by Chris Killen
This week it’s Rachel’s turn.
Rachel’s story is called ‘The House’.
Nothing happens in it.
There are no characters.
It’s just this three-page description of a house.
Paul glances across at Rachel, who’s looking down at her desk, puffing out her cheeks in mock embarrassment, her scrappy, disorganised ring binder spilling open in front of her.
‘Alison?’ Paul asks the girl with the pale moon face and thick black eyeliner, seated directly to Rachel’s left. ‘Do you want to start us off? What did you think of Rachel’s story, Alison? Alison? Alison?’
Alison looks up from her iPhone, startled, then opens her plastic folder and takes out the three sheets of paper that Paul had asked them to print out and gives them a once-over.
‘I liked it, I guess,’ she says.
Eventually, class finishes and everyone closes their folders and puts away their tablets and laptops and zips up their rucksacks and starts drifting out of the room. It’s protocol for the person whose story has just been workshopped to have an extra ten minutes alone with the tutor afterwards, in case there’s anything else they need to go over in private. So as the class disperse, Rachel hangs around by Paul’s desk, chatting to Alison.
‘Right, let’s head down to my office,’ Paul says, once they’re the last three in the room.
‘Is it alright if Alison comes, too?’ says Rachel.
‘Well, she’ll have to wait outside,’ Paul says.
They’re both looking at him now: Rachel in her unflattering Rip Curl hoodie and baggy jeans, Alison in a translucent whitish T-shirt that hangs off her shoulder and a pair of those shiny black leggings.
They’re so young, Paul thinks. They can only be nineteen, if that.
Don’t look at Alison’s bra, he tells himself, as his eyes drift down towards it, completely visible beneath her T-shirt.
He still can’t work out if she’s a goth or not. Do you even get goths any more? Her hair is dyed black and her fingernails are painted black and her eyes are always heavily made up in thick black eyeliner, but unlike the goth girls Paul knew as a teenager, she’s always wearing these aggressively tight clothes, and whenever she walks around, at the start and end of class, she causes something to coil, a little inappropriately, in Paul’s stomach. There’s a small tattoo on her forearm, a black triangle which – for the first few weeks of class – he thought was drawn on, and another (a rose? a snake? a rose and a snake?) curling mysteriously in the hair behind her left ear.
‘Alright, let’s go,’ Paul says, bundling up his notes and pens and nodding towards the door. Rachel exits first, then Alison, then Paul. He feels himself hanging back a little in order to sneak a quick glance at the smooth round curves of Alison’s buttocks beneath her shiny leggings as she swishes along the corridor ahead of him.
Jesus, he thinks, stop being such a cliché.
Outside the door to ‘his’ office (which is actually just a spare office room that Paul and all the creative writing PhDs have been sharing this semester) Alison announces that she’s gonna go downstairs and get a coffee actually, and that she’ll wait for Rachel in the café bit.
As she turns to leave, she catches Paul’s eye and says, ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw.’
‘Oh . . . right,’ Paul says, taken aback, wanting to carry on speaking but not quite sure what to say.
‘See ya,’ she says, possibly to Paul but much more probably to Rachel, spinning on the rubber heel of her low-rise Converse and heading off down the corridor, her leggings stretched so tight that Paul can just about make out the tiny strips of her knicker elastic beneath them, digging into her hips.
And then he and poor old dowdy Rachel Steed go into the office, a cramped grey room with an old computer desk in the far corner and a couple of brown plastic chairs which Paul sets out for them.
‘How do you feel that went?’ he says.
Rachel examines the end of her stubby fingernail, picks at it, then looks up at him with an intensity he wasn’t expecting. ‘My story’s shit, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Admit it.’
Paul glances at the printout on the desk in front of him, at the parts he’s underlined, his handwritten notes in the margins, things like: Where are the characters? and What’s this about, exactly?
He looks back up at her and she’s still staring at him.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ he says, feeling a bit scared of her all of a sudden.
‘It’s good,’ he hears himself say, which was definitely not what he’d planned on saying last night as he read it over for the first time and groaned, inwardly, not just about how shit Rachel’s story was but about almost everything in his life: his writing, his flat, his relationship, his diet, his bank account, his baldness . . .
‘I mean, it needs more work,’ he says, ‘but as a first draft, it’s actually kind of great.’
LAUREN
2004
Lauren woke in her old pyjamas, in her old bed, in her old room, and felt a frustration so acute it was like a needle jabbing at her heart. She lifted her phone from the bedside table, brought it to her face, and squinted at the display, where a tiny envelope symbol flashed on and off. Paul, she guessed, correctly, before clicking through to her messages. Without opening it she held down a button on the phone, until it asked her if she wanted to delete this message.
Yes, she selected.
Oh, if only she could also delete the memory of the one time he came here, and slept in this bed with her, his bony elbows digging in her back. And then, the next morning, he’d crouched down by her bookcase and slid her battered copy of Ariel off the shelf (the one with all her embarrassing, well-intentioned A-level annotations in it), even though she’d already told him she didn’t want him looking through her things. And then, that same night, he’d fallen out with her mum over seemingly nothing, maybe it was for smoking in the garden, and the whole time he’d had that same dazzled, gawping face on him which was the face almost everyone made the first time they came here and saw her mum’s house and commented on how big it was, and realised just how well off they must be.
Halfway down the stairs, Lauren heard the sizzle of bacon.
Don’t be argumentative, she told herself as she entered the kitchen and took a seat (the nearest to the door) at the gigantic wooden table – a new addition to the room. Just say nice things. Do whatever your mum wants. Tell her about yourself. Don’t act like a stroppy teenager for once. Finally become a grown-up.
‘You are eating meat at the moment, aren’t you?’ Lauren’s mum said.
‘I’ve stopped again,’ Lauren lied.
Why did you say that?
Lauren’s mum turned off the hob and ran her fingers through her newly cut hair (a shiny, dyed-gold bob, the kind of thing you might see on daytime TV), then scratched at a fleck of burnt lasagne on the counter top. ‘What’s your plan, then?’ she said in a different, colder voice.
‘Dunno,’ Lauren said.
‘Planning on getting dressed at all?’
Lauren pulled her dressing gown a little tighter around her waist, brought her feet up off the cold tiles and onto the chair.
‘I am dressed,’ she said.
Her mum scraped the half-fried rashers of bacon into the pedal bin, then stuck the pan into the sink. It hissed like a cat.
Start again.
Try to be nice this time.
‘I guess I could have some bacon, actually?’ Lauren said.
Her mum just sighed.
‘Look, I don’t know what I’m doing yet, alright?’ Lauren said. ‘With my life. Okay? And anyway, it’s not as if . . .’
Oh dear.
What are you about to say now?
There’s still time not to say it, you know, to say something else.
‘As if what?’ her mum asked, plunging her hand into the sink, angrily rummaging around beneath the frying pan in the suds.
Say something else!
Anything!
Tell her how nice her new haircut is!
Ask her where she got the kitchen table from!
‘Well, it’s not exactly as if you work either,’ Lauren said, watching her mum’s face twitch and flicker.
‘Fuck!’ her mum cried – a strange thing to cry, Lauren thought, until her hand emerged from beneath the suds, and Lauren saw the dark flower of blood pumping out from her clenched fist, curling quickly around her wrist, then beginning to drip from her elbow and spatter on the floor.
‘Shit, keep still, put your hand up,’ Lauren instructed, trying to lift herself up out of her seat but feeling pinned by a woozy gravity, her own head spinning as the blood landed, too loudly, on the kitchen tiles. ‘I’ll get a towel,’ Lauren said, but she didn’t. She couldn’t get up.
Lauren hated anything at all to do with blood.
When she was little she threw a tantrum in the doctor’s, during her one and only blood test.
She’d screwed her eyes shut and gripped her mum’s hand, squealing just from the feel of the cold, wet swab of cotton wool, before the needle even went in, and then, when it did, she couldn’t help herself: she opened her eyes and looked, even though it was the thing she was scared of most of all, and she saw the cylinder filling with bright red liquid and almost fainted.
‘We’d better call a taxi,’ Lauren’s mum said, holding her dripping elbow over the sink. ‘This is going to need stitches.’
‘Right,’ Lauren murmured, still unable to stand.
She pushed out her chair and sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, closing her eyes, taking deep breaths, fighting back the nausea, as her mum took the large cordless phone from the table with her good hand and calmly thumbed through for the taxi number.
* * *
While Lauren was out walking around the village a few nights later, just as she used to do when she was a stroppy fifteen-year-old – just to the post box on the green and back – her phone began buzzing in her pocket.
Paul, she thought, but the display read EMILY T. Emily was a large, hippyish girl from her third-year post-colonial literature and theory module, who was always up for going for a drink afterwards, and who always wore bags and headbands with little circles of mirror sewn into them, and who Lauren could never quite work out if she was actually friends with.
‘Hello?’ Lauren answered cautiously, one quarter of her suspecting that this was an accidental call, that all she’d hear on the other end of the line were the muffled swishes of the inside of Emily’s mirrored handbag, full of joss sticks and tobacco-free cigarettes and dream catchers.
‘Hey,’ Emily said, happily, friendlily, as if she was carrying on a conversation from last week. This, Lauren remembered, was one of the things that had annoyed her about Emily: a general lack of self-awareness. ‘I was just calling to say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye?’
When Lauren reached the post box, she stopped walking and touched the cold, dimpled top of it with her palm.
‘Yeah, I’m leaving Nottingham,’ Emily said. ‘I’m going to Canada.’
‘Oh, wow, um, great,’ Lauren replied.
‘Yeah, I got a year’s working visa sorted out,’ Emily continued. ‘It just came through. Only applied last month.’
Why is she telling me? Lauren wondered. Is she just doing it to show off?
‘Great,’ Lauren said again, as she looked at the sooty little houses hunched around the edge of the green, then back down the lane towards her mum’s. The sun was dipping behind the trees and this view should be pretty and tranquil, but instead it just looked so miserably small, so depressingly English, so un-Canadian, where things would be large and spacious and new-built, probably.
‘How about you?’ Emily asked. ‘What are you up to? How’s Paul?’
‘I thought you might’ve heard,’ Lauren said. ‘We broke up.’
‘Oh, so what are you doing now?’ Emily asked.
Emily was like Lauren; her parents were rich, she didn’t need a job. At uni, between semesters, she’d disappear off to places like Goa and Bali and Fiji and always come back with a dusty-looking tan and braids in her hair and anecdotes about bonking – who the fuck called it ‘bonking’ in 2004? – boys in teepees.
‘I’m living at my mum’s for a bit. Just until I know what I’m doing next.’
‘Oh shit,’ Emily said. ‘Sorry, Lozza.’ (She was the only person who ever called Lauren that.) ‘That’s rubbish.’
‘Yep.’
‘So what are you doing next?’
‘All I’ve got pencilled in,’ Lauren said, ‘are a few more weeks of moping around in my dressing gown and a few more arguments with my mum.’ She was hoping it would sound funny, but it didn’t. It just sounded depressing.
‘Come to Canada, then.’
‘What?’
‘Come with me. Why not?’
Lauren ran her hand back and forth over the cold dimpled top of the post box and tried to come up with a good reason.
Three weeks later, Lauren showed her mum how to use the computer, the once-top-of-the-range Dell that had been sat yellowing in the study, gathering dust and static, for the past three and a bit years, ever since she’d insisted on keeping it during the divorce. It creaked and groaned like an old person when they turned it on.
‘Does it always make noises like that?’ Anne asked.
Ignore her, Lauren told herself.
She’s just playing up her uselessness, her fear of technology.
Lauren told her to sit down, in Dad’s old office chair.
‘I’m warning you, by tomorrow I won’t remember any of this,’ Anne muttered as she slid into the creaky Aeron chair and Lauren stood behind her.
Once the computer had finished booting up, Lauren guided her, step by step, through the process of connecting to the internet, ignoring her when she winced at the dial-up noises, then showed her which icon to click on (which she insisted on calling ‘The Earth’ even though it clearly said Internet Explorer beneath it), her still-bandaged right hand pushing the mouse cautiously around its mat, as she navigated herself awkwardly towards the Hotmail sign-up page.
To reach this point took almost half an hour.
Everything about it was a struggle.
It was like some sort of awful failed sitcom pilot (Net Mums: ‘Mothers and Daughters Attempt to Surf the Web Together with Hilarious Consequences’).
‘I really don’t see the point of all this,’ Anne muttered as she filled in her personal details.
‘The point,’ Lauren said, ‘is that in a few weeks’ time I will be on the other side of the world, where it will be too expensive and too late at night to just phone you all the time, and at least this way we’ll be able to keep in touch. Alright?’
Anne just nodded and clicked submit.
IAN
2014
My alarm goes off and I press snooze, then snooze again, and then, finally, I just turn it off and lie on my back, unable to get out of bed. I hear Carol go into the bathroom. I hear the flush of the toilet and the buzz of her electric toothbrush and the hum of her hair-dryer, and then, a little later, the slam of the front door.
On my way to the bathroom, I stick my head into the living room, which I didn’t really get a chance to look at properly last night. It’s just a small cream-coloured room with a leatherette sofa and an Ikea coffee table and a non-flatscreen TV in it.
I squat down in front of the little bookcase in the corner. There’s a shelf of DVDs (Along Came Polly, When Harry Met Sally, Bridesmaids) and below that, a shelf of self-help books (The Alchemist, Ways to Happiness, The Secret, etc.).
When we were teenagers, Carol used to listen to Sonic Youth and Nirvana. She used to read William Burroughs and have her nose pierced.
When did she get into all this shit? I wonder, sliding out one of the books and reading the back cover.
Are you lost? it says.
(Yep, I think.)
Are yo
u seeking more purpose and direction in your life?
(Yep.)
Do you sometimes feel that you have perhaps strayed from your original path?
(Yep.)
If you have answered ‘yes’ to any of the above questions, then this book is for you! Simply carry on reading and let Jennifer McVirtue (PhD) be your guide on the path back to happiness.
I turn the book over and look at the front cover, a badly photoshopped image of a garden path with wispy fairies dancing up and down it.
I want to go home now, I think, not knowing quite where that is any more.
Before I leave the flat, I look at myself for a long time in the bathroom mirror, wondering what to do about my beard. Should I just trim it a bit with Carol’s nail scissors, or shave it off completely using the purple ladies’ razor on the side of the bath?
I make a growling face at myself and think: Would you employ this person?
(Probably not.)
So I pick up the nail scissors and start snipping.
As I’m doing my chin, I find six bright white hairs hiding amongst the black ones.
I keep thinking about what Carol said in the car: ‘Makes you look about fifty.’
I’m thirty.
I feel about a hundred.
In the city centre, there’s an even bigger HMV than the one I used to work for. Its shutters are down and there’s a big red ‘RETAIL UNIT TO LET’ poster tacked in the window. I stand outside it for a long time, smoking roll-ups and pretending to be waiting for someone.
When our branch closed, it was chaos.
On the last day, everyone left with handfuls of CDs and DVDs stuffed in their backpacks. I got home with mine and looked them up on eBay. Even brand new they were only worth about a penny each.
A little further down the street, a crowd has gathered round a small break-dancing boy. They clap and cheer as he spins on his head, then pops himself back up onto his feet. Still in time to the beat, he flips the baseball cap off his head and moonwalks around the front row of the crowd with it, flashing a gappy, milk-toothed grin as the hat fills with change.
