by Beth O'Leary
‘I need to call our breakdown cover,’ I say, looking down at my phone. ‘Can someone walk to the nearest one of those post-thingies that tells them where we are?’
‘I’ll go,’ Dylan says. He clears his throat, embarrassed – his voice came out all squeaky.
Deb already has the car bonnet open and is rummaging around in there. Rodney sidles over to the Good Samaritan.
‘So,’ he says to him, in the bright tone of someone who does not have a natural gift for small talk. ‘What do you do?’
I close my eyes. This is not how this weekend was meant to go. Why aren’t I speeding down the motorway singing Dolly Parton at the top of my voice, with Deb eating Minstrels in the passenger seat? That was the plan. And that sounds so good right now.
Dylan calls the number out to me as he walks back to the car. His T-shirt billows in the breeze and his hands are tucked in his jean pockets. He looks too good – it hurts. I turn away, staring out at the traffic as I ring our breakdown cover.
This is dangerous. Not the car troubles, I mean, but Dylan. For a split second there, as I watched him strolling across the tarmac with his hair blowing in the wind, I didn’t mind missing out on Dolly Parton and Minstrels with my sister. I wanted to be here. With him.
Two hours. Two hours.
‘My breakdown cover guarantees roadside attendance within thirty minutes,’ Marcus says as we spread a blanket out on the verge.
God, I hate him. And he still unsettles me. If anyone else had said what he said before the car broke down – that shit about how I broke Dylan – I would have left them on the side of the road. But with Marcus, even now, I have to fight not to slip into old Addie. Little Addie, forgettable Addie, Addie who’s always second place. He brings out the worst in me in pretty much every way.
‘Yes, well,’ I say, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I bet my breakdown cover is a lot more affordable than yours.’
‘That’ll be your mistake,’ he says. ‘You get what you pay for.’
He’s still not quite meeting my gaze, I notice. Dylan, Rodney and Deb have all set off in different directions for a wee, and right now, stuck setting up the picnic with Marcus, I wish I had a weaker bladder.
I just have to rise above. Be an adult.
‘Me and Dylan can put the past behind us for one day, Marcus. Maybe you should try and do the same?’
He snorts. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’ll just . . .’ the Good Samaritan says from behind me. ‘I’ll just be getting on, then, eh?’
‘Oh, God, sorry.’ I blush, swivelling to look at him. ‘Thanks so much for your help.’
I just don’t have the headspace to be polite to guests right now. Rodney’s bad enough. He gives off this vibe of total ineptitude. As if he needs constant looking after, like a toddler, or my dad at a party.
‘I didn’t catch your name, sorry?’ I say.
‘Kevin,’ the Good Samaritan says. The rush of traffic creates a constant wind. We’re all raising our voices a bit, like we’re in a noisy pub. ‘I drive lorries.’
‘Kevin who drives lorries,’ Marcus says, ‘you look like a man with stories to share – why don’t you sit yourself down with us and tell us some tales?’
I double take. Somehow while I’ve been facing the other way Marcus has found my bag of top-up snacks. He’s already snapped off half the fruit-and-nut bar, which he is now gnawing. I narrow my eyes and then look back at Kevin.
He isn’t smiling, not technically, but he’s kind of . . . smiling without smiling. Like how dogs do. Now that I’m calming and the sun’s not behind him, I take a moment to look at him properly. He’s short and stocky and weathered. I don’t reckon Kevin spends much time on self-care. His body is dotted with tattoos: a Union Jack on the front of his leg, just above the knee; a date, 05.09.16, at the side of his neck; a small and surprisingly cute dog on his forearm, labelled Cookie, RIP.
Kevin’s eyes drift to Deb as she walks back towards us. ‘Why not? This job’s only a favour for a friend. I’m not really on duty,’ he says.
And so Kevin who drives lorries comes and joins us on the picnic blanket.
It’s a fairly tight fit. We’re in a circle around a mound of snacks. The sun is high enough to burn me, and I slather on sun cream while Deb lifts the bottom of her T-shirt to tan her stomach.
‘We’re almost two hours behind schedule,’ Deb says, squinting as she checks her phone screen. ‘We’ll never make it in time to help set up for the barbecue now. We’re still in . . . where are we?’
‘Just past Banbury,’ Kevin supplies, swigging from the large bottle of lemonade he and Deb have been passing back and forth.
‘Bloody hell,’ Deb says, lying back on the blanket again. ‘We’ve barely got anywhere! Shouldn’t someone call Cherry to give her a heads-up?’
Dylan and I exchange glances. Cherry is not going to be happy if we’re late for the start of the wedding celebrations.
‘Let’s wait a bit,’ I say. ‘The breakdown recovery guys could be early. They said two hours at the worst. Plus we budgeted loads of time for stops, Deb.’
‘What’s your story then, all of you?’ Kevin asks, eyes on Deb. ‘Seems like a lot of people to fit in a Mini.’
Dylan coughs. A lorry shoots past in the left lane and Deb’s hair flies up in response.
‘Should I not ask?’ Kevin says.
Marcus points at me. ‘Addie broke Dylan’s heart’ – he turns to point to Dylan – ‘about a year and a half ago and then totalled his car this morning. She feels guilty for ruining his life so she’s giving us a lift because we’re all going to the wedding of Cherry, the only person in the world who has ever liked both Dylan and Addie.’
My heart beats faster, the rage bubbling again. Addie broke Dylan’s heart. Like he didn’t fucking eviscerate mine. I fight to hold my tongue, because I shouldn’t rise to it, I mustn’t.
Deb sits up on her elbows. ‘That’s bullshit,’ she says. ‘Better version: Dylan walked out on Addie in December 2017. Biggest mistake of his life, obviously, and he knows it.’
Dylan looks down at the grass.
‘Then Dylan drove into the back of our car and destroyed his. We said we’d give them a lift to Cherry’s wedding like the very good people we are. And I liked both Dylan and Addie,’ she adds. ‘For a while.’
Kevin looks between us all. You can see the gears working.
‘And him?’ he asks, pointing to Rodney.
‘Oh, Rodney’s just along for the ride,’ Deb says, lying back down again.
‘Sorry,’ says Rodney.
Marcus rolls his eyes. Dylan is still staring down at the grass. I wish I could see his face properly.
‘Aren’t you going to tell her?’ Marcus demands, nodding to Deb. ‘Dylan, Christ, have some balls. Tell her it wasn’t like that.’
The motorway roars through the silence.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Marcus says, getting up and brushing down his jeans. ‘Anyone getting flashbacks to 2017, or just me?’
‘Marcus,’ Dylan says quietly. ‘Just leave it, OK?’
‘Leave it? Leave it?’
‘Marcus.’ Sharper this time.
Rodney’s head swivels back and forth between Marcus and Dylan as if he’s watching table tennis. I clench my fists in my lap. I want to leave. My muscles are tensed, ready.
‘What about Etienne, Dylan?’
My nails cut into my palm. My heart rate soars. I really didn’t think Marcus would say it.
‘Don’t talk about what you don’t understand,’ Deb snaps.
Kevin looks between us all, forehead creased. ‘Bloody hell. It’s like an episode of Jeremy Kyle out here.’
‘What’s not to understand?’ Marcus asks. He sounds genuinely exasperated, and I can’t look at him. I can’t sit here any longer. My body ache
s with tension.
I get up so abruptly I spill Rodney’s little plastic cup of orange juice. He yelps and rights it, but the juice is already spreading across the blanket.
I walk away. Up the bank, towards the steps Kevin came down when he found us. My heart’s pounding. I hear Deb call for me. I don’t look back. It takes me a while to realise someone’s following me, and another few seconds to clock that it’s Dylan.
‘Go back to the others,’ I say, glancing over my shoulder at him.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Dylan, just go.’
He says nothing this time, but I can still hear him above the rush of traffic. I walk faster and reach the road that crosses the motorway bridge. There’s a path here, narrow enough for one person to walk along. To either side are fields separated from the road by grassy banks dotted with white flowers. If it wasn’t for the roar of the cars beneath me, I’d feel like I’d stepped into the countryside.
‘Addie, come on, slow down.’ He jogs to catch me up. ‘Are you OK?’
I stop and spin on my heels so fast he stumbles and almost collides with me.
‘Am I OK? Marcus is so . . .’ I look away. It’s hard, standing this close to Dylan and meeting his gaze. ‘He’s such a dick.’
‘I know. I’ll talk to him.’
‘No, don’t. Just . . . give me a minute.’
‘I know it’s hard to do, but the best thing is just to ignore him.’
‘Oh, and that’s what you’re doing, is it?’
This is so familiar. It’s like slipping into an old pair of shoes. I’m angry because I’m ashamed, I know that, but I still say the words that’ll hurt him.
‘Because to me it looks like you’re still his trusty sidekick. Following him around like a puppy.’
Dylan opens his mouth to snap back at me and then closes it again. He looks at the ground. My heart hurts. I remember this sense of self-loathing so well. Is this still who I am? Just because it’s familiar, does that mean it’s me?
Maybe those old shoes don’t fit me any more. The anger’s gone as quickly as it came.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Sorry. I didn’t . . . I’m just upset.’
He looks up. ‘It’s not like that with Marcus,’ he says. ‘Not any more. He’s changing.’
Ugh. No. I tear my gaze aside, turning to keep walking away from the motorway.
‘He hasn’t changed a bit. You can’t change a man like Marcus.’
‘I understand why you’d think that.’ Dylan’s voice is calm and level. ‘But I do believe he’s getting somewhere. He’s different.’
Dylan’s walking beside me now, on the roadside. His arm brushes mine, snagging a little against the sticky sun cream on my skin. For a moment I can smell him again. The scent makes me dizzy, as if the world’s going warped, like when someone gets pulled back in time on the telly.
‘Doesn’t seem to be different when it comes to me.’
‘You know he doesn’t know the whole story,’ Dylan says quietly.
‘I know.’ I take a road left into a new-build estate lined with parked cars and squint as the sun hits a window. ‘He’s still a dick, though.’
Dylan doesn’t dispute it. We walk on for a while in silence. This feels weird, like we’re suddenly improvising a scene we’ve run through a thousand times before. Dylan’s expression is serious. I can’t seem to recover that anger that went out of me when I saw how I’d hurt him. Suddenly all I want to do is make him smile. It’s such a forceful sensation that I press a hand to my stomach to stem it.
‘While we’re here, just the two of us, I . . . I want to say I’m sorry for what I said about your decision to stop talking to me,’ Dylan says into the silence. ‘That was your choice.’
In fairness, he’s always respected that choice. Even though I’ve ached so many times to take it back.
‘I thought it would make it easier. To . . .’ I trail off.
‘Yeah. Did it?’
No. Nothing made it easier. I was unmade, when Dylan left me, and there was no simple way to rebuild myself. Only piece by piece.
‘It’s not been the easiest couple of years,’ I say, in the end.
‘No.’ His arm brushes mine again – on purpose, I think. ‘I wish I could’ve . . .’
‘Don’t do that.’ It comes out strangled. ‘Don’t wish things.’
He stays quiet. ‘Marcus has changed. Is changing. Just look out for it – please. For me.’
‘Don’t do that either. Don’t say for me like . . .’
‘I’m sorry. But I want you to know I wouldn’t be in a car with Marcus if he was still the man you knew when we were together.’
I glance at him. He wouldn’t have said something like that a year and a half ago. I play spot-the-difference again: the shorter hair, a little line between his eyebrows . . . and now when Marcus is being a prick to me, Dylan snaps at him. That’s new too.
The frown, the hair, the snapping – it all adds up to make him seem kind of worldlier. A bit damaged, a bit stronger. More self-possessed.
‘We should probably . . .’ He sighs and looks behind him. ‘We’ve left a very weird combination of people by the side of the motorway.’
I rub my face and laugh shakily into my hands. ‘Oh, God. Kevin the trucker has probably killed them all.’
‘Or Rodney. It’s always the quiet ones.’
We smile at one another. I turn back first, my arm brushing his again.
‘I was wrong,’ I say on impulse. ‘About the not-talking. It was worse. I – it – I wish I hadn’t asked you to leave me alone.’
I watch the corners of his mouth turn up. There was a time when I would have done anything to make him smile like that.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ he says simply.
We walk back towards the Mini in silence. It’s hard to know what to say after that. I’m walking slower than I should be. I like the feeling of him beside me.
We both stop as we reach the steps down to the motorway.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Dylan says. ‘Can’t leave them alone for five minutes, can we?’
Dylan
Beneath us, on the motorway verge, Rodney, Kevin and Marcus form a bizarre tableau – they seem to be conducting some sort of amateur Olympic Games.
Rodney has an empty bottle held like a javelin, his other arm sighting the throw (thankfully he is aiming away from the busy motorway). He is sporting an expression of comical concentration on his face. Meanwhile Marcus and Kevin are squatting down to lift two suitcases.
‘It’s all in the legs,’ Marcus is saying as he grabs hold of my luggage. ‘You don’t need upper-arm strength.’
Addie’s sister watches over proceedings from the picnic blanket, where – from my limited understanding of such things – she seems to be expressing breast milk into a hoover-like contraption attached to her chest.
Kevin hefts the suitcase with practised ease. ‘Upper-arm strength helps, though.’ He proceeds to bicep-curl the suitcase while Marcus – who’s never had the patience or dedication required to regularly go to the gym, or in fact regularly do anything – attempts to lift the suitcase above his head like a weightlifting champion. He gets halfway and then sets it down again, looking rather red in the face.
‘Just getting a good grip,’ he says.
Kevin chortles, doing a few casual squats.
Addie sighs beside me. ‘I do not like the way Deb is looking at that trucker.’
‘Kevin? Really?’
‘She’s not had sex since having Riley. She said something about wanting to get back in the saddle this weekend.’
Her expression mirrors mine.
‘Is Rodney actually taking part?’ I ask, watching him practise the throw before going in for the real thing. He looks a little like an animated stick figure with his knobbly knees jutting a
nd his feet turned out. The bottle sails up the bank, not quite reaching the line of trees at the top, and then topples gracelessly down again.
‘Just joining in, I guess, in his own way,’ Addie says, with something that sounds a lot like fondness. ‘He doesn’t seem to have fallen for Deb like the other two, does he?’
‘Kevin’s certainly smitten, but I would say Marcus is . . .’ I pause carefully. ‘Doing what Marcus does whenever there’s a woman in proximity. Not that Deb would ever go anywhere near him, all things considered. Oh, bloody hell, there he goes,’ I say as Marcus topples over below, suitcase thudding to the ground beside him. ‘He had to pick my suitcase, didn’t he?’
Kevin carefully sets Marcus’s suitcase down. Rodney stretches a hand out; it takes Kevin a moment to realise he’s asking for a high-five. Rodney’s delighted expression when their palms clap suggests that Rodney is accustomed to people leaving him hanging.
‘You lot are a right laugh,’ Kevin says, bouncing on his toes, seemingly energised by all the bicep-curling.
‘Really? Even Rodney?’ Marcus says, brushing himself down as he stands. ‘Kevin, you need to broaden your horizons. You know I once met a woman who could fellate her own toes? Now she was fun.’
‘Gosh,’ says Rodney, as Kevin roars with laughter and slaps Marcus on the back.
Deb spots us and waves, then removes her breast pump; it’s only my extremely quick thinking that saves me from the sight of Addie’s sister’s nipple.
‘If you lot want anything else to eat or drink, it’s not a long walk to Tesco from here,’ Kevin says, and there’s a huskiness to his tone that makes me wonder if he might have seen rather more of Deb’s breast than I did.
Deb pushes herself to standing. ‘Why don’t you show me?’ she says briskly to Kevin.
‘Called it,’ Addie says.
‘What? You don’t mean – they’re not going to have sex on the way to Tesco, are they?’
‘You really have changed,’ Addie says dryly, then her cheeks flare as she registers what she’s said. She’s right to blush – I’m gone the moment she says it, thinking of all the nights we couldn’t wait until we got home, sex against walls, in the backs of cars, on the dry chalky soil of the vineyard next to Villa Cerise . . .