by Beth O'Leary
‘Are you going to help me out?’ I say eventually.
He stretches out a hand. The roof is only gently sloped here, and Marcus has his feet lodged in the guttering so he can’t slide off, but still, it’s mad, this. We could really die.
I take his hand and let him help me up. His skin’s cool. He smells of the pool, and an aftershave a bit like Dylan’s, but sharper. I shuffle on my bum, carefully twisting so I can lie back and look at the night sky.
‘Wow.’ There are so many stars, more than I’ve ever seen before. They’re everywhere, stretching out all around us, sliding into the edges of my vision. The sky is so big, I think. I’ve drunk too much wine too fast – I’d never normally have a thought like that.
‘Sublime, isn’t it?’ Marcus says. ‘In the Edmund Burke sense.’
I’ve no idea what that means. If it were Dylan, I’d ask, but there’s no way I’m asking Marcus.
Dylan coughs from beneath us. ‘Shit, Terry’s up!’ he hisses. ‘Let me go fob him off, hang on.’
Marcus laughs lightly. It’s so dark, just the light from the loft bulb shining up through the trapdoor. Marcus’s hand brushes the back of mine for a moment as he shifts on the tiles.
‘He’s scared to come up,’ Marcus says.
‘Who, Dylan?’
‘He doesn’t like heights. But he tends to forget until he gets there.’
I can hear the smile in Marcus’s voice. I can hardly look at all the stars above us, like my brain just won’t take it all in.
‘You weren’t scared,’ Marcus says.
‘I was.’
‘But you’re up here anyway.’
‘Sure.’
‘Are you the sort of woman who always does the dangerous thing?’
I smile at that. ‘Not at all. I’m not that exciting.’
‘I think you are,’ Marcus says. He shifts. I think he’s turned to look at me, though it’s hard to be sure in the darkness. ‘And I’m excellent at reading people.’
‘Right,’ I say, humouring him. ‘Sure you are.’
‘Your school reports always said you had lots of potential. You’ve worn those bracelets on your wrist since you were thirteen, maybe earlier – you feel naked without them. You love to dance, and you love to be seen, and you hate to be forgotten. And when you stand at the edge of a sheer drop with somebody else . . . you think for just a moment about pushing them off.’
My foot slips a little and I gasp. Marcus chuckles.
‘Am I right?’
‘You’re a cliché,’ I tell him, resettling, pulse slowing. ‘You’re even trying to mansplain me to myself.’
‘Ah, but I’m right, though.’
I shake my head, but I’ve found as the evening’s gone on that it’s hard to be pissed off with Marcus. You get the sense he doesn’t take a single thing seriously. Telling him off would be like trying to discipline a cat.
‘I do love dancing,’ I concede. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘I’d dance with you now if the roof were a little flatter,’ Marcus says.
I frown. He’s flirting. I don’t really know what to do about it, and the silence stretches, awkward, until he laughs into the dark.
‘You really like Dylan, don’t you?’ he says.
‘Yeah, I really like him.’
‘He told you about Grace?’
‘The woman he was looking for when he got here? Yeah, he told me.’ We’ve not talked about her much. Just enough to make me feel pretty confident he’s not actually that bothered.
‘So he told you she was with me when they started sleeping together?’
‘I . . .’ What?
‘Oh, he didn’t betray me, or anything as prosaic as that. I can feel the judgement coming off you in waves. I knew, he knew, that’s just how we roll.’
I can hear Dylan coming back into the loft below us. ‘Is it very high?’ he calls up at us. ‘I mean, of course it is, but . . . Is it very high? You know, does it feel high?’
Marcus laughs. ‘He’s kidding himself if he thinks he’ll really do it,’ he says, and this time when his hand brushes mine I can’t write it off as an accident.
‘He’ll do it,’ I say sharply, and shift away. ‘You can’t even tell there’s a drop!’ I call down. ‘It’s too dark! It’s just stars and stars and stars. Come on. It’s amazing, you’ll love it. Just climb up the ladder and stick your head out so you can see.’
Dylan emerges eventually, lit from below. His face is frozen in an expression I’ve not seen before. I can’t help smiling. He looks absolutely adorable, his sleepy green eyes almost clenched shut, his hair all mussed.
‘Look up,’ I tell him. ‘Just look up.’
He tilts his head back. I hear him breathe out. Marcus is silent behind me.
‘Good God,’ Dylan says. ‘It’s like . . .’ He trails off.
‘There’s not much that leaves Dylan unable to find a simile,’ Marcus says wryly.
Dylan looks back towards us. His eyes aren’t clenched quite so tightly now, but I can’t tell who he’s looking at, me or Marcus.
‘Well?’ Marcus says, as the moment stretches out. ‘Are you in or out, my friend? Up or down?’
Dylan takes a tentative step up the ladder and pauses again. ‘Oh, God,’ he says in a strangled voice.
I shuffle closer. ‘You don’t have to,’ I say. ‘You can see it fine from there.’
His mouth takes on this fixed look, like he’s gritting his teeth, and he takes another step up the ladder, then crawls himself up on to the roof. His chest is heaving by the time he’s next to me, but he lies back beside me without a word. I reach for his hand and squeeze it tight.
‘Dylan Abbott,’ Marcus says, sounding mildly impressed. ‘Aren’t you just full of surprises?’
NOW
Dylan
Deb is driving, Dolly Parton is playing, and Marcus is hungry; the result of these three things in combination is almost certain to be bad, so I am very much on edge.
‘You just have to wait,’ Deb tells Marcus, voice raised over Dolly.
Addie’s still sitting next to me, still so distracting I have to close my eyes whenever she moves. Thank goodness for Rodney, squashed to the other side of me, intermittently singing along to ‘Here You Come Again’ with infuriatingly incorrect lyrics.
‘There!’ Marcus yells, so suddenly everyone jumps. ‘Burger van! Pull over!’
‘Fucking hell!’ Deb says. ‘Stop shouting at me!’
‘Pull in, then!’ Marcus says urgently. ‘I need food.’
I lean forward. ‘He is much easier to manage when he has been fed, just to flag.’
Deb makes a noise somewhere between a growl and a fuck-sake and pulls over just in time, braking so hard we’re all thrown forward. Addie rubs the back of her neck, wincing.
‘Are you OK?’ I ask her, as Deb parks up by the burger van.
For a second I want Addie to say no so that I can do something, check her shoulder, her neck, just touch her. It’s such a bizarre, torturous thing to be pressed up against the one person whose body I know almost as well as my own, to have my thigh sliding against hers, and not even be able to place my hand on her arm.
‘Fine, yeah, just the whiplash from earlier,’ she says. She turns her face away from me, examining the sun-streaked trees through the window as her fingers test at the muscles of her neck; my hands twitch with the urge to cover her fingers with mine.
‘Bacon butties!’ Marcus says, climbing out of the front passenger seat and slamming his door.
Addie opens her door and I climb out behind her; my legs are so stiff that when I stand, I make that oof sound men like my uncle Terry do when they sit down on a sofa.
‘We weren’t meant to stop for lunch until we got to Stoke-on-Trent,’ Deb grumbles, dropping into step with us.
&n
bsp; ‘You’re the one who had to fit in a quickie with a trucker,’ Marcus says over his shoulder.
There’s a couple of blokes in sweat-dampened T-shirts eating bacon sandwiches at their cars, squinting against the fierce sun, but there’s no queue, and Marcus all but runs to the van.
‘Was Marcus being judgemental there, d’you think?’ Deb asks, turning to me and Addie. ‘Do I need to bollock him?’
‘Definitely,’ Addie says, just as I say,
‘Definitely not.’
They both turn to me and, in perfect unison, raise their eyebrows.
‘Marcus doesn’t really do judgement, honestly,’ I say, spreading my hands. The twin gazes of the Gilbert sisters are somewhat terrifying, and my heart skips a little. ‘I just mean, there’s almost no life choice that Marcus would find unacceptable.’
‘I give no shits for whether he likes my life choices,’ Deb says. ‘I personally couldn’t be happier with them, trucker-quickie included. But if he has opinions on my decisions, I’d like to inform him that he should keep them to himself.’
This is one thing that does not seem to have changed about Deb. She may now be a mother – something I never thought I’d say about Deb Gilbert – but she still has that unbelievable ability to genuinely not care what other people think. I’ve never met anyone else with that skill; plenty of people who feign it, or aspire to it, but none who embody it quite like Deb.
‘I can still hear you,’ Marcus calls, having placed his order at the van. ‘And can confirm that I have absolutely no opinions about your life decisions. I myself am very partial to a quickie with a randomer.’
He walks back to us, taking a large bite from his bacon butty, as behind him Rodney places his order.
‘Bacon butty with egg, mushroom and burger sauce, please, sir!’ he says.
‘His life choices, on the other hand,’ Marcus says, pointing to Rodney, ‘those I have opinions about.’
‘What would you like?’ I say to Addie as Marcus and Deb start squabbling again.
‘Oh, I’ll get mine,’ she says quickly, reaching for the pocket of her dungarees.
This is just the sort of moment that would once have made me freeze up: any conversation about money with Addie felt like a trap, because I never handled it right. I’d insist on paying, which was wrong; I’d make a big fuss of letting her pay, also wrong; I’d say something stupid like Why does it even matter who gets this, it’s only a fiver. When Addie used to say I was weird about money, I found it infuriating, but I get it now. These days I am well acquainted with the stomach-writhing terror of a declined card, the genuine joy of finding something you want for dinner in the reduced section at the supermarket. I’ve had a friend insist on paying for me many times, now, and I know precisely what that feels like.
‘Sure,’ I say, stepping aside slightly so Addie can order first. Easy and casual is what I’m aiming for, and I think I come pretty close, or at least, as close as one can get when making a huge effort to make no effort at all.
Addie double takes before giving her order. It’s just a tiny blink-blink and a turn of the head, but I love it, I love that I’ve surprised her. See, I’ve changed! I want to shout. I’m different, I’m better, you were right, I was a tit about all those things, but look how much less of a tit I have become!
‘Bacon and egg butty, please,’ I say instead, to the woman inside the van. ‘No sauce.’
Addie
‘Dylan didn’t try to stop me paying for something just now,’ I hiss to Deb.
She’s leaning against the car, working her way through a hot dog. Deb eats at serious speed. She claims it’s all about focus, but I’m pretty sure she just doesn’t chew.
‘What, he didn’t even go all blustery and awkward and drop something first?’ Deb asks, mouth full.
I shush her, glancing at Dylan. He’s stood with Marcus and Rodney, looking painfully sexy, even while eating a bacon and egg butty, which is very hard to do attractively.
‘He was just totally normal about it.’
‘Astonishing. Do you think now he’s . . . Addie? Ads?’
There’s something in my throat.
I cough but it stays there, and it’s hard to breathe, I can feel it sitting there right in the top of my throat. Whatever it is feels enormous, like a golf ball, and my breath’s coming too fast. I’m starting to panic.
Someone hits me on the back, right between my shoulder blades. Hard. A small lump goes flying out of my mouth and I can breathe again. I double over, gasping for air. I retch and taste acid in my throat. My neck hurts again, a nasty hot pain like when you twist it the wrong way too fast.
‘All right now?’
I straighten slowly and turn. It’s Marcus. He’s looking at me properly, as if he’s actually trying to see me – so far today he’s looked at me like he’s really trying not to.
It was him who slapped me on the back. I don’t know how he got over here so fast. Dylan and Rodney are coming but they’re still a good few seconds behind him.
‘Fine,’ I croak.
Marcus is frowning. His eyes move over my face. The feel of his gaze on me is suddenly so familiar, and I flush, remembering how he used to look at me, once.
‘Addie, are you all right?’ Dylan says, appearing behind Marcus with Rodney in tow.
I swallow and wipe my eyes. I can still feel where it was, that lump in my throat.
‘All fine, just a bit of bacon rind.’
Marcus has backed off now, but I know his eyes are tracking me. I look at Dylan – he’s glancing at Marcus, but he turns back when he feels my gaze, and as he meets my eyes his expression is so tender. It makes my heart ache. He shouldn’t be looking at me like that, not now.
The sun beats down. Marcus watches me, I watch Dylan, Dylan keeps his eyes on both of us.
There’s a plop, and suddenly everyone’s gaze turns down, following the sound. Rodney has just dropped the whole fried egg out of the end of his butty. It lies there, flaccid and pale, right next to the lump of bacon rind I just spat out.
‘I’d imagined this road trip being a bit more glamorous than it’s turning out to be,’ Deb says to me after a moment. ‘Hadn’t you?’
‘Careful, Rodders,’ Marcus says, nodding to Rodney’s butty. ‘You’re about to lose the bacon, too.’
THEN
Dylan
I wake the next morning to a crushing headache and a tall blonde straddling me, one hand firmly gripping my face. If it weren’t for the headache and the fact that the blonde is extremely familiar, I would assume this were a particularly exciting dream, but alas, it’s just Cherry.
‘Oof,’ I say, pushing her off me. ‘What are you doing, woman?’
‘Just finishing up!’ she says. ‘There!’
She has a pen in her other hand – an ominous sign. I wipe the back of my hand across my face and it remains clean, which is even more alarming, since it indicates permanent marker.
‘What have you done to me? And why are you even here?’
‘Everyone’s here!’ Cherry says, hopping off me.
‘What do you mean, everyone?’ I sit up, rubbing my eyes.
Cherry, true to form, is bounding about my suite like a puppy exploring new terrain, which feels particularly ridiculous given that this villa not only belongs to her parents but is in fact named in her honour.
‘Marcus messaged yesterday saying you were holed up here on your own with my Addie!’ Cherry says, blonde ponytail flicking as she disappears into the bathroom. ‘Why didn’t you tell me! I am such a fan of you and her as a couple, I predict huge things, huge – wow, that’s a lot of condoms, Dyl! Ambitious much?’
I shove back the covers and climb out of bed, following Cherry into the bathroom and steering her away from where she’s rifling through my toiletries.
‘Boundaries,’ I say. ‘Remember we talke
d about those?’
The door to my bedroom bursts open before she can respond. In they all tumble: my brother, Luke; his boyfriend, Javier, with Marcus riding piggyback on his back; plus Marta and Connie, two of the girls from our third-year house at university. And Grace.
I’m only wearing my boxers, but that doesn’t stop them all piling into me; I manage to stagger back so that when we fall, we land on a chaise longue in a tangle of limbs. Connie kisses one of my eyes – I think she’s aiming for my forehead; Luke ruffles my hair like Dad used to do when he was in a good mood; Marcus grins down at me, his face no more than an inch from mine. Cherry has given him the artistic treatment too: one of his eyes has been covered with a drawn-on eyepatch, like a pirate, and he is sporting a very detailed goatee.
‘Morning,’ he says. ‘I thought things were getting boring. Didn’t you?’
‘We’re going hiking, Dyl,’ Cherry calls, disappearing out of the bedroom door. ‘I’m getting Addie!’
‘Wait!’ I yell, but she’s already gone, and there are far too many exuberant bodies piled above for me to follow her. ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Marcus . . .’
‘You didn’t think to tell me you were going on the family holiday solo?’ my brother says, heaving himself off me and settling on the floor, arms loosely braced on his knees. He lifts his eyebrows enquiringly as Javier collapses down beside him, his waist-length hair falling across Luke’s arm as he tips his head on to my brother’s shoulder.
‘Luke is sulking,’ Javier informs me.
‘Connie, stop it,’ I say, swatting at her.
She’s picking something out of my hair; she shows me what’s in her hand, and it’s a large dead bug. I make a face. I’m not entirely sure what we all got up to last night.
‘Luke, I’m sorry, I just . . .’ Wanted to do my own thing for a while. Wanted some time to be me. Wanted Addie. ‘I don’t know, really,’ I finish weakly.
Luke’s eyebrows stay high, but Javier tugs on his arm, and he lets it go with a sigh. My brother has my dad’s looks: he’s all broad and stern, his hair a tone lighter than mine and cropped short.