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

As if there isn’t already an acrid scent of vomit clinging to everything in here, including me, after helping him towards the sofa. I sit down in the chair opposite him and look at my feet. I feel bodily exhausted; a poem tugs at me, something about the ache of giving and its quiet void, but I’m too tired to humour the urge to follow its thread.

Starting the Masters has been intense – even part-time, it seems to take up every spare hour, and I’d forgotten how hard learning can be. I haven’t exercised that muscle in far too long. All that time spent swanning around Cambodia reading modern novels and suddenly the texts I knew inside out for my finals – Chaucer, Middleton, Spenser – are foreign again, locking me out.

The evening bar work was manageable over the summer, when I was just spending my days at home with Addie, but the late nights are making it harder and harder to get up early and study. And every so often there comes a message from my mother, testing the water, seeing if I’m desperate enough to go begging to my parents yet.

My hope is that taking Addie home will be read as a peace offering; quietly, in the back of my mind, I never thought my parents would really cut me off for ever. They’d come around to the Chichester plan, I thought, and the gifts and monthly payments and credit-card pay-offs would resume. Realising this about myself is not pleasant, and besides, it’s starting to look as though I was wrong.

‘I’m going to save you, my friend,’ Marcus says, waggling a finger at me. ‘All this, all of it, it’ll all make sense when you know. When you know.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I say sharply, more sharply than I should – he’s barely able to form words, let alone make sense.

‘I’m going to show you. How bad she is. How bad for you. Addie is. I mean, you think I need help, you think I need help, you . . .’

He rants at me about Addie all the time now, telling me to leave her, telling me to end it, telling me everything was better before she came into my life. I can only believe that this fixation on Addie is a symptom of his wider disease – alcoholism, I assume, maybe something else too – but it’s awful, and as much as I try to shield Addie from it, she knows he despises her. I can’t bear to hear him talk about her like this; I get up and head for the kitchen, stepping over a plastic container of Chinese food, noodles spilling out of its side like entrails. He needs water, if he can keep it down.

The kitchen is even worse than the living area – there are no clean glasses, and I wash two with hand soap because there’s no washing-up liquid.

Marcus hasn’t been this bad since India left Joel. I wake constantly in the night wondering what it is that’s set him off so drastically, what’s changed in him, what’s made him so desperate he’d lose himself again. Marcus’s dad has now cut him off, and India too, so he needs me more than ever – it’s sickening, the things he’s doing for rent and booze money. A few weeks ago, picking his phone out of a puddle of sticky hot sauce from the takeaway, I discovered his profile on an escort website.

‘Drink this,’ I say, passing Marcus the water. ‘I’m going to go out and get you some proper food. Something nutritional.’

‘Will you come back afterwards? And eat with me?’ Marcus asks, looking up at me with glassy eyes.

‘Yeah, I’ll stay.’

He smiles. ‘Good,’ he says, flopping back on the sofa. ‘Good.’

Addie

‘Addie, calm down . . .’

I clutch the phone to my ear, sobbing. I’m sat in a cubicle in the staff toilets, doubled over with my hair in my face. I have to cry quietly. I can’t risk another teacher hearing me. And I only have ten minutes before the bell rings and I have to go inspire a roomful of moody teenagers to write their own accounts of the bloody Battle of the Boyne.

‘I can’t do this any more, Deb,’ I whisper. ‘I feel like it’s driving me insane. I’m someone I don’t want to be. You know the other day I thought I saw Marcus going through our bins?’

‘What?’

‘But when I got downstairs there was just the guy from next door. And I felt fucking mad.’

‘You’re not mad. This whole thing with Marcus has just got very messy, somehow.’

‘Do you think that he’s trying to break up me and Dylan?’

There’s silence on the other end of the line. I clench my eyes shut so tight I see little red dots when I open them again.

‘Do you think that?’ Deb asks eventually.

‘I do. I really do. Clearly the guy has issues, like he drinks whisky for breakfast and stuff, and it’s so sweet that Dylan is trying to help him, but I kind of feel like he’s . . . evil. I think he’s got it in for me. I think he’s following me.’

‘Following you?’

‘Or maybe that’s just like the bins, me being totally paranoid. I don’t even know any more. But Dylan’s there now, and there goes our trip to Wiltshire again . . .’ My shoulders shake as I sob. I brush the tears off my skirt. At least it’s black, so they won’t show too much when I’m stood in front of the class again.

‘That in itself is pretty suspicious,’ Deb say. ‘How many of those trips to Wiltshire have you missed because of Marcus?’

‘Four,’ I say, without pause. I know that number like it’s engrained on the inside of my brain. I think about it all the time.

‘Well. There’s something solid you can’t deny.’

‘And Marcus never seems to have a meltdown unless I’m spending the