If I Never Met You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  “Why?” Laurie said under her breath.

  “Because Nadia is the epitome of herself.” Emily raised her voice. “Laurie wants to know why you got banned from the book group?”

  Nadia was in her usual cloche hat, today a pleasing salmon shade.

  “Firstly, I rejected the central tenets of Eat, Pray, Love,” Nadia said, as Emily pushed a glass of wine toward her, and Nadia wriggled her duffle coat off. “Then we were required to produce Gratitude Lists to discuss what we were thankful for.”

  “Oh, really?” Emily said, swinging a and how did that go look at Laurie, who tried not to laugh.

  “I said I was not grateful for my life, I had worked for it, and my sister’s friend Amy said I was ‘too centered’ in my own privilege, and I told her to fuck off and then my sister said I had to go.”

  “We won’t ask you to be grateful for anything this evening, Nads,” Emily said, handing the menu over. “Not even lobster tacos. Can I tell her your latest news?” She looked to Laurie.

  “Knock yourself out,” Laurie said.

  “She’s no longer with the hot lad she was pretending to date. It turns out that messing women around and then saying he hadn’t was kind of his thing—he got sacked for it.” Emily gave Laurie a “fair?” questioning look and Laurie nodded.

  “Ugh,” Nadia said. “I’m sorry. I mean I am sorry for any pain. While not being sorry you gave him his marching orders, if he is a shit.”

  “Thank you,” Laurie said. “I’m not in pain. Well, I’m in some pain over it, but I know that it will pass and I’ll feel happier again, at some point. That will do for now.”

  “Like that poem ‘to the girl crying in the next toilet stall.’ Listen I love you, joy is coming,” Emily said.

  “Yes. Joy is coming. If maybe not here,” Laurie said, glancing around. It was the kind of poseur’s bear pit that would’ve scared Laurie, pre-Dan’s bombshell, but not now. Her fling with Jamie had given her that confidence back, at least. Sigh. Who would ever measure up to . . . STOPPIT.

  “Can I propose a toast,” Laurie said. “To what happiness looks like to us.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, picking her glass up so fast she spilled some. “To deciding what our happiness is, and being happy that way. Rather than having some bunch of bastards tell us what it is.”

  They clinked glasses and drank.

  “Are you girls ready to order?” said a waiter with a goatee, appearing at their side with a touch screen pad. “Need me to explain anything?”

  “We’re not girls,” Nadia said. “So you can explain your mode of address.”

  “Hey, y’all look pretty young to me,” he said, chewing gum and grinning in what he thought was a flirtily winning manner.

  Emily said: “Oh, you dear sweet fool, she will now verbally decapitate you.”

  Laurie felt it was a poorly advertised part of kitten owning that they were absolute sodding hooligans. If her new twelve-week-old black longhair mix breed with white whiskers, Colin Fur, was in the magistrates court, Laurie would be advising the short, sharp shock of a custodial sentence for sure.

  “Only language he understands, sadly,” she’d tell the bench, while removing another shredded pair of Wolford tights from the little beggar’s jaws.

  She’d impulsively picked him up from the animal shelter at lunchtime, on her way home from work, Christmas Eve of all days, thinking how nice it would be to have a tiny friend around on her solo Christmas Day. She was now realizing it would mean spending the whole time extracting said tiny friend from reenacting Touching the Void on the curtain rails.

  Laurie wasn’t daunted by Christmas Day alone, not one bit. She was going to dress up, only for herself, make a giant lunch, only for herself, and share some smoked salmon with Colin Fur. Finding out she could manage on her own was great.

  She didn’t mind the time off work either. It had been wild lately. After Jamie’s sacking on Friday, Monday had felt like a peculiar limbo period where she had no idea what her status was. In the end, she took the initiative and asked to see Mr. Salter, late on Monday afternoon. He said yes, he and Mr. Rowson would see her, suggesting an unprecedented both-partner bollocking designed to strike fear into her heart.

  Laurie went in with armor, however. She knew how strong she was. She’d lost Dan, and coped; she’d lost Jamie, and coped. She’d drawn a final line with her dad, and coped. And if she lost her job, she’d cope.

  So much of her life had been about being scared of not being wanted by people. If the news was that this law firm no longer wanted her, well fine. Plenty of others would.

  She’d spoken honestly about the manner of Dan’s leaving, the devastation she’d been in, and how seriously she took her responsibilities.

  “In conclusion, I badly regret the ‘relationship’”—she made air quote marks. She still couldn’t believe the way it had been fake, real, then fake again—“with Jamie Carter, but I was not my usual or best self when I made that decision. Given he didn’t get the partnership and has left, it seems sensible to put it behind us. I feel as if I’m on the back foot now. I like working here and will look elsewhere for employment if you think it’s necessary, but I’d rather stay.”

  Salter and Rowson boggled at her confidence.

  “We don’t want you to leave, Ms. Watkinson,” Salter said, though from Rowson’s expression she thought he might’ve considered it. “I would like to know this, however. Why were you helping Jamie Carter to a partnership, rather than applying for it yourself?”

  “Oh . . .” Laurie was stunned. “I suppose I’m content doing what I am. I didn’t think I was partner material, to be honest.”

  “That’s a shame, as I would like you to apply for it in the New Year,” Mr. Salter said. “I was thinking of asking you to put yourself forward anyway. The sangfroid with which you’ve dealt with this, despite your mistakes, has convinced me. We don’t only divine character in how people handle wins. You see more in the disasters.”

  Ain’t that the truth.

  “Oh . . . OK.” She was getting a promotion out of this?! “Thank you.” She paused, and blurted: “You think the criminal department lads will cope with a female boss?”

  “No,” said Mr. Salter, and they shared an unexpected bout of conspiratorial laughter.

  Laurie’s phone went off with an unrecognized mobile number on Christmas Eve afternoon and, despite her conviction that those were always best to leave to ring out, she picked up.

  “Hello, sweetie! It’s Hattie! Jamie’s best mate. We met at Eric’s sixty-fifth. In Lincoln. I was drunk. I made you ingest plum vodka.”

  “Oh, hi!” Laurie said, smiling at the number of descriptors Hattie felt necessary to identify her among all the Hatties that Laurie had met at sixty-fifth birthdays in Lincoln recently.

  “I will get to the point as you probably have presents to wrap and shit. I know everything—Jamie told me. And I mean everything. Well, I don’t know everything, like not how many positions in a night.”

  Laurie laughed despite herself.

  “I know about the deal you two made. I’ve known for a while.”

  “Did you know before Lincoln?!”

  “. . . Yeah. Dread secret. Only at the last minute after I’d blabbed to his parents that I knew he was seeing you. Jamie said I had to stop getting their hopes up and explained why.”

  Hah, he’d told his best friend too. Wait—so when Hattie said Jamie was besotted, it wasn’t based on any fibs they’d told?

  “You asked me if I was in love with him?!”

  “Ha. Jamie said you were sharp! How do you remember that? I was bladdered! You were more like a couple than anyone else in that room and I couldn’t resist stirring.”

  “Hah,” Laurie said, but the atmosphere of that night was now roaring back in her memory.

  “From the way he was talking about you constantly I thought it must be more complicated than he was saying, and then I saw you both together, and I knew for sure.”

  �
��Right.”

  “I know why he lost his job.”

  “Yeah. Not been a few weeks I’ll forget in a hurry!” Laurie said with fake jollity.

  “Your decisions are your decisions, for your reasons, but if it was because you thought Jamie was some lying manipulator, I want you to know that Jamie really, really loves you. I’ve known him since we were small, and, yes, he’s broken some hearts but only in the way anyone as beautiful as him does; he’s not nasty. It’s beyond unfortunate that Past Him bit him on his arse when it did. For what it’s worth, he told me about the Eve thing at the time. He told me the same thing he told you: he knocked her back. And, Laurie, look: he had no reason to lie to me.”

  “This is really kind of you, and you’re a great mate to him,” Laurie said. “I think Jamie and I are just not meant to be.”

  This was said off the top of her head, given Laurie wasn’t otherwise one for fate and mystical catechisms.

  “Fuck ‘meant to be’!” Hattie said heartily. “‘Meant to be’ is too passive in a crisis. He’s talking about moving to London. I know he’d stay in Manchester if he thought you wanted him. Part of the reason he’s going is to avoid seeing you around. He said it’s not even about seeing you with other men, just that simply seeing you would hurt too much.”

  “He said that, did he,” Laurie said with a doubtful tone.

  “Yes, he did.” But, said that little voice, he’d hardly tell his best gal pal he was up to no good.

  “He’s right, he probably needs to go,” Laurie said. At least she’d be spared seeing him draped over someone in that tiki bar.

  “Laurie, seriously, I am going to back my claims up. I’m going to show receipts. He and I always stay in touch over email. Massive long Gmails about all sorts of things you know, and it’s quite personal. Things we wouldn’t tell anyone else.”

  “. . . OK?”

  “He sent me one the Sunday after you got together. Let me read it to you . . .”

  “Hattie . . .” Laurie said, but she obviously wasn’t going to be diverted.

  “Hats, big news: I finally told Laurie how I feel. I was absolutely bricking it, but seeing her with another man, briefly (explain another time) (God, I am still fuming; I knew that beefy beta mope was going to crack on to her from the start), put me into the kind of state where a man listens to Nick Cave albums at top volume and smashes back bottles of whisky, while primitive roaring. It spurred me into action, and I turned up on her doorstep at midnight and declared myself. She said she felt the same way, but understandably was very wary of me after the times I’d bragged about being discount Errol Flynn.

  “This, despite the fact I was a quivering mess at the sight of her bra strap, or had been trying to hold her hand all the time, like we were fifteen. It didn’t apparently clue her in to the fact I hadn’t been that person since almost the moment we met. She has no ego in that way whatsoever, I don’t think. So that’s something I can definitely bring to our relationship, haha!

  “We’re so similar, Hats. That’s the wonderful, strange, incredible thing that we would never have found out, if it weren’t for Salter & Rowson solicitors off Deansgate being skinflints in building maintenance. We help each other in a way that I didn’t know was possible. We’re a little way off the heavier conversations regards marriage and kids but there’s pretty much nothing I wouldn’t feel I could tackle if we did it together. I keep thinking: if I’d never met her, how different things would be. I scoffed at the idea anyone could make you see your life through new eyes and I’m so, so glad to be wrong.

  “Anyway, sorry for the heated prose. At least you’re spared hearing the sex was amazing, eh! (The sex was amazing.) (I know how terrible and juvenile this sounds, but I didn’t know what it could be like with someone you’re actually in love with.)

  “She’s so gorgeous, I get slightly out of breath thinking about her. I can’t wait to bring Laurie back to Lincoln and for you and Padraig to meet her properly. I want everyone to love her as much as I do, though Mum and Dad are there already I think.

  “Hey, how’s the infection, did it clear up?

  “Wait, discount that last part, that wasn’t directly relevant content,” Hattie said.

  Tears streamed down Laurie’s face as Colin Fur let go a guttural howl from somewhere above her head.

  “Did you . . . wail?” Hattie said hesitantly.

  “No, that was the kitten.”

  “Jamie’s getting the four p.m. train to Lincoln, so he’ll be at Piccadilly in half an hour,” Hattie said. “I’ll just leave that there.”

  44

  Where is he—where is he—where is he?

  Laurie scoured the concourse for Jamie to no avail, but looking at the Departures board, he had to be here somewhere.

  She’d locked the kitten in the kitchen and dragged on any old things on top of her “it’s Christmas Eve, time to let go” outfit of baggy joggers and sloppy, shapeless wide-neck jumper. The Uber had been painfully slow to arrive but once she was in, they’d flown through the streets, past boozy office workers spilling out of the bars and up the ramp of the station, where Laurie had practically fallen out before the car came to a complete stop.

  He must’ve gone through the barrier by now. At a ticket machine, Laurie endured an agonizing wait behind the world’s slowest stoner gap-year boys, wearing flip-flops with socks in December, then bought the cheapest she could find, a single to Stockport, and dashed through to the other side.

  When she got to the platform, she looked right, left, right, left. He wasn’t here. Had Hattie got the time wrong?

  Her eyes came to rest on a man in a navy coat with short curly dark hair and exceptional cheekbones, standing by the Coke machine, staring at her.

  There.

  In her haste, Laurie half skipped to him, apprehension at what she had to say briefly canceled out by the elation of finding him.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello?” Jamie said, looking at her curiously.

  “Going home for Christmas?”

  “Er . . . yeah. And you? Getting a train too?”

  “No, I’ve come to find you.”

  “OK?”

  “To tell you that I’m sorry. I doubted you and I freaked out. I trusted Dan and he let me down and I wasn’t ready to go through that again.”

  A silence, where she wondered if she would get the Jamie who’d been so scornful last time they met, or the tender Jamie of the messages to his best friend.

  “I know. I get that. I think it was too big an ask, to be honest.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.” He got his phone out of his pocket. “You can have my pass code; I can show you texts from Eve that back up everything I’ve told you. I should’ve offered that before but I was in too big a state, thinking I’d lost my job and you on the same day. I lashed out.”

  “Thank you but I don’t need to see them.” Laurie paused. “I trust you. Hattie shared the email you wrote about me, with me . . .”

  “Oh, did she now?”

  “She did. I shouldn’t have needed to hear you’d said those things. I knew them anyway, because it’s how I feel too.” Laurie drew breath. “That’s what’s special about us. It’s funny, given I thought we were chalk and cheese, but it’s like we have some sort of telepathy. I purposely turned that intuition off, and surrendered to what everyone else thought of you. I didn’t want to rely on my own judgment because it let me down so badly where Dan was concerned.”

  Jamie said nothing.

  “So I didn’t think about the person I spent time with in Lincoln, or at barbecues that turned into slasher flicks, or having nervous breakdowns in skyscrapers with. Because him, I trust, and I am madly in love in with.” She paused. “Why haven’t you been in touch with me?”

  “You haven’t been in touch with me. Checkmate.” Jamie smiled.

  “I know. I was worried you’d say, after some thought, you were definitely sure it was over.”

  “That’s exactly
why I didn’t call you. I thought, let the silence speak for itself and you can avoid those crushing few seconds of certainty.”

  The Manchester icy wind howled around them and Laurie pushed her hair out of her face.

  “What I’m saying is, do you want to try again?” she said.

  “No, not really, what’s done is done,” Jamie said. “And I’ve had a promising inquiry from a member of Little Mix.”

  Laurie was stunned for a moment and then Jamie’s frown cracked, and he started laughing. “Your face, hahaha.”

  “You bad bollock!”

  Jamie stooped and rifled in his bag.

  “Open this. I was going to post it from Lincoln.”

  Laurie fumbled it open with cold hands and found a short note, wrapped around a small cardboard box. She opened it. It was the necklace she’d admired on Steep Hill.

  “I’d got my mum to buy it and send it,” Jamie said.

  She opened the note:

  Dear Laurie,

  If there’s any chance whatsoever you might change your mind, I want that chance more than anything in the world. I wouldn’t waste that chance. I’d use it for the rest of our lives, in fact.

  All my love, Jamie x

  Laurie looked up, tears in her eyes.

  “Come here.” Jamie dropped his bag and grabbed her in a hug. “I’m so sorry for what I put you through,” he said, muttering into her hair. “I should’ve told you upfront what had gone on with Eve. Keeping my cards close to my chest became second nature.”

  “You lost your job. You paid enough for it.”

  The train pulled into the station.

  “What are you doing for Christmas?” Jamie said. “Do you want to come to Lincoln? I’d not steeled myself to tell my parents we were no more yet. We could get a later train, after you’ve packed a bag?”

  “I could, except I’ve got a wrecker of a kitten that can’t be left.”

  “I’ve got a house sitter for Margaret. We could add your kitten into the deal, pay her extra?”