Mhairi McFarlane

‘The real version of this, Joe, goes – you knew it was theft and you knew it was sensitive. If you’d told me, I’d object and you’d have to take it out. So you went ahead and chanced it, thinking, if you got away with it, cool. If it went wrong and I kicked off, it was a price worth paying to keep it in
the script. Even when you knew I’d watch it here, with our friends around us, it didn’t change the stakes enough for you to come clean before you put me through that. Because why gift me an opportunity to be a nuisance? None of this fall-out means anything, because my pain over this is absolutely nothing to you. Not compared to your career. This is merely an inconvenient difficulty to be managed, before you get to the real business of some brunch meeting with men in designer sunglasses in Los Angeles where no one eats the food.’

When she finished speaking, Roisin saw that Joe looked embattled, but also faintly – and uncharacteristically – impressed. She had his attention. Roisin’s fury was obviously the first time he’d listened to her in a while.

She wondered if he was filing it away to use in the future. She wondered if any privacy was now an illusion.

Between us meant nothing.

‘Look, I haven’t actually exposed any secret. No one but us would know that moment came from your childhood.’

This said more about Joe than he realised. Image was everything, and he’d not damaged hers. That the fact that only she could perceive the treacherous plagiarism meant it as good as didn’t matter. Because, once again, she didn’t.

‘Even if that was the point here, my mum might recognise it, don’t you think?’ Her voice wavered. She couldn’t bear the thought of it.

‘She won’t see it. She stopped watching SEEN, didn’t she?’

Joe resented his mother-in-law for her indifference to his work. Lorraine, of course, hadn’t bothered with the social nicety of pretence: ‘not my cup of tea’. Jesus, was Joe also taking oblique revenge?

Roisin said, blood rushing in her ears, ‘I want to end things entirely, Joe.’

He paused. ‘You want to break up?’

‘Yes.’

The summer air hung heavy around them.

‘You don’t love me any more?’

‘I don’t think I know you any more, to love you,’ Roisin said, holding in tears in the tight wall of her chest.

‘Hah. Good dodge.’

Joe wouldn’t do anything as lame as look surprised, yet, to her surprise, she sensed he was. Why did he not consider that’s where this could be going?

Yes, they’d been together almost a decade. But they were still young, they weren’t married, they had no kids, and the tenor of this fight, with no concessions or gentleness on either side, felt explicitly terminal to Roisin. If it wasn’t the end, it was certainly signposting the way. Hadn’t Joe been working up to this? Had he not accepted it himself yet? Did he want to go first?

Ah, wait, the money, she thought. Joe wasn’t particularly materialistic or macho about it, but nevertheless, that was the
quiet part out loud – no one really thinks a not-rich person will split up with someone who is. By forty, he’d have a fortune, and Roisin was opting out.

That he currently felt undumpable actually made quite a lot of sense.

‘I don’t have the bandwidth for this. I had no idea that you were going to wake up this morning and decide we were over,’ Joe said.

‘I think we’ve been over for a while,’ Roisin said. ‘I’m just the one to say it.’

She got a message, direct from her gut, so shocking and surreal that her brain immediately rejected it. Her gut nevertheless stubbornly clung onto its instinct.

The night he walked back from Sesso, Joe had had a shower when he got in. He never showered before bed, and she’d registered it as odd at the time. When she mumbled a question as he climbed under the covers, he said he’d got rained on. Except it hadn’t rained, unless Burton Road was in the most micro of microclimates: Roisin loved sleeping with an open window. The night had been still.

And it was somewhat contradictory that this evening had both inspired the opening scenes of a story and had been completely uneventful. At the very least, he’d thought about it, hadn’t he?

Roisin strained in vain to recall any specific waitress.

Though she had asked if the cheating was autobiographical, she’d never seriously considered that it could be. She felt she was entitled to make the point that others might think it was.

What if it was? Was she going mad? Before last night, she’d have scoffed at the idea, said it was impossible. He wasn’t the type. Lacked the chances, anyway, as she told her counsellor. Even if she could conceive of Joe doing those things, why rub her face in it and risk his neck like this?

Except … look at what he’d done with her past. He couldn’t care less. He thought a hollow mea culpa was enough, once caught red-handed. He’d played the odds.

A huge wave of nausea rolled up, so strong that Roisin felt it might knock her off her feet.

What if the failure to check his conscience was because Joe didn’t have one?

What if the greatest betrayal here wasn’t the one she thought it was? What if Joe was Jasper?

Two things to know about me. I don’t feel guilt. And I’ll do it again.

Monogamy, Jasper argues, is the price society asks us to pay for a settled life with a soulmate, and it’s too high
for some. Certainly, after an hour of such pulse-racing, stylish television, plenty of us will be unhealthily addicted to Jasper Hunter.’

Dev looked up. ‘What about that, then?’

‘Incredible,’ Roisin said, though in her head the sentence continued: Dismal male fantasies really get a pass, don’t they. Let me help you, Niall Thingy: yes, it does matter if you hide your shagging around. Where are ‘Becca’s’ rights not to be shagged on? It’s not about what society asks of him, it’s what he promised her.

Becca. Roisin felt vomitous. She needed time and space to sort through what she’d learned about Joe. There was a spectrum of possible revelation here. It ran from: Joe showing considerable insensitivity in not priming her for sensitive content, especially when he was robbing detail from real life. To: the whole thing was a deranged form of confessional, the most hidden in plain sight insult imaginable.