by Chris Killen
Greg stops typing and turns in his swivel chair, folding his hands in his lap.
‘Absolutely, yeah,’ he says, a new concern in his voice. ‘What’s on your mind?’
What a nice guy, Paul thinks.
‘Not more bad news, I hope?’
‘Kind of, actually.’
Since the mugging, Paul’s been pitied by almost everyone he knows at the uni. Poor bastard, they probably think whenever they pass him in the hallway or see him sat alone in the veggie café, not even attempting to write any more, just dabbing the crumbs of cake off his plate and staring into space. See that guy there? they probably whisper amongst themselves, well, he lost his whole novel. Just like that. Some mugger nicked his laptop and the only hard copy along with it. I heard it was amazing, too.
Paul can’t look Greg in the eye.
So he looks instead at the bookcase on the opposite wall, at the rows of paperbacks and hardbacks crammed onto the shelves in no particular order, searching out the luminous yellow spine of his own first novel.
‘It’s quite, erm, sensitive,’ he says, ‘the thing that I need to talk to you about.’
‘Right,’ Greg says, leaning forward in his chair.
Paul leaves a suitably dramatic pause. He attempts to subtly frame his features to make himself look exhausted.
‘I’ve had some pretty bad news about my health,’ he says quietly, his eyes fixed on the dusty front wheel of Greg’s swivel chair.
‘Oh no,’ Greg says. ‘Oh, bloody hell, mate.’
‘Yeah,’ Paul nods, trying to summon tears into the corners of his eyes. ‘It’s . . . um . . . It’s quite serious, actually. And as you can imagine it’s been quite a shock for me and for Sarah and everything and it’s, you know, it’s knocked me for six . . .’
‘I can imagine,’ Greg says. ‘Is there anything . . . I mean . . . How can I put this? Is there a definite diagnosis yet?’
‘They don’t know, you know, the extent of things yet. But yeah . . . it’s . . .’
Paul wonders if he’s actually going to say the word.
‘It’s cancer,’ he says, feeling the two syllables deliver their one-two gut punch, just the way he’d hoped.
‘Oh Paul,’ Greg says, lifting himself involuntarily out of his seat.
Paul keeps his eyes fixed on the wheel of Greg’s chair. He clears his throat. He says, ‘I know I’ve only got a few weeks left until the end of the semester, but the truth is, I’m finding it really hard to give it my all. And I was wondering if . . .’
‘Don’t worry about us,’ Greg says, softly, soothingly; saying exactly what Paul had hoped he would.
‘I can get one of the PhDs to cover your remaining classes, mate, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘Thanks so much, Greg,’ Paul says sombrely, trying to contain the happiness and relief deep within him; sealing it off as a tingling feeling somewhere around his stomach. ‘Right, I’ll be off then.’
‘I’m so sorry, Paul,’ Greg says, offering his big, warm, soothing hand to shake, and Paul hopes that if Greg senses the clamminess of his own palm, he’ll put it down to the illness rather than nerves. ‘Do keep us all posted, mate. I’ll sort everything here for you and speak to HR, and then I’ll send you an email to wrap things up sometime next week then?’
‘Great,’ Paul says. ‘That sounds great.’
Thank fuck for that, Paul thinks as he walks out of the New Writing building, past the library and the veggie café in the direction of the city centre. It’s almost five o’ clock on Friday. Damon will be finishing work soon. Paul will send him a text. See if he fancies meeting in town for a pint, maybe. Somewhere noisy. Somewhere full of people and life.
Sarah’s staying at her parents’ again this weekend.
It’s the third weekend in a row.
Paul suspects that there will be a Monday when she just doesn’t come back.
It’s okay, he tells himself.
Things will work themselves out.
She’ll see that I’ve changed.
I’m different.
I am a new Paul now.
All my updates are being installed.
I’m not dying.
I’m not teaching any more.
The nicotine patch on my arm is tingling, which means it’s doing its job.
I’m not a writer.
I’m not an anything.
I’m just a human being, walking down a street in Manchester.
Also: he has a brand new phone. Okay, it’s not quite as good as an official iPhone, but he can still look at the internet if he wants to, which is the main thing anyone really needs a phone for these days. And if he’s lucky, he won’t have to see or be reminded of Alison Whistler ever again.
Since the eyeball incident, he’s not logged back into Twitter.
And, anyway, he tells himself – ignoring the gaze of a tramp in a newsagent doorway and resisting the urge to go inside and buy a packet of fags – what can anyone actually do now? I don’t even work there any more.
I’m a free man.
Paul only has one more payment due from the university.
Don’t worry about it, he tells himself.
You’ll look for a job, first thing tomorrow morning.
Tonight, let’s get drunk and celebrate.
LAUREN
2005
Lauren tried again. She walked through the door marked ‘nothing to declare’ and squeezed Michael’s hand defiantly. This is the rest of your life starting, right here! Two Brits Abroad, now home again. She wondered what Michael would make of her mum, and realised with a mixture of embarrassment and guilt that so far she’d only told him negative things: that she nagged and meddled and never really understood her.
The plan was to spend a couple of weeks at Anne’s house, before they moved to London, where they would use Michael’s uncle’s flat as a base from which to find jobs and a home of their own. This was Michael’s plan. He’d made all the decisions. Lauren was just following along. So far, she’d not really mentioned that her mum was loaded.
They walked through the exit and scanned the small crowd, and Lauren automatically looked for her name amongst the taxi drivers’ hand-written signs, simply because she was the kind of person who’d always wanted to see her name written on one. She thought briefly of a nice memory of Paul; one summer evening in Nottingham train station, she’d surprised him on the platform after he’d been home for the weekend. That was not so long after they’d started going out, in that first flush of excitement, before things turned sour.
So if Ian was a song and Michael was a desk, then what was Paul?
Paul was a really pretentious, plotless novel.
Things will be different this time round, Lauren.
You will learn how to grow up.
You will learn how to have grey hair and one day be thirty-two years old.
You will get a job doing something important and you will make a new group of friends who will be [something] and you will [something something something].
She spotted her mum and waved. As she walked self-consciously towards her, Lauren noticed that she looked different somehow; a little thinner, a little older, and she was wearing a baggy blue jumper and some kind of silly hat, a purple one with a floppy brim, the kind of thing they might have joked about a year ago if they’d seen someone else wearing it.
As they hugged, Anne said, ‘Hello, sweetie,’ into Lauren’s neck and kissed her, and Lauren wondered if her mum was anything at all like she’d described to Michael. She felt another twinge of embarrassment, remembering how much time she’d spent painting her as this tyrant, and made a promise to herself to tell him more nice things about her, the very next time they were on their own.
Lauren stood back to get a good look at her.
She never normally wore a hat.
Lauren touched the brim of it.
‘Come on,’ Anne said, swatting Lauren’s hand away, ‘let’s get out of here.’
&nbs
p; ‘What’s this for?’ said Lauren. ‘I thought you always said you didn’t suit hats.’
IAN
2014
I’m walking so fast down Oxford Road, I don’t really look where I’m going. I dodge round a group of students, step slightly into a doorway, then feel my foot knock something over. There’s a jingle of change and I see pennies and ten p’s rolling off all over the pavement and out into the road. Shit. I’ve kicked the homeless man’s rain-sodden Costa cup over.
‘Shit, I’m so so sorry,’ I say, trying to gather up as many of the coins as I can from around the students’ feet, who don’t seem to notice or care.
The man sits in the doorway, cross-legged, his stained coat draped over his knees, watching me.
I can just make out the music shop from here. They’ve not started pulling the shutters down yet, which means it’s not quite gone six. I’ve still got time.
I hand the man all the remaining change I can find on the street.
‘Cheers, mate,’ he says, grinning hopefully.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any spare change I’m afraid.’
I reach deep into my jeans pocket, trying to feel around amongst the old filter tips and bits of tissue for any loose coins and without thinking I pull out the massive wad of twenties that Carol let me get out on her card. The homeless man looks at them. I look at the homeless man looking at them. I put them back in my pocket.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
As I turn to go, I spot a face I wasn’t expecting.
It’s Paul.
Paul Saunders: my old flatmate, Lauren’s ex-boyfriend, strolling down the road towards me.
I turn back, stepping over the homeless man’s cup again, and ducking into the newsagent. I hang around by the photocopier, peering out of the window through a gap in the index-card adverts, waiting for him to go past.
He looks exactly the same, facially. His hair’s mostly gone though. And he’s wearing the kind of clothes – brown cord blazer, fitted shirt, smart jeans, expensive shoes – that let you know immediately that he’s got some kind of swanky lecturing job at the university.
The more I think about it, I knew he was here all along.
His first novel had come into HMV. We’d put it in the discount paperback bin. One afternoon I’d turned to the back flap and looked at his author photo (cropped so you couldn’t see he was balding) and it’d said:
Paul Saunders was born in 1982. Human Animus is his first novel. Saunders has been widely published in journals and anthologies, both print and online. He lives, and drinks, in Manchester.
Come on, come on, I think, shifting from foot to foot, desperate to get to the music shop before they pull the shutters.
I check the time on my phone: two minutes to six.
Once Paul’s finally gone past the window, I duck back out of the shop, stepping carefully over the cup of coins, and walk along the road behind him, praying he doesn’t turn round.
He doesn’t, and I make it to the doorway just as the man with the beard steps outside.
‘Can I help you, mate?’
‘Yeah, I’ve come for . . .’ and I turn to point my guitar out in the window but it’s gone.
The man waits for me to speak.
‘. . . the Tele Custom,’ I say, pointing to the space in the window where it used to be. ‘The cream and black one?’
‘Oooh, sorry, mate,’ he says. ‘Sold that the other day.’
As I wait for the mp3s to finish downloading, I take a big swig of rum straight from the bottle. I open a new tab and type ‘postcards band uk’ into Google. No surprises. There are, in total, the same four mentions of us as always on the internet: our Myspace page, two small posts on the Drowned in Sound forum, and the Discogs listing for our only seven-inch. That’s it. You can’t actually buy it anywhere. (Not even on eBay.) You can’t download it. You can’t read the lukewarm, 3/5 review the NME gave it.
Next I log into my emails.
Not my Gmail though, my old Hotmail account, which I only ever use these days for offers and mailing lists and petitions.
It says I have 999(+) new emails. I scroll through the first few pages and all of them are spam.
I compose a new email, to [email protected]:
hi,
how are you?
sorry it took me a while to reply.
hope you’re okay,
Ian x
I click send, then close the browser.
Once all the songs have finished downloading, I log off Rosemary’s Wireless.
On my way towards the front door, I look in at Carol. She’s in her room, packing. I carry on down the hall, out of the door and down one flight of stairs, until I’m stood outside Flat 7.
I knock on the door and wait.
The door is answered by a small, stout woman with short black hair and flushed red cheeks.
‘Can I help you?’ she says.
Behind her I can see into the flat. It has different carpets to Carol’s – they’re brown and orange; a queasy, swirling 70s design – and the flat in general looks much more old-fashioned and cluttered than Carol’s. A hot, foggy smell, like boiling potatoes, drifts into the hall.
‘Are you Rosemary?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ she says, confused. ‘Sorry, who are you?’
‘I’m from flat eleven,’ I say, pointing at the ceiling. ‘I’ve just come to let you know that you should really encrypt your wireless connection.’
PAUL
2014
In the kitchen, at three a.m., attempting to make toast, Paul knocks a teapot off the counter – not just any teapot: a delicate, mostly ornamental teapot that Sarah’s had since childhood, that was handed down to her from her now-deceased grandma, and that Paul has always been scared of touching – and it smashes into tiny, irreparable pieces on the tiles.
‘Fucking shitting fuck,’ he says.
This evening he ended up going out drinking by himself because Damon was busy.
He sat in the corner of Kro Piccadilly, miserably eyeing up women in tight shiny dresses and drank seven pints of strong continental lager. From the all-night Spar, he bought a ten-pack of Marlboro Lights and then just wandered around the city centre weaving in and out of the groups of pissed-up men and women, feeling vaguely like if someone started a fight with him he wouldn’t actually mind – that, for maybe the first time in his life, he understood that urge to punch someone’s fucking teeth in that sometimes came with drinking.
‘Not tonight, mate,’ the massive bouncer told him outside Lovely Legs in Chinatown. ‘Come back when you’re able to stand up straight, yeah?’
Wandering along Oxford Road, past the groups of students, wondering where Alison was and three times almost calling her from his almost-iPhone, Paul stopped to pick up a flyer off the pavement. He squinted at the blurry, neon-purple text and was only able to read the name of the club (VODKA L@GOON). Then he noticed there was something smeared on the flyer, and sniffed his fingers, and realised it was dog shit.
Then he was sick down the side of the precinct centre.
Then he fell asleep on the bus home.
(He’s still not washed his hands.)
After chugging down a pint and a half of tap water, Paul steps over the smashed teapot and carries a plate of toast through to the living room.
He sits down on the sofa, turns on the telly, flicks through the channels, and stops on Babestation, where an almost naked, baby-oiled woman squirms and gyrates on a silky purple bedspread, her lips moving but no sound coming from them as she gives a tit-wank to a cordless phone.
Paul leans forward and squints at the small print crawling across the bottom of the screen: £2.20 per minute from a landline, prices from mobile networks may vary.
He takes his phone out of his pocket, wipes his shitty thumb across the screen, and taps the Facebook app.
He and Alison are still friends.
He’s waiting for her to delete him. On her wall, she’s uplo
aded a new set of photos, titled ‘Peaks and Trofs’, which turns out to be twenty-three photos of Alison outdoors, somewhere in the Peak District, hiking with a group of grinning, fresh-faced, racially diverse kids about the same age as her, and then later, the whole bunch of them larking around in a bar, playing a game with the beer mats, mugging for the camera, then starting a Scrabble tournament. It looks so wholesome and fun and youthful, Paul has to quickly exit out of the photos, feeling for the first time like he shouldn’t be looking at them, like he’s intruded on a private, intimate moment, a day which Alison and this group of goons will recall with real fondness, maybe, when they’re all thirty-one and a half years old, eating toast on a sofa.
He lifts the last bite to his mouth, licks the crumbs off his fingers, then looks at the time.
The babe on Babestation flutters her eyelashes at him, flicking her tongue up and down the oily plastic shaft of the phone.
He types in the number on the screen and presses call.
* * *
‘The absolute main thing,’ Terry says, a week and a half later, ‘is that you don’t go wandering off too far from your designated area. I know it’s cold, but just stay roughly where I drop you, okay?’
Paul nods as much as he’s able, stuffed into the passenger seat of the grubby, dog-smelling Ford Focus.
‘And make sure you look like you’re enjoying yourself, yeah?’
‘Yep,’ Paul says.
‘I’ll be back about lunchtime, to top your flyers up and let you grab a bit of grub.’
Terry pulls up to the kerb outside the Subway in Fallowfield.
Oh god, Paul thinks, as he wrestles himself out of the car. Why does it have to be here? As he reaches back into the footwell for his sack of flyers, the top part of his costume gets caught in the doorframe and he has to shimmy his body to get it free. He hears it tear a little.
‘Careful,’ Terry hisses.
‘I’m fine,’ Paul says, standing up and brushing himself down.
Underneath the main tube part, he’s wearing a black Lycra onesie. The flyers in his sack are for Supraprint Commercial Printing and Dissertation Binding Services!
