Sarah carefully lays out her outfit for tomorrow on the little chair by her dresser, then gets into bed.
Paul sits on the edge of it, peeling off his grey M&S socks and throwing them, one by one, into the gloomy corner of the bedroom. Before getting into bed, he quickly goes back into the corridor and rattles the bolt on the front door to their flat, just to make sure that nobody is able to burst in during the night and attack them. Then Paul gets into bed, imagining actually talking about their relationship; asking Sarah if she’s really happy, hinting abstractly towards the possibility of them breaking up.
How can she be happy? he wonders. This is awful.
‘Can you put the light out?’ she says.
‘Sure,’ Paul says.
I’ll say it tomorrow night, he thinks. Sarah needs her sleep.
She turns her back to him and curls herself into a ball at the edge of the mattress, which is the only position she can ever get to sleep in.
Paul reaches over and puts the light out, then lies on his back for a long time in the dark with his eyes open.
LAUREN
2004
On the aeroplane, Lauren closed her eyes and pressed her balled hands into her lap and waited for the noisy, shuddering part to finish. As she waited, she tried not to think about Paul. She tried not to feel guilty about The Notebook Incident, or to picture him shuffling around sadly in his BHS dressing gown, left like an abandoned pet in the house which, she guessed, her mum was still paying half the rent on.
As the screeching got louder instead of quieter, she began to convince herself that the plane was going to crash. She began to imagine – as the cabin lights flickered and the plane’s body dipped very slightly and a lady a few rows behind made a small oh sound – one of the engines exploding in a shitty, mid 90s Die Hard-style flash of superimposed flames and sparks. What a corny way to die, she thought as her heart began to thump.
Then, very suddenly, all the screeching stopped, and Lauren trained her vision on a small hinged rectangle of the plane’s wing, flapping away above other larger rectangles of boring brown field, before everything tilted and span, and then was hidden beneath a solid-looking layer of cloud.
The seatbelt lights blinked out.
The captain made a crackly announcement about cabin pressure and altitude.
The pastel-pink old lady in the next seat over smoothed a few invisible creases from her trousers, and then turned and gave Lauren such a forlorn, biscuit-yellow grin it forced Lauren’s heart to break just a tiny bit.
When the drinks trolley finally appeared, Lauren asked in her most grown-up voice for a vodka and Coke, please, even though it said six a.m. on the clock inside her body. (She’d planned to ask for a double, but chickened out at the last minute.)
And then, once she’d had a few sips, she began an argument with Paul in her head:
I’m not just doing all this to bum you out, she told him sulkily. I was feeling miserable, too. It just wasn’t working, and deep down you know that.
Things sometimes just don’t work.
People don’t work together.
And you and I were two of those people, okay?
Okay?
Paul?
But he didn’t reply.
She put down her drink and rummaged through her hand luggage, amongst the lipsticks, ChapSticks, boiled sweets, and The Rough Guide to Vancouver, for The Second Sex, which she’d been intending to read for the past year and a half, and opened it, finally, at page one.
She forced her eyes along the sentences, even though she knew nothing was going in. And eventually – a whole three pages later; good going! – closed the book again and rested it on the tray next to her drink, unable to remember a word.
She looked out of the window.
She drummed her fingers against the grey plastic armrest.
Finally, she unwrapped her complimentary headphones, plugged them in, turned on the little seat-mounted TV and, from everything on offer, selected Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde.
In Vancouver International Airport, she attempted to feel excited, reminding herself that this was a Once In A Lifetime Experience. A few feet ahead, a group of tanned-legged, overly giggly female backpackers were all snapping away at the large Native Canadian totem pole at the bottom of the escalator, and when Lauren passed it, she forced herself to stop and take out the brand new Pentax her mum had bought her and do the same.
During a long, shuffling wait at passport control, she considered listening to her iPod, but realised that all the music loaded onto it was music that Paul had loaded onto it.
Paul, she thought.
Paul would recover.
Paul would be fine.
Paul would write a short story about this.
Paul would write a whole novel, probably.
Paul would sit for hours in the Broadway café and smoke a million roll-ups and drink pints of continental lager in funny-shaped glasses and write copious notes about what a total fucking bitch she was in one of his pretentious little Moleskine notebooks.
Oh Paul, I’m sorry, she thought just as the man in the passport booth beckoned her forward with a small wave.
I wonder how many miles apart we are, right at this exact moment.
IAN
2014
In the Jobcentre, an extremely tall man in a shiny grey suit tells me that his name is Rick and shakes my hand and smiles at me. There’s something wrong with his skin. Little bits of his face look so dry that they might flake off at any moment. It’s especially bad around his mouth. He gestures me into the seat opposite, then starts typing on his computer. Occasionally he stops to glance up at me. I wonder how old he is. It’s impossible to tell.
‘Right, then,’ Rick says, finishing his typing. ‘It says here that you worked in a music shop for the last six years, yeah? Can you tell me a little bit more about that?’
‘We sold CDs and DVDs and games and books,’ I say. ‘I just worked behind the till. I wasn’t a manager or anything.’
Rick nods and types a few words.
I don’t feel like I’m selling myself particularly well.
‘Then it closed down,’ I say.
‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘And why was that? Nothing to do with you, I hope?’
He smiles at me.
I can’t quite bring myself to join in.
Maybe his mouth might heal up quicker if he stopped smiling quite so much.
‘Things were cheaper online,’