If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  “But nothing’s changed?” Laurie said. “We’re like we’ve always been.”

  “I think that’s part of the problem.”

  Laurie’s mind was occupying two time zones at once: this surreal nightmare where her partner of eighteen years—her first and only love, her best friend, her “other half”—was sitting here, saying things about how he’d sleep in the spare room for the time being and move out to a flat as soon as possible. She had to play along with it, because he was so convinced. It was like colluding with someone who’d become delusional about a dreamworld. Follow the rabbit.

  Then there was the other time zone, where she was desperately trying to make sense of the situation, to manage it and defuse it. He was only using words—no tangible, irreversible change had occurred. Therefore words could change it back again.

  She’d always had a special power over Dan, and vice versa, that’s why they fell for each other. If she wanted to pull him back from this brink, she must be able. She only needed to try hard enough, to find the way to persuade him.

  But to fix it, she had to grasp what was going on. Laurie prided herself on cold reading people like she was a stage magician, and yet the person closest to her sounded like a stranger.

  “How long have you felt this way?” she asked.

  “A while,” Dan said, and although his body showed tension, she could already tell he had relaxed several notches. Announcement made, the worst was over for him. She hated him, for a second. “I think I knew for sure at Tom and Pri’s wedding.”

  “Oh, that was why you spent the whole night in a strop, was it?” Laurie spat. And realized the lunacy of that sort of point scoring, when the whole game had been canceled. He wouldn’t go through with this. Surely.

  Her stomach lurched. It was utterly ridiculous to take him seriously, and wildly reckless not to.

  Dan made a hissing noise, shook his head. Whether he was dismayed at Laurie or himself wasn’t clear.

  “I knew none of that wedding fuss was for me. I knew that’s not where I was at mentally.”

  A painful memory came back to Laurie, because it turned out her senses hadn’t entirely failed her.

  She recalled that the couples present had been corralled by the DJ for the first-dance-after-the-first-dance. She and a half-drunk, sullen Dan were forced into a waltz hold to Adele. She’d felt a sudden total absence of anything between them, not even a comfortable ease with each other’s touch, in place of a spark. It was like their battery was dead and if you pressed the accelerator it’d only make an empty phut-phut-phut. They shuffled around the floor awkwardly, like brother and sister, not meeting each other’s gaze. Then as soon as the song was over she forgot about it, and put it down to Dan not liking “Someone Like You” or being told to do things.

  He’d made a passive-aggressive show of going to sleep in the cab on the way back. Laurie felt she’d committed an unspecified crime all day, but when asked “What’s up with you?” she’d gotten a belligerent “. . . NOTHING?”

  But crap days in a long-term relationship were a given. You no more thought they might spell the end than you feared every cold could be cancer.

  “Is there someone else?” Laurie said, not because she thought it possible but you were supposed to ask this, weren’t you? In this weird theater they were playing out, at Dan’s insistence. They worked together—on a practical level alone, this seemed improbable.

  “No, of course not,” Dan said, sounding genuinely affronted.

  “I don’t think you get to OF COURSE NOT me, do you?” Laurie shrieked, anger breaking, causing Dan to flinch. “I think OF COURSE NOT is pretty much fucking unavailable to you right now, don’t you? We’ve stopped having any shared reality from what I can see, so fuck off with your patronizing OF COURSE NOTs.”

  Dan was completely unused to seeing her this incandescently angry. In fact, the last time she hit these heights, they were twenty-five and he’d lost her car keys in the healing field at Glastonbury. They’d been able to laugh about it later, though, alchemize it as an anecdote. Comedy was tragedy plus time, but there’d never be enough distance to make this amusing.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly. “But, no. Like we always said. No cheating, ever.”

  “Ever?” she said with a knowing intonation.

  “You know what we agreed. I’d tell 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 traveling, 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 would be 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 premi
ses, 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 grocery delivery and complaining about the generic cookies they got as substitutions for Jaffa Cakes, going for musty pints of stout in their local pub, 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 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

  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-size 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 anymore, 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.”

  He drew breath. “That’s the thing. I kept thinking I had to stay to be kind to you but I wasn’t being kind, so what was the point?”

  “You’ve always been quite grumpy, to be fair,” Laurie said with a small smile.

  Dan didn’t appear to listen.

  “You know how people always asked how could we do it, how could we ‘settle down’ so young?”

  “Yes,” said Laurie, voice tight.

  “We both said it was the easiest thing we’d ever done, we never even thought of it that way. And I always meant it, Laurie, always. But maybe now, at thirty-six, it’s caught up with me. I don’t feel I’ve lived enough.”

  Laurie took a deep breath and tried to get past how much this hurt. She’d stifled him, stopped him from going on expeditions, with his fascinating penis as travel companion. However, she had asked for straight answers.

  “If I’d never met you—if you’d slept around at university, and we’d got together at twenty-five, or thirty, this wouldn’t be happening?” Laurie deliberately didn’t say this in an accusatory way; she wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. I can’t go back and live a different timeline until I get here again, and do you know what, I promise you, I wouldn’t want to. And it’s not about sex. It’s about . . . Oh God, I don’t want to say ‘finding myself.’ But life’s big decisions are mainly instinct, right? The same way we both just knew, back at university. Now I know this isn’t right for me anymore. I’ve lost myself.”

  “Is it me, I’m not enough? Or too much? You’re looking at other women or . . . our friends or their wives, or our colleagues, thinking, ‘I wish Laurie was more like that’?” Her throat was tight and she felt as if she was standing here, stark naked. To ask these questions: it was the hardest, most exposing thing. Tell me how you fell out of love with me. Describe it.

  “No! God no. It’s not about you. I know that sounds insulting, but it isn’t.”

  A pause.

  “OK. Thanks for being honest,” Laurie said dully.

  She meant it. She didn’t hate this situation any less, but she grasped it a little better. Dan being this open with her reminded her how they used to be able to talk, and the pain hit her stomach again with a physical force. She would never be able to forget how easily you could lose someone’s love. She hadn’t felt it slipping away.

  “Won’t you miss me?” she said.

  This was it, the biggest question. The one that left her feeling ridiculous, pitiable, even, but she knew she had to. The idea Dan would no longer be on the “people to contact in an emergency” space on her passport felt impossible. She needed him to explain how he could do this and not feel how she’d feel, if she did this.

  “The thought of it is brutal, Laurie. Like missing a limb,” Dan said, tears starting. “I love you. I don’t love our relationship anymore.”

  “We could stay together and make the relationship different,” Laurie said, eyes welling up.

  They both sobbed, heads bowed, because Dan didn’t want to say it and she didn’t want to hear it. The sound of it was strange, in the quiet room.

  “Why would you leave me like this? Why would you do this to us?” Laurie said, and she sounded like someone else. Who was this mournful, begging woman? And who was this merciless person who’d taken Dan’s place? How could eighteen years end in just a few hours?

  “I’m sorry . . . I’m really sorry . . .” Dan gasped.

  “If
you were that sorry, you wouldn’t do it,” Laurie said thickly, not even caring how she sounded, almost pleading. This was like a catapult back to the powerlessness of childhood, wondering why grown-ups did the completely arse-about-face cruel things they did.

  “I can’t not do it.” He looked like he was going to say something else and then thought better of it. Like when they told a client to go No Comment. The more you say, the more you’ll incriminate yourself.

  Laurie suspected what he wouldn’t say was: There came a point where feelings weren’t there to be resuscitated, they had died. That dance at that wedding. That’s what she’d picked up on. Flatlining.

  “And I want you to be happy. You deserve more than someone who . . .”

  “OK. Spare me that stuff, Dan,” Laurie said briskly, wiping her eyes, squeezing her already folded arms tighter. “You’re like the climber who can’t carry their injured mate, so leaves them to die. Do what you need to do but don’t pretend it’s about anything other than your survival.”

  “Hah.” Dan rubbed his face tiredly. “You’re so bloody clever, you are.”

  She wasn’t sure, in the tone of his voice, that it was a compliment. It even sounded like a hint at some other part of this. Laurie was too tired and raw to judge.

  “I don’t know who or what I’m meant to trust in,” Laurie said, tremulous. “We spend our whole lives together and one day it’s—nah, not for me? What do I do with that? What’s the lesson I have to learn here?”

  “There isn’t a lesson for you; you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  She could feel it now, the grief and enormity of what had been abruptly taken from her. A future. The rest of their lives. A promise, broken. “Then how am I going to ever believe this won’t happen again?”