Page 106 of Between Us

One thing Roisin was sure of: this time she’d not tell anyone, or involve anyone.

She paced the room, mobile in a grip so tight her knuckles were white.

What did Joe call himself? A ‘dull serial monogamist’? A dull serial monogamist with … a mistress in York? Something about it being his birthplace made her feel this would be more than a one-off.

And what did Joe teach her about writing? Apart from the fact it apparently legitimised a lot of shit behaviour?Good plot comes from character.Ergo, Joe being a hopeful beggar on an app, cosplaying single, with a profile that could be screenshot –nah. He’d think that was for absolute morons. Joe paying for it –nope. He’d say it was not for men of his calibre, for sure. Joe, in the years of penury when it was definitelyimpossible to book suites, and then the years of being kinetically busy, having time to start and maintain an extra-curricular in another city? Implausible.

Joe had been a light-to-now-non-existent user of social media, so he’d not picked up Side Lady there, either.

Back to character. He believed himself to be a serial monogamist and self-image mattered to Joe, however much he warped the Ts and Cs.

Who could he sleep with, and maintain his own fictions? Who was a somehow more ethical, less traitorous shag for Mr One Woman Guy?

Who did he somehow have a head start, an ‘in’ with? A friend of Dom and Victoria, hence not wanting Dom to know? Didn’t Dom have a futile crush on a siren called Amber, who inspired the Gina-alike, Gwen? Was Amber’s admirer in fact, Joe? Joe was a daredevil, but if so, voluntarily naming her to Roisin stretched credulity. Itcouldbe her? With no surname, Roisin was up a gumtree in ever identifying her.

Wait. No.

The answer came to Roisin like magic, in that inner voice, from nowhere. Or, perhaps, a ‘nowhere’ that involved ten years of close study.

65

The Last Woman, of course. Beatrice.

When they went to his schoolfriend Jim’s wedding, a year ago – the one of the beautiful candid photograph – Joe had assiduously avoided his ex. He had pecked at Roisin to leave the reception early, spent the evening stuck to a far wall.

‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.

‘I have absolutely no interest in small talk, and Beatrice will probably be quite curious about you,’ Joe had said. ‘If she smashes down the rosé and buttonholes us, we should make a sharp exit.’

Roisin had probed this aversion to their contact, to check it wasn’t his lingering feelings.

‘God no! It’s the exact opposite: it’s such old news and I barely remember that time. She’s sent me chatty messages down the years I’ve left on Read, because who wants to get into that? I’m wary Bea will get hammered and make a beeline for us, that’s all. No pun.’

Roisin had never questioned the terms of their break-up very closely: she didn’t even know how long they’d been seeing each other. She was responsible and it was toouncomfortable. No one aged twenty-three and falling in love wants to ponder the collateral too hard.

They’d had a grand total of one conversation about it, fizzing with nerves and novelty on their first date in a tapas bar.

I was dreading telling her, but it was pretty civilised, once she got over the shock,Joe had said.She was very Live and Die in York, York Forever, if you know what I mean. She’d already declined to move to Manchester – she’ll barely visit. I didn’t want to stay there, and we’d reached a crossroads anyway. I mean, she wasn’t OVERJOYED to discover you exist. I don’t wanna pretend. But I think she knew the end was nigh. She wants to stay friends, and I’ll stay friendly, but not friends.

Who knew if any of that had been true.

That night at the wedding, Beatrice had given Roisin at least one long, enigmatic, borderline resentful look across the room, when the table wine was flowing. You were fully entitled to resent, and inspect, the woman he left you for. Roisin only hoped Beatrice knew that nothing had happened until she and Joe were post fact.

Bea had very straight, platinum-blonde hair, with a swept to the side long fringe, a style cut short enough she could tuck it behind her ear. She was hip and slender, in an oversized tortoiseshell necklace in the shape of an autumn leaf, a tropical-patterned pant suit and platform heels. She was cool, Roisin thought, and confident.

Roisin remembered thinking she didn’t look like the nervous, parochial girl that Joe had painted, blaming that on her own stereotypes or the passage of time, rather than any fault in his original account.

Meanwhile, Joe played his discomfort off as advanced boredom. Yet looking back, Roisin could see it was more like fronting nerves.

What if his reluctance to be at that event, and his unwillingness to be around Bea specifically, wasn’t because she didn’t matter any more, but because shedid?

What if the ‘she’s never got over me’ hints were some really plucky ‘foreshadowing’, as Joe would term it? Insurance, if Bea slurred,you don’t know the half of itin the Ladies?

For the first time, Roisin realised she’d conflated two separate things after seeingHunter.

There was having sex with someone other than your partner, repeatedly. Then there was having that sex with a merry-go-round of near-strangers. Joe being cunning, fearless, and adept at the latter was always improbable, and her friends rightly called out that it didn’t sound like him. That part felt like what it was: the sort of high-wire antics that sustain a TV series but don’t happen much in life.I’m no Rufus Tate, and I don’t have any cinematic licence to clear a restaurant.

The high stakes Sesso encounter didn’t stack up as Joe.

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