have no idea.
‘Twenty quid?’ I guess.
‘It came to thirty-six pounds sixty-eight.’
‘I don’t quite see what your point is,’ I say.
I’ve stopped doing the washing up now.
I’m just standing there with my hands in the water.
I imagine myself taking a plate out of the sink and smashing it against the counter top.
‘My point,’ Carol says, ‘is that you need to start saving money and stop buying brand names like a dickhead. How much do you have left in the bank, in total? Three hundred quid?’
‘Something like that.’
(It’s actually closer to thirty, but I don’t know the exact figure because I’ve been too scared to check my balance.)
‘You really need to start being more careful,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m just a bit of a mess at the moment. I’m not really thinking straight.’
I can feel my eyes becoming blurry and a buzzing warmth creeping up from my collar, so I turn back to the sink and pretend to do more washing up, but really I’m just putting my hands in the water and swishing them around to make noises.
I hear her screw up the receipt and stuff it back in the bin bag, then walk across the kitchen towards me. She rubs my arm and rests her head gently against my shoulder and I remain very still, like a rabbit. Beneath the water, I press my fingertip against the ridged blade of a bread knife.
‘You’ll be okay, you wally,’ she whispers.
PAUL
2014
Paul spends two distracted hours, wandering around the university library, unable to find a suitable table to work at. Then he sits, finally, in the Herbivores vegetarian café and doesn’t write anything anyway, just sips a cup of tea and attempts – vaguely, frantically, unsuccessfully – to come up with a better idea for a novel than the one he’s currently writing. Then he takes the bus home, to the one-bed flat in Didsbury, South Manchester, which he shares with his girlfriend Sarah.
During the journey, he takes his phone out of his jacket pocket and looks at his emails. There’s two: one from LinkedIn, telling him a person whose name he doesn’t recognise wants to connect with him, and one from his agent Julian:
From: Julian Miechowicz <[email protected]>
To: ‘Paul Saunders’ ([email protected]) [email protected]
Date: 06 Oct 2014 16:57pm
Subject: Novel
?
Sent from my iPhone
Julian Miechowicz | Conwin Black Associates
Julian is a transplanted American, a few years older than Paul, with a thick black beard and a pained, disinterested way of speaking. Every time Paul’s met Julian, Julian has at some point or other touched his beard and squinted and said a variation of the statement, ‘The publishing industry is a sinking ship; in ten years’ time people won’t be reading books any more.’ At their last meeting, which took place in the back room of a small pub in Soho, Paul promised Julian that he’d start a Twitter account, even though, deep down, he suspects that Twitter is for arseholes. He also promised that he’d have a draft of his novel ready for Julian to read ‘very, very soon’. That was almost two months ago, and Paul’s getting worried that Julian might drop him if he doesn’t deliver soon.
Paul stares at the floating question mark.
He begins to compose a reply on his phone – Sorry. Almost there. Just a few more – then gives up and exits Gmail, and taps his Facebook app instead, scrolling down the feed for something to distract him. He scrolls past a post about someone losing weight, a post about executions in Iran, a post about what film someone should stream tonight, and then taps, finally, on a shared link to an old Guardian interview with Jonathan Franzen about his writing method.
When you get home, Paul thinks as he begins to scan through the article, you are going to develop a new writing method, which is where you just sit down and actually write. No more dicking around on the internet. No more watching Come Dine With Me in the living room. Not until you have a full novel draft to show for yourself. When you get home, Paul, you are going to shut yourself away in the bedroom and work hard, for the first time in your life.
He stops reading the Jonathan Franzen article – turns out he’s read it before – and puts his phone back in his pocket and looks out of the window at a kid on a bike/a woman tying a dog up outside a cornershop/a man closing the boot of a Ford Fiesta/a plastic bag floating around in the wind like that bit in American Beauty.
Alison Whistler, Paul thinks.
In his head, she’s sat in class again, not paying attention to him, tapping away at her iPhone. She had a 5, which is two models up from Paul’s. She’s . . . what? Thirteen years younger than me? He wonders what she’s up to tonight. Whether she goes to those Vodka Island foam parties that he always sees the flyers for, littered up and down Oxford Road. He wonders whether she has a boyfriend.
(‘I read your book at the weekend, btw.’)
Paul’s book is called Human Animus.
It’s the reason he got the job at the uni in the first place, the reason he’s not working in a bar any more.
When Paul thinks about the Paul who wrote it: a thin, single man in his mid twenties, who still had all his hair and smoked twenty-five to thirty cigarettes a day, it’s as if he’s remembering someone else, a character in a film, maybe.
He removes a stale piece of nicotine gum from his mouth and rummages around in his coat pocket for a bit of paper to wrap it in. He takes out a small Moleskine notebook (which he paid over a tenner for at the university shop, and which he has decided to carry around with him, since about three weeks ago, in order to reignite his creativity), tears out the first page (still blank) and wraps up the gum. Then he takes a packet of Wrigley’s Extra from his other coat pocket and pops a pellet into his mouth. Since Paul gave up smoking almost eight months ago, at Sarah’s strong insistence, he’s been chewing gum – both nicotine and regular – like a maniac. He’s on about two packs a day.
Is Jonathan Franzen on Twitter? Paul wonders, remembering hazily that in another interview he had possibly spoken out against it.
As the bus creeps home, Paul imagines Franzen standing in a gigantic, air-conditioned kitchen, stretching his back a couple of times (it’s morning, he’s just woken up), then cracking the top on a bottle of ice-cold Perrier and walking
