by Chris Killen
2014
‘Have you seen The Motorcycle Diaries?’
Carl’s speech was slurry even though he’d only had two pints. I suspected that he’d been drinking somewhere else, too, since much earlier in the evening.
I shook my head, my eyes drifting once more to my phone, which I surreptitiously slid off the table, letting it drop into my lap then touching its button and glancing at it, wondering why I was even being covert; it wasn’t as if Carl was paying attention. He was just enjoying talking now, slurring wetly in my direction. I’d heard about his camera collection, his gym membership, his current job, the job he was retraining for, and his year-and-a-half motorcycle odyssey across South America.
21:37, my phone’s display said, which meant I’d been here for thirty-six minutes. It felt like much longer. Days, perhaps. I’d had one and a half small white wines, and spoken somewhere in the region of fourteen sentences.
‘Oh shit,’ I said, looking up from the blank screen of my phone, forcing my eyes to widen as far as they’d go. ‘I just got a message from my flatmate. I think I need to go, actually.’
‘Everything okay?’ Carl slurred, confused.
‘My cat’s fallen ill,’ I said, grimacing apologetically, standing, pulling on my coat, all in one quick motion.
I don’t know what Carl thought when I just left like that, really quickly, without even kissing him on the cheek or giving him a hug or saying any of the things you’re probably supposed to say, even if you don’t really mean them: ‘We should do this again,’ ‘It was great to meet you,’ etc.
It felt good to be back outside and I began the walk home slowly, enjoying the cold air on my face. I only lived six streets away and I tried my hardest to maintain a steady, even pace. I’d been reading about various mindfulness and meditation techniques recently, and one of them was a walking meditation, where you just focused on your steps, letting your head clear, thinking only of your feet, rhythmically touching against the ground, plodding along at a simple pace, one-two, one-two, one-two . . .
But as I walked, I found myself thinking again about my lie to Carl, about Ginny being unwell, and instead of keeping my footsteps steady I picked up pace, with each new step convincing myself that perhaps something was wrong with her, that by talking about it, by saying it out loud, I’d kind of willed it into existence and that I’d get home and find her dead.
I sat down on the edge of my bed, still breathless from my almost-run. Ginny was asleep, curled tightly, nothing at all the matter with her. I stroked her the wrong way on purpose, uncovering a newish patch of grey-white hairs amongst the black. She opened one eye a little, then closed it, curling herself even tighter.
When I turned on my laptop, its fan whirred and buzzed and rattled. Something was going wrong with it. It was on its last legs.
It took an age to log into Hotmail. I sat on the bed and stroked Ginny the wrong way and watched the little circle on the screen revolve, chasing its own tail, as I waited for my inbox to load.
Finally I typed ‘voicemail’ into the search bit at the top, opening the email from Michael that simply said ‘Here you go’, and then clicked on the link to the almost completely blank page that, he’d assured me, would always be there, no matter what.
I pressed the play button, and there was another long pause while the file buffered. Then a crackle, then a whistling tone, and then, ‘Welcome to answerphone. You currently have no new messages and three saved messages. To hear your messages press . . .
‘First saved message: Hello, love, it’s me. Just phoning to say happy birthday. What time is it there? Give me a ring when you get this.
‘Second saved message: Hello, love, only me again. Thought it might be a bit later by now. Or is it still early? I can never work it out. Anyway, whatever time it is, I just wanted to say that I love you very much and hope you’re having a nice day, and I’ve posted a little thing, even though you said you didn’t want anything, but I don’t hold out much hope of it getting there in time anyway. Okay, I’ll call again in a little while. Bye!
‘Third saved message: We’re not having much luck at this, are we? Oh sod it . . . Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you-hoo, happy birthday to you.’
part three
be right back
LAUREN
2005
On the flight home, Lauren waited for Michael to offer her the window seat. He shuffled his way towards it, then, once he’d sat in it, looked over his shoulder and grinned at her. There were slivers of airport bagel caught between his teeth. You didn’t actually tell him you wanted the window seat, Lauren reminded herself. He isn’t psychic.
This was a thing she’d been working hard on recently: coming to terms with the fact that people weren’t psychic. Also: lowering her expectations. It was like limbo. Last week she discovered a clump of grey hairs at Michael’s temples and forced herself to get excited about them.
Look, she forced herself to think, real life!
As the plane began to taxi, she slipped her hand into both of his and felt the grainy, calloused texture of his palms with her fingertips. He was like someone, a celebrity she couldn’t quite think of right this second. The plane picked up speed, rumbling, the engines beginning to howl, and Lauren marvelled at just how unfazed Michael was: by planes, by take-offs, by anything.
This was why she’d chosen him.
Because it was a choice, wasn’t it?
There was Michael and there was Ian and you chose Michael and now you need to stop thinking about this and questioning it or else you will never be happy.
Ian was like an Elliott Smith song: pretty and delicate, but always on the brink of falling apart.
Michael was like a desk: solid and useful and around for a long time, which you could lean on if you had to, or eat your dinner off. Whatever that meant.
‘Michael,’ she said, but he didn’t hear her over the engine sounds.
So she wiggled her fingers, not to free her hand, just to communicate her excitement at the idea of going home.
Michael was from Winchester.
Look, she thought, looking at him. Look at how happy this fully grown man from Winchester is just to sit there and look out of the window!
The plane was calmer now.
The seatbelt lights blinked out.
The grey hairs at Michael’s temples were multiplying. Each day there seemed to be more of them. Lauren suspected that if she kept her eyes fixed on the spot next to his ear for the whole nine and a half hours of the flight, she might even see a few new ones appear.
Michael turned his big, square-jawed face towards her.
‘Alright?’ he said.
At night, in bed, he always spent a long time doing the things she asked him to. He knelt between her legs and worked hard on her, like she was one of his websites.
‘Yep,’ Lauren nodded, forcing her mouth into a smiling shape.
You have made the right choice.
She watched him remove the in-flight shopping magazine from the netting by his knees and begin to leaf through it. He flipped straight to the back, past all the kids’ toys and novelty items, to the practical things like alarm clocks and cufflinks and watches with rotating faces that glow in the dark and still function underwater.
She would probably buy him a rotating, glowing underwater watch for his birthday, whenever it was. His thirty-second birthday. Lauren did not know how old this was, not really. All she knew was that it was somewhere past that invisible line into ‘adult’. A place that, from where she was sitting, seemed impossible to get to.
She unwrapped her headphones and touched the buttons on the seat-mounted display in front of her, scrolled through, selected an episode of Friends, and as it began, allowed herself to entertain the daydream that this was how their new life would unfold, a couple of weeks from now, once they’d both moved into Michael’s uncle’s spare room in Stoke Newington. Lauren and Michael (Joey! That’s who he reminded her of! He was like an unfunny Joey!
) would become the centre of a new circle of friends, a circle of friends that they would both make together, in this new city, the nation’s capital, which they were both going to find jobs and start again in!
Because Michael is The One.
He has to be.
He saw you.
He would really like to make you laugh again.
(He’s not done it so far.)
Stop it.
You’re just winding yourself up again. You’re looking for cracks, like you always do. You’re always finding faults and picking at them until they get bigger and you’re not going to make that mistake again this time. You are not going to fuck this relationship up, Lauren, no matter what, and if there are any faults then they’re due to you being too unrealistic, demanding too much, and you need to learn to modify the way you think about things, the way you approach the world. You need to calm down and realise that things are a bit duller, a bit more realistic, a bit more shitty in real life.
Michael is solid and realistic and dependable.
He makes websites for a living.
You have made the right choice.
* * *
At the baggage claim, Lauren insisted she was just tired, that that was the reason for her moody, pouty silence. Really though, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that from the moment she set foot back in England she’d felt a kind of cement-coloured malaise expand inside her like a miserable balloon. And all those things she’d developed in Canada, all the things she’d been convinced were solid, permanent improvements – her posture, her confidence, her general outlook – began undoing themselves, like some snag of her was caught in Vancouver, and the further she got from it, the more the jumper of her unravelled.
She sat on a bench, wondering why she always seemed to be waiting for boys to fetch her luggage.
There was Michael, lumbering towards the belt of the carousel, snatching his own suitcase off it. Lauren’s popped out through the flaps soon afterwards.
She didn’t tell him, though.
She didn’t make any indication that she’d seen it.
If Michael picks up my suitcase, she said to herself, then this is a sign that everything will work out okay.
She began gripping the edges of the bench and gritting her teeth as it sailed towards him.
If Michael recognises my suitcase then we are going to be happy.
The suitcase was about to slip past him and still he made no move to grab it.
If Michael recognises my suitcase then I have made the right decision.
‘There! THERE!’ she shouted manically, when it was almost at the other end of the belt, causing a few people to turn and look at her, puzzled. ‘That one there! The big green one with brown bits!’
He made a dash for it, almost knocking over a toddler in his attempt to reach it, but it was too late. It disappeared through the flapping mouth at the other end, and Michael turned and smiled and shrugged as if nothing whatsoever was wrong.
IAN
2014
I press the touchscreen on the Jobmatchmachine and scroll through the listings. Nothing. Not even a top hat. So I walk back to the soft red seating area and take my seat and wait for my name to be called and when it is, finally, it’s Rick again of course. He waves at me and lifts himself out of his seat as I walk towards him. At first I think he’s grown a goatee, but as I get closer I realise it’s actually a dark brown scab that’s crusted all the way round his lips. In between little cracks in the scab I can see bright red dots of blood. I wonder if it’s okay for him to be working here like this. Shouldn’t he be at the doctor’s? Shouldn’t he be at home?
‘Back again,’ he says cheerily, dabbing the corner of his mouth against the back of his hand then examining it.
‘Yep,’ I say.
‘What happened?’ he says, looking over some printouts, which, I assume, have all the details about my Quiztime Solutions experience on them.
‘I wasn’t quite meeting my targets,’ I say. ‘So they let me go.’
‘And when was that?’
‘Six days ago.’
‘So what have you been doing since then?’
I’ve been lying on my bed a lot in a foetal position, feeling miserable.
I’ve been sitting in the living room, drinking rum with Carol.
I’ve been ignoring all sorts of messages and notifications on Facebook.
‘Looking for work,’ I say.
‘Right,’ says Rick, dabbing his mouth again.
He clicks his mouse and leans in towards his monitor.
‘Do you have anything where I could just walk around outside?’ I say, but Rick isn’t listening.
He leans in towards the screen and clacks his tongue loudly against the roof of his mouth. ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Alright. I’ve got a warehouse here. Think you could handle working in a warehouse?’
‘Maybe.’
‘A small team of motivated individuals are needed for work in this busy warehouse environment to boost our staff during the seasonal period,’ Rick reads from the screen. ‘You will be expected to unpack and repack various consumer goods in this exciting temporary goods-handling position. Well? Any good?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘I’ll print it out,’ he says.
As he gets up to go and collect the printout, I take one of the Depression Counselling leaflets from the desk, fold it in half, and stuff it in my jacket pocket.
Today, at four fifty-five p.m., Dalisay flies home to Manila. I know this because she sent me a Facebook message last night, telling me so. She said it was nice to meet me and wishes me all the best for the future and told me that she would say a prayer for me. I’ve not replied.
I look at the clock in the corner of the screen.
It’s four fifty-six p.m.
I go over to the window.
The not-Rosemary person in the expensive ground-floor flat opposite is hanging tea towels on a clothes-horse. It must be very warm in her flat because she’s only wearing a T-shirt. I wave at her, just a little wave, but she doesn’t notice.
I leave the room and walk down the corridor, doing my coat up on the way.
When I reach the kitchen doorway, I stop.
Carol’s at the kitchen table, still in her pyjamas.
She’s been off work pretend-sick for just over a week now. I know this because I’m the one who has to keep calling in and lying for her. She just mopes around the house in her pyjamas and dressing gown all day, letting mugs of tea go cold everywhere. Last night I went round collecting things for the washing up and I found one on the edge of the bath and another right in the corner of the living room, behind the TV.
I don’t mind though. Not really.
(If I’m completely honest, I’m enjoying the company.)
‘Want anything from the shop?’ I ask.
‘More rum,’ she says.
It’s become a sort of in-joke between us, all this rum drinking we’ve been doing, except I wonder sometimes whether there’s actually anything funny about it.
On the way down the stairs, I pass Flat 7.
Once I’m outside, I take out my e-cig and take a long, hard drag. Even though it’s vapour instead of smoke, Carol still won’t let me do it indoors.
I’ll give up nicotine on my thirty-second birthday, I promise myself as I exhale.
Halfway towards Morrisons, an aeroplane goes by overhead.
When I get back, Carol’s still sat exactly where I left her. I suspect that if I dipped my finger in the two thirds of tea in her mug, it would be stone cold. I sit down opposite and take the bottle of White Label rum from its bag and stand it between us, next to the salt-shaker person, who seems to be hugging onto the thing of pepper for dear life.
‘How’re you feeling?’ I ask.
Carol’s eyes are bloodshot and her hair looks unwashed, and I’m worried that if she carries on much longer with this fake illness, it might turn into a real one.
‘I feel great,’ she s
ays. ‘Really fucking fantastic.’
‘Want to watch some telly?’
‘Not particularly.’
I move my finger around in a little pile of salt, sweeping it into a line.
‘Do you want to go home?’ she says.
‘Home home?’ I say.
‘I’ve spoken to Mum and told her I’m coming back early for Christmas this year. Thought you might like to come too. Or you could just stay here.’
‘How early?’
‘First thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Count me in,’ I say.
A pause.
‘Um.’
‘What?’
I move the salt around with my finger.
‘Can I borrow five hundred quid?’
PAUL
2014
In the hushed corridor of the New Writing Centre, Paul knocks gently on Greg’s door, which is propped open. Greg looks up briefly from his computer, then fixes his attention back on whatever it is he’s typing. An email, probably. Some sort of admin nightmare. Greg is director of the Writing and American Studies programme at the university. He’s also a widely published, critically respected poet, who nearly always seems to be swamped beneath the twin demands of academia and family life, leaving him little time to ever get anything of his own written. The few times Greg has talked to Paul about his life, he’s made it sound like he gets about one half-minute per day to fumble a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and scribble down a beautiful crystalline line of poetry, before his admin work or his wife or his two-year-old daughter comes to drag him away again. Yet he publishes a new book every other year. Greg is kind, too. He exudes a soothing, calming warmth. He will understand, Paul thinks. This is going to turn out okay.
‘Hi, Greg,’ Paul says. ‘Can I have a quick word?’
‘Sure, sure,’ Greg says in his soft, deep voice, still focused mostly on his typing. ‘Come in. Have a seat. I’m just trying to get these emails finished.’
Paul steps gingerly into the room, then just stands there.
‘Have a seat,’ Greg says again, still without looking up.
‘Do you mind if I, um, close the door?’ Paul says, trying to make his voice sound measured but worried.