In Real Life by Chris Killen Page A

a call centre here.’
    â€˜Alright,’ I say.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜It doesn’t say,’ he says.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I say.
    â€˜I’ll print it out,’ he says.

PAUL
    2014
    O n 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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜I’ve definitely not seen it,’ Paul says.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 . . .’
    â€˜Right,’ says Paul, not really listening.
    â€˜. . . 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.
    â€˜. . . 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 considers telling Damon about the lump, but he doesn’t know quite how to phrase it. Also, he doesn’t want to say it out loud. He’s very nearly Googled ‘lump on inside lower gum’ six or seven times now. He’s stood in front of the bathroom mirror with his mouth open, peering inside it at the visible pinky-white bump, feeling his heart quicken and needle-pricks of cold sweat break out on his skin.
    It’s nothing, he’s told himself.
    It will go away.
    It’s just . . . mouth cancer .
    â€˜I think I’m dying, Damon,’ Paul (almost) says, there at the wobbly little outdoor table. And he knows what Damon would say, too, if he did actually tell him. He’d say what anyone in their right