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It’s Not Me, It’s You
When she’d told Paul about it once, he said: ‘LSD is a helluva drug.’
Delia had always been creative and never quite known how to channel it: in writing and drawing The Fox, she found herself fulfilled in a way she’d never been before. She bought herself fine-nibbed pens and A3 drawing pads with her pocket money and escaped into the frames of the story, spending hours cross-legged on her bed, sketching away. Everyone in her family had their magical outlet from mundanity, and now Delia did too.
She felt too foolish to show any of her friends, but luckily having a brother as offbeat as Ralph meant she had a non-judgemental audience. When she’d first shyly showed him The Fox’s escapades, she half-expected even him to laugh at her. Instead, he was fascinated – and with Ralph, you always knew you were getting a genuine reaction.
‘Can I see more?’ Ralph would ask. ‘What happens next?’
What happens next? might’ve been the most thrilling thing anyone had ever said to Delia. Someone cared what might happen in a fictional universe she’d made up, simply to entertain herself, as if it had a life of its own. As if The Fox existed.
Somehow, though The Fox had started as a Delia alter ego, it became instructive to her. If there was something happening and Delia didn’t know how to deal with it, she punted it over to The Fox, presented the challenge in a universe where she could make the courageous choice.
She carried on writing and drawing it at university, when she studied Graphic Design, but shelved it when she graduated, lacking the self-belief to launch a career. ‘What I learned on my course is that everyone else is more talented than me,’ she told Emma, who thought her work was incredible and called her a raving idiot. Delia complained she had all kinds of technical deficiencies compared to her peers. Emma vehemently disagreed. ‘You have something very special that sets you apart from most people: you have charm,’ Emma had said.
Instead of trying and failing, Delia never tried. She told herself that failure was inevitable and she’d only look silly in the process. It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation. So Delia fell into the kind of jobs that educated young women with a nice phone manner in the twenty-first century fall into, because that’s what she told herself she was good for.
This evening, a dozen years since university, Delia felt faintly daft returning to the escapism of her youth. However, as she turned the pages, she found herself grinning despite herself. It was sparky and joyful in a way you so often weren’t, in adulthood.
What did Ralph say? ‘You’re in charge.’ She was surprised at how inspiring those three words felt. Perhaps Ralph was much better at motivating her, than vice versa.
She was lost in re-reading The Fox’s adventures until her mum, who’d somehow returned home without Delia noticing, called up the stairs to ask if she should put the spaghetti on.
After dinner, Delia picked up a pen and tentatively began a fresh page of The Fox. It came to her immediately, like mouthing the lyrics to an old song you’d not heard in years, and yet instinctively knowing the next line.
Twelve
Had Delia not told Roger about Peshwari Naan’s surprise appearance in her inbox because the search was a welcome distraction from her misery?
The thought only occurred to her as she turned her computer on the next morning, and felt a shiver of excitement wash up and down her arms. It was an analgesic for the pain of thinking about Paul.
Sure enough, she had a Naan e-communiqué waiting for her, from a Peshwari Naan Gmail address.
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
Why are you looking for me?
Delia typed:
From: Delia Moss
You didn’t answer my question! Quid pro quo.
Would she have to wait another day for the response? That would be deeply frustrating. No, she had it within ten minutes. Another thought: the Naan had an office job. The log-off time yesterday had been consistent with that.
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
I knew because I am quite good at this ‘computers’ thing. Now you …?
Delia wasn’t supposed to be hiding her intent, she supposed. She’d better chuck in an emoticon to keep everything friendly.
From: Delia Moss
That’s not really an answer, is it? 
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
I’m not negative, really. I post things that make me laugh. (It’s the most troublesome of the Naans. Why put fruit in it? I know you’ll be with me on this.)
From: Delia Moss
OK, but … they don’t always make other people laugh. Some of the councillors have got quite upset. (Yep, agree on the Peshwari wrongness. Chilli and/or garlic, every time. Coriander for a curveball.)
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
That’s because they’re hairy old cornflakes who wouldn’t know humour if it dry-pumped them from behind with a strap-on while grunting their name. (I also like cheese, and keema.)
Delia did a small bark-laugh at her desk, and Ann, busy see-sawing a bent big toe with her special chiropractic elastic band, looked over suspiciously.
‘Something on Buzzfeed,’ Delia mumbled, while typing a reply.
From: Delia Moss
Whether that’s true or not … would you consider toning it down?
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
Is there any reason why I should?
Delia drummed her fingers on the desk.
From: Delia Moss
As a favour to me? I’ve been tasked with getting you to stop. It’d hugely help me if you did. Or minded your manners a bit more. My boss would be happier.
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
Maybe your boss should grow a bigger pair of plums and tell these councillors to get a sense of perspective. I’m entertaining people and adding to the sum of bliss in the universe.
From: Delia Moss
You can be entertaining and not go so far as to suggest Councillor Hammond told the AGM he bleaches his bumhole.
From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com
That one wasn’t a lie. Check the meeting minutes. He described it as looking as fresh as a grapefruit half afterwards.
Delia nearly guffawed at her desk and stifled it in time, as Ann’s eyes slid towards her again.
Delia reckoned she could talk this Naan round. She’d established a rapport, now to see if she could gently dissuade him from Viz-quoting anarchy.
The mystery remained: how the hell did he find her? That part was spooky and baffling.
Her mobile pinged with a text; Emma.
I will be calling you in five mins. I have an idea. Move to a secure area and open your mind to incoming magnificence. E X
Delia smiled to herself and slipped the phone into the pocket of her chambray pinafore dress, making her way to the gardens outside. Park, if you were being fancy: a strip of green between the council and the rest of the world.
As Delia kicked her heels, she thought how she’d forgotten – to her chagrin – how much she and Emma meant to each other.
Something in Delia’s good-humoured unfussiness matched up very well with Emma’s ebullient smarts. Delia was all about home, Emma was all about work, yet they equally enjoyed sitting around giggling at stupid things while wearing loose pyjama trousers. They found the bitchier shades of female gatherings hard to take. They weren’t snipy, or competitive with each other, and neither of them ever gave the other grief for a lapse in correspondence. They instinctively got each other, in the way of great friendships. In their differences, they learned from each other.
So while Delia was wilting and fading in the face of Paul’s loss, Emma wasn’t saying poor you and plumping her cushions and making chicken soup. She was right there in the sinking boat, trying to bale the water out.
It occurred to Delia that she was also part of another long-term double act, a still-devoted couple, and the thought comforted her.
Nevertheless, Delia did worry what scheme this might be. No matter what worked for Emma in resolving a dispute, she was not going to host an air-clearing round table summit with Paul and Celine.
When Delia answered her mobile, she heard a soundtrack of ambient traffic bustle and the heavy breathing of someone walking fast. Emma’s whole existence moved at a different mph to Delia’s.
‘I can’t talk long! I’ve had a huge brainwave. You’re going to say no at first and then you’re going to think on it and say yes.’
‘Oh, kaaay …’
‘You know we were saying you should come down? Why not move in for a while?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, move in here with me. I have a spare room and you could resolve my guilt about not looking for a lodger. I didn’t want one and I can afford not to but Dad’s been on at me about it. Live here for free, sort yourself out, make me dinner. Do that mysterious thing you do where you make a place feel homely. We could be a comfort to each other, like the two old spinsters in A Room with a View. Your room doesn’t have a view, by the way.’
Delia hadn’t yet seen Emma’s new flat in Finsbury Park. With the hours Emma worked, Delia suspected she hadn’t seen much of it either. Delia lifted her face to the sun and enjoyed being out of doors, not in her office, a place that smelled of carpet and disappointment.
‘The small issue of my employment? I can’t leave my job,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s the only job I have, and I need the money?’
‘You always said that job wasn’t a job for life thing, and how long have you been there now? Seven, eight years? When are you going to leave?’
Delia grimaced. True, but. You didn’t get two broken legs and then decide the time was right to do a parachute jump. Or something.
‘I know. However, having lost my home and my partner, I’m not in the mindset of binning the job.’
‘I knew you’d say that. It seems like the worst time to do it, when actually it’s the best time. Everything’s upside down, anyway. Also, if you want Paul back …’
‘That’s a big if,’ Delia said, thinking Emma had her sussed. Her eyes drifted to a woman bending down, fussing with a moon-faced churlish baby in a buggy.
‘If you do want him back, coming down here will ensure you have his complete attention. Trust my instincts. I know the difference between a small fix and a big fix. What’s happened between you and Paul needs a big fix. Make him miss you.’
‘Won’t I clear a path for him and the shag piece?’
‘False. You’re already out of the way, if he wants that. But while you’re in Newcastle, you can return to him any time. In London, you’re suddenly out of sight and very much in heart and mind. If there was maybe a little too much routine before …’
Delia’s stomach flexed. She’d thought that routine was what happiness felt like.
‘… You doing something dramatic and unexpected will completely focus his mind. He’ll be running after you. You’ll have the proof it’s you he wants.’
Delia tried this idea on for size. Paul would be startled, it’s true.
Domesticated Delia disappearing to the Big Smoke. She wasn’t sure that doing rash things because of how they’d look to Paul was very healthy, mind you. And it could backfire spectacularly.
‘My boss has a saying,’ Emma said. ‘When the fight comes, don’t turtle up.’
‘Turtle up?’
‘Go into your shell.’
Emma loved management-speak neologisms.
‘So you want me to be your housekeeper?’ Delia said.
‘No! Well, yes. If you want to be. Mainly I want you to keep me company and put yourself back on track.’
‘I couldn’t not work and live off you. That’s mad.’
‘Then look for a job! You’re qualified in comms, PR. There’ll be tons more opportunities here. I’ll start sniffing around.’
Delia nearly said they were plenty of jobs in the north too, they weren’t living in black and white. But Emma didn’t generally do that London superiority thing, so Delia forgave her the odd slip.
‘Don’t! I’ll think about it,’ Delia said, ‘I promise.’
She wouldn’t, she was pacifying Emma. It was nice to think she was wanted. And it had been nice to toy with the idea of making Paul sit up and take notice. Realistically, there was no way Delia was adding ‘unemployed’ to her tick list of life achievements. London intimidated her. It was so gigantic. You were supposed to feel like you were in the middle of things, but you were never in the middle of it.
As she rang off and raised her eyes from the ground, they met those of a girl with a liquorice-black pudding basin haircut, bright pink lippy and a nervous, expectant expression. She’d been waiting for Delia to finish her call. She could quite conceivably be twenty-four.
Delia felt she might faint. Not here. Not now.
‘Excuse me?’
Delia’s mouth was dry and her heart pulsing: zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom.
‘… Yes?’
‘Where did you get your dress? I love it.’
Relief flooded out of Delia like rainbow cosmic energy.
‘URBAN OUTFITTERS! IT WAS AGES AGO THOUGH, SORRY! Hahahaha,’ she squealed, while the girl looked politely startled at Delia being drunk. ‘Maybe try eBay?’
The girl smiled, clearly thinking: and maybe Betty Ford for you.
Even if she wasn’t going to London, Delia thought, as she trudged back into the office, shaky with fight-or-flight adrenaline, she couldn’t pretend Newcastle felt the best place for her either.
Thirteen
Delia lay in the avocado bath and braced her toes on the taps, as she’d done a thousand times in her youth, looking at her burgundy nail varnish. She always wore dark red on her pale feet; it reminded her of a childhood fairy story about drops of blood on snow.
The house was quiet: Ralph was on a shift and her parents were at their weekly pub quiz.
In her reflection in the plastic-framed mirror at the end of the tub, she could see the hollows of her eyes as charcoal smudges, after flannelling off her black eyeliner. She’d worn make-up like it for so long, even she thought she looked peculiar without it, like a newborn mole.
Hmmm. Not so newly born any more. Not long till thirty-four. Delia hadn’t wanted to think about this until now, but there was something about being naked that forced her into stark honesty.
Here was the thought that had buzzed like a wasp at the edge of her thoughts, ever since the revelation about Celine.
If she wanted kids, Paul was still probably the safer option than re-launching herself back into the dating scene in her mid-thirties, hoping to find another solid prospect.
Even if Delia met someone else soon – and this seemed unlikely – she had to factor in the time to get to know and be sure of him, before taking the step into parenthood. She hated to give in to outmoded ideas about being a single woman of a certain age – no choice should be made in desperation, or it wasn’t a choice at all. She’d be the first to tell a friend she had all the time in the world. But you said things like that to make those without a choice feel better. If she was honest, her situation as it stood felt perilous.
As she and Paul discussed the other night, where would you even start, dating now? Deeply unfairly, at thirty-five, he was still young enough to be the cool rather than creepy older guy to a twenty-four-year-old. He could wait till she was, say, thirty and ready to be thinking about a family.
Delia didn’t have similar leeway.
She’d been out of circulation so long, the mindset required to make polite conversation over a gin and tonic with a stranger you might want to sleep with seemed utterly alien and overwhelming.
Before Paul, she’d pinballed from boyfriend to boyfriend without ever having to consider the getting of them. They’d always been there when required, and sometimes when not required. Modern dating, it needed practice – it wasn’t something you could start from cold and expect instant success. You weren’t without baggage, and neither were your prospectives.
Emma was long-term single, with the odd dishonourable exception of posh, brusque men she met through work and had brief, brusque flings with. Delia had always shivered slightly at the brutality of it all. Emma had been dumped a couple of times by social media, seeing Harry or Olly with someone else in a ski resort selfie. (Though Delia put these cruelties down partly to Emma’s self-confessed questionable taste in men.)
Emma had been looking for her Paul online and through friends-of-friends all her life, and had yet to encounter one.
Then there were further hurdles, if Delia miraculously hit it off with a potential in a drink at The Baltic. New person sex. Gulp.
Delia looked down at her body.
She hadn’t needed to assess its aesthetic value quite so bluntly before: it did its job, and it was loved. She might want a flatter stomach, but as long as there were A-line skirts, creamy blue cheese and Paul around, it wasn’t a priority.
Now she wondered at what restoration work might be needed before it could be opened to the public again. She gazed despondently at the white orbs of her breasts, bobbing in the water. In clothes, they got a fair bit of interest. Double D-cups were popular enough with menfolk.
However, cosmetic surgery had come in during Delia’s decade off the market. Frighteningly, she had seen the word ‘saggy’ cruelly hurled at women she thought of as aspirationally pert. A larger chest size inevitably meant she had some ‘hang’, when out of a bra. The thought of pinging the clasp on one and being assessed by someone she didn’t know all that well was frightening.
Delia shivered: Emma had once been hard-dumped right after the first time with someone. Imagine that. Even Emma’s buoyant demeanour had taken a bad knock.
Delia wasn’t thin, or sculpted. She had little silvery shoals of stretchmarks on her hips. And she had hair.
Would being a natural redhead startle some? Given that extreme waxes were the near-norm? She used to get teased for having a Ronald McDonald wig in the games changing rooms at school. She didn’t fancy discovering the prejudice was alive and kicking, two decades later, right when she and what she could quaintly call a new lover were about to get down to it.
A new lover – it seemed impossible. Paul and Delia. Delia and Paul. They belonged to each other. Yet he’d loaned himself out.
She added more scalding hot water to the bath, to make up for how cold she felt.
Was this how it worked, coming to terms with an affair – like passing through the stages of a death: anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance?
Yes, a bereavement was exactly what it was. Accepting that the old relationship with Paul, the one where he’d never be unfaithful and she had unshakeable belief in him, was dead. If they got back together, it would be a new relationship. Many features of the old, but not the same. Realising that gave her much sadness, but some peace.
What if she went to London? Got away from all this and gained some perspective with distance? Only that would mean becoming unemployed. As much as she was indifferent towards her job, Delia couldn’t quite countenance it.
Delia dipped her head under the water and let her hair float in a warm halo of snakes around her skull, thinking of herself as a modern-day Ophelia, submerged in Radox pine bubbles. Her feelings for Paul hadn’t vanished over the course of one ugly evening.
She could see a time she would go back to him. She also knew she had a giant lump of stone inside her stomach, a dead hard weight of hurt and resentment that would have to dissolve, slowly, until she could feel love towards him again.
Delia didn’t know how or when or if she’d be able to rid herself of it. It seemed a big enough challenge to have admitted that she would try.
Fourteen
‘We’ve had a major security breach and this Peshwari Naan pest has ratcheted up to Threat Level: Amber,’ Roger barked at Delia, causing everyone to look at them both, obviously wondering how words in their native language could be strung together to form something so incomprehensible. ‘There have been some developments.’
Delia looked at him blankly.
‘Are you, or are you not meant to be updating and monitoring our Twitter feed?’
‘Yes,’ she said, bewildered.
‘When did you last tweet?’
‘Erm, an hour or so ago?’
‘Then log on to our account,’ Roger said, leaning over Delia and heavy-breathing decaf Caffe Hag down the neckline of her sweater. He adopted the hand-on-hip lean-in pose, with the self-importance of a security spook briefing the POTUS at a COBRA meeting.
Delia obliged, feeling a significant prickle of fear. Should she mention the Naan emails yet?
She brought up the council’s timeline and instantly clenched her jaw to keep the muscles in her neck from spasming in laughter.
It was full of fake tweets.
Comrades! It’s Awards Season Again! Please nominate in the following categories …
Ugliest Planning Decision
Most Harrowing Public Toilet Experience
Hottest Councillor
Best Dogging Spot
Delia said: ‘Oh dear,’ and cleared her throat. Do not laugh, do not laugh …
‘You hadn’t seen this?’
‘Of course not!’ Delia said, hastily moving to the Edit Account Settings section. ‘I’ll change the password right now.’
‘We’ve been hacked?’ Roger said, pushing his science teacher glasses up his nose.
No. I thought it might be fun to pretend the council has an award for Most Specific Graffiti.
‘How do we know it’s Peshwari Naan?’ Delia said.
‘Same M.O.’ Roger took the mouse from Delia and scrolled down the page. ‘The fictionalised quotes.’
Coun. Janet Walworth said: ‘The awards are a chance for you to tell us which of our policies really twat you off.’
‘This has never happened before. That password change may hold him off for now but in light of this, I wonder how many vulnerabilities the system has. I will put our I.T. team on it. Now, please take a look at what’s happening over at the Chronicle.’
Roger was absolutely loving this, Delia realised.
Delia pulled up the Chronicle site and under Roger’s guidance, put ‘city council’ into its search engine. The first story that came up was about an unemployment seminar.
Delia scrolled the comments, not expecting to see anything, but there, third down was Peshwari (did this person really have a job?).
Hey guys: got to let you know that the Powers That Be and pen pushers up at City Hall are on to me. Guess some people don’t like The Sheeple to see with their own eyes. I’ve been asked to ‘mind my manners’. Well, this truther won’t be silenced! The chief executive sits on a throne of lies. And signs off expenses for big platters of Ferrero Rocher at receptions. This genie is OUT of the BOTTLE.
