If I Never Met You Read online

  “Hahaha!”

  “For fu—” Jamie performed a mixture of bashful and still edgy. He was being winsome and acting vulnerable because right now she could choose to do him damage, of that she was sure.

  “I’m not a fan of the office gossip,” Laurie said. “I won’t say anything. Don’t muck her around, OK?”

  “It’s not like that, I promise,” Jamie said. “It’s career talk.”

  “Uh-huh,” Laurie said, casting her eyes back to where Eve was tilting her chin, pouting at her own reflection.

  Laurie returned with heavy dread to her seat, only to see with joy that Emily was in it, and everyone else had clustered around the other side of the table to screech at something on one of the girl’s phones. Blessed release. Given the volume of the music, at this distance, they might as well have gone to Iran.

  “I am flying a humanitarian mission. Did you get Suzanne-ed?” Emily said, as Laurie took Suzanne’s former position next to her.

  “Yep.”

  “She’s a complete fucking twat, isn’t she?”

  Laurie’s old-fashioned went down the wrong way as she coughed in delighted surprise and Emily slapped her heartily on the back.

  When Laurie had her voice back, she said: “She let me know I was an old maid and weird nun for my uneventful romantic history.”

  “What a bleak cow. Last I heard she was hopping on Marcus from KPMG and he has a community dick, so no one’s taking her advice.”

  Laurie coughed on her drink again. “A what?”

  “You know, used freely by everyone. Open access. A civic resource.”

  Laurie managed to stop laughing long enough to add: “And she and Carly asked me where I was from.”

  Emily did a grit-teeth face.

  “I said Yorkshire and they said—”

  Emily put a hand on Laurie’s arm and tilted her head: “No, I meant where are you from?”

  Emily had been a spectator to this enough times to know how it usually went. In their younger years, it was usually Emily who jumped in with a “First of all, how dare you . . .” while Laurie shushed her.

  “Oh, Loz, I am sorry,” she said. “Clients love them, so I’m scunnered. Why do bad people have to be good at their jobs?”

  Laurie laughed, and remembered why she so often said yes to Emily. She thought there was a lot of truth in the closest friendships being unconsummated romances. Emily was a high-flying executive, Tinder adventuress, and queen of the casual hookup; Laurie was serious and settled and steady, yet their differences only made them endlessly fascinated with the other.

  They still had a sense of humor, and a bullshit detector, and priorities in common.

  Emily opened a Rizla paper and put it on the table, dainty fingers sprinkling out a slim sausage of tobacco. Emily had smoked roll-ups ever since they met, when she hung out of Laurie’s bedroom window in halls, bottle of Smirnoff Moscow Mule in the other hand.

  “She asked me ‘who did my work,’” Emily said.

  “Work?” Laurie said.

  “Work.” Emily took her hands off the cigarette in progress and pulled her cheeks up, while making a pursed-lips trout mouth.

  “What the . . . ? You don’t look like you’ve had anything done!”

  This was true, although Emily had always been physically extraordinary to Laurie. She was tiny, golden limbed (which was due to a professional painting) with the face of a Blythe doll, or cartoon: eyes floating miles apart, tiny nose, wide full mouth. It all misled you, so you didn’t expect her to have the language of a docker and the appetites of a pirate. Men fell in doomed passions on a near-weekly basis.

  “Mmmhmm. About a month after she arrived. Was tempted to sack her then and there. Except she’d have gone around the other agencies saying Emily Clarke sacked me for pointing out her cosmetic work and the fact I’d sacked her would seem to prove it and I’m too fucking vain for that sort of mockery.”

  “What a bitch!”

  “Right? She says, ‘Oh no, I mean I thought it was very tasteful, very discreet.’ At first I thought it was bad manners, but I’m coming to suspect she’s a straight-up sociopath.”

  “They walk among us.” Laurie nodded, twitching at her phone screen. Dan had never replied. He was the one always telling her to go out more and yet he was doing the antsy when you home routine? In long-term couple code that was a don’t be late and smashed hint, without wanting the argument that might ensue from actually saying as much.

  “You know that better than anyone, with your job.”

  “Ah well, maybe she’s right and I have missed out. How would I know? That’s what missing out means,” Laurie said, feeling philosophical in the way you could after five units of alcohol.

  “Trust me, you haven’t. I’m taking a rest from dating apps,” Emily said, tugging at her hemline where it cut into her thighs. “The last guy I met was Jason Statham in his photos, and I turn up for the date and it’s more like Upstart Crow.”

  Laurie roared at this. “Are you still Tilda on there? Has anyone figured it out? Do you really never tell them your real name?”

  “Yep. I make sure there’s no bills left out if we go to mine. You don’t want Clive—thirty-seven, personal trainer from Loughborough, who’s into creative bum-plug play—tracking you down on LinkedIn.”

  “Groooooo.”

  “Ignore Suzanne. Everyone here”—Emily waved her arm at the general bar-dining area—“wants what you have. Everyone.”

  Hah, Laurie thought. She was fairly sure she knew at least one person here who didn’t want what she had, but she appreciated the sentiment.

  “You don’t!” Laurie said.

  Emily’s utilitarian approach to sex bewildered Laurie. Perhaps Emily needed to meet Jamie Carter, and they’d explode on contact.

  “I do, though. I’m just realistic it’s probably not out there, so I make do in the meanwhile. It’s not common, what you have, you know. Not every Laurie finds her Dan, and vice versa,” Emily said. “You two were hit by lightning, that night in Bar CaVa.”

  “And there I was thinking it was baked-bean-flavored tequila shots.”

  As she left, Laurie noticed the now-empty table where Jamie and Eve had sat. No doubt he’d sidled past when she was deep in conversation with Emily, keen for her not to see them leaving together.

  Career talk, arf. Like he’d chance a sacking for telling Eve about his LPC course in Chester. Like he’d chance a sacking if the prize was anything less than taking her home.

  He must think Laurie was naive or stupid. The trouble with liars, Laurie had decided from much research in the professional field, is they always thought everyone else was less smart than them.

  3

  Laurie clambered out of the cab into the heavy smog of late summer air and the nice-postcode-quiet of the street, aware that while her senses were muffled by inebriation, neighbors with families would be lying in their beds cursing the cacophony that was someone exiting a Hackney.

  The throbbing engine, singsong conversation, slamming of a heavy door, the clattering of your big-night-out heels on the pavement.

  Two weeks back, the sisters next door had managed to have such an involved back and forth for ten minutes about whose puke it was, Laurie had been tempted to march out in her pajamas and pay the soiling charge herself.

  Ah, middle age beckoned. Hah, who was she kidding—Dan called her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. She was the girl in halls who kept a row of basil plants alive in the shared kitchen.

  Loud-whispering “keep the change,” to the driver, she ducked under the thick canopy of clematis that hung over the tiled porch, grabbing blindly for her keys in the depths of her handbag, and once again thought: We need a light out here.

  She’d been infatuated with this solid bay-fronted Edwardian semi from the first viewing, and knackered their chances of driving a hard bargain by walking around with the estate agent, gibbering on about how much she adored it. They bought at the top of what they could afford at the time, and in Lau
rie’s opinion it was worth every cent.

  Their front room, she liked to point out, was the spit of the one on the sleeve of Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, right down to the stained glass, potted palm, and half-drunk red wines usually strewn around.

  There was a honey-yellow glow from under the blinds, so either Dan had left the lamp on for her or he was having another bout of insomnia, passed out on the sofa in front of BBC News 24 with the sound on low, feet twitching.

  Laurie felt a small rush of love for him, and hoped he was up. As much as it was authentic, she knew it was also in some part due to spending a trying evening surrounded by strangers, feeling homesick and out of place. Not belonging.

  As a person of color who grew up in Hebden Bridge, she didn’t care to revisit that feeling often. Even in a cosmopolitan city she got the OH, I LOVE YOUR ACCENT? EE BAH GUM jokes. “You don’t often hear a black girl sound that northern, except for that one out of the Spice Girls,” a forthright client had said to her once.

  She thought Dan might have waited up for her, but the moment she saw him, she knew something was badly off. He was still dressed, sitting on the sofa, feet apart, head bowed, hands clasped. The TV screen was a blank and there wasn’t any music on, no detritus of a takeaway.

  “Hi,” he said in an unnatural voice, as Laurie entered the room.

  Laurie was an empathetic person. When she was small she once told her mum she thought she might be telepathic, and her amused mother had explained that she was just very intuitive about emotions. Laurie was, as her dad said, born aged forty. Better than being born aged nineteen and staying there, she never said in reply.

  The air was thick with a Terrible Unsaid and her antennae picked it up easily enough to feel completely nauseous.

  Laurie clutched the jangle of her keys to her chest, with their silly fob of a fuzzy pink cat, and said: “Oh God, what? Which of our parents is it? Please say it now. Say it quickly.”

  “What?”

  “I know it’s bad news. Please don’t do any buildup whatsoever.”

  Laurie was about six or seven drinks in the hole and yet in an instant, completely, pin-sharp sober with adrenaline.

  Dan looked perturbed. “Nothing has happened to anyone.”

  “Oh? Oh! Fuck, you scared me.”

  In relief, Laurie flumped down onto the sofa, arms flung out by her sides like a kid.

  She looked at Dan as her heart rate slowed to normal. He was regarding her with a strange expression.

  Not for the first time, she felt appreciation, a bump of pride in ownership, admiring how much early middle age suited him. He’d been a kind of jolly-looking chubby lad in their youth, puppyish cute but not handsome, as her gran had helpfully noted. And with a slight lisp that he hated but, oddly enough, always had women swooning. Laurie always loved it, right from the first moment he had spoken to her. Now he had a few lines and silver threaded in his light brown hair, the bones of his face had sharpened, he’d grown into himself. He was what the girls at work called a Hot Dad. Or, he would be.

  “You couldn’t sleep again?” she asked. His insomnia was a recent thing, due to him being made head of department. Three a.m. night sweat terrors.

  “No,” he said, and she didn’t know if he was saying no, I couldn’t sleep or no, that’s not it.

  Laurie peered at him. “You all right?”

  “About you coming off the pill next month. I’ve been thinking about it. It’s made me think about a lot of things.”

  “Has it . . . ?” Laurie suppressed a knowing smile. The atmosphere and anxiety now made sense. Here we go, she thought. This was a clichéd moment in the passage to parenthood. It belonged in a scripted drama, shortly after a couple had seen two blue lines on the wee stick.

  Should he trade in the car for something bigger? Would he be a good father? Would they still be the same?

  Nah. There’s no room out there to park a people carrier anyway.

  Of course! He could try to be less sulky, perhaps, but that was about it. Kids had a way of automatically curing excess self-pity, from what Laurie could tell. At least for the initial five years.

  Yes. The same, but better! (Actually, Laurie had no idea about the last answer. If they procreated, it would be the best part of two decades before this household belonged to the two of them again, and inviting a tyrannically needy intruder to disturb their privacy and contented status quo was scary.)

  But the done thing in a couple was to pretend to be sure about the imponderable things, whenever the other person needed comfort. If necessary, deploy outright lying. Dan could pay her back when she asked tearfully after returning from a failed shopping trip, whether her body would ever look like it did before.

  “I don’t know how to say any of this. I’ve been sitting here since you left, trying to think of the right words and I still can’t.”

  This was hyperbole, because Laurie left him having a shower with the radio broadcasting the football game, but she didn’t say so.

  “Look,” Dan said. “I’ve realized. I don’t want kids. At all. Ever.”

  The silence lengthened.

  Laurie sat up, with some effort, given her foolish shoes—strappy silver slingbacks she fell for in Selfridges, “look good with plum toenails” according to the salesgirl—weren’t anchoring her to the floor very steadily.

  “Dan,” she said gently. “This doubt is totally normal, you know. I feel the same. It’s frightening, when it’s about to become real. But we can do it. We’ve got this. With having a kid, you hold hands, and jump.”

  She smiled at him, hoping he’d snap out of it soon. It felt like a role reversal, him demanding a deep talk, her wanting to do enough to make him feel taken seriously so she could go to bed. Dan was flexing his fingers, steepled in his lap, not looking at her.

  “And it’s me who has to push it out,” Laurie added. “Don’t think I haven’t Googled ‘third-degree tearing.’”

  He wouldn’t be easily joked out of this, she realized, looking at the depth of his frown lines.

  She felt them running at different speeds, her carrying the noise and trivia of the night out with her like a swarm of bees, him evidently having spent a pensive period staring at the shadows in the somber Edward Hopper print they hung over the fireplace, worrying about the future.

  “It’s not just having kids. I don’t want anything that you want. I don’t want . . . this.”

  He glanced around the room accusingly.

  Stripped floorboards?

  “What do you mean?”

  Dan breathed in and out, as if limbering up for a feat of exertion. But no words followed.

  “. . . You want to put it off for a few years? We talked about this. I’m thirty-six and it could take a while. We don’t want to be mucking about with interventions and wishing we’d got on with it . . . you know what Claire says. If she knew how great it would be, she’d have started at twenty.”

  Invoking this particular member of their social circle was a stupid misstep, and Laurie immediately regretted it.

  Claire was both a massive bore about her offspring and a general pain in the hoop. Ironically, if they hadn’t suffered her, they might’ve reproduced already. Occasions with her often concluded with one or the other of them muttering: You’d tell me if I ever got like that, right?

  “You know what they say. There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,” Laurie added. “If you—”

  “Laurie,” Dan said, interrupting her. “I’m trying to tell you that we don’t want the same things and so we can’t be together.”

  She gasped. He’d say such an ugly, ridiculous thing to get his point across? Then she did a small empty laugh, as it dawned on her: this was how much men could fear maturity. It ought not to be a revelation to her, given her dad, and yet she was badly disappointed in Dan.

  “Come on, are you really going to turn this into a full-blown emergency and make me say having a family is a deal breaker, or something? So it can all be my fault when it’s
had us up five times in a row?”

  Dan looked at her.

  “I don’t know how else I can say this. I’m not happy, Laurie.”

  Laurie breathed in and out. Dan wasn’t bluffing: he wanted a direct assurance from her she’d not come off the pill. She’d have to hope they revisited the idea in a year. She was aware that it could mean their window of opportunity closed completely. And she could end up resenting Dan. There’d be no playing tricks, pretending to take the pill when she wasn’t and whoops-a-daisy. That was how Laurie was conceived and she knew the consequences were lifelong.

  “Is this purely because I want kids?”

  She would take it off the table to stay with him, she knew that in a split second’s consultation with herself. It was unthinkable to do anything else. You didn’t lose someone you loved over hypothetical love for someone who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist.

  “That, other things. I’m not . . . this is not where I want to be anymore.”

  “OK,” she said, rubbing her tired face, feeling appalled by how extreme he’d been prepared to be, in order to get his way.

  She felt like she might cry, in fact. They’d had fights before where very occasionally one or the other of them had vaguely threatened to leave, usually when drunk and in their dickhead twenties, and whichever of them had said it felt sick with guilt the next day.

  Pulling this now, at their age, was beneath Dan, however much he was bricking it over the responsibilities of fatherhood. It was really unkind.

  “. . . OK, you win. Regular pill taking for the time being. Christ, Dan.”

  Dan looked at her with a stunned expression and Laurie froze, because again, she could read it.

  He wasn’t stunned she’d agreed. It wasn’t a gambit. He wanted to split up.

  She finally understood. Understood that he meant it, that this was it.

  Absolutely everything else was completely beyond her comprehension.

  4

  When people did monumentally awful things to you, it seemed they didn’t even have the courtesy of being original, of inflicting some unique war wound, a lightning bolt–shaped scar. These reasons were prosaic, dull. They were true of people all the time, but they weren’t applicable to Dan and Laurie. They were going to be together forever. They agreed that openly as daft lovestruck teenagers and implicitly confirmed it in every choice they’d made since. No commitment needed checking or second thinking, it was just: of course. You are mine and I am yours.