7
Roisin remembered when she used to pay for Joe’s train tickets to London and for clothes that weren’t faded band tees. She didn’t mind, and today Joe could rightly say her investment had been repaid to the tune of many, many thousands. The apartment was in both their names.
She wasn’t selfishly nostalgic for Joe being dependent on her, she was sure of that. She just wished it hadn’t led here.
Once, Joe’s career had felt like wholly shared excitement; she had the seat next to him on the fairground ride. SEEN started out a moon-shot, an outline written in coffee shops, its plot twists tested on Roisin as the first audience.
So, wait: HE turns out to be the man in the video doorbell footage, too? Wow, no, I wouldn’t see that coming. That’s really clever, Joe.
Then it became a pilot script in Final Draft software – Roisin had enjoyed reading the lead female character’s dialogue aloud for him. She felt robbed when a hair-tossing actress got to say, palms down on desk: ‘Harry. I’d bet my life we’re dealing with identical twins. And if this play we’re making doesn’t come off, I HAVE bet my life!’
Thing is, Roisin hadn’t only been unprepared for its impact, she’d been complacent. The great thing about Joe being the writer and not an actor, she’d blathered to the group, is he can get creative fulfilment and no hassle down Burton Road.
When SEEN became signed contracts, they bought fish and chips and a £10 bottle of cava and had a picnic date in the park together. It felt like a statement, instead of going to a fancy restaurant. It’s going to be Still Us, the way we always were, Plus This.
Joe’s diary used to be: get up, drink black coffee, preferably wash, write, stick something in the oven, more writing. Rinse and repeat. Now it became complicated and ablaze with fuss. Roisin learned the lingo of co pros and turnaround and punches.
After a day of high-powered breakfast and lunch meetings in the capital, Joe would get off the train mid-evening at Manchester Piccadilly, and Roisin would meet him for dinner out.
He’d talk too fast, and they’d drink too fast, and she gloried in every last detail of the latest developments. She was so pleased for him and always thought, girlfriend bias aside, he had the talent to make it.
Then the work came so thick and fast it often made sense to stay in London overnight, and Hollywood called, and he was flying back and forth to Los Angeles.
A production company in New York bought the rights to another of his ideas. At some point, Roisin accepted get past this week and things will calm down a bit was a coping mechanism lie of adulthood.
Joe being away never bothered Roisin. She enjoyed her own company, liked hearing about his adventures.
Yet somehow, at some point, hectic and mentally occupied became cold and detached.
Roisin learned not to message Joe when he was away, because she rarely got much back. He must be the only man, she thought, to deploy the heart react emoji to WhatsApps as a dismissal.
How’d it go with Fox Searchlight? Heart. Did the hire car get replaced? Heart. Oh my God, that ginger moggy is back soiling our garden! Pooing with his tail vibrating, making unnerving eye contact! Heart. You heart defecating cats, OK.
She’d not raised it. When someone comes through the door after five days away bearing a duty-free Toblerone, you don’t want to greet them with whining.
A thought came to Roisin, and once she’d had the thought she couldn’t un-have it: the prolonged absences were doubling as practice for breaking up. Each time he returned, he was a degree more distant than the last time.
Life had fundamentally changed, or maybe more accurately and painfully, Joe had changed. Can success really change a person, though, she wondered? Maybe it only brings elements that were always there to the fore?
The humour that once bonded them felt like sparring, underscored by resentment. Like an arm-wrestling bout that had to have a winner.
Plans with their friends were an obligation, if not an irritation – Joe always had something slighting to say.
God, that place again? We’ve become bourgeoise. Soon we’ll have Bless This Mess decal stickers on our wheelie bins.
She half wondered if hating on Matt was a way of carving out a convenient exit from the Brian Club. Sorry, not if he’s there – I can’t stand him.
Sex had dwindled, and when it occurred, had the unmistakeable sense of reaching a deadline: … best do it or it’ll become a thing we haven’t done it.
When they first met, the spark between them was obvious. Joe had immediately mentioned he had a long-distance girlfriend, Bea, back in his home city, York.
Nothing had happened between Joe and Roisin – nor would it have, if the girlfriend had remained; Roisin wasn’t into foul play – but she’d catch Joe looking at her, across tables, at the hour of the night when blood alcohol levels were high and the lights were low.
One Friday afternoon, Joe had found Roisin alone in a corner of the shop, stickering Signed By The Author copies of Terry Pratchett.
‘I want you to know. I’m ending it with Bea.’
‘OK,’ Roisin said.
‘When I’ve done that, I’m going to ask you out.’
‘OK,’ Roisin said, and tried not to flush sunset red.
He walked away. Woah. Quietly spoken Joe, with a love of the graphic novels of Alan Moore and a winning resemblance to young John Cusack, had a streak of real confidence. It was undeniably, hugely attractive.
Those were the days they hung on each other’s every word. The times they did nothing but talk: a day off together, walking round parks, browsing record shops, spinning pints of real ale out in old boy’s pubs. Everything was interesting if they were together. Oh, to be that young again, when everything felt new.
As the first – and it turned out, only – couple of the group, they became the ones to have everyone back to their flat when they were all too pre-payday skint to go out: Joe on the music and snacks, Roisin on lighting candles and mixing drinks. They were foundation laying and empire building, as a team.
Had someone else now been made a similar promise to the one she got made over Discworld? Roisin had gone back and forth over it and concluded:
1. Their origins story showed Joe could be ruthlessly decisive, and a year of near intimacy-free purgatory wasn’t that, and 2. He was talking about their getting a dog.
Nearly a decade on, it was as if their love was a neglected, autumn leaf-strewn swimming pool. It technically still existed, yet Joe had drained the water out, inch by inch. If you jumped into it, there was nothing there. You’d break your ankles.
Roisin had started seeing a counsellor, without telling Joe.
Do you think he’s being unfaithful?
Hah, no. He’d certainly have a huge scheduling headache if he was.
Can the relationship be fixed?
I don’t know.
Do you want to fix it?
I don’t know. I think so. I want to be how we were. But I don’t know if that’s gone for good.
Roisin kept telling herself, get this or that out the way. Get through Dev’s Downton Abbey do, get Hunter safely launched into the world – and nurse Joe through any bad reviews. Afterwards, there’d be time for a state of the nation.
Frankly, she suspected Joe would ask for one eventually, and dignity demanded she went first.
It made sense to wait, yet Roisin knew a pointless delaying tactic when she invented one. It was the personal life equivalent of Amir querying whether Fifty Shades was great literature of the future.
Faking it never really worked.
‘ARE YOU DECENT???!’ Dev roared on the other side of the door.
Joe, typing, was so startled he almost sent an unfinished email, cursing Dev under his breath.
‘Decent!’ Roisin said, flinging the door open, striking a pose in her black dress.
‘Bloody hell, Sheen. If I wasn’t engaged and your boyfriend wasn’t a friend, and also just over there, near a brass fire poker.’
‘Haha! Thank you.’
‘Meredith and Gee are already on it downstairs, go join them. Anita’s taking forever, as per. Joe, we’re up. You’re in a crucial role – you’re my head of the butter chicken dept,’ Dev said. ‘I’m on parathas and raitas. Got Matt manning the bhajis station, with a side line in lassis. Mango lassis.’
‘I’d not let Matt near the lassies’ mangoes,’ Joe said.
Roisin snorted, despite herself, and Dev disappeared off, cackling. Roisin could tell Joe resented the interruption.
Joe doesn’t enjoy anything any more, Roisin thought. He didn’t enjoy her. Enjoying was happening elsewhere.
‘Do I look OK?’ she asked, smoothing the dress over her hips and holding her stomach in.
Joe glanced up from his screen. ‘Sure.’
‘Sure. And you a writer.’
‘It – looks – really – nice – you – always – look – really – nice,’ Joe said, deliberately mechanically. ‘That do?’
No, of course not, Roisin thought, but didn’t say it. She needed a fight right before this dinner like a hole in the head. One thing she knew for sure: there’d be no showdown on these premises.
‘Coming down?’
‘Just gonna finish this mail. Go on ahead.’
Are you still in love with him?
What’s the test for that?