says Rachel.
‘Well, she’ll have to wait outside,’ Paul says.
They’re both looking at him now: Rachel in her unflattering Rip Curl hoodie and baggy jeans, Alison in a translucent whitish T-shirt that hangs off her shoulder and a pair of those shiny black leggings.
They’re so young, Paul thinks. They can only be nineteen, if that.
Don’t look at Alison’s bra, he tells himself, as his eyes drift down towards it, completely visible beneath her T-shirt.
He still can’t work out if she’s a goth or not. Do you even get goths any more? Her hair is dyed black and her fingernails are painted black and her eyes are always heavily made up in thick black eyeliner, but unlike the goth girls Paul knew as a teenager, she’s always wearing these aggressively tight clothes, and whenever she walks around, at the start and end of class, she causes something to coil, a little inappropriately, in Paul’s stomach. There’s a small tattoo on her forearm, a black triangle which – for the first few weeks of class – he thought was drawn on, and another (a rose? a snake? a rose and a snake?) curling mysteriously in the hair behind her left ear.
‘Alright, let’s go,’ Paul says, bundling up his notes and pens and nodding towards the door. Rachel exits first, then Alison, then Paul. He feels himself hanging back a little in order to sneak a quick glance at the smooth round curves of Alison’s buttocks beneath her shiny leggings as she swishes along the corridor ahead of him.
Jesus, he thinks, stop being such a cliché.
Outside the door to ‘his’ office (which is actually just a spare office room that Paul and all the creative writing PhDs have been sharing this semester) Alison announces that she’s gonna go downstairs and get a coffee actually, and that she’ll wait for Rachel in the café bit.
As she turns to leave, she catches Paul’s eye and says, ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw.’
‘Oh . . . right,’ Paul says, taken aback, wanting to carry on speaking but not quite sure what to say.
‘See ya,’ she says, possibly to Paul but much more probably to Rachel, spinning on the rubber heel of her low-rise Converse and heading off down the corridor, her leggings stretched so tight that Paul can just about make out the tiny strips of her knicker elastic beneath them, digging into her hips.
And then he and poor old dowdy Rachel Steed go into the office, a cramped grey room with an old computer desk in the far corner and a couple of brown plastic chairs which Paul sets out for them.
‘How do you feel that went?’ he says.
Rachel examines the end of her stubby fingernail, picks at it, then looks up at him with an intensity he wasn’t expecting. ‘My story’s shit, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Admit it.’
Paul glances at the printout on the desk in front of him, at the parts he’s underlined, his handwritten notes in the margins, things like: Where are the characters? and What’s this about, exactly?
He looks back up at her and she’s still staring at him.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ he says, feeling a bit scared of her all of a sudden.
‘It’s good,’ he hears himself say, which was definitely not what he’d planned on saying last night as he read it over for the first time and groaned, inwardly, not just about how shit Rachel’s story was but about almost everything in his life: his writing, his flat, his relationship, his diet, his bank account, his baldness . . .
‘I mean, it needs more work,’ he says, ‘but as a first draft, it’s actually kind of great.’
LAUREN
2004
Lauren woke in her old pyjamas, in her old bed, in her old room, and felt a frustration so acute it was like a needle jabbing at her heart. She lifted her phone from the bedside table, brought it to her face, and squinted at the display, where a tiny envelope symbol flashed on and off. Paul, she guessed, correctly, before clicking through to her messages. Without opening it she held down a button on the phone, until it asked her if she wanted to delete this message.
Yes, she selected.
Oh, if only she could also delete the memory of the one time he came here, and slept in this bed with her, his bony elbows digging in her back. And then, the next morning, he’d crouched down by her bookcase and slid her battered copy of Ariel off the shelf (the one with all her embarrassing, well-intentioned A-level annotations in it), even though she’d already told him she didn’t want him looking through her things. And then, that same night, he’d fallen out with her mum over seemingly nothing, maybe it was for smoking in the garden, and the whole time he’d had that same dazzled, gawping face on him which was the face almost everyone made the first time they came here and saw her mum’s house and commented on how big it was, and realised just how well off they must be.
Halfway down the stairs, Lauren heard the sizzle of bacon.
Don’t be argumentative, she told herself as she entered the kitchen and took a seat (the nearest to the door) at the gigantic wooden table – a new addition to the room. Just say nice things. Do whatever your mum wants. Tell her about yourself. Don’t act like a stroppy teenager for once. Finally become a grown-up.
‘You are eating meat at the moment, aren’t you?’ Lauren’s mum said.
‘I’ve stopped again,’ Lauren lied.
Why did you say that?
Lauren’s mum turned off the hob and ran her fingers through her newly cut hair (a shiny, dyed-gold bob, the kind of thing you might see on daytime TV), then scratched at a fleck of burnt lasagne on the counter top. ‘What’s your plan, then?’ she said in a different, colder voice.
‘Dunno,’ Lauren said.
‘Planning on getting dressed at all?’
Lauren pulled her dressing gown a little tighter around her waist, brought her feet up off the cold tiles and onto the chair.
‘I am dressed,’ she said.
Her mum scraped the half-fried rashers of bacon into the pedal bin, then stuck the pan into the sink. It hissed like a cat.
Start again.
Try to be nice this time.
‘I guess I could have some bacon, actually?’ Lauren said.
Her mum just sighed.
‘Look, I don’t know what I’m doing yet, alright?’ Lauren said. ‘With my life. Okay? And anyway, it’s not as if . . .’
Oh dear.
What are you about to say now?
There’s still time not to say it, you know, to say something else.
‘As if what?’ her mum asked, plunging her hand into the sink, angrily rummaging around beneath the
