She scanned the comments, forgetting that it being Jamie’s post meant most of the people were strangers to her.
Looking good, sir
Wow, great shot. Like an Armani advert. Where is this?
You look like the Stark who had his throat cut in the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones. And she looks like the Dragon woman’s handmaiden Missandei, i.e., both fit
<3 She’s beautiful, who’s this, Jamie?
Well played, woof
The name’s Carter, Jamie Carter
Whoa! Exotic totty!
Jamie had replied to the last saying: “Laurie is from Hebden Bridge—surely even you’ve been to Yorkshire, Dave.” Since his not being sure of her name, she noticed Jamie had been very attentive to any detail she offered, and it was a neat way to point up the microaggression without going full attack dog.
There were tons of likes, eighty-five in total, Bharat among them, and Dan’s sister, Ruth, had commented:
Great to see you looking so well, Laurie! Wowsers x
Laurie didn’t see that coming. She hit reply and typed a thank-you. She’d always liked Ruth, but since Dan’s mum took Dan’s side, she’d assumed Ruth had done the same and their obligatory “sorry to hear” “I’m fine thanks for asking” text exchange had been friendly but fairly economical on both sides.
What did Dan think? Had he seen it?
From her busy WhatsApp to the half-dozen texts, she could see the required splash had been made. And the shamelessness of these inquiries: people she never spoke to—who hadn’t gotten in touch to say Sorry to hear about you and Dan—now eagerly fishing.
Laurie only replied to two people directly: Jamie, to reassure him the wording was fine, and Bharat.
Bharat
WTAF, YOU DARK HORSE! WHAT THE HELL AM I SEEING?! Jamie Carter?!
Laurie
He asked me out and I thought: why the hell not ☺
Bharat
This guy is a stealth bomber, I’ll give him that. I’m probably going to catch him with my mum next time I go home
Laurie
THANKS, BHAZ I’m the second-to-last woman on earth you’d expect him to show an interest in
Bharat
NO NO NO NO. I didn’t know you were ready, that’s all. Glad you having fun. You look TOTAL FIRE. WTF THE HAIR?? Gossip tomorrow please xxx
Laurie couldn’t deal with the agitation caused by the constant ping-ping-ping of new comments and likes and queries. Jamie inhabited a different online world to her, a busy, interactive one—in fact the man seemed to be a social hub, and Laurie found it overwhelming.
As the thread underneath wore on, friends outright asked if he and Laurie were “an item,” and Jamie replied “early days” with a smiley emoji, and “if I’m lucky” to another. He and Laurie agreed in hasty further messages, finessing their approach, that vague, noncommittal positivity was the best bluster. Goodness, it felt odd.
He was right about the mixed messaging stimulating more fuss, as everyone tried to figure out if what seemed like an announcement actually was one.
After a twitchy morning, Laurie found herself irresistibly drawn to putting on her tracksuit trousers, finding an old Couch to 5K app on her phone, and plodding around the streets, warily at first.
She could only tolerate so much of the female voice instructing her to now walk briskly for TWO MINUTES before she switched the app off, turned her music up, and ran for herself, until the pace and the pounding of blood and the impact of her feet on the pavement was the only thing that existed.
Laurie ignored shouts from a car full of lads, dodged around strollers, and urged herself onward, and as she arrived back home, feeling exultant, thought, this is why Dan used it as springboard for leaving her. She felt ready to fight a polar bear. Unfortunately it also put Laurie in mind of what it readied Dan for. She got a flash image of grunting and pumping and wanted to die.
Was he going to ruin everything for her? It was hard to feel anywhere was her space when they were colleagues.
Laurie peeled off her clothes to shower, watching herself in the mirror, and thought of Jamie’s pushy mate calling her exotic totty. What a sham, a long con job made of shapewear and filters. She didn’t feel either exotic or like totty, she felt like a woman from Yorkshire in her late thirties with soft, malleable, untended parts, some of which were silvered with stretch marks, and with unruly hair down there that definitely wasn’t sculpted into a martini glass shape.
She’d never put her naked form to any particular objective test of desirability because she was desired by Dan. She put her hands over her breasts and hoiked them up an inch: Was that where they should be? Was that where they used to be? Laurie honestly couldn’t remember. If she asked Dan this sort of thing, as erotic memory keeper, he’d make a joke and then usually lunge and grapple with her.
Laurie hadn’t considered herself as being defined by what any man thought of her and yet there was no denying that her body, unwanted now by her lifelong partner, felt like a body she had to reassess and own for herself again.
The thought of being exposed in front of someone else of the opposite sex provoked abject terror, yet it was that or lifelong celibacy.
Last time Emily had shown her Tinder it was full of men called things like Kev and Daz sitting naked in hotel bidets, swigging from bottles of Peroni, declaring their “massive love for the sesh.”
Maybe Keanu Reeves films and a vibrator would be preferable, Laurie thought, turning the water on.
20
“Morning!” Laurie said cheerfully, power walking up the stairs on Monday, as the two receptionists present, Jan and Katy, both detained by phone calls, almost screeched with disappointment that they couldn’t bang down the receivers fast enough to commence interrogation.
It was also possible their round eyes and look of fascination was Laurie’s change of image. She’d pulled Honey’s curly hairdo up into a ponytail, but it was still far more bushy than her usual more severe style. As Laurie had fretted about being conspicuous, she wondered if her mum had a point, back at school, that she could allow. Laurie’s Afro curls weren’t a crass bid for attention, they were genetics, and yet she flattened them to move less observed in a mostly white world. To fit in. How much of her existence had been about trying—with varied success—to fit in? To keep her head down?
“Morning, team,” Laurie said heartily to Bharat and Di, and Bharat said, “Oh, here she is, whoring her way to her desk as if she’s not Manchester’s most notorious slut. Careful she doesn’t try to shag you on her way past, Di!”
“Things have come to a pretty pass when a woman can’t go for five mojitos, two toots of coke, a bump of ket, and a game of strip Boggle in the Britannia Hotel without being called loose anymore,” Laurie said as Bharat chortled. “Honestly, you make one sex tape with a girthy dildo . . .”
“Bit harsh to call Jamie Carter a girthy dildo, but you know him best I guess,” Bharat said.
Laurie and Bharat honked, and Di looked stunned. How many years had she sat opposite Laurie, and the biggest scandal Laurie had ever offered was admitting she’d never seen X Factor.
All three of them started at the sudden sight of Dan in the doorway. He was wearing that pale pink shirt of his she always liked. Laurie felt oddly pleased with the optics of him interrupting at that moment, because she’d been doing proper corpsing laughter. Dan shot Laurie a direct, purposeful look she couldn’t decipher.
“Uh, do you have Mick’s sixtieth collection?”
“Oh, yeah . . .” Bharat rifled through his trays in a tense silence and handed over a brown envelope, baggy at one end with coins. Laurie’s heart pounded.
“Ta.” Dan promptly departed and they all did a “hmm-mm” throat clearing at one another, as a way of communicating not sure what that was without saying so, in so many words.
It was a condition check, Laurie decided, a way of letting her know he’d seen the picture and wasn’t going to react.
But this was the f
irst time since they broke up that he’d found a pretext to visit her desk, so given actions spoke louder than (barely any) words, it had backfired.
Having run the gauntlet and survived, Laurie was feeling almost smug, until the first loo break of the morning ran her slap-bang into Kerry as she exited the cubicle. A one-woman gauntlet.
“Oh, hello you. Belle of the ball. Apple of daddy’s eye.” Laurie had long suspected Mr. Salter’s fondness for her made her especially problematic to Kerry. Kerry’s snarky, wry tone always implied she’d caught you up to something, and was deciding whether or not to dob you in for it. It was very Lauren Bacall, the same delivery as: You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?
“Your selfie with Jamie Carter is the talk of the office. Are you seeing each other?”
“Haaah.” Laurie washed her hands. “Thought it might be. He asked me out and I thought it’d be fun.”
“Out for a drink, then? Nothing more happen?” Kerry said, running a lipstick around her mouth, eyes moving to the side to catch Laurie’s expression.
“Bit personal!” Laurie said in what she hoped was a jolly way. “How was your weekend?”
“Hmm,” Kerry said, capping the tube as if she’d not heard or the question was rhetorical.
Laurie wished she’d rehearsed this more, had her tactics more finely worked out. She’d been reckless. The plan went: (1) post photo, (2) bullshit that she and Jamie were involved.
There was a lot of gray area, and now she’d made an enemy of Kerry by not preparing a fob off when directly asked if they’d slept together. It was utterly outrageous Kerry felt entitled to know this, of course, but these were the unofficial rules of Salter & Rowson. Kerry either got what she wanted from you or she spin-doctored her way around and made life a misery. She twisted you the fuck up.
At lunchtime, Laurie received a WhatsApp from Bharat to meet her at Starbucks, and she suspected if he wouldn’t risk saying it on premises, it was nothing to be pleased about.
Laurie was right.
As they queued, Bharat said:
“Kerry’s telling everyone that this was clearly a totally contrived stunt to make Dan jealous and you and Jamie Carter can’t possibly be seeing each other.” This tacit support from Bharat was a kindness; it was always accepted that you needed to know what line Kerry was pushing about you, to push back on it.
Laurie gulped.
“What a cow! Why on earth wouldn’t it be true?”
Laurie knew Bharat would accept Laurie’s word over Kerry’s as a point of honor, and felt both glad and guilty. Laurie had already spun him the line that she was deliberately doing things that felt out of character—broadly true—and threw the bonding-in-the-lift incident in, relieved that wasn’t an invention.
“Timing too quick, and that you dodged saying if you’d gone home with him. She doesn’t want to lie, but she wants to make us all think something happened. Laurie is not a natural liar.”
“As if I’m going to tell her!”
“I know. She said it’s totally out of character for you, you’re too ‘straight edged’ to go for a man like Carter, and we all know you’re still in bits over Dan. I quote: ‘one hundred percent set up, including the Toni & Guy, Sasha Fierce do.’”
Laurie flinched.
“Anyway, she’s stirred the cauldron good and proper and even taken it upon herself to tell Dan he obviously provoked this, and that you must be in a real state to go this far.”
Laurie cringed again, and cursed Kerry.
“What an ultra bitch.”
She was badly needled, like everyone was laughing at her. That she couldn’t see herself the way others so plainly did.
Kerry could find anyone’s weak spot; it was her superpower. Somehow she’d immediately identified that the worst things for Laurie would be pointing up the implausibility of her as Jamie’s paramour, and the humiliation of her ex thinking it was for his benefit.
“How dare she,” Laurie said as they left, holding cups bearing the names LORI and BAWAT. “And my hair wasn’t Toni & Guy!”
“That was the biggest burn of all,” Bharat agreed. “My friend Jessie you met was given the worst time there—she came out looking like Rod Stewart. Not even Faces Rod, Nana Hair Rod.”
“I don’t think I’ve met Jessie?”
“Yeah, you did. Her sister was the practice nurse in Alderley Edge who gave one of the Spice Girls her abnormal smear test, remember? Forget which one. It was fine, she only needed some precancerous cells lasered.”
Laurie guffawed. “What a bio!” and then, “Thank you, Bharat, somehow you always lighten the mood.”
“Like the NYPD, I protect and serve.”
Laurie had seen a case on the whiteboard for this afternoon, with the initials JC next to it. She’d heard Michael and others mutter that because he shared them with Jesus Christ, he thought he was the Second Coming.
If she got to the mags court before the hour, she could possibly intercept Jamie outside without anyone seeing. This conversation was too involved for WhatsApp. She timed it right, as he was ten paces ahead of her on the pavement the whole way, talking into his phone for much of it.
“Jamie,” she said, pouncing on him as he put his phone in his pocket.
Laurie glanced around to check they weren’t being observed and motioned for him to duck around the side of the building with her.
Laurie was slightly out of breath, skin still warm with not only the exertion of tracking him, but prickling shame at Kerry’s cruelties.
“It’s over,” she said urgently under her breath. “Kerry is going ’round saying it’s obviously fake and a ploy to get back at Dan.”
Jamie shrugged. “And?”
“And, we’ve been made. Or I have. They’re not going to buy the idea we’re together.”
“This is to be expected, as they get their heads ’round it.”
“Why would they change their minds?”
“You keep saying they, plural. This is Kerry. Kerry’s gonna Kerry. Why do you care what she thinks?”
“Uh, I thought what people think was the whole point of this? Why else are we doing it?”
“Kerry is one person, and someone everyone knows is about as reliable a news source as the Daily Star,” Jamie said. “Let her say what she wants. It’s more fuel thrown on to the fire, which we have set.”
“But if it’s out there, the idea that it’s not real and it’s for Dan’s sake, from now on I look stupid!”
“Will you calm down?” Jamie said. “You don’t look stupid. We carry on. The plan is the plan.”
Being told to calm down made Laurie feel even more foolish.
“This has fallen at the first hurdle. It’s simply not plausible. God, the last thing I wanted was for people to think I am in such a mess over Dan I’d do this.”
“Your sensitivity over his reaction is clouding your judgment,” Jamie said, frowning. “Absolutely nothing’s changed. See it from the outside, beyond Salter & Rowson’s microclimate. The idea it’s impossible two single people in their thirties who work in the same office might be dating—it’s not ‘out there,’ is it? It’s not ‘persuading people that 9/11 was an inside-job’ level of buy-in?”
Laurie could see how exasperated Jamie was with her. Someone so ambitious and confident probably had low tolerance for what he perceived as weak nerves and cowardice.
“You only want to press on because it might get you a juicy promotion!”
“No shit, that’s why I’m doing this? Not much of a gotcha, is it? It doesn’t make my analysis wrong.”
Laurie was silent.
“OK, look.” Jamie rubbed the bridge of his nose, moving his Clark Kent glasses upward, and Laurie suspected he was regretting it too, whatever he said. “If you drop it now, Kerry has won, because if it stays a one-off then it will look like a stunt. Carry on, and she looks more and more wrong. Which’ll it be?”
Laurie had no comeback. He was right.
“. . . OK.” She shrug
ged in defeat.
There was a pause as they prepared to part.
“Do you wear glasses?” Laurie adjusted the files she was carrying.
“Uh?” Jamie pointed at them, on his face.
“I mean sometimes you’re in them and sometimes you’re not.”
“Have you heard of long-sightedness and shortsightedness?”
“Yes, but I can’t work out which you have.”
“Is this relevant in some way I’m not grasping?” Jamie said testily.
“It’s not relevant. I’m being nosy.” Laurie smiled. “I’m meant to know stuff about you, now we’re going out.”
“They’re clear,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Clear? As in no prescription?”
“Yes.”
“So why wear them?”
Jamie turned his head up to the heavens briefly. “When I first started going to court I looked young, OK, and I noticed I got treated differently when I wore them. They’re a . . . prop.”
“OK.”
“Don’t tell anyone at the office, please. I will get roasted for it.”
“I will definitely not tell anyone at the office.”
“Thank you.”
“. . . That you do Atticus Finch cosplay! Hahahahoohoo.”
Jamie glowered as Laurie doubled over. She had a feeling no one had ever sent him up like this. Certainly no female. Laurie didn’t know why she dared with Jamie, she just knew she did.
“Oh, up yours. Great. Right I’ve got a murder committal in court nine, going to do that before I do one myself. Catch you later.”
He stalked off, leaving Laurie wiping her eyes, not sure if she should regret her mockery.
When Laurie’s WhatsApp pinged at five p.m., she expected Jamie to be saying You know what, maybe you’re right, let’s leave it.
Jamie
If I Never Met You Page 15
