Page 55 of Just for the Season

We have a lot to tell each other – it’s like the more you see someone the more you have to say to them because you go more and more micro and you know more and more about each other – so I describe the new mugs I had delivered today from John Lewis for my flat and how much I love them and Marcus is (or appears to be) genuinely interested, and he then tells me all about the game of padel he played at 8 a.m. this morning with Rob and another couple of friends from the village. And it’s nice. It feels like we’re becoming really, properly friends. Like something good has come out of our fake relationship.

In fact, when we do fizzle it out, we’ll still be able to see each other, because I can tell Gran we’re still very good friends, we’re just binning the romance side of things. And she won’t be worried about me being upset because she’ll be able to see us still getting along. Perfect, actually.

We go for Japanese this time for dinner, my choice; it’s a restaurant Ellie and I took Jack to a few years ago. Marcus has been before, so many times that they actually recognise him, it turns out. And the owner comes out and greets him in Japanese, and he replies sounding very fluent.

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘My ex-wife is German but her mother is Japanese, so she grew up speaking it, and in the dying stages of our relationship I thought learning it myself might help. I was willing to try anything. So I did an intensive course. It did help me impress a lot of people, it turns out, and with business, but it did not impress her or help our relationship.’ And then he says, ‘So do you have a go-to on this menu or are you going to be adventurous?’ He very clearly doesn’t want to say any more about the ex-wife.

I join in with a detailed discussion of the menu, and soon we’re back on normal, safe, non-personal-life-discussing ground.

Dinner whizzes past in the way that it does when you’re with someone whose company you love. We make each other laugh, we have a lot to say on a wide variety of topics, big (geopolitics, on which luckily we broadly agree) and small (including when you should and should not wear socks – literally), and the food is good.

And then it’s time for us to hurry to the cinema for the start of the film. We’re slightly late, but that’s ideal, it turns out, because we arrive just as the ads are coming to an end and the trailers are starting.

‘So pensioners and the Pope,’ Marcus says as we settle into our seats with a glass of red wine each (it’s a fancy cinema, with velvet seats and its own bar) and toffee popcorn (me) and mixed sweet and salted (him). ‘How good do we think this film is going to be?’

‘Better than post-apocalyptic erotica.’ I take a sip of my wine and snuggle into my chair. ‘I love posh cinemas like this.’

The trailers are very PG and mainly pure schmaltz.

‘There’s no way there’s going to be any sex in this film, weird or otherwise,’ I say happily.

‘Yeah, going by the trailers it’s going to be amazing.’

‘Excuse me. That sarcasm was unnecessary,’ I say mock sternly. ‘Compared to last weekend’s one it will be.’

‘True. The bar is very, very low.’

Halfway in, it turns out that pensioners stealing the Pope can get really scary. I’m clutching Marcus’s arm all over again.

‘I’ve fallen in love with them,’ I whisper to him. ‘I don’t want anything bad to happen to them.’

‘Well thank goodness for that,’ Marcus says at the end, very sarcastic again. ‘A happy ending. Who’d have thought. Also, who would have thought the actual Pope would turn his back on the papacy in order to marry a seventy-six-year-old sweet-shop-owner from Brighton? So plausible.’

‘I loved it. Don’t ruin it with unnecessary focus on realisticness,’ I admonish him (a little hypocritically given that I usually insist on things being realistic).

He smiles at me, and I think about how I’ve had a truly lovely evening. A fake relationship is so much better than a real one.

18

MARCUS

Frankie is adorable.

Big hair, big eyes, an even bigger smile.

She’s wearing that smile as she looks up at me and all I want to do is keep on smiling back and looking into those eyes for as long as I can.

Well, that isn’t all I want to do. I’m having a lot of thoughts and instincts right now that I should not be having and certainly shouldn’t act on. It’s just that the way she has just one dimple that peeps out when she’s grinning, and the way she tilts her head… It’s very difficult to remember at times that this is fake.

It is fake, though.

We are platonic friends. We’re becoming really close platonic friends, actually, and I’m loving that. It’s rare to have such a close female friend – certainly in my experience anyway – and I’m enjoying it a lot.

‘I apologise,’ I reply. ‘It was totally plausible. I can’t think of a more plausible film.’

‘You like Star Wars. Super plausible?’