need to stay here too long.’
Please don’t make me pay rent, I think.
‘I could ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre,’ she says. ‘He gets back next week.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
(I can think of almost nothing worse than working at a call centre with Martin as my boss.)
‘Have you spoken to Mum yet?’ she says.
‘Yep,’ I say quietly.
‘Well, you haven’t, because I called her just before I came to collect you and she knew nothing about all this.’
‘I’ll give her a ring later on.’
‘You’re going to have to help with rent and bills, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘And if you want to smoke, you’ll have to do it outside.’
I can hear it in her voice, just how much she’s enjoying telling me what to do. I keep quiet and nod my head as she continues, listing all the rules of the flat: how I have to try to keep all the doors closed to save the heat, and how I can’t have baths, just showers, and how I mustn’t run the taps unnecessarily while cleaning my teeth.
She is only six and a half minutes older than me but she’s always been the one in charge.
‘Is there internet?’ I say.
‘No.’
This takes a few seconds to fully sink in.
Who doesn’t have the internet? I think.
‘Who doesn’t have the internet?’ I say out loud.
‘I don’t,’ Carol says. ‘It’s a waste of money,’ and the way she says it reminds me of Dad.
I’m about to tell her, then stop myself.
I get in under the blankets, still in all my clothes, and curl myself into a ball. I close my eyes but suddenly I’m not tired any more.
I’ve unpacked most of my things – my two pairs of jeans and my three jumpers and my one smart shirt and trousers – into the wardrobe, and I’m using the taped-up cardboard box as a makeshift bedside table. There’s nothing useful inside it, anyway. It’s just full of sentimental things that I can’t quite bring myself to throw away: an envelope of letters, a collection of worn-down plectrums, a printed-out photo of a person holding a birthday cake, about a thousand gig tickets.
I’ve stuffed my guitar case as far as I can beneath the bed and set the alarm on my shitty Nokia for half-seven in the morning, and my plan is to find somewhere in the city first thing to print out copies of my CV and then spend the rest of the day walking around, handing them out.
I stretch my legs, and my feet touch a cold patch of blanket.
I turn onto my back.
I feel an email-shaped ache appear inside me, somewhere around my stomach.
It begins flashing on and off, but I ignore it as best I can.
Please leave me alone, I tell it.
All you’ve ever done is make me unhappy.
Earlier on, when I first unpacked and opened my laptop, a dialogue box popped up in the corner of the screen, asking if I wanted to view available wireless networks.
So I clicked OK and scanned down the list, and they all appeared to be locked and I was about to give up when I noticed one right at the bottom, open to anyone, called ‘Rosemary’s Wireless’.
As I watched my cursor begin to float towards it, I made my decision:
No more internet for a while.
And then, very quickly, before I could change my mind, I closed my laptop and put it away, right up on top of the wardrobe.
PAUL
2014
Somehow Paul finds himself teaching creative writing. He is thirty-one years old. He is going bald. He is wearing black skinny jeans and a pale blue shirt and a pair of smart, real-leather shoes. He is standing in a large room on the first floor of a university building, holding a marker pen, about to write something on a whiteboard. There are nineteen students in Paul’s class, a mixture of second- and third-year undergraduates, and as they all look up from their horseshoe of desks, waiting for him to speak, whatever it was that Paul had planned on saying disappears completely from his head.
It’s like Quantum Leap. He feels beamed-in. He feels like a stranger, suddenly, in his own body. He takes his hand away from the whiteboard and slips the marker back into his jeans pocket, as if that was what he’d meant to do with it all along.
‘Okay,’ he says, turning to face the class. ‘Let’s have a look at, um, at Rachel’s story. Did everyone print out Rachel’s story and read it through, yeah?’
The class give no indication that they’ve heard him.
‘Okay, who wants to go first?’ Paul says.
Nothing.
Each week, after about twenty minutes of Paul’s stuttering and mumbling on an aspect of creative writing, they will critique the first draft of a short story by someone in the group, and no one will ever say anything much about it except, ‘I liked it, I guess.’
This week it’s Rachel’s turn.
Rachel’s story is called ‘The House’.
Nothing happens in it.
There are no characters.
It’s just this three-page description of a house.
Paul glances across at Rachel, who’s looking down at her desk, puffing out her cheeks in mock embarrassment, her scrappy, disorganised ring binder spilling open in front of her.
‘Alison?’ Paul asks the girl with the pale moon face and thick black eyeliner, seated directly to Rachel’s left. ‘Do you want to start us off? What did you think of Rachel’s story, Alison? Alison? Alison?’
Alison looks up from her iPhone, startled, then opens her plastic folder and takes out the three sheets of paper that Paul had asked them to print out and gives them a once-over.
‘I liked it, I guess,’ she says.
Eventually, class finishes and everyone closes their folders and puts away their tablets and laptops and zips up their rucksacks and starts drifting out of the room. It’s protocol for the person whose story has just been workshopped to have an extra ten minutes alone with the tutor afterwards, in case there’s anything else they need to go over in private. So as the class disperse, Rachel hangs around by Paul’s desk, chatting to Alison.
‘Right,
