It’s Not Me, It’s You

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.

Eight (#ulink_744f5762-2bc2-5745-b3de-340b7b2dc265)

‘I see you’ve got something less smelly,’ Ann said, by way of Monday-morning greeting.

A wan Delia was unpacking her lunch on to her desk: cling-filmed ham and gherkin sandwich squares, salt and vinegar Hula Hoops, waxy Granny Smith.