24
Roisin wasn’t going to break the silence that followed.
‘Right, we’re on the clock because of my flight,’ Joe said, after a while. ‘Before we both crank up any more levels, can I suggest we keep it for when I get back? It’s a lot right now. Especially when we’re here.’ He nodded back at the house.
‘Ah, the Calm Down, Crazy Woman gambit.’
‘No, more about the fact we have no time and a lot of company. It’s Dev’s special weekend.’
‘I’d have preferred this not to happen in front of them, too.’
‘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?
‘Who knows, but it’s far from guaranteed that she won’t, isn’t it? What do I say if she asks me about it?’
‘You’d think she wouldn’t, though, eh,’ Joe said, raising an eyebrow.
‘Meaning what?’
‘It’s quite delicate. For her.’
This was so much hypocrisy, Roisin felt she might choke. ‘Wow, now you’re aware of how intensely taboo it might be? Better late than never, huh. Oh wait, no, late has exactly the same value as never, here.’
‘You know what I mean! She’s not going to go there.’
‘Yes, I do know what you mean, having never suffered from your curiously useful brain fog about this. I know it would be completely agonising for my mum to ask me if I discovered things about her open marriage by accident, twenty years ago. That I’d obviously told my partner, and he put it on television, and she recognised herself.’
Joe shook his head. ‘I wish I’d thought this through, I really do. I’d not have gone near it.’
Fuck you, Roisin thought. You are a liar. The only regret here is discovering how strongly I’ll defend myself.
‘Given I know the last thirty seconds came from my life, can I ask if the taxi bit at the start was something that happened, too?’
‘What?’
‘Leaving your scarf at a restaurant and walking back when we got a cab. Getting in late. That was two summers ago, right? The Italian place, Sesso? In fact, it’d be exactly two years – I think it was Gina’s birthday.’
‘What’s the question here? Did I sneak back that night and bone a waitress?’ Joe said.
‘Yes, that’s the question.’
‘Amazing. Do I get to be offended you would even ask that, or is that not how this works?’
‘Did you not think by using an actual scenario I recognised that I might be a bit disorientated or worried by that?’
In the context of their monogamy, using their real life as a set felt so tacky. It spoke of a great hinterland of laddish wish fulfilment. Did he really not realise she’d be affected by it? It was like Joe had had a radical surgical resection of his empathy when he signed his first contract.
‘No, because I thought you understood we were firmly in the realm of fiction. If it needs spelling out, then yes, that’s made up, Rosh,’ Joe said. He was drawing himself up to full height, trying on some indignance for size. ‘I’m not a chronically unfaithful danger shagger like my anti-hero. Nor in the past have I ever headed up an elite squad of police with extraordinary powers of visual recognition.’
‘I think it was reasonable to ask,’ Roisin said. ‘The girlfriend’s hot friend sub plot was somewhat gross, too. How is Gina meant to feel about that?’
‘Gina’s not meant to feel anything because that wasn’t Gina. Or me. Or any of us. Wow. Starting to wish I’d got a gig writing Emmerdale. You could demand to know who the sheep were based on.’
‘Nice. Loving being your straight woman in the teeth of my humiliation.’
‘These questions are ridiculous, so they’ll only get ridiculous answers. It’s pretty shit for me to have my work pulled apart by my girlfriend like this. Do you not think it hurts, that you didn’t like it?’
This was so self-absorbed, Roisin could only gasp.
‘You know what you really don’t like,’ Joe continued. ‘You don’t like losing the spotlight.’
‘What?!’
‘For a long time, you had the upper hand; we both know that. I was always punching. Fit, funny, confident Roisin, great at her job, centre of attention … How did that skint, sarky wannabe writer guy in the corner pull her? Now I’m the one getting the fuss. The balance of power has shifted, and you don’t like it, so you’re projecting other reasons.’
Some accusations, from someone you knew well, were like being shivved under the ribs, an attack by an expert assassin who knew exactly how to puncture a vital organ in one economical move. You felt it because you knew it was true. Others were out of the blue, from nowhere: like a frisbee arcing through the air, straight at you.
This was a frisbee.
‘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.