Instructions For Living Someone Else's Life

by Mil Millington

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The new novel from the bestselling author of THINGS MY GIRLFRIEND AND I HAVE ARGUED ABOUT.

Chris is 25. He has a job in advertising he despises - despite being naturally brilliant at creating shamelessly successful campaigns - an 'artistic' girlfriend, and his two best mates from university, who spend a lot of time playing pool, drinking Grolsch and quoting lines from Robocop at each other.

But Chris's life is about to change. The eighties are coming to an end and he must take decisive action if he is to fulfil what he suspects is his true potential.

So, after pre-emptively celebrating the fact he is about to hand in his resignation, Chris goes to bed drunk in 1988 but very unexpectedly wakes up in 2006, with an unbelievable hangover, a long-suffering (and worryingly 'old'-looking) stranger for a wife, a life that hasn't turned out the way he had hoped for at all, and an unnerving amount of new body hair...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

I can no longer remember how long I’ve been on this island. Sometimes I think I’ve been here always; that what I believe was my earlier life is nothing more than a dream that’s been forged to the hardness of memory by heat and isolation. But then I remind myself that I’m wearing clothes I constructed from empty, plastic, microwave rice packets. I must have lived in a world beyond this place at some time, I must have – it says ‘Savoury Chicken Flavour’ all over my trousers.

Now my days are filled with nothing more than eating seafood and near-relentless masturbation, but it was once so different; once there were days, sometimes weeks, when I ate hardly any seafood at all. Back then I had an editor, Helen Garnons-Williams, whose professional wisdom matched her thorough personal loveliness and, twice, her shoes. Often, remembering, I become teary just thinking about her. Until, after indiscriminately tearing things for a while, I slowly regain the understanding of homographs that solitude has eroded and recall a second editor. When our work was done, Helen took her sweet face and her collection of erotic exclamations to a lucky new publisher, and I moved onto the lap of Jon Wood. The very idea of male editors is, of course, an affront to God and nature; thus, it speaks prettily of Mr Wood that, in his cupping palms, there was satisfaction
(and – I blush – on occasion almost pleasure) in a relationship so intrinsically collied and bestial. Yes, he persistently uses the telephone instead of email (and we all know what that says about a person), but his hard work and his good humour and his repeated declaration that his entire reputation should rest solely on how well Instructions for Living Someone Else’s Life fares in the nation’s bookstores is tremendously winning.

Purposelessness is the carrier of despair, so, to keep myself busy and maintain structure during the endless, empty hours, I have devised a strict routine. On Tuesdays, for example, I pick at my feet. Sometimes, while doing this, I imagine myself once more back in the world beyond these confining shores, and I picture Ali Gunn. Who is fearful. Like a literary agent from the id. It’s a great comfort to know that she’s chosen to stand by my side, though I wouldn’t want to be around if anyone ever decides to dig up her patio.

Finally, sustaining me through the long, lonely nights here with consoling memories of love, support, companionship and shouting is the precious image of Margret. If I could have only one thing from my lost life with me on this island, it would be pizza. But, if I could have two, then the other one would be Margret. Being able to put things down for one damn second without their being tidied away to some ridiculous place where I’ll never find them again, I now realise, is small compensation for the simple yet perfect pleasure of being able to feel the touch of her hand in mine and hear the unremitting movement of her mouth. My heart will always be with her, even if my body, and any kind of right of attorney over my financial affairs whatsoever, remains forever in this cursed place.

And so I cast this message into the sea. If you’ve found it, then that’s enough. That you know I was once a man like you, unless you’re a woman, in which case you’ll have to pretend you’re a man for little while, but not in any sexual role-play way – that’s weird, actually, that you’d think of that; let’s hope that no one sitting by you right now is somehow aware you’re having those kind of thoughts, eh? Anyway, as I was saying, I hope nothing more than that you see this note, understand, perhaps run your fingers gently over the words, then realise what I had to use to write them, and go and wash your hands.

Simon Mayo had leapt, mid-sentence, into Chris’s ear.

It had been a bit of a jolt at the time, but Chris was over it now. Now, he was happily eating a slice of toast while he looked through the window at the busy street beyond. There wasn’t much distance between the front of his undesirable ground-floor flat and the pavement that marked the beginning of the not-sought-after neighbourhood as a whole. With the curtains pulled back, he could easily connect visually with any passer-by and, as he nibbled his burnt Mother’s Pride, he occasionally waved at one and made an expression of surprised, fancy-seeing-you-walking-here! recognition. He didn’t actually recognise any of them; he simply liked to watch as they, instantly and instinctively, returned his cheery gesture; outwardly unfazed but, if you knew to look, with a frantic, ‘Christ! Where the hell do I know him from?!’ just howling behind their eyes.

He was in a jolly mood this morning. Normally, he would never do anything so puerile as standing at his window greeting random strangers simply to see if they’d greet him back out of panic. No, this wasn’t Chris’s normal behaviour. Normally, he’d do it on the Tube; he’d wait until he heard the beeping alert begin then (apparently having just spotted them) brightly call out, ‘Hi! Great to see you again!’ to the person directly beyond the shutting-in-three-seconds train doors.

This was the ideal place for the game. Those who didn’t respond (mostly because they were simply stunned inert by confusion) would then find themselves peered at oddly by the fellow passengers with whom they were trapped. Why had this person completely ignored their friend? What terrible secret or psychological defect might explain that? Usually, the opposite happened – and this was even better. The person would respond, then be whisked away almost immediately to spend who knew how long racking their brains trying to recall where they might possibly have met Chris before; but, better still, because they’d been tricked by their own reflexes into mirroring Chris’s wide and merry gesture before they could think about it, they’d been outed. The dead-faced, insulating shell that everyone in a commuter train wears would have been shattered, and there they now were: on the Tube, exposed as human.

But, best of all, was Chris’s fantasy. It wasn’t a consuming fantasy, far less the intention of the whole exercise – not remotely – but it was one he enjoyed having from time to time. In this dream he would unleash his bright, booby-trap salutation to some woman, and she, lightning fast, would slip out before the doors closed and acknowledge him twice as warmly. ‘My God! It’s so wonderful to see you again!’ This she would do in the full knowledge that she didn’t know who the hell he was, and that he knew she didn’t: it would be done to call his bluff. (Right, smart-arse, what are you going to do now, eh?) If a woman ever did that, Chris thought, he would, there and then, ask her to marry him.

In his fantasy, she always replied to his proposal with, ‘No, you twat.’ Which rather annoyed him; not because she’d say it (of course she’d say it), but because it was his fantasy, after all. In the real world he already had a very attractive girlfriend and he wasn’t looking for another one (that’s to say, a ‘different one’ rather than ‘another one’; women can be picky about such semantic distinctions), but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that it’s a bit unfair when even your own fantasy ends with your being called a twat. Still, it was merely an idle dream purely for entertainment purposes so he was easily able to shrug off its going a bit pear-shaped at the end.

He was resilient. He was, let’s not forget, someone capable of coping with Simon Mayo leaping, mid-sentence, into his ear.

Simon Mayo did this almost every weekday, because of Chris’s six-minute-sized declaration that he was not a number, but a free man. It would have been easy (too easy, that was the point) to set the radio alarm by his bed to activate at an o’clock or a half hour, to start with the beginning of a news report or the pips. But Chris had deliberately programmed it to go off six minutes past the unthinkingly obvious.

‘Get up,’ he had said to his muscles in response to the abrupt arrival of today’s Breakfast Show. He wasn’t a morning person. He never had been. His birth, his father had often told him, had taken hours longer than expected. Twenty-five years ago optimistic midwives had predicted he’d emerge at four or five a.m., but his mother had been in labour until ten. This was almost certainly because unborn-Chris’s final in-womb act after the contraction alarm went off was to repeatedly hit a snooze button on the cervix and go back to sleep. He understood that, for some people, waking up was a brisk change of location – one moment there, the next here. For him, however, it was slow, precarious, and not especially pleasant: no swift hop out of slumber, but rather more like being sucked back into consciousness through a thin straw.

Even this morning, the morning of a day he’d been planning for months (a day he was looking forward to: a Day of Action), had slumped on top of him out of the mouth of Simon Mayo and had to be manhandled off his eyelids like a fat corpse before he could claw his way into himself proper.

‘Get up,’ Chris had told his muscles again as he’d reluctantly opened his eyes to look towards the digits on the clock-radio. At first, his vision had been still too blurry with sleep to read them, but seeing their snot-green glow at all had informed him that Katrina wasn’t there.

How Who-takes-which-side-of-the-bed? comes about is one of the bigger mysteries of relationships. Rarely, if ever, is it discussed – it simply happens, as though preordained. Nonetheless, it’s fixed very early on, and thereafter changes only if you get a new partner, or a new house. When Katrina stayed, she always slept on the right, between him and the radio – her shoulder blocking the view from where he lay. No snot-green glow: Katrina. No Katrina: snot-green glow. Chris had reached into his still-sleepy memory and managed to pull out that she hadn’t come back with him the previous night because she’d been all fired up about the new painting she was working on and wanted to keep in the flow. He’d decided to leave her to it and get a good night’s sleep at his own place. He had a Monday to prepare for: and a big Monday at that.

By the time Chris had successfully remembered all this Mayo had begun playing Nick Kamen’s ‘Tell Me’, for who knew what possible reason.

But that had all been twenty-five minutes ago – a lifetime away. Generally, once he’d managed to break through the sticky, surface tension of the waking barrier he was fine – and, this morning at least, he’d raise that assessment to fine and dandy. The unaccountably huge and wondrously addictive weight of the duvet was no longer pinning him down; now he stood eating buttery toast at his front window, casually disconcerting random strangers with his waves, and full of eagerness to begin putting his plan into effect. He chewed, and smiled, and savoured the keen anticipation.

This was going to be a very good day.

Someone (inexplicably, not Wilde) observed that ‘Friends are God’s apology for relatives.’ No one, however, has yet given us an explanation for colleagues.

Now, workmates can be the people with whom you go out drinking and dancing as well. But almost as common is for them, instead, to be stupid, pestiferous, freeloading gits you can’t wait to see the back of every day, and who – if you think about them outside work at all – cause your hands to spontaneously warp into rigid claws.

OK, it might be that a particular workplace brings like-minded people together. If you get a job in a tanning salon, it’s no surprise to find yourself in the company of someone who also feels that lipliner is central to her life; if you set to work as a builder, then no disinterested person is going to think it unreasonable of you to expect to find yourself with other liars and thieves. That’s perfectly understandable. But it’s equally likely that the people across the office or with whom you share staff toilets are more or less a random collection of humans; it’s simply a lottery. A good proportion of you will spend more time in the company of your work colleagues than with anyone else in your lives. Yet, unlike friends, you don’t choose them, and, unlike relatives, you’re not bound as confederates by your DNA’s timeless struggle to keep itself in the gene pool either.

Chris worked for Short Stick Media and everyone he worked with hated him.

Much as it often felt like it, hating Chris was not actually company policy. There wasn’t even an unofficial ‘Us and Them’ (or, rather, ‘Us and Chris’) attitude dividing the staff into, on the one hand, a coherent, unified group of people who didn’t like Chris and, on the other hand, Chris. His colleagues’ enmity wasn’t organised, or even openly declared; it was a deeply personal thing that they kept to themselves and, though they were always on the lookout for ways to make his life less pleasant, they were also always careful that their doing so wouldn’t reveal that they regarded this as an end in itself. Publicly, between each other, they expressed a professional admiration for Chris. Each of his colleagues believed that he or she was the only one who didn’t like him. This made their dislike all the more intense – due to the aggravation of believing that, while they hated him, everyone else seemed to think that the sun shone out of his backside.

The reason for all this ill will landing on him was a combination of his ability and his attitude. After leaving university, Chris had spent a few years learning his craft in a series of fairly short-term positions at a number of different firms. He absorbed many important facts, had an epiphany or two, and, when he chose to start at the Short Stick Media advertising agency, he’d pretty much made up his mind that he essentially knew it all. He wasn’t brash or arrogant about this. It was simply that he’d realised, correctly, that he had a natural talent few could match: he just seemed to have an innate aptitude for producing cheap and nasty campaigns. Operatic scores, elegant photography and vast spectacles with purple silk were not his forte. But, while there were only a small number of accounts of the Guinness or British Airways variety, there were many, many thousands of clients who needed shrill adverts for local commercial radio stations, say, or something exactly crude and jarring enough to sit well across a full page in some monstrously uninteresting trade journal. And when it came to producing copy that was taut, punchy and crass enough to sell (for example) anodised copper fasteners to their target audience – irrespective of the fact that if anyone else accidentally read it they would become angry and upset – then Chris was a rock-solid maven.

Short Stick Media itself was surging from strength to strength. In fact, the company was so successful that, although a relative newcomer, it had already acquired two other, smaller businesses in the field of advertising and promotion, and its creator, David Short, was – it was widely agreed – going places (some even suggested that, in a few years, he might dominate the downmarket). It was a company with a drive to win and a clear sense of direction: a one-stop shop where, rapidly and at highly competitive rates, a campaign could be taken all the way from an inchoate, appalling notion to a Christ-awful reality. Though Chris didn’t have a senior position at Short Stick, everyone knew that he was by far the most gifted member of staff there. Not only did he produce exactly what was required – create what was, within its own terms, perfection – but doing it was, for him, almost effortless. Chris Mortimer was the Mozart of tat.

Being extremely good at your job is, of course, a sure way to piss off all your colleagues. But you’re really in unpopularity’s fast lane if, on top of this, you turn out everything you do with what amounts to a relaxed yawn while they have to work as hard as they can to squeeze out something that, it’s instantly obvious to all concerned, is far, far worse.

Is it possible to improve upon this neat combination, if you especially fancy being the target of a full forty hours of varyingly concealed, low-level hostility each week?

Well, yes it is.

Almost always in life you really enjoy and value the things you do well. Brilliant mathematicians love maths. Splendid bassoon players are filled with joy and fulfilment from playing bassoons. Even people with a talent for football not only get pleasure
from, but also feel there’s meaningful value to, the ability to run around and intermittently kick something quite accurately. You’ll have noted that this phenomenon is specifically as stated: you enjoy and value the things you do well. It’s not simply the result of effort – borne of consideration and desire. You are not necessarily good at the things you enjoy and value. Any number of people would dearly love to play the piano well, or draw wonderfully, dance in a way that made them even remotely attractive to the opposite sex – but they can’t, and they know they can’t. This fact makes the point unarguable: the point is, it’s as if we’re programmed – as if there’s a routine running secretly in our subconscious – so that, when we happen across something we have an aptitude for, we like that thing. Perhaps it helps to focus our energies where they will be most effective. Perhaps it’s just Nature taking pity on us: when it turns out that the only thing you’re any good at is not getting completely lost, well, then the Pity Protocol kicks in and ensures that you develop a real passion for orienteering, at least. It’s psychology making a virtue out of necessity, basically.

Chris, however, was an aberration – the exception that proves the rule. He didn’t like what he did very much, and he certainly didn’t regard it as having any worth. The bleak, unsightly stupidity of what he produced was something he wearily commented on almost daily. Chris regarded this as his own personal misery. But, as misery is, let us say, solipsistic, all his colleagues saw was someone declaring that what they did (they were doing the same thing as Chris, after all) was utterly without merit.

Put these factors together and you can understand the (unspoken, quietly festering) attitude of Chris’s workmates. They didn’t actually wish him dead – he was too obviously an asset to the company and thus, by extension, to each of them as individuals. But they did hope he would fall badly on the stairs, ideally chipping the bone in his shin on the edge of a step.

However, none of them gave any thought to the possibility that Chris might be thinking, ‘Bugger this for a game of soldiers.’ His burden of aptitude made him prominent professionally, but, by nature, he was too unassuming for them (dynamic and thrusting and dynamically thrusting as they all were) to think he’d do anything … well, that he’d do anything. Oh, he complained all right; he didn’t conceal his cynicism and discontent, that was plain enough. But it was so near-constant that the impression it created was that he enjoyed moaning as an activity – he’d never actually act on the moans, because the moaning itself was sufficient. It was also well known that he was prone to Pointless Acts of Trivial Rebellion. Someone, for example, now always checked the initial letters of the sentences if his idea used a number of lines descending the page or poster, as Chris found it hard to resist the temptation of a childish acrostic. Or take the fact that, recently, and to everyone’s puzzlement, he’d been very insistent about the precise piece of dialogue that needed to be delivered by one of the two child actors due to record a radio ad for some biscuits. What had baffled his colleagues was that the ‘dialogue’ wasn’t even words – it was nothing but ‘enthusiastic speech made completely unintelligible because the child’s mouth is full’. ‘What do you think?’ Child Actor One was to ask, and Child Actor Two’s reply would be mere (but obviously happy) mouth sounds, as he couldn’t bring himself to stop chomping away. Why, then, was Chris so determined that the garbled words absolutely must make the noise ‘Jouma … sewapskiet … pap’? That nothing else quite conveyed the innocent, totally consuming, biscuit-eating ecstasy. The answer accidentally emerged when, by pure coincidence, it turned out that the technician at the recording studio happened to come from South Africa; and he couldn’t help mentioning how bizarre it was that the random ‘I’m a child with an unstoppable love of this biscuit’ line sounded exactly like ‘Jou ma se wap skiet pap’ – a common Afrikaans curse meaning ‘Your mother’s twat shoots porridge.’

This kind of puerile behaviour was Chris’s league. If he had any strategy at all, it was probably something like, ‘Come the revolution, I’m going to knock on your door and run off.’ His colleagues assumed that they could depend on his getting on their nerves daily, forever, at a more or less stable, low-level intensity. That was Chris, they all knew: he was a target, not an arrow.

‘I’ll be there,’ Andrew insisted, holding the telephone receiver between his shoulder and his ear – giving a sort of ‘hanged man’ flop to his neck. He was glancing through a stack of invoices; placing them into piles on the table one by one, like dealing cards.

Chris snorted. ‘You always say you’ll be there, then you cry off at the last minute.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Yes it is. You say you’ll be at the pub, and you say you’ll be at the pub, and you say you’ll be at the pub, and then you stay at home watching Dynasty or something, like a big girl.’

‘No I don’t. I—’

‘Oh, crap – I have to go.’ Chris had spotted his boss approaching.

‘Somewhere there is a crime happening.’

‘What?’

‘RoboCop.’

‘What?’

‘RoboCop. “Excuse me, I have to go. Some—”’

Chris put the phone down before Andrew could continue. Andrew, he knew only too well, couldn’t stop himself pouring out everything that happens in a movie you haven’t seen. You had the feeling that he tried to, but the thing was simply bigger than his will to resist it: ‘I’ll … I’ll … I’ll just tell you this bit … ’ Once the fragile membrane holding it back had been pierced by your accidentally enticing him with an opportunity, it all came gushing out unstoppably. And Chris had missed RoboCop when it was on at the cinema a few months ago, having made the tactical error of going to see it with Katrina. She’d wrinkled her nose, and pushed a strand of her hair back behind her ear in an especially cultivated fashion, and – to maintain his position as sophisticated and thoughtful – he’d had to sit through Babette’s Feast instead (a film during which–despite its being many, un-BBFC-cut minutes longer than RoboCop – nothing whatsoever blows up).

‘Personal call?’ asked Chris’s boss with a broad, I’m-one-of-the-lads-just-like-you grin that left no room for any doubt that he was genuinely narked about it.

‘No,’ Chris replied.

David Short decided to respond to this by remaining silent.

Chris decided to let him.

To get a psychological submission by forcing a nervous and hurried scramble for an obviously invented explanation, the head and founder of Short Stick Media carefully applied the extended, awkward pause like a martial artist digging a thumb into a pressure point. Like some other kind of martial artist, Chris reached into his drawer and took out a bag of crisps.

The person next to Short shifted uneasily from foot to foot. His name was Euan and this was his first day. He’d been introduced only briefly to the others in the office, and was anxious about who it would be expedient to befriend and who he should make a point of disliking – the latter aspect reinforced the former (your friendship is valued more if you appear to be choosey about your friends, and hating the same person is a useful bonding technique too). Was Chris the alpha male in this place, or was he the office wanker? It’s always tricky to make that particular call.

Short gave a big, loose laugh and turned away to nod towards Euan. ‘This is our new gofer,’ he said.

Witnessing this surrender – a shaming acceptance of defeat in the face of his plucky counter-attack of silence – Chris tingled inside, deep down where he suspected his soul used to be. Usually, he wouldn’t have had the slightest interest in any kind of silly ego wrestling, but today was different. Today he was going to allow himself a bit of satisfaction – and, obviously, while you get some satisfaction from doing something that gives you pleasure, you get even more from doing something that annoys someone you don’t like. In that sense, this was a perfect start to the morning: if you wanted to hit Short where he lived, then what you needed to do was deny him a petty victory.

‘Hi there,’ said Chris, offering Euan a crisp.

‘Euan,’ said Euan.

‘Cheese and onion,’ said Chris.

Short put his hands deep into the expensive pockets of his foreign trousers to signify that nothing concerned him less than whether or not he got offered a crisp too. ‘Chris will teach you all the basics, Eu, yeah? Show you a rope or two.’ He placed three beats here and, on the third, the cheery brightness of his face gave way to an abrupt intrusion of fearful anxiety. ‘That is OK, Chris, right?’

Having him train a newcomer, while still doing all his other work, and the whole carefully seasoned with the insinuation – for Euan’s benefit, of course – that he might not be up to it. Top notch.

‘Yep, that’s fine, David,’ Chris replied with a smile. It really was remarkable, he thought to himself, how sanguine you can be about everything when you know that, a fortnight from tomorrow, you won’t be there.

That was at the centre of Chris’s plan. Well, at what would have been the centre, had there been any actual plan to go around it. But we’ll come to that detail later.

‘Well, if there’s anything you need …’ Short said; after a careful moment he completed the sentence with a substantial slap across Chris’s back that could equally well have meant either ‘I’ll be in my office’ or ‘you can sod off’. With that, his Gucci’d feet turned snappily, he spun on his designer balls, and Chris watched him saunter away across the office.

‘So, what’s the story, Euan?’ Chris asked. ‘Straight out of uni?’ He popped another crisp into his mouth.

Euan nodded. ‘Yes.’ He supposed that bein. . .