If I Never Met You

Dan knocked on the door dead on seven p.m. and Laurie felt his nerves in this uncharacteristic punctuality. When you’re so far on the back foot that you don’t want any other single thing counting against you.

He was in a new jacket, a sage green padded puffy thing she’d have told him not to buy, and she vaguely wondered if he’d dressed up for this, too. Him having clothes she’d not seen jangled her. It wasn’t how she pictured him, in the intervening time. She’d been wondering if she could stand to turn him down, to make him spend longer in purgatory. The fact she felt undermined by the fact he’d bought winterwear without consulting her told her she didn’t have anything like the strength.

Dan sat down and refused Laurie’s offer a beer – ‘I’m driving’ – which she took to be him signalling that he didn’t expect a yes, wasn’t being complacent.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said, and Laurie frowned.

‘A bit formal? Are we communicating as lawyers now?’

He shifted his weight and coughed and didn’t make any cautious gesture of amusement.

A tiny amount of dread entered Laurie’s body. She couldn’t read him.

‘Was it to say something in particular?’

‘Yes … OK. God. There’s no good way of saying this.’

Using that line again? Jesus. She remained impassive. He didn’t deserve the smallest amount of help and she’d hate herself if she gave it to him. It was bad enough she was taking him back.

‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Laurie’s palms were suddenly slick, and she could feel the pulse in her wrist. I wanted you to be the first to know was a REALLY fucking odd introduction to ‘I made a mistake.’ If not that, what?

Was he off to find himself in the Outback, despite her mockery over his poor globetrotter credentials? She was going to have to grit her teeth through Christmas, desperately hoping he’d not encountered any misfortune while hiking through remote dusty areas of the planet? Desperately scanning his Facebook, hoping he’d post a proof of life photo, looking tanned and craggy?

‘First to know what?’ Laurie said finally, into the agonising silence, during which Dan’s face was etched with grave worry.

‘I’ve met someone.’

The phrase smashed into the living room like a meteorite, taking out the fireplace, leaving a smoking crater. She physically recoiled. He’d come here to say he was with another woman? Already? Laurie had not, for a single second, entertained that this was what happened next. Not this fast. He’d only just moved out? How was this possible?

‘Met someone?’ she repeated incredulously, staring at the pre-faded, pretend-worn knees on his indigo jeans, clothes which she realised she’d not seen before either.

Dan nodded.

‘You’re together, like a couple?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve slept with someone?’

This was patently a stupid question, a teenager’s question, given he’d called them a couple. Laurie was so far beyond dealing with this that she had no process between the rapid firing in her brain, and her mouth.

Dan twisted his hands together and said:

‘Yes.’

Laurie wanted to scream, or sob. Until now, his leaving was only words, a temporary absence, and a three-month lease. A few patching-up conversations with their parents, and Emily, a year that you ‘put behind you’ when you raised a glass at the New Year bells.

Now it was definitive, he’d done something he couldn’t undo. Laurie steadied herself, with great effort, and asked, ‘But – we’ve barely split up? It’s been weeks?’

Dan didn’t reply to this, but carried on. ‘She’s called Megan. She works at Rawlings.’

Giving her a name made it real. Laurie tried to quell her spinning stomach, and racing mind, to focus. There would be time to fall apart later. Lots of it. Rawlings, a rival firm. Someone he’d met in court.

‘And you started seeing her, when?’ she said, with restrained force.

Dan twisted his hands some more.

‘Few weeks back. A month or so.’

‘But you knew her already?’

‘Yeah. A year, year and a half.’

‘Did I really mean this little? That you could move on this quick?’

He was silent.

‘What the FUCK, Dan? What?! Please explain this because I’m not close to understanding how you could be this ruthless?’

‘It’s not something I planned,’ he said, eventually. ‘I think … the end is more recent for you than for me, in that I wasn’t happy for a while.’

‘Oh God, so we’re back to the idea you’d been miserable for ages?’

‘No, not ages!’

It was over. He was with someone else. Yet Laurie was already asking herself how they came back from this. There is no ‘they’, a voice told her. There is ‘them’ now. Have you gone deaf?

‘You fucking sadist,’ Laurie said, shrill but hoarse. ‘Who are you? I don’t even know. I really don’t even know.’

Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry, Laurie told herself. Not yet, though it felt like she had psychically collapsed in on herself, like a dying star.

She had an enemy, a nemesis, a rival she never knew about, who had climbed into bed with her long-term partner when, somehow, Laurie wasn’t looking.

Laurie hadn’t for a second considered there was anyone else. When she asked Dan that question, that first night, it was more to embarrass him than anything. To point up the seriousness and the stakes of his actions to him. Laurie was braced to receive Dan back, and now this?

And when exactly did it start?

She held up a trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. ‘You’ve been gone ten weeks, Dan, and you got together with her a few weeks back. And she’s already important enough for you to come round and tell me about? Something’s not quite adding up, is it? This is Concorde speed.’

Dan blew air out. He looked like his jaw had locked, that he was finding it difficult to speak. He couldn’t look at her. ‘Obviously we were friends, before. Only friends though, nothing happened.’

‘But you knew that you were going to get together with her when you left me, didn’t you?’

Dan was vigorously shaking his head but Laurie knew the bones of him, she’d known him half her life. She could see in his eyes that he was lying. Never mind that, she could see on the bare timeline here, he was lying. No intuition needed, that’s how staggeringly obvious his cruelty was.

‘Nothing happened before …’

‘Don’t try to fucking out-lawyer a lawyer, Dan. “Nothing happened” – meaning you waited to have sex until you told me you were leaving me. But she was right there, lined up. You left me for her.’

He shook his head but again Laurie could see he had no words, without completely perjuring himself.

Laurie still loved Dan, deeply, and yet with the excruciating pain he was inflicting on her, she felt the banal truism of there being a fine line between love and hate.

Laurie knew that most people were murdered by someone they knew; she’d stood up in court and argued for the killers’ bail applications, while they wept not only about their fate, but about their loss.

In this moment, she understood why.

8

Laurie suppressed her homicidal impulses and tried to summon every ounce of someone who thought strategy for a living to handle this, to not let Dan off the hook by putting her feelings first.

‘So you were obviously really fucking heartbroken. How long did you wait to climb into bed, after the Pickfords van left here? Days? Hours?’

‘I was. I am. She has nothing to do with us, with what happened.’

‘Oh what SHIT! You’d fallen for someone else, you dumped me for her, but you’ve convinced yourself she is incidental?! This is beyond insulting. It’s downright fucking ludicrous.’

‘Laurie, if we were right, if things had been OK, Megan wouldn’t have happened. The cause and effect is the wrong way round if you think Megan split us up.’

Laurie gasped. ‘These are mental gymnastics, contortions, so you don’t have to feel guilty. Basically it’s my fault, for not making you happy enough?’

‘No! Relationships fail all the time, I’m not saying it’s your fault. This is what has happened, that’s all, and I know it’s shitty for you, I know that.’

‘Yeah relationships are especially likely to fail when one person has started an affair. You know, that thing we promised we’d never ever do to one another. Remember that?’

‘It wasn’t an affair,’ Dan said, grimly, but to Laurie’s ears, without the necessary conviction.

‘Being on a promise with someone is an affair, Dan.’

He said nothing, because she had nailed it. The utter emptiness of this argumentative victory. In fact victory was the wrong word. Sour satisfaction at best, except she felt no satisfaction whatsoever.

‘You had an affair and you won’t even do the decent thing and say as much, call it what it is, in case it makes you feel bad.’

‘I feel awful.’

Laurie had to tell herself to breathe before she could speak again.

‘I begged you to tell me what was going on, I begged you. And you gave me a load of WANK about finding yourself. You had met some other woman you wanted to bang, and you spun me this line about your existential angst?!’

‘All of that was true!’ Dan said, more vehement now, but Laurie knew he was only vehement in the way anyone in a corner was, with a near-hyperventilating woman shouting unwanted truths at him.

‘Was it too obvious, too LAMESTREAM, to admit you’d found a better option, like a million other boring ageing men who can’t keep it in their pants? Is she twenty-five, this mysterious someone who doesn’t make you feel trapped, and like there’s nothing worthwhile between here and death?’

‘Thirty-five.’

Instantly, despite her fury and humiliation at the idea some lissom ingénue had stolen Dan’s affections, this was worse – Laurie hadn’t been traded for a younger model. She’d lost to a woman of her own age, or thereabouts. It was a fair fight, this boxing match, they were in the same weight category with similar length of training. Laurie was simply too boring.

That fear was lurking behind it all, she knew that. Domesticated, exemplary employee, devoted to Dan, ticked so many boxes – but dull. Someone who could make you feel like life held no surprises anymore. Right now, she wanted to surprise the shit out of him, but the only ways she could think of involved petrol and matches.

‘I promise you, that’s not how it was. I was already unhappy, the thing with Megan came right out of the blue …’

‘This is such bullshit!’ Laurie shouted, reacting to hearing her name again like she’d been tasered. ‘Your whole thing was oh no I hate this conventional, being tied down, settled monogamy, it’s not for me, maybe I will go backpacking. And your first big gesture of freedom is getting another girlfriend?! Another lawyer, at that?’

Laurie had to pause for breath but she knew she was dying for Dan to say, she’s not my girlfriend, it’s a fling. He didn’t of course – if she was a fling, why would he be here? Which meant Laurie was still gambling, even now, they could come back from this.

Being confronted with how little you could accept from someone, when your heart was on the line and you were being tortured, was awful. Laurie hated herself too, in that very moment.

‘I don’t know what you expect me to say, Dan. Great, crack on, hope the sex is amazing,’ Laurie spat. ‘Why even tell me?’

There was a pause, as this had been a rhetorical question, and yet Laurie realised she’d hit on a very good point. Why had he told her? Fear of Salter & Rowson’s Stasi seeing them, perhaps? Except … this was a very ballsy move, nevertheless. Dan was the man who even after ten weeks had yet to tell his parents they’d separated (Laurie had stopped answering the house phone in case it was his mother calling); he didn’t go looking for trouble or difficulty, to put it mildly.

Dan said, haltingly, ‘Because …’

‘Because …?’

Another silence. ‘Because you deserved to hear from me’ or some other platitude wouldn’t warrant this hesitation, and the advocate in Laurie asked: why has he told you now? Why not wait a few months and look less of a bastard? Her whole body was coated in a thin layer of freezing sweat.

‘Oh, fuck … I have absolutely no idea how to say this and it’s still not real to me. I have no idea how to say this, no idea …’

He was gabbling.

Through a cascade of her tears, Laurie said, ‘What the fuck? What more is there? Are you getting married or something?’ Her heart was racing.

‘She’s pregnant,’ Dan heaved out. He buried his face in his hands, almost as a defensive move, as if he thought Laurie might physically attack him.

Time stood still for a moment, time in this world that Laurie didn’t understand or want to live in any more. Pregnant. Pregnant. It echoed through their thoughtfully decorated, tasteful, affluent Chorltonite couldn’t-stand-it-for-a-day-longer-could-you-Dan living room.

‘She’s …? What? It’s yours?’

Dan nodded and Laurie couldn’t absorb what he was saying.

If she’d been shocked before, it didn’t compare to this state of total standstill. Laurie simply stared. She couldn’t be. What? What?

‘It was an accident, she said she was on the pill. But she wants to keep it. Fuck, Laurie, I didn’t plan for this, I promise you, it’s happened out of nowhere.’

‘How …?’ No not how, she knew how. Don’t be sick, not yet. ‘When?’

‘Two months.’

‘You’ve only been moved out a little over two months. You jumped right into her bed?’

Dan stared at her levelly, and emptily, and Laurie snorted, a watery snort of horror and disgust and disbelief.

‘You’re staying with her, and you’re having a baby?’ Laurie said. Dan nodded and she saw his tears and she wanted to punch him in the face. ‘You told me you didn’t want kids?’

He was grey-white. ‘I didn’t. I don’t. It’s an accident.’

Enough. Laurie stood up, grabbed Dan by the shoulders and manhandled him out of the room and into the hallway, shrieking, ‘Get out! Get the fuck out!’ while Dan made useless vague noises of objection.

‘You do this to me, you tell me you don’t want kids, and you do this?!’

She pushed Dan out of the door so hard he stumbled and nearly fell over. Laurie didn’t care if the whole street heard, or saw.

She slammed the door with much force and noisily slid the bolt. It wasn’t exactly likely he’d risk his life by using his key to get back in, but it felt the right thing to do all the same. Final.

She leaned her head on the glass for just a moment and then turned and raced up to the bathroom, vomiting into the loo, retching again and again until there was nothing left, then slumped back down on the floor. She had a good view of the underside of the bowl and the whiskers that coated it – Dan was gone forever, but still here recently enough she’d still be cleaning up his mess. Mess? Devastation.

Baby. He was having a child, with someone called Megan. He had been having an affair for some time, that was certain, emotionally if not physically. He’d celebrated his first nights of freedom by impregnating someone else. Laurie was going to have to recite these utterly harrowing, bizarre facts until they sunk in for her.

He was going to be a dad. But not with her. An image sprung into her head, a pink turnip-faced newborn with froggy eyes, wrapped in a cocoon of white crochet blanket eyes, Dan cradling it, looking up at the camera with the shell shocked, Cloud Nine expression of an hours-old parent. He would do this, without her. She would not be the mother of his children. He would not be the father of hers.

Hers. Hah.

Laurie made a noise that sounded peculiar to her, in the quiet of the house, a kind of strangled whimper, shading into an animalistic howl. It echoed, unanswered, in her empty house.

9

Laurie rang in sick the next morning. It helped her voice was barely a croak as she spoke to the receptionist to claim upset stomach and the sweats.

‘Ugh yeah you sound like shit, don’t come in and give it to us,’ said Jan on reception, who no one had ever confused with a bleeding heart liberal.

Laurie crawled back to bed and lay staring at the white star-shaped ceiling lampshade as the hours drifted past.

She felt certain Dan had gone in to the office because 1. he’d have guessed she might not, and they couldn’t both be off without questions and a cover story about food poisoning or something, which was a falsehood too far now, and 2. he wasn’t shattered by what was happening.

The only communication she received was an email from hyper efficient Jamie Carter: Hey sorry to bother when you’re on your sick bed but do you know anything about the adjournment in the Cheetham Hill robbery?

Oh, go swivel. ‘If ambition was hair, he’d be the Yeti,’ as Bharat once said.

Laurie pretended to herself she was ill and therefore allowed herself to doze.

When she rejoined consciousness for a spell in the last afternoon, she had a text from Bharat – WTAF, YOU ARE NEVER ILL! It was Di’s baking day so I saved you a jam tart, but a fly got stuck in it xxx – and another, from Dan.

Hi. Hope you’re OK. Can’t imagine how shit you feel Laurie and I’m so so so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen. I don’t know what to say. Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me.

When Dan dropped his initial bombshell – she couldn’t think of that partial account of a conversation now without clutching her chest, like she might have a coronary with the rage – she’d wondered if he’d become an arsehole. She now knew the answer to that. Or if he’d not become one, maybe he’d always had this tendency, it had got worse, and somehow Laurie had blinded herself to it.

‘Call me if you want to, even to shout at me’ was revolting – the preening self-regard and false big-hearted performative good guyness of go on, I know I deserve it, once you’d swaggered clear of the blast.

He’d very likely robbed Laurie of her chance of parenthood herself with his indecision, walked out the door and immediately inseminated someone else. She hadn’t even begun the work of working out how upset she was about her odds of motherhood being dramatically slashed, after a lifetime of thinking it was there for her at the time of her choosing.

Dan hadn’t been sure about taking this huge step with the love of his life, but with Megan, it had happened instantly. He gave to her what he’d withheld from the woman who’d washed his socks for the last decade.

Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.

The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she had barely registered it passing.

Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.

She now saw that hobby for what it was – getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.

They used to talk so openly, it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to one another. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.

Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.

That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realised. What she called Dan’s moodiness – and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate – was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.

At some point, he turned away from her, he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.

That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution, together.

On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan – simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself – turned on a sixpence.

Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.

It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week, too.

With shaky hands and weak body – when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime – Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name, fairly unusual, would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.

Nothing. Not in Dan’s friends, not in the friend’s lists of those she knew at Rawlings. Megan must be one of those rare people who didn’t use social media.

Unless … Laurie lay on her back and stared at the filigree of spider webs along the picture rail, the parts of a house you rarely paused long enough to inspect, when not laid prone, in the twilight land of the unwell. Unless.

Unless Megan had blocked her? It seemed aggressive, unfair – surely it was for Laurie to block Megan, in the proper way of things. But if you knew your new boyfriend had told his very-recent-ex long-term girlfriend you were pregnant, you’d know a very, very scorned woman was coming hurtling your way. Why would you leave any of your business open to it?

Laurie opened a browser again, but this time, set up a fresh Facebook profile using her Gmail address, instead of the old Yahoo one.

Laurie wouldn’t need to add any friends or signal the existence of the second account in any way, she could use it purely as a stalking tool.

Once it was active and she launched her investigations again, Laurie didn’t know what to hope for.

Confirming you’d been blocked was disconcerting enough when it was just someone you didn’t rub along with brilliantly well at work, let alone the woman who stole the love of your life and was pregnant with his child. But if she wasn’t blocked and Megan really was a twenty-first century Greta Garbo, Laurie’s burning need to know more would go unmet.

With a dull thud, as she clicked on Dan Price’s profile – his photo, a throwback picture of himself in fancy dress at university on the night he met Laurie, salt into wounds – and then again in his friends, Megan Mooney sprang up in front of her. Profile photo, a jokey one of Lucille Ball.

She was blocked. The bitch had blocked her, while camping here brazenly in Dan’s friends. Laurie swallowed back bile, literal, physical bile.

She took a deep breath and braced herself before diving in. Megan Mooney. She sounded like a secretary in a 1940s screwball, or the quiet mouse ‘by day’ alter ego of a Marvel superhero.

Laurie checked herself: she could do this without sobbing or screaming, breathed again, and clicked.

Megan had shared some JustGiving links – OH YOU LIKE SUPPORTING CHARITIES, DO YOU, LIKE A GOOD PERSON? – Laurie internally spasmed: she might not be ready for this experience, like a wobbly patient on a ward trying to walk too fast and doing themselves a mischief.