The Road Trip(78)

We drink too much too quickly, giddy on our escape from the Queen of Navarre’s clutches. I get up to go to the loo and everything shifts to the left a little; I have to put a hand out to steady myself on the table.

When I get back a guy is leaning over my seat, talking to Addie. He has a shaved head and a beard, and you can see the muscles clearly bunched beneath the fabric of his blue T-shirt. I can tell he fancies her. His body language says it all, and she looks so beautiful, dressed in cool grey silk with those gumball-bright bracelets working their way up her forearms.

‘All right?’ I say. I’m attempting to sound gruff; it comes out croaky. I’m drunker than I should be, and the sight of this man leaning over Addie, her dark hair falling over her shoulders like ink snaking through water . . . it kicks the fear back into gear with a suddenness that makes me wonder whether I ever truly relaxed.

‘Dyl,’ Addie says, smiling. ‘Tamal here has already introduced me to his mother! What do you think of that, hmm?’

She’s just teasing me. I think, on some level, I must know this. But as I register the elderly lady standing behind Tamal – he’s asking if they can have our table so she can sit down – all I hear is the criticism. I’m angry, and again, on some level I do know that the anger is self-directed: I absolutely ought to have introduced Addie to my parents by now. But I haven’t seen either of them since they cut me off, and I still haven’t told Addie about that.

‘Well, you’ll be going home with Tamal, then, will you?’ I say.

Everyone’s shocked faces bring me back to reality. Christ, what a hideous thing to have said. I genuinely have no idea where it came from, and then a thought hits me like a punch in the gut: it’s just the sort of thing my father would say.

Addie gets up quietly, with a smile for Tamal and his elderly mother, and walks away. I assume she’ll wait for me outside the pub, but no, she’s not there; maybe she’ll be at the station; surely she’ll meet me in Chichester so we can share a cab home. But she doesn’t even come home. She goes back to her parents’ house.

I’m beside myself; I go to Marcus’s house at two in the morning, gambling that he’ll be awake and alone and have the patience to listen to me talk about quite how profoundly I dislike myself. He answers the door in his boxers, and I notice how thin he’s becoming – his ribs are pale shadows beneath his skin and there are indents at his hips like thumbprints.

‘Have you left her?’ he asks.

I think he was asleep; his voice is slurred, his eyes a little glazed.

‘I fucked up,’ I say, ‘and she just walked away. I don’t know if she’s coming back.’

Marcus closes his eyes for a moment. ‘Come in,’ he says, stepping aside. The house smells stale and fuggy; the scent reminds me of those months when we lived together at the log cabin. The place has been exquisitely furnished, and I wonder if India had a hand in it, though Marcus hasn’t spoken about his stepmother for months.

‘What if she leaves me?’ I say. I sound pitiful. ‘What if I screw up so badly I drive her to someone else?’

‘Then you’ll know I was right,’ Marcus says heavily, leaning back against the fridge, closing his eyes again. ‘And you’ll come here, and we’ll get drunk, and things will go back to how they should be at last.’





Addie We keep arguing. It’s like we’re either completely happy or fighting about something totally stupid. There’s no middle ground with me and Dylan.

For our anniversary in July, Dylan takes me to the poshest restaurant in Chichester. He’s got a job tutoring some super rich Russian kids – they give him hundreds of pounds as a birthday gift. I buy him a cafetière, which sits on our sideboard at home, looking a bit shit in comparison.

The restaurant is intimidatingly quiet. The food’s tiny and every course seems to involve a foam.

‘Mmm, delicious foam, said nobody ever,’ I say, swirling my fork through a particularly large green bubble of it.

Dylan snorts into his glass of water. ‘It’s haute cuisine, darling,’ he says, putting on his poshest voice. His natural voice, really. I hear it when he’s on the phone to his mum. Who I have still not met. Another simmering not-yet-argument. My parents offered him the option of moving into their home back in January, that’s how well they know him, and I’ve still not even spoken to his mum and dad.

‘How’s your, err, quaffled tripe?’

Dylan laughs so hard he nearly sprays me with water. I start giggling too, checking the other tables to make sure nobody’s staring. The restaurant is full of sixty-year-old men with attractive women in their forties. So clichéd. I do a scan of the tables: affair, third marriage, affair, escort, that one’s going to kill him in his sleep for the life insurance pay-out . . .

‘It’s griddled duck’s liver,’ Dylan corrects me, clearing his throat. His eyes flash with laughter. ‘And you are a philistine.’

‘Is that on the dessert menu?’

He smiles, a wicked slow smile that nobody gets to see but me. ‘I hope so.’

His phone beeps. I raise my eyebrows. We said no phones.

‘Sorry!’ He wriggles it out of his trouser pocket. ‘I’ll turn it off.’ He checks the screen and his face freezes.