he spoke.
Be nice, Lauren told herself.
It took almost every single fibre of her being not to just tell him to fuck off.
Instead, she politely shook her head and said, ‘Just Vancouver. Sorry.’
‘Hey, me too,’ he said, smiling and nodding too excitedly as he flashed his ridiculously white teeth at her again.
I bet nothing bad has ever happened to him in his entire life, Lauren thought, before remembering that nothing bad had ever really happened in her life, either.
‘Are you taking a taxi, yes?’
‘I guess so.’
‘And you already have a hostel booked, yes?’
Lauren considered lying, then shook her head.
‘Then you should come with us,’ he said, turning and gesturing to another two identical, possible-Germans who were both smiling and waving at her, looking full of energy and not like they’d just come out of a nine-and-a-half-hour Reese-Witherspoon/feminist essay marathon.
Is this actually what happens in other countries? Lauren wondered. Is everyone else really just as friendly as those cartoon teenagers in foreign language textbooks, as soon as you step outside England?
Just then the familiar brown and green of Lauren’s suitcase caught her eye, about to sail past them on the conveyor belt.
‘That’s my . . .’ she said, pointing it out but making no real effort to move towards it, instead feeling an immobilising tiredness sweep through her.
The blond boy smiled and bounded towards it, plucking it off the belt with one hand.
‘Okay, great,’ he said breathlessly as he placed it at her feet, as if something had been decided.
The boy, it turned out, was called Per (pronounced ‘pear’). He was Norwegian, and so were his two friends, Leif (like ‘leaf’) and Knut (‘nut’). As in salad, thought Lauren, as they crammed themselves into the back of a rattling, synthetic-pine-smelling taxi. She stayed quiet and let the three of them do the talking, pretending to be Norwegian too.
As they drove towards the city, the Rocky Mountains rose up from behind the concrete loops of the highway, and the Norwegians gasped and pointed them out, and one of them even tapped her on the shoulder, trying to jog her into excitement, too.
Be happy, she told herself.
The clock on the dashboard said 3:56, late afternoon, but it felt like no time at all.
The hostel Per had earmarked (The Flying Dog) looked, from the outside, more like a nightclub: just a large entranceway, set between a shuttered-up sports bar and a shuttered-up bookstore in what, Lauren guessed, was a slightly seedy, possible red-light area, just past the bridge into downtown. She kept her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, letting Per lift her bag from the taxi’s boot and carry it, along with his, up the sticky, glittery stairs and into the large, brightly painted, blue and white, first-floor reception area, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication album was playing in full on the stereo and groups of backpackers were lounging around the edges of the room on beanbags and the floor.
They trudged slowly towards the reception desk, and Lauren hung back, again letting the Norwegians do the talking. When it was finally her turn to check in, she showed the girl her passport, filled out her form and paid for a week’s stay using stiff, sharp new fifties, still in the Post Office wallet her mum had pressed into her hand at Milton Keynes. She felt a ripple of surprise flutter around the Norwegians re the amount of money she was carrying. Then each of them received a tight roll of hard, starchy sheets and a room key with a grubby, green plastic handle.
Here were a few questions that Lauren asked herself as she climbed the much less glittery, much more piss-smelling concrete stairs at the back of the hostel, up past the vending machines and the shared toilets and a row of industrial laundry baskets, to room 464:
Am I really doing this?
Am I enjoying myself?
Is this an exciting and valuable new life experience?
Am I making a massive mistake?
Are the Norwegian boys all staring at my arse?
She could, she knew, just get a real hotel room: a clean one, with just her in it.
The fourth-floor corridor smelled of a mixture of rotting vegetables, dirty washing and – possibly – marijuana. Their room was even worse; a wave of warm, rancid air attacked Lauren the moment she opened the door. The others didn’t seem to mind or notice it, claiming their beds and talking in Norwegian. They laughed loudly in unison, then turned to look at her, grinning.
‘What?’ Lauren said.
But they just carried on chattering, and she felt her cheeks begin to burn.
There were three bunks in the room – six mattresses in total – two of which had already been claimed by strangers; by their stained hiking rucksacks and their balls of dirty socks and their damp, dangling sports towels.
Lauren held her breath and wished she’d never agreed to this.
She wished again that she was in a hotel room instead, a proper one.
You could do it, you know.
You have the money.
You could say, ‘Fuck this,’ and leave, right this second.
‘You smoke? Drink?’ Per asked softly, tapping her on the arm, miming taking a swig from a bottle with one hand and then puffing on something with the other.
She looked down at her horrible bottom bunk, at the thin roll of bluey-grey sheets that she couldn’t quite bring herself to fit onto it, and nodded.
IAN
2014
As I wait for my name to be called, I have a go on one of the Jobsearch machines. I tap through the listings on the greasy, smudgy touchscreen, but there’s almost nothing that I can realistically see myself doing. Either you have to already have a specific qualification like animal care or a foreign language or a PGCE, or else you have to be prepared to do something really, really awful, like harass people in the street or clean their offices at five in the morning. I print out only two listings: one seeking someone willing to dress up as a large top hat to advertise a city-centre printing company, and the other for a part-time general assistant in a funeral home. I fold the long waxy printouts and put them in my jacket pocket, making sure to leave the edges poking out far enough so that Rick will see them. Then I wander back over to the seating area.
The Jobcentre is open plan, and from where I’m sitting I can see Rick chatting enthusiastically to a woman in a burka. He’s leaning across his desk and smiling at her, occasionally tonguing the sore red corners of his mouth. The whole place is heaving. It’s like a really depressing Argos. There must be over a hundred people milling around this large grey-and-red room.
Eventually
