Amazon, I nod.
He clicks his mouse a couple of times, then frowns at his screen, fiddling with a small patch of stubble on his chin and making a soft clacking noise with his tongue.
If I had to guess, I’d say he was in his mid thirties, about three school years above me.
‘And what were you doing before that job?’ he says.
‘Just bar work.’
‘No other skills?’
‘Not really.’
‘And you’ve got a degree in . . . in media studies, is that right?’
‘Yep. A two-one.’
‘Alright,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a bakery here. In Sale. Think you could handle working in a bakery?’
I try hard to imagine myself working in a bakery: I’m wearing an apron and one of those net hat things, and I’m carrying a tray of sickly, uncooked sausage rolls towards an industrial-sized oven.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
‘I’ll print it out anyway,’ Rick says.
He clicks his mouse and the printer begins to whirr and it sounds, very slightly, like the end of the world.
In the music shop, I spend a long time by the door, reading all the adverts on the Musicians Wanted notice board: Bass player needed for funk/soul/rock combo. Drummer required to complete British r’n’r/blues band. Energetic frontman/lyricist seeks full backing band. Influences: COUNTING CROWS, BLACK CROWES, BLACK SABBATH, ROLLING STONES, STONE ROSES, STONE TEMPLE PILOTS, OASIS, COLD-PLAY, KEANE . . .
Eventually, I shuffle over to the plectrums and maracas at the counter.
‘Need any help there, mate?’ a large bearded man with a deep voice asks when he notices me.
You don’t need to do this, I tell myself. There’s still time to change your mind. You could just say, ‘No thanks,’ and smile and walk away.
‘I was just wondering how much I might get for a guitar, second-hand?’ I say, nodding down at the case in my hand.
‘Follow me.’
He leads me towards the back of the shop, past the bass guitars and the P.A. systems and a teenage boy playing a Queens of the Stone Age song on one of the Gibsons.
‘Right, let’s have a look then,’ he says, dragging up a couple of stools.
His beard is big and black and greasy-looking with grey and white bits in it, and, just like mine, the fingertips of his strumming hand are nicotine-yellowed, the nails bitten back to the quick. I hand him my guitar case, feeling a twinge of embarrassment at the large black-and-white Postcards sticker on it, and he lays it on the floor in front of him, pops the locks, lifts the lid.
‘Very nice,’ he says, his tongue doing a quick, slimy swoop of his chapped bottom lip.
Then he lifts my guitar out of the case and up onto his lap.
‘You in a band?’ he says.
‘Not any more,’ I say.
He plugs the guitar into one of the practice amps, adjusts a few knobs, then strums some clean-tone blues riffs. I watch his stubby fingers go up and down the fretboard. He plays in a very different way to how I play. To how I used to play. He changes channels on the amp and starts doing some technical, widdly, Steve Vai-y stuff, the tip of his tongue peeping out from between his lips as he does a few bends and hammer-ons.
I feel sick.
I want to go home.
I want to get into bed and pull the covers over my head and never come out again.
‘Nice axe,’ he says, lifting my guitar up to his face to inspect the pick-ups, then the bridge. He rests it against the amp and rests his hands in his lap and looks at me sternly.
‘I’ll give you four twenty for it.’
On eBay, on a good day, it could fetch double that.
I take a deep breath.
‘So?’ Carol asks when she gets in from work. ‘How’s it going, jobseeker? Any luck?’
She’s dressed in the kind of smart black clothes you might wear to an office. I still don’t know what she does, and it’s gone on too long now to just straight-out ask her. All I know is that it probably has something to do with accounting, because accounting was what she studied at uni.
‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Went into town again, handed out a few more CVs.’
She takes off her coat and kicks off her shoes and sits down next to me on the sofa. I’m watching a programme about a middle-aged couple renovating their house. They keep complaining about things and then spending too much money and then complaining about things and then spending too much money. I’m waiting for them to have an argument or start crying.
‘I’ve got your rent money, by the way,’ I say.
‘You don’t have to give it to me now,’ she says.
‘I’ll just spend it, otherwise,’ I say.
I go back to my room and count out two hundred and twenty pounds (which is how much we’ve agreed for a month’s rent, including bills) from the four hundred and twenty in the envelope.
My plan is not to tell Carol I sold my guitar.
She’ll just freak out.
And anyway, I’m planning to buy it back again as soon as I get a job.
‘Want me to ask Martin if there’s anything going at the call centre?’ she says as I hand her the roll of notes.
I look over at the mantelpiece, at a framed picture of her and Martin together. I look at his piggy, too-close-together eyes and his thick red lips, his ruddy pink cheeks and Neanderthal brow, and try to imagine him as my boss.
(It still seems like the worst thing ever.)
‘Alright, yeah,’ I say, unable to hurt her feelings. ‘That’d be great, thanks.’
PAUL
2014
In bed one night, on his own, Paul closes Chrome, and hiding behind it is a pop-up window. Meet horny local single girls online for sexy camchats in your area, it urges him. It’s sometime in the early hours of the morning and Sarah has taken a week off work to visit her parents in Surrey and Paul has finally managed to get up off the sofa and climb into bed with his laptop, where he’s spent the last hour and a half poring through Alison Whistler’s Facebook photos (he accepted her friend request), then watched pornography.
Would any horny local single girls really be online at three thirty-eight a.m. on a Wednesday? Paul wonders. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen is a live feed of a thin, pale woman in a bright blue bikini. She stares blankly from her little window, then smiles and waves in Paul’s general direction. There’s a glistening pink dildo and a bottle of lube on the bed next to her. She doesn’t look local to Paul. She looks Eastern European, maybe. She’s blue-eyed and bleached-haired and scarily, skeletally thin. Paul closes the pop-up, shuts the lid of his laptop and puts it on the floor next to the bed.
He removes a tasteless wad of nicotine gum from his mouth and places it on the bedside table next to his charging iPhone, a sticky clump of toilet roll, and a paperback copy of his own first novel.
He’s been flipping through it, trying to remember what was in it, trying to look at it from the imagined perspective of Alison Whistler.
There’s a slightly miserable scene in it where a couple try to have sex in a train toilet, and another, a little later, which is