In Real Life

by Chris Killen

  Terry beeps his horn, revs the engine, then pulls away into the busy morning traffic.

  Only eight hours to go.

  This is the Tesco Express nearest to Alison’s house, the same one Paul bought that box of twelve Durex Fetherlite from. She could walk past at any moment. And if she did, would she recognise him? Paul reminds himself that he is mostly just a foam tube: that, apart from his blacked-up face sticking out from a hole three quarters of the way up, he’s disguised.

  A group of student lads walk past. Paul offers them flyers. Two of the three lads accept them, and Paul turns to watch them walk off in the direction of the uni. A few paces away, about equidistant from Paul and the nearest bin, they all drop their flyers on the ground. Terry has already gone over this a number of times: every few minutes, Paul must retrieve any large quantities of discarded flyers and throw them away himself, otherwise Terry will get into trouble and, as a consequence, Paul won’t get paid. For his shift today, Paul stands to make forty-five quid before tax (it’s up to him if he wants to declare it).

  He’s stopped carrying the leather document wallet around with him.

  He’s just a top hat now. An anonymous, blacked-up top hat.

  He offers a flyer to a student girl and she shakes her head and doesn’t look him in the eye.

  Paul hears his phone whistle – a cheeky, suggestive noise, which means ‘text message’ – somewhere deep in the sack of flyers that’s dangling from his shoulder. He gets the flap open and tries to find it, knowing his actions are useless: the stretchy synthetic fabric of the bodysuit would stop his fingers from being recognised on the phone’s touchscreen, anyway. He’ll have to wait until Terry comes back at lunchtime.

  The other option, Paul thinks, is to stuff the flyers in that bin over there and do a runner. In costume. To Didsbury.

  Pacing up and down the small strip of shops, he mostly hangs around outside the tanning salon because their wall clock is visible from the street. He still has seven hours and ten minutes to go. Is this really his job now? He wonders if he’ll even be able to last a day, let alone the three-to-four-days-a-week that Terry’s looking for.

  Paul steps out into the path of a thin, hunched-over student boy and thrusts a flyer into his bespectacled face.

  ‘No thanks,’ the boy says in a soft Birmingham accent, swatting it away.

  Oh shit.

  Paul turns quickly, but it’s too late.

  Craig’s face crumples in a mixture of embarrassment and dismay.

  On Sarah’s tiny, metallic turquoise netbook, there’s a full list of her search history. Paul discovers it accidentally one afternoon, after a furtive wank in the living room with the curtains drawn. He opens the Chrome history, about to get rid of the entry for ‘xvideos.com – tattooed emo teen brunette’ when he sees the list. It probably goes all the way back to when she first bought the computer, two and a bit years ago.

  ‘Home fertility test,’ it says, between ‘Kristen Stewart Oscars dress’ and ‘vegetable recipe cauliflower beetroot’.

  Oh, Sarah, Paul thinks when he reads it.

  He scans down the list:

  ‘cost fertility treatment manchester’

  and

  ‘chances of conception 35’

  and

  ‘ovarian cyst 1 ovary removed as teenager chances of conception’.

  Why didn’t you feel you could talk to me about this stuff? he asks her in his head.

  He deletes the xvideos.com entry, closes the lid of the netbook and looks at his flaccid, spermy penis.

  I’m going to become someone better, he thinks. Just you wait.

  LAUREN

  2005

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ Anne explained, unable to look Lauren in the eye, her scalp visible through her fluffy, patchy hair.

  They were both sitting at the kitchen table with mugs of cold tea and plates of untouched toast, and Michael had taken himself out for a long walk around the village to give them both a bit of time alone, and the kitchen felt huge and icy despite the Aga.

  ‘You should have said,’ Lauren said, ‘when you first found out.’

  It’s breast cancer, Stage 3C, which means it’s spread.

  She was diagnosed four months ago, in December. They’d spoken just twice that month, once on her birthday, Lauren using the payphone in the café and calling England via an international phone card after missing three calls from her mum, and then again, briefly, on Christmas Day. And then, in early January, she’d received a longish email from her mum which was mostly about the garden, and described a new friend she’d made who, a few paragraphs later, was revealed to be a squirrel. It transpired that she’d still not told any of her friends or her sister or any other members of their family yet. She’d not told Lauren’s dad and said she had no intention of doing so, even though it would be a fantastic way to burst his gleeful little post-divorce bubble.

  ‘I thought,’ Anne said, then stopped.

  ‘What?’ Lauren croaked.

  ‘I thought I could try and get it all sorted out, before you got home.’

  And then she began to cry, which Lauren had only ever seen her do twice before, and both times there had been someone else there to comfort her, too. Lauren lifted herself out of her chair and put her arms gently around her mum as she sobbed, feeling how much thinner and smaller her body was beneath her jumper.

  In bed that night, Lauren pleaded with Michael to hold her tighter.

  ‘I don’t want to crush you,’ he said.

  She wanted him to crush her completely.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, Lauren. It’s rubbish, it’s a rubbish situation. I’m sorry.’

  She felt no comfort from this.

  In fact, she felt absolutely nothing towards Michael whatsoever as she sobbed into his T-shirt in the dark. She wiped her nose on it. She pleaded with him to hug her tighter, to hug her as hard as he could. When he asked if she’d got anyone else she could talk to, any other close friends or relatives or anything, she thought of Ian then shook her head.

  ‘Please don’t go to sleep,’ she pleaded as his breathing began to slow.

  ‘I won’t,’ he promised, his grip loosening a little on her shoulder.

  I don’t know who you are, she thought as he began to snore.

  IAN

  2014

  ‘Okay, are you ready?’ I ask.

  It’s just gone six, and everything is blue and luminous and the roads are almost completely deserted as we drive through the suburbs somewhere outside Stockport. It’s so cold inside the car that you can see your breath.

  ‘Go for it,’ Carol says.

  So I stick the CD in the car’s stereo and press play.

  There’s a long pause as the machine quietly whirrs and then, loud and clear, ‘Green Door’ by Shakin’ Stevens starts up.

  Carol’s wearing her weird purple driving glasses. She cocks her head and listens closely to the music, unsure what it is at first.

  Come on, I think. You can’t have forgotten this one.

  Then her face breaks out in a grin.

  ‘Oh wow,’ she gasps.

  On the chorus, we both sing along.

  Next comes ‘Fire and Rain’. It’s only halfway through ‘You Can Call Me Al’ when I notice a large teardrop sliding out from under her glasses and down her right cheek, followed quickly by a second, then a third.

  ‘He might have been a miserable sod at times,’ she says, ‘but I still miss him.’

  ‘Me, too,’ I say.

  At home, Carol parks in the space where Dad’s blue Ford Escort used to go. When we knock on the door, Mum opens it almost immediately. She looks really, really old – much older than I remember her. She smiles widely and puts her arms out and hugs us both at the same time.

  I walk back out to the car and start carrying our bags into the hall.

  ‘Look at all this,’ I say.

  The skirting boards are a much brighter white and the
carpets are different and there’s a fancy-looking cordless phone on the table by the door and, next to it, a brand-new, blinking wireless router.

  ‘I’ve updated things a bit,’ she says. ‘I’ve entered the twenty-first century.’

  Carol laughs.

  ‘I’m on the internet now, too. If either of you want to use it. I’ll write you down the password for the thingy after tea.’

  I carry my things up the stairs to my room, which has transformed into a small, plain guest room at the end of the hall. I dump my bags on the carpet in the middle then walk over to the little window on the far wall and look down at the overgrown back garden and the frost-covered, corrugated iron of the garage roof, which probably still contains that old Triumph that Dad never quite got round to doing up.

  I turn round and Mum’s standing there, looking at me from the doorway.

  ‘Nice to have you back,’ she says.

  ‘Nice to have me back, too,’ I say.

  ‘You know you can stay here for as long as you want.’

  ‘I know.’

  She heads down the small, creaking staircase and I hear the faint murmur of her and Carol’s voices in the living room. In the corner of the room is the single bed I slept on all through my childhood and teenage years, the one I lost my virginity on. I close the door to my room, then lie down on it, still in all my clothes.

  After dinner, we move over to the sofas and Mum brings out a big bottle of port and pours us each a large glass. A plate of mince pies appears.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ she says.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ we say.

  ‘What do you need the internet for, anyway?’ Carol says.

  ‘You sound like your dad,’ Mum says.

  ‘It’s a waste of money,’ Carol says.

  ‘I’ve joined a forum,’ Mum says. ‘It’s just a glorified book group, really, except there’s people from all over the world on it. I’ve got friends in Australia now, and, um, America. And there’s a man from Birmingham. It’s good fun. You should try it.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I say.

  Carol shakes her head, baffled.

  ‘And there’s this website called YouTube. Have you heard of it?’

  We both nod, trying to keep the smiles off our faces.

  ‘It’s just for funny videos really. Have you seen that one of Fenton? The naughty dog?’

  Port tastes much nicer than White Label rum. The gas fire is turned up to full and the curtains are pulled shut and the room quickly becomes so warm and fuzzy that I start to feel myself nodding off occasionally, even though it’s not yet ten o’clock.

  After a while, I excuse myself and go up the stairs to bed.

  In the bathroom, while brushing my teeth, I look at my face in the mirror and think: Tomorrow morning you will throw your e-cig away. You will get a haircut and have a shave and start doing some sort of exercise. You will learn a new language. You will buy an acoustic guitar. You will do twenty sit-ups and twenty press-ups each morning and start reading poetry. You will try to do something that is not just for yourself, like volunteering, maybe.

  I wish I’d brought my cardboard box.

  I don’t need it for a bedside table – there’s a proper one here – but it would’ve been nice to read Andrew’s letters again. Because for the first time since he sent them to me, I feel about ready to reply.

  PAUL

  2014

  As Paul steps off the train and walks along the platform, he gets caught in a flood of nostalgia; he remembers his years at university, in particular a time when Lauren met him off the train holding a bit of card with his name written on it. In the departures lounge, he remembers the endless weeks after she’d broken up with him, when he’d come and sat here for hours drinking over-priced coffees at one of the little brass tables, watching the people coming and going, and hoping, ridiculously, that Lauren would be one of them even though he suspected she was at her mum’s, then found out she was off to Canada for a year (a mutual friend let it slip in town).

  Turning out of the station, he thinks about the shitty student house in the Meadows that he and Ian and David shared. They each chose a poster for the living room from the sale in the student’s union. Paul chose Nighthawks at the Diner, and Ian chose Unknown Pleasures and David chose Beer: Helping Ugly People Have Sex Since 1862.

  This will be the first time he’s seen any of them in six or seven years.

  He wonders if they’ll have anything left to say to each other.

  He wonders what they’ll think of him, touching the smooth skin of his scalp.

  Amazon keeps recommending him caffeine shampoo but it’s way too late for that.

  The best lads past and present assemble at five in the Wetherspoon’s opposite the Cookie Club. They sit around a large table and drink weak pints of lager, and at first the conversation is stilted and subdued and mostly about what cars people have. Paul sits at the edge of the table, sipping his Fosters, hoping no one will make him admit that he still can’t drive. Luckily, before the question reaches him, someone starts describing a video they saw on the internet.

  ‘It’s this fucking dog, right. No, wait, it’s this kid. This lad. In America. And he starts getting attacked by this dog, right? This, like, wild dog. And it’s dragging him off by the leg ’cause he’s only small.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ someone interjects.

  ‘And then this fucking house cat comes bolting up out of nowhere, right, and chases the dog away! It’s mental.’

  Everyone nods.

  They’ve all seen it.

  ‘What about that one of the girl dancing and then she goes upside down and falls through the coffee table?’ someone else ventures.

  They’ve all seen that one, too.

  ‘I saw one the other week of this drummer at this wedding, right,’ a third voice begins, as Paul remembers a pornographic clip he watched last week, of a naked Japanese woman being molested by an unconvincing sci-fi monster with slimy, penis-like tentacles.

  Once they’ve all described videos to each other for a while, the conversation turns to jobs. Paul shifts uncomfortably in his chair.

  ‘What’re you up to these days?’ asks a lad called Kareem, who Paul wonders if he’s ever even met before.

  ‘I was teaching for a while,’ Paul says, ‘at the uni. Then I did a bit of . . . promotional stuff. But now it’s mostly freelance, writing gigs.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Kareem asks, nodding enthusiastically, a lot more interested in this than Paul was hoping.

  ‘It’s not that interesting,’ Paul says.

  But Kareem persists.

  ‘What kind of writing? Magazine stuff?’

  ‘It’s more online, really.’

  ‘Not SEO?’ Kareem almost shouts.

  Paul nods.

  ‘No way! That’s what I’m in, too! Not the writing of it, but the back-end stuff.’

  ‘What a coincidence,’ Paul says.

  He’s only been bidding on freelancing websites for keyword-rich article-writing jobs for about a fortnight but already he hates it deeply. He’s been doing all the actual writing on Sarah’s netbook, too, and its miniature keyboard makes the shitty articles he has to compose seem even more trivial and banal and ridiculous than they already are. The absolute worst are the porn ones. Paul’s latest assignment (he’s still got half left to do when he gets back) is writing the bits of keyword-heavy copy for a group of extreme niche porn sites, all with names like Tentacle Rape and Sneaker Sniffers and Domgirls and Schoolbabe Hentai and The Toonporn Repository.

  ‘This horny tentacle monster is ready to fuck every gaping hole of this screaming nude glistening Japanese babe in this erotic and completely free gallery of 100% free hardcore Japanese tentacle rape movies.’

  That’s the kind of thing Paul’s been writing recently.

  And the worst part of all is that it’s not even writing, not really. No one’s actually reading any of it. It’s just a way of pushing these websites to the front p
age of Google for the benefit of a small pocket of tentacle fetishists. Paul’s copy doesn’t need to be elegant. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to be a certain number of words long and stuffed with as many potential search terms as possible:

  tentacle porn

  tentacle sex

  tentacle fuck

  tentacle impregnation

  tentacle monster

  japanese tentacle porn

  tentacle videos

  tentacle porn videos

  live action tentacle porn

  tentacle sex videos

  tentacle bondage

  japanese tentacle sex

  live action tentacle attack

  tentacle swallowing ecstasy

  On top of all that, it pays pennies.

  For the porn work, Paul’s being paid 0.5 of a cent per word, weekly, into a PayPal account. Which means he needs to write about 3,500 words an hour, just to make minimum wage.

  ‘Whose round is it?’ someone asks.

  Paul decides to take the hit early, while they’re still in Wetherspoon’s and everyone’s just on pints.

  ‘I’ll get these,’ he says, lifting himself out of his chair.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ David – the stag – says, and after they’ve taken everyone’s orders (Fosters, Fosters, Fosters top, Fosters, Stella, Fosters), the two wander over to the bar.

  ‘You know Lauren’s going to be there, right?’ David says.

  Paul didn’t know this, no. He wonders why she would, then remembers that David met his fiancée, Jenny, through them in the first place. Jenny was one of Lauren’s friends from uni. Of course.

  ‘Yeah, I’d heard something,’ he says.

  He feels embarrassed, even now, of the public mess he made of himself after Lauren broke up with him. He still hates anything at all to do with Canada.

  ‘And where’s Ian tonight?’ he asks.

  ‘No one knows,’ David says. ‘I sent him the Facebook invites to this and the reception, but he’s not replied to any of them. I don’t think anyone’s heard from him in months.’

  David looks more upset by this than Paul was expecting.

  He wonders if it’s strange that he doesn’t really give that much of a fuck about any of them any more.