If I Never Met You

Laurie fumed, her chest tight, and tried to breathe through it. The tactlessness and the tastelessness of Dan using things they’d sincerely pledged to each other a lifetime ago. He was currently trashing that memory, and every other memory for that matter, while asking Laurie to treat it as sacred covenant. What an arsehole.

Was he an arsehole? Had he turned into one, somewhere along the line, and she hadn’t noticed? She studied him, as he stared morosely at his hairy knees in his shorts, face like a baleful Moomin.

It didn’t matter. She loved him. They’d long ago passed the point where her love was negotiable; it wasn’t contingent on him not being an arsehole. He was her arsehole.

Laurie had passed that point, anyway. Dan had reached a parallel one where he could abandon her. That’s what it felt like: desolate abandonment. He wouldn’t care about Laurie, from now on? No, no, he did want her. She knew in her guts that he did, which is why this had to be stopped before he did any more damage.

‘But we’ve got to stay at the same company together? How’s that going to fucking work?’

Dan and Laurie managed a few degrees of separation at Salter & Rowson by being in different departments, but once they were exes that would hardly be enough.

‘I can start looking for other positions. I might jack it all in. I’m not sure yet.’

‘Honestly, Dan, it still sounds like you’re freaked out by having a baby and have decided to go full nuke from orbit to fix it,’ Laurie said, in a final stab at returning them to any sort of normality. ‘You don’t want to go travelling, for fuck’s sake. They wouldn’t let you stay head of the department, either. And you hated a week in Santorini, last year.’

As Laurie said it, she wondered if the missing element in that analysis was that he hated it with her.

‘Having children is only one part of it. The reason it’s made me do something about how I feel is because you can’t go back on that decision, you can’t un-have a baby. It made me decide. I don’t want this life, Laurie, I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock after all this time. It shocks me too. That’s why it took me so long to face up to it. But I don’t. Want it.’

‘You don’t want me?’

A heavy pause, where Laurie felt Dan steel himself to say it.

‘Not like this.’

‘Then how?’

Dan shrugged and blinked through tears.

‘The word you’re looking for is no,’ Laurie said.

Tears flash flooded down her face now and he made to get up and she frantically gestured: don’t come near me.

‘Erm … just you know, one minor objection on my part,’ she said, voice thick and distorted by crying. It was ambitious to try to put on a sarcastic tone. ‘How am I going to have kids with anyone now, Dan? I’m thirty-six.’

‘You still can!’ he said, imploringly, nodding. ‘That’s not old, these days.’

‘With who? When? Am I going to meet someone next week? Get things moving on conceiving a few months after that?’

‘C’mon. You’re you. You’re a massive catch, always have been. You won’t be short of offers. You’ll be inundated.’

Laurie finally accepted in that moment, that this was real, they really might be over.

Dan had always had the healthy, normal amount of male jealousy. If anything, more than average: he’d always been sure if one of them would be stolen away by a rival, it was Laurie. Male friends who complimented her in his presence always got a ‘hey now …’ from Dan that was entirely joking but also not. Male hires at her firm always got an early warning that she might not have a wedding ring but she wasn’t single and also the guy was here on premises, so watch yourself, and she assumed this was by Dan or briefed by his representatives. (She’d never had to tell anyone she was ‘spoken for’, anyway, they always mentioned oh you’re Dan Price’s girlfriend. Funny phrase, that. Why was someone speaking for you?)

If the idea of her having kids with someone else got this shrug of a response, this mediocre auto-response, something had flown.

‘Such a massive catch, you’ll pass me up?’

‘We’ve been together all our lives, Laurie, you’re my only serious girlfriend. It’s not like I’m walking away lightly, or that I never cared.’

Laurie was on the back foot. He’d planned for this. He was a politician who had notes; she’d been ambushed.

She still couldn’t believe he wasn’t exaggerating somehow, but there was a dreadful binary: if he could say all this and not mean it utterly sincerely, that would make it even worse.

There was a huge, bewildering gap in all of this for Laurie. An untold mystery in how Dan had gone from unpacking the Ocado delivery, and complaining about the plain digestives they got as substitutions for Jaffa Cakes, going for musty pints of stout in their local and laughing at dogs with overbites in Beech Road Park on a Sunday morning, to this final, total departure, with nothing in between.

It was as if one minute she’d been running for a bus, and the next she’d woken up in a hospital bed, the quilt flat where her legs used to be, with a doctor explaining they were ever so sorry but there was no saving them.

‘Good to know you used to care,’ she said, hearing how plaintive and bitter her voice sounded, in the darkened sitting room. ‘Small mercies? Or is that meant to be a big mercy?’

‘I do care.’

‘Just not enough to stay.’

Dan stared blankly.

‘Say it,’ Laurie said, with force.

‘No.’

It was the logical conclusion of everything he’d said; and yet that hard monosyllable surprised her so much, he might as well have slapped her.

5 (#ulink_bc1b6689-737c-57b0-ba4c-4595d09b2a06)

At three in the morning, having been wide awake for hours, Laurie got up, marched into the spare room and stamped on the button to turn the big floor lamp on.

‘Dan? Wake up.’

The human-sized sausage shape under the duvet stirred and Dan’s head emerged, hair askew.

At first he frowned in sleepy confusion. When he focused on Laurie’s face, and visibly remembered the specifics of his existence, his expression changed to a man woken by an FBI flashlight who knew exactly what he had hidden in his crawl space.

‘I need to know why.’

‘What?’

‘I need to know why this is happening. I know you think you’ve given me reasons but you haven’t. Only vague bullshit about us wanting different things. We’ve wanted all kinds of different things in the past but we never had to split up over it. We would’ve talked about it. I offered to hold off on kids, even put it aside, same with getting married. So it’s not that we want different things. That’s like a line you heard in Cold Feet or something.’ Laurie paused. ‘Just tell me the whole truth, however hard it is. This not knowing is worse, Dan. Look at what you’re doing to us, after our whole lives together. You owe me that.’

Dan stared at her and pushed himself up on his elbows. A silence stretched between them and Laurie sensed he was readying himself for honesty. This return ambush had worked, he’d not had time to rehearse.

Dan cleared his throat. Laurie was breaking out in a flop sweat but she still didn’t regret asking.

‘… I started waking up early. While you were still asleep,’ he said. ‘… And I’d see life as a tunnel. I could mark off everything along the way. The wedding at Manchester Town Hall. The honeymoon in Italy. Kid one, kid two. Sunday barbecues, DIY, saving up for an extension. Still hating work, but having to go for partnership because there were mouths to feed,’ his voice was hoarse with sleep and sounded strange. ‘And it was like there was nothing between here and death that left the script. It was planned out for me, every step. I was expected to do it. And I kept asking myself, like a nagging voice, a whisper that got louder and louder: did I want to do it?’

Laurie could interject here that clearly, he wasn’t expected to do several things on that list. She held herself back.

‘… I felt trapped. I’d built this box I didn’t want to live inside any more, but I wasn’t allowed to leave it. I didn’t want to leave it, as I knew how much I’d hurt you. I started being a wanker to you all the time, because I was miserable, but I didn’t want to say so.’