by Beth O'Leary
Dylan cut Marcus out for almost a year? I shoot him another look, but he’s turned his face towards the window.
‘It was Luke, actually,’ Dylan says. ‘He told me about your . . . apology thing.’
Another long silence, just the sound of Deb’s breast pump, the low music and the wheels on the road. The traffic is beginning to slow again. Cars close in around us.
‘I suppose I thought I’d give you an opportunity to get around to apologising to me, too.’
I keep glancing in the mirror. Marcus catches me looking at him and I quickly turn my eyes back to the road.
‘I assume it was your therapist’s suggestion,’ Dylan goes on. ‘And that there was a reason you’d managed to apologise to Luke, Javier, Marta, your stepmother, your father, and my mother for your various indiscretions and misbehaviours, but not yet got around to me.’
His voice is rising – he’s hurt, maybe, or angry, but he’s keeping it in check. I know that tone well.
I catch Deb’s eye in the mirror. I widen my eyes, like, Don’t ask me what all this is about.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Marcus,’ Dylan says lightly. ‘I’m listening.’
Dylan
A phone rings in the long, stifling silence; Deb fumbles around and swears as she tries to find her mobile without letting go of the breast pump.
‘Saved by the bell,’ Marcus says under his breath, just loud enough that I can hear him. My heart is thudding unsteadily; I really thought we were getting somewhere there, but of course Marcus wouldn’t perform his apology on cue – I’ll likely never get one now I’ve asked for it. And besides, he hardly knows the depth of what he ought to be apologising for; no wonder he feels like he’s jumping through hoops in the dark. I clench my fists in my lap. He’s trying, I remind myself, and I think of what Luke said when we last spoke: Write Marcus off if you want to, I won’t judge, believe me – but don’t pretend you’re giving him a chance when you’re clearly just not.
‘Hello? Is Riley OK?’ Deb says.
Addie’s on alert immediately – her eyes dart towards Deb in the mirror as the traffic crawls around us, hunched cars inching along like beetles, sunlight glinting on their backs.
‘OK. Oh, yeah, of course, now’s good,’ Deb says, and Addie relaxes.
They’ve always had that bond, the Gilbert sisters; I’ve envied Deb more than once for the way she slots in with Addie so instinctively, as if the two of them were made to come as a pair.
‘Is it Dad?’ Addie cocks her head, listening, then gives a quick grin. ‘Put him on speaker, Deb.’
The voice of Addie’s father cuts through the stuffy heat of the car, and it’s like catching the scent of Addie’s shampoo in the street, like hearing the rattle of beaded bracelets. It’s like stepping back for half a second into the life where she was mine.
‘. . . told your mother it wasn’t meant to be that colour, but she says it’s perfectly fine, and not to mention it to you,’ he’s saying. ‘Oh, bugger, probably shouldn’t have told you that. But it was so yellow. I’m sure babies didn’t poo yellow in my day.’
‘What shade of yellow?’ Deb asks.
I look back; Marcus is gazing out the window moodily, but he pulls a disgusted face at that. I find myself smiling. Losing Addie was so all-eclipsing I rarely thought of the other people I lost with her, but hearing Neil’s voice makes me miss him in a way I can honestly say I have never missed my own father.
‘I’d go for . . . mustard? English mustard, that is, the powdered kind.’
‘Ooh,’ says Rodney, ‘that is quite yellow.’
‘Oh, hello,’ Neil says cheerfully. ‘Who’s that, then?’
‘We’ve got company,’ Deb says. ‘That’s Rodney, and . . .’ She trails off.
Addie is furiously shaking her head at her. The joy at hearing Neil again seeps away, because of course Addie doesn’t want her father to know I’m here in the car with them. I walked out on his daughter: he must despise me.
‘And . . . Rodney made flapjack,’ Deb finishes. She pulls a face at Addie.
‘Flapjack!’ Neil says, sounding genuinely enthused. ‘Lovely!’
‘Dad, the yellow poo,’ Deb says, with the air of a woman getting back down to business. ‘Talk to me about texture. Loose? Firm? Peanut butter?’
‘Your dad’s such a nice guy,’ I say into the silence that follows once Neil finally hangs up.
‘He’s all right,’ Deb says, with unmistakable fondness. ‘Why, what’s yours like?’ She pauses. ‘Oh, sorry, he’s a bit of a shit, isn’t he?’
Marcus laughs at that. He seems to be cheering up a little, and frankly it would have been impossible to stay angry for the duration of Neil’s very serious, very earnest discussion of Riley’s faecal matter.
Deb’s finished pumping, and there’s a lengthy pause while she rummages around for the cool bag to store the bottle of milk. Rodney, who is ostensibly trying to help, seems to have more limbs than an octopus – Addie winces as one of his knees shoves into the back of the driver’s seat.
‘Yeah, my dad’s . . . difficult,’ I say, when the commotion has died down. ‘I can’t blame him entirely for that, though. I have consistently disappointed him – I’ve made something of an art of it, actually.’
I feel Addie glance at me but keep my eyes on the road ahead. The heat is hovering on the tarmac, blurring the car in front and turning it into an oil painting, perhaps, or a live stream on poor WiFi. This whole day has an air of surrealness to it, and the blur, the heat, the fierce sun, they make it feel even stranger.
‘We’ve reached an understanding,’ I say. ‘He keeps out of my life, and I keep out of his. We’ve not spoken since December 2017.’
Addie startles as I say the date. I look down at my hands in my lap. For a wild second I imagine reaching across and covering her hand on the steering wheel with mine.
‘I found out something rather unpleasant,’ I say. ‘About my father. Or, more precisely, about my father’s girlfriend, who, it turns out, lives a very nice life in a townhouse in Little Venice that he pays for out of the family business.’
In the long, shocked silence, Rodney unclicks his Tupperware of flapjack again.
‘And you found that out in December of two years ago?’ Addie says slowly.
I nod, still looking down at my hands.
‘No,’ Marcus says. ‘That day?’
I glance up at Addie, anxious. The colour rises slowly up her chest, her neck, to dapple her cheeks.
‘That’s what you’d been talking to Luke about when I texted you?’ Marcus says.
‘Mm. He’d been home.’
‘Confronting your dad?’
‘Talking to my mother,’ I correct him. ‘Confronting my dad would be . . . Ah.’
That’s something Luke and I have never had the courage to do, not even for this.
‘You know your dad’s going to be at Cherry’s wedding, right?’ Marcus says, and I can hear his expression: eyebrows raised in incredulity.
I take a slow, wobbly breath, because there it is again, the moment I think about seeing my father – a weight against my chest like the heel of a hand pushed against my ribs. The power he has is mine/given, and now I choose/to take it back. It’s my most popular poem on Instagram, just three lines long, titled ‘Simple’. It’s one of my least favourite poems now – I wrote it in the months after I’d lost Addie and cut off contact with Dad, and now its oversimplicity seems faintly pathetic. As though freezing out my father would flick the switch, and here I’d be, perfectly healed and happy, my own master.
‘Dyl?’ Marcus prompts. ‘You know your mum and dad are invited, right?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know.’
‘And you’ve not seen your dad for over a year and a half?’
‘No. I’ve not.’
‘And you’re just going
to . . . see him at the wedding?’
‘Yes.’
There’s a long silence.
‘Is there a game plan beyond that point?’ Marcus asks dryly.
Addie keeps glancing at me, her gaze like sunshine on my cheek.
‘Not yet,’ I say rather helplessly. ‘I’m hoping I’ll know what to say when I get there. Luke will be there too. It’ll be all right with Luke there.’
‘OK!’ Marcus says, and I hear him stretch, and Deb say oof as he presumably elbows her somewhere. ‘Well, luckily we’ve got about two hundred or so miles to work on that shitshow of a strategy.’
THEN
Addie
Marcus changes completely after our trip to see the snake. No more flirting, no charm – he pretty much ignores me. But I sometimes feel his gaze on me when I’m not looking. It takes me a couple of days to notice that when Marcus is watching me, Grace is watching Marcus.
‘You’re looking at him again,’ I tease her as we wash up the breakfast things side by side. She’s washing, I’m drying and surreptitiously picking off the bits of scrambled egg she’s missed.
‘Who, Marc?’ She’s been idly staring at Marcus on the terrace, through the window above the kitchen sink. ‘Oh, I’m a lost cause, aren’t I? I just find him so fascinating.’
We get on well, me and Grace. She can be a little much sometimes, but I’ve lived with Cherry: I have pretty good tolerance for intense posh people. Plus she’s incredibly smart, and like Dylan she’s not patronising about it. And, crucially, she’s never looked at Dylan the way she’s always staring at Marcus.
‘If you find him so fascinating, then why . . .’ did you sleep with his best friend, too?
Grace laughs, getting the subtext. ‘Darling, I’m the queen of self-sabotage, don’t ask me why I do anything. Besides, Marc isn’t the sort of guy you go steady with, is he? If we’d been exclusive, he would have lost interest even more quickly than he did. He wanted free-spirit Grace, sexual-adventurer Grace, always-out-of-reach Grace. He wants games and scandal.’
‘You deserve someone who wants you for who you really are,’ I tell her. ‘And doesn’t try to turn you into somebody else.’
She laughs, throwing her head back. ‘I’ve yet to find a man like that,’ she says.
I wince, and she clocks it straight away. She presses one soapy hand to mine, stilling it for a moment to catch my eye.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘That wasn’t about Dylan. He’s not a bad man, nothing like that, he and I just weren’t . . . Oh, it wasn’t real.’
‘Was it a game? To Dylan?’ I force myself to ask. ‘The whole thing with you?’
Grace sobers, pressing her lips together. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, darling, I know you’ll probably find that terribly distasteful, but I don’t think he ever liked me, and honestly, I didn’t like him that way either. Marc was losing interest, and . . . sleeping with Dylan, it got Marc’s attention in a way I never could with any other man. And I think Dylan liked having something that was Marc’s for once.’
I flinch at that. Grace sends me a sympathetic glance but keeps going.
‘Leaving for Europe was a master stroke on my part, frankly, because if those boys need one thing, it’s a sense of purpose, and so they chased me far longer than they would’ve if we’d all stayed in Oxford. I think they liked the idea of sleeping with the same woman more than they ever liked me.’
My teeth are gritted tight. ‘I’m sorry,’ I manage. ‘That’s horrible.’
‘Oh, I gave as good as I got, darling,’ Grace says, passing me a plate. ‘And I’ve done plenty worse to others. If you run with this lot’ – she nods to the figures draped around the pool – ‘things are always going to get a little messy. The difference is, with Marc . . .’ She sighs. ‘I can’t seem to shake him the way I’ve always shaken everybody else.’
‘I get it,’ I say, stacking the plate.
Grace smiles slowly at me. ‘Dylan’s really got under your skin, hey?’
I blush. Grace smiles.
‘Well. May he prove to be a man who deserves you,’ she says, handing me another plate with a flourish.
They break stuff: a lamp in the ballroom, a door on the second floor. Connie’s finger, which means she spends a night in a French emergency room with Uncle Terry, who was the only person sober enough to drive her, since his hangovers are worse than everyone else’s and he can’t keep up.
They drink and laugh and get high and the days turn blurry under the sun.
Meanwhile I fix everything. Except the finger – that’s outside my expertise.
In fairness to them all, they do treat me and Deb like part of the gang. Not like the caretakers. It’s just when something goes wrong and they yell for me or my sister that I’m reminded we’re not quite on a level here. I’m not really one of them.
‘They’re like overgrown children,’ Deb observes one day, looking down at them all on the lawn. Connie has her head on Marta’s stomach, Grace is sitting up against Marcus’s legs, Luke and Javier are intertwined. Dylan’s off with Uncle Terry somewhere, I think, trying to keep him amused. Deb and I have been clearing insects out of the pool – Marta swam right into a giant hornet earlier and nobody’s heard the end of it.
‘Do you like them?’ I ask Deb.
‘Oh, how can you not?’ she says, leaning on the terrace balustrade. ‘But I’d keep them at a bit of a distance, personally. I don’t see how you can get in the middle of that’ – she points to the tangle of limbs below – ‘and not end up in a mess.’
I tilt my head to her shoulder, not quite letting it touch. I’m so grateful she’s here, my sister. Sometimes this week I’ve felt like I’m getting kind of lost. Or maybe losing the confidence to be Summer Addie. But with Deb, I’m always myself. The proper Addie, the real one.
‘I love you,’ I tell her. ‘Thanks for coming back when they arrived.’
‘Of course,’ she says, surprised. ‘You only ever have to ask, and I’m here. Always. Isn’t that how this sister thing works?’
Dylan’s a bit different with his friends. He laughs more and says less. His poetry isn’t something he gushes about, it’s the punchline to someone else’s joke. He’s still charming and lost-boyish. But he’s . . . quieter. Sometimes even I lose track of where he is in the crowd.
At night, though, he’s mine. We’ve given Deb the bed in the flat and once the partying is over for the evening, I collapse beside him in that enormous four-poster. We have sex a lot, but we talk a lot too. All night, on our last night. Nose to nose, hands linked.
‘The sound of teeth against a spoon when someone’s eating soup, insects that scuttle, people who don’t listen,’ he whispers. It’s five in the morning, and his voice is hoarse. We’re talking about pet peeves – I’ve no idea how we got here. ‘And yours?’
‘Yes to people who don’t listen,’ I say, and press a light kiss to his lips. ‘That’s a good one. And rats. I hate those too. And it drives me nuts when your uncle Terry says women! Like he can instantly win a debate with that. You know, when one of us has said something he doesn’t agree with?’
‘Oh, Uncle Terry is a pet peeve all on his own,’ Dylan says, grimacing, and I laugh. ‘I’m sorry. He’s awful.’
‘He’s . . .’ Hmm, what am I allowed to say here? He is Dylan’s uncle, after all. I change tack. ‘Is your dad like him? Terry’s his brother, right?’
There’s a long, still silence.
‘No, Dad’s different,’ Dylan says eventually, and his tone has changed. ‘He’s . . . tougher than Terry.’
I frown. ‘What does tougher mean?’
‘He’s just not much fun,’ Dylan says. ‘What’s your dad like?’
That was quick. Given that we just spent forty-five minutes talking about Pokémon and Ninja Turtles, I really thought Dylan’s dad would take more than ten seconds
to discuss. I try to make out Dylan’s expression in the darkness.
‘You guys don’t get along?’ I ask quietly.
‘Let’s just say he’s one of those people who doesn’t listen,’ Dylan says.
He leans in and kisses me then, slowly. I feel the kiss moving through me like I’ve swallowed something hot. He’s trying to distract me. It works.
‘So? What about you, what’s your dad like?’ Dylan asks again, resettling his head against the pillow.
‘He’s just Dad, really, I’ve never thought about what he’s like,’ I say, but I can feel myself starting to smile just at the thought of him. My heart aches for home, and I tighten my fingers around Dylan’s. ‘I’m as close to him as I am to my mum. He’s really good at advice, and he’s funny, but you know, Dad-funny.’
Dylan chuckles at that. I can feel him relaxing again.
‘Do you miss them?’ he asks. ‘Your parents?’
‘Yeah, I do.’ That feels like a bit of an embarrassing thing to say when you’re twenty-one, and I blush in the dark. ‘At uni I always went home loads midterm, so this is the longest I’ve ever not seen them, actually. But I’ve got Deb. And it’s been amazing, this summer.’
‘Amazing, hey?’ Dylan whispers.
I swallow. My heart rate picks up. ‘I don’t want it to end,’ I say.
My voice is so quiet Dylan shifts even closer to hear me. I can feel his breath on my lips like a feather.
‘Who said anything about ending?’ he whispers. He’s shadowy in the dark, but I can see his eyes flicking back and forth as he looks at me.
I sort of knew. I didn’t think he’d say he was leaving the villa and that was it, summer romance done. But even so, my heart is thundering now. I want this conversation so much it scares me. I shift away a little, turning my face into the pillow. Dylan runs his hand up my back, making me shiver.
‘Can I tell you something?’ he says quietly.
I wriggle, pushing the sheet down away from my face, suddenly breathless. I think he’s going to say it and once he has, that’s it, like he’s putting a timestamp on our lives. Creating a before and after. I feel it coming like I’m speeding towards something, and for one panicked moment I think I ought to slam on the brakes.