Between Us, page 1
BETWEEN US
Mhairi McFarlane
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2023
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023
Cover illustration © Maja Tomljanovic
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008412487
eBook Edition © February 2023 ISBN: 9780008412494
Version: 2023-02-10
Praise for Mhairi McFarlane
‘My heart always soars at a new Mhairi novel, I love, love, love her. She’s so great at treading the narrow line between humour and loss. I read this with delight and envy’
MARIAN KEYES
‘Gorgeously romantic, as well as a story about friendship and grief and loss; I never wanted it to end’
BETH O’LEARY
‘Funny, charming and smart’
LUCY DIAMOND
‘Gorgeous, funny, life-affirming’
JENNY COLGAN
‘Funny, poignant, full of insight … a triumph’
KATIE FFORDE
‘A luminous, heart-achingly beautiful love letter to friendship’
JOSIE SILVER
‘An effortlessly brilliant read – will have you laughing when you shouldn’t and sobbing when you least expect it’
GIOVANNA FLETCHER
‘So funny, so sad in parts, and just so sharp and heartwarming’
LIA LOUIS
‘Witty, moving and original. I will read anything Mhairi writes, she is the master of thought-provoking romantic fiction and I adore the characters she creates’
SOPHIE COUSENS
‘Funny, sad and entirely unputdownable, full of compassion and hope, and blissfully, wonderfully romantic’
CRESSIDA MCLAUGHLIN
‘Laugh-out-loud funny, devastatingly moving, and delightfully swoony, all at once. McFarlane is in a league of her own’
LOUISE O’NEILL
‘Hilarious, wise, and clever with twists and turns and packed with heart and chemistry that sizzles off the page … she’s brilliant and untouchable’
JUSTIN MYERS
‘So funny, so moving, so perfectly paced, so everything. She is absolutely brilliant, the kind of writer you feel lucky to be around at the same time as’
EMMA HUGHES
‘I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a book so much’
GILLIAN MCALLISTER
‘Sparkly writing, laugh-out-loud funny and a story that’ll keep you enthralled’
JANE FALLON
‘No one writes such wry, emotionally complex romantic fiction as Mhairi McFarlane’
RED
‘Witty, sharp … This is modern and honest romantic fiction at its most accomplished’
HEAT
‘Hilarious, clever and beautifully written’
DAILY MAIL
Dedication
For Jeanie
A woman telling great stories
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for Mhairi McFarlane
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
About the Publisher
Prologue
2003
Stockport Plaza Theatre
Wythenshawe’s No. 1 Psychic! proclaimed a poster on an easel on stage, for tonight’s show: a clairvoyant called Queenie Mook. The name was so peculiar, it couldn’t be made up.
‘You wonder who decides that?’ Roisin said. ‘It’s not like you can get … accredited.’
Aged twelve, she was proud of accredited.
Her mother looked at her with narrowing eyes, under Lancôme-blacked lashes, sensing sedition.
When Roisin had been permitted to join her girls’ night out, it came with a warning.
‘Don’t bother if you’re going to be a smart arse – it’s rude to Diana and Kim,’ her mum had said. ‘Di’s dad, Rodney, died of acute pancreatitis last November. She’s hoping he’ll come through.’
‘Oh, right,’ Roisin said, thinking that treating Queenie Mook as a switchboard for the Afterlife didn’t seem destined for success. Her promotional material showed she mainly worked cruise ships.
‘They’ve been at sixes and sevens since. Rod still ran the financial side of the drain-cleaning business.’ Lorraine made it sound as if Diana had a pressing but functional enquiry: where is the 2001 VAT return, or similar.
Roisin wanted to attend for two reasons: curiosity about mediums, and because this was a properly exciting jolly. Her mum was drenched in a forcefield of Guerlain Shalimar, a lion’s mane of salon-blown hair, satin dress stretched across her hips, sheer tights and patent heels.
It was fun to be in her mother’s orbit on such occasions, seeing the heads she turned. Like being PA to someone famous. There was a taxi from Webberley, Lorraine’s perfumed coven demanding that Lionel Richie’s ‘All Night Long’ was TURNED UP, PLEASE.
Fifteen minutes to curtain up. Thanks to the carafes of pink wine they’d seen off during the pre-show brasserie dinner, there was a flurry of trips to the ladies.
Lorraine went first, then Di and Kim together.
‘Don’t you need a wee?’ said her mum, after a minute of concerted pouting into her make-up compact. Roisin vaguely wondered if Lorraine wanted her out of the way. For the purposes of a surreptitious phone call, perhaps? Her parents kept secrets. Roisin was always caught between wanting to know what they were, and not wanting to know what they were.
‘Nah.’
‘Hmmm, I think you should go. We’re in the middle of a row and those seats will fill up.’
Roisin’s conviction that her mother had an ulterior motive deepened. But she knew it was easier to comply, so she stood up and headed to the toilets. All the stall doors were closed. As she plonked down on the cold seat in her cubicle, she heard the acoustics of the other occupants exiting theirs.
Flush. Door bang. Tap gush. Flush. Door bang. Tap gush.
‘With the way Lorraine’s hitting the Pinot Blush, I assume she’s no longer with child ?’ said a disembodied Kim.
For a split second, Roisin thought they meant her.
‘Oh no. She got rid. A couple of weeks ago.’
‘She never told Glen?’
Glen. Roisin’s dad was called Kent. (A pub landlord called Kent. His name was a gift to customers he kicked out.)
‘God, no. As she says, what would be the point? He’d not want her to keep it, and two’s enough. Who’d go back to night feeds?’
‘What about Kent? Did he know?’
‘Doubt it, don’t you? Don’t ask, don’t tell.’
‘Mmmm. She wants to be more careful.’
‘Says she had a dodgy omelette at the Fox & Hounds, threw up her pill. Never thought.’
‘You know, I’ve wondered about the food at the Fox’s. I had coleslaw once that tasted like tuna. I’m sure it gave me the shits.’
There was a blast of an air dryer, which obscured the next part, until Roisin could tune back in:
‘… does what he likes, too. She and Kent are like a couple of carefree teenagers, aren’t they?’
‘Mmm-hmm. She’s free of that particular care now, anyway. Is my skirt seam straight?’
They clattered out.
Roisin sat with her knickers round her knees as she absorbed the fact that her mother had got pregnant by a man she knew as one of her parents’ card-playing friends.
This information put the official signature on a disorientating, gruesome experience she’d had a year earlier. On these particular social occasions, involving Texas hold ’em and copious amounts of tequila, her parents issued stern warnings not to come downstairs under any circumstances.
Roisin and her brother had long ago developed a technique for sneaking down to spy on Christmas present wrapping, and later to subvert being grounded: the bar in the family pub was high enough that, as a smaller person, you could crouch low and crab-scuttle behind it.
You were in the saloon at the front, which the grown-ups typically inhabited after hours. You could, with the agility of a safe-cracker, carefully unbolt the little door panel at the side and escape into the lounge, and then the pub garden and Webberley beyond.
This Saturday, despite the muffled hubbub below, Roisin had a powerful craving for Dr Pepper. She would look back and wonder if, in fact, her subconscious had a thirst for knowledge, because the appeal of the drink and the potential bollocking in no way balanced out.
Roisin crept downstairs, heart in mouth. Sliding the bottle out of the rack and hooking its medal lid on the opener was made infinitely easier by the raucous, booze-fuelled badinage of her dad and a woman, Glen’s wife, Tina, unseen but very close at hand. Cigarette smoke curled in the air and the jukebox played something jazzy. Ice clinked. Laughter exploded.
Mission accomplished, as Roisin gripped the soda pop bottle, yet something compelled her to take the insane, additional risk of opening the side door and poking her head into the lounge bar. In the near distance, at the pool table, two figures were clamped together. She couldn’t see the faces of either. Her mother’s legs, feet with painted toenails in gold strappy shoes that Roisin coveted, dangled either side of bare male buttocks. Roisin made out foreign, animalistic noises as the dull thud of understanding hit her in the guts. A cry of shock and objection caught in her throat before she withdrew and fled back upstairs to lie awake in bed, awash with sweat and chest pounding, trying to make sense of what she’d seen.
Now, returning to her place in the theatre balcony, Roisin felt similar.
She couldn’t help staring at the near imperceptible, shallow curve of her mum’s stomach under shiny fabric, inspecting her glossed face for clues. When had she done it, the termination? During a school day?
She’d assimilate tonight’s lurid intel entirely by herself: with perhaps one failed attempt to discuss it with her younger brother, Ryan. No matter how many times he made it clear that Roisin’s revelations weren’t welcome, she lived in hope of him as a confidante.
Roisin became grateful for the distraction of watching Queenie Mook ply her strange trade, in the multicoloured up-lit, kitsch altverse of the variety theatre.
Queenie was very petite and had a helmet of fluorescent orange hair, a startling synthetic tangerine that recalled Johnny Rotten.
She addressed the throng as ‘my loves’ and was dressed in a silk blouse with an egg-sized enamel brooch, navy trousers, like the manager of a branch of Vision Express. Roisin was a little disappointed, having envisioned an imperious Sixties matriarch with a chignon, in a beaver fur coat.
The show soon settled into a rhythm – Roisin figured out it was a game of harvesting information from the audience, while weaving the illusion of having supplied it. The phantoms, seen and heard only by Queenie, only ever offered their first name, which was always a plain and common one. None of them gave surnames, which would’ve resolved identity a lot quicker.
A procession of Teds, Marys and Jacks queued up. Queenie auctioned their presence to the auditorium, along with a few other salient, yet vague details. Perhaps Mary loved music – everyone would say that about her, she says – or Jack was motioning a steering wheel? Did he … like cars? Drive tractors for a job? Did he – sorry if this is difficult, my loves – die in a road accident?
There’d eventually be a gasp of recognition from somewhere in the stalls and Queenie would zero in on a target.
However, whether the message was indeed for the – usually emotional – recipient was conditional. If they corrected Queenie too many times, she’d snap: ‘Sorry my love, this message isn’t for you,’ and move on briskly.
Lorraine, Kim and Di were rapt throughout, hanging on Queenie’s every word, wiping under their eyes when Queenie provided dubious catharsis. Diana’s dad, Rodney, did not put in an appearance. Should’ve had a more common name, Roisin thought.
Roisin’s composure only faltered in the last twenty minutes, during an interaction with a widow near the front row.
The woman’s late husband, Clive, victim of a chronic lung condition, was reportedly on stage with Queenie.
The widow was sobbing. The chicanery of the whole thing had seemed like relatively innocent – if bizarre – fun to Roisin, until that moment. Did Queenie know she was inventing these visitors? Did she really give credence to her own powers? Do liars always know they’re lying?
‘When he went, it was fast?’ Queenie said, once the woman had quietened.
‘No. It was slow. He was on oxygen for weeks.’
‘But when he went, it was fast?’ Queenie paused. ‘Clive’s telling me it was fast – he’s very certain,’ she added, to make it clear who the woman was contradicting. ‘He keeps gesturing to his chest, as if he’s short of breath,’ Queenie added, banging her own sternum with a fist, somewhat unnecessarily.
‘Uhm … well at the end, I suppose it was quick?’ the widow said.
‘That’s what I meant,’ Queenie said, nodding. ‘He is saying: “it was slow, but fast at the end.”’
Roisin barked a small laugh. People glanced over and her mother angrily shushed her.
‘How can it be slow and fast?’ Roisin whispered, and Lorraine glared.
‘Clive wants you to know you did everything right. He loves you very much. He says it’s lovely where he is,’ Queenie said.
There was audible weeping, and more expressions of gratitude. Roisin squirmed. Queenie clearly knew it was time to go out on a high.
‘Thank you for being here and sharing what I call my moments of clear seeing with me,’ Queenie said, and the room broke into rapturous applause.
The arc of history was long, and it bent towards sick humour. When Roisin and Joe broke up, twenty years later, Roisin could only think that it was perfectly summarised by the paradox of Queenie Mook.
It was slow, but fast at the end.
1
‘Miss, Miss, MISS. Miss? Dirty weekend with your boyfriend? Miss!’
Amir gestured at the trolley case standing sentry behind Roisin’s desk, which she was poorly concealing by draping with a cagoule. He was in the naughty-yet-good-natured category among her students, and she responded accordingly.
‘Very clean actually, Amir. A spa weekend with some of my girlfriends.’
If there was one thing that both her childhood and her career had taught Roisin Walters, it was that lying to kids might not be noble, but generally got the job done.
‘A SPA. Like, a sauna?’ He chewed his pen and made a cheeky face.
‘Back to the text, please. I’m going to collect your papers in …’ She glanced up at the wall clock, her ever reliable teaching assistant. ‘… five minutes’ time!’
‘Miss,’ Amir persisted, then seeing her under-her-brow look of scepticism: ‘No no no – it’s about the book!’
Roisin rolled her eyes. ‘Go on.’
‘Right, everyone thinks Great Expectations is good, like. A posh book. Which is why we’re studying it in an English Lit lesson.’
