Page 5 of Between Us

After the season two cliff-hanger finale, Roisin was being asked in every lesson if it was true that its lead character, Harry Orton, was really dead, or if he’d survived being shot and falling into the Thames.

Her by-rote answer: ‘I don’t know, and if I did, I still couldn’t tell you!’ (Real answer by Joe: ‘I wish he fucking was, the whingeing diva.’)

She had been relieved whenSEENwent on what Americans calledhiatusbefore its third series, despite an outcry from the nation.

The career breakthrough for Joe that they’d thought would mean calmer, warmer waters financially was more like a tidal wave that washed away life as they’d known it before. It had left them clinging, bewildered, to a remaining rock. (A very nicely appointed rock: they’d bought a luxury apartment in a converted chapel in West Didsbury. When handed the keys, they’d felt as dazed and fraudulent as if the money had come from a drug deal.)

Joe had blank chequebooks flapped open around him to write whatever he fancied in the rest fromSEENand he’d come up withHunter. It was a three-part show about a maverick Manchester detective and sex addict thrill-seeker, Jasper Hunter. ‘Much darker and edgier thanSEEN,’ Joe said, proudly.

Having realised she was a powerless passenger on this drunken joyride, Roisin’s feelings aboutHunterwere mixed. She didn’t know whether to fear failure, or success. Given Roisin didn’t like her accidental notoriety at Heathwood as it was, she was sure she’d like being asked about a shagging drama even less. Sex scenes written by your partner – it was going to feel weird, and she didn’t even get to feel weird in private.

What could she say to Joe, though? ‘Please don’t depict frantic carnal couplings and make everyone think about you and your girlfriend of the last nine years’?

It was an intractable problem. It was also what her department head, Wendy Copeland, codenamed as NFI – Not Fucking Ideal.

Roisin opted for the underrated coping strategy called Pretend It Isn’t Happening and, without intending to, Amir had made it clear that was an illusion.

She wrestled her suitcase out from behind the desk.

It’d be fine.

This bells-and-whistles minibreak in the Lake District would take the curse off. She’d view the first episode in the bosom of her friendship group and feel a sense of proud ownership. The mocking in her lessons would bounce offher like small stones on a toughened windshield, ripping along at motorway speed.

Roisin knew she was self-soothing, and it’d only really convince her when she had a glass of wine in her hand, and not for long after the point she didn’t have a glass of wine in her hand. But fuck it! Otherwise, there was Pretend It Isn’t Happening.

This holiday was thanks to their friend Dev, an extrovert, indefatigable social engine and one-time reality-TV star, winning the short-lived, torridFlatmates, almost three years ago. He had hired what looked to be, on the photos in their WhatsApp group, a stately home.

Tonight, they had a dinner party, celebrating Dev and his fiancée, Anita, getting engaged. Tomorrow, there was a party for their friend Gina’s recent birthday and afterwards, the mansion’s screening room would be deployed for the premiere ofHunter.

Roisin was getting a lift up with their friends Gina and Meredith; Joe was heading there already with Dev (what with writers and ex-reality-TV stars keeping much more loosey-goosey schedules than secondary schoolteachers). Their mate Matt was arriving via airport transfer, after some kind of wine tour in Lisbon with his latest woman, because of course he was.

Roisin rolled her wheeled suitcase down the corridor and out through the entrance-exit and into the school car park. It was teeming with departing kids, shouting, kicking balls, anticipating two days of freedom before the last week of the school year.

Gina’s classic VW camper van, in orange-and-white colourway, was easy to spot, and indeed had been spotted by curious pupils.

‘Ahoy there! Your unobtrusive carriage awaits. Throw that anywhere in Ethel.’ Meredith gestured at the slid-open door and Roisin’s case. The van, which Gina had won in a raffle last year, had been christened Ethelred the Unready. Given the running costs, the competition organisers had a cheek calling it a prize rather than an adoption.

‘Though if you don’t wedge it in properly and Gina takes a corner too hard, it will be the last thing to go through your mind. You alright with me in the front, doing the navigating?’

‘Damn right I am,’ Roisin said, manhandling her belongings into a shape where she was available to lean over and hug Meredith.

She was in a very Meredith outfit of gold Birkenstocks, jeans with roll ups, a t-shirt saying ALEXA PLAY CHER, and a raggy headscarf tied in her fusilli pasta-shaped wild mop of blonde curly hair. A look she called ‘Gay Boden mum goes to Latitude festival’. (She referred to herself as an ‘out-of-work lesbian’, due to an extended period of being single.)

‘Actually, I’m going to stretch my legs,’ Gina said, appearing round the side of Ethel. ‘Hi, Rosh. We’ve got tins of Pornstar Martini in the Saino’s bag under your seat, dig in. I am not digging in yet, obviously.’

Gina, both bosomy and slight, was in a fluttery spring-summer yellow dress and blush ballet slippers. Her shoulder-length brown hair was tied up in a practical scrunchie. This one smallconcession aside, she looked absolutely nothing like someone about to confidently manhandle a tin bin with a steering wheel the size of a bicycle tyre for an eighty-mile distance. Yet there was no safer or more ballsy driver.

‘Miss! MISS! MISS WALTERS?’

They all looked over to see Amir and Pauly, waving.

Amir shouted, ‘GET ONE OF THEM MASSAGES WITH OIL!’

3

‘This place,’ Meredith said, as they began their approach.‘Twelve grand for the weekend,’ she mouthed, with an expression of faux-scandal.

‘Are you kidding?!’ Roisin said, pulling the tin of metallic-tasting, foamy Pornstar from her lips and grimacing a little. It was like pineapple-flavoured phlegm.

---