We present an extract from Sounds Like Fun, the debut novel by Bryan Moriarty.
Meet Eoin. Eoin is doing great. He's 27, gainfully employed and in a long-term relationship with his boyfriend Rich. Okay, so his best friend Jax is diving into yet another disastrously bad relationship and Eoin's going to be the one dealing with the eventual fallout. And his boss at the café, Rebecca, seems to have vanished, so somehow Eoin's left managing the place. And to be honest, he's not got much else going on. But still, he's got his boyfriend Rich - steady, sensible and dependable Rich. That is, until Eoin's world is turned upside down when Rich announces that he wants an open relationship. Terrified of losing the man he loves, Eoin reluctantly agrees to this new arrangement, and stumbles into the world of dating with no strings attached. What could go wrong?
By the time I spotted the pothole, it was too late to change direction or pull on the brakes, so as the front wheel of my bike buckled and I was catapulted over the handlebars, all I could do was shut my eyes and hope the impact wouldn't be too bad.
Strangely, I heard myself hitting the footpath more than I felt it. There was a dull whump as I landed on my right arm, followed by the hiss of my helmet scraping across the concrete, and my own strangled moan as I came to a stop and rolled onto my back.
I lay there for a few seconds, breathing through the pain in the shoulder I had landed on and cursing myself for not paying attention to the road. I had been craning my neck to read a street sign, trying to remember my way to the pub where I was meeting Rich and his friends, and hadn’t noticed the small, vicious hollow lurking in the shadow of the kerb.
I heard the blast of a car horn and looked up, dazed, to see a man gesturing violently to my bike, which was blocking his way. As I sat up, a jogger skipped over my outstretched legs and sprinted away, clearly determined not to let this whim- pering heap affect their average speed.
Typical London, I thought.
I raised one hand to the driver and mouthed, 'Sorry,’ but that seemed only to aggravate him further. He began flailing his arms around with such force that I worried he’d put a fist through his own windscreen. I hauled myself to my feet and dragged the bike towards the kerb. The driver scooted around me, lowered the window long enough to snarl something about keeping the f**king roads clear, and zoomed off in the direction of the traffic lights at the end of the road.
I propped the bike against a wall and pulled out my phone to call Rich. I felt guilty to be ringing with such a mood killer, especially since I was already running late and had only recently resolved to make more of an effort when seeing Rich’s friends. Rich and I had been together for nearly six years, and it had started to bother me that I wasn’t closer to the other people in his life.
‘I’m after coming off the bike,’ I told him, when he answered.
‘Oh, sh**! You okay?’ he asked. I couldn’t help feeling comforted by the concern in his voice.
‘I’m grand,’ I said, slowly rotating my shoulder to see if I could feel any damage. ‘It was just a bit of a shock. And the bike’s fucked.’
‘Did you get doored again?’ Rich asked.
This was an innocent question, but I prickled at his use of the word ‘again’. Yes, I’d previously been knocked off my bike by a family of tourists getting out of a taxi, but that had been years ago, and it wasn’t as if I went roaming the streets of London in search of car doors to collide with. In fact, considering how dangerous this city could be for cyclists, I thought it was impressive I hadn’t come a cropper more often.
‘It was a pothole,’ I said. ‘Big one?’
I looked over at the offending crater, which was about the size of a cereal bowl. ‘Enormous,’ I said.
‘How far away are you?’ Rich asked.
‘Probably less than ten minutes on foot,’ I said. ‘I’ll just need to figure out how to get the bike there, is the only thing.’
I waited for him to offer some help. He usually did. ‘Any chance you could give me a hand?’ I asked eventually, when it became clear he hadn’t taken the hint.
‘Oh, of course,’ he said, his voice surprised but enthusiastic, as if I’d suggested a detour past an ice-cream shop on a long car journey. ‘I’ll come and find you… Eoin’s fallen off his bike,’ I heard him say to someone else, who made a sound of vague concern in response.
‘Sorry,’ I said to him. ‘Thanks.’ ‘No worries, I’m on my way.’
I sent Rich my location, and turned to examine the bike. The shape of the front wheel made me nauseous. It reminded me of when, on a family holiday in Mayo, my elder sister Ciara had broken her arm so spectacularly, while showing me how to jump off a sand dune, that by the time our parents found us, she had passed out and I was throwing up at the sight of her mangled wrist.
Clearly the front wheel wasn’t going to roll with a dent like that, so I lifted the bike by the handlebars and plodded off, the back wheel ticking softly as I went. I felt awful for damaging it so badly, betraying the faithful machine I used every day. I’d cycled everywhere I could in London ever since, six months after arriving, I had realised that doing so would be the best way to avoid the money-sapping torture of travelling on the Tube. My friend Jax had taken me to Brick Lane market, and haggled on my behalf for so long that the dealer eventually agreed to sell me a second-hand, almost-definitely-stolen bike for half the asking price if we would only piss off and leave him alone. The cycle home through central London, which Jax worried would be the last thing I ever did, felt like the first day of the rest of my life. Buying my current bike three years later had been a moment of pride that I imagined others must experience at the birth of a child, if your new child was twice as fast as the previous one and a gorgeous shade of pale green. I hated to see it so messed up by my own carelessness, and I almost welcomed it when, as penance for my sin, one of the pedals spun round and banged into my shin.
I reached the corner of the road and spotted Rich walking my way, the concern on his face contrasting with his generally relaxed appearance. He had let his hair grow out over the school holidays and, in the evening sunshine, the grey streaks in it looked like blond highlights. He was trim and weathered from all the time he’d spent swimming outdoors over the break, and it struck me for maybe the millionth time what a stumpy oddball I must seem beside him. He caught sight of me and picked up speed, his expression changing to one of suppressed amusement.
‘What are you smiling at?’ I asked, when he came within hearing distance, though as usual, I found his smirk infectious. Just the sight of him was enough to make me relax, and my injured shoulder spasmed as the tension left the muscles around it.
‘You just look terribly hard done by,’ Rich said. ‘Like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘Just this stupid broken bike.’
I lowered the front wheel to the ground, and accepted Rich’s kiss.
‘So,’ he said, checking his watch, ‘there’s a bike shop down the road. We could see if it’s still open.’
He picked up the bike, which looked a lot lighter in his hands, and rested the crossbar on one shoulder.
‘Careful of the oil,’ I said. ‘Your shirt, I mean.’
As always, Rich was dressed immaculately, in a white button-up that was just the right thread count for a summer’s evening, sleeves folded carefully to just below his elbows.
‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
A car beeped, and I looked around, wondering if the driver I’d blocked had come back to yell at me again. But Rich was raising his free hand.
‘Hello, Sandra!’ he called to the flame-haired woman waving in our direction from her car. Sandra glanced at the traffic lights, which had just turned green, and mouthed, ‘How’s your mum?’ as she released the handbrake. Rich gave a thumbs-up, and Sandra responded with a delighted toss of her head as she accelerated away.
It was something I could never get used to. Walking around this area of north London with Rich, the city somehow felt like a village, where every second person was ready to greet him.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she used to run a yoga studio,’ Rich said, ‘back when they were still relatively rare. I worked there as a receptionist over the summer holidays one year.’
He made it sound so normal, this chance encounter and the sense of connection to the city that came with it, that I decided not to draw attention to how odd it felt to me.
Instead, I returned to my misfortune with the pothole, which grew in diameter and depth as I described it, emphasising that I’d been distracted by my eagerness to join Rich and his gang. I then moved on to my favourite rant: the state of London’s cycle lanes, most of which, I argued, were purpose-built to eradicate as many cyclists as possible, and which left me searching health websites for the phrase ‘bruised perineum’ roughly once a year. Rich winced and laughed in all the right places, and I could feel my mood lifting the further we walked. ‘I mean, it’s not like Dublin was perfect for cyclists,’ I said, as the bike shop came into view, ‘but there, it felt more like neglect than design, you know?’
Rich didn’t answer. He was waving to the bike mechanic, who was wheeling in some of the models he had out on display.
‘Room for one more?’ Rich called.
‘Always.’
‘Great.’ Rich put down the bike and turned to me. ‘Do you mind dealing with this? I’m going to run back to the pub.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but it won’t take long.’
‘No, but Danni and Shanice are leaving early, and I haven’t seen them properly in ages.’
I was sure he’d seen his whole uni gang in the past month or so, which hardly counted as ages, but I thought it would be a bit petty to say as much. ‘Of course,’ I said instead. ‘Sorry. I’ll be there in a few minutes.’
Rich gave me a peck on the cheek and jogged up the road in the direction of the pub. I squinted against the evening sun and watched him go, another Londoner in a rush.
‘F**kin’ hell, mate,’ said the mechanic, who had caught sight of the front wheel. ‘What did it ever do to you?’
I got to the pub about twenty minutes later, having dutifully nodded and sighed as I listened to all the ways I had been neglecting and mistreating my bike, and how it was really just as well I had wrecked the front wheel because the whole bloody thing was on the verge of falling apart, thanks to my feckless joyriding. I turned down the offer of a full-body service that would have cost me a month’s rent and escaped with the promise of a new front wheel in a few days’ time.
Rich and his group of friends (whom I had privately named the ’Member-Whens due to their insatiable appetite for anecdotes from their uni days) were gathered around a table by the front window of the pub. They were sitting in a shaft of evening sunlight so strong that Kev and Olga were obliged to shield their eyes with one hand to look at Shanice and Danni, who had their backs to the window. Rich’s friend Andrew was at the head of the table, slumped in the high- backed armchair he always chose when we met at this pub.
He was the first to spot me and beckoned me over with a regal flick of the wrist.
Despite Rich’s suggestion that they’d be leaving early, Danni and Shanice seemed in no rush. They were telling a story in their usual style, Danni prompting and annotating Shanice’s narrative as she went. They had been friends since they were three, and had lived together since they were eighteen, so each of them was the world’s leading expert on the other.
‘And it wasn’t just the fancy stuff he did,’ Shanice was saying, as I dropped my backpack and squeezed Rich’s shoulder to see if he wanted a drink. ‘I mean, you know me, I prefer plain food, simple things.’
‘Dry chicken and rice,’ Danni reminded the table, and I wondered if I saw Olga glance at Kev, recalling that Shanice had brought her own meal to their wedding reception.
‘But he also remembered everything,’ Shanice continued. ‘Like I mentioned that the clock in our kitchen was stopped.’ ‘We never really look at it,’ Danni said. ‘I just check my phone for the time.’
‘And next time he came over, he’d brought me fresh batteries.’
‘I saw them,’ Danni added, just in case anyone claimed that such generosity was beyond belief.
‘And then,’ Shanice said, ‘he goes AWOL for two weeks.
I’m thinking, is his phone dead? Is he dead? So I—’
‘He has a wife,’ said Andrew, who had clearly had enough set-up and was ready for the twist.
‘No, he does not,’ said Danni, while Shanice reached for her goblet of gin and tonic.
‘He has a husband,’ said Olga. Kev snorted into his drink.
I left them guessing and went to order. While waiting for the barman to notice me, I watched the group in a faded mirror hanging behind the bottles of spirits. Danni was still fielding guesses, while Shanice adjusted her glasses, preparing herself for the story’s punchline. The rest of the table was leaning towards them. Only Rich was looking elsewhere, his head turned towards the bar. I waved at him through the mirror, but he seemed not to be looking at me.
When I returned to the table, the group was engaged in another guessing game.
‘Three?’ asked Olga. Shanice shook her head. ‘Not three,’ said Danni. ‘Twenty?’ said Kev.
‘Oh, come on,’ snapped Shanice, with the annoyance of someone whose extraordinary answer has been spoiled.
‘Six,’ I said, pulling over a stool from the next table, unsure of what we were guessing.
There was a short pause as everyone looked at me prop- erly for the first time.
‘That’s exactly right,’ Danni said, with the understated panache of a daytime-quiz host.
I was delighted to have been able to contribute something to the conversation, and so soon after arriving. Between the age gap (Rich and his friends were all five or six years older than me) and my lack of insight into the experiences that bonded them together, I often found that when I was with them half an hour could pass without me saying anything. As a consequence, I would start to drink quicker than the rest of them, and the fear of blurting out something stupid in my drunkenness would make me even quieter.
‘Six, including you?’ Andrew asked Shanice. ‘Six women, including me.’
‘And did the rest of them know he was sleeping with five other women?’ Olga asked.
‘Two of them were living together,’ Shanice said, ‘so…’ She shrugged and took a sip of her drink, while Danni tutted.
‘Are you still seeing him?’ Rich asked.
The table laughed, while Shanice placed one hand on her chest and winced.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ Rich said.
‘Even if he hadn’t lied,’ Shanice said, ‘which, by the way, he had been doing for nearly four months, I have no intention of being in someone’s harem.’
‘Well, polyamory is way more popular now,’ Andrew said. ‘Not with me,’ Shanice said. ‘It sounds like getting stuck in a house share for the rest of your life.’
Danni nodded, seeming relaxed enough about her own lifelong house share.
‘Well, I wouldn’t mind living in a house like that,’ Andrew said, looking around the table with an ‘Am I right, fellas?’ expression. Rich caught my eye and grinned, perceiving, I guessed, my internal eye-roll.
‘And on that enlightened note,’ Shanice said, ‘we’d better be going.’
She pushed away her drink, Danni knocked back hers, and the two wiggled out from behind the table.
‘Sorry to miss you, Eoin,’ Danni said, tapping me on the shoulder as she passed. ‘Did you get your bike sorted?’
I opened my mouth to reply, but the pair were already waving goodbye to the rest of the group. In the brief pause that followed their exit, I noticed Kev giving Olga a swift kiss on the cheek, as if to reassure her that he didn’t have any other wives he’d neglected to mention. I looked back to Rich, hoping for another private smile, but he was staring off towards the bar again. I turned to check that there wasn’t a match on that I hadn’t noticed, but there weren’t any screens behind the bar, just a couple of staff members bobbing in and out of sight as they restocked the fridge.
Because I had arrived late, my drinking was out of sync with the rest of the group’s, so when Andrew drained the last of his IPA and announced that he’d have to go, I still had two-thirds of a pint in front of me. Rich said he’d get one last drink to keep me company. I felt like I’d won a prize in a raffle. In return for seeing Rich’s friends, I was being rewarded with a bonus mini-date, just me and Rich. I’d have to be up early to open the café – even earlier than usual, I remembered, because I wouldn’t be cycling – but it would be worth it, I thought. Time with Rich was always worth it. He ruffled the hair on the back of my head as he returned to the table, and I smiled up at him.
‘Were you here for Shanice’s story?’ he asked, as he sat down. I could hear the hint of a slur in his words.
‘I caught the ending,’ I said. ‘Bit of a bombshell after seeing him for that long.’
‘Well,’ Rich said, clinking his glass against mine, ‘I suppose you and I were seeing each other casually for a long while before we committed.’
‘Sure,’ I said, though I felt he was skipping a lot of our courtship in summing it up like that, ‘but at the end of it, we were committing to one relationship each.’
The corners of Rich’s mouth slid downwards into the expression of an unhappy clown, the face he always made when he disagreed with something but wasn’t sure if he could be bothered arguing.
‘By the way,’ I said, leaning in, ‘do you reckon Olga’s pregnant?’
‘What?’
‘She was drinking tonic with no gin for the evening.’
‘And?’
‘And,’ I said, ‘when Kev went to the bar, I noticed he poured it into her glass while he was up there, which I think means she wanted to hide it.
Rich laughed. ‘Perhaps you’re reading a little much into it. But, yeah,’ he said, ‘the Shanice thing, I take your point. That guy really was a bit two-faced about it all. I mean, I don’t know if you were here for the bit when he suggested they go on holiday together?’
I shook my head. Rich and the others had picked over the story at length already, so why was he insisting on circling back to it?
‘And I see what you mean,’ he went on. ‘If he had been honest and made sure everyone was aware of the situation, then maybe they’d all be happy with it.’
I didn’t think I had made the point Rich was now agreeing with. Somewhere at the back of my head, muffled by the haze that descends after two and a half pints, an alarm bell began to ring. ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘although that’s quite a big "if".’
‘And,’ Rich said, his gaze drifting into the middle distance, ‘I suppose that polyamory, which was what he was suggesting, is one thing, but there are degrees as well.’
‘Degrees,’ I repeated. The alarm was growing louder, and I wanted to steer the conversation away from this subject but had no idea how. I looked at the glass in my hand, and briefly considered dropping it.
‘Well,’ Rich went on, ‘for instance, one could have a relationship that was open, say, sexually, but was otherwise a loving, monogamous unit.’
Rich tended to adopt this abstract way of formulating sentences whenever he wanted to bring up something awkward, or something that was bothering him. If I suggested seeing a slasher movie he didn’t fancy, he would start to muse aloud about the morality of the horror genre until I took the hint and suggested something else.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘One… could have that kind of relationship.’ Rich picked up his sunglasses from where they’d been resting on the table and began polishing them with a stray napkin. From the way he fumbled with the lenses, I could see that he was a bit drunk. I loved Rich in summer mode, when the careful, methodical side of him took a step back and was replaced by something a little more carefree, less controlled. He left the glasses on the table and looked at me from under his brow.
‘Is it something you’ve ever done?’ he asked. ‘What?’
‘An open relationship.’
I laughed. ‘What do you think?’ I asked.
Rich knew pretty much my entire romantic history and, given how brief it was, I felt it was obvious that I’d have mentioned something like an open relationship before.
‘Is it something you’d be interested in?’ he asked.
The alarm in my head stopped ringing, replaced by a deep, dark roar. I put down my glass and rested my hands on the table, attempting to tether myself to something solid and unbreakable.
‘I’ve … I’ve literally never thought about it,’ I said. ‘Is it… Do you think it’s something you’d be interested in?’
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realised they sounded more like an invitation than a question. Unlike Rich, I was no good at speaking in the abstract. Rich smiled in response, and with his mussed-up hair, his face shaded by the day’s beard growth, he looked suddenly wolflike, almost dangerous. Despite the roaring in my ears, I felt a sudden urge to rip that beautiful, pristine shirt off him.
‘I might be interested,’ he said, his smile growing. ‘It could be fun, I suppose.’
I didn’t say anything, assuming the confusion and panic I felt would show on my face. I waited for Rich to laugh, to say he was only joking. I didn’t particularly care whether or not he’d be telling the truth, I just wanted to hear him say it. But instead he trailed his hand across the table towards mine, and gently ran his middle finger across my knuckles. ‘Maybe it’s something we could try,’ he said.
For the second time that evening, I felt as if the ground had opened up beneath me, and that I had been launched forward through space. I wondered if the landing would be as painful this time round.
Sounds Like Fun is published by Hodder & Stoughton
