45
‘Get out!’ Lorraine cried, at the sight of Roisin and Matt in the doorway on Saturday afternoon.
‘Wobbly start,’ Matt said.
‘Sorry, not you, Matthew – that stray,’ Lorraine said, pointing in the area of their ankles. ‘MEATBALL, GEDDOUT!’
They glanced down to see that a cat had taken advantage of their entering the pub to ‘plus one’ himself onto the premises.
‘Aw, hello, Meatball,’ Matt said, stooping to pet the black and white animal of considerable circumference. His facial markings gave him a pleasing look of a piebald highway bandit.
‘Meatball?’ Roisin said.
‘That’s his name, I’m told,’ Lorraine said. ‘You can see why. Loafs around the place uninvited and bothers people for their chips.’
‘A cat that eats chips?!’ Matt said.
‘Oh, a cat that eats anything he can hoodwink people into giving him. Shoo!’ Lorraine said, as Meatball steadfastly ignored her.
‘Is he really a stray?’ Roisin said, joining in the fussing, noticing how she and Matt could brush hands and it not be odd. She was lucky to have a male friend like this. She trusted him to spend time here and not use any information he gleaned to embarrass her. Matt was a man absent of spite.
‘Well, he’s strayed from somewhere ’cos he’s in here all the time,’ Lorraine said, snapping her fingers and pointing at an indifferent Meatball, who waddled off in the direction of the saloon bar.
Roisin and Ryan had never been allowed pets, notionally because a public house was an inhospitable environment.
(‘They will only up and die and upset you,’ Lorraine had said.
‘Everything dies!’ said an adolescent Roisin. ‘The price of love is grief.’
‘Yes, well, I’m not having the grief of changing a guinea pig’s straw when you lose interest.’)
For tonight’s Saturday shift, Roisin had arranged to settle Matt in, go for dinner in Manchester with what was left of the Brian Club, and drive back here later. It looked, on the face of it, a considerable sacrifice. In actuality, she was glad of the excuse not to drink, and to spend time on the road and in her own head.
Leaving Matt and Lorraine to interact unsupervised for around four hours made Roisin slightly uneasy, given her mother’s loose cannoning, but perhaps a baptism of fire was best. She couldn’t be here to supervise the whole time.
Matt was going to get a taxi back to his flat in the city until Lorraine – unsurprisingly – said he absolutely must crash in Ryan’s old room. At least her parents were into privacy in one way: each room had an en suite, so as Roisin got ready to go out she had no fear of doing an impromptu first-floor landing tango with Matt, both of them clad in slipping towels.
Roisin would’ve shown Matt round the till, but Lorraine was super keen to play tutor. Reminding herself that Matt had wanted this and that she shouldn’t feel anxious for him, after changing, Roisin bid them farewell and promised to return around closing up.
‘Nice dress, by the way,’ Matt said.
In her near-week of purgatory, Roisin had gone to & Other Stories and bought herself a pouffy-sleeved black dress with a sweetheart neckline.
‘Yes, it’s great to see your waist for once,’ Lorraine added supportively.
Tonight’s dinner out was the first post-Benbarrow catch-up. Roisin fully endorsed Meredith’s reply to Dev’s original venue suggestion.
Meredith
Sorry can we not bother with places serving reindeer moss and any menu with the word ‘nixtamalized’ on it? I want to see you all and consume melted cheese and cheap liquor, not pretend to be interested in an espresso-cupful of jizz and a tray of mossy pebbles
Dev
I depend on women pretending to be interested in my cupful of jizz and mossy pebbles
By an elimination process of things being booked out on a Saturday and Dev’s name still meaning something, they’d landed on San Carlo, a central pizza-pasta place full of rowdy, glamorous, high-cosmetic-maintenance twenty-something Manchester.
Roisin wound her way to the table in the buzz, ten minutes late after forgetting city centre parking was a bastard, and saw it had an unexpected occupant.
‘Joe? You made it?’ Roisin said, thinking thank God she’d WhatsApped Gina and Meredith and given them a full update on Joe’s offer, Sesso being what Americans called a ‘nothing burger’, and their current status.
(Meredith’s reply had been pure wisdom: I think you half wanted to find out he’d been unfaithful so the decision was made for you. This way you’ll know you were in control of your choice.)
Joe had been too busy tonight preparing material for next week’s meetings – except now, as he sat beaming, sandwiched between Dev and Gina, apparently, he wasn’t.
‘Ah, Dev called me and persuaded me to knock it on the head for an evening. Messaged you.’ He nodded to Roisin’s phone, which she’d not seen while driving.
Roisin tried not to seethe on this turn of events. If Joe had told her he was going, she’d have stepped away.
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.
‘Cor, if lip fillers were sticks of dynamite, we’d be blown sky high here, right?’ Joe said, under his breath, glancing around.
‘I’ve left Matt working a shift with my mother in Webberley,’ Roisin said to the table, to keep her mind occupied.
At least Joe looked wrongfooted now, instead of her.
She’d checked Matt was alright with her telling the Brians and he’d shrugged, sure, why not. She was impressed he didn’t care about status.
‘Lol, what? Matt? A barman for your mum? Is this his most ambitious seduction attempt yet?’ Joe said.
Roisin looked at Joe, levelly. To everyone else, that was a standard risqué jibe at Matt. With what he knew of her family, it was crasser than that.
‘Nice. He’s on a sabbatical from work and keeping busy,’ Roisin said, deciding to sidestep Matt’s sacking for his dignity. ‘It’s a lifesaver for my mum.’
‘Let me get this straight: Matt is dating a Hollywood star and his job is making bitter shandies for old boys playing darts? If I pitched this in a Hallmark movie, I’d be told it was a step too far,’ Joe said.
‘Not any more,’ Roisin said. ‘He and Amelia have gone their separate ways.’
‘What a shame, she was so nice,’ Gina said, snapping a breadstick. ‘They could’ve had such beautiful, rude babies.’
‘No Anita?’ Roisin said to Dev, glancing around.
‘Nah, she’s poorly. Tummy bug. Left her watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in her clown trousers. Honestly, the one way we’re incompatible is TV. She says I only like things with people in snowstorms saying, “We must keep moving! We need to get to the camp by nightfall, before It awakens!”’
‘Have you had a chance to look at the menu, guys?’ a waitress interrupted, and they guiltily tasked themselves to making choices.
Roisin saw she had a message from Meredith and read it carefully, holding her phone inside her bag.
I bloody hope it’s not morning sickness.