Between Us, page 4
Joe’s diary used to be: get up, drink black coffee, preferably wash, write, stick something in the oven, more writing. Rinse and repeat. Now it became complicated and ablaze with fuss. Roisin learned the lingo of co pros and turnaround and punches.
After a day of high-powered breakfast and lunch meetings in the capital, Joe would get off the train mid-evening at Manchester Piccadilly, and Roisin would meet him for dinner out.
He’d talk too fast, and they’d drink too fast, and she gloried in every last detail of the latest developments. She was so pleased for him and always thought, girlfriend bias aside, he had the talent to make it.
Then the work came so thick and fast it often made sense to stay in London overnight, and Hollywood called, and he was flying back and forth to Los Angeles.
A production company in New York bought the rights to another of his ideas. At some point, Roisin accepted get past this week and things will calm down a bit was a coping mechanism lie of adulthood.
Joe being away never bothered Roisin. She enjoyed her own company, liked hearing about his adventures.
Yet somehow, at some point, hectic and mentally occupied became cold and detached.
Roisin learned not to message Joe when he was away, because she rarely got much back. He must be the only man, she thought, to deploy the heart react emoji to WhatsApps as a dismissal.
How’d it go with Fox Searchlight? Heart. Did the hire car get replaced? Heart. Oh my God, that ginger moggy is back soiling our garden! Pooing with his tail vibrating, making unnerving eye contact! Heart. You heart defecating cats, OK.
She’d not raised it. When someone comes through the door after five days away bearing a duty-free Toblerone, you don’t want to greet them with whining.
A thought came to Roisin, and once she’d had the thought she couldn’t un-have it: the prolonged absences were doubling as practice for breaking up. Each time he returned, he was a degree more distant than the last time.
Life had fundamentally changed, or maybe more accurately and painfully, Joe had changed. Can success really change a person, though, she wondered? Maybe it only brings elements that were always there to the fore?
The humour that once bonded them felt like sparring, underscored by resentment. Like an arm-wrestling bout that had to have a winner.
Plans with their friends were an obligation, if not an irritation – Joe always had something slighting to say.
God, that place again? We’ve become bourgeoise. Soon we’ll have Bless This Mess decal stickers on our wheelie bins.
She half wondered if hating on Matt was a way of carving out a convenient exit from the Brian Club. Sorry, not if he’s there – I can’t stand him.
Sex had dwindled, and when it occurred, had the unmistakeable sense of reaching a deadline: … best do it or it’ll become a thing we haven’t done it.
When they first met, the spark between them was obvious. Joe had immediately mentioned he had a long-distance girlfriend, Bea, back in his home city, York.
Nothing had happened between Joe and Roisin – nor would it have, if the girlfriend had remained; Roisin wasn’t into foul play – but she’d catch Joe looking at her, across tables, at the hour of the night when blood alcohol levels were high and the lights were low.
One Friday afternoon, Joe had found Roisin alone in a corner of the shop, stickering Signed By The Author copies of Terry Pratchett.
‘I want you to know. I’m ending it with Bea.’
‘OK,’ Roisin said.
‘When I’ve done that, I’m going to ask you out.’
‘OK,’ Roisin said, and tried not to flush sunset red.
He walked away. Woah. Quietly spoken Joe, with a love of the graphic novels of Alan Moore and a winning resemblance to young John Cusack, had a streak of real confidence. It was undeniably, hugely attractive.
Those were the days they hung on each other’s every word. The times they did nothing but talk: a day off together, walking round parks, browsing record shops, spinning pints of real ale out in old boy’s pubs. Everything was interesting if they were together. Oh, to be that young again, when everything felt new.
As the first – and it turned out, only – couple of the group, they became the ones to have everyone back to their flat when they were all too pre-payday skint to go out: Joe on the music and snacks, Roisin on lighting candles and mixing drinks. They were foundation laying and empire building, as a team.
Had someone else now been made a similar promise to the one she got made over Discworld? Roisin had gone back and forth over it and concluded:
1. Their origins story showed Joe could be ruthlessly decisive, and a year of near intimacy-free purgatory wasn’t that, and 2. He was talking about their getting a dog.
Nearly a decade on, it was as if their love was a neglected, autumn leaf-strewn swimming pool. It technically still existed, yet Joe had drained the water out, inch by inch. If you jumped into it, there was nothing there. You’d break your ankles.
Roisin had started seeing a counsellor, without telling Joe.
Do you think he’s being unfaithful?
Hah, no. He’d certainly have a huge scheduling headache if he was.
Can the relationship be fixed?
I don’t know.
Do you want to fix it?
I don’t know. I think so. I want to be how we were. But I don’t know if that’s gone for good.
Roisin kept telling herself, get this or that out the way. Get through Dev’s Downton Abbey do, get Hunter safely launched into the world – and nurse Joe through any bad reviews. Afterwards, there’d be time for a state of the nation.
Frankly, she suspected Joe would ask for one eventually, and dignity demanded she went first.
It made sense to wait, yet Roisin knew a pointless delaying tactic when she invented one. It was the personal life equivalent of Amir querying whether Fifty Shades was great literature of the future.
Faking it never really worked.
‘ARE YOU DECENT???!’ Dev roared on the other side of the door.
Joe, typing, was so startled he almost sent an unfinished email, cursing Dev under his breath.
‘Decent!’ Roisin said, flinging the door open, striking a pose in her black dress.
‘Bloody hell, Sheen. If I wasn’t engaged and your boyfriend wasn’t a friend, and also just over there, near a brass fire poker.’
‘Haha! Thank you.’
‘Meredith and Gee are already on it downstairs, go join them. Anita’s taking forever, as per. Joe, we’re up. You’re in a crucial role – you’re my head of the butter chicken dept,’ Dev said. ‘I’m on parathas and raitas. Got Matt manning the bhajis station, with a side line in lassis. Mango lassis.’
‘I’d not let Matt near the lassies’ mangoes,’ Joe said.
Roisin snorted, despite herself, and Dev disappeared off, cackling. Roisin could tell Joe resented the interruption.
Joe doesn’t enjoy anything any more, Roisin thought. He didn’t enjoy her. Enjoying was happening elsewhere.
‘Do I look OK?’ she asked, smoothing the dress over her hips and holding her stomach in.
Joe glanced up from his screen. ‘Sure.’
‘Sure. And you a writer.’
‘It – looks – really – nice – you – always – look – really – nice,’ Joe said, deliberately mechanically. ‘That do?’
No, of course not, Roisin thought, but didn’t say it. She needed a fight right before this dinner like a hole in the head. One thing she knew for sure: there’d be no showdown on these premises.
‘Coming down?’
‘Just gonna finish this mail. Go on ahead.’
Are you still in love with him?
What’s the test for that?
8
Roisin descended the broad staircase carefully, placing her gold T-bar heels with purpose. Telling kids off for running and tripping in corridors brought with it responsibility. No way was she returning for the last week before the summer holiday in an authority-diminishing orthopaedic fracture boot.
She caught the distant voice of Taylor Swift singing ‘Champagne Problems’. It was so apposite; briefly alone and lonely in her evening finery, it was momentarily as if she was starring in a Baz Luhrmann film.
Roisin hesitated on the bottom step, trying to press record on her memories, to take in the otherworldly atmosphere of blank-eyed statues, dusty floors and soaring high space, the chalky sweet smell of the lilies.
It had become a cliché to say your friends were your adopted family, where you felt real belonging – it was no less true for Roisin for being hackneyed. She’d never met people who had stuck to her like this, who made her part of a gang.
The fact that they might not choose each other now – it was hard to see how they’d even encounter each other to do the choosing – made it more special, and vital. They couldn’t recapture the clean slates of being in their early twenties. But they could keep hold of each other.
Joe put lower value on it, she supposed, because he could. He had lovely, happily married, supportive parents who middle-class garden-pottered, visited National Trust properties and called him as the credits rolled on every episode of SEEN. He still had a circle of school friends back in York, including his ride or die best mate, Dom.
The Brian Club was merely a nice-to-have for him; for Roisin, they were everything. They were the point.
She followed the music to the grand sitting room, where Meredith and Gina were both giggling conspiratorially by the fireplace, surrounded by an improbable number of flickering candles.
The music was coming from a lozenge-shaped bluetooth speaker that had been somewhat disrespectfully balanced on the brim of a fireplace statue’s hat, as if it was an outsized feather in its band.
If there were curses and ghosts associated with Benbarrow Hall, they were surely going to get them up the wazoo.
Meredith was in a parrot-orange silk top and cerulean blue trousers, while Gina was clad in a sinuous cream dress that clung to her out-in-out mini Marilyn Monroe figure, with a large bow tied at her narrow neck, hair pinned up.
‘Oh my God. You both look extraordinary. I look like someone’s prom date in 1996.’
Tonight, Roisin had hauled out an old ‘posh event’ failsafe, which was flattering and easy to wear, if unexciting. It had a full skirt which ended mid-calf, the sort you got on a child’s dolly. It had seemed cute in her twenties, but she feared it was a bit gauche in her thirties. When she’d fretted she had nothing to wear for this trip, Joe had encouraged her to go wild with his credit card. Generous, but it was still his credit card and she didn’t like how that felt.
‘You look like the girl everyone wanted to take to prom,’ said Gina, with her usual sweet sincerity and mild awe. Gina always treated Roisin as if she knew a secret passcode in life that Gina didn’t, as if she’d jail broken its phone. Roisin didn’t understand why: as far as she could see, she’d never done anything to merit it.
‘Notice in the whole time we’ve known each other, we’ve never needed to check if we’ll be wearing the same thing,’ Meredith said, sloshing fizz from an ice bucket into a third glass. ‘Don’t worry’ – she read Roisin’s concerned look – ‘this is from the supermarket delivery we ordered.’
‘And these are pre-canapes – Matt says he adlibbed in case we were hungry,’ Gina said, with the customary note of adoration in her voice. ‘It’s cubes of brie on sour cream Pringles. Slag’s canapés.’ Gina gestured at a plate balanced on a velvet pouffe.
‘Student hors d’oeuvres,’ Meredith said.
‘Whore-derves!’ Gina said, and they high-fived.
‘I’m sorry if you thought I wouldn’t, but I in fact will,’ Roisin said, bending down and carefully conveying one into her mouth between finger and thumb.
‘Oh, we’ve had about ten between us,’ Meredith said.
‘Here you are, and some actual canapes,’ Matt said, entering the room carrying a tray on the flat of his palm, like a waiter.
He was in a white shirt and stupid-handsome, dark brown hair and gilded skin. Like the playboy son of an American tobacco magnate.
It always looked like a lot of fun to have his face. Roisin had never considered that about conspicuous beauty before, that people might want to hang around it simply to see where it led.
But he was without moustache …?
‘You had second thoughts?’ Roisin said, pointing to her top lip.
‘Yeah. If even its fans thought it conveyed a look of irresponsible inseminator …’
‘It might give too much away?’ Roisin finished for him, grinning.
Matt smiled back, a tight smile. ‘I’ll put these on this side table,’ Matt said, crossing the room. ‘Mini onion bhajis with a mint and coriander chutney. Surprisingly, caused less angst than the butter chicken.’
‘Ah, Joe’s area,’ Roisin said, tapping her nose.
‘No comment.’
‘Also, the Pringles are great,’ Roisin said indistinctly, through her second. ‘Excellent improvisation.’
‘Glad you like. Wait until you try my White Russians made with Whiskas Cat Milk.’
Roisin put her hand in front of her full mouth as she laughed.
‘Enjoy,’ Matt said, heading back to the kitchen.
They dropped the mini bhajis into their mouths, cupping them with the tissue provided.
‘Look at us, ladylike, as if we’ve not just tractored through a load of crisps like wild coyotes,’ Roisin said.
‘This is the life, eh,’ Meredith said, crumpling the paper napkin and gazing at the room. ‘Did we ever think, doing our stockroom audits, we’d be here in ten years’ time?’
‘I didn’t think I’d be here ten months ago,’ Roisin said.
‘I didn’t think I’d ever be here,’ Gina said.
‘Technically we’re not here-here, I suppose. It’s Dev’s achievement, Dev’s festival. It’s Devtonbury,’ Meredith said.
‘Devload?’ Roisin said.
‘But we’re here, in that we’re still together,’ Gina said, and Roisin replied with an emphatic ‘Yes!’ as her stomach constricted.
So, you don’t want to finish with your partner, because you think you’d finish the group?
9
She was being ridiculous. It wasn’t that fragile, was it – the Brian Club, the old gang? They’d simply reorganise, and the keynote gatherings would be divided up between Roisin and Joe like divorced parents negotiating access. This stuff happened all the time.
What are you afraid of?
The counsellor had to go and drop atomic bomb questions like that, didn’t she. Surely that wasn’t second session material. Roisin was ashamed of her reply. That ending it with Joe would make no sense to anyone else. And when it’s that impossible for anyone else to understand, isn’t it a clue that maybe you’re doing the wrong thing?
Why do other people’s opinions matter?
‘I don’t know,’ Roisin had said, privately thinking: is a creeping yet unfocused conviction your relationship is a hollow sham sufficient cause to ditch an entire future timeline? It might turn out that you were in fact self-indulgently pissed off at the realities of being a decade into cohabitation with a workaholic. She could hear her mother’s voice. ‘There are worse addictions, darling.’
No, that wasn’t it, either. She knew the correct answer to that was: ‘Yes, it is sufficient, because what you’re describing is loveless pragmatism.’
Here it was: the thing that kept her trapped. But somehow being away from home had shaken this revelation loose. Roisin simply didn’t know if Joe Now was also Joe Then – if one became the other, overwrote him like old video cassette, or if the former version was still there, available to return to her, if she was patient. Until she’d figured it out, she couldn’t make a move.
Roisin caught Meredith looking at her and quickly recovered her features from a worried scowl into pleasure.
Dev had decided to serve their meal in the kitchen, in part to distinguish it from Gina’s birthday celebration in the dining room the following day. It was by no means the lesser choice. The sturdy wooden table with black bistro chairs was in a dog’s leg around the freestanding Aga. They’d filled the table with a star-studded clutter of tea lights, wherever there was space around plate settings. The white china pendant lamps above had a lambent, firefly glow. The whole look could’ve been torn straight from an upmarket interiors magazine.
Roisin had forgotten how great a cook Dev was. He had that signature of the truly confident, in that he never tried to do too much.
Tonight, there was a cauldron of butter chicken on the stove, with stacks of paratha and a mound of plain rice the size of a Forest Hog, and a supporting act vat of saag aloo, which their resident vegetarian, Gina, could have as her main. The table held raitas and something shrimp-pink with beetroot, bowls of chutneys and pickles.
Dev, always a host by temperament, had found a setting worthy of his talents.
Everyone held their phones aloft to record the scene – the modern ritual.
She glanced at Joe for a moment’s connection, but he had stationed himself by the butter chicken with a serving ladle.
‘We’re not going to say grace, so instead let’s say thanks, Dev, and a cognac for the chefs,’ Roisin said, lifting her glass with a nod to Joe and then Matt, as others followed suit.
‘Oh God, do you remember that visiting manager from London who got us to describe “an interesting thing that happened to us recently”, at the start of any meeting? Peppy bitch,’ Meredith said, with theatrical shudder.
‘There is nothing worse on this blue planet than “team building”,’ Matt said.
‘I’ve got an interesting thing. Last month I was so hungover that my iPhone’s Face ID didn’t recognise me,’ Gina said.
She looked surprised when everyone burst into hysterics.
‘That’s not possible, surely!’ Matt said. ‘It’s biometrics.’
‘It wasn’t biometrics, it was mezcal.’
‘Ohhhh, was that the same night you called me weeping so hard you couldn’t speak, and I thought something terrible had happened …’ Meredith said.
