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) 📖

to be a human being when you’re inclined to be an arsehole. And you’re very lucky I am enough of an idiot to keep trying.’

The bathroom door swings shut behind us. Rodney is at the urinals, wide-eyed, as if we’ve caught him doing something X-rated.

‘Oh, gosh, umm, hi,’ he says, lifting one hand in a wave.

‘Presumably I’m not allowed to flush his head down the toilet?’ Marcus asks me.

‘Correct. Well done.’

Marcus sighs. ‘Reforming one’s character is very tedious. Can’t I just carry on being a dissolute reprobate?’

I smile slightly. ‘No,’ I say, looking at him carefully. The hollow cheeks, the hunched shoulders, the hunted, haunted eyes. ‘No, I don’t think you can.’

Addie

‘I told you! We need a dastardly plan!’

‘You know, we’re saying dastardly a lot, but I’m not actually sure what it means?’ I tell Deb. She’s expressing again – the battery-powered one has run out, so she’s plugged the other into a socket next to the storeroom. The two teenage boys behind the tills are staring at her like she’s escaped from the zoo. ‘Can’t we just drive off without him? Or drop him somewhere?’ I say.

‘Like in a lake?’

‘What? No! Why can I never tell whether you’re joking?’

‘It’s the deadpan delivery,’ Deb says, adjusting the poncho covering her top half. ‘Don’t blame yourself.’

‘I was thinking we could just leave him somewhere, maybe, you know, take his phone . . .’

‘I can’t believe we’re talking about this.’

I glance over towards the counter. Marcus and Dylan are trying to keep Rodney occupied while we come up with some sort of strategy. Marcus is doing a really shit job of pretending to be interested in whatever Rodney’s saying.

‘Maybe we can just talk to him? Reason with him?’ I say.

Deb tilts her head, watching Rodney. ‘He does seem . . . pretty harmless.’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I know Cherry was freaking out, but she’s in crazy wedding mode. I’m sure if we just ask him not to come to the wedding, it’ll be fine.’ I feel a surge of relief at the thought. This is much more rational. It was the madness of that Budget Travel family room. We lost our heads.

‘A sensible conversation,’ I say. ‘Yeah. I mean, he seems a bit odd, but he doesn’t seem dangerous.’

Deb catches Dylan’s attention and waves the boys back over.

‘What, right now?’ I say.

‘Well, there’s not a lot else I can do while attached to the wall,’ Deb says. ‘Might as well make use of the time. Hi, boys. Rodney. We just want to have a little chat with you about your plans regarding Cherry’s wedding.’

Rodney’s eyes widen. His body goes stiff. He looks frantically from me to Dylan to Deb to Marcus and back again. And then, very suddenly, he lunges towards Deb.

She lets out a squawk, recoiling. Dylan shouts, a sort of hey, and he’s moving forward, arm outstretched to shove Rodney, but Rodney’s too fast. He’s snatched the car key from Deb’s lap and he’s already ducked past Dylan.

Marcus is the first to react when Rodney starts running. But Rodney’s long, gangly legs are coming in useful – he’s fast. Marcus only manages to snag the end of Rodney’s T-shirt between his fingers before Rodney slips from his grasp, leaving Marcus staggering into a stack of bourbon biscuits.

I’m running before I’ve even thought about it. I can hear Deb swearing behind me as I push through the glass doors of the service station, and I’m with her, it is annoying to be plugged into a wall expressing breast milk when everyone else is chasing a potential criminal across a petrol station forecourt.

‘Go on, get him!’ she yells, like Delia Smith at a Norwich City match. ‘Go on!’

Dylan is closest – my legs are too bloody short for this, and Marcus is tangled up somewhere back there in a heap of chocolate biscuits. I dodge a woman coming to pay for her petrol – ‘Oi!’ she yells – and duck between cars. Rodney’s just metres from the Mini. Dylan is a few steps behind him, and he gets to him just as he opens the door, but Rodney turns as he gets in and shoves Dylan backwards, right into . . .

Me. We stumble backwards on to the bonnet of the car behind. The alarm goes off. The back of Dylan’s head cracks into my collarbone with a dull, painful thud and my sprained wrist hurts so much I feel as if my hand must have fallen off. I roll free from under Dylan’s body and I look up just in time to see Rodney driving off, in our car, with all our belongings.

‘I knew it was a mistake to leave the dastardly planning to you ladies,’ Marcus says from behind us. I can only just hear him over the alarm of the car we fell on. I turn to look at him. He’s doubled over, bracing his hands on his thighs.

As I turn and watch the Mini’s erratic path along the A7, the pain of my wrist comes rushing back. I let out a gasp and bend over, cradling my arm. Dylan’s hand is on my back. By the time I’ve blinked away the tears and looked up again, Deb is here. Her outfit is once again stained with breast milk and her expression is thunderous.

‘My cool bag was in that car,’ she says, and somehow her voice cuts over the sound of the car alarm, no trouble. ‘Now where the hell am I meant to store this?’

She waves a bottle of breast milk at us. We blink back at her.

‘Next time,’ she says, stalking back towards the petrol station, ‘run faster.’

Everyone is grouchy. We don’t talk for a while. Marcus pays for all the biscuits he crushed, and we just sit there next to the newspapers outside the shop, eating broken bourbons in the small patch of shade.

‘At least we know where he’s going,’ Dylan points out, sipping his coffee. Thank God all of us had our phones and wallets in