Luke’s still doing his exercises when Julie walks into his room.
‘You’re early,’ he says, looking up from a crunch.
Julie explains about the floods.
‘Do you think we’ll get flooded here?’ he asks her.
‘Don’t think so. It hasn’t ever flooded here before, has it? Why?’
Luke laughs. ‘I’d be fucked if we did.’
‘Nah,’ Julie says. ‘You’re upstairs. If it flooded this high, we’d all be fucked.’ Julie sort of slumps on to the bed, looking annoyed.
‘So, what’s wrong?’
‘Wrong?’
‘Yeah.’ Luke gets up off the floor and walks over to his computer and checks his e-mail. ‘You seem all . . . I dunno, all thingy.’
‘Oh, my dad pissed me off . . .’
Luke smiles. ‘Tell me something new.’
‘Yeah, and I did this stupid test at work and now they want me to become a manager. It’s so boring I don’t even want to talk about it. But for some reason I told Dawn, and she told my dad, and now they’re both like, It’s a career, and I’m just totally not interested.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah. I just wish it had never happened. I don’t even know if I can keep working at The Edge as a waitress now.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know. Because I’ve been noticed or something. I just want to do my stuff without anyone noticing and trying to fast-track me to something else.’
‘Maybe you’re just good at everything.’
‘Try telling my father that. He still thinks I’m the world’s biggest failure.’
‘He’s a dick.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Julie laughs. ‘My dad’s a dick. Huh.’
What would happen if today was the season finale for a TV drama? Luke ponders this question after Julie leaves for Chantel’s party. He reasons that today couldn’t actually be a season finale – everything’s too unresolved. This is more like an episode-before-the-penultimate episode or something; the setback before the resolution. Mind you, there hasn’t been any setback, really, or not any particularly dramatic setbacks. Only Julie would see a job offer as a setback. (Although Luke can understand why this is, it doesn’t work so well as narrative.) Luke’s whole life is a perpetual setback, and it’s not like anything can go more wrong for him. Leanne’s probably going to dump him but that’s what he wanted, so that’s hardly a setback. He will miss the sex, though. Someone succeeds and that’s a setback; someone gets rejected and that’s not. Luke’s life needs more narrative drive, somehow – it’s just not TV enough at the moment.
The thing about Luke’s life: if it isn’t TV, then what is it?
One of the only arguments Luke and Julie ever had was over some story she told about her day at The Edge a year or two ago. Her story wasn’t neat enough for Luke, and when she finished it, he’d said something like, ‘Is that it? Didn’t anything else happen?’ and he hadn’t meant to offend her, but she’d started crying, in this weird way that seemed frustrated as well as sad.
‘Real life isn’t the way you think it is,’ she’d said, eventually.
‘How do I think it is?’
‘Like TV.’
‘I don’t think that . . . I don’t actually know anything about real life, at least, not outside of my room. I’ve always admitted that. I know TV isn’t real, I just don’t know what is. You and me in here – that’s all I know about reality. And I don’t think we’re like TV,’ he added.
‘It’s not the content . . . it’s the structure,’ Julie said. ‘It’s that whole beginning, middle and end thing in narratives. What do they call it? The three-act structure or whatever. Everything you see on TV – every A, B and C strand of a sitcom, every plotline in a soap opera . . .’
‘Everything happens for a reason,’ Luke said.
Julie stared at him. ‘Huh?’
‘In TV, everything happens for a reason. That’s how you can predict plots so easily. You know, like in soap opera – if two characters who aren’t normally in scenes together suddenly are, you know that they’re going to have a relationship or that one is the other’s secret son or something.’
‘Yeah, exactly. But in real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.’
Luke sighed. ‘I know that. But . . .’
‘What?’
‘I’m not in real life, am I? I wish I was in real life but I’m not. I’m stuck in this shitty Truman Show world and TV narratives are all I’ve got. Jules, I’m really sorry I said that thing before, about that story you told . . .’
‘It wasn’t a story. That’s my point. It was just an event.’
‘I know. I just . . .’
‘Not all events are stories. That’s what I’m saying.’
Luke thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, but people make events into stories. Stories give events meaning, or at least they do for me. I understand stuff better if it’s a story – if it’s edited to make sense, so characters get introduced properly and storylines are identified and resolved, you know, neatly. Like Big Brother – you know how I couldn’t follow the twenty-four-hour webcam thing at all; I could only follow the actual edited TV show? It was because it was cut together to make a story. Sometimes I worry that even if I did get out of here, I wouldn’t be able to follow what was going on, because, I don’t know, because it would be like someone who knew how to sit in a garden thinking that meant they could trek through a jungle or something. Maybe I can only understand things through stories, and I can only understand characters on TV – not real people and I’m better off staying in here with my TV because of that.’
‘No, Luke. You’re going to get out of here one day.’
‘What, resolve my story? My plotline? Yeah, right.’
‘It’s more like TV out there then you think,’ Julie said. ‘People talk like on TV, dress like on TV, get highlights in their hair like on TV, and tell each other stories because, well, the language of TV is stories. Everyone our age talks like they’re on Friends and they have these meaningless conversations with each other that are so, like, you know, almost acted out as if they were on a sitcom. And they’re just covering up their shit lives by doing that. You’re not the only person who sits in front of the TV all the time, you know.’
‘Oh.’ Luke smiled, sort of sadly. ‘I’ll feel right at home, then.’
‘Look, it’s just me,’ Julie said. ‘I just can’t turn events into stories – or, well, I can, but I just don’t like it. That’s why I got upset, because I thought you wanted me to do that. Thing is, I prefer moments. You know, like when things happen and they just don’t mean anything. When I did English at school the teacher said that fairytales, myths and even the Bible were all just ways of arranging moral code, safety advice and reflections on the world into stories, so that people could understand the messages better, so the messages were more easily digestible and compelling and meaningful. And I get that, I totally do. It’s just that I don’t want life packaged into stories for me, like those stupid ready-meals Dad and Dawn eat.’
‘Hang on,’ Luke said. ‘You eat Pot Noodles. What’s the difference between a ready-meal and a Pot Noodle?’
‘Pot Noodle doesn’t pretend to be real,’ Julie said. ‘It doesn’t claim to be authentic. It just is what it is.’
Luke doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but he knows he doesn’t know it. He feels normal because, to him, he is normal. But he sort of assumes that nothing he does could be normal – that people outside would be different by definition, that they wouldn’t imagine they’re in a TV commercial every time they clean their teeth, or pretend they’re starring in a fitness video when they work out, or think that, someday, someone will make a film of their life and it’ll look just like this. So Luke’s life is TV. That’s just how it is.
Knowing his life has an unnatural connection with fiction actually comforts him, though. Because if his life is a story, then his illness will have to be cured – there’s no point in it otherwise. In stories, problems are only there so they can be solved. And after all, why have a story about a boy who’s allergic to the sun if he doesn’t get cured? That would be stupid.