today then, mate?’ he says once I’m sat down.
Up close, his mouth looks even worse than before. I almost want to ask him about it.
‘Not bad,’ I say.
‘Any luck on the old job front?’
‘Not really,’ I say, feeling my mind suddenly shed itself of all the fake information I’d stuffed it with. I’d spent all morning going over my story, making sure I’d filled in a decent number of boxes on the What I’ve Been Doing To Look For Work booklet and then memorising all the things I’d made up.
‘O–kay,’ Rick says, peering at his computer screen, double-clicking his mouse. ‘Call centre. I’ve got a call centre here.’
‘Alright,’ I say.
‘We need dynamic, self-motivated individuals to work in this unique and exciting new business opportunity,’ he reads, not very dynamically, off the screen. ‘Sound any good?’
‘What would I be selling exactly?’
He rests his chin on his hand. His little finger dabs at the blistered corners of his mouth as his eyes dart hopelessly round the screen.
‘It doesn’t say,’ he says.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘I’ll print it out,’ he says.
PAUL
2014
On Saturday night, Paul goes for a pint with his friend Damon at the bar down the road. They sit at one of the small circular tables in the busy pavement seating area, where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and baking hot from the overhead heaters.
‘It’s this bloke, right,’ Damon says, ‘and he’s shouting at this busker, this trumpet player, telling him how shit he is. But he’s, like, really, really intelligent.’
‘I’ve definitely not seen it,’ Paul says.
‘It’s great,’ Damon says, trying to find the YouTube clip on his phone. ‘Fuck. It’s not buffering. I’ll send it to you when I get in.’
‘Cheers,’ Paul says.
Damon is one of Paul’s only friends in Manchester. They met six years ago, when they were both working on the fiction desk in Waterstone’s, while Paul was still writing his first novel. And now Paul’s teaching and writing full time and Damon is working in telesales. Sometimes Paul can tell how envious Damon is of his lifestyle – how, from the outside, it must look to everyone like he’s just swanning around in his own clothes, making things up all day – and as such Paul finds it almost impossible to ever really complain, at all, about anything: about how he wasted the whole of today watching videos of Jonathan Franzen interviews, for instance, or how yesterday he wrote two and a half thousand words of seemingly good prose, only to come back to it this morning to discover it had transformed into a fucking piece of shit overnight. And so whenever Paul hangs out with Damon, Paul has to just pretend that everything is completely, totally fine.
‘I almost handed in my notice the other day,’ Damon says. ‘I wrote it in between calls and printed it out on my morning break. And then I carried it round in my pocket, you know, waiting for the right time to give it to my manager. But I found that, just by having it on me like that, I felt a bit better, you know? A bit more in control of things . . .’
‘Right,’ says Paul, not really listening.
‘. . . so I’ve decided to just carry on like that for a while and see how it goes . . .’
Paul tongues the lump in his mouth.
‘. . . I’m not like you. I don’t have a thing that I’m good at . . .’
Paul moves his tongue backwards and forwards over the lump, wishing it would go away. The skin around it has become sore and rough, due to all his recent tonguing. It has the same kind of sting as an ulcer, and as he tongues it, his mouth fills with a thin, sour fluid.
He considers telling Damon about the lump, but he doesn’t know quite how to phrase it. Also, he doesn’t want to say it out loud. He’s very nearly Googled ‘lump on inside lower gum’ six or seven times now. He’s stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his mouth open, peering inside it at the visible pinky-white bump, feeling his heart quicken and needle-pricks of cold sweat break out on his skin.
It’s nothing, he’s told himself.
It will go away.
It’s just . . . mouth cancer.
‘I think I’m dying, Damon,’ Paul (almost) says, there at the wobbly little outdoor table. And he knows what Damon would say, too, if he did actually tell him. He’d say what anyone in their right mind would say: ‘Go and get it checked out at the doctor’s, you fucking idiot.’
But the thing is, as long as Paul doesn’t get it checked out, it could still be benign.
He watches Damon chugging away on a full-strength B&H, complaining about how much he hates his job but doesn’t know quite what he wants to do instead, his lips all chapped, his huge forehead beaded with sweat, his ginger hair sticking up in brittle tufts, his eyes small and round and angry, and thinks: You lucky, lucky bastard.
Take a big swig of your pint, Paul. It’s Friday night. You should be enjoying yourself. Relax. Take a few deep breaths. Just focus on what Damon is saying.
Paul’s gaze drifts to the twenty-pack of B&H on the table between them.
He takes his phone out of his pocket, checks it, puts it back, then looks at the fag packet again.
‘Can I have a cig?’ he says.
‘Is that really a good idea, mate?’
But before Damon can stop him, Paul opens the pack, sticks one in his mouth and lights it.
A little later, Paul stumbles up the stairs to his flat, fumbles with the key, gets the door open after three attempts, stumbles inside. He’s bought a pack of ten Marlboro Lights from the garage on the way home. Sarah’s not back until Sunday evening, he reminds himself as he forces the living-room windows open as wide as they’ll go, then heads into the kitchen for something to use as an ashtray.
He comes back in with an old saucer and a fridge-cold can of lager and sits down on the sofa, turns on his laptop, lifts it onto his knees. He lights a Marlboro Light and sucks deeply, then exhales a plume of smoke towards the ceiling.
Sarah would go mental if she saw him.
Her uncle died of emphysema.
Her whole family are extremely anti-smoking.
That was one of the things that got Paul off on the wrong foot with her mum in the first place: he’d sneaked downstairs to have a roll-up in her back garden and then left the stub in one of her plant pots.
The whole family went nuts at him.
On the train
