If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  This was the first he’d spoken. Laurie stared in shock at Jamie.

  “Which is it?” Mr. Salter said.

  “We’re not,” Jamie said firmly, glancing at Laurie. “We had . . . crossed a line or two for authenticity’s sake, got a bit carried away. But we certainly aren’t together.”

  Jamie barely met Laurie’s eyes, set his jaw, and stared straight ahead.

  Mr. Salter saw all of this, she realized, as she turned back and his rheumy gaze came to rest on Laurie.

  “All right, I’ve heard enough, Ms. Watkinson. I feel severely let down by you, and by this. We had spoken in this office, on trust, which I believed was mutual. Consider this a verbal warning and if you do anything to piss me off in the foreseeable future, I might skip the written stage. Close the door on your way out.”

  Laurie was desperate to speak to Jamie, to find out what had happened, and she didn’t have to wait long.

  A junior from the criminal department called Matt appeared in the doorway and said breathlessly: “Jamie Carter’s been sacked. Immediate effect.”

  Laurie, Bharat, and Di almost comically scrambled to get past one another and out to see what was happening.

  A Roman amphitheater of spectators had gathered on the second floor as Jamie exited the criminal office, holding a briefcase, his coat, and the umbrella that Laurie once remembered him jamming lift doors with.

  A very sad-faced Mick, the security guard, was guiding Jamie toward the stairs. Laurie made to go after him.

  “I wouldn’t follow him out,” Michael said, arms folded, “or they might just lock the door after you. You don’t want any more of his reputation smeared over you.”

  “He’s my boyfriend, so I’ll see him out, thanks,” Laurie said, to an audible “ooh!” from the crowd, presumably both at the declaration and the insubordination. She glimpsed Dan, looking pig sick at the back. At least her honesty with him had stopped this being any gotcha.

  “You can stop the show now, we’ve all seen the email,” Kerry snapped.

  Laurie turned.

  “You know what, I couldn’t care less what you do or don’t think, Kerry. You’re not the policewoman of my private life. Or anyone else’s here for that matter.”

  “Can I get an amen!” Bharat shouted, from the back of the crowd, and incredibly, a reasonably hearty “AMEN” went up. Kerry scowled, looking green as a parrot.

  Laurie walked down the stairs with Jamie and out through the lobby, Mick holding the door for them, beckoning for Jamie to hand over his security pass and pulling the door shut behind them.

  Once they were outside in the street, Jamie turned and said: “I hate to say it, but Michael’s right. Go back in, now. Salter’s temper’s on a hair trigger. If he hears you’re out here with me, you could get sacked too.”

  “I can’t believe they sacked you and not me?!” Laurie said.

  “Laurie, now I’m gone, blame the whole idea of the phony relationship on me,” Jamie said. “When Salter’s calmed down, he won’t want to fall out with his best defense lawyer.”

  “But this is unfair! And probably illegal, getting rid of you but not me for the same offense.”

  “Hah. They know every loophole and can safely get rid of anyone. I’ve struck a deal where they say it was my decision and I get some gardening leave. Word will get ’round, of course, so I have to be quicker than the word before the pay runs out. He knows I couldn’t stay, Laurie, not when they loathe me. It was untenable.” He paused. “They didn’t only sack me for our relationship.”

  “What then?”

  He didn’t speak for a few seconds. “They think I was involved with Eve.”

  “You said . . . you didn’t . . . ?” Laurie said, and trailed off. Oh, no.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t. But I haven’t told you the whole story of that night.”

  Laurie swallowed hard. “OK.”

  “It was dinner, nothing more. But Eve had booked a room at the hotel. She made a play for me at the end of the evening and I said no, stakes are too high here, thanks. She was not impressed. She had a point. I shouldn’t have been seeing her out of hours. It was mixed messages and it was undignified to have to put her straight. For both of us.”

  “Right . . .”

  “I told you I was networking, but quite specifically, I wanted to know if Salter was thinking of retiring. I thought she might have information, as family, that’d help me with the timing of my pitch for partner. Short version, I used her. She’s whip smart. She figured that out.”

  Jamie continued: “Then the photos of you and me started going up, and Eve got in touch and said, ‘I see what you’re doing, and I know what was said in your promotion meeting’—she’d fished with her uncle. She said, ‘You’re using another woman to get ahead.’ I told her you were happily in on it but she didn’t believe me. This sounds strange, but she didn’t want you to feel used in the same way that she had done. She thought I was playing you and wanted to find a way to make you see sense—she’d clearly worked out that if she said anything to you directly, she’d sound jealous.”

  The text, in Lincoln, that Laurie wasn’t allowed to see.

  “What was the lunchtime visit about?”

  “To unsettle me, and it worked. More pertinently, to give Michael my phone pass code. She asked me to find something on my phone, moments after you’d gone upstairs, and she leaned right in as I did it. I think Michael reached out to her to see if we’d slept together; they discovered a common cause. She had the idea of unmasking me to ‘save’ you and Michael probably laid it on thick about how vulnerable you were. But Michael probably spotted that, to be absolutely sure I got the heave overboard, she needed to tell her uncle I had form.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. Laurie felt numb.

  “How did Michael get your phone?”

  “I leave it on my desk plenty. It’s locked, so I don’t think anything of it. I guess he’d have gone in, searched for your name for incriminating material, and bingo. There’s no other emails between us.”

  Laurie absorbed this. “He sent it global, for maximum damage.”

  “Oh yes. No one’s asked how he got hold of it, from what I can tell. Fuck this place, it’s a clique and it’s rotten. I’m glad to go.”

  “But I should stay?”

  Jamie looked discomfited. “Unless you have any other irons in the fire. The bosses love you.”

  “Correction. They used to.”

  She’d been in denial, but this was it. Jamie was off, into the horizon, and Laurie’s standing at her workplace was irreparably soiled. Much as she hated Dan and Michael’s intervention, their premonitions had come to pass.

  “Did you split up with me in there, when Salter asked us point blank?”

  “No. I knew I was fucked and I thought any more idea from Salter that we were a couple, and you would be too.”

  “What if he’d not sacked you? How would we have managed that? We start keeping a real romance secret?”

  Jamie shrugged. “I suppose so?”

  “Or, or. You would’ve split up with me to keep them happy?”

  This felt eminently possible, despite everything. She believed in Jamie’s feelings for her but she’d never seen a second’s self-sacrifice regards his career, for anyone. All this time worrying about another woman coming between him, but was his job the thing she could never compete with?

  “No,” Jamie said, frowning. “I never wanted the promotion that much. Wow.”

  “You sure? It seems to be all that’s driven you since I’ve known you.”

  “I’ve changed since I’ve known you.”

  People don’t change. Do they?

  Laurie couldn’t let this go.

  “It was pretty mortifying, me saying yes when you said no.”

  “Well, sorry. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “If you’ve changed, why still lie? Why not say, hey, Mr. Salter, yeah, I shouldn’t have done it but now here is the situation and, yes, I am with Laurie.
”

  “The truth wasn’t what was needed, here, or what was going to help.” He clenched his jaw and jutted his chin slightly and they were clearly skirting the territory of their first big fight. Or the last one?

  “Jamie, the truth is sometimes of value in itself. Not working out what it’ll get you.”

  “Oh, Laurie, of all the times to go all ‘inspirational meme over a sunset’ on me.” Jamie smiled weakly, and it felt so much like Dan’s brush-offs that her hair stood on end.

  “Of all the times for you to go lying triangulating lawyer bastard on me!” she snapped.

  “This is the way the world IS, Laurie!” Jamie’s temper broke. “I know you’re honest and decent and I love you for it, but this is how it actually works. It’s shit and cruel and unjust and you do what you need to do to survive. I learned that young. So did you.”

  “Don’t do that, don’t try to make me feel bad for being upset about this.”

  “What exactly are you angry with me for, here, please? Not standing there pledging my undying devotion to you, to someone who’d sack us both for it?”

  “Ah . . .” Laurie turned her eyes to the sky. “Right now? Everything. For not telling me about Eve, so this ambushed me.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Jamie adjusted the weight of his briefcase. “I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to. There it is.”

  She didn’t feel much apology coming from him, however.

  “How will you get another job in Manchester? With the rules on practicing elsewhere?” Laurie said.

  “I don’t know, I might have to look at other cities.”

  “London?” Laurie said. Jamie did a double take. “Uhm yeah, maybe, I don’t know? There are a lot of law firms there. Give me a second, given I just got sacked five minutes ago?”

  “That’s us done then, isn’t it?”

  “Is it? There’s this thing called a train . . .”

  “Remember what Michael and Dan said? That you’d lie to me, that you’d leave my professional standing in tatters when you moved on to pastures new? No part of that prediction was in fact wrong, was it?”

  “What? You’re agreeing with their view of me? That’s pretty disloyal and weak.”

  He glowered in disgust, nose wrinkled. She’d never felt this defensive hostility from him before. She had to come out fighting, to stop it frightening her. Attack as a form of defense.

  “I’ve been disloyal and weak?! You manipulating another woman has brought the whole house of cards crashing down on both of us, but I’m supposed to carry on thinking you won’t treat me badly, because you’ve changed or it’s different with me? All those lines that have been used by bad men since the dawn of time.”

  “‘Bad man’! Stop acting like this was all my idea, something I’ve tricked you into for my nefarious ends. We both did it because we both wanted something from it. Sorry it went wrong, but then I’m the one who lost my job.”

  “It was your idea.”

  Jamie rolled his eyes in genuine contempt. “Nice. So under pressure, I tried to think about what’s best for both of us. You revert to shit old stereotypes of me, start insinuating I’m using you. This is how deep it runs, your good opinion of me.”

  “Did you sleep with Eve?”

  “You honestly have to ask me that, when I just said I didn’t?”

  “Yes. It’s the one thing you’ve been accused of that isn’t true, according to you. It’s something of an anomaly.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re going to believe me, whatever I say.”

  Laurie’s chest hurt. It was one of those rare times when you can feel something being torn down, the something intangible that exists between you.

  A moment whistled between them in the frostbitten Manchester wind. It was one of those moments that decided how everything was going to be afterward.

  “I’m not sure I know who you are,” Laurie said simply. Persuade me, she thought. Talk me around. Please. She didn’t want to push this hard but she had to, or she wouldn’t trust him from now on.

  “In that case, you’re not who I thought you were either,” Jamie said.

  Chattering people spilled out of the doors behind them and Jamie gave her a weary, hard glance, adjusted his briefcase again, and turned, walked off. Laurie sucked in air and let it out and said “oh” to herself. She thought he’d fight harder. Apparently not.

  As she trod back up the stairs, empty as a husk, Michael was standing at the top, jangling change in his pocket.

  “I did try to warn you. We tried to protect you from him, but you wouldn’t have it.”

  “Get bent, Michael,” she said.

  “Let me guess, he’s announced that you’re not together as of ’round about now? Given that he has no need for you anymore?”

  “Incorrect, sorry.”

  He’d hear eventually, but no way was she adding to his jubilation this afternoon.

  “Oh, right. I look forward to the announcement of your wedding, at which point I will bike naked around Piccadilly Gardens singing ‘Life Is a Rollercoaster.’”

  “Get yourself some saddle rub in, then.”

  “Haha! Good one. Don’t cry over him, darling—he’s not, and has never been, worth it.”

  “I wish I was as interested in your life as you are in mine.”

  “So do I,” Michael said, as a very sudden, spiky way of declaring himself a No Score Draw sensation. Laurie said nothing, marching past, leaving him standing, startled, by himself.

  “Bharat, Di,” Laurie said, back at her desk, “I’m so sorry I lied to you. It had to be a strict policy of telling no one or it wouldn’t have worked. I was telling the truth later on; Jamie and I did end up together for real.”

  “Oh, darling, I don’t care, I think it’s genius!” Bharat said. “So bloody cool. You’re my wife from another life. And that Jerry Maguire shit you just pulled was BALLSY AS FUCK.”

  Laurie flopped into her chair. At least she only had Monday and the morning of Christmas Eve to get through before the office closed at lunchtime for ten days for Christmas, and she’d not have to see any of the rest of her colleagues until the New Year.

  She hadn’t begun to mentally pick through the wreckage of what happened with Jamie.

  How had it all gone wrong so fast?

  Bharat leaned over and patted her hand. “Don’t sweat it, Lozza. Some days you’re the dog, and other days you’re the bone.”

  43

  “Lobster tacos,” Emily said, studying the menu and speaking over a remix of Ed Sheeran. “Lobster tacos. Sometimes you feel we’ve strayed far from God’s light, don’t you? Why would you put lobster in a taco?” She glanced around her. “Also, making club versions of Ed Sheeran is like putting my dad in cargo shorts.”

  They were in a bar-nightclub-restaurant that, as per, Emily had nominated. There was neon squiggly writing above them declaring IF THE MUSIC IS TOO LOUD YOU ARE TOO OLD and bright leather banquettes and a framed Marilyn Monroe Warhol, and the kind of “graffiti is a valid art form” murals that looked as if they’d let troubled teenagers design as part of a community rehabilitation project. Emily had proposed a last meetup, to celebrate Monday being Christmas Eve Eve, with the caveat: “No fucking walking involved like last time, don’t even try.”

  “I am more upset at ‘Lil Chick Burgers’ and ‘Lil Hot Links,’” Laurie said. “I would rather forgo sausages than ask for ‘Lil Hot Links,’ and I don’t forgo sausage lightly.”

  “We’re on to the Jamie situation already!” Emily said.

  “Har har,” Laurie said, rolling her eyes, with the tense, clenched-up feeling she got when thinking about him.

  He’d not contacted her since the fight, so that was clearly that. It confirmed her suspicions that he would now laser focus on reemployment, probably in the capital. She’d not contacted him either, of course, so this was hypocritical. But what would she say?

  She hadn’t thought she’d be another scorned woman left in Jamie Carter’s wake, but equally, no sco
rned women left in his wake thought that was who they’d become. That was how it happened.

  Who was he, in the end? Had he been totally himself in the dark, when they were alone? The man who wore glasses and didn’t need glasses, who could be so generous and open and then so cold and hard in that moment outside the office.

  But mostly Laurie had been studiously not thinking about Jamie. Doubt lingered, but doubt only caused more trauma. Better to forcibly banish doubt, and get on with the rest of her life.

  Laurie explained the situation with Jamie, as much as she could. Referring back to Liverpool, and to her doubts over Eve. “I was at the ‘quacks like a duck, walks like a duck’ point,” Laurie said, sipping her wine. “He’s a duck. I’m OK, though. It’s OK.”

  She wasn’t OK, obviously, but Emily was a good enough friend to know that it meant Laurie wanted to be treated as OK.

  “You think he did sleep with this boss’s niece? I mean, she was clearly pissed at being used by him, to do what she did?” Emily said and Laurie winced anew.

  “. . . I don’t know. Maybe?” She played it as not caring much, while it turned her intestines into a reef knot.

  “Mmm.” Emily tapped her paper straw against her mouth thoughtfully. “Although, although . . .”

  “Oh God, what!” Laurie said.

  “No, I think you did the right thing. One strike, out. It’s just . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s not mutually exclusive, is it? He could have been a person who did those things, and then fallen for you for real later? I don’t know.”

  Laurie shook her head.

  “It’s like you said. This isn’t what I need. Also, no one can change anyone’s character. No love of a good woman can fix a bad man. It’s you who told me this!”

  Despite saying this, Laurie couldn’t accept Jamie was a bad man, not yet. But that was due to attachment hormones still swirling through the body. She imagined that final realization would arrive with a jolt, when a tale of his misdeeds got filtered back to her via the usual channels at Salter’s. Like reconciling herself to Dan and his affair: your mind has to start the process, and your heart will follow.

  “I know, I know. It’s a shame but at least you got a sensational rumping out of it. By the way, warning, Nadia may be what I believe she calls ‘ornery,’” Emily said. “She’s been thrown out of her sister’s book group. Ah, here she is now.”