“I hit him quite hard. So it’s more likely he’s sitting on the sofa with peas on his face complaining about what complete bitches we both are.”
For some reason that cheered Rosaline up slightly. “I don’t condone violence, but he did have it coming.”
“It’s what you do. Bloke gets in your face. Won’t get out of it. You have to get him out of it.” A pause as Harry manoeuvred them round a long Eddie Stobart lorry. “So, you want to tell me what happened? You ain’t gotta.”
Rosaline groaned. “It’s fucking embarrassing and a fucking cliché.”
“Wanted you to have a threesome, did he?”
The worst thing about it was how fucking obvious it was. Obvious and sordid. “Yes, he did. With his bicurious ex-girlfriend. Who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Oh, mate. I’m sorry. Like, I’ve got to admit I’ve never worked out why people are so into it.”
“Porn?” suggested Rosaline. “Bragging rights?”
“No, I get that. And I can see how, at first, you’d think it’d be great. ’Cos it’s like having a second helping of pudding. But actually it’s really confusing. I mean, you’ve only got two hands and one dick. Or else they get well into it and you’re like, You know what, shall I just leave you to it?”
Rosaline slanted a slightly curious look at him. “Are you speaking from experience?”
“I don’t spend every Saturday eating pies with Terry.”
“Fuuuck.” She flopped back against her seat. “I still feel like a complete fucking idiot.”
“You’ve got to stop blaming yourself, mate.”
“You know, and this is going to sound unbelievably bad out of context, but I’m starting to think I don’t blame myself. I blame my fucking parents.”
“Have a lot of threesomes, did they?”
“Very funny. No. But they liked Alain. And I knew they would. And why am I twenty-seven, with a kid who knows what ‘sesquipedalian’ means, and still making decisions about my own life based on what I think would please two people who are fundamentally unpleasable?”
He made the same sound that the guy who’d charged her a hundred and something quid to look at her boiler had made when he looked at her boiler. “You might’ve lost me. The way I see it, if they’re your family, either they’ll love you no matter what, or fuck ’em.”
“Yeah, they don’t work like that. They’re more, We’re here for you no matter what you choose, as long as you choose what we want you to. It’s sort of the Model T Ford of emotional support.”
“That sounds like a fuck ’em situation, then.”
“It’s not that easy. For a start, I keep taking their money because if I don’t my house will fall down and my daughter will starve. And I don’t actually want to cut them out of Amelie’s life because they’re her grandparents and they love her. Also, there’s a non-zero chance they might be right and I have been fucking up my life since I was nineteen. For no reason.”
“I never said it was easy,” Harry told her. “Terry and Shirl’s dad’s a proper arsehole. Messed ’em up real bad and they both know it, but every”—he made another of those This’ll cost you noises—“two, three years he’ll show up again and sometimes they’ll tell him to piss off like they should but sometimes they don’t ’cos he’s still their dad and either way they get through it and try to do better next time.”
“Is that why Terry’s such a knobhead?”
“Nah, he wouldn’t want you to give the old man that. He’s a knobhead on his own account.”
She laughed. “So, what? I just write off having latched onto a prick because my parents approved of him as a learning experience?”
“Well, it’s that or carry on beating yourself up about it.”
“I think,” she said after a moment, “I’ll carry on beating myself up about it.”
“Fair enough.”
They drove on for a while, the motorway sliding past interminably. And Rosaline, who was nothing if not true to her word, carried on her beating herself up. Now she was out of immediate danger—and was it okay to call it “danger”? It had been scary and uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like she’d been storming the beaches at Normandy.
In any case, now she was out of whatever she’d been in, she had plenty of space to catalogue her regrets. To which she could now add having wasted the best part of two months dating a well-spoken wanker who’d clearly never seen her as a person at all. Just a university dropout whose insecurities he could leverage into a threeway. Especially when there was a guy right in front of her who’d twice dropped everything to bail her out of a bad situation.
“There’s services up ahead.” Harry nodded towards the big blue sign. “Mind if we stop for a coffee?”
“Oh God. This has been a four-hour round-trip for you, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, and I thought it’d be a bit awkward to take a piss at Alain’s.”
“Let’s take a break.”
They pulled into a car park sparsely dotted with late-night travellers and made their way beneath the triangular glass awning and into the incongruous brightness of the Welcome Break.
Harry glanced around at the variety of fast-food concessions. “Reckon I’ll go Burger King. You always know what you’re getting with Burger King. There’s a Smith’s down that way if you want to get a book.”
“Why would I want a book?”
“I dunno. Just thought you might want a book.”
“What? You think I’d make you drive all the way out to the Cotswolds to rescue me from my atrocious romantic choices and then ignore you in favour of Marian Keyes?”
“It’s up to you, mate. I mean, I’ll be honest, if what I wanted was a chat, there’d be easier ways to get it than driving to the Cotswolds. I came to get you ’cos you needed got. You don’t owe me nothing.”
“I am grateful, though.”
“Yeah, I know. You don’t have to prove it. Fancy a Whopper?”
She did, in fact, fancy a Whopper. She really fancied a Whopper. “Oh God yes. Not only did Alain try to make me fuck his ex-girlfriend, he tried to make me do it on savoury macaron and pea salad.”
“Now that’s evil.”
They Whoppered up, courtesy of a stoned teenager, and then claimed a space in the mostly empty seating area, on either side of a table that was trying hard to pretend it was made of wood.
“I always liked these places as a kid,” remarked Harry. “They felt sorta magic.”
This would never have occurred to Rosaline, but it did make sense in a way. “They do have a . . . detached-from-space-and-time quality.”
“Yeah, and sometimes they’d have an arcade or one of them vibrating massage chairs. We used to fight like cats and dogs over ’em. Dunno why, though, ’cos they was shit.”
“I’ll remember that if I’m in the vicinity of a vibrating massage chair.”
“So . . .” Harry drew a line of ketchup with a fry he didn’t seem interested in eating. “Thought you might want to know I went to the doctor’s the other day. Apparently I’ve got an anxiety thing . . . like you said. And they’re trying me out on some pills and I’m on a waiting list for phone therapy. You know, like over the phone. Not, like, with a phone.”