in the envelope.
My plan is not to tell Carol I sold my guitar.
She’ll just freak out.
And anyway, I’m planning to buy it back again as soon as I get a job.
‘Want me to ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre?’ she says as I hand her the roll of notes.
I look over at the mantelpiece, at a framed picture of her and Martin together. I look at his piggy, too-close-together eyes and his thick red lips, his ruddy pink cheeks and Neanderthal brow, and try to imagine him as my boss.
(It still seems like the worst thing ever.)
‘Alright, yeah,’ I say, unable to hurt her feelings. ‘That’d be great, thanks.’
PAUL
2014
In bed one night, on his own, Paul closes Chrome, and hiding behind it is a pop-up window. Meet horny local single girls online for sexy camchats in your area, it urges him. It’s sometime in the early hours of the morning and Sarah has taken a week off work to visit her parents in Surrey and Paul has finally managed to get up off the sofa and climb into bed with his laptop, where he’s spent the last hour and a half poring through Alison Whistler’s Facebook photos (he accepted her friend request), then watched pornography.
Would any horny local single girls really be online at three thirty-eight a.m. on a Wednesday? Paul wonders. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen is a live feed of a thin, pale woman in a bright blue bikini. She stares blankly from her little window, then smiles and waves in Paul’s general direction. There’s a glistening pink dildo and a bottle of lube on the bed next to her. She doesn’t look local to Paul. She looks Eastern European, maybe. She’s blue-eyed and bleached-haired and scarily, skeletally thin. Paul closes the pop-up, shuts the lid of his laptop and puts it on the floor next to the bed.
He removes a tasteless wad of nicotine gum from his mouth and places it on the bedside table next to his charging iPhone, a sticky clump of toilet roll, and a paperback copy of his own first novel.
He’s been flipping through it, trying to remember what was in it, trying to look at it from the imagined perspective of Alison Whistler.
There’s a slightly miserable scene in it where a couple try to have sex in a train toilet, and another, a little later, which is supposed to be erotic, where a girl describes an awkward threesome in minute detail while her boyfriend masturbates.
He wondered, as he read back over these scenes, what Alison thought when she reached them, whether they changed her opinion of him at all, whether they turned her on or just made her think he was creepy . . .
He picks up the phone and wipes his thumb across the screen.
No new texts, or emails, or anything.
He types ‘Goodnight x’ in a message to Sarah and hits send.
Then he turns off the light, takes a pillow from the empty side of the bed and starts to spoon it.
When Paul closes his eyes, he finds himself looking once again at that glossy, harshly lit webcam cabinet. The thin, pale girl in her tiny blue bikini smiles and waves at him. Jesus. Paul swipes her away to the back of his brain with a big, imaginary thumb. And now, instead, sitting a little awkwardly at the other end of the webcam chat is Alison Whistler. ‘Take off your top,’ Paul commands in a computery Stephen Hawking voice. But Alison Whistler gives him the finger, then lifts a bottle of Jägermeister to her lips and chugs it, just like she did in that Facebook video from a student house party in Fallowfield. She pulls the bottle away, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, ‘I read your book this weekend, btw.’
Paul’s phone buzzes and he picks it up and looks at it.
‘Goodnight x,’ Sarah’s message says.
We really need to break up, Paul thinks, shifting onto his other side and throwing his leg over the pillow now, too, sort of dry-humping it in an effort to get comfortable. Sarah can move back in with her parents and I can stay here, or maybe I’ll get the deposit back from the flat and go travelling instead; India, or Australia, or somewhere warm anyway, where I can grow a massive beard and walk around barefoot and not talk to anyone about writing for a wh—
He moves his tongue to brush what feels like a small bit of food away from his gum, but it’s not food, Paul realises, as his tongue continues to scrub across it. It’s a lump. Maybe I burned my mouth earlier on, he thinks, hopefully. Except Paul can’t remember burning his mouth on anything and anyway, the more he tongues it, the less it feels like a burn and more just like a hard, scary, not-going-anywhere lump. Oh shit. It feels massive against his tongue, sitting there on the inside of his lower gum on the right-hand side of his mouth. Paul worries it with his tongue, flicking the tip against it, then pressing his whole tongue against it, as hard as he can, in an attempt to make it go away or soften. Which it doesn’t.
His heart’s thudding now and a cold sweat is prickling out all over his body.
Mouth cancer, a voice whispers inside him.
Fucking hell.
This is the result of all those years smoking, from when you were fifteen years old until about eight months ago.
Fucking hell.
You were a smoker, a full-time, twenty-a-day smoker for close to sixteen years. Of course this has happened. Mouth cancer at thirty-one.
Fucking hell.
His T-shirt becomes damp at the armpits as he reaches into his mouth and touches the lump with his fingertip.
What will he tell his parents?
They’re getting old, they’ve just retired; the last thing they need is their only son phoning them up to announce that he has mouth cancer.
He presses the lump hard with his fingertip but it doesn’t go away, and as he tongues it, he makes an involuntary whimpering sound. The bed sheets twist around him, pinning him, and he wrestles himself free and props himself upright, gasping, yanking at the neck of his T-shirt.
He grabs his phone and swipes his thumb across the screen. It illuminates the room like a cold blue candle. He checks his emails, his messages, his Facebook, but there’s absolutely nothing online – not even a folder of Alison Whistler’s photos from three years ago titled ‘Pyjama Lolz’ – that can distract him now.
He opens the Google app, types ‘mouth ca’, then stops.
Because if I write it down, Paul thinks, then it becomes real.
LAUREN
2004
At the baggage claim, as Lauren waited for her gigantic suitcase to pop from the flapping mouth of the carousel, she felt a gentle tap on the shoulder. She turned and looked up into the bright, tanned face of a tall blond boy. He looked German, possibly, or Scandinavian.
‘Are you going on to Whistler? For snowboarding?’ he asked in a hesitant Swedish(?) accent. His teeth were extremely square and white, and he had one of those
