He wondered, as he read back over these scenes, what Alison thought when she reached them, whether they changed her opinion of him at all, whether they turned her on or just made her think he was creepy . . .
He picks up the phone and wipes his thumb across the screen.
No new texts, or emails, or anything.
He types ‘Goodnight x’ in a message to Sarah and hits send.
Then he turns off the light, takes a pillow from the empty side of the bed and starts to spoon it.
When Paul closes his eyes, he finds himself looking once again at that glossy, harshly lit webcam cabinet. The thin, pale girl in her tiny blue bikini smiles and waves at him. Jesus. Paul swipes her away to the back of his brain with a big, imaginary thumb. And now, instead, sitting a little awkwardly at the other end of the webcam chat is Alison Whistler. ‘Take off your top,’ Paul commands in a computery Stephen Hawking voice. But Alison Whistler gives him the finger, then lifts a bottle of Jägermeister to her lips and chugs it, just like she did in that Facebook video from a student house party in Fallowfield. She pulls the bottle away, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, ‘I read your book this weekend, btw.’
Paul’s phone buzzes and he picks it up and looks at it.
‘Goodnight x,’ Sarah’s message says.
We really need to break up, Paul thinks, shifting onto his other side and throwing his leg over the pillow now, too, sort of dry-humping it in an effort to get comfortable. Sarah can move back in with her parents and I can stay here, or maybe I’ll get the deposit back from the flat and go travelling instead; India, or Australia, or somewhere warm anyway, where I can grow a massive beard and walk around barefoot and not talk to anyone about writing for a wh—
He moves his tongue to brush what feels like a small bit of food away from his gum, but it’s not food, Paul realises, as his tongue continues to scrub across it. It’s a lump. Maybe I burned my mouth earlier on, he thinks, hopefully. Except Paul can’t remember burning his mouth on anything and anyway, the more he tongues it, the less it feels like a burn and more just like a hard, scary, not-going-anywhere lump. Oh shit. It feels massive against his tongue, sitting there on the inside of his lower gum on the right-hand side of his mouth. Paul worries it with his tongue, flicking the tip against it, then pressing his whole tongue against it, as hard as he can, in an attempt to make it go away or soften. Which it doesn’t.
His heart’s thudding now and a cold sweat is prickling out all over his body.
Mouth cancer, a voice whispers inside him.
Fucking hell.
This is the result of all those years smoking, from when you were fifteen years old until about eight months ago.
Fucking hell.
You were a smoker, a full-time, twenty-a-day smoker for close to sixteen years. Of course this has happened. Mouth cancer at thirty-one.
Fucking hell.
His T-shirt becomes damp at the armpits as he reaches into his mouth and touches the lump with his fingertip.
What will he tell his parents?
They’re getting old, they’ve just retired; the last thing they need is their only son phoning them up to announce that he has mouth cancer.
He presses the lump hard with his fingertip but it doesn’t go away, and as he tongues it, he makes an involuntary whimpering sound. The bed sheets twist around him, pinning him, and he wrestles himself free and props himself upright, gasping, yanking at the neck of his T-shirt.
He grabs his phone and swipes his thumb across the screen. It illuminates the room like a cold blue candle. He checks his emails, his messages, his Facebook, but there’s absolutely nothing online – not even a folder of Alison Whistler’s photos from three years ago titled ‘Pyjama Lolz’ – that can distract him now.
He opens the Google app, types ‘mouth ca’, then stops.
Because if I write it down, Paul thinks, then it becomes real.
LAUREN
2004
At the baggage claim, as Lauren waited for her gigantic suitcase to pop from the flapping mouth of the carousel, she felt a gentle tap on the shoulder. She turned and looked up into the bright, tanned face of a tall blond boy. He looked German, possibly, or Scandinavian.
‘Are you going on to Whistler? For snowboarding?’ he asked in a hesitant Swedish(?) accent. His teeth were extremely square and white, and he had one of those ridiculous little triangular patches of hair beneath his bottom lip, which waved at her as he spoke.
Be nice, Lauren told herself.
It took almost every single fibre of her being not to just tell him to fuck off.
Instead, she politely shook her head and said, ‘Just Vancouver. Sorry.’
‘Hey, me too,’ he said, smiling and nodding too excitedly as he flashed his ridiculously white teeth at her again.
I bet nothing bad has ever happened to him in his entire life, Lauren thought, before remembering that nothing bad had ever really happened in her life, either.
‘Are you taking a taxi, yes?’
‘I guess so.’
‘And you already have a hostel booked, yes?’
Lauren considered lying, then shook her head.
‘Then you should come with us,’ he said, turning and gesturing to another two identical, possible-Germans who were both smiling and waving at her, looking full of energy and not like they’d just come out of a nine-and-a-half-hour Reese-Witherspoon/feminist essay marathon.
Is this actually what happens in other countries? Lauren wondered. Is everyone else really just as friendly as those cartoon teenagers in foreign language textbooks, as soon as you step outside England?
Just then the familiar brown and green of Lauren’s suitcase caught her eye, about to sail past them on the conveyor belt.
‘That’s my . . .’ she said, pointing it out but making no real effort to move towards it, instead feeling an immobilising tiredness sweep through her.
The blond boy smiled and bounded towards it, plucking it off the belt with one hand.
‘Okay, great,’ he said breathlessly as he placed it at her feet, as if something had been decided.
The boy, it turned out, was called Per (pronounced ‘pear’). He was Norwegian, and so were his two friends, Leif (like ‘leaf’) and Knut (‘nut’). As in salad, thought Lauren, as they crammed themselves into the back of a rattling, synthetic-pine-smelling taxi. She stayed quiet and let the three of them do the talking, pretending to be Norwegian too.
As they drove towards the city, the Rocky Mountains rose up from behind the concrete loops of the highway, and the Norwegians gasped and pointed them out, and one of them even tapped her on the shoulder, trying to jog her into excitement, too.
Be happy, she told herself.
The clock on the dashboard said 3:56, late afternoon, but it felt like no time at all.
The hostel Per had earmarked (The Flying Dog) looked, from the outside, more like a nightclub: just a large entranceway, set between a shuttered-up sports bar and a shuttered-up bookstore in what, Lauren guessed, was a slightly seedy, possible red-light area, just past the bridge into downtown. She kept her hands in the pouch of her hoodie, letting Per lift her bag from the taxi’s boot and carry it, along with his, up the sticky, glittery stairs and into the large, brightly painted, blue and white, first-floor reception area, where the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication album was playing in full on the stereo and groups of backpackers were lounging around the edges of the room on beanbags and the floor.
They trudged