It’s Not Me, It’s You
Mhairi McFarlane
An achingly funny story about how to be your own hero when life pulls the rug out from under your feet. From the author of the bestselling YOU HAD ME AT HELLODelia Moss isn’t quite sure where she went wrong.When she proposed and discovered her boyfriend was sleeping with someone else – she thought it was her fault.When she realised life would never be the same again – she thought it was her fault.And when he wanted her back like nothing had changed – Delia started to wonder if perhaps she was not to blame…From Newcastle to London and back again, with dodgy jobs, eccentric bosses and annoyingly handsome journalists thrown in, Delia must find out where her old self went – and if she can ever get her back.
Copyright (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Jacket illustration © Gianmarco Magnani
Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007549474
Ebook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780007524990
Version: 2016-04-22
Dedication (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
For Tara
One of the most heroic women I know
Contents
Cover (#u6bcaa19a-e032-5801-8d16-4217444b3485)
Title Page (#u4ac47e6a-e470-586d-aa57-e8aa5cfe74e7)
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Keep Reading – Who’s That Girl? (#u86bd8066-4323-54b2-939b-81aaa1671657)
Keep Reading – You Had Me at Hello (#u04fbd6f8-89f9-53c4-a6f5-1d976b345157)
Keep Reading – Here’s Looking at You (#ucbb55050-a3c2-527b-91a0-0ab0ee30c785)
Read on for more from Delia, Adam and Mhairi …
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Mhairi McFarlane
About the Publisher
One (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
Ann clomped over in her King Kong slippers, with a yoghurt, a spoon and a really annoyed expression.
‘Is that stuff in the Tupperware with the blue lid, yours?’
Delia blinked.
‘In the fridge?’ Ann clarified.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s stinking it out. What is it?’
‘Chilli prawns. It’s a Moroccan recipe. Leftovers from what I made for dinner last night.’
‘Well its smell has got right into my Müller Greek Corner. Can you not bring such aggressive foods into work?’
‘I thought it was just confident.’
‘It’s like egg sandwiches on trains. You’re not allowed them on trains. Or burgers on buses.’
‘Aren’t you?’
It was a bit surreal, being snack-shamed by a woman who was 1/7th mythical monkey. Ann wore the slippers because of extreme bunions. Her feet looked like they didn’t like each other.
‘No. And Roger wants a word,’ Ann concluded.
She went back to her seat, set the contaminated yoghurt down and resumed typing, hammering blows on the keyboard with stabbing forefingers. It made her shock of dyed purple-black hair tremble. Delia thought of the shade as Aubergine Fritter.
Ann’s policing of the office fridge was frightening. Despite being post-menopausal, she decanted her semi-skimmed into a plain container and labelled it ‘BREAST MILK’ to ward off thieves.
She was one of those women who somehow combined excess sentiment with extreme savagery. Ann had a framed needlepoint on her desk with the Corinthians passage about love, next to her list of exactly who owed what to the office tea kitty. For last year’s not-so-Secret Santa, she bought Delia a rape alarm.
Delia pushed out of her seat and made her way to Roger’s desk. Life as a Newcastle City Council press officer did not provide an especially inspiring environment. The pleasant view was screened by vertical nubbly slatted blinds in that porridge hue designed to make them look dirty before they were dirty, to save on cleaning costs. There were brown-tipped spider plants that looked as if they were trying to crawl off the shelving and had died, mid-attempt. The glaring yellow lights, built into the ceiling tiles’ foamy squares, made everything look like it was taking place in 1972.
Delia got on well enough with the rest of the quiet, predominantly forty-something staff, but geographically she was trapped behind Ann’s wall of misery. Conversations conducted across her inevitably got hijacked.
Delia crossed the office and arrived at Roger’s desk at the end of the room.
‘Ah, Delia! As our social media expert and resident sleuth, I have a game of cat and mouse for you,’ he said, pushing a few A4 printouts towards her.
She wasn’t sure about being christened the office’s ‘resident sleuth,’ just because she’d discovered the persistent odour in the ladies lavatory had come from an ‘upper decker’ left in one of the cisterns by a discontented male work experience placement who might have deep-rooted issues with women. It was a eureka! moment Delia could’ve done without.
Roger steepled his hands and drew breath, theatrically. ‘It seems we have a goblin.’
Delia paused.
‘You mean a mole?’
‘What do you call a person who goes on to the internet intentionally trying to annoy people?’
‘A wanker?’ Delia said.
Roger winced. He didn’t do swears.
‘No, I mean a concerted irritant of a cyborg nature.’
‘A robot?’ Delia said, uncertainly.
‘No! Did I mean cyborg? Cyberspace.’
‘Being rude to people online … A troll?’
‘Troll! That’s it!’
Delia inspected the printouts. They were local-interest-only stories based on council reports in the local paper. Nothing particularly startling, but then they usually weren’t.
‘So this individual, rejoicing in the anonymous moniker “Peshwari Naan”, starts trouble in the conversations underneath the Chronicle’s online stories,’ Roger said.
Delia scanned the paper again. ‘We can’t ignore it? I mean, there are a lot of trolls online.’
‘Ordinarily, we would,’ Roger said, holding a pen horizontally, as if he was Mycroft Holmes briefing MI6.
He took his job deathly seriously. Or rather, Roger took nothing lightly. ‘But it’s particularly vexatious in its nature. He invents quotes, fictitious quotes, from members of the council. It makes a mockery of these councillors, damages their reputations and derails the entire debate, based on a falsehood. The unwitting are sucked into his vortex of untruths. Take a look at this one, for example.’
He tapped a piece of paper on his desk – a recent story from the Newcastle Chronicle.
‘Council Set to Green-light Lapdancing Club,’ Delia read the headline aloud.
Roger picked the printout up: ‘Now, if you look at the comments below the story, our friend the sentient Indian side order claims—’ he put his glasses on, ‘I am not surprised at this development, given that Councillor John Grocock announced at the planning meeting on November 4th last year: “I will be first in the queue to get my hairy mitts on those jiggling whammers.”’
Delia’s jaw dropped. ‘Councillor Grocock said that?’
‘No!’ said Roger, irritably, taking his glasses off. ‘But that false premise sparks much idle chatter about his proclivities, as you will see. Councillor Grocock was not at all happy when he saw this. His wife’s a member of the Rotary club.’
Delia tried not to laugh, and failed when Roger added: ‘And of course, the choice of Councillor Grocock was designed to prompt further juvenile sniggering with regards to his name.’
Her helpless shaking was met with disappointed glaring from Roger.
‘Your mission is to find this little Cuthbert, and tell him in the most persuasive terms to cease and desist.’
Delia tried to regain her self-composure. ‘All we have to go on are his comments on the Chronicle’s website? Do we even know he’s a “he”?’
‘I know schoolboy humour when I see it.’
Delia wasn’t sure Roger could tell humour from a shoe, or a cucumber, or a plug-in air freshener for that matter.
‘Use any contacts you have, pull some strings,’ Roger added. ‘Use any means, foul or fair. We need to put a stop to it.’
‘Do we have any rights to tell him to stop?’
‘Threaten libel. I mean, try reason first. The main thing is to open a dialogue.’
Taking that as a no, they had no rights to tell him to stop, Delia made polite noises and returned to her seat.
Hunt The Troll was a more interesting task than writing a press release about the new dribbling water feature next to the Haymarket metro station. She flipped through further examples of Peshwari Naan’s work. Mr Naan seemed to have a very thorough knowledge of the council and a bee in his bonnet about it.
She toyed with the phone receiver. She could at least try Stephen Treadaway. Stephen was a twenty-something reporter for the Chronicle. He looked about twelve in his baggy suits, and had a funny kind of old-fashioned sexism that Delia imagined he’d copied from his father.
‘Ditzy Delia! What can I do you for?’ he said, after the switchboard transferred her.
‘I was wondering if I could beg a favour,’ Delia said, in her brightest, most ingratiating voice. Gah, press office work was a siege on one’s dignity sometimes.
‘A favour. Well now. Depends what you can do for me in return?’
Stephen Treadaway was definitely a little Cuthbert. He might even be what Roger called ‘a proper Frederick’.
‘Haha,’ Delia said, neutrally. ‘No, what it is, we have a problem with someone called Peshwari Naan on your message boards.’
‘Not our responsibility, you see.’
‘It is, really. You’re hosting it.’
Pause.
‘This person is posting a lot of lies about the council. We don’t have any argument with you. We’d like an email address for them so we can ask what’s what.’
‘Ah, no can do. That’s confidential.’
‘Can’t you just tell me what email he registered with? It’s probably Pilau at Hotmail, something anonymous.’
‘Sorry, darling Delia. Data Protection Act and all that jazz.’
‘Isn’t that what people are supposed to quote at you?’
‘Haha! Ten points to Gryffindor! We’ll make a journalist of you yet.’
Delia did more gritted-teeth niceties and rang off. He was right, they couldn’t give it out. She didn’t like being in the wrong when tussling with Stephen Treadaway.
She tried Googling ‘PeshwariNaan’ as one word, but she got tons of recipes. She attempted various permutations of Peshwari Naan and Newcastle City Council, but only got angry TripAdvisor reviews and a weird impenetrable blog.
She had welcomed a challenge, but this was suddenly looking like a nigh-on impossible task. She could go on the message boards and openly request him to contact her, but it wasn’t exactly invisible crisis management.
And was he a crisis? Peshwari was active but hardly that evil. Scrolling through the Chronicle’s news stories, it was clear that most people got he was joking and the replies were similarly silly.
Under a report about ‘Fury Over Bins’ Collection “encouraging rats”’, Peshwari claimed that Councillor Benton had started singing ‘Rat In Mi Kitchen’ by UB40.
Delia sniggered.
‘Something’s amusing you,’ Ann said, suspiciously.
‘It’s a troublemaker on the Chronicle site. Roger’s asked me to look into it.’
‘New frock?’ Ann added, uninterested in Delia’s response. Her eyes slid disapprovingly over Delia’s dragonfly-patterned Topshop number.
Ann clearly thought Delia’s outfits were unprofessionally upbeat. Aside from medicinal novelty slippers, she believed in simple, sober attire. Delia wore colourful swingy dresses, patterned tights and ballet shoes, and a raspberry-pink coat. Ann wore plain separates from Next. And gorilla feet.
People said Delia had a very distinctive, ladylike style. Delia was pleased and surprised at this, as it was mainly borne of necessity. Jeans and androgyny didn’t work well on her busty, hippy, womanly figure.
Years before she reached puberty, Delia realised that with her ginger hair, she didn’t have much choice about standing out. It wasn’t a tame strawberry blonde, it was blazing, rusty-nail auburn. She wore her long-ish style tied up, with a thick wedge of fringe, and offset the oyster-shell whiteness of her skin with wings of black liquid eyeliner.
With her wide eyes and girlish clothes, Delia was often mistaken for a student from the nearby university. Especially as she rode to work on her red bicycle. At thirty-three, she was rather pleased about this error.
Delia drummed her fingers on the desk. She had a strong feeling that Peshwari was male, bored, and thirty-ish.
His references were songs and TV shows she knew too. Hmmm. Where else might he be online? In her experience, message board warriors had always practised elsewhere. Twitter? She started to type. Wait. WAIT.
Yes – complete with avatar of a speckled flatbread, there was a Peshwari here. And he mentioned being a Geordie in his bio. (Snog On The Tyne.) She hit the GPS location on the tweets, praying to a benevolent God. They were sent from the web, and not only that – BAM! – a café in the city centre, Brewz and Beanz. A most distressing name for likers of proper spelling and good taste, she’d always thought. She knew the place – her boyfriend Paul called it Blow Your Beans.
She scrolled through the Naan’s timeline and noted they were usually posted at lunch hours and weekends. This was someone in an office, firewalled, annoyed, bored. She empathised. Project Naan kept her occupied for two hours, until the weekend’s start point arrived. Friday afternoon productivity in her office was never Herculean.
Well, Monday’s lunch destination was assured. A stake-out, that was much more exciting than the usual fare. She wouldn’t tell Roger just yet: no point bragging and then realising she’d happened across a different talking Naan altogether.
Delia headed into the loos to get herself ready for her evening out. She’d left the bike at home and got the bus in today. She changed into a small heel and a 50s-style rock’n’roll petticoat she’d brought with her to work, stuffed into a plastic bag. She shook it out and wriggled it on under her date-night attire dress.
The ruffled taffeta was a dusky lavender that poked out an inch below the hem and picked up on the pattern of the fabric. She was self-conscious once back among her colleagues, and bolted for her coat.
But not fast enough to evade Ann’s gimlet gaze.
‘What are you wearing?!’ she cackled.
‘It’s from Attica. The vintage shop,’ she said, cheeks heating.
‘You look like a Spanish brothel’s lampshade,’ Ann said.
Delia sighed, muttered wow thanks and grimaced. Nothing between nine and five mattered today, anyway.
Today was all about this evening: when life was going to take one of those small turns, a change of direction that led onto a wide, new road.
Two (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
‘If he’s making stories about the council worth reading, they should pay him, not sue him,’ Paul said, wiping his paratha-greasy hands on a paper napkin.
‘Yeah,’ Delia said, through a thick mouthful of spicy potato. ‘But when a councillor gets upset, we have to be seen to do something. A lot of the older ones don’t understand the internet. One of them once said to us, “Go on and delete it. Rub it out!” and we had to explain it isn’t a big blackboard.’
‘I’m thirty-five and I don’t understand the internet. Griz was showing me Tinder on his phone the other day. The dating app? You swipe left or right to say yes or no to someone’s photo. That’s it. One picture, Mallett’s mallet. Yes, no, bwonk. It’s brutal out there.’
‘Thank God we did dating the old way,’ Delia said. ‘Cocktail classes.’
They smiled. Old story, happy memory. The first time they met, she’d swept into his bar on a cloud of Calvin Klein’s Eternity with a gaggle of friends and asked for a Cherry Amaretto Sour. Paul hadn’t known how to make them. She’d volunteered to hop over the bar and show him.
She still remembered his startled yet entertained expression as she swung her legs round. ‘Nice shoes,’ Paul had said, about her Superman-red round-toe wedges with ankle straps. He’d offered her a job. When she said no thanks, he’d asked for a date instead.
‘In the current climate, we’d be marginalised freaks who’d have to be on a specialist site for gingers. Gindar.’
Delia laughed. ‘Speak for yourself.’
‘If there’s no female of my species on Gindar, who am I dating? Basil Brush?’
‘What a fish for compliments,’ Delia said. ‘You should be slinging a rod in the Angling Championships, Paul Rafferty.’ She giggled and glugged some beer.
Delia was biased, but he wasn’t short of appeal.
Paul had dark-red hair, a few shades less flaming titian than Delia’s. He had the lived-in, ‘all night poker’ fashionably dishevelled look, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and worn jeans that dragged on beer-slopped floors. There were no jokes about both being ginger that they hadn’t heard – the worst was when they were taken for brother and sister.
Paul caught the waiter’s eye. ‘Two more Kingfishers when you’re ready, please. Thank you.’
Paul’s manners when dealing with members of the service industry were impeccable, and he always tipped hard, largely as a result of running a bar of his own. Pub, Paul always corrected Delia. ‘Bars make you think of tiny tot trainee drinkers.’
Delia thought it’d be most accurate to say Paul’s place straddled the line between pub and bar. It had exposed brickwork, oversized pendant lamps, and sourdough bread on the menu. But it also had real ales, a no dickheads policy and music at a volume where you could hear yourself speak. It sat between the stanchions of the Tyne Bridge and in the Good Pub Guide, and was Paul’s beloved baby.
‘I’m grinding to a halt here,’ Delia said, surveying the wreckage of her dosa.
‘I’m still rolling, I’m a machine. A curry-loving machine,’ Paul said, poking his fork into some of her pancake.
They had pondered expensive, linen tablecloth restaurants for their ten-year anniversary and then admitted they’d much prefer their favourite Southern Indian restaurant, Rasa. It was a treat to have Paul out on a Friday night.
Perhaps it was daft, but Delia still got a thrill whenever she saw Paul in his element behind the bar; dishrag thrown over shoulder and directing the order of service with the confidence of a traffic policeman, pivoting and slamming fridges shut with his foot, three bottles in each hand.
When he spied Delia, he’d do a little two-fingers-to-forehead salute and make a ‘one minute and I’ll bring your drink when I’ve served the customers’ gesture, and she’d feel that familiar spark.
‘How’s Griz’s search for love going?’
Paul was always quite paternal towards his staff – Delia had turned her spare bedroom into a recovery ward for an inebriated youth more than once.
‘Huh. I don’t think it’s love. He’s bobbing for the wrong apples if so. Seriously, Dee,’ Paul continued, ‘there are some weird generations coming up underneath us. Girls and boys wax their pubes off and none of them listen to music.’
Delia grinned. She was well used to this sort of speech. It not only amused her; Paul had special dispensation to act older than his years.
It was in the first flush of passion that Delia had found out Paul’s past: he and his brother Michael had been orphaned in their mid-teens when a lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel and piled into their parents’ car on the A1. The brothers reacted differently to the event, and the inheritance. Michael disappeared to New Zealand by the time he was twenty, never to return. Paul put down all the roots he could in Newcastle – bought a house in Heaton and later, the bar; sought stability.
Delia’s tender nature could not have been more touched. When he’d first revealed this, she was already falling in love, but it pitched her head-first down the well. He’d been through such horror? And was so amiable, so fun? She knew instantly that she wanted to dedicate her life to taking the sting away, to being all the family Paul needed.
‘Ah, it was a shitty thing. No question,’ Paul always said whenever it came up, rubbing his eye, looking down, partly embarrassed in the face of Delia’s lavish emotion, partly playing the wounded hero.
‘Who’s written lyrics like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the last ten years?’ Paul continued now, still on modern music in the present day.
‘What’s the one about “that isn’t my name”? Na na na, they call me DYE-ANNE, that’s not my name …’
Paul made a sad face, and a gesture to the waiter for the bill.
‘You love playing the codger, despite being the biggest child I know,’ Delia said, and Paul rolled his eyes and patted her hand across the table. Kids. She imagined Paul as a father, and her heart gave a little squeeze.
They settled up and stepped out into the brisk chill of an early Newcastle summer evening.
‘Nightcap?’ Paul said, offering her the crook of his arm.
‘Can we go for a walk first?’ Delia said, taking it.
‘A walk?’ Paul said. ‘We’re not in one of those films you like with the parasols and people poking the fire. We’re going to walk to the pub.’
‘Come on! It’s our ten-year anniversary. Just onto the bridge and back.’
‘Oh no, c’mon. It’s too late. Another time.’
‘It won’t take long,’ she said, forcibly manoeuvring him onward, as Paul exhaled windily.
They set off in silence – Paul possibly resentful, Delia twanging with nerves as she wondered if this surprise was such a good idea after all.
Three (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ Paul said, with both humour and irritation in his voice.
‘Share a moment.’
‘I could be sharing the moment of being in a warm pub with a nice pint.’
Paul didn’t do showy romance or I love yous. (Delia had to ask him, months into their relationship. He blanked. ‘Why else did I ask you to move in?’ Because my lease was up on the other place? Delia had thought.)
Simple, self-evident, uncomplicated affection was all Delia needed, usually. Solidity and companionship mattered much more to her than bouquets or jewellery. Paul was her best friend – and that was more romantic than anything.
And she loved this city, with its handsome blocks of sandstone buildings, low skies, rich voices and friendly embrace. As she tottered down the steep street to the Quayside, breathing the fresher air near the river, clutching Paul’s arm to steady her, she knew she was in the right place, with the right person.
The sodium orange and yellow lights from the city tiger-striped the oil-black water of the Tyne as they arrived at the mouth of the Millennium Bridge. The thin bow, pulsing with different colour illuminations, was glowing red.
It felt like a sign. Red shoes, red hair, red bicycle. For some reason, the phrase date with destiny came into her head, which sounded like an Agatha Christie novel. There weren’t many people about, but enough that they weren’t alone. Whoops, why hadn’t Delia thought of that? All they needed was some persistent hanger-abouters and this plan would be sunk. But in this temperature, loitering on bridges at pushing nine o’clock was not a particularly popular choice.
She felt her heartbeat in her throat as they approached the midway point. The moment was arriving.
‘Do we have to walk the whole way or will this do?’ Paul said.
‘This’ll do,’ Delia said, disentangling herself from his arm. ‘Doesn’t the city look great from here?’
Paul scanned the view and smiled.
‘How pissed are you? Hang on, it’s not the time of the month? You’re not going to cry about that lame beggar seagull with one eye and one leg again? I told you, all seagulls are beggars.’
Delia laughed.
‘He was probably faking.’ Paul squeezed one eye closed and bent a leg behind him, speaking in a squeaky pitch. ‘Please give chips genewously to a disabled see-gal, lubbly lady. Mah situation is mos pitiable.’
Delia laughed harder. ‘What voice was that?’
‘A scam artist seagull voice.’
‘A Japanese scam artist seagull?’
‘Racist.’
They were both laughing. OK, he’d perked up. Deep breath. Go. It was stupid of her to be nervous, Delia thought: she and Paul had discussed the future. They’d lived together for nine years. It wasn’t like she was up the Eiffel Tower and out on a limb with a preening commitment-phobe, after a whirlwind courtship.
Paul started to grumble about the brass bollocks temperature and Delia needed to interrupt.
‘Paul,’ she said, turning to face him fully. ‘It’s our ten-year anniversary.’
‘Yes …?’ Paul said, for the first time noticing her sense of intent.
‘I love you. And you love me, I hope. We’re a great team …’
‘Yeah?’ Now he looked outright wary.
‘We’ve said we want to spend our lives together. So. Will you marry me?’
Pause. Paul, hands thrust in pockets, squinted over his coat collar.
‘Are you joking?’
Bad start.
‘No. I, Delia Moss, am asking you, Paul Rafferty, to marry me. Officially and formally.’
Paul looked … discomfited. That was the only word for it.
‘Aren’t I meant to ask you?’
‘Traditionally. But we’re not very traditional, and it’s the twenty-first century. We’re equal. Who made the rules? Why can’t I ask you?’
‘Shouldn’t you have a ring?’
Delia could see a stag-do group approaching over Paul’s shoulder, dressed as Gitmo inmates in orange jumpsuits. They wouldn’t have this privacy for long.
‘I know you don’t like wearing them so I thought I’d let you off that part. I’m going to get a ring though. I might’ve already chosen one. We can be so modern that I’ll pay for it!’
There was a small silence and Delia already knew this was not what she’d hoped or wanted it to be.
Paul stared out over the river. ‘This is a lovely gesture, obviously. It’s just …’
He shrugged.
‘What?’
‘I thought I’d ask you.’
Hmmm. Delia thought the sudden insistence on following chivalrous code was disingenuous. He didn’t like being bounced into it, more like.
She fought the urge to say, sorry if this is too soon for you. Butwe’ve been getting tipsy on holidays and talking about it happening maybe next year for the last five years. I’m thirty-three. We’re meant to be trying to start a family straight after: on the honeymoon, hopefully. This is our ten-year anniversary. What were you waiting for? When were you waiting for?
She shook the irritation off. The mood was already strained and she didn’t want to shatter it completely with accusations or complaints.
‘You haven’t given me an answer,’ she said, hoping to sound playful.
‘Yeah. Yes. Of course I’ll marry you,’ Paul said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see this coming at all.’
‘We’re getting married?’ Delia said, smiling.
‘Looks like …?’ Paul said, rolling his eyes, grudgingly returning her smile, and Delia grabbed him. They kissed, a hard quick kiss on the lips of familiarity, and Delia tried to keep still and commit the feeling to memory.
When they moved apart, she said, ‘And I have champagne!’ She knelt and fumbled in her heavy bucket bag for the bottle and the plastic flutes.
‘Here?’ Paul said.
‘Yeah!’ Delia said, looking up, pink with exhilaration, Kingfishers and cold.
‘Nah, come on. We’ll look like a pair of brown-bag street boozers. Ground grumblers.’
‘Or like people who just got engaged.’
A look passed across Paul’s face, and Delia tensed her stomach muscles and refused to let the disappointment in.
Maybe he noticed, because he pulled her up towards him, kissed the top of her head and said into her hair: ‘We can go somewhere that serves champagne and has central heating. That’s my proposal.’
Delia paused. You can’t try to run the whole show. Let him have his way. She took his hand and followed him back down the bridge, arm once more through his, their pace now quicker, thoughts buzzing. Engaged.
Paul had once said to her, about the loss of his parents: you can still choose whether you’re going to be unhappy or not. Even in the face of something so awful, he said he’d started to recover when he realised it was a choice.
‘But what if so many bad things have happened to you, you’re unhappy and it’s not your fault?’ she said.
Paul replied: ‘How many people do you know where that’s the case? They’ve chosen gloom, that’s all. Every day, you get to choose.’
Delia realised two things during that conversation. 1) Part of the reason she loved Paul was his positivity. 2) From then on, she could spot Gloom Choosers. Her office had one or two.
So tonight, Delia thought, she could either dwell on the fact she’d never got a proposal, and that her offer to him instead had been met with some reluctance. That Paul was simply never going to be the kind of man to gaze into her eyes and tell her she set his world alight.
Or she could concentrate on the fact that she was walking hand-in-hand with her new fiancé to a pub in their wonderful home city to drink champagne and chatter about wedding plans, on a stomach full of coconutty curry.
She chose to be happy.
Four (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
‘They only do champagne by the bottle,’ Paul said, after they burst in to the warmth of the Crown Posada. Paul didn’t drink in places that hadn’t won CAMRA awards. They rubbed their hands and studied the laminated drinks menu as if they were at The Ritz.
‘Shall we bother with the fizz? Booze is booze is booze,’ Paul said.
Delia realised the evening as she’d imagined it wasn’t quite going to happen, but don’t force it, she thought to herself. You have your wedding day planning for all this stuff. (Wedding day planning! It was possible that Delia had a secret Pinterest board, covered with long-sleeved lace dresses and quirky licensed venues in the Newcastle area, and hand-tied bouquets of peonies, paperwhites and roses in ice-cream colours. At last, she could now go legit.)
She acquiesced cheerfully and Paul readied sharp elbows among the crowd to get their usual order, a bottle of Brooklyn Lager for him and a Liefmans raspberry beer for her. Paul sometimes worried they were ageing hipsters.
He motioned for Delia to grab a table and she retreated across the room to watch him waiting his turn at the bar, one eye on the action, the other playing with his phone. Nat King Cole’s ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)’ was crackling on the Posada’s ancient gramophone, competing with a roomful of lively inebriated conversation.
Paul’s scruffy good looks were even better when offset by something smarter, she thought, like tonight’s fisherman’s coat. She had an idea for a Paul Smith suit, tie and brogue combination for the wedding (the Pinterest board was busy), but she’d have to broach it carefully so Paul didn’t feel emasculated. She wanted him to be completely involved.
She knew the right way to pull him in – interest Paul in the drinks, then the music, and finally, the food.
Think of it as dinner at theirs, writ large, she’d say. Paul and Delia were big on having people to dinner. When Delia had moved into the house in Heaton, she’d been free to indulge all her nesting urges. Paul had invested in the house as a blank canvas, but with no particular idea of what to do with it. He liked that she liked decorating, and a perfect deal was struck.
When other people her age were spending on clothes, clubs and recreational drugs, Delia was saving for a fruit-picker’s ladder she could paint the perfect sailboat blue, or trawling auctions for mirrored armoires that locked with keys that had tassels. She knew she was an old-before-her-time square but when you’re happy, you don’t care.
Delia was also an enthusiastic home cook, and Paul always had wholesaler-size piles of drink from the bar. Thus they were the first among their peers with a welcoming, grown-up house.
Many a Saturday night ended in a loud, messy singalong with their best friends Aled and Gina, with Paul acting as DJ.
In fact, Delia had wondered whether to throw an engagement party. She had recently ordered some original 1970s cookbooks and was enjoying making retro food: scampi with tartare sauce, Black Forest gateau. She fantasised about a kitsch Abigail’s Party buffet.
Should her family come to that do? Delia would wait to call her parents, leave it until tomorrow. She would love to tell them now, to make it more real. But she couldn’t bear the thought that Paul didn’t have an equivalent call to make. Not even to his brother, what with the time difference.
Her phone rippled with a text. Paul. She looked up in surprise. He was playing it cool, pocketing his phone as he gave their order to the bar man.
Delia grinned an idiotic grin, feeling the joy roll through her. Oh ye of little faith. She had her moment. He’d needed time to get used to it, that’s all. There was a romantic in him. She slid the unlock bar, typed her code (her birthday, Paul’s birthday) and read the words.
C. Something’s happened with D and I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else. She’s proposed. Don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow? P Xx
Delia sat stock still, the weight of the phone heavy in her palm. Suddenly, nothing made sense. She had to work through the discordant information, line by line, as her stomach swung on monkey bars.
‘Don’t know what to do’ punched her in the heart.
Then there were the kisses at the end of the message. Paul was not an electronic kisser. Delia was privileged to get a small one. And she was his closest family.
But what was so frightening was the intimate tone of the message. A voice coming through it that wasn’t Paul’s, or Paul as she knew him.
She spoke sternly to herself. Delia. Stop being wilfully stupid. Add the sum up to its total. This is clearly meant for another woman. The Other Woman.
‘I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’ Some faceless, nameless stranger had this size of a stake in their lives? Delia felt as if she was going to throw up.
Paul put the drinks down on the table and dragged the chair out opposite her.
‘I like the ale in here but they need to step the service up. They’ve no rush in them.’ Paul paused, as Delia stared dully at him. ‘You OK?’
She wanted to say something smart, pithy, wounding. Something that would slice the air in two, the same way Paul’s text had just karate-chopped her life into Before and After.
Instead she said, glancing back down at her phone, ‘Who’s C?’
Paul looked at the mobile, then back at Delia’s expression again. He went both red and white at the same time, the colour of a man Delia had once sat next to on a National Express coach who’d had a coronary in the Peaks.
She’d been the only passenger who knew First Aid, so she ended up kneeling in mud at the roadside doing CPR, trying not to retch at tasting his Tennant’s Extra.
She would not be giving Paul mouth-to-mouth.
‘Delia,’ he said, with an agonised expression. It was a sentence that started and stopped. Her name and his voice didn’t sound the same. From now on, everything was going to be different.
Five (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
Art didn’t prepare you for the smaller moments between the big moments, Delia thought. Life had no editing suite to shape the narrative into something that flowed.
If the arrival of Paul’s text had happened onscreen, after the close-up of Delia’s horrified face there’d have been a jump cut to her bowling away down the street, stumbling on her heels (rom com), slinging plates around their kitchen (soap opera), angrily filling a battered clasp-lock suitcase (music video), or staring out across the blustery Tyne (art house).
Instead, what happened next undercut the momentous awfulness with boring practicality.
It was established in words of few syllables that Paul had sent the message to the person it was about, rather than the person it was for. A fairly common cock-up that usually had less dramatic impact. There was a surreal moment when a wild-eyed Paul rambled about only sending it to Delia the second time when he thought it hadn’t sent, or something. As if that could make it better and it could somehow be un-seen.
It begged a lot of other questions and answers, ones they could no longer exchange in a busy pub.
Delia managed to quell her urge to vomit. Then she had to get home.
While she considered leaving Paul on his own, looking at two full glasses and a swinging pub door, he’d only follow her. If she succeeded in storming solo into a taxi, all she’d do at home was wait to confront him anyway. It seemed a self-defeating gesture of defiance that would achieve nothing more than a double cab fare.
So she had to endure a silent, agonising journey in a Hackney, pressed against the opposite side of the seat from Paul, staring through the smudged window, occasionally catching the curious face of the driver in his rearview mirror.
When she put her key in the door, there was the familiar bump, scrape and snuffle of their dog Parsnip on the other side. Paul, obviously glad of the distraction, shushed and petted him, making Delia want to scream: Don’t be nice to the dog, you huge bastard faker of niceness.
Parsnip was a tatty old incontinent Labrador-Spaniel cross they’d got from a rescue centre, seven years ago.
‘We can’t place this one, he pisses,’ the man had told them, as they stroked the sad, googly eyed, snaggle-toothed Parsnip. ‘Could that be because you tell people he pisses?’ Paul said. ‘We have to,’ the man replied. ‘Otherwise you’ll just bring him back. His name should be Boomerang, not Parsnip.’
‘No bladder control and named after a root vegetable. Poor sod,’ Paul said, and sighed, looking at Delia. ‘I think he’s coming home with us, isn’t he?’
And right there was why Delia fell in love with Paul. Funny, kind, Paul, who understood the underdog – and was sleeping with someone else.
Delia pulled her clanking work bag from her shoulder and dropped onto the leather sofa, the oxblood Chesterfield she’d once spent all day pecking at an eBay auction to win. She didn’t have the will to take her coat off. Paul threw his on the arm of the sofa.
He asked her in hushed tones if she wanted a drink, and again she felt like she hadn’t been given a copy of the script.
Should she start screaming now? Later? Was the drink offer outrageous, should she tell him he couldn’t have one? She simply shook her head, and heard the opening of cupboards, the plink of the glass on the worktop, the clink of the bottle. The glug of … whisky? She could tell Paul took a hard swig before he re-entered the room.
He sat down heavily on the frayed yellow velvet sofa, at a right angle to where she was sitting.
‘Say something, Dee.’ He sounded gratifyingly shaky.
‘What am I supposed to say? And don’t call me Dee.’
Silence. Apart from the clatter of Parsnip’s unclipped toenails on tiles, as he skittered back from the kitchen and settled into his basket in the hallway.
She was expected to open this conversation?
‘How did it start?’
Paul stared at the fireplace. ‘She came into the bar one night.’
The same way I did, Delia thought.
‘When?’
‘About three months ago.’
‘And?’
‘We got chatting.’
There was a pause. Paul had a cardiac arrest pallor again. It looked as if giving this account was as bad as the original discovery. Good.
‘You got chatting, and next thing you know, your penis is inside her?’
‘I never meant for this to happen, Dee … Delia. It’s like some nightmare alternate reality. I can’t believe it myself.’
‘How did you end up shagging her?!’ Delia screamed and Paul almost started with fright. Offstage, Parsnip gave a small squeak. Paul put his glass down with a bump, and his palms together in his lap.
‘She kept coming in. We flirted. Then there was a Friday lock-in, with her friends. She came and found me when I was bottling up. I knew she liked me but … it was a total shock.’
‘You had sex with her in the store cupboard?’
‘No!’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘No, I absolutely didn’t,’ Paul said, without quite enough conviction, shaking his head. Delia knew the answer he wouldn’t give: not full sex. But more than a kiss. What Ann called mucky fumbles.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Celine.’
A sexy name. A cool name. Celine created visions of some bobbed, Gitane-smoking Left Bank beauty in black cigarette pants.
Oh God, this hurt. A fresh wound every time, as if she was being whipped by someone who knew exactly how long to leave the sting to burn before lashing again.
‘She’s French?’
‘No …’ He met her eyes. ‘Her mum likes Celine Dion.’
If Paul thought he could risk cute ‘you’d like her, you’d be friends’ touches, with information that had come from pillow talk, Delia feared she’d get violent towards him.
‘How old is she?’
Paul dropped his eyes again. ‘She’s twenty-four.’
‘Twenty-four?! That’s pathetic.’ Delia had never disliked her own age, but now she boiled with insecurity at the twenty-fourness of being twenty-four, compared to her woolly old thirty-three. She’d never worried that men liked younger women, and yet here they were, living the cliché.
Twenty-four. One year older than Delia had been when she met Paul. He’d traded her in. Ten-year anniversary – time to find someone ten years younger.
‘How many times have you had sex?’
Delia had never wondered if she was the kind of person who’d want to know nothing, or everything, when in this situation. Turned out, it was everything.
‘I don’t know.’
‘So many you’ve lost track?’
‘I didn’t keep count.’
‘Same thing.’
A pause. So much sex Paul couldn’t quantify it. She could probably tell him how many times they’d slept together this year, if she thought about it.
‘Where did you have sex with her?’
‘Her house. Jesmond. She’s a mature student.’
Delia could picture it; she’d lived there as a student too. Lightbulb twisted with one of those metallic Habitat garlands that looked like a cloud of silvered butterflies. Crimson chilli fairy lights draped like a necklace across the headboard. Ikea duvet. Bare bodies underneath it, giggling. Groaning. She felt sick again.
‘How did you hide it? I mean, where did I think you were?’
To have had no idea was genuinely startling. She’d always been so proud of the trust between her and Paul. ‘All that opportunity, aren’t you ever worried?’ some women used to say. And she’d laugh. Not in the slightest. Cheating wasn’t something they did.
‘I’ve been leaving work earlier some nights. Delia, please, can we …’ Paul put his face in his hands. Hands that had been in places she’d never imagined.
She looked down at her special anniversary dress with the dragonflies. She and Paul shared a home, a wavelength, a pet, a past. They were always honest, or so she thought. Any passing fancies on either side were running jokes between them, and could be admitted in the safety of knowing there was no real risk. There was leeway, trust, a long leash. Paul and Delia. Delia and Paul. People aspired to have what they had.
‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia said.
‘Can we not …?’
‘Can we not be having this awkward conversation about all the times you’ve had sex with someone else? That relied on you, not me, didn’t it?’
She felt as if Paul had let an intruder into their lives, a third person into their bed. It was a total, bewildering, senseless betrayal from the one person she was supposed to be able to count on. Why? She didn’t want to question herself – it was Paul who should face interrogation – but she couldn’t help it.
Would it have been different if I’d been different? Made you feel less secure? Lost a stone? Gone out more? Gone on top more often?
‘When it started, it was like an out-of-body experience,’ Paul said, and Delia opened her mouth to say something about it surely being a very in-body experience, and so Paul rattled on fast. ‘It was disbelief at what I was doing, that I even could do it. I wasn’t looking for it, I swear. You and I, we’re so solid …’
‘We were,’ Delia corrected him, and Paul looked anguished.
‘And – I don’t know what happened. It was as if all of a sudden I’d crossed a line and there was no going back. I hated myself but I couldn’t stop.’
Yeah, they’d come back to that, the stopping, Delia thought.
‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia persisted.
Paul squirmed.
‘I’ve never compared.’
‘Start now.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was she like me?’
‘No!’
‘So, different?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Better?’
‘No.’
‘Would you tell me if she was?’
‘… I don’t know. But she isn’t.’
‘Is this something you’ve wanted for a while?’
‘No! God, no. It just happened.’
‘It doesn’t happen. You make a decision to do something like that for a reason. I mean, other women must’ve come on to you and you’ve said no? You told me you did.’
‘I did. I don’t know why this happened.’
‘She was too attractive to pass up?’
Paul shook his head.
‘I didn’t see it coming I guess, and then somehow, when I was drunk, it was on.’
‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’
For once Paul looked nonplussed.
Delia quoted: ‘“She’s proposed and I don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow?”’
Paul looked at the floor.
Right on cue, there was a tiny treacherous little mechanical hiccup from the direction of Paul’s discarded coat. They both knew what it was: Celine’s reply.
Six (#ulink_ca251e5f-8c86-50ee-8478-70abda62e39d)
‘Read it,’ Delia said, and Paul shook his head.
Delia felt a determined venom pulse through her veins. ‘Read it out,’ she said, steadily.
Paul pulled the phone from his coat pocket. She waited in case a look crossed his face that told her it wasn’t Celine, but she could see from his unchanging scowl of dread that it was.
‘I’m not reading this.’
‘If you ever want any trust between us again, read that text aloud.’
Paul grimly swiped the text open, jaw clenched. When he spoke, he sounded strangled. Delia knew she’d never forget the strangeness of hearing her fiancé’s lover’s voice coming through his. She could see him desperately trying to edit it and not quite having the time to do it and still make it sound natural.
‘If I think you’re leaving bits out, I’ll ask to see it,’ she said, hearing herself as if she was a stranger. The woman scorned wasn’t a role she ever thought she’d have to play.
‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us? Can you …’ Paul looked over, beseeching in his shame, obviously hoping against hope that Delia would burst into tears and let him off the rest of it. She shook her head and willed herself to wait. He continued in a funereal whisper: ‘Can you get away tonight at all to call me? Speak tomorrow. Love you. C.’
Love.
‘How many kisses?’
‘Three.’
With a gasp, Delia felt the tears start, warm water that gushed down her cheeks and partially blurred Paul from view. Her nose started running too; it was a full face explosion of liquid. Paul made to get up and comfort her and she shouted at him to get away from her. Delia wouldn’t allow him to hug her, to make himself feel better. As if right now, he was the person who could make her feel better.
Delia rubbed at her eyes and when she could focus, she saw Paul was crying too, albeit in less of a fountain-like way. He wiped at his face.
‘I’ll end it. It’s over. It was the most massive, insane mistake …’
‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’ Delia said, in a half-sob.
Paul shook his head, looking sorrowful that he kept being asked all these tricky questions.
‘Tell me the truth, or there’s no point. If you keep lying, there really is no point any more.’
‘I was going to say we were getting married and it was time to finish.’
‘No you weren’t. You said you didn’t know what to do.’
‘I didn’t want to break it off in a text. I was building up to it.’
Delia cleared her throat several times, and mopped herself up as best she could with her bare hands.
‘I don’t believe you. I think you hadn’t decided what you were going to say to her. You don’t want to get married.’
Paul muttered, ‘It was a surprise, I admit.’
‘I can imagine you weren’t in the mindset when you were busy throwing your nob up someone else.’
Paul looked at Delia with bloodshot eyes.
‘How would you feel if I’d done this?’
‘Devastated,’ Paul said, without hesitation. ‘Gutted beyond belief. I can’t tell you this isn’t shockingly unfair and awful shitty behaviour, because it is. I hate myself for it.’
Yet – was Delia imagining that he sounded as if he was recovering, ever so slightly? Some of the Paul self-assurance had already crept back in. The worst had happened for Paul – Delia had found out. So now he was already repairing, while Delia was still scattered in a hundred pieces.
Parsnip waddled into the room. For the first time since they’d brought him home, Delia resented their dog; she’d cleaned up a lot of piss. Petting him was a way of easing Paul’s discomfort, breaking the tension.
‘I know it’s going to take a huge effort to get past this, but please tell me we can,’ Paul said.
Paul wasn’t leaving her for Celine? She hadn’t framed the question quite so bluntly until now, but it was the big question, she supposed. However, it dawned on her what he was actually asking. If I end it with Celine, promise me you’ll still be here? He didn’t want to be left with neither of them.
She wasn’t ready, not by miles, to decide how she felt. Especially as she didn’t believe that he’d planned to end it with Celine. That text spoke of uncertainty, tell me what to do, the same way he was asking her now.
Delia saw the light glinting on the unused flute glasses in her open bag. They’d never even used them.
Ten years together, laden with guilt, and he hadn’t indulged her enough to drink the champagne. I mean, maybe the guilt was why he hadn’t wanted a spotlight on the whole engagement thing, but that hardly made matters better.
‘I don’t know if we can,’ Delia said, standing up, stiff underskirt rustling. She felt like a painted panto dame. ‘I’m going to stay in the spare room tonight.’
‘You don’t have to, I’ll stay in it.’
‘I don’t want to be in our bed. Tomorrow I’m going home to my parents. You can meet Celine and tell her whatever you like.’
‘We can’t leave it like this,’ Paul said.
Paul honestly expected some sort of pledge from her? Delia feared this said something about Paul, and something about her too.
‘I don’t know who I’m with any more, so how can I know if I want to be with him?’
‘I’m still the same, I’ve just done something that makes me a huge arsehole.’
‘No, you’re not the same. You’re a traitor, who I don’t trust.’
Delia left Paul with Parsnip, thundered up the stairs, pulled her dress off and went to bed in full make-up and her new underwear. She didn’t cry again. She was numb, only partly functioning: as if a chamber of her heart was no longer pumping blood round her body. Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ looped in her head.
She realised perhaps that failing to set a date wasn’t about what Paul was waiting for. It was who.
Seven (#ulink_88670c3a-1b29-5846-ba8f-4c04a6f13bf6)
Ralph answered the door to Delia in a t-shirt saying Colorado Surf Club ’83, eating a floppy buttered triangle of Mighty White toast.
‘S’up,’ he said, grinning, and then remembered why his older sister was on the doorstep with a trolley case and puffy eyes. ‘Ehm. Are you … well?’
Delia smiled, despite herself. Ralph didn’t quite comprehend the subtleties of conventional interaction. Liberal, well-meaning teachers at their comprehensive had tried to get him diagnosed with this and that, so everyone could label it and feel better, but never succeeded. Ralph suffered from chronic Ralphness. It was a benign condition, in Delia’s view.
‘I’ve been better,’ she said, smiling, stepping inside and stretching up to make him hug her. Ralph bent his head in an awkward, touching way and circled her with his arms, looking like someone doing an impression of a hug they’d seen once in a Human Beings instruction manual.
Ralph was a mountain of a man, with Delia’s carrot-coloured tresses, worn haphazardly tufty.
A cruel onlooker might note that it wasn’t only the fact of Colorado being landlocked that’d prevent him being in Colorado’s Surf Club. Delia worried about his weight, but he worked in a chip shop and had never met a junk food he didn’t like, so it was a futile battle.
‘Mum’s at the allotment and Dad’s out back. Want some toast?’
Delia shook her head. She’d not eaten a meal since last night’s curry, so it was just as well that had been huge. Her stomach was now a balloon knot that tightened every time she spent more than a minute in contemplation.
‘I’ll put my stuff in my room,’ Delia said, fake-brightly, bumping her trolley case up the stairs, grateful her parents weren’t witnessing this sorry sight. The thirty-three-year-old wanderer returns.
She was supposed to be showing them an engagement ring.
‘How’s Parsnip?’ Ralph asked, to her back. Delia was glad she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Leaving wobbly Parsnip was a wrench. He’d been abandoned once and she’d promised him it’d never happen again.
‘Good!’
‘You could bring him, you know. He can sleep in my room.’
‘Thanks.’
Delia’s family lived in a semi in Hexham, a market town about twenty miles up the Tyne from Newcastle. Ever since she could remember, the house had looked like this; full of solid wooden furniture, patchwork and crocheted old throws, and rows of herbs in tubs that leaked earth along the windowsills. It was resolutely about function, not form, which was perhaps where Delia’s urge to prettify and home-make had come from.
It was welcoming and constant though. On the bricked mantelpiece, there was a framed photo of her parents’ wedding in 1971: her dad in giant chocolate-brown bell-bottomed suit, big ginger Open University beard. Her grey-blonde mum in that bowl cut that gripped the circumference of your head, and a post-hippy-era trailing veil with daisies.
Her family were … eccentric was the gentlest word, though Delia felt disloyal even using that. Paul used to sing the theme tune to Button Moon as they drove to visit, in affectionate reference to the fact her family home was its own planet, with its own customs.
Paul. Their team of two, that no longer existed. The stomach knot tightened.
Everyone in Delia’s family related best to something other than people: her mum to her allotment and garden, her dad to the timber, saws and planer in the shed, her brother Ralph to computer games and the television in his stuffy bedroom.
Delia was loved, but she was – she didn’t like to admit this, as she pushed open the door to her old bedroom – a little lonely in their midst. She was the only one with common sense, and a sense of the outside world.
She heaved her case onto the pine single bed and unzipped it, flipping the lid. Looking at the possessions she’d brought, she felt the tears swell in her chest. Oh God … this was even harder than she’d thought. Delia wanted to go home to Heaton. But she couldn’t. Her feelings completely forbade it. For all she knew, Paul was with Celine right this second, telling her he’d marry her instead. She didn’t know where she stood or what he wanted any more.
She’d got up very early, after a sleepless night, thankful that she kept lots of her clothes in the spare room and could pack and leave without seeing Paul. He’d obviously woken with the closing of the front door and the disturbance of Parsnip though because she’d had a missed call and a text offering her a lift shortly after, which she’d ignored.
Again, Delia wished she had someone to tell her what to do. Was leaving the right thing?
Her mum had made sympathetic noises when she’d called that morning to say they were having problems and that she was going to come home for a while, but Delia wasn’t surprised that she was out when she arrived. Her mum found emotions, especially raw ones, disconcerting. She would make her a cup of tea and rub her back, but Delia would know she’d be dying to get out to her cukes and radishes and not discuss the whole messy personal business. Ralph and her father were even less use.
No, there was only one person who’d have insight and sympathy about this, though she dreaded telling her.
Delia’s eyes moved to a familiar photo blu-tacked to the mirror. It was possibly her favourite picture in the world. It could stay here as she’d had copies made, framing them and sending one to Emma.
It had been taken in their second year at university, by some long-forgotten amorous boy. Delia and Emma wrapped around each other in a cheek-to-cheek embrace, huge Rimmel-lipsticked smiles, plastic pint pots of Newcastle Brown Ale in hands, toasting the camera-holder.
It wasn’t that they both had the moonshine complexion of the twenty-year-old, or that they were so happy. It’s that they both looked so confident. It brimmed with the ‘Look out, I’m coming to get you’ insouciance she used to have.
Delia wasn’t vain, but she thought she looked pretty in it. She had such heavy liquid eyeliner, she was practically in a bandit mask. She’d believed life was going to be full of adventures. Then she met Paul three years later, and was happy to give them up. All that she had, was suddenly his.
‘Hello, knock knock,’ said Ralph, his unkempt head, with its specs and watery blue eyes, appearing round the door. ‘Ehm. Would you like to play Grand Theft Auto?’
Delia smiled. Actually, that was exactly the sort of thing she wanted to do. Even though she didn’t know what it involved.
She followed Ralph to his bedroom. Ralph’s cluttered, natural-light-free, Star Wars memorabilia-strewn lair might conceivably be the HQ of some young pop culture website punk, or Pentagon hacker genius. Instead it was exactly what it looked like: the dream timewasting crib for a twenty-eight-year-old man who still lived at home.
He handed Delia a confusingly complicated control panel and motioned for her to take a place on one of the beanbags. She loved the way the video games reversed the roles between them: Delia asking stupid questions, Ralph gently chiding her for not grasping it fast enough.
It was strangely reassuring, concentrating on clumps of pixels instead of real things, in the bluish haze of Ralph’s eternal twilight mole hole.
‘Is Paul not coming here again, then?’ Ralph said, eyes fixed on the screen, as Delia’s avatar crouched behind a car in the middle of a firefight with some Mexican drug lord’s gang. Her parents had been licensed to pass this news on.
‘I’m not sure,’ Delia said. She had a sudden desire to share. ‘He’s been seeing someone else.’
‘Why?’ asked Ralph. ‘They’re dead now, you can move. Fast.’
‘I don’t know,’ Delia pushed a button and head-butted a wall.
‘Does he like her more than you?’ Ralph said. From anyone else, this would have been wounding. From Ralph, it was artless, childlike curiosity.
‘I don’t know that either. She’s younger than me. She might be cleverer and better and funnier and more attractive and … fresher.’
‘She’s still not The Fox, though,’ Ralph said, as he took the controls from Delia and expertly navigated her out of a dead end.
‘What?’ Delia had not heard that name in so long, it took her a moment to absorb its meaning.
‘The Fox. Like, Super Delia.’
‘You remember her?’ Delia said, taken aback and very touched.
‘Course,’ Ralph said.
‘She was retired a long time ago,’ Delia said, sighing and resting her head on Ralph’s arm, then realising it inhibited his gaming, and awkwardly moved it.
‘It was you who put her into retirement, so you can get her out of retirement. You’re in charge, like, here,’ Ralph said. ‘Oh YES! Let’s go rob a plane.’
Ralph had a high-pitched, cawing bird-like laugh that ripped from his larynx with no warning rumble and took people unawares.
Delia smiled. She could enjoy Ralph’s games for a bit, then she’d get bored. Ralph’s ability to have a complete immersion wallow for days at a time struck her as a male brain thing. Or maybe a Ralph brain thing.
‘Do you want a Swiss roll?’ Ralph said, and for a second, Delia thought this was gamer talk, but he reached over and picked up a cake box.
‘I’m alright, thanks,’ said Delia, frowning a little as Ralph unwrapped the cellophane and started eating a whole cylinder of buttercream-filled sponge like a baguette.
Her mum put her head round the door. Her upper half was clad in her grass-cuttings-flecked gardening gilet. ‘Oh you’re here, love.’
‘Yes,’ Delia smiled.
‘Macaroni cheese for tea?’
‘Sounds good.’
Her mum hesitated. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I will be.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘Yes please.’
In terms of maternal advice, that – bar the odd stiff word as Delia helped clear up from the evening meal – would be that. The door closed and Delia turned back to the screen, where Ralph was racing across the fictional city of Los Santos to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, the wind in his virtual hair.
‘You really liked The Fox?’ Delia said to Ralph. ‘I worried it was silly.’
‘No way. Best thing you ever did,’ Ralph said, wiping some jam from his chin.
There was something to be said for having someone who would, with no spite whatsoever, give you the unvarnished truth.
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