Between Us

by Mhairi McFarlane

“Don’t LOOK, Meredith!” “What’s looking going to do?” Meredith said. “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back!” Gina cried. “Wasn’t that a movie tagline?” Dev said. “I think it’s Nietzsche?” Matt said to Gina. “I saw it on a poster,” Gina said.

The next morning, Dev was ladling out fried eggs and bacon in the kitchen with the sangfroid of a man who’d once carried on making full English breakfasts in Flatmates when the police had turned up after a report of common assault by a drag queen, Margaret Snatcher, on a vegan sex toy manufacturer.

Anita mixing virgin Bloody Marys—Bloody Shames, as Dev called them.

Dev had insisted on tons of toilet paper, with the immortal words: I won’t play a game of chicken with my own arse.)

It’s not like anyone sits you down and says, So, there’s the birds, the bees, and also your mum and dad, who are a whole petting zoo.

Roisin made a garbled explanation to her preoccupied mother and jumped into her car, scrunching gravel as she departed Webberley like a bat out of hell, a bat who nevertheless didn’t want a speeding fine.

“Don’t start with your diets don’t work spiel,” Lorraine added. “If diets don’t work, how come everyone’s gotten thinner when they’re rescued after shipwrecks?”

Roisin put on the black & Other Stories dress he’d once said he liked and booked a cab, reasoning that if it went well, she’d want a drink, and if it went badly, she’d need a drink.