The Road Trip by Beth O'Leary (grave mercy .txt) 📕

We go up to London one weekend in Addie’s holidays, to see a play – she was initially reluctant, claiming that everything I like is ‘incomprehensible’, but I talked her around with promises of famous actors and ice cream in the interval. It becomes clear within minutes that I have chosen very poorly: the website claims that this modern interpretation of Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris is ‘as lurid and scintillating as an episode of Love Island’, but it turns out no amount of neon swimwear could make this play accessible. I sit here, teeth gritted as the Queen of Navarre takes a full five minutes of groaning to die, and wonder what the hell I was thinking dragging Addie to London to watch this absolute car crash.

As Addie shifts beside me, bored, frustrated, I reach for her hand.

‘Let’s go,’ I whisper in her ear.

‘What?’ She blinks at me in the half-darkness of the theatre.

‘This is drivel,’ I tell Addie, my lips against her ear. I feel her shiver at the contact and it makes me hot; I can never resist that shiver. ‘It’s dreadful, Addie. It’s . . . what would Deb say? It’s absolute toilet.’

Addie snorts with laughter and someone behind us shushes her; I tug on her hand and we make our way down the row with a chorus of excuse me, so sorry, excuse me. We fall out of the theatre, still hand in hand, and I do my best impression of the Queen of Navarre’s lengthy death and it makes Addie laugh so much she cries splodgy droplets of grey mascara on the soft, freckled skin below her eyes.

‘I need a pint,’ she says, wiping her cheeks.

I resist the urge to google the best bar in the area, and instead let her pull me into the darkly lit, sticky-floored pub on the street corner; she manages to nab us a table with Deb-like proficiency, getting to the chair just before a suited banker type and his date.

We drink too much too quickly, giddy on our escape from the Queen of Navarre’s clutches. I get up to go to the loo and everything shifts to the left a little; I have to put a hand out to steady myself on the table.

When I get back a guy is leaning over my seat, talking to Addie. He has a shaved head and a beard, and you can see the muscles clearly bunched beneath the fabric of his blue T-shirt. I can tell he fancies her. His body language says it all, and she looks so beautiful, dressed in cool grey silk with those gumball-bright bracelets working their way up her forearms.

‘All right?’ I say. I’m attempting to sound gruff; it comes out croaky. I’m drunker than I should be, and the sight of this man leaning over Addie, her dark hair falling over her shoulders like ink snaking through water . . . it kicks the fear back into gear with a suddenness that makes me wonder whether I ever truly relaxed.

‘Dyl,’ Addie says, smiling. ‘Tamal here has already introduced me to his mother! What do you think of that, hmm?’

She’s just teasing me. I think, on some level, I must know this. But as I register the elderly lady standing behind Tamal – he’s asking if they can have our table so she can sit down – all I hear is the criticism. I’m angry, and again, on some level I do know that the anger is self-directed: I absolutely ought to have introduced Addie to my parents by now. But I haven’t seen either of them since they cut me off, and I still haven’t told Addie about that.

‘Well, you’ll be going home with Tamal, then, will you?’ I say.

Everyone’s shocked faces bring me back to reality. Christ, what a hideous thing to have said. I genuinely have no idea where it came from, and then a thought hits me like a punch in the gut: it’s just the sort of thing my father would say.

Addie gets up quietly, with a smile for Tamal and his elderly mother, and walks away. I assume she’ll wait for me outside the pub, but no, she’s not there; maybe she’ll be at the station; surely she’ll meet me in Chichester so we can share a cab home. But she doesn’t even come home. She goes back to her parents’ house.

I’m beside myself; I go to Marcus’s house at two in the morning, gambling that he’ll be awake and alone and have the patience to listen to me talk about quite how profoundly I dislike myself. He answers the door in his boxers, and I notice how thin he’s becoming – his ribs are pale shadows beneath his skin and there are indents at his hips like thumbprints.

‘Have you left her?’ he asks.

I think he was asleep; his voice is slurred, his eyes a little glazed.

‘I fucked up,’ I say, ‘and she just walked away. I don’t know if she’s coming back.’

Marcus closes his eyes for a moment. ‘Come in,’ he says, stepping aside. The house smells stale and fuggy; the scent reminds me of those months when we lived together at the log cabin. The place has been exquisitely furnished, and I wonder if India had a hand in it, though Marcus hasn’t spoken about his stepmother for months.

‘What if she leaves me?’ I say. I sound pitiful. ‘What if I screw up so badly I drive her to someone else?’

‘Then you’ll know I was right,’ Marcus says heavily, leaning back against the fridge, closing his eyes again. ‘And you’ll come here, and we’ll get drunk, and things will go back to how they should be at last.’

Addie

We keep arguing. It’s like we’re either completely happy or fighting about something totally stupid. There’s no middle ground with me and Dylan.

For our anniversary in July, Dylan takes me to the poshest restaurant in Chichester. He’s got a job tutoring some super rich Russian kids –