Mhairi McFarlane

‘The real version of this, Joe, goes – you knew it was theft and you knew it was sensitive. If you’d told me, I’d object and you’d have to take it out. So you went ahead and chanced it, thinking, if you got away with it, cool. If it went wrong and I kicked off, it was a price worth paying to keep it in
the script. Even when you knew I’d watch it here, with our friends around us, it didn’t change the stakes enough for you to come clean before you put me through that. Because why gift me an opportunity to be a nuisance? None of this fall-out means anything, because my pain over this is absolutely nothing to you. Not compared to your career. This is merely an inconvenient difficulty to be managed, before you get to the real business of some brunch meeting with men in designer sunglasses in Los Angeles where no one eats the food.’

When she finished speaking, Roisin saw that Joe looked embattled, but also faintly – and uncharacteristically – impressed. She had his attention. Roisin’s fury was obviously the first time he’d listened to her in a while.

She wondered if he was filing it away to use in the future. She wondered if any privacy was now an illusion.

Between us meant nothing.

‘Look, I haven’t actually exposed any secret. No one but us would know that moment came from your childhood.’

This said more about Joe than he realised. Image was everything, and he’d not damaged hers. That the fact that only she could perceive the treacherous plagiarism meant it as good as didn’t matter. Because, once again, she didn’t.

‘Even if that was the point here, my mum might recognise it, don’t you think?’ Her voice wavered. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

‘She won’t see it. She stopped watching SEEN, didn’t she?’

Joe resented his mother-in-law for her indifference to his work. Lorraine, of course, hadn’t bothered with the social nicety of pretence: ‘not my cup of tea’. Jesus, was Joe also taking oblique revenge?

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 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.

Grace and Imogen were exactly the kind of people to produce a nickname for you out of nowhere and apply it liberally.

They moved on to circulate, and half an hour later, Roisin glanced over and saw Imogen almost bent double with laughter at something Matt had said. She straightened up, put
the back of her hand to her mouth and the other on the small of his back, and Roisin felt a sharp stab of an unexpected, unnamed emotion.

She looked at Matt, and he saw her. His eyes travelled down to her dress, and suddenly it felt two sizes tighter and considerably more revealing than it had done before.

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.

It was lying to their friends. Well, lying to Dev to be precise, and making the women awkward. When she said she wanted time to think, she didn’t mean, ‘while we attend social outings as a couple.’

Her frayed nerves made it harder to judge, but, watching
Joe dunk a piece of bread in oil, this surprise cameo smacked of a power play.

Minutes later, she checked her phone discreetly and saw:

Hey R: I’m hitting brick walls and bleeding all over Final Draft tonight & Dev called, saying to sod it off and come out. I won’t if you’d find it tricky. LMK. J x

Immaculate housekeeping. Forty-five minutes old: sent too late for her to prevent it, yet providing Joe with complete comprehensive cover.

When he’d come through the door earlier this week, drenched in contrition, why hadn’t she simply stuck to her guns and said no, they were done?

Because she was caught off guard. Because she’d not, at that point, got the feedback from Matt going to Sesso and sated a thirst for evidence. Because she thought nine years deserved a second chance. None of these reasons, on inspection, were good reasons.

Nothing that mattered had changed. She’d go home tomorrow and say she had finished thinking, they were definitely done. It wasn’t a good moment to finally have this conviction, at the start of an hour and a half of being friendly and social in Joe’s company.

Unlike their first two face-offs, Joe was on the moral high ground for this third round. He wasn’t going to let Roisin off lightly. Fair enough, really, she thought. It wasn’t as if she’d gone gentle on him.

She cleared her throat. She was going to have to confirm her decision to end things having made a flurry of false accusations. It was indeed what Wendy Copeland had codenamed NFI.

‘I think we should split up, Joe. Something’s broken for me that can’t be fixed. I think if we went to counselling, it’d delay the inevitable and waste your time, and I don’t want to do that.’

‘Wow,’ Joe said, regarding her. She couldn’t tell what percentage of his righteous indignation was fury and what was hurt. She was busy trying to keep control herself.

He stepped backwards and sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘Fucking wow. Ten years together, and you throw it in
my face that we’re over five minutes before I go to Los Angeles. Now you repeat it, after going behind my back to check up on me and accusing me of fucking around. So it didn’t matter whether I was guilty or not? You’re still doing this?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roisin said stupidly. It sounded awful, because it was.

‘Right, well,’ Joe said, after an agonising pause. ‘The paperwork on the apartment is done – I sent it back today. I’ll start looking for flats and packing my things up.’

‘I don’t want you to give me your share of this apartment. It’s insanely generous, but it’s too much.’

‘I gave you my word and I keep my word. It also means we don’t have to drag this out and get involved in interminable back and forth over selling it, solicitors, all that shit. I don’t want any of it. I want to go.’

‘OK.’

‘Well, I don’t want to go, at all. But.’

He gave Roisin a penetrating, sullen look. It should look like pure loathing, yet it was somehow a Rhett Butler stare that she feared could equally precede shouting or trying to kiss her. Like their initial showdown, it was as if Joe was finally interested.

A thought came to Roisin: that clear bell voice of her subconscious. Now he can’t have you, he really wants you. A tired love had become a sharp hunger again.

Lorraine took what she needed, then took some more, yet when Roisin needed some giving back – like, say, her mother putting Ryan politely in his place when he was undermining his sister – Lorraine went AWOL, playacted dumb. Support was something she sought but never bestowed.

Why even tell Roisin that Matt had been misspoken? Because Ryan was always higher in the pecking order. Even as Matt and her daughter saved her fête and saved her face, Lorraine couldn’t resist subtly reasserting that her son was CEO of the company. That his was the five-star standard of care. She rewarded words and took actions for granted.

Four years after her dad died, her mother was seeing a man with terrible moccasin shoes called Gary, who drove an uninsured car and flirted with Roisin. Roisin knew Gary had very
bad word of mouth among the womenfolk of Webberley, and that sort of grapevine was rarely wrong.

She tried to get her mother to see sense. Ryan told Lorraine she should do whatever made her happy. He resisted Roisin’s entreaties to raise doubts, though she knew he had them. Ryan never made an intervention that could cost him popularity or even minor difficulty. Lorraine became engaged to Gary. She then discovered he was already married and had a petty criminal record.

Both of her offspring were at university, yet Roisin was required – with the emotional equivalent of a gun at her temple – to miss nearly two months of her course to come home and nurse her mother through a mini-breakdown and keep the pub running.

Her mother’s legend recorded that her recovery was magicked into being the day that Ryan had scraped enough from his student budget to send her an incredible bouquet. She still repeated the emetic message on the card about how his mother was a queen who deserved nothing less than a king.

Moccasins Gary had been expunged from the record, and Lorraine instead recalled only that Roisin was so much of a daddy’s girl, she’d scared Lorraine’s suitors away.

‘Glad to have helped,’ Matt said. ‘It’s given me an inner glow.’

‘Hope that’s not Terry’s burger relish. I saw Del Monte fruit cocktail going into it.’

She and Matt laughed like Beavis and Butthead. Roisin saw a sixty-something woman seated at a picnic table shoot them both an adoring look, obviously taking them for a couple.

Roisin beamed back. Matt saw the woman too, and glanced appraisingly at Roisin.

In a split second, she became acutely self-conscious. Her arm, chucked around Matt’s middle, demonstrating how easy she was with him, was suddenly heavy as lead. She could sense every inch of her limb making contact with his midriff, feel the heat of his skin through his shirt. What had been so thoughtlessly done was charged with electricity.

Was her arm even positioned normally? Roisin couldn’t tell. She was as stiff-jointed as a shop mannequin. Someone else had cranked her elbow hinge, curled her fingers, and she could only maintain the pose.

Matt put his hand over hers and moved her arm down to her side, and her breathing stopped. A clear indication that Roisin had overstepped, and that he felt awkward too. But … he didn’t let go of her hand? They stood looking out over the garden, their palms clasped together.

In a little invisible game of raising the stakes, Roisin adjusted her hand inside his grip, interlocking their fingers. Matt responded by squeezing her hand. She squeezed back. What was going on? She felt incredible tension in parts of her body that were not her hand.

Lorraine burst into the garden, ringing the bell for last orders like a town crier, and she and Matt sprang apart like foxes who’d had water thrown over them.

Roisin obsessed about the surreptitious handholding, and what it meant, for the rest of the shift. Probably nothing; she was out of practice at courting rituals.