It’s not buffering. I’ll send it to you when I get in.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Paul says.

  Damon is one of Paul’s only friends in Manchester. They met six years ago, when they were both working on the fiction desk in Waterstone’s, while Paul was still writing his first novel. And now Paul’s teaching and writing full time and Damon is working in telesales. Sometimes Paul can tell how envious Damon is of his lifestyle – how, from the outside, it must look to everyone like he’s just swanning around in his own clothes, making things up all day – and as such Paul finds it almost impossible to ever really complain, at all, about anything: about how he wasted the whole of today watching videos of Jonathan Franzen interviews, for instance, or how yesterday he wrote two and a half thousand words of seemingly good prose, only to come back to it this morning to discover it had transformed into a fucking piece of shit overnight. And so whenever Paul hangs out with Damon, Paul has to just pretend that everything is completely, totally fine.

  ‘I almost handed in my notice the other day,’ Damon says. ‘I wrote it in between calls and printed it out on my morning break. And then I carried it round in my pocket, you know, waiting for the right time to give it to my manager. But I found that, just by having it on me like that, I felt a bit better, you know? A bit more in control of things . . .’

  ‘Right,’ says Paul, not really listening.

  ‘. . . so I’ve decided to just carry on like that for a while and see how it goes . . .’

  Paul tongues the lump in his mouth.

  ‘. . . I’m not like you. I don’t have a thing that I’m good at . . .’

  Paul moves his tongue backwards and forwards over the lump, wishing it would go away. The skin around it has become sore and rough, due to all his recent tonguing. It has the same kind of sting as an ulcer, and as he tongues it, his mouth fills with a thin, sour fluid.

  He considers telling Damon about the lump, but he doesn’t know quite how to phrase it. Also, he doesn’t want to say it out loud. He’s very nearly Googled ‘lump on inside lower gum’ six or seven times now. He’s stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his mouth open, peering inside it at the visible pinky-white bump, feeling his heart quicken and needle-pricks of cold sweat break out on his skin.

  It’s nothing, he’s told himself.

  It will go away.

  It’s just . . . mouth cancer.

  ‘I think I’m dying, Damon,’ Paul (almost) says, there at the wobbly little outdoor table. And he knows what Damon would say, too, if he did actually tell him. He’d say what anyone in their right mind would say: ‘Go and get it checked out at the doctor’s, you fucking idiot.’

  But the thing is, as long as Paul doesn’t get it checked out, it could still be benign.

  He watches Damon chugging away on a full-strength B&H, complaining about how much he hates his job but doesn’t know quite what he wants to do instead, his lips all chapped, his huge forehead beaded with sweat, his ginger hair sticking up in brittle tufts, his eyes small and round and angry, and thinks: You lucky, lucky bastard.

  Take a big swig of your pint, Paul. It’s Friday night. You should be enjoying yourself. Relax. Take a few deep breaths. Just focus on what Damon is saying.

  Paul’s gaze drifts to the twenty-pack of B&H on the table between them.

  He takes his phone out of his pocket, checks it, puts it back, then looks at the fag packet again.

  ‘Can I have a cig?’ he says.

  ‘Is that really a good idea, mate?’

  But before Damon can stop him, Paul opens the pack, sticks one in his mouth and lights it.

  A little later, Paul stumbles up the stairs to his flat, fumbles with the key, gets the door open after three attempts, stumbles inside. He’s bought a pack of ten Marlboro Lights from the garage on the way home. Sarah’s not back until Sunday evening, he reminds himself as he forces the living-room windows open as wide as they’ll go, then heads into the kitchen for something to use as an ashtray.

  He comes back in with an old saucer and a fridge-cold can of lager and sits down on the sofa, turns on his laptop, lifts it onto his knees. He lights a Marlboro Light and sucks deeply, then exhales a plume of smoke towards the ceiling.

  Sarah would go mental if she saw him.

  Her uncle died of emphysema.

  Her whole family are extremely anti-smoking.

  That was one of the things that got Paul off on the wrong foot with her mum in the first place: he’d sneaked downstairs to have a roll-up in her back garden and then left the stub in one of her plant pots.

  The whole family went nuts at him.

  On the train back afterwards, he’d promised Sarah he would give up, right there and then.

  He opens Facebook, ignoring the ‘Trumpet Fight’ video that Damon has already posted on his timeline, instead going straight to Alison Whistler’s profile.

  She’s changed her profile pic to a photo of a cat wearing sunglasses, and her cover photo is now a neon-pink, galactic-looking background.

  The first post on her wall is a rant about how the server in Starbucks was rude to her this morning:

  Idgi, it concluded. Why do ppl think it’s alright to treat you that way? 0_o

  Paul types ‘what does idgi mean’ into Google.

  Takes another swig of his lager.

  Lights a cigarette.

  Tabs back to Facebook.

  He turns on chat, not actually intending to chat to her, let’s get this clear, just to see if she’s online, and looks down the list of names (mostly people he went to school with, who he never really talks to any more), and when he sees her name with a small green circle next to it, his heart does a little cartwheel.

  He swigs his lager and chain-smokes three more cigarettes, all the while looking at Alison Whistler’s name, wondering what would happen if he just clicked on it.

  I could do it, he thinks.

  It would be so easy.

  I could just type ‘hi’.

  ‘Hi,’ he types.

  But I’m not actually going to press return, he thinks, taking a deep drag on his cigarette, feeling drunk and dizzy and for one brief moment like the Paul he used to remember being: the Paul who wrote that novel, mostly very late at night and a bit drunk, pretending he was Charles Bukowski, the Paul who didn’t have mouth ca—

  He presses return.

  Oh shit, he thinks, as soon as he’s done it.

  Oh shit, oh fuck. What have I done?

  ‘hi’ Alison messages back, almost instantaneously.

  Oh god, Paul thinks. Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit.

  He considers just quickly closing the chat box, shutting the laptop down, going straight to bed. Instead he takes a big swig of his can, then a long drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Hi,’ he types again.

  ‘how are you?’ Alison messages back, almost instantaneously.

  ‘OK,’ Paul types. ‘You?’

  ‘cant sleep,’ Alison types.

  ‘Me neither,’ Paul types.

  There’s a pause.

  What the fuck am I doing? Paul thinks.

  ‘I’d better go to sleep,’ he types, but doesn’t send.

  ‘theres a lot of sex in your book lol,’ Alison types.

  A moment later a little picture appears, of a blushing cartoon face.

  Paul deletes ‘I’d better go to sleep’ and types ‘What did you think?’

  He is about to send it when his mobile buzzes.

  It’s Sarah.

  ‘Missing you. Can’t sleep. You still awake? xxx,’ it says.

  Fucking hell.

  Paul deletes ‘What did you think?’ and retypes ‘I’d better
go to sleep’, quickly hitting send before he can change his mind.

  ‘lol,’ Alison Whistler types.

  ‘Bye,’ Paul types.

  ‘see you monday,’ Alison types.

  Paul doesn’t reply.

  He waits.

  A winking cartoon face appears.

  Alison Whistler has gone offline, the chat box tells him.

  LAUREN

  2004

  They ended up on a small roof terrace, which was still part of the hostel. One of the Norwegians went off somewhere and came back a few minutes later with ice-cold cans of beer. They were small, like Coke cans, and Lauren felt dreamy and spaced out as she sipped from hers. It was not unpleasant, this feeling, and she finally felt herself unwind and begin to have a good time.

  You are here in Canada, finally.

  The Norwegians were laughing and talking amongst themselves, and there were other groups up on the roof, too: a tanned kissing couple in the corner nearest to them, both with ratty white-person dreadlocks; and she could hear other voices behind her, English accents and Canadian accents and maybe French ones.

  ‘Smoke? Smoke?’ Per was saying.

  He’d snaked himself right in close on the low wooden bench that ran around the edges of the terrace. Down below, she could hear cars beeping and swishing along the street, headed, she assumed, into downtown Vancouver. It was dark but not cold – she was only wearing a T-shirt – and the lights of the nearby buildings glittered and twinkled. How pretty, she thought as she took a large gulp of beer then accepted the joint from Per.

  She took a long blast, held it in.

  She passed it along to the stranger on her left.

  ‘So how long you here for?’ Per asked.

  ‘I’m on a working visa. So . . . a year, I guess? You?’

  ‘We are just here as tourists,’ he said, smiling. ‘Just one week here. Then America. Seattle. You like Seattle?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been.’

  ‘You like grunge music?’ he said, miming playing a guitar.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  Pretty much all music made Lauren think of Paul now; of his meticulous, tiny handwriting on the compilation tapes he used to make her, of the way he would very seriously put on a CD in his room and then quickly pad back to the bed and just sit there in silence next to her, listening to it, wanting desperately for her to hear whatever it was he was hearing in it.