‘Had to come a totally different route and everything.’
‘What did?’
‘The removal van, stupid.’
Heather comes out of her office. ‘Julie?’ she says.
‘Yeah?’ says Julie, tipping blue-cheese dressing into its little pot.
‘Can you come in here for a minute?’
‘Can’t she go on a break?’ says Leanne.
‘It won’t take a minute,’ says Heather. ‘Then she can go on a break.’
Heather’s office isn’t really her office at all. She shares it with the other supervisors and managers at The Edge. As a result, the room has an anonymous atmosphere, like a waiting room or a bus stop. There’s a lot of clutter on the single desk, and bits of Edge uniform lying around – blue T-shirts and braces – mostly still in plastic wrappers. Heather gestures for Julie to sit down opposite her at the table.
‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a little test for you.’
She opens the drawer and pulls out something that looks like a job application.
‘What’s this?’ Julie asks.
‘A test, like I said.’
‘OK.’ Julie likes tests. ‘Cool.’
‘Aren’t you going to complain?’ says Heather.
‘What? No. Why?’
Heather shrugs. ‘All the others did.’
‘Oh.’ Julie looks at the test. ‘Do you want me to do it now?’
‘Please. I’ve got to stay here and watch, to make sure you don’t cheat.’
‘OK.’
‘It’s not that I think you would – or even really that you could, because it’s not that sort of test, but still, those are the rules.’
‘OK.’
Julie takes her pen out of her bum-bag – heavy with her float – and opens the test paper. Most of the questions on the test are about food hygiene, food and drink preparation, customer service and The Edge rules. They’re all multiple choice. Julie finishes the test in about seven minutes.
‘I’m done,’ she says to Heather, who’s reading a magazine.
‘Blimey,’ says Heather, startled. ‘It wasn’t some sort of race.’
‘I wasn’t trying to . . .’
‘You can go on a break now,’ she says, sighing. ‘Tell David to watch the restaurant.’
David’s hardly said a word to Julie all day, as if the conversation they had never happened. She hasn’t known what to say to him, so it’s been a pretty odd day. He hasn’t even told any sex jokes, or quoted any Eminem lyrics, or anything. He’s just had the radio on in the kitchen, and has turned it up whenever any cheerful pop song comes on.
‘So how’s it all going?’ Julie asks Leanne, once they’re out in the back room.
‘All right,’ says Leanne. ‘I’m moving on.’
‘Moving on?’
‘Yeah. I’m going to tell Luke it’s definitely over.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, we can never go out anywhere. And he’s been distant lately, too, you know, totally wrapped up in his own world.’ She sighs. ‘It’s hard getting through to him when he’s like that.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Julie doesn’t know what else to say. Leanne gives her a Lambert & Butler. She lights the cigarette and gets dizzy instantly. She hasn’t had one for about four hours.
‘I’m going out on the pull with Chantel later,’ Leanne says.
‘I thought you were saying she’d been held up in the floods?’
‘Nah.’ Leanne draws on her cigarette. ‘Removal company has, though. Chantel came early and left her mum to get on with it. She’s been hiding out in a hotel in Shenfield while they sort out all the stuff. Not that they’re bringing much of it, of course, it’s mainly her gran’s stuff they’re keeping for sentimental reasons. Everything else is being chucked out, and they’ve got this designer working on the new house ready for them to move in, and Chantel’s like, “Now I’m a millionaire I’m not helping the removal men move my stuff; I just want to go in there when it’s all done.” I’d be the same. I hate moving.’
As far as Julie knows, Leanne’s never moved.
‘What’s she like?’ Julie asks.
‘She used to be really fat,’ says Leanne. ‘I don’t know. She’s all right.’
‘Is she nice?’
‘You’ll see tomorrow, won’t you?’
David sticks his head around the door. ‘Heather says can you come out?’ he says to Julie. ‘I’ve got to do a test or something.’
‘Sure,’ says Julie.
Leanne puts out her fag and goes back to Blockbuster.
Julie’s meeting Charlotte Moss after work. It’ll be the second time she’s socialised with someone other than Luke and Leanne in one week, which is pretty remarkable considering that the last time she went out so much was before Mark died. Since their little group – Mark, Charlotte, Julie and Luke – broke down completely, Julie’s hardly been out at all.
The e-mail Charlotte sent Julie, late on Friday night, was so chatty that it almost seemed as though nothing had happened. But then Charlotte’s the sort of person who’d send a ‘Hey, nice to see you yesterday’ e-mail even if she was referring to the day you told her you’d thought seriously about killing yourself.
Chapter 14
While Luke sleeps he can’t help but hear the day outside. He has, at most, two clear hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, then, inevitably, when the world starts without him, he finds himself half-dreaming of birds, doorbells, vacuum cleaners, pneumatic drills and cars. He almost wakes when he hears the little bleep from his computer each time an e-mail comes through or the tone that tells him he’s been disconnected from the Internet. Each time this happens, he opens his eyes and through his thick, hot, nylon head he wants to get up and check out what’s going on but he can’t because he’s nocturnal, because although he probably wouldn’t instantly fry if he got up in the morning, it just wouldn’t feel right.
On Monday morning Luke’s semi-unconscious dreams are enhanced by a new group of sounds that he hasn’t heard very often in his life – the sounds of someone moving into the street. At what must have been about eight o’clock something very large with a deep, growling engine pulled into Windy Close. Since then there has been a lot of banging and male voices and counting to three – and the rain, of course, which hasn’t really stopped since Friday night.
Usually, Luke plans his day around what’s on TV, filling the rest of the time until Julie turns up with Internet chats, keeping up with his newsgroups and checking his e-mail in between the times it automatically checks itself, which is once every five minutes. Today Luke has no plans. After breakfast, he reads a bit more of his incomprehensible book while he waits for Wei to phone. He didn’t give a time, and Luke forgot to ask for one. Luke barely manages to go to the toilet all day, thinking the call will come the minute he does. He doesn’t get dressed, either. Frustratingly, he also can’t connect to the Internet, or his phone will be engaged when Wei calls.
The next chapter of the book, after the one with the factory setting (tiled floors, broken fans, sewing machines, women with babies on their hips, tyrannical supervisors, men with guns, mosquitoes), features a woman wearing something called a ‘sarong’. Luke can’t look this up on the Internet, so he spends the whole chapter thinking it’s a hat, until she rips it off to have sex with some guy whose name makes Luke think of fishing and wasps.
The call eventually comes at about 6.00, during a trailer for a TV documentary about the Big Brother contestants and what they’re doing now. One of the reasons Luke became so obsessed with Big Brother over the summer was because it was the first piece of TV he could actually relate to, and because it was so easy for him to follow. He knew what it was like to be trapped in one house, not really knowing what was going on outside, waiting for experiences to be presented to him. He used to hope that something would happen and the last housemates would never leave the house, because then there would always be some people like Luke out there, and it would be like a special
soap opera just for him, and he wouldn’t feel like such a freak.
When Luke’s phone rings, it does so through some software on his computer. He can set it to make animal noises instead of simply ringing, so when Wei calls, the phone roars like a lion, three times.
‘Hello?’ says Wei, when Luke picks up.
‘Hi,’ says Luke. ‘Wei. Thanks for calling.’
‘Have you had a good day?’
‘OK. I’ve been reading.’
‘Anything good?’
‘Just a novel. It’s OK. Hard to follow.’
‘Why hard to follow?’
‘It has all these places I don’t recognise. Also, the story is a bit . . .’
‘A bit what?’
‘It doesn’t seem to flow properly.’
‘A non-linear narrative?’
‘Something like that. It keeps going into the past, then the future.’
‘You should stop reading it.’
‘I don’t have anything else to do. Well, apart from watching TV – but I’m feeling a bit sick of TV at the moment.’
‘You could think, surely?’
‘What, and do nothing? I’d go mad.’
Wei laughs. ‘I can see how it may seem like that but it may be worth remembering that weaker men than you have endured lifetimes in solitary contemplation with no TV and no friends . . . Just their thoughts. It is possible.’
Luke can’t imagine that. ‘But surely they go mad?’ he says.
‘On the contrary. These men – and women – have done the greatest thinking in the world. They consume little – not much food, no entertainment, no sex – but they produce great truths.’ Wei laughs softly. ‘But you need to go out and experience life before you can learn and think to that extent. You have to see the world you are thinking about. And anyway, maybe you don’t want to spend your life learning. Maybe you want to climb mountains. The world also needs mountain climbers. There’s that saying: If everyone was a thinker, who would fetch the goats? I think it’s Swedish. Anyway, I take it you’d rather be a mountain climber?’
‘Yes,’ Luke says instantly. ‘I’d love that. I’d give anything to climb just one mountain. Or even just to look at a mountain . . . That would be enough for me, more than enough.’
‘You have friends?’ Wei asks.
‘One. Julie. And another girl who lives nearby, but . . .’
‘Many girls.’ Wei laughs again.
‘No! Not like that. Well, one of them, Leanne, she and I . . .’
‘You have sex?’
‘Yes . . . But we’re not very compatible. It’s a mistake.’
‘And Julie?’
‘She’s my closest friend in the whole world.’ Luke pauses. ‘I used to have some other friends, not quite so close but, you know . . . Anyway, one died, and one moved away. Now it’s just me and Julie.’
‘And she helps you?’
‘Yes. She comes here every day. I don’t know what I’d do without her.’
‘OK. And she is normal?’
‘Normal? Julie?’ Luke laughs. ‘No. She’s . . .’
‘She goes outside?’
‘Oh yes. But she’d rather live like me, I think. Outside is too much for her.’
‘Perhaps she is the thinker and you are the mountain climber.’
Luke thinks. ‘Perhaps. But . . .’
‘But?’
‘I’m so worried about her. She probably needs healing more than I do. She is a thinker but she never went to university. She ended up staying here. She won’t eat anything natural. She’s scared of nature, and dirt and anything organic. She virtually lives on Pot Noodles and soup, which she supplements with sweets and Lucozade and Ribena, because even though she’s scared of eating, she’s more scared of fainting or wasting away. It’s hard to explain . . .’
‘She is afraid of the earth?’
‘Yes. Dirt and earth and . . .’
‘And you are allergic to fire. Interesting.’ There is a tapping sound and then Wei’s voice comes again. ‘Can you fax me some details about Julie? I have to go now but we can speak again tomorrow evening. OK?’
‘Yes. Great. Oh – before you go, could you tell me what time you’ll get in touch tomorrow evening? I don’t mean to try to pin you down or anything, it’s just . . .’
‘No, not at all. What is a good time for you?’
‘Um . . . Eleven? I know it’s a bit late but Julie will definitely be here then and . . .’
‘Yes, it would be useful for me to speak with Julie as well. OK. Eleven it is.’
Chapter 15
The night before Mark died.
It was going to be a normal Friday. As usual, Julie, Charlotte and Mark were planning to hang out in Luke’s bedroom, watching videos late into the night. Fridays were never for going out; always for staying in. There used to be good TV on Friday nights. Charlotte, Mark and Luke would pig out on music shows, sitcoms and offensive animation, waiting for Julie to come back from work with the pizzas and videos, which in those days they actually had to pay for because Leanne still worked at Homebase. Julie thinks about how different it was then, and she remembers that Leanne wouldn’t have given them free videos then anyway even if she had worked in Blockbuster. She never exactly approved of their little group.
Charlotte lived at 14 Windy Close for about two years. Like the older, badder supporting-role girl in coming-of-age films, her few scenes were intense – never just there, she was totally, enormously there. And when she left, it was like a power cut, or when someone turns off the radio when your favourite song comes on.
First of all, Charlotte was beautiful. Secondly, Charlotte was impossible to ignore. It wasn’t just Julie; no one could stop looking at Charlotte. And it wasn’t because of her beauty, because a lot of the time Charlotte did nothing at all with her natural looks, preferring to go around with unwashed hair, chipped nail-polish, cheap sunglasses and charity-shop clothes that would look shit on anybody else. Charlotte just had something, and Julie spent a lot of time trying to work out what it was. Before they were even introduced, Julie would watch for hours from her front window as this girl lay there in the sun toasting her tits in the front garden, reading angsty books in the sunshine, playing dumb while people got offended.
‘You’ve got a crush on her,’ Luke said, on that particular Friday, just before Julie left for work. ‘I’ve been wondering what it is, and that’s it. You’re obsessed with her.’
‘What? With Charlotte?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Luke, I’m so not. God. Fucking hell.’
‘You’ve read all her favourite books.’
‘So have you.’
Charlotte’s arrival had, among other things, been a bit like a travelling library pulling into the street and then staying for a couple of years. Luke and Julie were able to discover authors like Douglas Coupland, Haruki Murakami and young London-based writers whose work wasn’t even available on Amazon. Charlotte was a walking twentysomething crisis with all the books to match and her crisis was so compelling that everyone wanted a part of it. And since she never talked about it, whatever it was, the books were the only way in.
Julie’d never read an actual life-changing book before but after Generation X she added supermarkets to a long list of places she wouldn’t ever go. After reading Generation X, Julie knew that if she walked into a supermarket the world would end. Girlfriend in a Coma, which still reminds Julie of the first full summer Charlotte spent at Windy Close, made the supermarket problem a lot worse.
‘Maybe you’re the one who’s obsessed,’ Julie continued. ‘Maybe . . .’
Luke interrupts: ‘Julie, look at yourself. Look at your hair, your make-up, your clothes. You’re becoming her. You even speak more like her now – all those likes and sos and totallys.’
‘And I couldn’t have got that from you? That’s not my obsession with Charlotte, that’s your obsession with American TV shows – no – programmes.’
Is there anything more emba
rrassing than being caught imitating someone you really admire, by someone who knows you really well? Apart from being caught taking a shit in public, maybe not. Taking a shit. That was one of Charlotte’s favourite phrases as well.
Julie fumed all the way to The Edge. How could she be trying to be Charlotte? How could Luke think that? Julie was herself, not some Charlotte-a-like, and she liked herself. That was the other thing, Julie didn’t want to be someone else. There was nothing wrong with her. All she was doing, if anything, was trying to inject a little tiny bit of Charlotte into herself, to take the parts of Charlotte that were compelling and add them to her mix so that she’d still be Julie but an enhanced, souped-up, better-than-new Julie. Julie + x, where x is that bit of magic that Charlotte has and Julie doesn’t. It’s like when you take a gene from one plant and add it to another. The second plant doesn’t become the first plant, it just takes the properties that are useful to it. All Julie was doing – and she wasn’t even doing it consciously – was a bit of harmless genetic modification, and, regardless of what people actually thought of GM in practice, as a metaphor there was really nothing wrong with it.
So she had a suntan for the first time in her life? Big deal. That wasn’t so much from wanting to be Charlotte as from wanting to be with Charlotte, since Charlotte sat in the sun the whole time. OK, so maybe Julie could have been a bit subtler with her make-up experiments. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried doll-style pink blusher just because Charlotte somehow got away with it, and maybe she shouldn’t have stopped washing her hair because it suited Charlotte in that weird way, and maybe the asymmetric blobs of Michael Stipe blue eye-shadow on an otherwise unmade-up and unwashed face was a mistake too, but all girls make mistakes with cosmetics, and it wasn’t like Julie had even had a proper female friend before. Maybe she was just catching up on stuff she should have done when she was, like, ten, or something.
Thing was, whatever Julie had done, whatever the germ of Charlotte-ness had given her, it was working. People didn’t ignore her so much at The Edge. The other waitresses asked Julie to join their Lottery syndicate, and sometimes they invited her to go out with them – not that she ever went, because she was always too busy with Luke and Mark and Charlotte. Maybe it was just the extra confidence Julie had from having a friend but something about knowing Charlotte put Julie in the world again. Something about knowing Charlotte made Julie realise that it’s OK to be a bit weird, thoughtful and quiet – you can, somehow, be cool too. How could Luke hope to understand all of that? It wasn’t like he’d ever been in the world himself, having to take his identity out and show it to people, waiting for them to judge him.
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