Читать книгу: «If I Never Met You»
IF I NEVER MET YOU
Mhairi McFarlane
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2020
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover illustration © Abbey Lossing / Handsome Frank
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008169480
Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008169473
Version: 2020-03-11
Dedication
For my sister, Laura
the human Lisa Simpson
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Acknowledgements
A Q&A with Mhairi McFarlane
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
About the Publisher
1
Dan
What time you think you’ll be back tonight? Roughly?
Laurie
Dunno. SOON I HOPE.
Dan
You hope?
Laurie
Everyone has raspberries in Proseccos 
Dan
I thought you liked Prosecco. And raspberries
Laurie
I do! I’ve got one. 
But denotes a certain type of Girls Night Out that’s not very me. They’re calling them ‘cheeky bubbles’ 
Dan
Your problem is other people like it too? Can’t imagine my criticism of a night out being ‘people ordered the same drink’ 
Laurie
… Except when you said you hate stag dos that ‘start with getting ten pints of wife beater in at 7am in Gatwick Spoons’.
Dan
You can’t take a moment off being a lawyer, can you?
Laurie
HAH. You misspelt ‘you got me bang to rights, Loz’ 
Dan is typing
…
Dan is typing
…
Last seen today at 9.18pm
Dan must’ve thought better of his reply. Laurie clicked her phone off and pushed it back into her bag.
Obviously she didn’t really mind the cliché, booze was booze, that was trying to be wittily acerbic bravado. It was a distress signal. Laurie was at sea and her phone felt like a connection back to shore. Tonight was an unwelcome flashback to the emotions of lunch breaks at secondary school, when you had a single-parent mum and no money and no cool.
So far, the girls had discussed the benefits of eyebrow microblading (‘Ashley from Stag Communications looks like Eddie Munster’) whether or not Marcus Fairbright-Page at KPMG was a bad arsehole who’d break hearts and bed frames (Laurie thought on what she’d gleaned, that was an emphatic yes, but also gathered that a verdict wasn’t desired). And how many burpees you could manage in HIIT class at Virgin Active (no idea there, none).
They were all so glamorous and feminine, so carefully groomed and produced for public display. Laurie felt like a dishwater-feathered pigeon in an enclosure full of chirruping tropical birds.
Emily really owed her. Tonight was the product of something that happened roughly once every three months – her best friend, and owner of a PR company, begged Laurie to join their team night out and make it ‘less bloody boring, or we’ll spend the whole time discussing the new accounts.’ Emily, as CEO and hostess, was at the head of the table putting everything on the company credit card and handing round the Nocellara olives and salted almonds. Laurie, late arrival, was at the far end.
‘Who was that, then?’ said Suzanne, to her right. Suzanne had a beautiful shoulder-length sheet of custard-coloured hair and the gaze of a customs officer.
Laurie turned and concealed her irritation with a ventriloquist’s dummy smile. ‘Who was what?’
‘On your phone! You looked well intense,’ Suzanne rolled her doe eyes upwards and mimed a sort of chimpanzee-like, vacant trance state, her hands moving across an imaginary handset. She whooped with girlish, alcohol-fuelled laughter, the sort that could sound cruel.
Laurie said: ‘My boyfriend.’
The word ‘boyfriend’ had started to sound a trifle silly, Laurie supposed, but ‘partner’ was so dry and stiff. She had a feeling her present company already thought she was those things.
‘Awww … is it early days?’ Suzanne combed her fairytale princess hair over her ears with her fingers, and put her flute to her lips.
‘Haha! Hardly. We’ve been going out since were eighteen. We met at university.’
‘Oh my GOD,’ Suzanne said, ‘And you’re how old?’
Laurie tensed her stomach muscles and said: ‘Thirty-six.’
‘Oh my GOD!’ Suzanne squawked again, loudly enough that they had the attention of a few others. ‘And you’ve been together all this time? No flings or breaks? Like, he’s your first boyfriend?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I could not have done that. Oh my God. Wow. Was he your …’ she lowered her voice, ‘First-first?’
Laurie cringed inwardly.
‘Bit personal after two drinks, hah?’
Suzanne was not to be deterred.
‘Oh my giddy aunt! Oh no!? Je-SUS!’ she said gaily, as if she was being fun and not judgemental and prurient and generally awful. ‘But you’re not married?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to be?’
‘Not really,’ Laurie said, shrugging. ‘I’m not madly pro or anti marriage.’
‘Maybe when you have kids?’ Suzanne supplied. Oh, subtle. Piss the piss off.
‘Are you married?’ Laurie said.
‘No!’ Suzanne shook her head and the lovely hair rippled. ‘I want to be married by thirty, for sure. I’ve got four years to find Mr Right.’
‘Why by thirty?’
‘I just kinda feel that I don’t want to be on the shelf.’ She paused. ‘No offence.’
‘Sure.’
Laurie briefly debated saying: you know that this is really rude, right? I mean you know you can’t stick ‘no offence’ on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterwards.
‘Where are you from, Laurie?’ said Carly in the animal print top, sitting on the other side of Suzanne, and a familiar heavy lead settled in Laurie’s gut.
‘Yorkshire,’ she said, with a bright aw-hell-please-can-we-not smile, which she knew would be lost on the recipient. ‘You can probably tell from the accent.’
‘No, I meant where are you from?’ she said, vaguely gesturing at her own face. Of course you did.
The usual fork in the road opened up: answer the question she knew they were asking, or pretend not to understand and prolong the agony. If you didn’t pander to it you were being ungracious, chippy, making a thing of it. You were the problem.
‘Yorkshire, seriously. I was born at Huddersfield Royal.’
A moment ticked past and Suzanne, to no surprise whatsover, pitched in. ‘She means where are your mum and dad from?’
‘My dad’s from Oldham …’
A fresh tray of cocktails arrived, cucumbers curls inside like ribbons, and Laurie’s genealogy was abruptly demoted in interest.
‘… My Mum is from Martinique,’ she said, but a distracted Carly and Suzanne had already forgotten they’d asked.
‘Y’what?’
‘Martinique! My Mum is from Martinique!’ Laurie said shrilly, above the music, pointing at her face.
‘Your mum’s called MARTINE EEK?’
Fuck it.
‘I’m getting an Old Fashioned,’ Laurie said, standing up abruptly. Make of that name what you will.
Then she saw them, a chance glimpse through the shifting throng. Laurie involuntarily grinned at the ignoble thrill of unexpectedly seeing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to see, huddled in a banquette, twenty feet away.
Her colleague Jamie Carter was out with a gorgeous young woman. So far, so predictable. But, rather than an unknown lovely, Laurie was ninety-nine per cent sure that the woman he was cosying up to was the boss’s niece, Eve, who he was specifically warned off going anywhere near, the day before she arrived. Office gossip dynamite. Possibly employment contract terminating dynamite, depending on just how protective Mr Salter was.
The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ threat.
‘Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,’ she’d guffawed, ‘The secret life of the neighbourhood tom.’
Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.
Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the legal undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.
Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.
The risky choice of companion aside, The Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.
A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?
Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.
She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasise dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star-shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses, usually? Hah, the vanity.)
Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practised hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.
His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe moulds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirt sleeves. And Eve … hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-coloured heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag (was that a Birkin? Oh to have rich uncles).
Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fitted in, amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs and brash confidence.
Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.
As Laurie waited in the four-person deep rabble at the bar, she pondered The Jamie Carter Phenomenon.
Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the fag break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting round social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.
At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was ‘without any baggage’, which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.
Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.
How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.
The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man, he never got blamed for ladykilling, or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.
2
‘Hello?’ said a male voice at her elbow.
‘Hi,’ Laurie said, starting as the subject of her reverie appeared, as if she’d summoned him. She felt a stab of irrational guilt, having been thinking about Jamie, spying on him.
‘You out for the night?’ Jamie said. He disguised it well, but Laurie could see he was apprehensive. They’d never spoken at work, knew each other by sight only. He had no measure of her and no goodwill to exploit.
They were both lawyers: she could work backwards through his thought process in approaching her. He’d seen her, therefore there was a fair chance she’d seen him, with Eve. Better to brazen it out and act like he was doing nothing wrong than leave Laurie unattended with a tale to tell.
‘Yeah. Tagging along with my mate’s firm. You?’
‘Just a couple after work.’
Heh heh oh really. She toyed with asking ‘who with?’ but was a shade too drunk to judge whether it’d clang as obvious.
‘What’re you having? In case I get served first,’ he said.
Bribery now, was it.
‘Old Fashioned.’
‘That’s it? You’re queuing for one drink? Where are you sitting?’
Laurie pointed into the dining area.
‘There’s table service through there, you know?’
‘I wanted the change of scenery,’ Laurie said. ‘Where are you sitting?’
Yes, she could play mind games too. Knight to your Rook!
‘Same,’ Jamie said. ‘Last time, the waitress took too long. Mind you, this is carnage.’
Hmmm. He’d spotted her, panicked and made an excuse to follow her out here.
Laurie noticed when he spoke that his incisor teeth were tilted slightly inward, like an uncommitted vampire. She suspected this was the true secret of his incredible appeal, the deliberate flaw in the Navajo rug. Otherwise he was a little too wholesomely, straightforwardly good looking. Somehow, the teeth made you think carnal thoughts.
They suspended conversation to stake elbow space on the bar and catch the barman’s eye. Laurie got served first and volunteered to buy Jamie’s, but he wouldn’t let her.
She was less convinced this was chivalry than unwillingness for her to discover his order of a lager and a Prosecco with a raspberry bobbing in it, which made it clear he was on a date. She heard him tell the barman anyway. Her cocktail took long enough to make that they returned to their seats at the same time, having traded awkwardly shouted staccato remarks about how it was heaving in here. As they neared Laurie’s destination he stopped and leaned in to speak to her, over the Motown decibels.
‘Could I ask a favour?’
Laurie got a waft of light male sweat and classy aftershave. She fought to keep her face straight and look like she didn’t know what was coming.
‘What?’
‘Could you not mention – this – at work. Who I’m with?’ he gestured at Eve at their table, who was studying herself in a compact mirror. She had a feline sort of beauty, hair slicked into a long high ponytail. Like a sexy assassin. Laurie squinted and pretended it had dawned who it was.
‘Oh, why not?’ Laurie said, faux innocent.
‘It would be very much frowned upon by Statler and Waldorf.’
Statler and Waldorf was a longstanding nickname for Misters Salter and Rowson. Laurie knew why he was using matey we’re-in-this-together shop floor nicknames.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think Salter wants his niece socialising with any of us.’
Laurie smiled. If she wasn’t miserable, wanting to further delay returning to Suzanne, and several drinks to the good, she might not wind him up. As it was …
‘By “socialising”, you mean shagging, and by “any of us”, you mean you?’
‘Well,’ Jamie shrugged, slightly taken aback and evidently at a momentary loss. ‘Who knows what goes through the old goat’s mind. You’d have to ask him.’
‘OK,’ Laurie said.
‘Thank you,’ Jamie exhaled.
‘… I’ll ask him!’
She waited for the punchline to land and enjoyed Jamie’s aghast expression when it did.
‘Hahaha!’
‘For fu—’ Jamie performed a mixture of bashful and still edgy. He was being winsome and acting vulnerable because right now she could choose to do him damage, of that she was sure.
‘I’m not a fan of the office gossip,’ Laurie said. ‘I won’t say anything. Don’t muck her around, OK?’
‘It’s not like that, I promise,’ Jamie said. ‘It’s career talk.’
‘Uh huh,’ Laurie said, casting her eyes back to where Eve was tilting her chin, pouting at her own reflection.
Laurie returned with heavy dread to her seat, only to see with joy that Emily was in it, and everyone else had clustered round the other side of the table to screech at something on one of the girl’s phones. Blessed release. Given the volume of the music, at this distance, they might as well have gone to Iran.
‘I am flying a humanitarian mission. Did you get Suzanne-ed?’ Emily said, as Laurie took Suzanne’s former position next to her.
‘Yep.’
‘She’s a complete fucking twat, isn’t she?’
Laurie’s Old Fashioned went down the wrong way as she coughed in delighted surprise and Emily slapped her heartily on the back.
When Laurie had her voice back, she said: ‘She let me know I was an old maid and weird nun for my uneventful romantic history.’
‘What a bleak cow. Last I heard she was hopping on Marcus from KPMG and he has a community dick, so no one’s taking her advice.’
Laurie coughed on her drink again. ‘A what?’
‘You know, used freely by everyone. Open access. A civic resource.’
Laurie managed to stop laughing long enough to add: ‘And she and Carly asked me where I was from.’
Emily did a grit-teeth face.
‘I said Yorkshire and they said …’
Emily put a hand on Laurie’s arm and tilted her head. ‘No, I meant where are you from?’
Emily had been spectator to this enough times to know how it went. In lairy younger years, it was usually Emily who jumped in with a: ‘First of all, how done you …’ while Laurie shushed her.
Oh Loz, I am sorry. Clients love them, so I’m scunnered. Why do bad people have to be good at their jobs?’
Laurie laughed, and remembered why she so often said yes to Emily. She thought there was a lot of truth in the closest friendships being unconsummated romances. Emily was a high-flying executive, Tinder adventuress and queen of the casual hook up, Laurie was serious and settled and steady, yet their differences only made them endlessly fascinated with the other.
They still had a sense of humour, and a bullshit detector, and priorities in common.
Emily opened a Rizla paper and put it on the table, dainty fingers sprinkling out a slim sausage of tobacco. Emily had smoked roll-ups ever since they met, when she hung out of Laurie’s bedroom window in halls, bottle of Smirnoff Moscow Mule in the other hand.
‘She asked me who did my work,’ Emily said.
‘Work?’ Laurie said.
‘Work,’ Emily took her hands off the cigarette in progress and pulled her cheeks up, while making a pursed-lips trout mouth.
‘What the …? You don’t look like you’ve had anything done!’
This was true, although Emily had always been physically extraordinary to Laurie. She was tiny, golden limbed (which was due to a professional painting) with the face of a Blythe doll, or manga cartoon: eyes floating miles apart, tiny nose, wide full mouth. It all misled you, so you didn’t expect her to have the language of a docker and the appetites of a pirate. Men fell in doomed passions on a near-weekly basis.
‘Mmm, hmm. About a month after she arrived. Was tempted to sack her then and there. Except she’d have gone round the other agencies saying Emily Clarke sacked me for pointing out her cosmetic work and the fact I’d sacked her would seem to prove it and I’m too fucking vain for that sort of mockery.’
‘What a bitch!’
‘Right? She says “oh no, I mean I thought it was very tasteful, very discreet”. At first I thought it was bad manners but I’m coming to suspect she’s a straight-up sociopath.’
‘They walk among us,’ Laurie nodded, twitching at her phone screen. Dan had never replied. He was the one always telling her to go out more and yet he was doing the antsy ‘when you home’ routine? In long-term couple code that was a don’t be late and smashed hint, without wanting the argument that might ensue from actually saying as much.
‘You know that better than anyone, with your job.’
‘Ah well, maybe she’s right and I have missed out. How would I know? That’s what missing out means,’ Laurie said, feeling philosophical in the way you could after five units of alcohol.
‘Trust me, you haven’t. I’m taking a rest from dating apps,’ Emily said, tugging at her hemline where it cut into her thighs. ‘Too many mis-sold PPIs. The last guy I met was Jason Statham in his photos, and I turn up for the date and it’s more like Upstart Crow.’
Laurie roared at this. ‘Are you still Tilda on there? Has anyone figured it out? Do you really never tell them your real name?’
‘Yep. I make sure there’s no bills left out if we go to mine. You don’t want Clive, thirty-seven, personal trainer from Loughborough, who’s into creative bum-plug play, tracking you down on LinkedIn.’
‘Groooooo.’
‘Ignore Suzanne. Everyone here,’ Emily waved her arm at the general bar-dining area, ‘Wants what you have. Everyone.’
Hah, Laurie thought. She was fairly sure she knew at least one person here who didn’t want what she had, but she appreciated the sentiment.
‘You don’t!’ Laurie said.
Emily’s utilitarian approach to sex bewildered Laurie. Perhaps Emily needed to meet Jamie Carter, and they’d explode on contact.
‘I do, though. I’m just realistic it’s probably not out there, so I make do in the meanwhile. It’s not common, what you have, you know. Not every Laurie finds her Dan, and vice versa,’ Emily said. ‘You two were hit by lightning, that night in Bar CaVa.’
‘And there I was thinking it was baked bean flavoured tequila shots.’
As she left, Laurie noticed the now-empty table where Jamie and Eve had sat. No doubt he’d sidled past when she was deep in conversation with Emily, keen for her not to see them leaving together.
Career talk, arf. Like he’d chance a sacking for telling her about his LPC course in Chester. Like he’d chance a sacking if the prize was anything less than taking her home.
He must think Laurie was naïve, or stupid. The trouble with liars, Laurie had decided from much research in the professional field, is they always thought everyone else was less smart than them.
3
Laurie clambered out of the cab into the heavy smog of late summer air and the nice-postcode-quiet of the street, aware that while her senses were muffled by inebriation, neighbours with families would be lying in their beds cursing the cacophony that was someone exiting a hackney.
The throbbing engine, sing-song conversation, slamming of a heavy door, the clattering of your big night out heels on the pavement.
Two weeks back, the sisters next door had managed to have such an involved back and forth for ten minutes about whose puke it was, Laurie had been tempted to march out in her pyjamas and pay the soiling charge herself.
Ah, middle age beckoned. Hah, who was she kidding, Dan called her ‘Mrs Tiggywinkle’. She was the girl in halls who kept a row of basil plants alive in the shared kitchen.
Loud-whispering ‘keep the change,’ to the driver, she ducked under the thick canopy of clematis that hung over the tiled porch, grabbing blindly for her keys in the depths of her handbag, and once again thought: we need a light out here.
She’d been infatuated with this solid bay-fronted Edwardian semi from the first viewing, and knackered their chances of driving a hard bargain by walking around with the estate agent gibbering on about how much she adored it. They bought at the top of what they could afford at the time, and in Laurie’s opinion it was worth every cent.
Their front room, she liked to point out, was the spit of the one on the sleeve of Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, right down to the stained glass, potted palm and half-drunk red wines usually strewn around.
There was a honey-yellow glow from under the blinds, so either Dan had left the lamp on for her or he was having another bout of insomnia, passed out on the sofa in front of BBC News 24 with the sound on low, feet twitching.
Laurie felt a small rush of love for him, and hoped he was up. As much as it was authentic, she knew it was also in some part due to spending a trying evening surrounded by strangers, feeling homesick and out of place. Not belonging.
As a ‘person of ethnic origin’ who grew up in Hebden Bridge, she didn’t care to revisit that feeling often. Even in a cosmopolitan city she got the OH I LOVE YOUR ACCENT? EE BAH GUM jokes. ‘You don’t often hear a black girl sound that northern, except for that one out of the Spice Girls,’ a forthright client had said to her once.
She thought Dan might have waited up for her, but the moment she saw him, she knew something was badly off. He was still dressed, sat on the sofa, feet apart, head bowed, hands clasped. The TV screen was a blank and there wasn’t any music on, no detritus of a takeaway.
‘Hi,’ he said, in an unnatural voice, as Laurie entered the room.
Laurie was an empathetic person. When she was small she once told her mum she thought she might be telepathic, and her amused mother had explained that she was just very intuitive about emotions. Laurie was, as her dad said, born aged forty. Better than being born aged nineteen and staying there, she never said in reply.
The air was thick with a Terrible Unsaid and her antennae picked it up easily enough to feel completely nauseous.
Laurie clutched the jangle of her keys to her chest, with their silly fob of Bagpuss, and said: ‘Oh God, what? Which of our parents is it? Please say it now. Say it quickly.’
‘What?’
‘I know it’s bad news. Please don’t do any build up whatsoever.’
Laurie was about six or seven drinks in the hole and yet in an instant, completely, pin-sharp sober with adrenaline.
Dan looked perturbed. ‘Nothing has happened to anyone?’
‘Oh? Oh! Fuck, you scared me.’
In relief, Laurie flumped down onto the sofa, arms flung out by her sides like a kid.
She looked at Dan as her heart rate slowed to normal. He was regarding her with a strange expression.
Not for the first time, she felt appreciation, a bump of pride in ownership, admiring how much early middle age suited him. He’d been a kind of jolly-looking chubby lad in their youth, puppyish cute but not handsome, as her gran had helpfully noted. And with a slight lisp that he hated, but oddly enough, always had women swooning. Laurie always loved it, right from the first moment he had spoken to her. Now he had a few lines and silver threaded in his light brown hair, the bones of his face had sharpened, he’d grown into himself. He was what the girls at work called a Hot Dad. Or, he would be.
‘You couldn’t sleep again?’ she asked. His insomnia was a recent thing, due to him being made head of department. Three a.m. night sweat terrors.
‘No,’ he said, and she didn’t know if he was saying no, I couldn’t sleep or no, that’s not it.
Laurie peered at him. ‘You alright?’
‘About you coming off the pill next month. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s made me think about a lot of things.’
‘Has it …?’ Laurie suppressed a knowing smile. The atmosphere and anxiety now made sense. Here we go, she thought. This was a clichéd moment in the passage to parenthood. It belonged in a scripted drama, shortly after a couple had seen two blue lines on the wee stick.
Should he trade in the car for something bigger? Would he be a good father? Would they still be the same?
1. Nah. There’s no room out there to park a people carrier anyway.
2. Of course! He could try to be less sulky, perhaps, but that was about it. Kids had a way of automatically curing excess self-pity, from what Laurie could tell. At least for the initial five years.
3. Yes. The same, but better! (Actually, Laurie had no idea about the last answer. If they procreated, it would be the best part of two decades before this household belonged to the two of them again, and inviting a tyrannically needy midget intruder to disturb their privacy and contented status quo was scary.)
But the done thing in a couple was to pretend to be sure about the imponderable things, whenever the other person needed comfort. If necessary, deploy outright lying. Dan could pay her back when she asked tearfully after returning from a failed shopping trip, whether her body would ever look like it did before.
‘I don’t know how to say any of this. I’ve been sitting here since you left trying to think of the right words and I still can’t.’
This was hyperbole, because Laurie left him having a shower with the Roberts radio broadcasting the football game, but she didn’t say so.
‘Look,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve realised. I don’t want kids. At all. Ever.’
The silence lengthened.
Laurie sat up, with some effort, given her foolish shoes – strappy silver slingbacks she fell for in Selfridges, that ‘look good with plum toenails’ according to the sales girl – weren’t anchoring her to the floor very steadily.
‘Dan,’ she said gently. ‘This doubt is totally normal, you know. I feel the same. It’s frightening, when it’s about to become real. But we can do it. We’ve got this. With having a kid, you hold hands, and jump.’
She smiled at him, hoping he’d snap out of it soon. It felt like a role reversal, him demanding a deep talk, her wanting to do enough to make him feel taken seriously so she could go to bed. Dan was flexing his fingers, steepled in his lap, not looking at her.
‘And it’s me who has to push it out,’ Laurie added. ‘Don’t think I haven’t googled “third-degree tearing”.’
He wouldn’t be easily joked out of this, she realised, looking at the depth of his frown lines.
She felt them running at different speeds, her carrying the noise and trivia of the night out with her like a swarm of bees, him evidently having spent a pensive period staring at the shadows in the sombre Edward Hopper print they hung over the fireplace, worrying about the future.
‘It’s not just having kids. I don’t want anything that you want. I don’t want … this.’
He glanced around the room, accusingly.
Stripped floorboards?
‘What do you mean?’
Dan breathed in and out, as if limbering up for a feat of exertion. But no words followed.
‘… You want to put it off for a few years? We talked about this. I’m thirty-six and it could take a while. We don’t want to be mucking about with interventions and wishing we’d got on with it … you know what Claire says. If she knew how great it would be, she’d have started at twenty.’
Invoking this particular member of their social circle was a stupid misstep, and Laurie immediately regretted it.
Claire was both a massive bore about her offspring and a general pain in the hoop. Ironically, if they hadn’t suffered her, they might’ve have reproduced already. Occasions with her often concluded with one or other of them muttering: you’d tell me if I ever got like that, right?
‘You know what they say. There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,’ Laurie added. ‘If you—’
‘Laurie,’ Dan said, interrupting her. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we don’t want the same things and so we can’t be together.’
She gasped. He’d say such an ugly, ridiculous thing to get his point across? Then she did a small empty laugh, as it dawned on her: this was how much men could fear maturity. It ought not to be a revelation to her, given her dad, and yet she was badly disappointed in Dan.
‘Come on, are you really going to turn this into a full-blown emergency and make me say having a family is a deal breaker, or something? So it can all be my fault when it’s had us up five times in a row?’
Dan looked at her.
‘I don’t know how else I can say this. I’m not happy, Laurie.’
Laurie breathed in and out: Dan wasn’t bluffing, he wanted a direct assurance from her she’d not come off the pill. She’d have to hope they revisited the idea in a year. She was aware that it could mean their window of opportunity closed completely. And she could end up resenting Dan. There’d be no playing tricks, pretending to take the pill when she wasn’t and whoops-a-daisy. That was how Laurie was conceived and she knew the consequences were lifelong.
‘Is this purely because I want kids?’
She would take it off the table to stay with him, she knew that in a split second’s consultation with herself. It was unthinkable to do anything else. You didn’t lose someone you loved, over hypothetical love for someone who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist.
‘That, other things. I’m not … this is not where I want to be any more.’
‘OK,’ she said, rubbing her tired face, feeling appalled by how extreme he’d been prepared to be, in order to get his way.
She felt like she might cry, in fact. They’d had fights before where very occasionally one or the other of them had vaguely threatened to leave, usually when drunk and in their dickhead twenties, and whichever of them had said it felt sick with guilt the next day.
Pulling this now, at their age, was beneath Dan, however much he was bricking it over the responsibilities of fatherhood. It was really unkind.
‘… OK, you win. Regular pill-taking for the time being. Christ, Dan.’
Dan looked at her with a stunned expression and Laurie froze, because again, she could read it.
He wasn’t stunned she’d agreed. It wasn’t a gambit. He wanted to split up.
She finally understood. Understood that he meant it, that this was it.
Absolutely everything else was completely beyond her comprehension.
4
When people did monumentally awful things to you, it seemed they didn’t even have the courtesy of being original, of inflicting some unique war wound, a lightning-bolt-shaped scar. These reasons were prosaic, dull. They were true of people all the time, but they weren’t applicable to Dan and Laurie. They were going to be together forever. They agreed that openly as daft lovestruck teenagers and implicitly confirmed it in every choice they’d made since. No commitment needed checking or second thinking, it was just: of course. You are mine and I am yours.
‘But nothing’s changed?’ Laurie said. ‘We’re like we’ve always been.’
‘I think that’s part of the problem.’
Laurie’s mind was occupying two time zones at once: this surreal nightmare where her partner of eighteen years, her first and only love, her best friend, her ‘other half’, was sitting here, saying things about how he’d sleep in the spare room for the time being and move out to a flat as soon as possible. She had to play along with it, because he was so convinced. It was like colluding with someone who’d become delusional about a dream world. Follow the rabbit.
Then there was the other time zone, where she was desperately trying to make sense of the situation, to manage it and defuse it. He was only using words – no tangible, irreversible change had occurred. Therefore words could change it back again.
She’d always had a special power over Dan, and vice versa, that’s why they fell for each other. If she wanted to pull him back from this brink, she must be able. She only needed to try hard enough, to find the way to persuade him.
But to fix it, she had to grasp what was going on. Laurie prided herself on cold reading people like she was a stage magician, and yet the person closest to her sounded like a stranger.
‘How long have you felt this way?’ she asked.
‘A while,’ Dan said, and although his body showed tension, she could already tell he had relaxed several notches. Announcement made, the worst was over for him. She hated him, for a second. ‘I think I knew for sure at Tom and Pri’s wedding.’
‘Oh, that was why you spent the whole night in a strop, was it?’ Laurie spat. And realised the lunacy of that sort of point scoring, when the whole game had been cancelled. He wouldn’t go through with this. Surely.
Her stomach lurched. It was utterly ridiculous to take him seriously, and wildly reckless not to.
Dan made a hissing noise, shook his head. Whether he was dismayed at Laurie or himself wasn’t clear.
‘I knew none of that wedding fuss was for me. I knew that’s not where I was at, mentally.’
A painful memory came back to Laurie, because it turned out her senses hadn’t entirely failed her.
She recalled that the couples present had been corralled by the DJ for the first-dance-after-the-first-dance. She and a half-cut, sullen Dan were forced into a waltz hold to Adele. She felt a sudden total absence of anything between them, not even a comfortable ease with each other’s touch, in place of a spark. It was like their battery was dead and if you pressed the accelerator it’d only make an empty phut-phut-phut. They shuffled round the floor awkwardly, like brother and sister, not meeting each other’s gaze. Then as soon as the song was over she forgot about it, and put it down to Dan not liking ‘Someone Like You’, or being told to do things.
He’d made a passive-aggressive show of going to sleep in the cab on the way back. Laurie felt she’d committed an unspecified crime all day, but when asked ‘What’s up with you?’ she’d got a belligerent ‘… NOTHING?’
But crap days in a long-term relationship were a given. You no more thought they might spell the end than you feared every cold could be cancer.
‘Is there someone else?’ Laurie said, not because she thought it possible but you were supposed to ask this, weren’t you? In this weird theatre they were playing out, at Dan’s insistence. They worked together – on a practical level alone, this seemed improbable.
‘No, of course not,’ Dan said, sounding genuinely affronted.
‘I don’t think you get to OF COURSE NOT me, do you?’ Laurie shrieked, anger breaking, causing Dan to flinch. ‘I think OF COURSE NOT is pretty much fucking unavailable to you right now, don’t you? We’ve stopped having any shared reality from what I can see so fuck off with your patronising OF COURSE NOTS.’
Dan was completely unused to seeing her this incandescently angry. In fact, the last time she hit these heights, they were twenty-five and he’d lost her car keys in the healing field at Glastonbury. They’d been able to laugh about it later, though, alchemise it as an anecdote. Comedy was tragedy plus time, but there’d never be enough distance to make this amusing.
‘Sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘But no. Like we always said. No cheating, ever.’
‘Ever?’ she said, with a knowing intonation.
‘You know what we agreed. I’d tell you.’
Laurie fumed, her chest tight, and tried to breathe through it. The tactlessness and the tastelessness of Dan using things they’d sincerely pledged to each other a lifetime ago. He was currently trashing that memory, and every other memory for that matter, while asking Laurie to treat it as sacred covenant. What an arsehole.
Was he an arsehole? Had he turned into one, somewhere along the line, and she hadn’t noticed? She studied him, as he stared morosely at his hairy knees in his shorts, face like a baleful Moomin.
It didn’t matter. She loved him. They’d long ago passed the point where her love was negotiable; it wasn’t contingent on him not being an arsehole. He was her arsehole.
Laurie had passed that point, anyway. Dan had reached a parallel one where he could abandon her. That’s what it felt like: desolate abandonment. He wouldn’t care about Laurie, from now on? No, no, he did want her. She knew in her guts that he did, which is why this had to be stopped before he did any more damage.
‘But we’ve got to stay at the same company together? How’s that going to fucking work?’
Dan and Laurie managed a few degrees of separation at Salter & Rowson by being in different departments, but once they were exes that would hardly be enough.
‘I can start looking for other positions. I might jack it all in. I’m not sure yet.’
‘Honestly, Dan, it still sounds like you’re freaked out by having a baby and have decided to go full nuke from orbit to fix it,’ Laurie said, in a final stab at returning them to any sort of normality. ‘You don’t want to go travelling, for fuck’s sake. They wouldn’t let you stay head of the department, either. And you hated a week in Santorini, last year.’
As Laurie said it, she wondered if the missing element in that analysis was that he hated it with her.
‘Having children is only one part of it. The reason it’s made me do something about how I feel is because you can’t go back on that decision, you can’t un-have a baby. It made me decide. I don’t want this life, Laurie, I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock after all this time. It shocks me too. That’s why it took me so long to face up to it. But I don’t. Want it.’
‘You don’t want me?’
A heavy pause, where Laurie felt Dan steel himself to say it.
‘Not like this.’
‘Then how?’
Dan shrugged and blinked through tears.
‘The word you’re looking for is no,’ Laurie said.
Tears flash flooded down her face now and he made to get up and she frantically gestured: don’t come near me.
‘Erm … just you know, one minor objection on my part,’ she said, voice thick and distorted by crying. It was ambitious to try to put on a sarcastic tone. ‘How am I going to have kids with anyone now, Dan? I’m thirty-six.’
‘You still can!’ he said, imploringly, nodding. ‘That’s not old, these days.’
‘With who? When? Am I going to meet someone next week? Get things moving on conceiving a few months after that?’
‘C’mon. You’re you. You’re a massive catch, always have been. You won’t be short of offers. You’ll be inundated.’
Laurie finally accepted in that moment, that this was real, they really might be over.
Dan had always had the healthy, normal amount of male jealousy. If anything, more than average: he’d always been sure if one of them would be stolen away by a rival, it was Laurie. Male friends who complimented her in his presence always got a ‘hey now …’ from Dan that was entirely joking but also not. Male hires at her firm always got an early warning that she might not have a wedding ring but she wasn’t single and also the guy was here on premises, so watch yourself, and she assumed this was by Dan or briefed by his representatives. (She’d never had to tell anyone she was ‘spoken for’, anyway, they always mentioned oh you’re Dan Price’s girlfriend. Funny phrase, that. Why was someone speaking for you?)
If the idea of her having kids with someone else got this shrug of a response, this mediocre auto-response, something had flown.
‘Such a massive catch, you’ll pass me up?’
‘We’ve been together all our lives, Laurie, you’re my only serious girlfriend. It’s not like I’m walking away lightly, or that I never cared.’
Laurie was on the back foot. He’d planned for this. He was a politician who had notes; she’d been ambushed.
She still couldn’t believe he wasn’t exaggerating somehow, but there was a dreadful binary: if he could say all this and not mean it utterly sincerely, that would make it even worse.
There was a huge, bewildering gap in all of this for Laurie. An untold mystery in how Dan had gone from unpacking the Ocado delivery, and complaining about the plain digestives they got as substitutions for Jaffa Cakes, going for musty pints of stout in their local and laughing at dogs with overbites in Beech Road Park on a Sunday morning, to this final, total departure, with nothing in between.
It was as if one minute she’d been running for a bus, and the next she’d woken up in a hospital bed, the quilt flat where her legs used to be, with a doctor explaining they were ever so sorry but there was no saving them.
‘Good to know you used to care,’ she said, hearing how plaintive and bitter her voice sounded, in the darkened sitting room. ‘Small mercies? Or is that meant to be a big mercy?’
‘I do care.’
‘Just not enough to stay.’
Dan stared blankly.
‘Say it,’ Laurie said, with force.
‘No.’
It was the logical conclusion of everything he’d said; and yet that hard monosyllable surprised her so much, he might as well have slapped her.
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