It’s Not Me, It’s You

‘Oh. Yeah,’ Delia said absently, registering Ann’s triumphant smile and belatedly remembering the spicy prawn bollocking.

Delia wouldn’t be explaining that all her pots and pans and exotic odorous ingredients were back at her house in Heaton which she’d fled on Saturday morning. This was a Hexham cupboards’ effort.

She still couldn’t eat but she didn’t want to worry her mum. She felt her concern when Delia’s gluey bowl of macaroni cheese was returned having been vaguely tampered with, as opposed to eaten.

Delia usually turned up with a Ziploc bag of spices to customise her parents’ cuisine to her tastes. Her parents obviously wondered who this floppy, quiet, appetite-less imposter was.

She placed her phone on her desk and saw she had a text: the umpteenth from Paul.

Please answer my calls. We need to talk. Px

The standard issue one small kiss, Delia thought, remembering how Celine merited the frankly promiscuous hand-in-the-bra quantity of one big, one small. She felt revolted.

Would it always be like this? Could she ever see their relationship free of this stain? She only knew there was a huge hole in her middle that you could see the sky through, like a surrealist painting.

Delia gave thanks that she was nowhere near close enough to anyone in her office to have confided Friday’s plan.

No one was asking to see the Art Deco square emerald and diamond cluster she wasn’t wearing, no one was demanding to hear how she had worded her proposal, or Paul’s reaction, or the hoped-for date of the wedding that wasn’t happening.

There was only one person who knew about Delia’s plans last Friday, and the inevitable email arrived within an hour. They’d have talked during the weekend, but Emma was in Copenhagen for a whistle-stop three day holiday. She did that a lot. They mostly conducted their friendship via email nowadays.

From: Emma Berry

Subject: Well …?!

How did it go, future Mrs Rafferty? (I’d like to think you’d keep Moss but I bet you won’t, you surrendered, cupcake apologist Stepford.) Can I see my bridesmaid dress yet? (No bias satin with spaghetti straps that’s designed for fatless flamingos, I look like Alfred Hitchcock at the moment.) X

In another universe, one where Paul had concentrated harder on who he was sending his texts to, or better still, was turning round to twenty-four-year-olds and saying ‘Woah, I’m taken,’ Delia was giggling in purest delight at these words, rather than wincing.

Delia didn’t want to tell Emma. Emma adored Paul, Paul adored Emma. ‘Can’t you clone him, or do some lifelike android thing,’ was Emma’s refrain.

He’d sweep her into a bear hug when she visited and make her his special recipe scrambled eggs, always keeping her glass topped up. Delia would spend the whole time refereeing good-natured debate between two highly opinionated people, enjoying every second. There was nothing as satisfying as two people you loved independently, loving each other.

Pulling Paul’s statue down was no pleasure at all, although it seemed like the kind of savage cold comfort she should be entitled to.

With heavy heart and hands, Delia opened a reply she could scarcely believe she was typing.

Hi E. It went like this: I proposed. Paul said yes, not particularly enthusiastically. Then we went for drinks, and he sent a text to his mistress saying ‘oh fuck, Delia wants to marry me’ to me by mistake. Turns out he’s been shagging a student for the last three months. So I’ve moved out to my parents and he’s asking for me to stay, but I’m not really sure what’s going on. Hard to tell what Paul wants. Or what I want, now.How was your weekend? (BTW, just to be clear – the wedding is off.) (But for the record, I’d never dress you badly, what are we: amateurs?) Xx

The reply was sent from BlackBerry, within three minutes.

Delia, what? Seriously? What?! Can I call you? Ex

Thanks but maybe not right now. Sour tits Ann would die of schadenfreude earwig joy. Maybe at lunch? 1.30? X

Yes. FUCK. E X

Delia wasn’t sure she should be spending her lunch hour sobbing on the phone, but Emma wouldn’t be put off for long. Emma was a corporate lawyer for a big firm in London and pursued an agenda with a dedication Delia reserved for pursuing Crème Eggs when in season.

Their lives had taken very different directions since university and Delia was so grateful they’d met in that little window of egalitarian opportunity. That brief space between adolescence and adulthood when it didn’t matter that Emma was high-powered alpha and Delia was domesticated beta, only that they’d been put in rooms next door to each other in halls of residence. Delia would be completely terrified meeting Emma, as they were now. As it was, she remembered younger Emma trying to bleach her cut-off denim mini by pouring lemon Domestos over it, or getting off with a gentleman at the Student Union known as Captain Tongue, three Fridays in a row.

Delia stared unseeing at words on a screen about the council’s new tree-planting drive until noon approached, and the chance to stalk Peshwari Naan. She’d forgotten about him in all the turmoil, and was hugely glad of the excuse to escape the office and breathe fresh air. It’d be an opportunity to call Emma. Although as soon as she was on her way to the café, she felt the risk of thinking, and weeping. Oh no – and she was passing the university, and its students.

Every single girl who entered her line of sight was a possible Celine. Delia’s eyes darted left and right as her nerves snapped. Did Celine know who she was? Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us?

Her. Us.

Delia nearly broke into a run to reach the coffee shop, wrenching open the door as if pursued by wolves.

She got herself a flat white and took a seat in the window with a good view of the room. There was a trustafarian-looking girl with dreads, typing on a MacBook Air, and three Japanese students huddled round an iPhone – no one with plausible Naan potential. Before, she thought she’d love a stake-out; today, she was listless. It was a countdown to speaking to Emma.

Delia’s mind drifted, as she toyed with her sugar wrapper.

Clichés about the aftermath of being cheated on were coming true, she noticed.

For example, she used to think the ‘it’s the lying that hurts’ line about affairs was slightly wishful. Really? Pretty sure it’d be the tongues and the hands and the frantic pulling at clothes and the groping and licking and gasping and grasping and sharing a shuddering climax that’d most bother me.

And while the thought of Paul having illicit intercourse with Celine was so horrific as to make her nauseous, unexpectedly, it wasn’t the worst pain. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before Delia – the thought of him having sex with another woman could be assimilated, however agonising it was. What Delia couldn’t begin to reconcile was the eerie, disorientating sense that she hadn’t known Paul the way she thought she had.

Take the conversation on their anniversary meal in Rasa, for example. He’d blithely mocked the younger generation’s dating habits and implied he’d be at sea if he was back on that scene. Meanwhile, he was confidently knocking off a twenty-four-year-old. Oh my God: and the remarks about intimate waxing. He knew this from a firsthand encounter with a lady’s bald part? Delia couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

That discussion had been gratuitous. Paul had voluntarily done an impersonation of a person he wasn’t, for her benefit. She tried to tell herself he’d been so scared of her finding out, that he’d overdone it. But it was more than that. It was treating Delia as a dupe.

She now recalled a few times recently that he’d grumped about being left to do all the bottling up at the end of a shift. I’m too nice a boss. These were times the too-nice boss had been in bed across town with another woman.

It was accomplished, bravura bullshittery. His deceit had been conducted so artlessly, all as part of Paul’s charming patter. Who exactly was she in love with?

Did any of his staff know? They might’ve had some idea, at these lock-ins. Did Aled and Gina know? Aled and Gina. She couldn’t believe it had taken this long to wonder. They’d declined the last dinner party, she remembered.

Had they cancelled out of awkwardness? Had Paul told Aled, in a drunken ‘Mate, I’ve messed up’ confidential?

She couldn’t pretend she was on her A-game, as time alone meant time thinking about her broken engagement, yet she saw precisely no one who could conceivably be Naan for the hour that she staked out Brewz and Beanz.

The only gang on a laptop now was a shoal of squawky teenage girls in private school uniforms, and whenever she passed them, ostensibly to get a stirrer or a sugar, she saw Facebook on their screen.

The Naan could be a member of staff, she supposed, tapping away out of sight in a backroom office. But his or her activity was unlikely to be confined to between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., if so. She checked his timeline her phone: no Naan tweets.

The search for answers would continue, in more than one area of her life. How ironic: Delia the ‘resident sleuth’, who hadn’t noticed her other half had another life.

Nine (#ulink_cdcfb0ad-0f00-5561-bc79-ce259731a0c7)

‘I’m struggling to get my head around this,’ Emma said down the phone, as Delia wiped tears from under her eyes and sniffed loudly and snottily as she plodded back to the office.

‘Me too.’

‘Why? Early midlife crisis?’

‘I don’t think he’s in any crisis. Or he wasn’t. I think a hot student threw herself at him and he went for it.’