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.