Going Out

by Scarlett Thomas

  ‘What, me? No. Drank loads of water, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you go back with that bloke?’

  ‘Who? Oh, Martin. Yeah, for a bit.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Luke yet?’ Julie asks her.

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘Don’t you think you should tell him, you know . . .’

  ‘That it’s over? Yeah. I’m not sure it is yet, though.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I might give him another chance. Dunno yet.’

  David gives Leanne a cigarette and she leans against the meet-and-greet station. All the tables and chairs are stacked outside.

  ‘Anyway, just wanted to make sure you’re both on for this party tonight. At Chantel’s. Her house-warming thingy.’

  David sort of shrugs. ‘Didn’t know I was invited,’ he says.

  ‘Well you are, so you’d better come. Julie?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Oh, does Chantel have cats?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Leanne says. ‘Probably. Why?’

  ‘They were in the street this morning. Jean was going mad.’

  ‘Oh. Stupid cow. They’re not going to kill him, are they?’

  ‘Well, maybe. He is allergic to most things like that.’

  ‘Oh well, we’ll soon find out, won’t we?’

  ‘Leanne!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ David asks.

  ‘They reckon Luke’s allergic to cats,’ Leanne explains.

  ‘Don’t you think he is?’ Julie asks Leanne.

  ‘Look, all that other stuff he’s supposedly allergic to – perfume, cigarettes, dust – he just isn’t, is he? You smoke there, don’t you?’

  ‘Not really,’ Julie says. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘I do,’ she says. ‘And I wear perfume and all sorts.’

  ‘I’ve never worn perfume round there,’ Julie says.

  ‘Yeah, well, I reckon his mum’s a bit paranoid, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d be paranoid if my kid was allergic to the sun,’ David says.

  ‘It is better to be careful,’ Julie agrees. ‘He is allergic to some pretty weird stuff. I’ve seen him have a reaction. It’s really horrible.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ says Leanne. ‘Seven at Chantel’s. And don’t tell Charlotte.’

  ‘What’s all this about Charlotte?’ David says, once Leanne’s gone.

  ‘Leanne thinks she’ll tell Chantel about the stuff that happened at number 14.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I forgot we weren’t supposed to say anything.’

  ‘I told Leanne – everyone’ll forget, and someone’s bound to tell Chantel eventually. I mean, I don’t think anyone’s going to come out and say it at the party or anything but once Chantel’s been living around here for a while she’ll just pick it up, won’t she? It’s local folklore now. I don’t see why it should make that much difference anyway. Every house has had someone die in it at some point.’

  ‘Suicide’s different, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it? I haven’t really thought about it.’

  ‘Would you want to live in a house someone had topped themselves in?’

  Julie shrugs. ‘I suppose not.’ Not because of superstition. It’s just good science to avoid unlucky or ‘cursed’ places. Often, places with a reputation for being unlucky really are unlucky because they’re downwind from a toxic-chemical plant, built on a site where something poisonous was buried or under a huge electricity pylon.

  Heather comes out. ‘Bloody hell, you haven’t done much,’ she says.

  Between them, Julie and David have uprooted about three tiles.

  ‘It’s really difficult,’ David says. ‘They’re stuck down.’

  ‘I thought the glue had dissolved,’ says Heather.

  ‘Yeah, around the edges, but not in the middle. See?’ David pulls one of the tiles and the edge rips, leaving the rest stuck to the floor by a patch in the centre. ‘It’s well fucked.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Heather says. ‘I can’t ring Head Office again.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ David asks.

  ‘Just keep going. Can you use lighter fluid or something?’

  ‘Could do. Be a bit of a fire hazard, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Suppose so. Oh, I don’t know.’ She looks like she might cry.

  ‘You should ring Owen or someone,’ David says. ‘You shouldn’t have to deal with all this on your own. Get him to come down here and sort it out.’

  ‘I’ve tried him, he’s not in.’

  ‘Oh. Well . . .’

  ‘Just keep going with the knife. Whatever’s left the tile company will have to do. Julie, can I have a word in my office?’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ Julie gets up. ‘Is something wrong?’

  She’s worried about smoking in the restaurant. She shouldn’t have let David convince her it was OK. After all, the health and safety regulations say that no one should ever smoke in a designated No Smoking area.

  ‘No,’ says Heather. ‘Just a word, if you don’t mind.’

  Julie follows Heather past the take-away counter and out into the back area.

  ‘So . . .’ Heather says, once they’re in the office. She seems less stressed now she’s out of the main restaurant area. ‘How do you think you did on that test the other day?’

  ‘Um, I don’t know.’ Julie shrugs. ‘OK, I suppose.’

  ‘Well . . . I was going to pretend you didn’t do very well – that’s what Owen said I should do, for a laugh – but I’m not very good at that sort of thing.’ Heather smiles. ‘OK. Well, you got a hundred per cent. Every question right. Not only were you the only person here to get all the questions correct – no one’s ever done it before apart from managers.’

  Julie smiles. ‘Oh. That’s good.’

  ‘So how do you feel about going into management training?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘That’s what the tests were for, to see who’s in the right jobs, who needs extra training and, like in your case, who goes forward for management.’

  ‘So I’d be a manager?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘No, I’m just a supervisor. No, a manager like Owen, of a whole restaurant.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Are you pleased?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think so.’

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it, because you’re not a student or anything, and you wouldn’t have to give anything up to do it.’

  ‘No. I suppose not. I’d never really thought about . . .’

  Heather carries on. ‘So anyway, Owen’s going to have a chat with you himself tomorrow or something, and give you the forms to apply for the management training. Most trainees have degrees but you’ve got loads of experience and the test result so it’s pretty straightforward. You’ll definitely get it, basically.’

  ‘God,’ Julie says again.

  ‘Right. Well, I thought you’d be pleased. Maybe it’ll make those floor tiles come up a bit quicker, eh?’

  Back in the restaurant, David’s still struggling with the same tile he was trying to get up when Julie and Heather left.

  ‘What was all that about?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Julie says. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘Fucking shit,’ says David.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Your dad’ll be pleased,’ says Dawn.

  Julie’s home from work early because of the floor and Dawn’s just got up from her nap.

  ‘He was saying to me the other day, “Julie’s not going to be a waitress forever, you know” – not that I was saying anything about you being a waitress at the time.’ Dawn yawns, her eyes puffy from sleeping for most of the afternoon. ‘You will tell him when he gets home, won’t you?’

  Dawn goes to bed for her nap when she gets home from doing the sandwiches, at about half past eleven. By then she’s not only made the sandwiches, but also driven around all the industrial estates in the Brentwood, Shenfield and Ingatestone area selling them: bounc
ing into the prefab offices in her pink trainers, matching lipstick and ash-blonde highlights, doing the hard sell on pork and pickle or egg and tomato. Dawn does pretty well with her sandwiches on the industrial estates: the people who work on them rely on services like hers because they can’t get anything to eat at lunchtimes otherwise. All the industrial estates are in the middle of nowhere.

  Julie read somewhere that retail parks and industrial estates were intended to work in harmony together. Concrete communities far away from everything else; the idea was that people would work on one concrete slab and go to the gym, see a film, buy furniture or get lunch on another. Trouble is, most people who work on industrial estates get paid fuck all and retail-park prices are ridiculous. Who can afford five Edge meals or Old Orleans bar lunches in a week anyway? No one Julie knows, certainly. The retail parks were slower to grow than the industrial estates anyway, and with half-built slow-food outlets offering nothing but dust and arse-cracks, the sandwich-makers moved in. Now they’re as much a part of the work day as Radio 1 and mild sexual harassment.

  When Dawn gets up from her nap, usually at about four, she drinks strong tea, eats a KitKat and watches her programmes – Fifteen to One, Countdown, Pet Rescue and Neighbours. She usually videos Celebrity and Wheel of Fortune (which clash with Pet Rescue and Neighbours) to watch after that. She used to watch Home and Away, until Channel 5 bought it and it was taken off ITV, but Celebrity, its replacement, is pretty good. Somewhere between Neighbours starting and the videoed programmes ending, Dawn puts the oven on and gets dinner in, usually a ready meal from Tesco: Indian, Chinese or Tex-Mex.

  When Julie’s dad comes in, he and Dawn eat from the plastic cartons in front of the Channel 4 News, which, along with Newsnight, is the only TV news Julie’s dad trusts. There’s less washing up when they eat out of the plastic cartons, which is good because, although Dawn doesn’t mind cooking dinner, she says she refuses to wash up for any man. She wants to get a microwave but Julie’s dad says that microwaves are just part of the government plot to melt everyone’s brains, so she doesn’t. She’s always offering to cook for Julie, but Julie always eats her own food.

  Dawn stirs sugar into her tea and takes it through to the sitting room. ‘You are going to do it, aren’t you?’ she says.

  Julie follows Dawn and sits down. The room smells of vanilla. It’s the stuff Dawn uses to polish the wood and the cabinets. She always does the polishing late, when Julie’s dad is in bed. It’s weird.

  Julie shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Retail management’s a really good area to get into,’ Dawn says. ‘My friend Toni started off working in a corrugated-cardboard factory on an industrial estate in Chelmsford, just assembling boxes or something. But she wanted to work with the public, so she went for a job at Stead & Simpson, which was horrible, all smelly feet and climbing up ladders only to find out you’ve run out of that size or that colour or whatever – I should know, I started in shoes before I moved on to sandwiches. Anyway, then she moved to Bay Trading as an assistant supervisor, which was all right but she didn’t get on with her manager. Then there was a supervisor vacancy at All Sports which she got and within a month they put her on one of those courses and she earns really good money now. She manages an All Sports up in Manchester. It’s a good laugh, and she gets loads of staff discounts, which is good with her having the three boys and everything.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d be any good at management,’ Julie says. ‘I’d have to do budgets and ordering and bossing people around. I wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘It might bring you out of yourself.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And you can’t live here forever. Not that we wouldn’t want you to,’ Dawn adds quickly. ‘It’s just you’ll be wanting to move on at some point, and everything’s so expensive now and once you’re in management, well, it’s a career, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. Um, Dad hasn’t been talking about me going again, has he?’

  ‘Not really. But I mean, you are twenty-five, and we do wonder if you’ll ever leave home.’ Dawn laughs. ‘But people do stay at home for longer now, don’t they? And you’ve got Luke next door and it’s not as if Jean’s going to want him to leave. That’s what I tell your dad. I say, “When he leaves, she’ll leave.” When Luke goes, you’ll be fast behind – but not before. I don’t really understand why he can’t leave home, myself. It’s not like his bedroom is the only place in the world with curtains.’

  ‘I suppose for him it doesn’t matter where he is,’ Julie says. ‘Since he can’t go out anywhere. He may as well stay in the same room forever.’

  ‘Depressing thought, isn’t it? Imagine what it would be like, living in the same room forever. Poor Luke. No wonder Jean worries so much. She’s very good to him, you know. She could have gone back to work after her hip operation but oh no, she stays there looking after him, day in, day out. You’re good with him too of course, everybody thinks so. Mind you, you should watch out that you don’t get, you know, too involved. You wouldn’t want his life. You should remember that.’

  ‘Dawn, I’ve been too involved for the past fifteen years. And I’m his best friend, not his home help, so it doesn’t really matter how involved I get.’

  ‘Maybe this management course is just what you need. They’re residential, you know.’

  ‘Oh. Really? God.’ In Julie’s mind, a big barracks-style building appears, with landscaped grounds surrounded by unfamiliar motorways, A-roads and – the only roads Julie can drive on – B-roads. She can’t travel by train any more, so how would she get to a place like that? And why is she even thinking this? It’s not like she’s ever going to do the management-training course anyway. She doesn’t really know why she told Dawn about it, either. It just seemed like something to say.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Dawn says. ‘It’s sort of like, you go away as a normal person and you come back as something else. Like magic really.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘Not much to think about if you ask me.’

  ‘No. Oh, Dawn?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why are you up? Aren’t you usually still in bed at this time?’

  ‘Yes, well, I’m trying to re-thingy myself.’

  ‘Realign?’

  ‘Something like that. Your dad and me have fallen out over my late nights again, so I’m trying to get back to normal. It’s strange, though. I just can’t sleep properly at night. But we never have sex any more and I’m always disturbing him and he says he can’t sleep without me . . .’

  Julie’s blushing.

  Dawn laughs. ‘Oh – too much information? Sorry.’

  Dawn’s got the TV on mute but Julie can see Watercolour Challenge finishing.

  ‘No, it’s all right.’ Julie gets up. ‘I’m going to go and check my e-mail anyway, then go next door.’

  Julie has a laptop she bought with her tips from The Edge last year. She has her own phone line in her room – some BT special offer that her father couldn’t resist, even though he couldn’t immediately think of a use for a second line.

  ‘Julie can have it,’ Dawn had suggested.

  ‘I suppose so,’ her father had said. ‘As long as she pays the bill.’

  Julie’s got one of those free-connection deals, the same one as Luke, so her phone bill never comes to very much anyway. It’s not like she ever phones anyone.

  She hits ‘connect’. While the computer dials her ISP, she looks over at Luke’s bedroom. The curtains are drawn and there doesn’t seem to be any movement inside. Apart from some spam from an American company offering Julie a university diploma, there’s no other e-mail. Remembering the party tonight, Julie pulls off her work uniform and goes to have a bath. Afterwards, while she’s putting on a skirt and jumper, she hears the familiar scraping sound of Luke’s window being opened, then the hiss of the antibacterial stuff his mum sprays around every day. Good. That means he’s up and Julie can get over there as soon as she’s d
ried her hair.

  When she gets downstairs, her dad’s home early.

  ‘. . . water everywhere,’ he’s saying.

  ‘Really? So they’re closing the college?’ says Dawn.

  ‘I’m just going next door,’ Julie says to them both.

  ‘Hang on,’ Julie’s dad says. ‘How come you’re home so early?’

  ‘Floods,’ she explains. ‘Floor’s knackered at The Edge.’

  ‘The same thing’s happened at the college,’ Dawn says.

  Julie’s dad raises his eyebrows. ‘Dawn told me about your job offer.’

  Julie looks at the floor. ‘Well, it’s not a job offer, really.’

  ‘What would you call it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a training programme.’

  ‘Same thing these days. What would your salary be, as a manager?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘It wasn’t that sort of conversation. Heather – the supervisor – she just told me I’d done well on this test and that they’re recommending me for the management thing. She made it sound like I’d won a prize or something and I had to pretend I was pleased. It wasn’t the right moment to start asking how much I’d be getting paid.’

  ‘This is exactly how people get exploited. What have I told you? Always ask what the salary is first.’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Anyway, why were you only pretending to be pleased?’

  ‘It was just a stupid catering test at The Edge.’

  He fixes his eyes on her. ‘And?’

  ‘And, well . . . A lump of wood could have passed it. It’s not exactly a big deal.’

  ‘Shame a lump of wood couldn’t have sat your A levels for you, then, isn’t it?’

  ‘Doug!’ Dawn says. ‘Stop bringing up her bloody A levels, for God’s sake. It was years ago. She tried her best. Leave her alone.’

  Julie’s dad’s laughing, as usual. The A-level thing is like one big joke to him now. He stopped being cross almost immediately and turned the whole episode into a comedy routine instead, telling mix-and-match jokes that usually started, My daughter’s so stupid she . . . or There was an Englishman, a Scotsman and my daughter . . . If there was a joke with an Irishman, a mother-in-law or a dyslexic, Julie would find herself stuck in it in place of them. Her father’s humour has always been strange. One minute he’s all politically correct, bring-back-trade-unions, power-to-the-people and so on; the next minute he’s laughing at a cripple joke, in a totally ironic way of course, thinking that because he’s so politically correct there’s something extra funny about him laughing at unfunny or un-PC jokes.