If I Never Met You

4. More protestations of how important she is to him. A bridesmaid ‘as it were’. I want you to feel you’re important without going to the trouble of actually treating you that way.

5. Not, despite the performative paternalism, referring to himself ‘Dad’. On the rare occasions she’d seen him when she was little, she’d loved the novelty of having someone to call Dad, but he always used to correct her: ‘You’re making me sound old.’ She was baffled: thirty was old, and he was her dad?

And not forgetting 6. The worst possible timing, as always.

Laurie

Hi, congratulations to you and Nic! Will come to the celebration, just let me know. I have less fun news, Dan and & I have separated. I’m keeping the house on and he’s moving out. His decision, no third parties involved. Ah well. Maybe I’ll meet someone at your tear-up.

xx

Two blue ticks, immediately. So he’d read it. No reply. More Classic Austin Watkinson.

And to round it all off – and this part she couldn’t blame her dad for, although it felt as if she should be able to – he’d now unwittingly made her phone call to her mum breaking the news about her and Dan, even more onerous. Her parents didn’t speak, so it was down to Laurie if she was going to be informed, and she should be, really. Laurie knew if she put it off, she’d end up avoiding it altogether; she wouldn’t keep secrets for her dad. Still, her mum wouldn’t thank her for it, and it’d feel like it was Laurie’s fault.

Laurie and Dan had spent all day Saturday slowly and painfully going through it all again, and now Dan was out on a run and Laurie was actually relieved not to have to face him for a few hours, endlessly wondering if she could have said or done something different to change this outcome.

Having told one person, it had started to become real. She could call her mum and practise doing it vocally – and now, in a Dan-less house, was better than later. She sat on the third step of the stairs, heaving the plastic rotary red and blue phone onto her lap. When she bought it a year ago from a website that did ‘vintage things with a modern twist’, Dan had said, ‘More bourgeoise knick-knacks. Behold our thirty-something pile of affluent middle-class tat!’

Did he hate all this stuff? In this home they’d made? Could she not even look at a sodding retro hipster landline in the same way? His belongings were piled into tragic bin bags in the dining room. She’d heard him, before she got up, quietly calling a local restaurant to cancel their reservation. This afternoon, they had been meant to be eating Sunday lunch at a pretentious new place nearby full of squirrel cage light bulbs and ‘Nordic-inspired small plates’.

‘Look at this,’ Dan had said barely a week ago, in another space-time dimension, waving his phone with the website open: ‘This place isn’t a restaurant, it’s a dining space prioritising a thoughtful eating menu with an emphasis on provenance and a curated repertoire of low intervention wines. Fucks saaake.’

‘You wanted to try it!’ Laurie had said, and Dan eye-rolled, shrugged. Back when Dan’s ‘rejection of things he’d nevertheless willingly chosen’ was confined to where they had meals out.

In the cold light of morning, Laurie couldn’t believe he was keeping on with this charade, that he wasn’t going to be standing in some unloved unfurnished two bed that smelled of plug-in air fresheners with a greasy estate agent and think: ‘what the hell am I doing?’

Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.

She listened to the ringing on the other end, replaced the receiver, and tried again. Her mum would be in the garden, and thought the first phone call was merely to alert you to the fact someone was trying to call you. She rarely answered until they’d made a second or even third attempt. It was a quirk that used to drive Laurie mad in her teenage years; they had flaming rows about Laurie always having to answer.

Her mum was ‘out of the normal,’ as a plumber once said, surveying the kitsch art collage of Elvis on their pink bathroom wall in the 1990s.

Her mother had very strict, controlling and conventional parents herself, and was determined to do things differently. Laurie admired this, while sometimes feeling she’d overcorrected to the other extreme.

If you’d wanted a mother who was chill with you being out until all hours and your friends accidentally dropping the F-word, Mrs Peggy Watkinson of Cannock Road was the one. Plus, she looked and dressed like Supremes-era Diana Ross. Both Conventional and Unconventional Dads of the neighbourhood were fans. And she wasn’t Mrs Watkinson, either, because she’d never been wed to Laurie’s dad. Laurie chose it as her surname because at the time, her mum was using her stage moniker, Peggy Sunshine. And Laurie was no way going to have a wacky surname on top of being the only black girl in her year.

When Laurie’s mum was addressed as Mrs Watkinson by a teenager, she smiled and did her characteristic hand wave. ‘In a past life, maybe.’ And mentioned there was wine open in the kitchen.

Your mum is the best, her friends said, as they trudged up the stairs, glasses in hand, promises extracted – by Laurie – not to tell their mums.

There were times when Laurie craved mums like everyone else had, who replaced lost PE kits, made chicken nuggets with beans and chips for tea instead of aubergine and pineapple curry, and didn’t have Egyptian birthing stools on display in reception rooms.

She tried ringing her mum again, but was unsuccessful. She’d give it a last try and then give up.

Whenever anything awful happened, no one ever considered the difficulty of the admin, Laurie thought. Someone had to broadcast it, manage the fall-out. How come there were so many services in modern society, and not this one? ‘Relationship Over? Let Us Round Robin!’

‘Working out how to tell everyone’ was a part of her and Dan’s separation that was going to be almost as gruelling a prospect as being left in the first place. It felt so unnecessarily cruel that you didn’t just have to go through the thing, you had to have a dozen conversations with people of varying closeness about the fact you were going through the thing.

Dan did this, Dan should deal with all of it. But he couldn’t, even if she wanted him to.

Some hip friends, a few years back, had posted up a witty archive photo on social media of themselves and made an official announcement to everyone they were divorcing.

Laurie considered it, lying in bed last night, but it only really worked as a ‘ripping the plaster off in one go’ technique if you said it was fine, you were both OK, no hard feelings, no bombshell story to uncover here, move along. Essentially, hinted it was a joint decision. Those euphemisms that publicists deployed when famous people parted: ‘leading different lives’ ‘grown apart’ and Laurie’s favourite, ‘conflicting schedules’.

Dan once said that mutual only ever meant: ‘one person has given up, and the other person concedes they can’t persuade them not to,’ and now that felt astute. Turns out, he was plot foreshadowing their own end. Where did he go, that Dan?

The phone finally connected, third time lucky, ha ha.

‘Hi, Mum … yeah I thought you’d be in the garden. OK to talk? I’ve got some bits of news … No, not that.’ It really did put the tin hat on this that everyone would think she was about to announce the baby. She took a breath to gird her loins.

‘Dan and I have split up. It’s his decision.’

She couldn’t bear to say ‘left me’, with all its sense of passive victimhood but she had to make it clear she wasn’t going to have answers. She recounted Dan’s reasons for going.

‘Oh dear, my darling. Sorry to hear this.’ Her mum had kept the strong Caribbean inflection from the island of her own childhood. ‘I know you will be very hurt but sometimes, paths diverge. He obviously has to do this next part of his journey on his own. Which is very painful for you, but it must be what his heart is telling him.’

Laurie gritted her teeth. Maddening calm was one of her mother’s attributes, that could also feel like a weapon.

She knew her mum, who lived outside society’s conventions in Upper Calder Valley with a fabulous kitchen garden and incense burners, wasn’t going to do the ‘what a bastard’ response, and in many ways, Laurie liked that her mum was an independent thinker.

But right now she didn’t want this stuff about how nothing was good or bad, it was just a different choice. Hippyishness could feel heartless. She wanted her distress to be recognised.

Laurie remembered her mum saying of her cousin Ray, who was in a serious motorbike smash, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’, and Laurie asking how someone subsequently living in an adapted bungalow held together with metal pins was stronger. ‘Mentally stronger,’ came the answer. Tenuous, at best. It was uncomfortably close to telling Ray to see the upside. Here was her version of that. Laurie was often struck by how the arc of history was long, but bent towards nothing really changing.

‘Dan will be on his own on his “journey” for a while, and then he’ll be with someone else. I think that’s how this works? He’s not going to become a nomadic shaman monk, Mum. He’s on a good salary at a provincial law firm.’

Unless you bought Dan’s blather about jacking it all in, which Laurie didn’t. Maybe her scathing cynicism was adding fuel to Dan’s theory they were no longer aligned, but still, file it under Believe It When I See It. She’d heard him kvetching about the state of Ryanair’s delays enough times, she couldn’t see him floating in tranquility down the Mekong Delta.

‘Well. So are you.’ That’s alright then. Jeez.

Peggy sort of tutted, in a ‘there there’ way, and Laurie sucked air into her painful rib cage. She’d not eaten more than a few pieces of toast with peanut butter for days. She didn’t expect her mum to be upset on her own behalf, and she had feared her mum would insist this was an opportunity in disguise. Not least because Peggy thought Laurie had settled down too young, and her feelings towards Dan always been polite rather than enthusiastic. Laurie got the feeling that Dan had presented to her as a stereotypical Nice Young Man, but her mum had found him a little dull. Peggy liked characters, eccentrics and oddballs. Speaking of which … her dad’s news.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ her mum said, after listening to the practical arrangements of the dissolution of Dan and Laurie Inc.

‘No. Thanks though,’ Laurie said, refusing to bite at such a lacklustre offer. ‘Oh, also.’ Deep breath. ‘Dad’s got married to Nicola. In Ibiza, but they’re going to have a do back here in Manchester too.’

Her mum was silent for a second. ‘Nicola? Is that the one from before?’

‘The Scouser, yeah.’

Laurie had only met Nicola a few times before but she liked her: a garrulous, handsome woman with her own jewellery business, who wore a lot of animal print and liked a party as much as her dad, which was saying something.

‘He always said marriage was a rotten institution, a place people went to die!’

‘Yeah. Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.’

Laurie was being sarcastic but it evidently didn’t register. She could hear her mum fidgeting on the other end of the phone, and pictured the frown that usually accompanied mentions of her father.