42
There was a lot of full-throated advice and encouragement out there about big, headline-making relationship decisions, Roisin thought, but nothing much about the minute-by-minute management of those choices. A lot of t-shirts exhorting DUMP HIM! and songs with rabble-rousing choruses, designed to be paired with salty margs and red lippie. But far fewer things said about the tone to adopt when his loving parents, Kenneth and Fay, unexpectedly called you on a Sunday afternoon for a speakerphone chat about the progress of the flat’s communal garden they were helping you with. Roisin had gone for the same jolly, bland normalcy she’d deployed with Lorraine. It still felt unpleasantly deceitful. She had to pitch it so she was neither OTT fake-perky or ominously and even discourteously flat.
Gloria Gaynor had nothing for her there; when it came to the moments between the moments, the awkward segues, the grey areas for protocol and the conversations that no longer flowed, you were on your own.
Thus, on the Tuesday evening Joe was due to return, Roisin found herself caught in another miniscule but agonising fix: jump up to go to the door when she heard him arrive? Or remain on the sofa and wait for Joe to make his entrance? The former felt eager and peculiar – to say what? She’d made it clear she wasn’t much fussed how his trip had gone. (News: J.J. Abrams ‘Bad Robot’ prod co want to make SEEN, nothing signed yet had been fired off mid-trip, to which she’d replied, Great news! You must be floating. Effusive but drab. Like he was a colleague.)
Standing by the entrance, almost as if in a challenge, felt weird. But the latter felt needlessly belligerent.
After half a glass of red, she twitchily WhatsApped Gina and Meredith to ask their advice about the world’s most pathetic micro-dilemma.
Meredith:
Lock yourself in the loo and shout through the door that you’re having a massive Tom Tit.
Gina:
What if Joe thinks that means another man
Meredith:
OK then ‘a Brad Pitt’
Roisin:
Thank you this has been invaluable
It felt pressured because this was the first moment, albeit in private, that they were a former couple. How Joe acted now would forecast the weather to come while they financially, practically, socially, and emotionally disentangled. He had a lot of power in deciding how the next two months of Roisin’s life played out.
Their breaking up, after so long, it was one of those things that happened all the time – but when it happened to you, it was unfeasibly gigantic. Roisin remembered thinking that the words, my dad died, were far too mundane and ordinary a statement, regarding its seismic impact and otherworldly strangeness. This, after nearly ten years together, had some of the same feel.
Roisin settled to a home renovation show where she could try to lose herself in the tricky choice of tiles for the pantry instead. The second episode of Hunter sat stubbornly unwatched: it was deeply inconvenient that iPlayer revealed that fact. Roisin guessed Joe wouldn’t have the neck to complain she’d not bothered.
She did not yet have the stomach for its content.
In the end, as was so often the way, the decision about getting the door was made for her. She heard a car loiter, then Joe bump up the steps and curse as he clearly failed to find his keys. She stuck the television on mute and went to answer.
‘Hi,’ Roisin said, opening the door, heart overclocking. ‘Too much luggage and too many pockets?’
‘Hello. Yep, thanks.’
Joe looked up, his sun-kissed skin again incongruous under Manchester skies. He must have made use of those rooftop bars.
He hoisted his ridged silver trolley case through the door and looked around. ‘Place looks immaculate? Cormac’s stint go OK?’
‘Oh. Yeah. Fine. I kept busy. Had extra days off work,’ Roisin said, in a stupid blurt. She wasn’t ready to talk about that.
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah.’
Joe obviously intuited they weren’t the good sort of days off and sensibly asked no more.
‘I’m going to have a shower and change, and then can we have a chat?’ Joe said.
Roisin felt numb. ‘If you have the energy,’ Roisin said.
‘No time like the present.’
Roisin couldn’t read his tone. She got herself more red wine, and after a moment’s thought, fetched the bottle and put an empty glass on the other side of the coffee table.
Joe reappeared with wet hair, in a clean t-shirt and joggers, sat down and poured himself a Shiraz.
‘It’s good to be home,’ he said, after a mouthful. He gazed far more intently at Roisin than he had in a long time. ‘You’re in the spare room?’
Roisin nodded. She didn’t want to seem mulish but had no idea what to say, until Joe showed his hand.
‘About last Sunday. I’m sorry for not … I’m trying to find a less speech-making sounding phrase than meeting the moment. I’m sorry for not knowing what to say. I was blindsided. I was about to fly to America for a huge meeting and my head was elsewhere. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.’
Roisin said nothing, glad he was being conciliatory yet still feeling intensely apprehensive. He wrote Cool Things To Say for a living, so she’d wait until she felt a truth.
‘… I’m also very sorry I put a painful chapter of your childhood memories into my programme and didn’t anticipate how upsetting that would be for you. I had a discussion with you on my mental to-do list at the time. Then it was Dom’s stag do weekend, if you remember that? Three nights in Budapest.’
‘Yeah. You went up to York the night before. You can remember this now?’
‘I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve gone from “no time to think”, to “fourteen hours of staring out of a porthole window at clouds” amount of time. I went into ultra-defensive arsehole mode when we spoke. I was gearing up to face terrifying moguls and execs who bark BORED at you in the middle of a sentence.’
He drew breath. ‘By the time I came back from Dom’s stag, I’d got a raft of notes and the seeking permission necessity slipped from my mind. The way I write, I memory hole things very fast and move on to the next bit. I thought it was my superpower for productivity; I never considered how much it could hurt you, Rosh. I must stress I’m not defending how I’ve acted or reacted, as it’s plainly not OK. I just want to be fully honest about how it happened.’
‘Did you think I’d say, yeah sure, use it if you asked me?’
‘Uhm …’ Joe’s brow creased. ‘I thought you’d allow it eventually but bombard me with lots of – justified – questions about how it fitted into what I was writing, and I wasn’t ready to talk about Hunter. That was the very selfish inhibition at the heart of it. I didn’t even ask myself if it was a good enough reason. I was a marathon runner who could only focus on the finish tape. Then it was all in the can; I couldn’t change it if you wanted me to. The denial and avoidance deepened. I’m like a fucking armadillo in Japanese trainers, these days.’
Roisin couldn’t smile. She hadn’t anticipated any of this.
‘About Hunter as a whole,’ Joe continued. ‘After SEEN, my agent said, “Now is the time to push the envelope – you’ll never be in a stronger position to write something really bold.” Agent-speak for, you have a pass to fuck up on this go, so take a risk. I thought about the men I know, from the super uxorious ones like Dom, still with Victoria from college, to the absolute bed hopper, lawless scoundrels who’ve done Mick Jagger numbers, like our pal, Matt, to dull serial monogamists like me. Among other things, I wanted to write about how straight men treat women.’
Roisin’s muscles tensed during this description.
‘Our pal’? Did Joe even realise how badly he’d alienated Matt? Did he care? Was there a glimmer of a possibility that Matt was, as Joe had said, a very attractive façade on a much darker place than she realised?
‘I already knew I was writing another detective, which felt a little ho-hum. I thought the more real I can make this feel, the more potent it will be. So, I set it here. I didn’t for a second stop to think that it might make you make connections with our life that aren’t there. Which is idiotic, and makes me realise I’ve been on a luxury cruise up my own colon.’
Roisin still said nothing.
‘… It’s supposed to have themes about the crisis in masculinity. What I wanted to say on Sunday was, you have to see all three episodes to realise Hunter’s behaviour isn’t glamorised. It doesn’t pay off; he’s really humbled by the end. But you can imagine that saying, “No, Roisin, you’ll calm down if you watch MORE” wasn’t advisable last weekend.’
‘What about the Gina character?’
‘That’s not Gina. I think Gina is a very attractive girl but she’s like a little sister to me. Can I tell you something in complete confidence?’
‘Go ahead,’ Roisin said. Pretty rich to be boasting about his discretion.
‘I don’t ever break male codes of honour. Which is why I’ve never pulled down Matt’s statue and have let you ladies think he’s charm personified. What’s discussed over the single malt stays over the single malt. But it came out on the stag do that Dom has had a long-term crush on Vic’s best mate, Amber. He’d never, ever do anything about it. He hates himself for it. I wrote that in. I was so arrogant I thought I could casually implicate myself all I wanted, as I had the world’s most chill girlfriend. And the world’s most boring private life, locked in that study all the time.’
Joe looked like a man who wouldn’t fear a polygraph, his gaze meeting hers, steady and unblinking. His previous rationales for what he’d done had been torturous excuses and PR gloss, but this admission of careless ego rang entirely true. Roisin finally believed him.
She didn’t dislike what he’d done any less, but she had the peace of mind of at least following how the person who was meant to love her had treated her this way.
And she no longer thought he could’ve done those things himself. Perspective had returned. She had been so shaken up, knowing he wasn’t giving her the truth, she’d leaped to two plus two makes seven.
Was it too late to call Matt’s investigation off?