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, let’s head down to my office,’ Paul says, once they’re the last three in the room.
‘Is it alright if Alison comes, too?’ 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