It’s Not Me, It’s You

Delia’s mind drifted, as she toyed with her sugar wrapper.

Clichés about the aftermath of being cheated on were coming true, she noticed.

For example, she used to think the ‘it’s the lying that hurts’ line about affairs was slightly wishful. Really? Pretty sure it’d be the tongues and the hands and the frantic pulling at clothes and the groping and licking and gasping and grasping and sharing a shuddering climax that’d most bother me.

And while the thought of Paul having illicit intercourse with Celine was so horrific as to make her nauseous, unexpectedly, it wasn’t the worst pain. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before Delia – the thought of him having sex with another woman could be assimilated, however agonising it was. What Delia couldn’t begin to reconcile was the eerie, disorientating sense that she hadn’t known Paul the way she thought she had.

Take the conversation on their anniversary meal in Rasa, for example. He’d blithely mocked the younger generation’s dating habits and implied he’d be at sea if he was back on that scene. Meanwhile, he was confidently knocking off a twenty-four-year-old. Oh my God: and the remarks about intimate waxing. He knew this from a firsthand encounter with a lady’s bald part? Delia couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

That discussion had been gratuitous. Paul had voluntarily done an impersonation of a person he wasn’t, for her benefit. She tried to tell herself he’d been so scared of her finding out, that he’d overdone it. But it was more than that. It was treating Delia as a dupe.

She now recalled a few times recently that he’d grumped about being left to do all the bottling up at the end of a shift. I’m too nice a boss. These were times the too-nice boss had been in bed across town with another woman.

It was accomplished, bravura bullshittery. His deceit had been conducted so artlessly, all as part of Paul’s charming patter. Who exactly was she in love with?

Did any of his staff know? They might’ve had some idea, at these lock-ins. Did Aled and Gina know? Aled and Gina. She couldn’t believe it had taken this long to wonder. They’d declined the last dinner party, she remembered.

Had they cancelled out of awkwardness? Had Paul told Aled, in a drunken ‘Mate, I’ve messed up’ confidential?

She couldn’t pretend she was on her A-game, as time alone meant time thinking about her broken engagement, yet she saw precisely no one who could conceivably be Naan for the hour that she staked out Brewz and Beanz.

The only gang on a laptop now was a shoal of squawky teenage girls in private school uniforms, and whenever she passed them, ostensibly to get a stirrer or a sugar, she saw Facebook on their screen.

The Naan could be a member of staff, she supposed, tapping away out of sight in a backroom office. But his or her activity was unlikely to be confined to between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., if so. She checked his timeline her phone: no Naan tweets.

The search for answers would continue, in more than one area of her life. How ironic: Delia the ‘resident sleuth’, who hadn’t noticed her other half had another life.

Nine

‘I’m struggling to get my head around this,’ Emma said down the phone, as Delia wiped tears from under her eyes and sniffed loudly and snottily as she plodded back to the office.

‘Me too.’

‘Why? Early midlife crisis?’

‘I don’t think he’s in any crisis. Or he wasn’t. I think a hot student threw herself at him and he went for it.’

How long would it have gone on if she hadn’t found out? Even if he was going to break it off after the proposal, that was led by Delia’s decision-making, not Paul’s. Perhaps her proposal forced him into ending it with Celine, when he didn’t want to.

‘Did you see any signs at all?’ Emma said. ‘I thought everything was as good as ever between you.’

Emma had a squeaky baby voice. Every single clue about her was misleading. The cute name, the cherubic, wholesome tavern wench face with rosy cheeks, the sleek ‘lacrosse at Malory Towers’ yellow bob. In fact, she was one part raucous socialite to two parts terrifying litigator.

Emma knew that her forcefulness came as a surprise and she used it to good effect in her job. She even played up to it, with her Boden dresses and Mary Jane shoes. ‘They think they’re dealing with Shirley Temple and discover it’s more Temple of Doom.’

‘Nope, no signs at all. Zero. Which makes it worse. I’m officially stupid and he’s a really devious liar,’ Delia said.

‘You’re not the first person to not know your partner’s being unfaithful. It’s not your fault. Paul, though. I can’t believe it. I’m so bloody angry with him. He knows what he’s got in you.’

‘Does he?’ Delia said, miserably. She was ashamed of him, and annoyed she felt the pang of protectiveness. ‘Everything I thought I knew was a lie.’

‘Not everything. You’re staying at home?’

‘For the time being.’

‘Do you want him back?’

‘I don’t know,’ Delia raised her eyes to the cloudy heavens. ‘I honestly don’t know. He says he’ll end it with her, but I don’t know what to think.’

‘Does he say it was only sex?’

‘Yeah,’ Delia said with a shrug. It wasn’t how that text sounded. ‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us?’ Delia had never had an affair – perhaps they were always this febrile and needy, even when they were only about banging.

‘But he would, wouldn’t he?’ Delia continued. ‘It’s a lot less trouble to choose me rather than her. That’s the awful thing. I’m not sure of him in any way.’

‘You do have ten years of history and a home. He loves you.’

‘Ten years that’s culminated in me wanting to marry him, and him wanting to sleep with someone else. The reviews are in.’

‘How easy will it be to get your money out of the house, if you do split up?’

Emma knew how much Delia loved the house, and that Delia had co-paid the mortgage for long enough that a chunk of it was hers. Her lawyerly mind usually leaped straight to practicalities.

‘Not very. I don’t think Paul has the money set aside to give me my equity. The bar’s needed a lot of work recently.’

‘And then there’s calculating what you spent doing it up. Oh, I am so sorry for you, Delia. This is so shit. Can I come and visit?’

‘I’d love you to but there’s no space in Hexham. Shall I come down?’

‘Definitely. As soon as you like. This weekend! I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to run into a meeting …’

‘No, go!’ Delia made her farewells as her mobile pipped at her with a waiting call from Aled. She switched to answer it before she knew what she was doing.

‘Hi, Dee. How are you bearing up?’ he said, stiffly.

‘Hi,’ Delia said. ‘So Paul told you?’

‘Yeah. Only about a month ago. I told him to knock it on the head.’

Pause. ‘I meant he told you I knew.’

‘Oh. Fuck,’ Aled said.

Unlike his best mate, dissembling wasn’t Aled’s forte. A big bear of a man with black hair and beard and hands like shovels, he had the unlikely job of wedding photographer. It happened by default: he started as general freelance, then most of the work he got was nuptials. Delia had been going to ask him to cover theirs.

‘You knew a month ago, and you didn’t tell me?’ Delia said, warm with resentment and shame. Here was another stage of the post-revelation process. Humiliation.

‘I know, I’m so sorry. He would’ve killed me. I couldn’t get in between you.’

‘Why did he tell you?’

Delia could hear Aled’s reluctance and discomfort whooshing right down the phone line, but he’d not left himself with an escape route.

‘He. Err. He didn’t exactly choose to tell me. I saw him with her. Then he had to tell me what was going on.’

‘What? When?’

Delia came to a standstill, open-mouthed. Paul had been that indiscreet?

‘I caught them in a store room. I went in for last orders.’

‘Caught them?’ Delia said, feeling faint. ‘Shagging?’

‘No! Kissing.’

The store room was obviously Paul and Celine’s enchanted kingdom. Delia had only been in there when heaving dusty crates full of mini bottles of mixers around. An overwhelming desire to know what Celine looked like gripped her, to complete the picture. The picture of her and Paul locked in a passionate tongue-wrestling session, her back pressed against a shelf of Britvic tomato juice and soda.

Delia was speechless. If she tried to speak, the noises would be hysterical and indistinct.

‘Me and Gina both thought he was an idiot.’

Gina knew? Their closest friends in this city? Delia already knew it didn’t matter what time passed or what rationalisations they gave her. Nothing would ever be quite the same between them again.

She felt as if everything in her life had belonged to Paul, that she was only sharing with him. In separation, when you had to divvy up your possessions, the fact of his ownership was unavoidable.

Uncovering an affair wasn’t a one big fact headline story. It was like Matroyshka dolls, lies inside lies inside lies.

‘Paul’s told me he doesn’t want to lose you,’ Aled said.

‘Oh yeah, he obviously doesn’t want to lose me, you can see that. So, so careful. I feel like a precious crystal vase.’

‘Gina is worried you’ll blame her, too.’

Delia muttered that it was only Paul’s fault, while feeling slightly rankled she was doing the excusing and the ‘make feel better’ of the conversation.

‘Really though, Delia, think about it. We couldn’t take sides. We had to let Paul tell you.’

‘Did he tell you he was going to tell me?’

Aled paused. ‘He said he’d finish it with this girl and that was that.’

This answered the question about why Aled was making the condolence call, not Gina. She knew the lack of female solidarity was too glaring. They were both going to keep schtum about this, forever. Sitting there through the speeches on their wedding day, clapping and toasting them and knowing that Delia had been betrayed.

She wanted to say: You did pick a side – Paul’s. But she didn’t have the stomach for more fallings-out.

Then, with nonchalant brutality, Aled added: ‘The Paris trip is incredibly stupid, I told him that.’

‘The what?’ Delia said, flat with dread.

‘Some plan, Cel— she – wanted him to go to Paris, to get over this. You have to talk to Paul about it. I’m sorry.’

Aled sounded as if he’d have given anything not to have had this conversation now. How did he think Delia felt?

Delia could only make a ‘Nmmm, hmmm, yep, bye’ sound before she ran to the undergrowth in the gardens by the office and retched black coffee and bile into the earth, hearing birds tweeting around her and the odd murmur from an onlooker.

Somewhere behind her, a middle-aged woman said, ‘Monday afternoon! The amount students drink these days is disgusting, Stanley.’

‘I’ve got gastric flu, actually,’ Delia said, turning round, eyes pink, but the woman was shaking her head and walking away.

Delia briefly contemplated pulling a sickie – she looked bad enough for even Ann to give her the afternoon off – then imagined going home and staring at four walls in her old box bedroom in Hexham. With her worried parents knowing she was psychically, not physically, ill.

Delia repaired the damage as best she could, squinting into her compact with the sunlight behind her, and rootling out an Extra Strong mint to combat the vomit smell. She drifted back into the office like a pale wraith.

Paul was going to Paris? Did he mean what he’d said about ending it, or did he simply feel he had to say it was her he wanted, when confronted?

Delia had to now admit something else to herself. She’d always sensed she didn’t quite have his full attention. She doubted that Paul would have picked her out, or fought for her, or even been too cut up if she’d wobbled on her way in those red shoes, a few months down the line.

Deciding to propose fitted a pattern she’d not wanted to examine until now. She had built a life around Paul, but he hadn’t moved an inch. The decorating told the story in microcosm: he was happy for her to get on with it, but that wasn’t the same as properly participating.

He was a showman and a show off, and he was a little more in love with himself than he was with her.

It would take something fairly startling to concentrate Delia’s mind on her work: a bomb scare, or Ann being pleasant. However, at not long after five o’clock, she got something startling enough. An email so strange, she started in her seat, and turned to scan the room behind her.

From: [e-mail]

Are you looking for me?

Ten

It was one thing to search for someone who used the phrase ‘womble’s toboggan’ – Delia had to consult the Viz Profanisaurus on that one – in comments on newspaper message boards.

It was entirely another thing to suddenly find yourself in the crosshairs of some sort of omniscient online troublemaker. The back of Delia’s neck grew cold and she shivered.

She couldn’t think of any possible way this man (was it a man?) had found her. Yes, she’d been in the café, but how had he known she was looking for him? She’d not committed a single keystroke to discussing him online, so even if he’d hacked her email (and how would he do that?) there was no smoking gun. And how would s/he recognise her anyway?

The principle of Occam’s Razor, Delia told herself; the simplest answer was usually the right one.

So the Naan could be one of her colleagues, who’d overheard the briefing with Roger?

Only thing was, there was surely no one in this office of long-servers and clocker-offers who had anything approaching that level of disrespect for their salary.

I mean, was it polite Gavin, forty-three, who liked Dire Straits, wakeboarding, his kids, and hated his wife? Nope. Or maybe Jules, fifty-one – married, no kids, saving for a Greek Island hopping month off to celebrate her thirtieth wedding anniversary soon? Hardly.

The idea they were firing up private email in office hours to endanger their income stream was downright crazy. And they certainly weren’t Viz readers.

And yet. Peshwari Naan’s words glowed stark black and white in front of her. Delia could go straight to Roger with this email address evidence, and say ‘Voila, here’s a way to talk to him.’ But something stopped her, and she wasn’t sure what. Possibly pride. A little longer, and she might solve this mystery and produce a stellar result.

After fifteen minutes internal debate, Delia opened a reply.

Yes I am. How did you know I was looking for you?

No reply, though she nervily hit refresh on her inbox every two minutes until it was time to go home. Home to Hexham.

Her phone rang mere minutes after she left the office, and she realised Paul was watching the clock, anticipating her being free. She answered. They had to speak some time.

‘Delia, at last.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To see if we can meet up.’

‘I don’t want to. We haven’t got anything to discuss.’

‘I understand how angry you are but I don’t agree that we don’t have anything to talk about.’

‘Like Paris, you mean?’

There was a rewarding moment of stunned silence, then Paul muttered:

‘Jesus, Aled, you absolute twat.’ Louder: ‘Yes, Paris, we can talk about that. How I’m not going. I’ve finished with Celine.’

‘Sorry to hear. Hope you’re both OK. Hugs.’

Paul sounded shocked, and Delia wondered how small a mouse she must’ve been in this relationship for him to not expect this depth of fury and hurt at him sleeping with another woman. Did he think she’d sling the Le Creuset set about a bit, sob, and then eventually allow him to put his strong arms around her? She felt more like committing a blunt trauma head injury with the cast-iron casserole dish.

‘I know you need time. I’m here if you want to talk,’ Paul said.

‘You seem to assume I’m coming back, one time or another.’

‘I’m not assuming anything! I’m letting you know what’s happened and where I stand. Glad I did, given Aled’s obviously not a reliable go-between.’

So winning, so plausible, so very Paul. The Paul who’d lied through his teeth. What had Aled said? ‘I told him Paris was a stupid idea.’ It sounded as if Paul had initially told Aled he’d considered going, even if he’d rejected it later.

‘Aled said he’d had to talk you out of it.’

‘That’s … ! What? I’m so angry at Aled for this. I can only think he blurted and then thought he had to say that to you, to compensate. You know what he’s like, tact’s like a foreign language to him sometimes.’

‘Who knows? Not me. Bye, Paul.’

Delia couldn’t act as if she and Paul still had that shared ground, and were confidantes.

She had considered Paul’s explanation already: that Aled, conscious he’d put his not-inconsiderably-large feet in it earlier in the phone call, was trying to win brownie points by making Delia think he’d disapproved enough to intervene.

Delia knew what she was doing. She was trying to knit the wound back together almost instantly: to find a way out, so Paul’s behaviour wasn’t as bad as she feared. Delia wanted to believe him, rather than Aled. She stopped herself, but not before she’d shown that her instincts to side with Paul remained in place.

Delia was going to have to subdue impulses like this. She’d trusted him absolutely, without question, and look where it had got her. Now, she had questions – and absolutely no trust.

Eleven

Ralph was behind his closed bedroom door, rapping ‘Dis dat prime SHIT!’ to himself and bumping into furniture, so Delia decided he sounded quite caffeine-wired and was probably OK for a cup of tea.

She would’ve asked him to help her to track down Peshwari Naan, only Paul had always gently mocked her for thinking Ralph was an I.T. supremo. ‘He plays loads of games, Dee, he’s not an expert. That’s like expecting someone who has the telly on all day to write you The Sopranos, or fix the reception.’

As she turned to head back downstairs, she saw that their mum had washed his royal-blue-and-yellow-striped chip shop tabard and left it neatly folded outside his door.

Delia had tried to have motivational talks about seeking alternative employment with Ralph, but they always fell on deaf ears.

‘Do you enjoy work?’ was one tack she used. ‘No, that’s why they call it work,’ Ralph gurgle-shriek laughed.

‘Wouldn’t you like to use your brain more?’ Delia said, and Ralph shrugged. ‘Do you like your work?’

He had her there.

Delia wasn’t fired up by writing press releases about school litter-picking drives or changes to the traffic light signalling in Gosforth. Her job paid for her life when she wasn’t at work, that was all.

Ralph said he was doing the same, it was just that his occupation involved adding the green dye to vats of grey marrowfat peas, or dunking wire baskets of raw potato slices into bubbling fat.

From time to time, Delia appealed to her parents to help her cause. Their view was that Ralph wasn’t in any trouble, and seemed happy: he’d move out eventually. They weren’t ambitious for their kids, and Delia usually liked that.

On occasion though, she mildly resented it. A boot up the bum wasn’t always a bad thing, but hassling Ralph felt like prodding a gentle creature through the bars of its cage, and it’d never bite you back.

She plodded downstairs and headed towards the sticky-sealed UPVC back door, cup of tea in one hand – tea was the currency at her parents’; like Buddhists bringing gifts, you must always bear tea – and crossed the garden to her dad’s shed. It was more of a small summerhouse, and full of the forest floor smell of wood shavings.

Her dad was at his workbench with a piece of oak that had been smoothed and planed into a crest, presumably one day to be part of a bed or a wardrobe.

‘Thanks, love,’ he said, putting his goggles on his head and accepting a mug of milk-no-sugar with sandy hands.

‘Mum’s not home yet. I thought I might make spag bol for tea?’

‘Sounds nice. Are you OK?’ her dad said.

‘A bit sad,’ Delia said. ‘I’ll get better.’

‘You’re always so cheerful, usually,’ her dad said. He blew on his tea and paused. ‘Did he not want to get married?’

‘He said he’d get married,’ Delia said, then stopped. She’d only said she and Paul had been arguing and needed some space. (She’d told Ralph the truth, but Ralph wouldn’t pass it on, nor would they ask him.)

She was conscious that if she said Paul had been unfaithful, she might never restore his reputation in their eyes. It was one thing eventually deciding to forgive your cheating partner, but adjusting wasn’t so easily accomplished by your parents. Better to keep them in the partial dark until you’d decided. Once again, the scorned woman’s sour rewards seemed to be denied to her. ‘I don’t think he was very happy with me. Or as happy as I thought. I’m not sure.’

Her father nodded; perhaps he’d deciphered this code. ‘You make everyone else happy though.’

Delia nodded, smiled, and gulped down the threat of a sob.

‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ her dad concluded, fixing her with watery blue eyes, the pouchier version of Ralph’s. ‘No rush.’

‘Thanks, Dad. Good to know,’ Delia said, and she meant it.

Back in the galley kitchen, she chopped onions and garlic, fried mince, and slopped a tin of chopped tomatoes into the pan, rinsing the residue out with water and adding that too – a student ‘make it go further’ trick that had stuck. It occurred to her how reassuring cooking could be, even though she wasn’t hungry.

It was ironic: without her usually very healthy appetite, Delia could feel herself tightening and shrinking inside her clothes. As if she might end up disappearing entirely into a deflated dress, like the Wicked Witch melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

If she was still getting married, Delia would have been delighted: the corsets on some of the vintage gowns she’d admired looked worryingly constrictive. As it was, it didn’t matter. She could be any size she liked – Paul had still slept with Celine.

Once the Bolognese sauce had coalesced into something orange-brown instead of red-brown, she turned the gas down, put a lid on it and went up to her bedroom.

Delia hesitated, once she’d closed the door. She could hear Ralph’s singing and her dad’s saw. Her mum was at the allotment. She opened the wardrobe. There at the bottom, under the old clothes and mothballed coats, were flat, clear plastic storage boxes with handles.

She slid them out, hauling them onto the bed, and opened the top one. Delia was oddly anxious, excited, and self-conscious. It was so long since she’d looked at any of this.

Delia had started The Fox when she was a teenager. It was an idea borne of daydreaming at school, when life had been getting on top of her. She was teased for her red hair. She wasn’t an exceptional student, she wasn’t an athlete, or cool, or popular.

She was lonely. So she fantasised another life for herself. One where she was all the things she wanted to be in the real world – special, fantastic, heroic, brave, exciting, useful. As a child, she was fascinated by a fox that visited the family garden, and bombarded her parents with questions. Why did it only come out at night? Did all the foxes know each other? Where were they hiding during the day? Delia had decided her invented answers were preferable to their explanations.

When the idea to draw a comic book occurred in her teens, she knew straight away it had to involve that fox.

As a superhero, The Fox lived in a subterranean lair, travelled on a super-fast bicycle and had an actual talking fox sidekick, called Reginald. Her network of bushy-tailed spies told The Fox what was going on in the city, and she used this information to uncover wrongdoing and fight crime.