If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  “Thank you,” Laurie said in a small voice to Jamie, as they otherwise descended in silence in the lift.

  At ground level, Laurie calmed somewhat. She’d felt trapped up there, as though her skin was two sizes too small.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, or do you just want to go home?” Jamie said.

  Laurie breathed out.

  “Yes, but not here.” She took Jamie by the hand to lead him to somewhere on the street they wouldn’t be jostled by the Friday night crowds, and Jamie squeezed her hand back reassuringly. She felt relief from him somehow, despite the unnatural interruption, and wasn’t sure why.

  Once they were in St. Peter’s Square, she turned to face him, tucking her hands deep into her pockets and hunching her shoulders against the chill. She was suddenly very cold.

  “There was a man, at the bar,” she said. “One of my dad’s friends. He brought a memory back.” Laurie shook her head. “Until ten minutes ago, if you’d said, did I repress any memories from my childhood I’d say ‘Haha, I wish.’ But I had. I’m kind of . . . stupefied, to be honest. It’s like I knew it was there, but I’d never looked at it. Like having something in your loft storage.”

  She wasn’t just cold, she realized she was shaking. Actual physical shaking, like she’d been plunged into subzero-temperature water.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Jamie said, and Laurie nodded, then shook her head again. I can, I will be OK.

  She breathed and steadied herself. “I want to. Ummm. When I was about eight, I went to visit my dad for the weekend. One of the few times he did turn up. He took me to his old flat.” Laurie paused. “His mates came ’round. They got wankered. My dad disappeared off somewhere ‘to see a man about a dog.’ He does that a lot. He left Pete and another guy to watch me. I knew I wasn’t safe, I knew . . .”

  Laurie steadied herself so she could continue. Jamie put his hand on her shoulder. That was the worst of it: before she knew, she knew.

  “Pete said . . . Oh God. I haven’t told anyone this, or thought about it, for so long.”

  “Not even Dan?”

  “No. Not that I was consciously keeping it from him. I was keeping it from myself.”

  Jamie nodded.

  “That guy Pete said to me: ‘Come sit on my lap and show me what color knickers you’re wearing.’”

  Jamie’s face changed. “What the . . . To an eight-year-old?”

  Laurie nodded.

  “Fuuuu—”

  “I don’t know if he was joking, trying to frighten me. What would’ve happened. I said I needed the loo, and I went and let myself out of the flat. This would be about eleven at night. I walked through the city until I found Piccadilly station . . .”

  “On your own? Aged eight?”

  “Yes.”

  “You must’ve been petrified.”

  “I was. I think it was fireworks night, you know. Explains why I hate fireworks. And drunken people who didn’t mean any harm were shouting ‘Where are you going?!’ and trying to talk to this little kid wandering through the streets, and I was hyperventilating.”

  Laurie was as still as a statue as she recounted this. Jamie looked stricken.

  “. . . I made it to Piccadilly, I asked them to sell me a ticket to go home to my mum. Of course, they flagged me as a lost child. The transport police turned up, they found a number for my mum and called her. I had to spend a night in a room at the station until she could get the first train in the morning to pick me up.”

  “Oh, Laurie.”

  “She was furious with me, Jamie.” Laurie welled up now. “She thought I’d wandered off. I mean, she was more furious with my dad, but he made up some story about how he only went to the corner shop for five minutes and I had no reason for what I’d done.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  Laurie wiped away tears. “She’d have never let me see my dad again. I might’ve been eight, but that much I knew. He wasn’t coming back from having left me with a pedophile, was he?”

  Jamie blew his cheeks out. If nothing else, Laurie had succeeded in taking the shine off the largesse and larging it upstairs. This was the unattractive reality, the dysfunction. Her dad didn’t care about her, or care for her, at all. That was why she hung back from him: she didn’t want the contagion of the pretense. She didn’t want to be suckered in by the money and the connections and then hate herself for it. She didn’t want to become him. She had to hold on to the truth.

  “Fuck, Jamie. Seeing Pete. It’s summed up so much for me. I feel like . . . this is where I’ve been stuck, my whole life. Between my mum’s anger and his indifference. The cross fire. I’ve got this vivid memory of sitting in McDonald’s with a hash brown in a little paper sleeve, and an orange juice, and her saying, Why did you do it, why did you run away, how can you expect me to trust you won’t do it again, to me, over and over. I couldn’t tell her. Should I have told her?”

  It felt oddly incredibly freeing to simply ask someone this. She didn’t know the answer, and she had beaten herself up for not knowing it, without even realizing, for so long.

  Jamie held her by the shoulders: “Laurie. You had to escape someone threatening to assault you, get yourself to safety and then decide if you wanted your relationship with your dad to rest on reporting it? Do you know how many thirty-eight-year-olds wouldn’t know what to do, let alone an eight-year-old?”

  “When you put it like that . . .”

  “There was no right or wrong answer. Whatever you did had a cost. There was only survival.”

  Jamie hugged her and said: “Also, remember this. You’re safe now.”

  Laurie buried her face in the wool of his coat and leaned on him and said: “Betcha wish you didn’t come now, eh, Jamie Carter. I did warn you.”

  He leaned down and said, close to her ear: “No, now I couldn’t be more glad that I did.”

  Laurie’s heart gave a squeeze and she couldn’t immediately look at him.

  When they separated again, she said, “No point ever telling my dad, anyway. He’d minimize it, say, Oh, Pete’s got a sick sense of humor, sorry you were startled by him, princess. And I was just ’round the corner buying some cigarettes. Even if he wasn’t. He’d never join the dots and be like, I left my child with a nonce, I am a disgraceful person! That would mean some reflection and taking responsibility, and that can’t happen to him.”

  “Can I make a suggestion? Tell your mum.”

  “Now? It’d only upset her. She can’t do anything about it.”

  “You’re upset. You’ve never told her: let her in. Give her a chance to help you. Stop making it your responsibility alone.”

  Laurie gave a morbid laugh.

  “When did you get so wise?!”

  Jamie sighed. “I had counseling. At university. I was living in reckless ways, trying to hurt myself. Which I came to realize was about punishing myself.”

  Laurie stared. “Oh.”

  “One of the things those sessions taught me is, you need to speak up, ask for help. If you don’t tell people why you’re suffering, or even that you’re suffering, they can’t help you.”

  “I’m not suffering!” Laurie said. “Missing the end of that party sure ain’t suffering.”

  “Yes, you are,” Jamie said. “You are standing here crying, frightened, about something that happened that was so bad, you blocked it out. You’re suffering.”

  Laurie nodded and sniffed and wiped her nose on her coat sleeve.

  He hailed her a taxi.

  “Look. You were there for me. Do you want me to come back to yours?” Jamie said, and Laurie’s mouth opened in surprise.

  “Not like that!” Jamie said hastily, at her widened eyes. “If you don’t want to be alone, I mean.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be OK.”

  Afterward, lying in bed, she thought about how that would’ve worked, and how it would’ve felt, and whether she wanted him to. Did he mean a drink? Did he mean he’d hold her all night like s
he did for him? She sensed the latter. Was it any kind of good idea to have someone playact that depth of feeling for you, wasn’t it the kind of innocent sweetness that could turn into a slow-acting poison?

  She didn’t want him to do things like this: for her to come to feel he was there for her when she wanted, and then for it to be abruptly revoked in the New Year, when he’d gotten things going with the new love.

  But as she admonished herself about how it wouldn’t have been at all sensible, Laurie knew she was rationalizing, because she wished she’d said yes.

  34

  The conversation with her mum on the phone the next morning was peculiar. Finally telling her the full story after twenty-eight years, and explaining seeing the man at her dad’s wedding reception had triggered it, did not go as Laurie had expected.

  She expected lots of fulminating about her father, but her mum was quiet, asking questions but not audibly reacting. The subject change wasn’t surprising but still hurtful.

  “Is it still all right if me and Wanda came to see the Whitworth Gallery next week? Do you want to meet up?”

  “Oh. Yes. I’ll come for the culture, and we can have lunch at mine afterward.” She knew from experience that Wanda and her mother wouldn’t accept her treating them if they went out, as they were both on tight budgets.

  “Sounds lovely, love. See you then.”

  Well—shoulder shrug—that was something and nothing. Why bother opening old wounds like that in return for nothing? She stopped herself: this was the cynic in her, the lawyer in her, the impatient child. Laurie had pushed this away for three decades; what if listening to it was the most her mum could manage right now?

  Laurie met them outside the building the following Saturday (after a week of seeing little of Jamie due to busy work schedules, but it turned out a sympathetic, knowing smile as you passed in the corridor could do much for a feeling of someone quietly being there for you), both looking splendidly eccentric in their own ways. Her mum still favored her stage wear—over-the-knee suede boots, long dramatic coat, ensemble set off by a now-silvered close-cut Afro. Wanda was about six feet, in crushed-velvet smock, moonstone rings on every finger, thin white straggle of hair. Dan used to say she resembled Rick Wakeman.

  “I was worried you’d be too thin but you look well,” Peggy said, after kissing her on each cheek. This was a compliment; her mum thought women should be “bountiful,” not “hungry.”

  Wanda had been babysitter to Laurie throughout her early years, and fostered many children—her house effectively doubled as the local youth center. She gathered Laurie in a crushing embrace that brought a Proustian rush of the sweet peppery perfume Wanda always wore. It was an essential oil, which came in a tiny blue glass bottle with a rubber teat atop.

  Laurie was ashamed to admit in childhood, she’d thoroughly nosied Wanda’s bathroom cupboards, a practice that was forbidden after Laurie exited it wearing Wanda’s contraceptive cap as a tiny yarmulke, asking why this hat was made out of a bendy material.

  Wanda went inside the Edvard Munch exhibition, and Laurie made to follow but her mum laid her hand on her arm.

  “Will you walk in the park with me?”

  This mother-daughter time had clearly been pre-agreed with Wanda, who didn’t look back.

  They walked through the gates of Whitworth Park, and Peggy linked her arm through Laurie’s as they strolled down dappled paths. It was a brisk, bright morning, cold enough that their breath misted but sunny enough that they were both squinting slightly.

  They reached a quiet corner and Peggy guided Laurie till they were sitting down on a bench.

  “I want to thank you for telling me about what happened,” she said after a long pause. “I’ve done much thinking about it. I think I understand things I never did before. Not about that incident, but in general.”

  “Oh?”

  “I . . . I’ve been very shortsighted, Laurie. I never thought that because your father did me harm, he did you harm too. I know he wasn’t around very much, that he could be negligent, but apart from that . . . You seemed to take him so much in your stride. I thought you enjoyed visiting him more than you liked being at home. When you came to live in this city, I thought it proved that,” she continued. “Your father always had the cash, he was fun dad. He didn’t partake in the drudgery, tell you to do your homework. He let you stay up late, watch anything, eat fried chicken and sweet things.”

  Laurie grinned in spite of herself. “The KFC and butterscotch pudding was amazing, Mum, I won’t lie.”

  “I didn’t want to let you go to his home for weekends, I didn’t trust him to take proper care. But you wanted to go and he accused me of ruining you having any relationship with him, when I resisted. I kept thinking, am I trying to take him away from her because I couldn’t have him?” Her mum’s eyes sparkled with tears and Laurie opened her mouth to contradict her and her mum shook her head: Let me finish. “I kept going against my instincts as a mother, Laurie. It’s my fault what happened. I knew something untoward had happened the night you ran to the station, but you wouldn’t tell me what it was. Then I let the fact you were protecting him make me angry. I took it out on you. That was wrong.”

  “Dad is an abuser,” Laurie said quietly but clearly. “Of drugs of various kinds, which don’t help his judgment, but also an emotional abuser. One of the reasons I never face Dad down is I know it wouldn’t go well if I did. I’d have to see a different side to him. You live within the lines he draws or you don’t have a relationship with him at all. So I chose to live inside the lines. I wanted to have a dad.”

  Peggy nodded. “Yes. I remember when you were born. I was in intensive care afterward and he wouldn’t come and take you. He said he wouldn’t know what to do. I was going to tell him then he could never see you again, or not until you were old enough it was your choice. My parents told me not to do that. That you needed a father.” She gulped, blinking rapidly in the gray-white sunshine. Laurie took her hand. “Then you were always such a determined, smart girl. Knew your own mind, made good choices. Not like me at twenty, I was a child. I had childish expectations of love.”

  “It isn’t your fault that Dad is the way he is,” Laurie said. “While we’re on the offloading, I should tell you something else too, Mum: it turns out Dan lied. He left me for someone, he was having an affair, and the someone is now pregnant.”

  “No?”

  “Yes. I think women spend a lot of time beating themselves up about how they caused or deserved male behavior, and it doesn’t happen anything like the same way in reverse. They get on with doing what they wanna do.”

  “Dan always seemed such a pleasant and devoted boy.”

  “Yep. Didn’t he just. That’s the part that destroys me. How will I ever spot the signs?”

  They leaned their heads against each other, looking out over the grass.

  “You’re not angry at me?” Peggy said eventually.

  “What for?”

  “For not protecting you from your father. I knew what he was. I knew what he was from the moment I told him I was pregnant and he said, ‘What did you do that for?’”

  Laurie gasped, despite herself. “No. I feel like we may have spent quite a lot of time putting feelings on each other that belonged with Dad. He kept marking those parcels Not Known at This Address, didn’t he? Sending them back.”

  “You are a very clever, very emotional girl.”

  “Emotional!” Laurie said ruefully with a smile, wiping her eyes.

  “Emotionally wise, I mean. You have been since you were a little girl, with those watchful eyes. You take it all in. I’m sorry if you should’ve taken less in.”

  Peggy started sobbing, to Laurie’s shock and she said: “Hey, don’t do that, come on. I’m OK!”

  She held her mum tightly. Laurie hadn’t realized that in asking for help, she was also offering it.

  Laurie seated Peggy and Wanda with a glass of red in the front room while she put the spinach and feta filo p
ie in the oven, enjoying looking after them.

  Over the meal, Wanda said, “You were always a good cook, Laurie. Remember when you made cheese toasties for about eleven people?”

  “Oh yes! I used to love doing that. Worcestershire sauce was my secret weapon.”

  “You know who I found the other day, Dundee the badger!” Peggy said.

  “Dundee!”

  “Dundee?” Wanda said.

  “I saw the name on a map and I loved it. I used to say I was going to call my son Dundee,” Laurie said. “My daughter was going to be Fife.”

  Laurie noticed she could say this without loss. Maybe she would have kids. Maybe she’d have them, with someone less selfish than Dan. Think big.

  “She couldn’t ever be apart from that badger, Wanda. Years and years and it went everywhere with her. Your father would send you those huge teddies and toys. When you did tea parties, Dundee had to have the highest chair at the head of the table and get his tea first, in case he thought you were favoring the new arrivals.”

  “Haaah. I’d forgotten that!”

  “You are a loyal person. When someone has your loyalty, it’s for life.”

  “Yes, well, you keep Dundee safe for me,” Laurie said, topping her mum up, feeling self-conscious at the praise.

  Laurie had earlier explained the pudding, vanilla ice cream, espresso, and liqueur: “It’s an Italian dessert, affogato.” Wanda had looked enraptured at the idea.

  “Shall we have the ice cream? Let’s have ice cream!” she said now, as if this was the most transgressive thing that three adults could do. “Let me get it!”

  Wanda also insisted on clearing the plates. Laurie knew it was fruitless to stop her—Wanda was one of those kinetic people with need to always be doing.

  During the noises offstage, her mum looked around and said, “Keeping this beautiful place on your salary. What a successful woman you are.”

  “Thanks. I don’t feel very successful at the moment.”

  “You miss him?”

  Laurie nodded. There was a pause full of Miles Davis, which Laurie had put on to please Wanda.