form and paid for a week’s stay using stiff, sharp new fifties, still in the Post Office wallet her mum had pressed into her hand at Milton Keynes. She felt a ripple of surprise flutter around the Norwegians re the amount of money she was carrying. Then each of them received a tight roll of hard, starchy sheets and a room key with a grubby, green plastic handle.
Here were a few questions that Lauren asked herself as she climbed the much less glittery, much more piss-smelling concrete stairs at the back of the hostel, up past the vending machines and the shared toilets and a row of industrial laundry baskets, to room 464:
Am I really doing this?
Am I enjoying myself?
Is this an exciting and valuable new life experience?
Am I making a massive mistake?
Are the Norwegian boys all staring at my arse?
She could, she knew, just get a real hotel room: a clean one, with just her in it.
The fourth-floor corridor smelled of a mixture of rotting vegetables, dirty washing and – possibly – marijuana. Their room was even worse; a wave of warm, rancid air attacked Lauren the moment she opened the door. The others didn’t seem to mind or notice it, claiming their beds and talking in Norwegian. They laughed loudly in unison, then turned to look at her, grinning.
‘What?’ Lauren said.
But they just carried on chattering, and she felt her cheeks begin to burn.
There were three bunks in the room – six mattresses in total – two of which had already been claimed by strangers; by their stained hiking rucksacks and their balls of dirty socks and their damp, dangling sports towels.
Lauren held her breath and wished she’d never agreed to this.
She wished again that she was in a hotel room instead, a proper one.
You could do it, you know.
You have the money.
You could say, ‘Fuck this,’ and leave, right this second.
‘You smoke? Drink?’ Per asked softly, tapping her on the arm, miming taking a swig from a bottle with one hand and then puffing on something with the other.
She looked down at her horrible bottom bunk, at the thin roll of bluey-grey sheets that she couldn’t quite bring herself to fit onto it, and nodded.
IAN
2014
As I wait for my name to be called, I have a go on one of the Jobsearch machines. I tap through the listings on the greasy, smudgy touchscreen, but there’s almost nothing that I can realistically see myself doing. Either you have to already have a specific qualification like animal care or a foreign language or a PGCE, or else you have to be prepared to do something really, really awful, like harass people in the street or clean their offices at five in the morning. I print out only two listings: one seeking someone willing to dress up as a large top hat to advertise a city-centre printing company, and the other for a part-time general assistant in a funeral home. I fold the long waxy printouts and put them in my jacket pocket, making sure to leave the edges poking out far enough so that Rick will see them. Then I wander back over to the seating area.
The Jobcentre is open plan, and from where I’m sitting I can see Rick chatting enthusiastically to a woman in a burka. He’s leaning across his desk and smiling at her, occasionally tonguing the sore red corners of his mouth. The whole place is heaving. It’s like a really depressing Argos. There must be over a hundred people milling around this large grey-and-red room.
Eventually I hear my name (‘Ian Wilson?’) and I look up, and there’s Rick waving me over.
‘So how are we doing today then, mate?’ he says once I’m sat down.
Up close, his mouth looks even worse than before. I almost want to ask him about it.
‘Not bad,’ I say.
‘Any luck on the old job front?’
‘Not really,’ I say, feeling my mind suddenly shed itself of all the fake information I’d stuffed it with. I’d spent all morning going over my story, making sure I’d filled in a decent number of boxes on the What I’ve Been Doing To Look For Work booklet and then memorising all the things I’d made up.
‘O–kay,’ Rick says, peering at his computer screen, double-clicking his mouse. ‘Call centre. I’ve got a call centre here.’
‘Alright,’ I say.
‘We need dynamic, self-motivated individuals to work in this unique and exciting new business opportunity,’ he reads, not very dynamically, off the screen. ‘Sound any good?’
‘What would I be selling exactly?’
He rests his chin on his hand. His little finger dabs at the blistered corners of his mouth as his eyes dart hopelessly round the screen.
‘It doesn’t say,’ he says.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘I’ll print it out,’ he says.
PAUL
2014
On Saturday night, Paul goes for a pint with his friend Damon at the bar down the road. They sit at one of the small circular tables in the busy pavement seating area, where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and baking hot from the overhead heaters.
‘It’s this bloke, right,’ Damon says, ‘and he’s shouting at this busker, this trumpet player, telling him how shit he is. But he’s, like, really, really intelligent.’
‘I’ve definitely not seen it,’ Paul says.
‘It’s great,’ Damon says, trying to find the YouTube clip on his phone. ‘Fuck. It’s not buffering. I’ll send it to you when I get in.’
‘Cheers,’ Paul says.
Damon is one of Paul’s only friends in Manchester. They met six years ago, when they were both working on the fiction desk in Waterstone’s, while Paul was still writing his first novel. And now Paul’s teaching and writing full time and Damon is working in telesales. Sometimes Paul can tell how envious Damon is of his lifestyle – how, from the outside, it must look to everyone like he’s just swanning around in his own clothes, making things up all day – and as such Paul finds it almost impossible to ever really complain, at all, about anything: about how he wasted the whole of today watching videos of Jonathan Franzen interviews, for instance, or how yesterday he wrote two and a half thousand words of seemingly good prose, only to come back to it this morning to discover it had transformed into a fucking piece of shit overnight. And so whenever Paul hangs out with Damon, Paul has to just pretend that everything is completely, totally fine.
‘I almost handed in my notice the other day,’ Damon says. ‘I wrote it in between calls and printed it out on my morning break. And then I carried it round in my pocket, you know, waiting for the right time to give it to my manager. But I found that, just by having it on me like that, I felt a bit better, you know? A bit more in control of things . . .’
‘Right,’ says Paul, not really listening.
‘. . . so I’ve decided to just carry on like that for a while and see how it goes . . .’
Paul tongues the lump in his mouth.
‘. . . I’m not like you. I don’t have a thing that I’m good at . . .’
Paul moves his tongue backwards and forwards over the lump, wishing it would go away. The skin around it has become sore and rough, due to all his recent tonguing. It has the same kind of sting as an ulcer, and as he tongues it, his mouth fills with a thin, sour fluid.
He