It's Not Me, It's You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘Nonsense that was good enough to see you going back with her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Paul looked beat. Not much hope of polishing the turd.

  ‘And that was enough, what she said?’

  ‘In that moment, yes. It was a take the red pill, follow this thing and see where it leads. It was about risk taking, I guess.’

  ‘Was it monkey sex?’

  ‘What?’

  Paul looked befuddled.

  ‘Was it wild? Give me some idea of what you did.’

  ‘It was sex. Plain, average sex.’

  ‘Who on top?’

  Paul’s jaw tightened further.

  ‘Her on top.’

  Delia’s stomach contracted.

  ‘Lights on? Off?’

  ‘Off. Well, she had some of those lights on a string, they were on.’

  Delia felt the triumphant sizzle of being proven right.

  ‘Why did Aled say he talked you out of a trip to Paris?’

  ‘I honestly have no idea,’ Paul said, visibly relieved at being allowed his own anger at last. ‘I’d already finished with Celine by the time I spoke to him about it. If he ever answered my calls, believe me, we’d have words.’

  Outside, there was the roll of a car’s engine and a beep.

  ‘Look, Delia …’

  ‘What’s Celine’s last name?’ Delia said, to cut Paul off.

  ‘Roscoe. Why?’

  ‘In case I ever need to know,’ Delia said. ‘Look after Parsnip.’

  She reclaimed her luggage trolley and flew out the front door before Paul could persuade her to stay. Before she could see her dog wake up, before she could look around and think about what she was leaving behind, possibly forever.

  Halfway to Hexham, her phone pinged.

  I got you the Valentines card on impulse, thinking about how much my mum would’ve liked you. Please come home. Px

  In that moment between sleep and wakefulness where you remember who you are, where you are and what you do, Delia spent longer than usual arranging all the pieces. It made a strange picture.

  As the sun leaked through her bedroom blinds and she sensed she’d slept beyond nine, Delia felt the weightless weirdness of having no job to go to.

  She imagined her old desk with the pink Post-its framing the computer screen, the photo of Parsnip in the paddling pool no longer there. Life continuing without her. Delia felt oddly bereft – it’d be strange not to, she thought, after seven years at the same office.

  Then she thought of how Ann would still be wailing about her arm and Roger glowering at her, and told herself better late to leave than never. She had no wedding to be saving for, any more. Someone else could do battle in the middle ground between the Naan and Roger.

  She’d had a big glass of red before she told her parents the night before, and gave them some white lies. Her boss had known of her intentions for a while, everyone was fine with it. She had savings, she reminded them. The wedding fund was a pretty healthy size, in fact.

  Nevertheless, their uneasy expressions communicated: Should we be paying more attention to you? Are you unravelling before our eyes?

  For all her efforts to act casual, obviously most people who moved from one end of the country to the other didn’t usually make the decision in the space of an afternoon. Or go the next day.

  Delia got herself together for a mid-afternoon departure, thinking, at least hanging around workless in Newcastle is of short duration.

  She knocked and pushed her head round Ralph’s door.

  ‘See you later. I’m off to London to stay with Emma for a bit.’

  ‘Cool. Go to Big Ben!’

  ‘Is it a favourite spot of yours?’

  ‘It’s where they fight the Ultranationalists in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.’

  Delia laughed.

  ‘You could come visit me, while I’m there?’

  Ralph shrugged and made non-committal noises. Ralph didn’t travel. Neither did her parents. There was an annual tussle to get them all to come into Newcastle city centre for a birthday. Last time they went to a nice restaurant, her mum had complained at the plate having ‘cuckoo spit and frogspawn’ on it.

  ‘Wait. Take this,’ Ralph said, rummaging around his fold-up sofa and producing a slightly crushed box of Fondant Fancies.

  She gave him a hard hug and a kiss on his soft cheek and didn’t meet his eye.

  Her dad was in the kitchen, having a cup of tea as her mum bustled around finding the car keys. Delia got the feeling she’d been spoken of, before she entered the room.

  ‘Off then, Dad! See you soon.’

  He gave her a kiss on the cheek and then held out two twenty-pound notes.

  ‘Oh no, no no,’ Delia said, as her throat and stomach tightened. ‘I’ve got plenty of cash, Dad, honestly.’

  ‘You might want a sandwich when you get there,’ her dad said, and Delia realised he’d feel better if she took it.

  ‘Be careful. London’s full of thieves and chancers, and they’ll see you’re a nice girl.’

  It was such a kindly fatherly idea that London would see anything about Delia at all, before it spat her back her out again.

  Delia smiled and nodded.

  ‘So you’re staying with Emma?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She lives on her own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re not …’ he hesitated. ‘There’s not a young man involved, is there?’

  It was so unexpected a question that Delia had to stop herself snorting.

  ‘Of course not!’

  She looked at her mum, who was fussing with her handbag and avoiding Delia’s eyes. This was what they’d come up with, in their concern. She was chasing a boy.

  ‘I promise you, there’s nothing to this but needing to get away for a while. I’ve barely seen Emma in the last few years, let alone had time to get to know anyone else.’

  Her father nodded. As they hustled out of the hallway, her dad huffing and puffing, holding her case at waist height – fathers didn’t acknowledge the wheels on trolley cases, they had to be picked up – Delia felt sodden with guilt for worrying them like this.

  Her mum drove her to the station in the old Volvo, with Delia anxiously trying to play down the whole unemployed peril with nonsensical chatter. If she talked fast enough, surely her mum wouldn’t notice.

  ‘This whole break Paul and I are having, it was the right moment,’ she said, hoping echoing Emma would be the charm.

  ‘You’re moving to London permanently?’ her mum asked, timidly. Her parents pretty much never lost their tempers or exerted their will. Something in their quiet forbearance was so much more shame-inducing than any shouting or outright disapproval.

  It was a good question. It gave Delia stomach snakes. It’d been her right to be vague with Paul, not with her mum.

  ‘No! I don’t know. It’s more to get away from things for a while.’

  The parental relationship loop: fibbing to protect them from worry, and them sensing being fibbed to, and worrying. The truth – that she had no idea what she was doing – would be more worrying, so Delia had no choice.

  On the train she sat next to a short old man in a bulky coat, who started a conversation about pollution, which Delia politely tolerated, while wishing she could listen to her iPod.

  As they got to Northallerton, he pointed to the tracks and said: ‘See those pigeons?’

  ‘Yes …?’

  ‘Pigeons know more than they’re letting on.’

  ‘Do they?’ Delia said.

  ‘Think they carried all those messages and never read any of them?’ the man said, incredulously.

  Delia said she was going to the buffet car and switched carriages.

  Arriving in London, she taxied from King’s Cross to Finsbury Park and told herself she’d definitely economise from tomorrow onwards. It was late, she was tired, and full of Fondant Fancies, cheese toastie, acidic G&T and a mini tube of Pringles, all picked
at in nerves and boredom.

  As Delia left the station, the evening air in the capital smelled unfamiliar: thick, warm, petrol-fumed. She was hit by a wave of home sickness so hard it was in danger of washing her away.

  Emma’s flat was the first floor of one of those haughty, draughty Victorian houses with drama in its high ceilings and cold in its bones. There were bicycles crammed under the plaster arch in the narrow hallway, and subsiding piles of mail for the various residents stacked on a cheap side table by the radiator.

  It was a leafy, residential street, yet still felt slightly overrun and run down.

  Delia had warned herself not to be shocked by the space that a wage as intergalactic as Emma’s could buy here. But she still was.

  She bumped her case up the steep worn-carpeted stairs to the door that separated Emma’s territory from the rest of the building and knocked. Music was humming on the other side and she hoped she wasn’t arriving into a cocktail party. She didn’t feel up to meeting the London society yet.

  The door was flung open and all five foot three of Emma Berry filled it to the jambs, in a pale green party dress with circle skirt, pointy salmon satin heels and bouffanted Marilyn-blonde hair. Despite constantly bemoaning imaginary obesity, she had one of those Tinkerbell figures where any weight gained went to the pin-up places.

  ‘Hey there, Geordie girl!’ she sing-songed.

  Delia grinned ‘Hello!’ and did an awkward fingertips-only wave, with her luggage.

  There was some fussing and clucking as Emma tried to reach round and take Delia’s case on the vertiginous steps and it became obvious Delia would probably be killed in the attempt. Emma shuffled back into the flat to allow Delia to make a very laborious entry instead.

  ‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ Delia said.

  ‘No, I was waiting for you! I admit I possibly started on the booze a bit early. Let me get a hug at you! This is so ridiculously exciting.’

  Emma smelled of gardenias and her dress had watery silver sparkles across knife pleats. It rustled with the crispness of new and expensive fabric as Delia leaned in. To Delia’s fairly expert eye, it was not of the high street.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here!’ Emma squealed and then it settled in both their faces that it was incredibly well-meant but possibly not the most tactful thing to say.

  Delia replied: ‘Neither can-fucking-I,’ and they laughed, breaking the tension.

  ‘It’s going to be so great.’

  Because Delia couldn’t share her confidence but didn’t want to offend with a lack of enthusiasm, she said: ‘Your dress is spectacular.’

  ‘It’s a Marchesa design.’

  Delia gasped. ‘Like the Oscar dresses?!’

  ‘It’s a replica I got on Etsy for a song. It smells a bit dodgy. So I’ve covered it in Marc Jacobs,’ Emma said. ‘The hair’s backfired a bit too,’ she said, stroking it. ‘I was going for Doris Day bubble flip, I think it’s more New Jersey mob wife.’

  Delia giggled.

  ‘Do you want the tour? It takes less than two minutes.’

  ‘Yes!’

  Delia followed Emma – noisy on the hard floors in her clippy-cloppy shoes – around the flat. It was so very Emma to dress up for Delia’s arrival.

  Delia’s weary soul gave a little sigh of relief that the flat was nothing like as ragtag and anonymous as the hallway downstairs.

  In fact it was tiny, but beautiful. The floorboards were stripped and varnished Golden Syrup yellow, and the doors were an artfully washed out, distressed chalky aqua with Mercury glass handles.

  The bathroom screamed ‘no man lives here’ – a white roll-top, claw-foot bath, Oriental silk dressing gown on a print block hook, thick white towels, a pile of water-wrinkled glossy fashion magazines. And one of those free-standing glass bowl sinks that look like a giant’s contact lens.

  ‘You’ve done all this?’ Delia said, in awe.

  ‘Nah, have I bollocks. The last girl had good taste and massive budget. Do not piss your money away on something that isn’t broke, I say. It cost me enough to buy it. I’ve run a J cloth over it and that’s it.’

  The front room was another stunner – vaulting ceiling with original plaster rose and ruby-red Murano chandelier dangling from it, deep emerald velvet L-shaped sofa and huge, trailing swathes of Liberty print curtains.

  Delia had a little covetous pang about a girls’ place. Paul mostly gave her free rein, but drew the line at ‘busy fussy old teashop spinster’ patterns.

  ‘Where’s your … things?’ Delia said, nailing what had confused her. It was as clutter-free as a photo shoot.

  ‘Got rid of things from Haggerston and stored a load with my parents back near Bristol.’

  Slight worry still tickled at Delia. Emma was clearly never here.

  They thundered up the small flight of hollow wooden stairs leading to the sleeping quarters. Delia was braced for the spare room to be the size of a margarine tub. Actually, it was well proportioned and there wasn’t much between it and Emma’s room – the main difference being Delia’s had a futon, while Emma’s had a wrought-iron princess bed. Both filled the floor space, leaving room for a shallow wardrobe only.

  Emma had propped a framed print of David Bowie on the cover of Low on the spare-room windowsill. ‘Do you still like him? To make you feel at home.’

  ‘Oh, Emma, thank you! It’s all amazing.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ she agreed. ‘Given it’s broken me for savings.’

  Emma had wealthy parents and even wealthier grandparents, the latter having obligingly pegged and left six-figure sums to her and her sister right when they wanted to get on the property ladder. It was still only a third of the cost of this flat, Delia guessed. The sums made her dizzy.

  Emma led Delia into the kitchen last, which was a sleek white gloss space-agey fitted affair, with yet more sea green as accent colour.

  A large twisty modern halogen light fitting, like a pipe cleaner animal made of a tungsten filament, hung low over the rustic wooden table in the centre. It was covered with dozens of foil trays of food with cardboard lids.

  ‘I got Thai,’ Emma said. ‘I didn’t know how hungry you’d be so I ordered everything. And I’ve got fizzy! I don’t have an ice bucket though.’

  She lifted a bottle of Taittinger out of a washing-up bowl full of ice cubes and slopped it into a wine glass.

  ‘This fuss for me?!’ Delia said.

  ‘Who else would I make more fuss for? To Delia Moss’s London adventure!’ she said, and Delia accepted the glass and toasted.

  Delia didn’t think she’d be having any adventure, nor did she much feel like one. But she felt so grateful, and humbled, because she’d managed to forget how fun her best friend was. Or ‘a certified loon’, as Paul had always said, fondly.

  Emma had this hedonistic knack for making life more exciting. It wasn’t to do with her income; she’d been the same at university.

  She was the person who produced cheap seats in the gods to a Shakespeare matinee that afternoon, and had been to a market and bought a whole octopus for dinner, its tentacles waving out of the bag. Or came back from the bar with a surprise round of Sambuca sidecars in espresso cups. (Her capacity for any intoxicant was fairly legendary.)

  The odd thing was, if you tried to replicate an Emma gesture at a later date, it was never quite the same. There was something in her spontaneous, generous joie de vivre that made it entirely of the moment, and it lost something in efforts to copy it. An Emma idea lived only once and shimmered briefly, like a sandcastle, or a rainbow.

  Or in this case, pork larb, khao pad and massaman curry.

  Takeaway food, foaming alcohol, cackling laughter, and Delia’s surroundings made sense. Her appetite had come back.

  After half an hour, she knew she was soaring high on the back of the eagle of booze and would no doubt crash hard on to the rocks of a hangover, but she didn’t care.

  As the night wore on, Delia and Emma slumped side by si
de on the sofa, Emma occasionally reaching down to top up glasses from the third bottle.

  ‘We won’t finish it, obviously,’ she’d said, solemnly, shortly before firing the cork at the chandelier with a soft phut. ‘That would be madness.’

  By the time it was pushing midnight, they’d covered Delia’s exit from the council, and Emma’s ill-fated entanglement with pitiless but vigorous Richard from Insolvency and Restructuring.

  ‘Rick the Dick, as he’s known to the secretaries. Sadly with that nickname, I got the wrong end of the stick, literally and figuratively.’

  And Emma’s sister’s forthcoming giant folly of a wedding.

  ‘Ten days in Rome for the hen, Delia! Ten days! Count them! They add up to ten.’

  ‘But you’re all for that non-stop party stuff,’ Delia said, holding her glass out for a refill, loving being the Delia she was with Emma again.

  ‘Not with Tamsin’s friends I’m not,’ Emma said, twisting the bottle away expertly before the glass frothed over, ‘Like Salem’s Lot, in Joules Breton tops and Hunter wellies. I was hoping for Bath tearooms and a spa, two nights, in and out. Everyone knows what happens on hens, you get wasted on the first night and phone in your performance on the second. Imagine doing that as rinse-repeat for ten days. Ugh.’

  Delia laughed. Emma topped her own glass up. Like a proper friend, Emma had clearly sensed that Delia needed time to work up to discussing Paul.

  ‘Do you think you’ll go back to him?’ she asked, eventually.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe, yes. When the rage at the thought of him with Celine has subsided. If it ever does.’

  ‘Celine,’ Emma said, trying it out. ‘Oof. He could’ve at least been poking a Hilda. Or an Ethelred.’

  ‘Ethelred’s a man’s name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Delia was reminded of the calming effect of someone not doing what they were supposed to, like Ralph.

  ‘Any idea why he did it? I mean, because sex. Paul doesn’t seem the type though.’

  ‘I think he wanted to try it out, take a risk. We’d been together for ten years.’

  Delia hated herself a little for sounding as if she was making excuses for him. She tried a different tack. Total honesty.