“Maybe not. He’s got a keeper air, which I guess makes him . . . mandinner?”
“How long do you think dinner lasts?”
“In my family? A very long time.”
Rosaline laughed. “Speaking of families, I really need to go ring my kid.”
“No problem. What should I order for you?”
“Uh . . .” It had been way too long since a cute girl had offered to buy Rosaline a drink. This was obviously a platonic drink, but she was still temporarily stumped. “Wine, I guess?”
“Do you want cheap red or cheap white?”
“When you put it like that, it doesn’t matter.”
Anvita vanished through the main doors of the hotel and Rosaline settled herself under a tree with her phone. It was about half an hour after Amelie’s bedtime, which made it the perfect time to ring home and see how she was.
“Roz darling.” Lauren only called her Roz darling when she was taking the piss or trying to cover something up. “How are things? Amelie’s upstairs and sleeping like a baby.”
“Just put her on.”
“I don’t know what you’re implying.”
“Lauren.”
There was a scuffling at the other end of the phone, then Amelie’s voice. “Hello, Mummy.”
“You’re meant to be in bed.”
“Auntie Lauren said I could stay up until you called.”
Reasonable. Also a transparent lie. “Have you had a nice day?” “Yes. We played games and ate cake and watched television and Auntie Lauren tested me on my spelling except she isn’t very good at spelling so it didn’t help very much.”
“Don’t be mean about Auntie Lauren.”
Rosaline could practically hear Amelie’s expression of indignation. “I’m not being mean. I’m telling the truth. We are always meant to tell the truth.”
“Not when it’s mean. Now you know it’s past your bedtime so you should say good night to Auntie Lauren and go to bed right now.”
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Well, lie down and close your eyes and you soon will be.”
This was bullshit. Rosaline knew full well that when you weren’t tired lying down and trying to be tired didn’t help. But children needed routines, and so you said what you had to.
“I don’t think that works. I try it every night and it takes ages and sometimes I don’t remember going to sleep at all but I think I probably do because I don’t remember being awake either.”
“It’s past your bedtime, Amelie. Go to bed.”
There was a ten-second window in which it seemed very likely that Amelie was about to protest. “Okay,” she said instead. “Love you to the moon and back.”
“Love you to the moon and back too. Put Auntie Lauren on.” Another scuffling, and Lauren was at the end of the line again. “If I find out she didn’t actually go to bed . . . ,” said Rosaline in her best parental voice.
“She will, she will. I’m not completely hopeless.”
Rosaline stretched out her legs, feeling the grass cool underneath her. “I never said you were hopeless, but you’ve also never met a rule you didn’t want to break.”
“I’m just teaching your daughter a healthy disrespect for authority.”
“You realise you’re going to be the authority until my mother shows up?”
“Fuck. I hadn’t thought of that.” Never one to dwell on a thought she found unpleasant, Lauren swiftly changed the subject. “So what’s it like? Do you feel all showbiz?”
“Not really. There’s a lot of standing around and answering the same question twenty times. And all I’ve succeeded in doing is making a mediocre Dundee cake and digging myself into a massive hole with one of the other contestants.”
Lauren, of course, latched onto this immediately. “That sounds like a tale hangs thereby.”
“Not a very good one.”
“Please. I’ve been watching children’s television all evening and while some of it has a delightfully surreal quality, I’ve been very starved for human drama. Tell me exactly what shape hole you’re in and precisely how dirty you’ll get trying to climb out.”
“Fine.” Rosaline sighed. “So you know how last night I told you I got stuck crashing at a random farmhouse? Well, someone else from the show got stuck there with me and we got talking and he was hot and interesting and an architect and he’s travelled and all this stuff.”
“That doesn’t sound like a hole, Rosaline. That sounds like a perfectly ordinary conversation.”
“I’m getting to the hole. The hole is imminent and now I’ve said the word ‘hole’ so many times it sounds weird. Anyway, the point of the hole—”
“Holes can’t have points, darling,” drawled Lauren. “That’s rather definitional.”
“Oh, go learn to spell. The point of the hole is that when we got to the bit where he politely asked me what I did, I panicked. And instead of saying ‘I’m a single mum who works in a shop,’ I said, ‘I’m a medical student who spent several years in Malawi.’ Which means I have to pretend to know about Malawi. Forever.”
At least Lauren had the decency not to laugh, but that was about her limit. “Three out of ten, Roz. All setup, no payoff.”
“I hate you. You know that, right?”
“To the moon and back?”
“To the fucking sun and back. And don’t take the piss out of my and Amelie’s thing. That’s our thing and it’s sweet and she’ll probably stop doing it in a couple of years and I’ll be a lonely old woman who nobody cares about longing for the days when I had a kid who actually liked me.”
“Oh please”—Lauren snorted—“in a couple of years you’ll barely be thirty. You’ll still be young enough to play a teenager on American television.”
“Yeah, somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a career option for me.”
Lauren was silent a moment. Then, “I can’t believe you’d told some man you were in Malawi. Why Malawi of all places?”
“I don’t know. I think Amelie’s dad went there once.”
More silence. In Rosaline’s experience that meant Lauren was building up to something.
“What is it, Loz?” she asked, resigned to whatever mockery was coming her way.
“Hmm? Oh, I was just trying to work out if it makes you more or less of a racist that your culturally appropriative journey of self-discovery only took place in your head.”
“To the sun and back,” Rosaline repeated. “I feel awful enough as it is without having to worry about that as well.”
“Why do you even care what this random train man thinks about anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy.” “You were into him, weren’t you?”
“I mean. Yes. I think?” Rosaline flumped against the trunk of the tree. “It’s a bit hard to tell because my only points of reference these days are primary school teachers, parents, and you.”
“I flatter myself that I set a high bar.”