The Road Trip: The heart-warming new novel from the author of The Flatshare and The Switch Beth O'Leary (ready to read books .TXT) 📖

I take the tea Cherry offers me and she scans my face for a moment, turning serious; she knows me too well.

‘OK?’ she mouths.

I smile, forcing the fear back to wherever it reared up from, dark and grasping. ‘Of course.’

She looks unconvinced, but then Deb starts complaining about the fact that Addie’s mother now insists on the purchase of skimmed milk, rather than their usual semi-skimmed, and a debate begins about whether full fat is green top or blue top, and Cherry is lost to me again.

I swallow, cupping the tea between my palms, watching Addie. She’s wearing her favourite dungarees, and her dark hair is still in the lopsided bun she slept in; she’s all unkempt and wild and at-home. It’s perhaps the Addie-est she has ever looked, here with her family clattering around her, and I feel terrifyingly sure that every man in the world must be in love with her.

Young and interesting and hot, she said. I’ve never even heard her mention the head teacher before. I do recall her saying that the senior staff were very supportive, but I think I had assumed they were all middle-aged women.

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I wince – it will be my father. I ignored his last phone call, letting it ring and ring in my hand, watching his name bobbing on the screen like a fishing lure on the water.

‘No way!’ Cherry is saying. ‘The lady across the road? The one with all the ear piercings?’

‘Yes! That one!’ Addie says, doubling over, laughing so hard her cheeks are turning rose-pink.

‘And what about the cat?’ Cherry says, eyes wide.

‘Shipped off to her mum’s,’ Addie’s mother says, laughing. ‘Haven’t seen it since!’

They all crack up – even Addie’s dad is chortling, and I’ve only ever seen him laughing when sportspeople fall over on the television. I wish I caught the beginning of the story instead of spending the last five minutes inside the tortured labyrinth of my own brain.

I ease my phone out of my back pocket and check it.

Call me. You can’t be serious about this Chichester nonsense. You need to come home and start doing something with your life, for God’s sake.

I swallow.

‘You OK?’ Addie asks, glancing down at my phone.

I switch it off quickly, turning the screen black. ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Just my dad, on at me to view another property.’

Addie laughs. ‘Listen to you. Property. You’re such a grown-up.’

Me, the grown-up? Every day she comes home from work and kicks off her shoes with a groan, pulling her hair out of its bun, and then she tells me all about the kids who refused to hand over the cigarettes they rolled on their lunch hour, and I try to say something helpful and supportive, but truly I feel like a fraud. Addie’s in the real world. I don’t even know what the real world is. The dread is tugging at me again, and in its way the fear of it is almost as bad as the dread itself.

My phone buzzes again: Marcus this time.

Hello?? You still out there? I’ve forgotten what you look like, my friend.

I feel an unmistakable twinge of guilt – since getting back to the UK, I’ve not seen Marcus as often as I should.

Come over tonight? I have something really cool to show you and it would be nice to actually spend some time?

‘What d’you think?’ Addie asks me.

‘Hey? Sorry,’ I say, shaking my hair out of my eyes. ‘I missed that.’

Addie huffs through her nose. ‘Are you writing a poem in there?’ she asks, pointing at my forehead.

‘Something like that.’

‘Give me the line and I’ll find you a rhyme, Dyl!’ Cherry yells across the kitchen, popping the toaster down.

I have tried many times to explain to Cherry that poems do not always have to rhyme, but she is not to be persuaded.

‘Thanks, but I’m good, Cherry.’

‘Cherry! Berry! Very!’ Cherry chants, ducking under Deb’s arm to get the margarine out of the fridge. ‘Derry! Kerry! Merry!’

‘Does she have a volume switch?’ Addie’s dad asks her mum.

‘She winds down eventually,’ Addie’s mum says fondly. ‘She’s just excited.’

‘Could we take her for a walk, or something?’ Addie’s dad suggests, with some desperation.

‘We were talking about what we’re going to do tonight,’ Addie tells me, voice raised over the noise. ‘Wine, a film? Cherry bingo – we drink every time she exclaims something?’

I want to. I don’t want to let Addie out of my sight even for a moment; I know on some level that I’m still paying for that time away, or perhaps not paying for it but earning it back. But there’s that text from Marcus. It would be nice to actually spend some time?

‘I’m seeing Marcus this evening,’ I say. ‘I’m really sorry.’

An expression flickers on Addie’s face. Not quite irritation, but perhaps something related to it – disappointment? Churlishness? She turns away so fast I can’t tell.

‘Cool, no worries,’ she says, heading out of the kitchen, slipping away.

Joel, Marcus’s dad, played for Arsenal in his youth, earning over fifty thousand pounds a week, and the house he built himself is designed to demonstrate that fact in every possible way. The mansion has an aura of forced glamour, of blaring, teeth-gritted, garish extravagance. The taps are made of gold – not just gold-coloured, but built from real, solid gold – and the bannisters are wrought iron, twisted into the repeated symbol of the Arsenal badge.

I’ve been to Marcus’s house so many times that I’ve stopped noticing how absurd it all is – the gigantic walk-in wardrobe in every bedroom, the cinema in the basement, the theme-park-style slide in the back garden. I have to consciously stop and take a moment to appreciate the sheer and disgusting decadence of it all.

‘You’re late,’ Marcus says, making his way down the grand staircase. ‘You missed dinner. India dropped around tacos.’

India is Marcus’s stepmother. She’s half Joel’s age and a former backing singer for Miley Cyrus; she built an empire on selling vegan dog