If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  She had been Saffy to her mum’s Eddy in Ab Fab—what did a Saffy do as a student?

  This Friday night, Laurie was in the eye of the storm in a rowdy barn called Bar CaVa. It catered exotically foul-flavored shots to the undergraduate population, and was the place you went to preload before getting even more steaming at second or third locations.

  She was in a Pixies T-shirt and jeans, hair in ironic schoolgirl plaits (she was in the student mode of immediately glomming on to the things she would have scorned and rejected back home, including hankering after the batty flavor combinations in her mum’s vegetarian cooking). She was with a bunch of girls she met in halls who seemed quite loud, posh, and not much her thing: two of them were discussing joining the hockey club.

  Laurie was vaguely aware of a group of lads in fancy dress for some rag week stunt in the corner of the room but didn’t pay them any heed until a girl with long straight brown hair tumbled to the floor, dramatically pissed. The lads dashed over to help her up.

  “She needs to be taken home,” said an Austin Powers, through false teeth. “Where are you staying?”

  The petite girl, like a rag doll, looked to be mumbling, indistinctly.

  Laurie’s ears pricked up at “be taken home.” There was no way she was letting someone who’d lost her motor functions be carried out of here by a load of men who Laurie would be unable to identify in an ID parade. She had not started her law degree, and yet with her innate fiery sense of right and wrong and moral duty, she suspected she might be a good fit for it.

  “She’s spannered, leave her,” said a Zorro, after they propped the girl upright in a seat. You could just about imagine she was OK if you didn’t notice her eyes were closed, like the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s.

  “We can’t leave her like this,” said a Hot Dog. “Where are her friends?”

  They gingerly poked around in a purse that was attached to the drunk girl’s wrist by a small loop of leather, and found a halls of residence card.

  “Here’s her room number,” said Zorro.

  At this, Laurie swigged the last of her drink and approached. “Hi. I don’t know her, but might be better for me to take her home?”

  “Hell-LOH!” said Austin Powers, truly inhabiting the role. “I can’t speak for her but I wouldn’t mind you taking me home.”

  “Hi,” said Hot Dog. “And thank you.”

  “I’m Laurie,” she said, feeling uncharacteristically confident.

  “Lorry? As in haulage?” said Zorro.

  “L-A-U-R-I-E.”

  “What a great name,” Hot Dog said. “It would be much, much better if you’d take her, thank you so much.”

  “No problem.” Laurie squatted down to level of Drunk Girl. Drunk Girl appeared to briefly focus on her and gave her a sloppy little grin.

  “Harro,” she slurred. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you.” Laurie grinned back. “Let’s get you home, eh? More fun to be sick in your own bed than here.” She hoisted her up, wrapping her arm around her tiny frame, and prepared to exit Bar CaVa.

  “Here’s her halls card,” Hot Dog said, handing it over. “Thank you.”

  Laurie read the name on the card. EMILY CLARKE.

  She noticed Hot Dog had kind eyes. In fact, he had eyes with so much personality, they could blaze out of a hot dog costume. They focused on her intently. You didn’t see that every day. You didn’t expect to get sex looks from a foam sausage.

  “Thank you, really,” Hot Dog said. “Can I get in touch with you? Find out if she’s OK?”

  Even though his concern was supposedly for Drunk Girl, Laurie knew it wasn’t her he was chiefly interested in.

  Laurie found a lip liner pencil in her bag and wrote her room number and halls on Hot Dog’s proffered hand. Swapping mobile numbers would’ve made more sense, but they were away from home, playing roles in a realm where normal rules didn’t apply. Laurie was almost self-consciously acting a filmic moment, to be quirky, to be a manic Pixies-liking black girl. And Dan later admitted: “Can I have your phone number?” was too obviously hitting on her.

  It was so easy, that was what Laurie remembered. This funny, cute Welsh lad with a slight lisp and a dry wit was everything she didn’t know she wanted until that moment. They couldn’t stop smiling at each other because it was so right, and they both knew it.

  Over the next month, Laurie lost her virginity, discovering sex wasn’t that big a deal when you found someone you wanted to do it with; who liked you as much as you liked them, who was as exhilarated and terrified about passing that milestone as you were.

  And she’d made a fast friend in Emily, the drunken wraith she’d rescued.

  It was all good things turning up at once, and Laurie felt her life had finally taken off.

  One day, lolling on her bed in the Amsterdam-window red light cast by the thick orange curtains in her halls room, a lovestruck Dan was discussing infidelity. They both recoiled from the idea that they would ever break the sacred covenant between them. It was unthinkable. They were Romeo and Juliet without the balcony, the warring dynasties, or the suicide misunderstanding. They’d had whispered conversations in the dark about the future, they both knew this was it.

  “Let’s promise each other, here and now,” Dan said, putting out his hand for Laurie to shake. “Let’s pledge that if either of us even thinks about being unfaithful, we tell the other one before it can start. That way neither of us ever has to worry. Complete and total honesty.”

  The improbability they were ever going to do it made the sweetness of explicitly pledging all the greater. Laurie shook his hand, and they kissed.

  She felt like laughing, remembering that now. The way life was so simple to kids in love. Find the right person, promise not to cheat on them. It’s not difficult! They were never going to make the strange, tawdry messes their parents’ generation had. The idea their parents had once felt the way they did hadn’t occurred to them. Eugh.

  Dan stalking Jamie’s online presence: it was a tiny glimmer of being wanted by him again, and Laurie craved it like a drug.

  22

  “How can you think it’s real when you’re not a toothless crone in the Middle Ages? I’m reading from Wikipedia here: It has no scientific validity or explanatory power,” Bharat said.

  “See, they can’t explain it!” Di said.

  “No, you div, it means astrology can’t explain anything.”

  “Then how do you explain star signs describing people perfectly? My sister is a completely typical Pisces, dreamy and creative. I am a classic Virgo.”

  “Credulous?”

  They were doing an old favorite, running through a Bharat and Di greatest hit. In its familiarity, Laurie was finding it as relaxing as panpipes in a birthing suite, although perhaps the analogy was unwise and a bout of unmedicated searing pain was also on the way.

  The mood on Monday at Salter & Rowson was decidedly different, Laurie noticed. Lots of lines of sight resting upon her, more frantic whispering, conversations that happened to end as she neared. There was a noticeable tension, like the hush of expectation when you walk into a room prior to public speaking.

  Jamie was correct: if the Ivy photo had set everyone wondering, the Hawksmoor shot had convinced them. Now the gossip wasn’t if she and Jamie were sleeping together, it was that they were.

  As Laurie grabbed some paperwork from the criminal office, Michael intercepted her.

  “Can I have a quick word?” he said, briskly leading Laurie to a store cupboard which was known colloquially as Churchill’s War Rooms, given it was solely used for hatching plots, strategic planning, and arguments too vicious or sensitive for the shop floor. And storage. It smelled of cardboard and a newly installed carpet.

  After the door clicked shut, Michael turned to her. “You’re hanging out with Jamie Carter, I hear?” putting an emphasis on hanging out that made it sound impossibly obscene.

  “Yes . . . ?”

  He exhaled in disbelief and d
isgust at the confirmation, hands on hips, shaking his head. Laurie got the feeling he had to get himself steady before he could speak.

  “This is a very poor judgment call, and the last thing I expected from you. I know Dan has hurt you, but this is . . .” Michael trailed off. “Jesus, really? Him?”

  Laurie shrugged. “It’s only a casual thing.”

  “I would’ve asked you for a drink if I thought you were ready. I’m sure a lot of guys here would’ve. But it was—what, first come first served?”

  Laurie’s eyes widened and she took a sharp breath at this insult: the entitlement, the sense of ownership. The idea she had no right to have sex with someone else, when Michael had been on the waiting list longer.

  “You what?”

  “I’m struggling to see why else you’d choose Carter.”

  “Er . . . Because he’s fit?”

  “He’s fit? Are you seventeen? And without moral compass? C’mon, Loz! Who body swapped you?”

  Laurie snorted.

  If Michael was in a pub, if this was a fair fight, she’d give him verbals that would stop short of a knee in the crotch. But this wasn’t quite so easy. Michael was tacitly wielding the only power over Laurie that he had—the threat of becoming an enemy who would do her unspecified harms within Salter & Rowson. As with Kerry, she had to tread carefully, swallowing down the urge to tell him to fuck off.

  “I wasn’t aware I needed your sign-off before I could start seeing someone,” Laurie said calmly.

  “This isn’t someone, Lozza, this is Jamie fucking Carter. He’s a rattlesnake. He’s ricin. He’s the kind of enemy you only get rid of by pushing him over the Reichenbach Falls. Do you know what the lads are saying? They’re saying they don’t want to discuss cases with you in case it turns into pillow talk. You know everyone’s always liked you and trusted you, but that’s going to change if you don’t wise up. Fast.”

  Laurie folded her arms and looked at the floor. Some part of her had known this was coming. She’d always been aware Salter & Rowson was a toxically sexist environment. She only needed to hear the way the men in the criminal department discussed the people they represented, or look at the gender of who answered phones and made coffee, and who got the bonuses and departmental headships.

  Laurie had been protected. The counterpart to a senior man: a Nice Girl. But as a single woman, she was fair game for the rough-and-tumble of such politics. She was—apparently—daring to have carnal relations with a male the testosterone club didn’t like, and that had to be punished.

  “What exactly is Jamie supposed to have done to you lot to be so hated?”

  Michael spluttered.

  “Tell me,” Laurie said. “All I hear is bitching about his suits being too flash and expensive.”

  “I assume we’re speaking in confidence,” Michael said, eyes blazing.

  “Yes of course,” Laurie snapped. “I’m still capable of independent thought.”

  “When he first turned up and wanted to make his mark, he was a total tosser. He poached loads of Ant’s caseload and then bad-mouthed his work.”

  “I thought he was given Ant’s caseload because Ant was off with his Crohn’s?”

  “Yeah, Ant was off sick and came back to find Jamie Carter’s all but taken his job. There’s big trials that Ant has prepped for, like the drugs four hander, and Carter waltzes in, gets two suspended sentences and takes the credit with Statler and Waldorf. Swaggering around like a cock.”

  Laurie saw how the trick was worked: the alleged villainy was entirely subjective, a matter of taste not substance: waltzing and swaggering. She increasingly suspected Jamie’s offense was his refusal to play the popularity game.

  “So, essentially, his big misdemeanor is that he efficiently took care of the work he’d been asked to cover?”

  Michael’s eyes bulged.

  “He’s really done a number on you, hasn’t he? There’s a theory, it’s a rumor, but—rumblings that he might be going for a partnership. Can you imagine? He’s been here five minutes, and tries to get made our boss. The nerve of the little twat.”

  “Surely not? He’s too young for that.”

  Michael appeared to simmer down by a degree, with this remark. Possibly as it implied it was an unfounded rumor, if Laurie wasn’t corroborating it.

  “Young, dumb, and full of . . .” He shot her a revolted, pained look.

  Laurie had been vaguely aware that Michael had a soft spot for her, but she had no idea she’d spark this sort of possessiveness.

  Unless . . . He had harbored notions. That Laurie might not be interested in him wasn’t a factor in his accounting. If she was seeing Jamie, then she must have also been available to Michael, because Michael was the better man. Laurie was property and Michael was an honest broker, who had been sexually gazumped. It was revolting, discovering the antediluvian attitudes and values that lurked just beneath the surface.

  “. . . And that’s before we get on to him fucking Salter’s niece who he was specifically warned not to fuck. Someone saw him in the Principal Hotel with her, so I think we all know how that ended. She was practically a teenager, for God’s sake. That’s who you’re dealing with, someone who’ll take what he wants, no matter the cost to others.”

  Hmmm. Laurie saw them in the bar of this hotel. Had he been seen elsewhere in the building too? Brandishing their key cards? It was hard to tell, as Michael would naturally exaggerate to make it sound more damning.

  “I don’t think he did anything with her, did he?” Laurie said. It helped she had no real skin in this game—Michael wasn’t in control of his emotions, she was.

  “Get real, Laurie. Seriously. Of course he did. You think a man like that passes when it’s on offer, on a plate, from a young pouting innocent? She was following him around like a schnauzer. And he immediately discards her when he’s got what he wanted. Bastard.”

  Laurie said nothing. Innocent schnauzer wasn’t how Jamie had characterized Eve, but then she might be dealing with two unreliable narrators here. She had a feeling that the less she said, the sooner Michael would run out of steam.

  “You’re very highly thought of here, you know,” Michael said.

  Ah, Laurie thought, now the manipulation changes tack to Good Cop. It was as if she’d never been in a custody suite.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m unclear why you’d risk tearing so much down for so little. Carter will have fucked off to some practice in London by next summer and you’ll be left picking up the pieces, in more than one way.”

  “I thought he was trying to be made partner?”

  “You know what I mean. His sort rape and pillage the village, then move on to the next one. He’s a plunderer. Why would a smart woman like you want to be another of his meaningless trophies?”

  “OK. First of all, no one’s raping or pillaging anyone. Secondly, I think you might be way over the line in telling me who I can and can’t spend time with out of work.”

  Michael scowled. Laurie had never been into Michael’s vicious archduke in BBC costume drama type of good looks, and right now she was very glad. She had a suspicion that Michael hated Jamie because he reminded him too much of himself.

  “OK, I’ve tried to warn you, Loz. What can I say. Ditch him now, while you can still repair this. We all know you’ve been through a tough time and we’d be prepared to chalk it up as an indiscretion, if it stopped now.”

  “The royal ‘we’? The whole criminal department gets a veto on my love life?”

  “It’s not love and it’s no life. You heard.”

  He threw the door open and stalked off. Laurie spotted the tactics: the flourish of a dramatic exit gave him the upper hand. A “do as I say or else,” when you didn’t want to spell out the “else.”

  Laurie’s chest was heaving with indignation, and the things she still wanted to say. Her fingers clenched and unclenched into fists.

  Whenever she and Jamie decided to end this, she’d have learned things about other m
en that she couldn’t unknow.

  Laurie hoped the day would pick up after Michael’s counseling session, but in vain.

  A district judge in an extremely foul mood gave her city center bin arsonist a three-month custodial sentence, out in six weeks, after Laurie argued for a suspended one due to it being a first offense for criminal damage and the pigeon not being harmed. He added tartly that “his counsel would have better spent their time engaging with plausible outcomes than trying to achieve extraordinary things at the expense of reality.”

  The prosecutors smirked.

  Her client didn’t quite follow the language or the argument, but he could tell the judge was saying Laurie had fucked up, and he flipped her the finger while the cuffs were being put on. Yes, yes, it’s my fault you tried to “send a message” with a “cleansing fire” to the “consumerist chimpanzees” of the Arndale mall.

  Laurie messaged Jamie on her way back to tell him about Michael’s hostility and didn’t expect anything other than a few sympathetically chosen emojis of bells and clowns, so tossed her phone into her bag after sending.

  Seconds after she took her seat at her desk, Jamie appeared in the doorway of their office, filling the frame, a hand braced on the doorjamb.

  “Laurie, you got a minute?”

  Bharat and Di both gawped. Not only was he bonking Laurie, he was prepared to approach her desk and speak to her, asking for private audiences! Absolute libertine.

  Laurie had already forgotten how ludicrously pretty he was: dark hair against snow-white skin, expensive ink-blue suit jacket gaping open to a slim midriff, clad in narrow cut, pale blue designer shirt. You could whip out a Nikon and snap him, standing there as he was, and probably win an award.

  “Let’s not risk the lift, eh,” he said, and they took the stairs, the receptionists watching them pass through the lobby as if Elvis was leaving the building.

  When they were at safe distance, Jamie said: “Michael’s been aggro with you?”

  “Yes. Pretty much promising me pariah status if I keep seeing you.”

  Jamie exhaled. “This is beyond shit, isn’t it? What business is it of his?”