She plodded downstairs and headed towards the sticky-sealed UPVC back door, cup of tea in one hand – tea was the currency at her parents’; like Buddhists bringing gifts, you must always bear tea – and crossed the garden to her dad’s shed. It was more of a small summerhouse, and full of the forest floor smell of wood shavings.
Her dad was at his workbench with a piece of oak that had been smoothed and planed into a crest, presumably one day to be part of a bed or a wardrobe.
‘Thanks, love,’ he said, putting his goggles on his head and accepting a mug of milk-no-sugar with sandy hands.
‘Mum’s not home yet. I thought I might make spag bol for tea?’
‘Sounds nice. Are you OK?’ her dad said.
‘A bit sad,’ Delia said. ‘I’ll get better.’
‘You’re always so cheerful, usually,’ her dad said. He blew on his tea and paused. ‘Did he not want to get married?’
‘He said he’d get married,’ Delia said, then stopped. She’d only said she and Paul had been arguing and needed some space. (She’d told Ralph the truth, but Ralph wouldn’t pass it on, nor would they ask him.)
She was conscious that if she said Paul had been unfaithful, she might never restore his reputation in their eyes. It was one thing eventually deciding to forgive your cheating partner, but adjusting wasn’t so easily accomplished by your parents. Better to keep them in the partial dark until you’d decided. Once again, the scorned woman’s sour rewards seemed to be denied to her. ‘I don’t think he was very happy with me. Or as happy as I thought. I’m not sure.’
Her father nodded; perhaps he’d deciphered this code. ‘You make everyone else happy though.’
Delia nodded, smiled, and gulped down the threat of a sob.
‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ her dad concluded, fixing her with watery blue eyes, the pouchier version of Ralph’s. ‘No rush.’
‘Thanks, Dad. Good to know,’ Delia said, and she meant it.
Back in the galley kitchen, she chopped onions and garlic, fried mince, and slopped a tin of chopped tomatoes into the pan, rinsing the residue out with water and adding that too – a student ‘make it go further’ trick that had stuck. It occurred to her how reassuring cooking could be, even though she wasn’t hungry.
It was ironic: without her usually very healthy appetite, Delia could feel herself tightening and shrinking inside her clothes. As if she might end up disappearing entirely into a deflated dress, like the Wicked Witch melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
If she was still getting married, Delia would have been delighted: the corsets on some of the vintage gowns she’d admired looked worryingly constrictive. As it was, it didn’t matter. She could be any size she liked – Paul had still slept with Celine.
Once the Bolognese sauce had coalesced into something orange-brown instead of red-brown, she turned the gas down, put a lid on it and went up to her bedroom.
Delia hesitated, once she’d closed the door. She could hear Ralph’s singing and her dad’s saw. Her mum was at the allotment. She opened the wardrobe. There at the bottom, under the old clothes and mothballed coats, were flat, clear plastic storage boxes with handles.
She slid them out, hauling them onto the bed, and opened the top one. Delia was oddly anxious, excited, and self-conscious. It was so long since she’d looked at any of this.
Delia had started The Fox when she was a teenager. It was an idea borne of daydreaming at school, when life had been getting on top of her. She was teased for her red hair. She wasn’t an exceptional student, she wasn’t an athlete, or cool, or popular.
She was lonely. So she fantasised another life for herself. One where she was all the things she wanted to be in the real world – special, fantastic, heroic, brave, exciting, useful. As a child, she was fascinated by a fox that visited the family garden, and bombarded her parents with questions. Why did it only come out at night? Did all the foxes know each other? Where were they hiding during the day? Delia had decided her invented answers were preferable to their explanations.
When the idea to draw a comic book occurred in her teens, she knew straight away it had to involve that fox.
As a superhero, The Fox lived in a subterranean lair, travelled on a super-fast bicycle and had an actual talking fox sidekick, called Reginald. Her network of bushy-tailed spies told The Fox what was going on in the city, and she used this information to uncover wrongdoing and fight crime.
When she’d told Paul about it once, he said: ‘LSD is a helluva drug.’
Delia had always been creative and never quite known how to channel it: in writing and drawing The Fox, she found herself fulfilled in a way she’d never been before. She bought herself fine-nibbed pens and A3 drawing pads with her pocket money and escaped into the frames of the story, spending hours cross-legged on her bed, sketching away. Everyone in her family had their magical outlet from mundanity, and now Delia did too.
She felt too foolish to show any of her friends, but luckily having a brother as offbeat as Ralph meant she had a non-judgemental audience. When she’d first shyly showed him The Fox’s escapades, she half-expected even him to laugh at her. Instead, he was fascinated – and with Ralph, you always knew you were getting a genuine reaction.
‘Can I see more?’ Ralph would ask. ‘What happens next?’
What happens next? might’ve been the most thrilling thing anyone had ever said to Delia. Someone cared what might happen in a fictional universe she’d made up, simply to entertain herself, as if it had a life of its own. As if The Fox existed.
Somehow, though The Fox had started as a Delia alter ego, it became instructive to her. If there was something happening and Delia didn’t know how to deal with it, she punted it over to The Fox, presented the challenge in a universe where she could make the courageous choice.
She carried on writing and drawing it at university, when she studied Graphic Design, but shelved it when she graduated, lacking the self-belief to launch a career. ‘What I learned on my course is that everyone else is more talented than me,’ she told Emma, who thought her work was incredible and called her a raving idiot. Delia complained she had all kinds of technical deficiencies compared to her peers. Emma vehemently disagreed. ‘You have something very special that sets you apart from most people: you have charm,’ Emma had said.
Instead of trying and failing, Delia never tried. She told herself that failure was inevitable and she’d only look silly in the process. It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation. So Delia fell into the kind of jobs that educated young women with a nice phone manner in the twenty-first century fall into, because that’s what she told herself she was good for.
This evening, a dozen years since university, Delia felt faintly daft returning to the escapism of her youth. However, as she turned the pages, she found herself grinning despite herself. It was sparky and joyful in a way you so often weren’t, in adulthood.
What did Ralph say? ‘You’re in charge.’ She was surprised at how inspiring those three words felt. Perhaps Ralph was much better at motivating her, than vice versa.
She was lost in re-reading The Fox’s adventures until her mum, who’d somehow returned home without Delia noticing, called up the stairs to ask if she should put the spaghetti on.
After dinner, Delia picked up a pen and tentatively began a fresh page of The Fox. It came to her immediately, like mouthing the lyrics to an old song you’d not heard in years, and yet instinctively knowing the next line.
Had Delia not told Roger about Peshwari Naan’s surprise appearance in her inbox because the search was a welcome distraction from her misery?
The thought only occurred to her as she turned her computer on the next morning, and felt a shiver of excitement wash up and down her arms. It was an analgesic for the pain of thinking about Paul.
Sure enough, she had a Naan e-communiqué waiting for her, from a Peshwari Naan Gmail address.
From: [email protected]
Why ar
e you looking for me?
Delia typed:
From: Delia Moss
You didn’t answer my question! Quid pro quo.
Would she have to wait another day for the response? That would be deeply frustrating. No, she had it within ten minutes. Another thought: the Naan had an office job. The log-off time yesterday had been consistent with that.
From: [email protected]
I knew because I am quite good at this ‘computers’ thing. Now you …?
Delia wasn’t supposed to be hiding her intent, she supposed. She’d better chuck in an emoticon to keep everything friendly.
From: Delia Moss
That’s not really an answer, is it? I want to discuss why you’re so negative about the council. A lot of your comments on the Chronicle site are pretty scathing! (assuming there isn’t another potty-mouthed, fruity Naan out there) (why ARE you called Peshwari Naan?)
From: [email protected]
I’m not negative, really. I post things that make me laugh. (It’s the most troublesome of the Naans. Why put fruit in it? I know you’ll be with me on this.)
From: Delia Moss
OK, but … they don’t always make other people laugh. Some of the councillors have got quite upset. (Yep, agree on the Peshwari wrongness. Chilli and/or garlic, every time. Coriander for a curveball.)
From: [email protected]
That’s because they’re hairy old cornflakes who wouldn’t know humour if it dry-pumped them from behind with a strap-on while grunting their name. (I also like cheese, and keema.)
Delia did a small bark-laugh at her desk, and Ann, busy see-sawing a bent big toe with her special chiropractic elastic band, looked over suspiciously.
‘Something on Buzzfeed,’ Delia mumbled, while typing a reply.
From: Delia Moss
Whether that’s true or not … would you consider toning it down?
From: [email protected]
Is there any reason why I should?
Delia drummed her fingers on the desk.
From: Delia Moss
As a favour to me? I’ve been tasked with getting you to stop. It’d hugely help me if you did. Or minded your manners a bit more. My boss would be happier.
From: [email protected]
Maybe your boss should grow a bigger pair of plums and tell these councillors to get a sense of perspective. I’m entertaining people and adding to the sum of bliss in the universe.
From: Delia Moss
You can be entertaining and not go so far as to suggest Councillor Hammond told the AGM he bleaches his bumhole.
From: [email protected]
That one wasn’t a lie. Check the meeting minutes. He described it as looking as fresh as a grapefruit half afterwards.
Delia nearly guffawed at her desk and stifled it in time, as Ann’s eyes slid towards her again.
Delia reckoned she could talk this Naan round. She’d established a rapport, now to see if she could gently dissuade him from Viz-quoting anarchy.
The mystery remained: how the hell did he find her? That part was spooky and baffling.
Her mobile pinged with a text; Emma.
I will be calling you in five mins. I have an idea. Move to a secure area and open your mind to incoming magnificence. E X
Delia smiled to herself and slipped the phone into the pocket of her chambray pinafore dress, making her way to the gardens outside. Park, if you were being fancy: a strip of green between the council and the rest of the world.
As Delia kicked her heels, she thought how she’d forgotten – to her chagrin – how much she and Emma meant to each other.
Something in Delia’s good-humoured unfussiness matched up very well with Emma’s ebullient smarts. Delia was all about home, Emma was all about work, yet they equally enjoyed sitting around giggling at stupid things while wearing loose pyjama trousers. They found the bitchier shades of female gatherings hard to take. They weren’t snipy, or competitive with each other, and neither of them ever gave the other grief for a lapse in correspondence. They instinctively got each other, in the way of great friendships. In their differences, they learned from each other.
So while Delia was wilting and fading in the face of Paul’s loss, Emma wasn’t saying poor you and plumping her cushions and making chicken soup. She was right there in the sinking boat, trying to bale the water out.
It occurred to Delia that she was also part of another long-term double act, a still-devoted couple, and the thought comforted her.
Nevertheless, Delia did worry what scheme this might be. No matter what worked for Emma in resolving a dispute, she was not going to host an air-clearing round table summit with Paul and Celine.
When Delia answered her mobile, she heard a soundtrack of ambient traffic bustle and the heavy breathing of someone walking fast. Emma’s whole existence moved at a different mph to Delia’s.
‘I can’t talk long! I’ve had a huge brainwave. You’re going to say no at first and then you’re going to think on it and say yes.’
‘Oh, kaaay …’
‘You know we were saying you should come down? Why not move in for a while?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, move in here with me. I have a spare room and you could resolve my guilt about not looking for a lodger. I didn’t want one and I can afford not to but Dad’s been on at me about it. Live here for free, sort yourself out, make me dinner. Do that mysterious thing you do where you make a place feel homely. We could be a comfort to each other, like the two old spinsters in A Room with a View. Your room doesn’t have a view, by the way.’
Delia hadn’t yet seen Emma’s new flat in Finsbury Park. With the hours Emma worked, Delia suspected she hadn’t seen much of it either. Delia lifted her face to the sun and enjoyed being out of doors, not in her office, a place that smelled of carpet and disappointment.
‘The small issue of my employment? I can’t leave my job,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s the only job I have, and I need the money?’
‘You always said that job wasn’t a job for life thing, and how long have you been there now? Seven, eight years? When are you going to leave?’
Delia grimaced. True, but. You didn’t get two broken legs and then decide the time was right to do a parachute jump. Or something.
‘I know. However, having lost my home and my partner, I’m not in the mindset of binning the job.’
‘I knew you’d say that. It seems like the worst time to do it, when actually it’s the best time. Everything’s upside down, anyway. Also, if you want Paul back …’
‘That’s a big if,’ Delia said, thinking Emma had her sussed. Her eyes drifted to a woman bending down, fussing with a moon-faced churlish baby in a buggy.
‘If you do want him back, coming down here will ensure you have his complete attention. Trust my instincts. I know the difference between a small fix and a big fix. What’s happened between you and Paul needs a big fix. Make him miss you.’
‘Won’t I clear a path for him and the shag piece?’
‘False. You’re already out of the way, if he wants that. But while you’re in Newcastle, you can return to him any time. In London, you’re suddenly out of sight and very much in heart and mind. If there was maybe a little too much routine before …’
Delia’s stomach flexed. She’d thought that routine was what happiness felt like.
‘… You doing something dramatic and unexpected will completely focus his mind. He’ll be running after you. You’ll have the proof it’s you he wants.’
Delia tried this idea on for size. Paul would be startled, it’s true.
Domesticated Delia disappearing to the Big Smoke. She wasn’t sure that doing rash things because of how they’d look to Paul was very healthy, mind you. And it could backfire spectacularly.
‘My boss has a saying,’ Emma said. ‘When the fight comes, don’t turtle up.’
‘Turtle up?’
<
br /> ‘Go into your shell.’
Emma loved management-speak neologisms.
‘So you want me to be your housekeeper?’ Delia said.
‘No! Well, yes. If you want to be. Mainly I want you to keep me company and put yourself back on track.’
‘I couldn’t not work and live off you. That’s mad.’
‘Then look for a job! You’re qualified in comms, PR. There’ll be tons more opportunities here. I’ll start sniffing around.’
Delia nearly said they were plenty of jobs in the north too, they weren’t living in black and white. But Emma didn’t generally do that London superiority thing, so Delia forgave her the odd slip.
‘Don’t! I’ll think about it,’ Delia said, ‘I promise.’
She wouldn’t, she was pacifying Emma. It was nice to think she was wanted. And it had been nice to toy with the idea of making Paul sit up and take notice. Realistically, there was no way Delia was adding ‘unemployed’ to her tick list of life achievements. London intimidated her. It was so gigantic. You were supposed to feel like you were in the middle of things, but you were never in the middle of it.
As she rang off and raised her eyes from the ground, they met those of a girl with a liquorice-black pudding basin haircut, bright pink lippy and a nervous, expectant expression. She’d been waiting for Delia to finish her call. She could quite conceivably be twenty-four.
Delia felt she might faint. Not here. Not now.
‘Excuse me?’
Delia’s mouth was dry and her heart pulsing: zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom.
‘… Yes?’
‘Where did you get your dress? I love it.’
Relief flooded out of Delia like rainbow cosmic energy.
‘URBAN OUTFITTERS! IT WAS AGES AGO THOUGH, SORRY! Hahahaha,’ she squealed, while the girl looked politely startled at Delia being drunk. ‘Maybe try eBay?’
The girl smiled, clearly thinking: and maybe Betty Ford for you.
Even if she wasn’t going to London, Delia thought, as she trudged back into the office, shaky with fight-or-flight adrenaline, she couldn’t pretend Newcastle felt the best place for her either.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 6
