‘Good day?’ Sarah asks, when Paul gets in.
Paul stands in the doorway to the living room and thinks about his day: the hours spent preparing his creative writing mini lecture in the morning, almost all of which evaporated from his head the moment he actually needed to say it, his shitty overpriced chicken tikka sandwich for lunch, his class in the afternoon, then Alison’s ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw’, his complete inability to tell Rachel her story was dreadful, the wasted hours wandering around Blue 2 with his head swimming and buzzing, for some reason unable to just choose a table and sit at it, and then this: coming home to a small, damp living room and the smell of drying washing and not even feeling bad or angry or fucked off about it, just nothing, absolutely nothing, like he’s trapped in a Paul-sized envelope of fog, maybe, and thinks: no, I’ve not had a good day.
‘Yeah, pretty good,’ he says. ‘You?’
‘Not bad,’ Sarah says. ‘There’s some soup in the freezer if you like. I’m not eating anything this week.’
So Paul walks into the kitchen, takes an ice cream tub from the freezer, opens it, and tips the contents – a speckled orange brick of frozen carrot soup – into a pot on the hob. As it begins to hiss, he turns on the little radio on the countertop.
‘We live in a culture now,’ an angry-sounding person says, ‘where people simply don’t want to pay for and support the arts any more.’
Paul nudges the sizzling brick of soup around the pan with a stained wooden spoon.
‘I’m sorry but that’s rubbish,’ another angry-sounding person on the radio says. ‘People always shared things. They lent each other books, records, CDs. Digital piracy is just a new form of borrowing. We have more access to culture than ever. And I think people are still willing to pay for that culture, if it’s something they really—’
Paul turns off the radio.
According to his last royalty statement, only four hundred and twenty-one people were willing to pay for his novel in paperback.
He thinks again about his new thing, whatever it is, about how impossible it seems to just decide on a single idea and see it through to a satisfying, meaningful conclusion. He doesn’t seem to have a brain that can think in a straight line any more. In its current incarnation, Paul’s new ‘novel’ is actually just a straight retelling of his first serious relationship at university. Oh dear, he thinks. Who the fuck would want to read that?
He feels sick suddenly. A spinning, dizzying sickness, like the one he gets whenever he tries to smoke weed. He turns off the hob and tips the mostly-still-frozen brick of soup back into its ice cream tub and returns it to the freezer. He takes a few deep breaths – in, hold, maybe I should start a Twitter account, release – and waits for the panic to subside. Then he goes and stands in the doorway, looking at the back of Sarah’s head.
‘I’m going to do some writing in the bedroom for a bit,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ Sarah says, not taking her eyes off the TV.
On his way to the bedroom, Paul passes the BT wireless router. I should just turn it off, he thinks. I should just unplug it and ask Sarah to hide it somewhere.
He doesn’t, though.
He carries on down the hall to the bedroom and climbs onto the bed. No slacking off tonight, he thinks as the laptop boots up. Once it’s running, Paul just sits looking at his desktop for a long time. He feels completely numb. He thinks about Alison Whistler. He thinks about Jonathan Franzen. He thinks about a person called Lauren Cross who was his first ever girlfriend and who is one of the two main characters in his latest novel (the other being himself).
No slacking off tonight, he thinks again.
He looks at the icon for Word.
He looks at the icon for Chrome, sitting just to the right of it, like Alison Whistler sitting just to the right of dowdy Rachel Steed in class.
He double clicks on Chrome and it opens on the Google homepage. Paul types ‘Twitter’ into Google. He clicks the link to Twitter. On the homepage, he begins filling in the sign-up form, wondering what shitty username he’s going to choose. Even just writing ‘Paul Saunders’ makes him feel a little depressed. If I had a better name, Paul thinks, a more interesting, unusual name, like ‘Franzen’ for instance, then all the other things in my life would probably be more interesting, too, as a consequence.
Paul fills in his email address and types in a password (Lauren500, the password he still, automatically, unthinkingly types for everything), and then, wearily, hits return.
On the next page, Twitter has suggested his username for him: paulsan62904936.
He selects and deletes paulsan62904936 and enters PaulSaunders.
This username is already taken! it says.
He tries ‘PaulSaundersNovelist’ but it only lets him type as far as PaulSaundersNove.
He types ‘Iamadickhead’.
This username is already taken! Twitter tells him.
A few hours later, Sarah comes into the bedroom. It’s half-ten, which is her usual bedtime on a weeknight. She has to get up at six in the morning, to commute an hour and a half on public transport to an admin job in Liverpool. Paul wonders why she never complains, about anything, even though, for the last year or so, since Paul’s royalties dried up, she’s been covering almost all of their rent and bills, never quite leaving enough money remaining to go out or buy anything other than ‘essentials’ (toilet paper, rice, etc.). She’s had to cancel her Virgin Active membership and her subscription to Marie Claire. (‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll just read things on my phone.’)
This teaching job is a positive new development; it might only be a single-semester contract right now, but Paul’s hoping it will lead to other similar work, because it’s not like he’s about to finish his novel anytime soon, despite what he’s been telling everyone.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sarah says.
‘Nothing’s the matter,’ Paul says, quickly closing Chrome.
‘You just looked all . . . shifty.’
‘Shifty how?’
‘Just shifty,’ she grins. ‘Like you were doing something you shouldn’t be doing. Were you writing another sex scene?’
He knows she’s just trying to joke around with him, but he can’t join in.
‘No,’ he says, slamming the lid of his laptop. ‘I mean, I was writing but it was just . . . you know, writing. Nothing sexy, I’m afraid.’
Paul and Sarah have not had sex in almost four months. At moments like this, it dangles between them like a cobweb. Sarah takes off her shirt and reaches behind her back to unclasp her bra and the no-sex cobweb flutters a little in the breeze.
‘Carry on writing if you want,’ she says. ‘You don’t need to stop just because I’m here.’
‘It’s fine,’ Paul says. ‘I think I’m done for the evening, anyway.’
His heart’s pounding and his hands are trembling as he puts the laptop on the floor next to his side of the bed.
He gets up and starts undressing, too.
‘You sure you’re okay?’ Sarah asks.
‘I’m fine,’ Paul says, a little too quickly, as he fumbles with the clasp of his belt.
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