Between Us, page 11
‘That is completely mad and also insulting. I’m really proud of what you’ve achieved.’
‘That’s why you’ve been off with me since we got here? You say you’re upset by Hunter, but you’ve barely met my eye since you arrived. It’s as if you were looking for a reason.’
‘It’s not jealousy, Joe. It’s because our relationship has evaporated. It’s like you’ve packed your bags and moved out. You don’t even seem to notice me, most of the time.’
‘You mean during this insane time for me – for us – where I’ve built us some financial security, I haven’t focused enough on you? I’ve not made enough of a fuss of you?’
She wondered how long it’d take for the wealth to be raised up. She wasn’t going to use her support of him for all those years as a weapon. Love was not meant to be balance transfers.
‘The fact you’re calling it “making a fuss”, as if I’m a brat, rather than being concerned I’m unhappy, is exactly what I mean.’
‘Fuck me. This argument, which you’ve clearly prepped for, and I haven’t, is a set of bear traps. What am I meant to do then, agree with you that I’m a cold bastard?’ He ploughed on before she could respond. ‘I really don’t need your drama, Roisin. I’m about to spend ten hours on a plane and then face some of the most daunting meetings of my life, ones that could change my life. Our lives. I’m starting that journey with this? Seriously? It couldn’t have waited until I got back?’
There it was. Joe couldn’t even see that complaining she was interfering with his work might be a bad look in a fight about how she was insignificant compared to his work.
‘If I’d waited, you’d say I couldn’t be that bothered and must have been inventing grudges while you were away. Your total unavailability to me is iron clad, Joe.’
‘OK, well, regardless of what I might or might not have said or done, in alternative universes,’ Joe said, once again not missing a beat to think, checking his watch, ‘my cab will get here soon and I’m going to write a thank you note for Dev. Can we bring this to an end?’
Roisin said, blood rushing in her ears, ‘I want to end things entirely, Joe.’
He paused. ‘You want to break up?’
‘Yes.’
The summer air hung heavy around them.
‘You don’t love me any more?’
‘I don’t think I know you any more, to love you,’ Roisin said, holding in tears in the tight wall of her chest.
‘Hah. Good dodge.’
Joe wouldn’t do anything as lame as look surprised, yet, to her surprise, she sensed he was. Why did he not consider that’s where this could be going?
Yes, they’d been together almost a decade. But they were still young, they weren’t married, they had no kids, and the tenor of this fight, with no concessions or gentleness on either side, felt explicitly terminal to Roisin. If it wasn’t the end, it was certainly signposting the way. Hadn’t Joe been working up to this? Had he not accepted it himself yet? Did he want to go first?
Ah, wait, the money, she thought. Joe wasn’t particularly materialistic or macho about it, but nevertheless, that was the quiet part out loud – no one really thinks a not-rich person will split up with someone who is. By forty, he’d have a fortune, and Roisin was opting out.
That he currently felt undumpable actually made quite a lot of sense.
‘I don’t have the bandwidth for this. I had no idea that you were going to wake up this morning and decide we were over,’ Joe said.
‘I think we’ve been over for a while,’ Roisin said. ‘I’m just the one to say it.’
She was braced for some spiky comeback, a stinging contradiction, but Joe only looked at her, with those dark eyes she’d once seen so much depth in.
Could she fall back in love with him? Not without his help.
‘I can’t do this now. Can we talk again when I’m back from the States?’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll be back in a week. Ten days, max.’
Roisin nodded yes. It wasn’t as if they could avoid that anyway.
Joe blew air out of his cheeks and picked up his mug. Roisin felt a wave of guilt at what she’d done and once again told herself: you didn’t choose this timing or location. You didn’t force this conflict into being.
‘I don’t want to run into anyone in the house, together. Can you give me ten minutes’ head start?’
‘Sure,’ Roisin said.
‘I’ll message you when I land,’ Joe said.
‘Thanks,’ she said stiffly.
He leaned over and gave her a quick hug that was more like a second’s grip, giving her no time to respond, and walked away.
She watched Joe cross the lawn to the house and didn’t know how to classify her feelings.
Glad the declaration was over with. Torn up, and sad. Devastated that it had happened at all and immediately, despite everything, self-doubting whether it had to happen.
In the distance, he closed the door behind him. Roisin let her shoulders drop an inch and tried to absorb this altered reality.
What was this other sensation, one she couldn’t instantly name? Wait – spooked. Spooked to the point of creeped out, even more so than she’d been in the screening room. Why?
She got a message, direct from her gut, so shocking and surreal that her brain immediately rejected it. Her gut nevertheless stubbornly clung onto its instinct.
The night he walked back from Sesso, Joe had had a shower when he got in. He never showered before bed, and she’d registered it as odd at the time. When she mumbled a question as he climbed under the covers, he said he’d got rained on. Except it hadn’t rained, unless Burton Road was in the most micro of microclimates: Roisin loved sleeping with an open window. The night had been still.
And it was somewhat contradictory that this evening had both inspired the opening scenes of a story and had been completely uneventful. At the very least, he’d thought about it, hadn’t he?
Roisin strained in vain to recall any specific waitress.
Though she had asked if the cheating was autobiographical, she’d never seriously considered that it could be. She felt she was entitled to make the point that others might think it was.
What if it was? Was she going mad? Before last night, she’d have scoffed at the idea, said it was impossible. He wasn’t the type. Lacked the chances, anyway, as she told her counsellor. Even if she could conceive of Joe doing those things, why rub her face in it and risk his neck like this?
Except … look at what he’d done with her past. He couldn’t care less. He thought a hollow mea culpa was enough, once caught red-handed. He’d played the odds.
A huge wave of nausea rolled up, so strong that Roisin felt it might knock her off her feet.
What if the failure to check his conscience was because Joe didn’t have one?
What if the greatest betrayal here wasn’t the one she thought it was? What if Joe was Jasper?
Two things to know about me. I don’t feel guilt. And I’ll do it again.
25
‘Here she is! Seen the papers?!’ Dev sing-songed, doling out a bacon sandwich to Roisin while the bluetooth speaker blasted Wet Leg’s ‘Chaise Longue’.
Anita was at the kitchen table, halfway into something egg-based and heavily sauced. That she loved to eat, and Dev loved to cook, was another way they were well suited. Roisin hoped they sorted out the procreating priority snafu.
The Brian Club were otherwise two men down, one in London, one en route to Los Angeles, and the two remaining were apparently yet to emerge.
What had become of Matt, after he climbed into that kidnapper-looking car? Roisin imagined him on all fours in a wet room in Soho House, ball gag in his mouth, as Amelia Lee barked orders and Granville, with venison biltong, looked on.
‘No?’ Roisin said to Dev, pasting on a neutrally curious yet psychologically robust kind of smile.
She had no intention of ruining the last hours of Dev’s grand trip with any hint she and Joe had fought. Yet she feared she’d have Recent Disaster written all over her face. She dreaded one of those moments when people cry, ‘Oh God, what’s wrong?!’ at the sight of someone who imagined they looked normal.
Roisin couldn’t convincingly mimic over-the-top high spirits, and it’d feel morally gross, so the acting job was mundane-cheerful.
As it turned out, Roisin needn’t have worried about what the focus would be.
‘Hoh, you need to hear the reviews!’ Dev said, hopping about once more at the sight of her in the kitchen. It hit her as insensitive, yet he wasn’t being. Why wouldn’t Dev expect Roisin to be overjoyed at Joe’s accomplishment?
She was gaslit by the fact that only she seemed to find the echoes of their lives in Hunter disturbing. Was Joe right – had she wildly overreacted?
Had her unhappiness in the relationship completely warped her judgement? Had it nuclear-fusion powered her response?
Dev dusted his fingers of toast crumbs, then put one hand on his hip as he authoritatively scrolled his phone.
‘Here we go … Sheen, it’s total five-star raves across the board. Only the Telegraph was sniffy. Listen to this …’ Dev muted Wet Leg.
Roisin sipped coffee and looked at a bacon sanger on sourdough that would feel like chewing a sofa cushion smeared with HP.
The world was laughing at her.
‘Right … right. OK, so, someone called Niall Thingy in the Observer,’ Dev said, drawing breath. ‘“I compartmentalise, that’s all. We all compartmentalise. Everyone has separate parts of their lives they divide and wall off from the others. Mine are simply a little more interesting than yours.” So says Jasper Hunter, the titular star (an indecently charismatic Rufus Tate) to camera. It looks like he’s the only detective on the force who’s going to be able to figure out who’s behind a spate of gruesome murders of fashionable young women. The victims’ only connection: they’re barmaids and waitresses. “Someone hates ‘sharing plates’ even more than I do,” quips Jasper’s morose, chauvinistic boss, Nev, played with evident glee by the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder. (This is a show happy to provide in jokes aplenty.) Jasper meanwhile is engaged, ecstatically happy with fiancée Becca: his one secret weakness is risky sex with strangers. “The only people who’d ask me what the appeal is,” says Hunter, after a graphic coupling with an improbably gorgeous receptionist in a car park, “are the ones who’ve never tried it.”’
Roisin was hoping Dev might stop, but he was on a roll.
‘… In less experienced hands than writer Joe Powell, of SEEN fame, Hunter would be a standard “maverick detective with private life in disarray” cliché. Yet Jasper has (I’m sorry) all his balls in the air. Hunter poses a bigger philosophical question. Does infidelity truly matter if you successfully keep it to yourself? The best mobster dramas force you to question your own complicity in the seductions of the lifestyle, your vicarious enjoyment of some of their most abominable transgressions …’
Dev looked up: ‘Abominable transgressions, I like that.’
Roisin gave a very taut smile.
‘… Similarly, Jasper’s exhilarating amorality towards casual sex draws you in. You start out shocked and even repulsed by his promiscuous duplicity. Monogamy, Jasper argues, is the price society asks us to pay for a settled life with a soulmate, and it’s too high for some. Certainly, after an hour of such pulse-racing, stylish television, plenty of us will be unhealthily addicted to Jasper Hunter.’
Dev looked up. ‘What about that, then?’
‘Incredible,’ Roisin said, though in her head the sentence continued: Dismal male fantasies really get a pass, don’t they. Let me help you, Niall Thingy: yes, it does matter if you hide your shagging around. Where are ‘Becca’s’ rights not to be shagged on? It’s not about what society asks of him, it’s what he promised her.
Becca. Roisin felt vomitous. She needed time and space to sort through what she’d learned about Joe. There was a spectrum of possible revelation here. It ran from: Joe showing considerable insensitivity in not priming her for sensitive content, especially when he was robbing detail from real life. To: the whole thing was a deranged form of confessional, the most hidden in plain sight insult imaginable. Even Roisin had to admit, the latter was a large proposition, possibly too huge to be plausible. He wasn’t, as he’d said, drawing from life in SEEN.
The shower, though. After that night after Sesso.
Had he simply needed a cold shower, after his mind had been racing? Ugh. That had to be it.
The alternative, to borrow a beloved phrase of her mother’s, didn’t bear thinking about. Yet she was.
26
Roisin heard a noise and turned to see Meredith who had been listening, arms folded, to the review. She was wearing a pale blue sweater with cartoon clouds on it, like The Simpsons’ titles. On Roisin, it would look insufferably twee, but on Meredith, it made her seem like fresh air in human form.
‘Now Dev has done the good news, I best break the bad,’ Meredith said, picking up a jug on the table and pouring a glass of orange juice. She popped two ibuprofen from a blister pack, threw them to the back of her throat and washed them down with a glug of Tropicana Original With Bits, in a practised movement. Once she’d swallowed, she said, ‘Our driver is in no fit state. I even question if she’s still pissed, given the number of units imbibed. We don’t want to be three Princess Dis in a Paris tunnel.’
‘Oh no!’ said Roisin, though once again, sinfully grateful that Gina’s indisposition was providing diversion.
‘Is Gina really minging?’ Anita said. ‘I did wonder how bad she was when she was saying we had to play swim-up blackjack at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas for my hen.’
‘And was calling it Pisa’s Salad. She doesn’t remember much of the evening,’ Meredith said. ‘Which … might be something of a blessing.’ She made a face.
‘You know what, when I dried out, I didn’t realise just how much I was gonna love never having hangovers,’ Dev said. ‘The days I spent feeling like I’d been attacked with the pointy end of a Polonium umbrella.’
‘I’m not too clever myself; I might take my bacon sandwich to go,’ Meredith said, nodding towards Dev’s spatula.
‘Sure thing.’
‘Please come view her in the Chapel of Rest,’ Meredith said to Roisin.
She led Roisin through the soaring hallway towards the drawing room. ‘Now, I must warn you, I’ve done my best. But Gina may not look how you remember her. The embalming process takes its toll.’
‘I CAN HEAR YOU!’ Gina croak-roared, out of sight.
‘She sounds the same though,’ Meredith said.
Roisin laughed.
Gina was in a saggy t-shirt and football-length soft cotton shorts, doll-sized and horizontal on one of the giant sofas. She looked like a trendy art installation where they skew the scale. Her complexion resembled candlewax, hair slicked back from her face.
‘I fear she does not have long,’ Meredith said.
‘Honestly, worst hangover ever,’ Gina said to Roisin. ‘Never drinking again. I woke up at four a.m. and didn’t know where I was. I caught the belt of my dressing gown on a door handle, couldn’t move and thought I was having a stroke.’
Roisin hooted.
‘Concentrate on recovering. Roisin and I can share the drive back,’ Meredith said.
Roisin nodded agreement, while inwardly shrivelling. She had in no way prepared herself, in her state of inner turmoil, for the prospect of manhandling a temperamental vintage coach down a motorway. How do you overtake in that thing? Buy it flowers and ask it nicely?
‘No, Ethelred won’t like a stranger touching her. It has to be me,’ Gina said. ‘I’ll be OK. Another hour.’
‘Does Sunny von Bülow want another drink?’
‘Who’s that? No, thank you – I threw the Fanta up.’
‘Do I need to rinse the washing-up bowl?’
‘I made it to the fireplace.’
‘What?!’
‘Heh heh.’ Gina managed a tiny evil smile. ‘Not really – the loo.’
‘Oh, if you can do humour then you’re recovering,’ Meredith said. ‘Why am I bedpan nurse?!’
Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips, like a mum who has been told their child’s stomach bug is suspiciously impervious to tortilla chips.
‘No, Mer. I feel awful,’ Gina said, ‘In every way. I can’t even remember a lot. I can’t remember Joe’s show!’
‘It’ll be on iPlayer,’ Roisin said, hoping she sounded less terse than she felt.
Gina dropped her voice. ‘Was I really really horrible to Matt?’
‘No! You were … robust,’ Meredith said. ‘You were quite horrible to his girlfriend, though, haha.’
‘The girl who looked like Amelia Lee,’ Gina said, eyes closed. She was maintaining the perfect immobility of someone who knew if she moved, she’d puke.
Meredith and Roisin exchanged glances.
‘Er … she was …’ Meredith began.
‘Was what?’ Gina said.
‘Yeah, she acted like a VIP,’ Roisin said. ‘Total diva. I’d not worry about offending her.’
Roisin, already holding her phone, hurriedly WhatsApped Meredith.
If she’s forgotten that bit, let’s go with it! Wait until
we’re safely home/Gina is out of her intensive care x
You make a very good point.
They left Gina to her convalescence, found a croquet set in a cupboard and passed the last hour playing a game on the front lawn.
Eventually Gina appeared, dressed, packed, headscarf on, and said, ‘Girls, I feel good to go, but it has to be now before my stomach or bum change their minds.’
They scarpered into the house to grab their luggage and it made the farewells with Dev and Anita mercifully brief. Roisin didn’t want to perjure herself, but, stumbling through effusive thanks, she had to.
‘You are, as always, the store manager of our hearts,’ Roisin said, planting a kiss on Dev’s cheek.
‘Yes, Bolton’s Rose. No thank yous could do this justice,’ Meredith said, helping out.
‘Ah, shut up. Only you lot could have made it this incredible. Insane and incredible.’
