by Beth O'Leary
‘Are you and Marcus a thing?’ she asks me. ‘I’ve always wondered.’
I stand and the hand drops away.
‘He’s so pretty,’ the tall woman says, as though she never touched my knee at all. ‘If he’s straight, I’m calling dibs.’
‘I need to . . . go outside,’ I manage. The door handle won’t turn. My heart is beating so fast I worry it’ll come loose somehow. I rattle at the handle, throw my shoulder against the door. Behind me, the women laugh.
I turn the handle the other way and the door comes easily – I fall through into the hall outside. A man I’ve never seen before is kissing a girl who’s sitting on the bannister, her bum hanging over, her legs wrapped around his waist. If he lets go, she’ll fall. I edge past, terrified to touch them, terrified to send her dropping.
The door to the woods outside is open to let out the heat; I stagger through. The porch is full too, more bare limbs, more writhing bodies. I run until the music is quiet enough for me to hear the sound of my shaking breathing. The woods are pitch-black. Something touches my face. I scream. It’s a branch, heavy with night-time dew, and it leaves a wet handprint on my cheek.
I curl up somewhere, my back to the bark of a tree. The moisture creeps into my jeans, my boxers, so cold that soon I can’t feel the ground underneath me at all. I hug my knees. I think of Addie, how she makes me feel the very opposite of this bleakness, how effortlessly she fills the grasping, hopeless hole in my chest. She’s never felt so far away from me, not even in those months we spent apart. The music thrums behind the darkness like the night is growling.
‘Dylan?’
I scream when something touches me again. This time a hand.
‘Come on, you’re freezing.’
He takes me back to the cabin. The music gets louder and louder and louder. The beat is too fast – I want it to slow down. I ask Marcus and he laughs and squeezes my arm.
‘You’re OK, Dyl. Let’s just get you warmed up. You’ve forgotten where your limits are, that’s all.’
He takes me upstairs and kicks a drunk man out of the bath so he can run it for me. When I ask about the music again he shouts down the stairs and it changes: something eerie and slow that I like even less.
I cry when I get into the water. It hurts. It feels like someone has bitten off the tips of my fingers. Marcus holds my hand tight.
‘You’re OK,’ he keeps saying. ‘You’re all right.’
‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I say, and my shoulders shake. ‘I don’t know – I don’t know what I’m meant to do. I’m losing myself again, aren’t I?’
I remember suddenly that my phone is out there in the woods somewhere, with all those messages from my father waiting for me in the dark, and I shudder so hard I splash Marcus with water. He swears quietly, letting go of my hand for a moment to brush the drops off his T-shirt, but his hand is back in mine before I have time to be afraid.
‘Nobody knows what they’re doing,’ Marcus tells me. ‘Lie back. Go on. You need to get your whole body in the water. You should stop thinking so hard, Dylan. You’re your own worst enemy.’
‘Dad wants me to work for his business.’
There’s a fine crack running down the centre of the ceiling. I trace it with my eyes, tipping my head back, letting the water touch the crown of my head.
‘Fuck your dad. He’s been controlling your life for ever. Make your own choice.’
‘I did. I have.’
‘It’s not making your own choice if it’s for a girl.’
I flex my hands. My fingers still hurt. I look down – my toes are yellow-white.
‘How do I know I’m making my own choice, then?’
‘You go with your gut.’
‘I am going with my gut.’
‘You’re going with your dick. And working for your dad, that’d be going with your head. I’m talking gut. The thing that you know deep down makes the most sense. The thing that’s truest to who you are.’
To be true to yourself, you have to have a sense of self to work with.
‘I’ve always had your back, haven’t I?’ Marcus lowers our joined hands into the water.
I hiss as the pain takes hold.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yeah, I know, I just . . .’
‘I’m giving you the chance to do what you want to do. You can write here. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?’
‘Poetry isn’t – it’s not a job.’
‘It is if you’re good enough.’
‘I’m not,’ I say automatically. The line on the ceiling is shifting a little to and fro in my vision, blurring.
‘That’s not your gut talking.’
I let the heat creep into my bones and stare at the crack above me and I know Marcus is right. If I really thought I wasn’t good enough, I’d stop writing. Deep down, I love what I write, and I think other people might too, one day.
‘Do you trust me?’ Marcus asks.
Marcus and I applied for Oxford together. English, because Marcus said that was easy to get into, and if I wanted to be a poet that would be a good place to start. The same college, because why would we do anything else?
Luke grew up and fell in love and went to the States for his undergrad – or, really, to escape Dad – but Marcus has never left my side. And I’ve never left his, the small boy with the curly hair and the flower wreath hanging wonkily over his ear.
‘Of course. Of course I trust you.’
‘Then listen to me when I say this is what you want.’ He loosens his grip on my hand. ‘I’ll kick everyone out. Don’t get out the bath until I come back. I think standing might be a little beyond you for the time being. And also, don’t drown.’
I hear the door click shut. At some point, without me really noticing, the urgent knowledge that I’m about to die has eased away. In its place is the familiar, clutching confusion that dogged me all last summer, beneath the dread – the sense that I’m doing something very important, and that I’m doing it entirely wrong.
NOW
Addie
Every time I check Google Maps, Scotland gets further away.
‘How is this even possible?’ I say as Google turns a little more of my journey from blue to red. ‘We’re driving towards Scotland, but every time I check, Scotland takes longer to get to?’
Deb and I are back in the front seats. This feels like the right order of things, if I’m honest. I am too grumpy to be crammed in the back with an assortment of men I did not want on my road trip.
‘Someone’s got to tell Cherry how late we are,’ I say, rubbing my eyes. ‘She’s going to cry, isn’t she?’
Something happened to Cherry when she started planning her wedding. The carefree Cherry who had cheerfully scrubbed her one-night-stand’s vomit out of our bedroom carpet at uni had transformed into a woman who could not stand the thought of her wedding bouquet containing fewer than sixteen dark red roses. Everyone says people change when they’re planning a wedding, but I’d assumed that only happened to crap people, ones who deep down had always been a bit ridiculous and had just hidden it well. But no. The wedding mania had even got to Cherry.
‘She’s not going to cry,’ Dylan says firmly.
There’s a long pause. I wait. He waits. I am totally confident Dylan will crack first. He may have changed, but he’s not changed that much.
‘I’ll call her,’ Dylan says.
I smile.
‘Don’t be smug, now,’ Dylan tells me, with the hint of a smile. ‘Or I’ll do it on speaker.’
Why is sitting in traffic so much worse than driving? I would rather drive for eight hours than sit in traffic for four. At least if you’re going at sixty there’s some sense of progress. As it is, I’ve been inspecting the back end of an Audi for actual for ever. There’s roadworks, that’s part of the problem – only two lanes inst
ead of four.
It’s half past four. We were meant to be in Scotland by now, at Cherry’s pre-wedding barbecue, but appear to be . . . I squint at a road sign catching the sun. Bloody hell, we’re not even at Preston. Cherry didn’t cry on the phone, but she went dangerously high-pitched. We really need to crack on to Scotland now.
The last song ends and I flick through one of my favourite country playlists. So many of these songs make me think of Dylan. I swallow. My finger hovers over ‘What If I Never Get Over You’, Lady A, but I shouldn’t. It’ll probably make me cry hearing that with Dylan in the back seat.
I settle for ‘We Were’ by Keith Urban. As the riff starts up I sink back in the seat and take a deep breath. This journey with Dylan is just as hard as I thought it would be. Worse, even, because he’s different. He was always quieter in a group, but that quietness doesn’t feel like Dylan stepping into the background now. It reads more like . . . thoughtfulness.
‘Give Rodney a bit more room, would you?’ Dylan says behind me. I don’t have to turn to know what he’s talking about. Marcus will be sat with his legs so far apart he might as well be at the gynaecologist’s.
‘Rodney’s fine,’ Marcus says. ‘If we must listen to this filth, can’t we have a classic?’
‘Dolly!’ Deb says.
Marcus groans. ‘Not Dolly Parton, please. Johnny Cash?’
‘Your knee is halfway into his side of the car,’ Dylan says, with a quiet firmness that makes me smile despite myself. ‘Just sit up a bit.’
‘All right, Mum, bloody hell,’ Marcus says. ‘How about it, Addie? A bit of Johnny Cash? Please?’
I raise my eyebrows in surprise. Marcus’s tone is almost . . . polite. I’m suspicious, but when I turn in my seat to glance at him he’s just looking out the window, expressionless. I watch him for a moment, wondering. I meant it when I said I don’t believe a man like Marcus ever changes. And an occasional please isn’t going to make me feel differently. But all the same, when I turn back to my phone, I hit play on Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’.
Deb switches lanes at snail’s pace in a vague attempt to get some forward momentum. Our windows are closed to give the air con its best shot at actually cooling someone down, but I’m dying for fresh air. The cars on either side of us are full of people yawning and bored. Feet up on dashboards and forearms leaning on steering wheels.
The car parallel to ours has three teenagers in the back, all squabbling over an iPad. From the outside, we probably look like a group of friends off on holiday together. The parents in that car are probably so jealous of us.
If only they bloody knew.
‘Google says all routes are red,’ Rodney pipes up. I turn and see him peering at his phone. His hair is slick with sweat and sticking to his forehead, and there’s a triangular dark patch from the neck of his T-shirt down his chest. God. Rodney’s having a shit day. Imagine thinking you’d found a nice, cheap transport option to a wedding, and ending up trapped in a sauna-car with us lot.
‘How long’s it saying it’ll take us to get to Ettrick?’ I ask Rodney.
‘Umm. Seven hours.’
‘Seven hours?’ everybody choruses.
Deb gently leans her head forward against the steering wheel. ‘I can’t go on,’ she says. ‘And I’m bloody desperate for a wee.’
‘We could finish this bottle of water?’ Rodney suggests.
‘Rodney, are you familiar with how women pee?’ Deb says.
‘Not . . . very familiar, no,’ Rodney replies.
Marcus sniggers.
‘Well. I’ll draw you a picture when we get there,’ Deb says.
‘Oh, wow, thanks?’ Rodney says.
‘If we swap, you can hop out and nip behind the treeline,’ I say, nodding towards the fields beside the motorway. ‘Nobody’s moving anyway. I can’t remember the last time we moved forward.’
‘Are you sure?’ she says, glancing ahead at the stationary traffic.
‘How badly do you need to pee?’
‘Even my pelvic floor exercises will not help me soon, Ads.’
‘What’s a pelvic floor?’ Rodney asks.
It’s like having an actual child in the car.
‘Ready?’ I say to Deb.
She nods, and we each open our car doors. God, it’s nice to breathe some fresh air. Even if that fresh air is nasty, smelly pollution. It’s hotter out here than in the car – I can feel my skin burning in real time as I walk around the back and meet Deb halfway.
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ I say to her as she passes me. ‘Giving Dylan and Marcus a lift?’
‘Oh, yeah. Worst idea ever,’ Deb says. ‘What were we thinking?’
I watch her weave her way through the rows of cars and up on to the bank, disappearing into the scrubby trees. At first, when the cars start moving around me, I feel a bit seasick. Like when you’re on a train and you think it’s leaving the station because the train on the other platform is pulling away, and your brain gets all confused. Then the car behind us hoots. And the car behind that. I come to my senses.
‘Shit.’
I yank open the driver-side door and climb in. Marcus is already laughing like a bloody hyena, and Rodney is going, oh dear, oh dear, like a flustered old lady having trouble with her nerves.
‘Ah,’ says Dylan. ‘This is . . . a conundrum.’
There’s a good three hundred yards between me and the Audi in front already. I glance in the wing mirror and catch sight of the cars behind us trying to inch into the other lane. There’s no hard shoulder either, because of these roadworks – we’re out of options.
‘Fucking shitting fuckity shit,’ I say, then blush, because I nicked that particular arrangement of expletives off Dylan, and I haven’t used it for years. Apparently him being here has reminded me of one of the few gifts he gave me that I did not give back: the talent of swearing like a true toff.
‘We can’t stay here. She can’t run into the traffic to get to us anyway, and someone’s going to go into the back of us. Shit.’ I start up, going as slowly as I can get away with. ‘Can you see her? Did she take her phone?’ I glance down at the car door – nope, there’s the phone. ‘Bloody bollocking fuckity fuck,’ I hiss between my teeth. ‘What do I do?!’
‘First things first, you probably need to drive faster than ten miles per hour,’ Dylan says apologetically. ‘Or we might all die.’
‘Right, right,’ I say, accelerating. ‘Oh, God, can you see her?’
Dylan strains to look out the window, but he’s on the wrong side. ‘Marcus?’ he says.
‘Can’t see her,’ Marcus says. ‘This is priceless.’
‘Oh dear, poor Deb!’ says Rodney.
‘Yes, thank you, everyone,’ I say, trying not to hyperventilate. ‘Shall I come off at the next junction? Where will she expect to meet us? What do we do?’
‘Breathe, Ads – it’s Deb. She could handle being dumped alone in the Sahara. She’ll just find this funny. Or mildly annoying,’ Dylan says, and I jump slightly as I feel his hand on my shoulder. He withdraws it quickly. I wish I hadn’t jumped.
‘Oh, God,’ I say, letting out a strangled laugh. We’re going at thirty now, which is about the same speed as everyone else as the motorway starts to get moving again. This would usually feel annoyingly slow but right now, while Deb’s spot on the verge slips away in my left mirror, it feels way too fast. ‘I need to get into the left lane. Marcus, would you please stop fucking cackling back there? It’s not helpful.’
Dylan snorts with laughter. I catch his eye for a moment in the internal mirror. He pulls a face.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s just . . . It is . . . a bit . . .’
I swallow down a laugh, but it comes back, and before I know it my shoulders are shaking too. ‘Shit,’ I say, lifting a hand to my mouth. ‘Why am I laughing?’
‘Pissing behind a tree!’ Marcus snorts, voice shaking with laughter. ‘Imagine her face when she comes back and we’re gone!’
‘Oh, no, oh, gosh,’ Rodney says, and I can hear that he’s stifling his laughter too.
We’re coming up to the next junction. I indicate, still giggling, kind of also crying, generally just feeling totally unhinged. Why the hell did I let Deb get out the car for a wee?
‘The traffic just hadn’t moved in so long!’ I say.
‘It was always going to move as soon as Deb got out,’ Dylan says. ‘It’s sod’s law.’
‘I’m an idiot,’ I say, still laugh-crying. ‘This was a terrible idea.’
‘You’re not an idiot,’ Dylan says, sobering. ‘You gambled and lost, that’s all. Or, you know, Deb did. Hey, there’s a Budget Travel Hotel – pull into their car park, maybe?’
I make a last-minute indicate and follow his direction. As I pull into a space in the car park and turn the key in the ignition, I realise I’m shaking.
Things don’t seem so funny, suddenly.
‘How will she know to find us here? Should we go looking for her?’
‘Let’s just try to think like Deb,’ Dylan says, as I twist around in my seat to look at the three of them.
Marcus is grinning into his fist, shaking his head. Rodney has his arms around himself in a sort of protective hug, like a kid on their first day of school. And Dylan is chewing thoughtfully at his lip. The sun catches across his face like the beam of a spotlight, turning his eyes pale lemon-lime, and more than anything I want to kick Rodney and Marcus out of this car and crawl into his lap.
It’s weird. Dylan was never the person I would turn to when I was upset. So it’s not a habit thing. Back when we were together, he was the last person I’d choose to cry on – mostly because when I was crying, it was because of him, and he’d not have a clue I was even upset. That was how we worked. We were so close but we barely told each other anything.
‘Think like Deb,’ I repeat. ‘OK. Well, she’s always practical. She’ll swear a bit, then she’ll go, what now?’