If I Never Met You

‘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.

5

At three in the morning, having been wide awake for hours, Laurie got up, marched into the spare room and stamped on the button to turn the big floor lamp on.

‘Dan? Wake up.’

The human-sized sausage shape under the duvet stirred and Dan’s head emerged, hair askew.

At first he frowned in sleepy confusion. When he focused on Laurie’s face, and visibly remembered the specifics of his existence, his expression changed to a man woken by an FBI flashlight who knew exactly what he had hidden in his crawl space.

‘I need to know why.’

‘What?’

‘I need to know why this is happening. I know you think you’ve given me reasons but you haven’t. Only vague bullshit about us wanting different things. We’ve wanted all kinds of different things in the past but we never had to split up over it. We would’ve talked about it. I offered to hold off on kids, even put it aside, same with getting married. So it’s not that we want different things. That’s like a line you heard in Cold Feet or something.’ Laurie paused. ‘Just tell me the whole truth, however hard it is. This not knowing is worse, Dan. Look at what you’re doing to us, after our whole lives together. You owe me that.’

Dan stared at her and pushed himself up on his elbows. A silence stretched between them and Laurie sensed he was readying himself for honesty. This return ambush had worked, he’d not had time to rehearse.

Dan cleared his throat. Laurie was breaking out in a flop sweat but she still didn’t regret asking.

‘… I started waking up early. While you were still asleep,’ he said. ‘… And I’d see life as a tunnel. I could mark off everything along the way. The wedding at Manchester Town Hall. The honeymoon in Italy. Kid one, kid two. Sunday barbecues, DIY, saving up for an extension. Still hating work, but having to go for partnership because there were mouths to feed,’ his voice was hoarse with sleep and sounded strange. ‘And it was like there was nothing between here and death that left the script. It was planned out for me, every step. I was expected to do it. And I kept asking myself, like a nagging voice, a whisper that got louder and louder: did I want to do it?’

Laurie could interject here that clearly, he wasn’t expected to do several things on that list. She held herself back.

‘… I felt trapped. I’d built this box I didn’t want to live inside any more, but I wasn’t allowed to leave it. I didn’t want to leave it, as I knew how much I’d hurt you. I started being a wanker to you all the time, because I was miserable, but I didn’t want to say so.’

He drew breath. ‘That’s the thing. I kept thinking I had to stay to be kind to you but I wasn’t being kind, so what was the point?’

‘You’ve always been quite grumpy, to be fair,’ Laurie said, with a small smile.

Dan didn’t appear to listen.

‘You know how people always said how could we do it, how could we “settle down” so young?’

‘Yes,’ said Laurie, voice tight.

‘We both said it was the easiest thing we’d ever done, we never even thought of it that way. And I always meant it, Laurie, always. But maybe now, at thirty-six, it’s caught up with me. I don’t feel I’ve lived enough.’

Laurie took a deep breath and tried to get past how much this hurt. She’d stifled him, stopped him from going on expeditions, with his fascinating penis as travel companion. However, she had asked for straight answers.

‘If I’d never met you – if you’d slept around at university, and we’d got together at twenty-five, or thirty, this wouldn’t be happening?’ Laurie deliberately didn’t say this in an accusatory way, she wanted to know.

‘I don’t know. I can’t go back and live a different timeline until I get here again, and do you know what, I promise you, I wouldn’t want to. And it’s not about sex. It’s about … Oh God, I don’t want to say “finding myself.” But life’s big decisions are mainly instinct, right? The same way we both just knew, back at university. Now I know this isn’t right for me anymore. I’ve lost myself.’

‘Is it me, I’m not enough? Or too much? You’re looking at other women or … our friends or their wives, or our colleagues, thinking, “I wish Laurie was more like that”?’ Her throat was tight and she felt as if she was stood here, stark naked. To ask these questions: it was the hardest, most exposing thing. Tell me how you fell out of love with me. Describe it.

‘No! God no. It’s not about you. I know that sounds insulting, but it isn’t.’

A pause.

‘OK. Thanks for being honest,’ Laurie said dully.

She meant it. She didn’t hate this situation any less, but she grasped it a little better. Dan being this open with her reminded her how they used to be able to talk, and the pain hit her stomach again with a physical force. She would never be able to forget how easily you could lose someone’s love. She hadn’t felt it slipping away.

‘Won’t you miss me?’ she said.

This was it, the biggest question. The one that left her feeling ridiculous, pitiable, even, but she knew she had to. The idea Dan would no longer be on the ‘people to contact in an emergency’ space on her passport felt impossible. She needed him to explain how he could do this and not feel how she’d feel, if she did this.

‘The thought of it is brutal, Laurie. Like missing a limb,’ Dan said, tears starting. ‘I love you. I don’t love our relationship anymore.’

‘We could stay together and make the relationship different,’ Laurie said, eyes welling up.

They both sobbed, heads bowed, because Dan didn’t want to say it and she didn’t want to hear it. The sound of it was strange, in the darkened room.

‘Why would you leave me like this? Why would you do this to us?’ Laurie said, and she sounded like someone else. Who was this mournful, begging woman? And who was this merciless person who’d taken Dan’s place? How could eighteen years end in just a few hours?

‘I’m sorry … I’m really sorry …’ Dan gasped.

‘If you were that sorry you wouldn’t do it,’ Laurie said thickly, not even caring how she sounded, almost pleading. This was like a catapult back to the powerlessness of childhood, wondering why grown-ups did the completely arse-about-face cruel things they did.

‘I can’t not do it.’ He looked like he was going to say something else and then thought better of it. Like when they told a client to go No Comment. The more you say, the more you’ll incriminate yourself.

Laurie suspected what he wouldn’t say, was: there came a point where feelings weren’t there to be resuscitated, they had died. That dance, at that wedding. That’s what she’d picked up on. Flat lining.

‘And I want you to be happy. You deserve more than someone who …’

‘OK. Spare me that stuff, Dan,’ Laurie said, briskly, wiping her eyes, squeezing her already folded arms tighter. ‘You’re like the climber who can’t carry their injured mate, so leaves them to die. Do what you need to do but don’t pretend it’s about anything other than your survival.’

‘Hah,’ Dan rubbed his face tiredly. ‘You’re so bloody clever, you are.’

She wasn’t sure, in the tone of his voice, that it was a compliment. It even sounded like a hint at some other part of this. Laurie was too tired and raw to judge.

‘I don’t know who or what I’m meant to trust in,’ Laurie said, tremulous. ‘We spend our whole lives together and one day it’s – nah, not for me? What do I do with that? What’s the lesson I have to learn here?’

‘There isn’t a lesson for you, you haven’t done anything wrong.’

She could feel it now, the grief and enormity of what had been abruptly taken from her. A future. The rest of their lives. A promise, broken. ‘Then how am I going to ever believe this won’t happen again?’

‘I don’t know what to say. It’s taken me … so long to work up the courage because …’

‘Woah, you’re now saying you weren’t happy for so long?’

‘No! Or not in a serious way. Just an underlying doubt. Fuck, Laurie. Working out how to do this without hurting you even more … it’s awful. It’s my mess and confusion but there was no way of it not ending up all over you.’

He was sat up in bed, head hangdog, bare chested, and Laurie couldn’t help but wonder who the next person to see him like this would be, who he was going to find that he wanted more with. Who didn’t make life feel like a tunnel.

‘OK. There’s nothing left to say. It’s happening because it’s happening. Thanks for everything, I guess?’

‘Laurie …’

‘I mean it. Thank you. The fact you’re going doesn’t mean everything before it didn’t matter. Not wanting to be with someone anymore, and admitting it, isn’t doing anything wrong.’

Dan looked taken aback and Laurie had surprised herself with this Christian forgiveness that she hadn’t known she was going to dispense, until this moment. It felt unexpectedly powerful. Was it a ploy? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t feel the same way, one moment to the next. Maybe, once again, it was the advocate in her. She only had this left, to make him change his mind. Remember the woman you fell in love with. Well, the girl.

Laurie hesitated, because she didn’t want to issue ultimatums or bluffs, they were pointless. But she still had to say it.

‘One thing, though, Dan. If you think you can do this, and spend three months of living in some flat in Ancoats being lonely, with your “man cave” sofa from Gumtree and your Sky Sports package, and then come back to me saying it was some massive midlife crisis … you know you can’t, right? This damage you’re doing, it’s permanent. If you go, that’s it.’

Dan nodded. ‘Yes. I wouldn’t presume to think I could ever ask that of you.’

Laurie left the room, knowing that she’d lied, and he probably did too.

6

Dad

Hello princess. How’s my beautiful clever daughter? Well guess what, me & Nic tied the knot!!! Just because of tax reasons, Visas, all that jazz. Did it out here in Beefa with a couple of witnesses but we’re going to have a proper tear-up in Manchester in a month or so, I’ll give you the details when I have them. Going to spend a few quid on it, need somewhere fancy, no fleapits. Get yourself a nice dress and send me the bill, you’re one of the bridesmaids, as it were. Love you loads my darling. Austin xxx

Laurie blinked at the WhatsApp through the fug of receding sleep on Sunday morning: you could dissect this in a lab as a perfect study of her relationship with her father. All of him was in there, like a nucleus containing the DNA information.

1. Lavish praise, blandishments.

2. Surprise news, the sort that makes it clear his life is, in fact, nothing much to do with her.

3. Material spoiling, bribes.

4. More protestations of how important she is to him. A bridesmaid ‘as it were’. I want you to feel you’re important without going to the trouble of actually treating you that way.

5. Not, despite the performative paternalism, referring to himself ‘Dad’. On the rare occasions she’d seen him when she was little, she’d loved the novelty of having someone to call Dad, but he always used to correct her: ‘You’re making me sound old.’ She was baffled: thirty was old, and he was her dad?

And not forgetting 6. The worst possible timing, as always.

Laurie

Hi, congratulations to you and Nic! Will come to the celebration, just let me know. I have less fun news, Dan and & I have separated. I’m keeping the house on and he’s moving out. His decision, no third parties involved. Ah well. Maybe I’ll meet someone at your tear-up.

xx

Two blue ticks, immediately. So he’d read it. No reply. More Classic Austin Watkinson.

And to round it all off – and this part she couldn’t blame her dad for, although it felt as if she should be able to – he’d now unwittingly made her phone call to her mum breaking the news about her and Dan, even more onerous. Her parents didn’t speak, so it was down to Laurie if she was going to be informed, and she should be, really. Laurie knew if she put it off, she’d end up avoiding it altogether; she wouldn’t keep secrets for her dad. Still, her mum wouldn’t thank her for it, and it’d feel like it was Laurie’s fault.

Laurie and Dan had spent all day Saturday slowly and painfully going through it all again, and now Dan was out on a run and Laurie was actually relieved not to have to face him for a few hours, endlessly wondering if she could have said or done something different to change this outcome.

Having told one person, it had started to become real. She could call her mum and practise doing it vocally – and now, in a Dan-less house, was better than later. She sat on the third step of the stairs, heaving the plastic rotary red and blue phone onto her lap. When she bought it a year ago from a website that did ‘vintage things with a modern twist’, Dan had said, ‘More bourgeoise knick-knacks. Behold our thirty-something pile of affluent middle-class tat!’

Did he hate all this stuff? In this home they’d made? Could she not even look at a sodding retro hipster landline in the same way? His belongings were piled into tragic bin bags in the dining room. She’d heard him, before she got up, quietly calling a local restaurant to cancel their reservation. This afternoon, they had been meant to be eating Sunday lunch at a pretentious new place nearby full of squirrel cage light bulbs and ‘Nordic-inspired small plates’.

‘Look at this,’ Dan had said barely a week ago, in another space-time dimension, waving his phone with the website open: ‘This place isn’t a restaurant, it’s a dining space prioritising a thoughtful eating menu with an emphasis on provenance and a curated repertoire of low intervention wines. Fucks saaake.’

‘You wanted to try it!’ Laurie had said, and Dan eye-rolled, shrugged. Back when Dan’s ‘rejection of things he’d nevertheless willingly chosen’ was confined to where they had meals out.

In the cold light of morning, Laurie couldn’t believe he was keeping on with this charade, that he wasn’t going to be standing in some unloved unfurnished two bed that smelled of plug-in air fresheners with a greasy estate agent and think: ‘what the hell am I doing?’

Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.

She listened to the ringing on the other end, replaced the receiver, and tried again. Her mum would be in the garden, and thought the first phone call was merely to alert you to the fact someone was trying to call you. She rarely answered until they’d made a second or even third attempt. It was a quirk that used to drive Laurie mad in her teenage years; they had flaming rows about Laurie always having to answer.

Her mum was ‘out of the normal,’ as a plumber once said, surveying the kitsch art collage of Elvis on their pink bathroom wall in the 1990s.

Her mother had very strict, controlling and conventional parents herself, and was determined to do things differently. Laurie admired this, while sometimes feeling she’d overcorrected to the other extreme.

If you’d wanted a mother who was chill with you being out until all hours and your friends accidentally dropping the F-word, Mrs Peggy Watkinson of Cannock Road was the one. Plus, she looked and dressed like Supremes-era Diana Ross. Both Conventional and Unconventional Dads of the neighbourhood were fans. And she wasn’t Mrs Watkinson, either, because she’d never been wed to Laurie’s dad. Laurie chose it as her surname because at the time, her mum was using her stage moniker, Peggy Sunshine. And Laurie was no way going to have a wacky surname on top of being the only black girl in her year.

When Laurie’s mum was addressed as Mrs Watkinson by a teenager, she smiled and did her characteristic hand wave. ‘In a past life, maybe.’ And mentioned there was wine open in the kitchen.

Your mum is the best, her friends said, as they trudged up the stairs, glasses in hand, promises extracted – by Laurie – not to tell their mums.

There were times when Laurie craved mums like everyone else had, who replaced lost PE kits, made chicken nuggets with beans and chips for tea instead of aubergine and pineapple curry, and didn’t have Egyptian birthing stools on display in reception rooms.

She tried ringing her mum again, but was unsuccessful. She’d give it a last try and then give up.

Whenever anything awful happened, no one ever considered the difficulty of the admin, Laurie thought. Someone had to broadcast it, manage the fall-out. How come there were so many services in modern society, and not this one? ‘Relationship Over? Let Us Round Robin!’

‘Working out how to tell everyone’ was a part of her and Dan’s separation that was going to be almost as gruelling a prospect as being left in the first place. It felt so unnecessarily cruel that you didn’t just have to go through the thing, you had to have a dozen conversations with people of varying closeness about the fact you were going through the thing.

Dan did this, Dan should deal with all of it. But he couldn’t, even if she wanted him to.

Some hip friends, a few years back, had posted up a witty archive photo on social media of themselves and made an official announcement to everyone they were divorcing.

Laurie considered it, lying in bed last night, but it only really worked as a ‘ripping the plaster off in one go’ technique if you said it was fine, you were both OK, no hard feelings, no bombshell story to uncover here, move along. Essentially, hinted it was a joint decision. Those euphemisms that publicists deployed when famous people parted: ‘leading different lives’ ‘grown apart’ and Laurie’s favourite, ‘conflicting schedules’.

Dan once said that mutual only ever meant: ‘one person has given up, and the other person concedes they can’t persuade them not to,’ and now that felt astute. Turns out, he was plot foreshadowing their own end. Where did he go, that Dan?

The phone finally connected, third time lucky, ha ha.

‘Hi, Mum … yeah I thought you’d be in the garden. OK to talk? I’ve got some bits of news … No, not that.’ It really did put the tin hat on this that everyone would think she was about to announce the baby. She took a breath to gird her loins.

‘Dan and I have split up. It’s his decision.’

She couldn’t bear to say ‘left me’, with all its sense of passive victimhood but she had to make it clear she wasn’t going to have answers. She recounted Dan’s reasons for going.

‘Oh dear, my darling. Sorry to hear this.’ Her mum had kept the strong Caribbean inflection from the island of her own childhood. ‘I know you will be very hurt but sometimes, paths diverge. He obviously has to do this next part of his journey on his own. Which is very painful for you, but it must be what his heart is telling him.’

Laurie gritted her teeth. Maddening calm was one of her mother’s attributes, that could also feel like a weapon.

She knew her mum, who lived outside society’s conventions in Upper Calder Valley with a fabulous kitchen garden and incense burners, wasn’t going to do the ‘what a bastard’ response, and in many ways, Laurie liked that her mum was an independent thinker.

But right now she didn’t want this stuff about how nothing was good or bad, it was just a different choice. Hippyishness could feel heartless. She wanted her distress to be recognised.

Laurie remembered her mum saying of her cousin Ray, who was in a serious motorbike smash, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and Laurie asking how someone subsequently living in an adapted bungalow held together with metal pins was stronger. ‘Mentally stronger,’ came the answer. Tenuous, at best. It was uncomfortably close to telling Ray to see the upside. Here was her version of that. Laurie was often struck by how the arc of history was long, but bent towards nothing really changing.

‘Dan will be on his own on his “journey” for a while, and then he’ll be with someone else. I think that’s how this works? He’s not going to become a nomadic shaman monk, Mum. He’s on a good salary at a provincial law firm.’

Unless you bought Dan’s blather about jacking it all in, which Laurie didn’t. Maybe her scathing cynicism was adding fuel to Dan’s theory they were no longer aligned, but still, file it under Believe It When I See It. She’d heard him kvetching about the state of Ryanair’s delays enough times, she couldn’t see him floating in tranquility down the Mekong Delta.

‘Well. So are you.’ That’s alright then. Jeez.

Peggy sort of tutted, in a ‘there there’ way, and Laurie sucked air into her painful rib cage. She’d not eaten more than a few pieces of toast with peanut butter for days. She didn’t expect her mum to be upset on her own behalf, and she had feared her mum would insist this was an opportunity in disguise. Not least because Peggy thought Laurie had settled down too young, and her feelings towards Dan always been polite rather than enthusiastic. Laurie got the feeling that Dan had presented to her as a stereotypical Nice Young Man, but her mum had found him a little dull. Peggy liked characters, eccentrics and oddballs. Speaking of which … her dad’s news.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ her mum said, after listening to the practical arrangements of the dissolution of Dan and Laurie Inc.

‘No. Thanks though,’ Laurie said, refusing to bite at such a lacklustre offer. ‘Oh, also.’ Deep breath. ‘Dad’s got married to Nicola. In Ibiza, but they’re going to have a do back here in Manchester too.’

Her mum was silent for a second. ‘Nicola? Is that the one from before?’

‘The Scouser, yeah.’

Laurie had only met Nicola a few times before but she liked her: a garrulous, handsome woman with her own jewellery business, who wore a lot of animal print and liked a party as much as her dad, which was saying something.

‘He always said marriage was a rotten institution, a place people went to die!’

‘Yeah. Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.’