51
‘There is an explanation for it, Rosh, yes. It’s not that I had sex with anyone in a toilet stall. If that’s what you’re implying, and I’m pretty sure you are.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I left my scarf behind that night. By accident, not intentionally. I walked back to get it, as you know. When I reached the restaurant, I saw it was round the neck of a waitress who was smoking outside. She was upset, she’d had a fight with her boyfriend. She offered me a cigarette. I thought it was a kindness to keep her company. I could also sense there was probably material in it.’
Roisin’s eyes widened.
‘Yeah, I know that sounds grubby, which is why I didn’t disclose it at the time. There we are. I can’t write about a man who stays in, looking into a laptop screen in the suburbs every night. Taking an interest in other people’s lives and being a nosy bastard goes with the territory.’
Roisin wasn’t going to encourage another soliloquy about screenwriting, so stayed silent.
‘I hung around, chatted with her and smoked with her for fifteen, twenty minutes. She told me the boyfriend was a married guy. I offered her some meagre advice she wasn’t going to take, wished her luck. I walked home and showered, as I knew getting into bed next to you reeking of Parliament Lights, eight years after I quit, was not a great idea.’
‘Yet by the time you came to write it, the way it played out was that you and Petra were climbing each other, yanking each other’s hair?’
‘Jasper Hunter and a character inspired by Petra did those things. Is this really what you think of me?’
‘Have you seen your own show?! It’s pretty hard to believe that a completely innocent chat became that sequence on screen. And that despite the encounter being innocent, you’re only admitting to it now.’
Joe looked incredulous. ‘OK, OK – if I’d done it myself, what are the logistics, here? We’ve established you were awake when I got home, right?’
Roisin gave the most miniscule of shrugs.
‘Firstly, we have to believe a twenty-two-year-old wanted to shag a then-thirty-year-old, despite me seeming like Gandalf to her, I’m sure. I’m no Rufus Tate and I don’t have any cinematic licence to clear a restaurant. Based on three minutes of chatting her up she’s suddenly game, then we’ve got, what, fifteen minutes left at the absolute most to have a knee-trembler behind some bottle bins?’
Roisin said nothing.
‘That wouldn’t have appealed to me when I was a randy teenager. Let alone when I had a lovely home and a nice girlfriend to go home to,’ Joe added.
Roisin had to admit that Joe’s steadiness suggested he had nothing to hide.
‘Sure you didn’t take Petra’s number? Arrange something else for another time? Then fail to mention it to me, for that reason?’
‘Yes, I’m very sure. For one thing, I’m not a predatory creep towards distressed young women. Feel free to check my phone if you need to.’
(Except: only idiots leave evidence on phones, right?)
‘After the lies you’ve told me, why should I believe this revised version where yes, OK, you met her?’ Roisin said.
Yet she was chicken scratching, and she knew it. This fitted all the facts. If there was a hole to pick, she couldn’t see it right now.
‘The lies I’ve told you?! I didn’t handle the confrontation at the country house well. I admitted that. I didn’t lie to you?’
‘You didn’t mention fag breaks with heartbroken girls from Split, did you?’
‘It wasn’t relevant! You only wanted to know if I’d slept with her! Why would I get into this, given it didn’t matter and sounds weird?’
‘Thank you! At least you concede it sounds weird.’
‘But having a brief and entirely clothed chat with someone of the opposite sex isn’t being unfaithful, last I checked.’
Roisin’s pounding heart started slowing, and she remembered that she had revealed more about herself than Joe. Clearly he did, too.
‘Your turn. You still haven’t told me. How do you know this, about Petra?’
Roisin swallowed. Sweat bloomed under her clothes. ‘I went to Sesso for dinner, sat at the bar. Got chatting to the front of house and he told me.’
‘He? A guy? You went and propped up a bar alone, and got into conversation? To check up on me?’ Joe said.
‘Yes.’ Roisin felt, and looked, crappy.
‘That doesn’t sound like you at all.’
‘I was pretty shaken up by Hunter, Joe. You know and I know that it contained at least one scene from real life. I got given the last week off from term because the kids were harassing me relentlessly about it, about whether it was real. Eventually I felt I had to find out.’
It was a manipulative moment to reveal this, yet it was an emergency for her dignity.
Joe’s brow knitted. ‘Right, because a bunch of thirteen-year-olds know me better than you do. Sorry, I can’t get past you going to Sesso to chat to the front of house. What’s he called?’
Was Joe jealous? Roisin hadn’t much experience of this, yet she supposed she’d never given him cause.
‘Rick.’
‘You went out for dinner alone and acted like you were interested in the stories of some guy working there?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think the chances of that bloke getting the wrong end of the stick, using it as an opportunity and hitting on you, are pretty high. Which is why you’d never do it. It’s wholly out of character.’
‘I’d never do it, and yet I did,’ Roisin said. It felt vile, being this brazen. Brazen, and hypocritical.
‘Did you?’ Joe said. ‘On your mother’s life?’
‘Yup,’ Roisin said, flinching hard at the lie and telling herself it was absolutely necessary, to keep Matt out of it. ‘He didn’t hit on me.’
‘You honestly thought me shagging waitresses was so likely, you turned private investigator?’
‘I didn’t know what to think.’
‘I think I’m entitled to feel pretty upset, don’t you? I apologised for the scene with your mum, it was out of order. I don’t think it justifies the suspicion I’m full scumbag. This is where we are, is it?’
Roisin didn’t know how to respond. ‘By the way, what day did you go to York, to your parents?’ she said.
‘Sunday.’
‘Your mum said you were arriving Monday.’
Joe blinked, looked momentarily blank. ‘Yeah. I kipped over at Dom’s on Sunday. I knew we’d get pissed having a catch-up and I didn’t want to get in late and wake my parents up. I said York – I didn’t think you cared about my itinerary. Why would I tell you the wrong day?’
‘I didn’t know, that’s why I asked.’
‘Oh, so I can lurk around here with waitresses?’
‘I have no—’
‘Tell you what,’ Joe said, interrupting, angry now, fumbling his phone out of his pocket and scrolling. ‘Here. Proof. Most recent photos on my camera roll.’ He turned the screen to face Roisin. He, Dom and his wife, Vic, sat on garden decking, a selfie, cheersing for the camera. ‘It makes total sense I’d use my parents as a cover story given you talk to them directly all the time. Fuck’s sake.’
Roisin said nothing.
‘Why do I feel as if you almost want an excuse, here?’ Joe said. ‘If you want to finish with me, Roisin, do it. Stop all this casting around for a reason you can raise up that makes you the injured party.’
Roisin said, ‘I wanted to know the truth. That’s all.’
‘I guess at least we’ve done this at home for free, instead of paying Relate to listen to it. What a way to discover your real opinion of me.’
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.
‘I’ll stay on at my mum’s to give you space,’ Roisin said.
‘Great.’
There was nothing to say as comfort that Joe wouldn’t throw back in her face. It was too soon, and quite possibly the only times that would ever be available were too soon and too late.
Roisin went to let herself out, feeling sick and foolish with how badly it had gone thanks to her rash accusations. It was as if she’d crashed into someone’s parked car when arriving to break news of a death.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
‘Is there anyone else?’ Joe said, as she opened the door.
‘What?’ Roisin said.
‘Oh, sorry, is this mistrust a one-way street? Is there anyone else you haven’t told me about?’
‘No, of course not.’
There was nothing else to be said.
She got into her driver’s seat with the lightheaded feeling of having made history, and not a good chapter. She’d known this day was coming now for a long time, but it was no less weird. Like the shock of a death after a protracted illness. It was slow, but fast at the end.
Like Ernest Hemingway said of going bankrupt, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
On a drive back in biblically torrential rain, Roisin asked herself how she’d travelled from the girl laughingly shrugging off the suggestion of infidelity to that counsellor months before, to the one covertly researching her partner. Perhaps Meredith was right; the decision to end was sufficiently momentous that she wanted objective proof that she should.
She pushed herself to find the deeper answer as she sat, engine idling in the early evening traffic, quiet tears running down her face as the windscreen wipers hypnotically, mechanically swipe-swiped. What was it about Hunter that had changed everything? Apart from the mere fact it involved sex and betrayal?
It was because by watching Joe’s onscreen alter ego, she’d become seized by the certainty that there were different versions of him, and she’d been living with only one of them.