Page 18 of Cover Story

‘I know her. I know Rufus’s date! Nicky! She worked with him, she was the ...’ Shilpa made air quotes ‘ “Funny colleague frenemy”. Beware the Funny Colleague Frenemy, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.Oh she sends me memes and calls me a wanker. Nothing to see here.It made me wonder …’ Shilpa paused, as Bel was weighing up how hard to tell her off, later. ‘Think you also know Tim’s date? Because that takes the absolute piss, if so. That’s sending a declaration of war that shall not go unanswered.’

‘Who can say?’ Bel said, knocking back a stiffening quantity of a Woo Woo.

‘You, of course!’ Shilpa said, fumbling her phone out and pausing, ‘Unless you don’t want to see?’

Bel gave a performative sigh. If she snapped: ‘Can we save this until later’ then she was admitting it was embarrassing and / or emotive. Somehow, in front of the coolly supercilious Connor Adams, that was unbearable. She wanted to maintain tough, bulletproof journo Bel.

‘Show me, then we can change the subject?’

Shilpa presented her screen to Bel and a double date squeezing into the frame. The phone was angled to capture a restaurant table with four wines on it, everyone with that look of a ‘kid on a camping trip’ excitement to be included. There were two familiar faces, the men’s … wait, scratch that:three.

‘Fuck, that’s Rhiannon!’ Bel blurted, despite herself.

‘I knew it!’ Shilpa said, equal parts outraged and delighted at vindication. ‘Who’s Rhiannon?’

Bel gulped. ‘Childhood friend of his. Really lovely. We’vebeen on holiday with her several times. We’re still in touch, actually … or, we were. Shit!’

The hard liquor was hitting as the hard intel was hitting– it was a heady mix. She was calling up her memories of Rhiannon, of Tim’s responses to her and vice versa, and reclassifying it all as slow-burn attraction. As something stifled by circumstance. Bel had spent so much time around them as longstanding platonic acquaintances, and all the while …? Bel didn’t want Tim back, but Shilpa was right, you could care without having feelings.

‘The bare treachery! They’ve both acquired people we know, to get at us! And dropped this in a selfie bomb! If it’s evenreal. The question is, do we respond with proportionate force? Also, Belly, I’m just going to say it because you never will, she’s nowhere near as hot as you.’

Bel muttered indistinctly as a new level of self-consciousness was unlocked, and Shilpa continued: ‘Connor, what do you think?’ turning her phone to him.

Oh, GOD.‘SHILPA,’ Bel hissed, properly furious-embarrassed now.

‘What would I do if my ex was posting being with someone new, who I happened to know?’ Connor said smoothly, and Bel was both utterly mortified and powerfully relieved at him deftly sidestepping the question.

‘Yes. And she’s your ex-wife.Recentex-wife,’ Shilpa said, laying it on thick. Bel might remind Shilpa she’d said she and Rufus were as ‘as likely to reconcile as Johnny and Amber’ by the end.

‘Are the other women here your friends?’ Connor said, inclining his head at her phone.

‘No,theirfriends,’ Bel said, intervening before Shilpa could craft any more theatre.

‘Then if I thought the ex was doing it to get my attention, I wouldn’t give them any.’

‘Thank you,’ Bel said, finally having a use for Connor’s chilliness.

‘I’m going to avenge it thricefold. You can’t let men go around freely doing psychological abuses on your apps,’ Shilpa said, and Connor smiled at her, amused.

Bel wasn’t imagining it, the mind-games-playing, shapeshifter Adams was leagues nicer with Shilpa, and to prove it, stayed foranother round that he insisted on buying.

Aaron rejoined them and regaled them with tales of Manchester’s stupidest criminals. As an anecdotalist, he was a five-star performer and the laconic accent made it even funnier.

Despite the rocky start, Shilpa’s pleasure in being there knitted them all together briefly as if they were a quartet of old friends; she brought relaxed warmth where Bel was wary inhibition.

As they arrived back at her flat– because, of course, Shilpa had left ‘a few overnight things last time, just in case’– pleasantly but not excessively inebriated, Bel remembered why Shilpa always got away with her transgressions: she made everything fun.

12

Later, Bel lay awake and processed Tim and Rhiannon.

It was taking some getting used to.

It was ridiculous to feel this upset really; Bel and Tim would be no more or less finished than they were already if he attended masked ball orgies, or lit church candles under an Isabel shrine and pledged a decade’s celibacy.

What made Bel’s stomach churn was that he must’ve known she’d find out this way, and knew it’d hurt all the more. It was a message, posted second class:you don’t deserve to hear it from me. Does it sting? It should. Knowing that he was still sad and angry enough to do something spitefully out of character, it was painful. Someone was alive in the world and hating you, and someone who used to bring you your morning coffee and call you ‘Mac the Wife’. Itreallyhurt. She’d made a good man bad.

Tim was the son of her mum’s best friend, they’d grown up knowing of one another’s existence. She, her brother Miles, Tim’s sister Verity and Tim always called themselves ‘honorary cousins’. It had burst into unexpected attraction one drunken family barbecue in their late twenties, when the security of falling for the nice guy who’d been there all along made perfect sense. But some part of Bel had always suspected she’d outgrowthe size of what they had, and that gnawed at her. She’d let him play co-pilot, crashed the plane and run from the wreckage. If what she’d done wasn’t cruel, why did it feel so cruel?

---