It's Not Me, It's You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘Do you live here now or are you coming back?’ Ralph asked, on his sixth chicken piece. ‘Nice photo of Parsnip.’

  Delia beamed. She’d propped the paddling pool picture up in Emma’s kitchen window.

  ‘He’s watching over me. I’m coming back eventually,’ Delia said, taking a chip from the bowl. ‘I miss Parsnip. My job is fun but crazy. I lie for a living and newspapers print it. I can only do it for so long without despising myself.’

  ‘Eventually’ covered a lot of sins. She hadn’t moved lock stock to London. However, right now, she couldn’t imagine returning to Newcastle and Paul. She was somewhere between the two, in purgatory.

  ‘What will happen if they find out you’re lying?’

  ‘Hmmm. Good question,’ Delia said, feeling a wriggle in her guts. ‘Also, me and Paul might work it out.’ She glanced at Ralph over her next drumstick. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Did he say why he was with that other girl?’

  ‘He didn’t exactly explain it …’ Delia said. Ralph was astonishingly insightful, in his own quiet, uncomplicated way. That was precisely what Delia needed: to know why. That was missing, and maybe it always would be.

  Ralph took in his surroundings. ‘It’s cool here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very cool. Emma wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  ‘Is that The Fox?’ Ralph said, in an awed voice, turning his head on one side. Ralph could see a frame where The Fox was being pursued by a masked, unnamed enemy, across London’s rooftops.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Delia said, bashful. She hadn’t been as circumspect with putting her drawings away while Emma wasn’t at home.

  She wasn’t embarrassed of her drawings, as such. Well, maybe a little. It was more that The Fox felt like her private hobby, a wonderful secret. She didn’t want to let air in and spoil it, just yet. She also had to be careful as sometimes, she used people from her life and superhero-ed or villain-ed them.

  ‘Can I read it?’ Ralph said, eyes wide, eyes still on the sketchpads propped on the chair by the sink.

  ‘Sure.’

  He wiped his hands on kitchen paper and picked the sketchpad up, taking it through to the front room. Delia put the kettle on and as she put her head round the door, saw that Ralph was sat cross-legged, turning the pages, chuckling to himself, completely absorbed.

  It was a lovely moment. It was fulfilling in a way nothing else was. If it could entertain Ralph, could it do the same for others?

  ‘Shall we muck around here this afternoon, go to the local for some early doors pints, come back and watch a stupid film on Netflix?’

  Ralph grinned: ‘Yeah!’ This was more his idea of a holiday.

  Later, replete with beer, Type 2 diabetes-inducing food and having seen off a very dumb film with Liam Neeson, Ralph played more games while Delia sat emailing Peshwari Naan.

  It’s been six weeks. The time has come to find out your real name. You can’t seriously think the council would budget to send me to London as part of a long con to unmask you. D

  … GPWM. (good point well made) It’s Joe. I work in the rates department. *Thumbs* *Toots Kazoo* That do you? PN/J

  Hello Joe! We meet at last! D

  Well we don’t quite ‘meet’ now, but we did meet, if you remember. (You don’t.) J

  How did you remember me? Are gingers who look like refugees from an am-dram production of Grease that memorable? D

  Truthfully? You’re pretty. J

  Delia had a little spark of surprise at this, and found herself smiling. It was nice to be told that, at this particular point in her life.

  Thank you!

  She noted the lack of Joe giving her a surname and wondered if the information could be gleaned on the council website. Did she even want to know?

  She thought about what Emma said, the risk of virtual love affairs. Delia loved chatting to Peshwari Naan, but as time wore on, she couldn’t honestly say she felt herself falling in love, or that holy trinity of attraction, affection and admiration that could turn into love. If it was purely platonic, however, why was she nervous about looking him up? She didn’t want to break the spell, she supposed. The disinhibiting power of the internet meant they’d chatted about things she wouldn’t usually tell someone on so short an acquaintance, and putting a face to her confidante would likely change things.

  Speaking of which …

  PS So my brother found the comic I’ve been writing since I moved to London. He’s been very complimentary about it. D

  WAIT, what? You write a comic?! I wanted to ask if you had a passion outside of PR. PR doesn’t seem very ‘you’ – if that’s not too forward from a man who knows you from one bit of buffet small talk and a series of emails. J

  Ah no it’s OK, PR/comms isn’t very ‘me’, it was just something I could do. Yes the dream was always to write comics. I did Graphic Art at university. Then I felt stupid about my comic when I was in my 20s and shelved it and did supposedly ‘proper’ things for a job instead. Only ‘proper’ seems to mean completely improper now. It’s been nice revisiting it. D

  What happens in this comic? J

  A nocturnal Delia superhero alter ego called The Fox, who lives underground, rides her magic bicycle around fighting urban crime at night with her sidekick fox, Reginald. Laughing at me yet? D

  Thank God she was behind a keyboard: that was infinitely easier to type than say.

  IMMENSE! Expecting a big NO, YOU SNOOP! but, can I see it? J

  If you really want to! Keep expectations low. D

  Delia looked up from her screen, to where Ralph was in communion with the other screen.

  ‘Are you having an alright time?’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah, I like London,’ Ralph said, absorbed by the virtual Miami on the TV.

  Much as she could enjoy solitude, by the end of Emma’s Italy trip, Delia was looking forward to a night when the company wasn’t the burble of the television while she made endless cakes with the KitchenAid. Ralph had left on Sunday, with Delia following him to the train carriage door and seeing him seated before she could leave him. She knew she had her parents’ tendency to wrap him in cotton wool. It was hard not to.

  Delia had accepted that touring the sights wasn’t Ralph’s preference, so they had a late breakfast and then went to see the latest giant science-fiction action explosion on a big-screen cinema in Leicester Square.

  Kurt seemed preoccupied and a little secretive after his week off. Delia was learning more about his temperament: his ups were very up but it seemed he had the downs to compensate. In the days that followed, she and Steph learned to look busy in this new ‘we’re all ruined!’ mood.

  If they tried to reassure him that business was good, he barked that it was OK for them, they were salaried. Equally, we don’t share the spoils of the big wins, Delia thought.

  In this slump, he snapped: ‘There’s a bar opening on Friday I think we should all go to. Lots of networking to be done.’ Delia nodded.

  Steph said, nervously: ‘I have a band audition on Friday.’

  ‘Wow, that’s brilliant,’ Delia said hastily, seeing Kurt’s eyes darken.

  ‘I said you’d have to pull some evenings,’ Kurt said to Steph.

  Pause. She looked stricken.

  It was completely unfair of him, Delia thought, to expect to claim their Friday evening at a day’s notice.

  ‘Is this the band that didn’t want to see a female drummer?’ Delia said, hoping to emphasise that Steph needed to keep this appointment.

  ‘Yes. I talked them round,’ Steph said, casting nervous eyes towards Kurt again.

  ‘Cool! That’s great.’

  ‘Alright, she doesn’t need you to fake orgasms,’ Kurt snapped at Delia, who blanched. ‘Do what you will,’ he scowled at Steph.

  After he left, Steph said: ‘I got myself in trouble there, didn’t I?’

  ‘If it was that important he’d have mentioned it earlier,’ Delia replied, though she suspected Steph was right.

 
Delia came into work in her favourite scoop-necked purple dress the next day, and a floppy black bow in her hair that Paul called her ‘washerwoman’ look. She tried to feel positive about a social occasion with Kurt and a coterie of snake-skinned scenesters.

  Presumably because Kurt didn’t queue, they were whisked by Hackney cab to the bar at not inconsiderable cost. Kurt was poured into a tight bright blue suit with brown brogues and wearing choking quantities of a stridently pinecone-scented cologne.

  ‘Cock & Tail’ was in a warehouse in Wapping, tricked out to look like a butcher’s shop. There were S-shaped meat hooks dangling above the bar, the staff wore striped blue and white aprons, and there was a pig’s head with an apple in its mouth mounted like a hunting trophy stag above the bar.

  The overall effect was both queasily tasteless and obnoxiously pleased with itself.

  All the cocktails came with a ‘carnivorous twist’. Delia dodged the Bloody Abattoir Mary that looked like it had a Peperami as a stirrer and instead went for a Suckle It Pig, something fizzy that tasted of apple and was served with crisps like Frazzles as a side order.

  Kurt had a Black Velvet Pudding, which came with a coin of black pudding on the rim in the place of a slice of fruit. Boak.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. I thought this was an exclusive event,’ Kurt said, looking towards the door.

  Across the room she spied who Kurt was eyeballing; a lightly ruffled – and admittedly dashing – Adam West arriving in his beige private dick coat. He was with what tabloids would term a ‘glamorous female companion’.

  Delia’s nerves prickled. Adam and Kurt in the same space could go very badly for her. She swigged the rest of her drink in one and lifted another from a passing tray. She could feel her courage rising with her blood alcohol levels.

  Kurt soon abandoned Delia to work the room. She busied herself by moving on to her third – or was it her fourth? – pig fizz thing, and checking her phone with a frown as if she was a heart surgeon waiting to be paged that an organ had come in for transplant surgery.

  ‘What do you think to the bar, Dana?’

  Delia looked up to see Adam, wearing his usual look of delighted self-satisfaction.

  ‘Ah, the old getting my name wrong gag, great to see it again,’ Delia said, noticing she was speaking rather thickly, and that a significant amount of caution had left her body. ‘I think it’s pretty awful to be honest.’

  ‘Agree. This place is simply teeming with harmful parasites.’

  ‘One or two.’

  Delia reached for her next drink and looked around the room to give the impression she’d mislaid the five great mates she had here that she’d rather be talking to than Adam West.

  ‘It’s one of those slap-my-forehead ideas, isn’t it,’ he continued. ‘Why did no one ever call a bar Cock & Tail before? Oh. Because it’s hugely crass.’ He sucked on the straw in his drink.

  Delia focused on him again.

  ‘Yet you’re hanging around, inhaling the free booze.’

  ‘Yet I am.’

  Adam’s girlfriend joined them and Delia’s soul shrivelled further.

  ‘Freya. This is Delia Moss, from Twist & Shout. I think you’ve spoken on the phone.’

  Adam threw a satirical glance in Delia’s direction and Delia tried not to visibly wince at finding out who she was.

  Freya had silken straight toffee hair, a butterscotch St Tropez-boothed body and the close set, dead yellow-amber eyes of a swamp-dwelling reptile. She teetered on spike-covered S&M style shoes that left Delia trying to fathom how she could walk a yard, let alone get herself to Cock & Tail.

  Freya threaded an arm around Adam and looked Delia up and down. ‘Hi.’

  Delia almost laughed. She’d never seen a woman mark territory quite so physically before. It was as if she wound herself round his leg like a cat with its tail. If Freya could’ve lifted her leg to spray him, she probably would have.

  ‘Delia!’ Kurt barked as he passed, leaning in across Adam and Freya. ‘Let’s circulate and talk to the people who matter, shall we?’

  He moved on.

  Adam grinned.

  ‘Silver-tongued bastard, isn’t he?’

  ‘Who was that twat?’ Freya asked.

  ‘“Who was that twat?” A question often asked in Kurt Spicer’s wake. And hopefully at his wake,’ said Adam.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me, I see people I need to talk to,’ Delia said, giving this announcement the kind of icy, clipped Bette Davis delivery that people used in films when they needed to escape unwelcome cocktail party company. Adam curled his lip in an O RLY? sardonic way.

  In fact, she needed a wee.

  It did the job though: when she exited Cock & Tail’s rather dank toilets, with one of those trendy, giant spinning lemon-shaped soaps on an arm that were surely unhygienic, Adam and Freya had been re-absorbed into the party and were nowhere to be seen.

  Having got herself a fresh drink – these apple things had grown on her – Delia tucked herself well out of view of Kurt, Adam and Freya, right by a huge spiky exotic plant in an earthenware tub.

  To her surprise, after tuning out the throb of the music, she realised she could clearly hear the private conversation on the other side of the foliage.

  ‘… At first I couldn’t make sense of it, then I twigged. Spicer’s hired these two wholesome northern girls as the perfect mules to shift his product. They’re like the Peru Two,’ she heard Adam saying.

  ‘This is the ginger girl who sounds like Geordie Shore, dressed like Hilda Ogden?’ Freya said.

  ‘Delia Moss.’

  ‘No relative of Kate, with those hips.’

  Oof.

  ‘Mmm. She doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea what’s going on.’

  ‘She probably has. Don’t be fooled by that salt of the earth thing,’ Freya said.

  ‘Seriously. She’s just off the train. She’s fallen off the hay cart and bumped her head. I know more about her company than she does.’

  ‘So, you’re going to sleep with her and try for pillow talk?’

  ‘Hah, hardly.’

  ‘Not into “Groundskeeper Willie” hair?’

  ‘I think I’d sooner be into willies.’

  There followed some nasty female cackling.

  ‘I have other ways.’

  ‘You surprise me.’

  ‘Kurt’s about to move into politics and I’m going to be there to shoot out the tyres on his bandwagon.’

  ‘She’s part of your plan?’

  ‘Without knowing. When the moment comes, I’ll chuck her to the wolves.’

  ‘I love it when you talk ruthless to me.’

  ‘It’s not ruthless if someone deserves it.’

  What a thunderturd! Delia thought.

  Hah, well, ironies: he was saying she was badly informed. She was better informed now, eh? She celebrated with another drink.

  Almost an hour later, an inebriated Kurt found Delia and told her he thought he’d set up one or two VIP meetings.

  ‘Great,’ Delia said, thinking this was her cue to leave, but her head and legs felt slow.

  ‘You know why you unsettle men?’ Kurt said.

  Delia took a second to catch up with the abrupt change in the conversation. Kurt hadn’t altered his tone or volume.

  ‘Er. No?’ said Delia, thinking, do I?

  ‘You have that childlike face and a very developed body.’

  ‘Developed body’? Surely that was a phrase only used by paedophile uncles during dubious parlour games?

  ‘We don’t know whether we want to protect you or defile you,’ Kurt said. He fixed her with what he thought was a meaningful gaze. Delia felt revolted. She needed to get out of this conversation, sharpish. Only nothing about her felt sharp. It was more warm, blunted and fuzzy.

  ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

  ‘Sure. You’re an innocent. There’s no shame in being wet behind the ears,’ Kurt said. ‘Or for that matter, wet between …’


  ‘The ears!’

  Adam West appeared next to them. Oh, great.

  ‘Kurt. How’s tricks? Never was a greeting more apposite.’

  ‘You’re interrupting.’

  ‘I know. Hey, loving your work with Marvyn Le Roux. Are you teaching him about disappearing acts?’

  ‘There’s an old Aboriginal phrase that makes me think of you, West. It loosely translates as go take a face bath between a wallaby’s buttflaps.’

  ‘Lyrical. I’d love to hear it in the original dialect,’ Adam said. ‘Anyway, I came to tell you the photographer wants a shot of you and another ligger.’

  ‘Get lost,’ Kurt growled.

  ‘I’m serious,’ Adam said, nodding back towards the photographer. A man with a Nikon round his neck could be seen doing a wave and thumbs up.

  Kurt grudgingly left Delia’s side and made his way to the far end of the bar.

  Adam turned to Delia as soon as Kurt was out of earshot.

  ‘You do realise he’s trying to take you home? And what’s that aftershave? He smells like a Virgin Active locker room.’

  Delia wanted to deliver scorching putdowns about how Adam West’s presence wasn’t welcome either.

  Instead, she felt a fizzing in her stomach and an acrid taste in her mouth. Delia didn’t think she was going to be sick, but she couldn’t stand there for a moment longer either. The news finally reached her that she was awe-inspiringly drunk.

  ‘I need some air,’ she said, and Adam nodded and steered her out of the door. She lacked the ability to shake him off.

  Outside she breathed the colder air of the Docklands deeply, and steadied herself. OK, OK. On top of it now.

  ‘I’m gosh to go back insides,’ Delia said to Adam.

  ‘I don’t think you want to go back into that den, in the state you’re in,’ Adam said. ‘This is work. Don’t show weakness.’

  The state she was in! Supercilious git.

  Delia had a reply all cued-up in her head: I am not in any state now if you’ll excuse me, I am going back inside.

  Instead a kind of ‘pshaaaw’ noise came out. OK, still drunk.

  ‘I see you have your bag. What does your coat look like?’ Adam said. ‘Actually, I know it. It’s the one that looks like you killed and skinned a Muppet. Do NOT move.’