It's Not Me, It's You

by Mhairi McFarlane

  Lionel was playing down his heroism with a perfect blend of aw shucks it was nothing humility and raffish wit, while Stevie and his studio crew lapped it up.

  ‘Weren’t you worried about stepping in?’ Stevie said. ‘That’s a helluva lot on your shoulders if it’d gone wrong.’

  ‘The thing is, Stephen,’ Lionel said, statesmanlike, ‘I come from a generation where we prized action above words. In these modern times of health and safety gone mad, risk management, you hear the most awful tales of lifeguards letting children drown because they didn’t have the right piece of paper to say they could legally pull them out. We over-sixties don’t hold with that. We muck in and get our hands dirty, for better or for worse. If that means we end up being blamed for mistakes, so be it.’

  ‘Uh-mazing. Any young ’uns listening could take note of this, Lenny. You’re a breath of fresh air.’

  Oh please, Delia thought.

  ‘The anti-ciggy lobby bores would disagree with you there, my friend, but thank you.’

  ‘Haha! Seriously. Inspiring stuff. We’ll be talking more to Lionel Blunt after this, by T’Pau.’

  Lionel was no longer seedy old slosh, but a brave, victory-for-common-sense Churchillian-Gandalf hybrid.

  Delia wondered again what Adam would’ve done to disrupt proceedings. The image of him being marched away under arrest came back again and she winced.

  When they got back to the office, Kurt fielding calls on his mobile the whole way and jiggling with anticipation at the pictures of Lionel and Bogdan hitting the Evening Standard, Delia felt limp as a dishrag. Kurt’s presence in the office meant she couldn’t even gossip with Steph.

  Delia volunteered to get Starbucks as a way of getting out of the room with Kurt, while he bellowed into his phone about Bogdan’s delicate psychological state meaning Kurt needed to sit in on any interview, and how he didn’t want his fragility ‘exploited’. If hypocrisy was hair, Kurt would be the Sasquatch.

  As she returned from the coffee shop balancing three tall cardboard cups slotted into a tray, a voice right behind Delia almost made her jump and spill them.

  ‘Afternoon, Delia.’

  She turned to see Adam West wearing a murderously angry expression and a pale-blue shirt. Frustratingly, both suited him.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stay zipped up. I’ve learned my lesson.’

  ‘Er … Hi.’

  ‘Lying to the police, wasting police time. The small detail of completely fucking me over. Congratulations, you’re a fully functioning team member at Twist & Shout. You got there in the end, eh?’

  Delia trembled, along with the cups. He was going to throw her to the wolves. Quid pro quo.

  ‘Tell me more about how self-serving and false I am, when you’re no better.’

  ‘Oh man,’ Adam stepped back, ‘I’m no better? This is going to be good. Explain that?’

  ‘You were about to lose me my job. All I was doing was stopping you.’

  ‘I gave you plenty of assurances I wasn’t going to do that, if I could help it. However much it’d be doing you a favour.’

  ‘If Kurt’s firm goes bust, my job goes with it?’

  ‘Ultimately, yeah. I can’t help that. Delia, sorry if you need it spelling out in skywriting but your boss is a dangerous man. I’m not going to apologise for taking him down, but it could happen in a way that kept your name clean.’

  ‘What was your plan today then?’

  ‘I was going to keep a safe distance.’

  ‘I spotted you.’

  ‘You knew to look for me. I’d have only made my presence known when I could plausibly say I’d got the tip-off elsewhere. As a favour to you. And I’m really asking myself why I bothered.’

  ‘When were you going to sell me out, then? Because you were definitely going to do it. “When the time comes, I’m throwing her under the bus. She deserves it. The ginger minger.” Sound familiar? It’s not a word for word quote but near enough.’

  Adam frowned. ‘When …? What?’

  ‘Cock & Tail, you and Freya. I heard you talking about me.’

  Adam seemed taken aback. Yeah get out of that one, Delia thought, sourly.

  ‘If you’d only asked me,’ he muttered, then louder: ‘I was actually bullshitting Freya to protect you in that conversation.’

  ‘Hah! You really do think I’m some northern dimwit. What did you say, I’d fallen off the apple cart?’

  Adam made an exasperated hand-to-forehead gesture.

  ‘Freya gets extremely stabby about any woman she thinks I might get to know. If I told her that you didn’t know anything, then she’d have nothing on you and leave you alone. I told you before, enemies on nationals aren’t something you want.’

  ‘You had no intention of losing me my job?’

  ‘I told you the truth. That it was a risk, but I’d try to limit it. You know, it’s possible if you’ve only overheard a conversation, you don’t have the context or the history between the people to make sense of it. If you were concerned, you could’ve simply asked me.’

  Adam could slink out of traps like a buttered ferret in a boob tube. Pure contempt and scorn for Delia had radiated from that exchange with Freya.

  ‘The tone of that conversation was absolutely not about having any sort of thought for me. What about the whole, “Huh, as if I’d sleep with HER, vom”?’

  ‘I told you, it wasn’t really about work. Freya gets jealous, it’s easiest to placate her. If I hadn’t played along with her, and not said tough-talking things, she’d have taken it out on you one way or another. I got enough heat for going home with you as it was. Yeah, in fact – tell me this. If I wished you harm, why did I rescue you from Kurt’s clutches that night?’

  ‘To have something over me.’

  ‘I already had something over you.’

  ‘… Staying at yours made me even more compromised.’

  ‘I made sure Kurt didn’t find out.’

  ‘You wanted me in play for the Lionel Blunt thing.’

  ‘You already were.’

  Delia adjusted her hands on the tray.

  ‘Even if you did that to be nice, it doesn’t change the fact that you were using me and I had every reason to protect myself.’

  ‘I believe in my cause; I didn’t want you to be collateral if I could help it. I tried to act with some sort of honour, and look where it got me. West End Central police station, answering questions about whether I was “manipulating myself to issue” or simply letting it dangle there.’

  Delia momentarily closed her eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, hoarsely.

  ‘You know, I told my sister about you, that I thought you were better than the place you’d found yourself. You know what she said? Lie down with dogs, get fleas. I should’ve listened. You absolutely played me.’

  ‘YOU played ME! You started the manipulation with the folder!’

  ‘That was to attack Twist & Shout, not you. Does nothing I’ve told you about Kurt matter to you?’

  ‘Oh what, and I was supposed to blindly trust in everything you said?’

  ‘No, you were meant to do your own asking and thinking and come to a conclusion yourself. It seems you did. Team Kurt all the way.’

  ‘Stop cloaking everything you’ve done in massive nobility and turning this into a moral judgement on me, when you backed me into a corner.’

  ‘I think it is a judgement, whether you like it or not. It’s a grim discovery of what you’re capable of, in a corner.’

  Delia was stung by the contemptuous dislike in his voice.

  ‘Fun as this has been, I’ve got to get back to work,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, about that. I’m going to pop in and have a chat with your boss about a folder. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I say, knock yourself out. I’ve already told him and he doesn’t care.’

  This startled Adam. He paled and didn’t speak for several seconds.

  ‘On the bridge, the police said
you were a couple … You’re seeing him, aren’t you? What you said at the cinema was true?’ A look of authentic revulsion and anger settled on his face, some of the film-Nazi hauteur of old. ‘Jesus, to think I felt sorry for you,’ he spat. ‘To think I bought all that “She’s vulnerable and been hurt by her adulterous boyfriend and hasn’t worked out how many lies he’s told her” stuff that was designed to make me feel white knight-ish towards you. Liars are clearly your thing.’

  Delia could correct his mistake, but it felt too much like asking for his approval – a pointless task in the circumstances anyway.

  ‘As if I was trying to make you feel sorry for me by telling you about Paul! I couldn’t even remember what I’d said the next day.’

  ‘Yet you could remember eavesdropping?’

  Delia opened her mouth to explain but Adam ploughed on: ‘It’s pretty hard to make me think less of human beings than Kurt Spicer already did. But congratulations. You managed it.’

  He glared at her with such a potent mixture of rage, disappointment and resentment that Delia couldn’t help but feel it.

  How had she ended up here? Three months ago she was a good person, in love, in respectable employment, and planning a blameless future. To be replaced by the woman who’d done these grubby things, and chosen so badly in where to place her trust, between Adam and Kurt. She’d never taken long enough to ask herself the pertinent questions, and find honest answers, as Adam said. She’d focused on her own survival, not the bigger picture. The Fox fought for good against evil, not to save her own skin.

  ‘I can’t believe I ever trusted a word out of your mouth,’ Adam said.

  ‘The feeling’s mutual,’ Delia said, turned on her heel and left him there.

  It wasn’t. She finally believed everything he said.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen you,’ Emma announced, at the start of Delia’s third month in London. She’d got in at what was nearly Delia’s bedtime, drinking apple juice straight from the bottle in the fridge door, looking wrecked. ‘We should spend Sunday together. Sundays are the best in London. Whenever I go back to Mum and Dad’s village Sundays are like time-travelling back to 1955.’

  ‘You keep saying you’re over London, and want to live on a smallholding with chickens,’ Delia said.

  ‘I do. I also want three bars on my phone and flat whites and Uniqlo and Bloody Marys at Kopapa. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘You want to live in the countryside once they’ve built all the things they have in the city there?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Delia was duly introduced to these Bloody Marys that weekend – spiked with sherry as well as vodka, Emma would’ve fitted in well in the court of Caligula – over Turkish eggs with chilli oil and thick charred toast. Kopapa was loud, busy and bright, filled with young people living shiny lives in a tiled, raucous room. Delia didn’t think her soul could settle in London, but her belly could be pretty damn happy. She swung her ballet-shoe-clad feet and practically hummed.

  ‘You like?’ Emma said, moving a celery stick out of the way of her mouth as she drained her 11 a.m. cocktail. She had blonde rope-twists of her growing-out fringe held away from her cherubic face with kirby grips, and was wearing a cream ruffled top along with a big onyx teardrop necklace, which Delia had bought her two Christmases ago from a craft market. She looked like a twenty-two-year-old intern. How the stress of her work and the pace of her partying didn’t tell on her appearance, Delia had no idea.

  ‘Mpppfff,’ Delia nodded vigorously with a mouthful of food, the yolk escaping. She would never understand non-enthusiastic eaters.

  At that moment, she saw the unmistakeably broom-handleish form of Freya Campbell-Brown, in buttock-skimming mini-dress, bare legs and slouchy fringed ankle boots. She was smoking on the street outside, holding fag aloft between knuckles, other hand clutching her elbow, listening to her companion with a shrewd expression. It wasn’t Adam, thank goodness, but a man with quiffed hair like The Fonz, blinding white sneakers and a piercing that left a hole in his earlobe large enough to poke a pencil through. Lionel Blunt would not approve. Freya finished her cigarette, dropped the butt and ground it under her heel.

  ‘Emma, talk! Say something so I don’t make eye contact with the woman coming in the door …’ Delia hissed.

  She’d been avoiding telling Emma the latest twist in the Adam West saga. The thought of what had happened between them made her stomach muscles turn into a Venus flytrap.

  ‘Hi.’

  Delia heard a hard voice to her left and turned her head to see Freya giving her a Paddington stare.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m still waiting on a “thanks” for bailing your arse out with your boss?’

  Delia gulped. Naked hostility wasn’t something she encountered often. The British way was coded hostility you seethed about afterwards.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t ask you to say anything. Adam did it of his own accord.’

  ‘He felt he had to clear up after you. For. Some. Reason.’

  Freya’s spitting out of the last three words made it clear she meant ‘His Penising Reasons’.

  ‘I’m not doing anything with Adam,’ Delia said, dumbly, wishing she could find a hundred Mae West-worthy comebacks that weren’t this lumpen bare denial.

  ‘Not for want of trying, I’m sure. You have egg on your face,’ Freya said, with a quirk of her lip. She runway-strutted back to her seat as Delia rubbed the back of her hand against her cheek.

  ‘Egg on her face, more like,’ Emma said, fascinated, putting her fork down, her smoked salmon with ‘yuzu mayo’ suddenly abandoned. ‘What was THAT about? Is she seeing him? She practically had static electricity hair like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters.’

  Delia offered a brief summary of what had happened, concluding: ‘Irony being, Adam absolutely despises me now.’

  Uncomfortably, she had to concede that Freya’s behaviour was further reaffirming Adam’s claim that when he misspoke about Delia, he was placating a nuclear warhead of a personality.

  ‘Can I be clear? He didn’t flash you, so there’s no point asking more about that?’

  Delia looked up in confusion and saw Emma was making her ‘I’m a devil’ face.

  ‘This is pure Uni, Delia. You’ve moved here and got yourself caught in a love triangle in how much time?’

  ‘It’s not a love triangle! It’s not a love anything. It’s me being trapped between two gits,’ Delia said, mock-grumpily.

  Emma stabbed at the ice at the bottom of her glass with her straw.

  ‘You don’t regret coming to London, do you? I know the job’s a bit ripe.’

  ‘No! It’s kept me sane! It’s been great. And I get to see you,’ Delia said, trying to convince herself that FlasherMac Gate didn’t cancel out the good, like eggy brunches.

  Emma smiled. Her time in Finsbury Park had made Delia see how she’d drifted into very intermittent, superficial contact with her best friend. She wouldn’t let it happen again. She’d already decided to propose they book a girls’ holiday, if Emma could cope with yet more of her.

  ‘It’s so incredible to have you living with me in London,’ Emma said. ‘I never see anyone otherwise.’

  ‘You seem to see loads of people?’

  ‘Nah, not really. It’s just wafting about, nothing of any quality,’ Emma said, stabbing her ice some more. Delia realised you should see plenty of people you love, because the meaningful conversations don’t happen in the first twenty-four hours together, or forty-eight, or even the first few days. They came at moments like this.

  ‘Do you think you’ll stay down here?’ Emma said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Delia said, ‘I think it’ll be hard to make enough money to have a life and I’ll miss Newcastle. But I’m enjoying it for now.’

  ‘You’re lucky being from a cool city. If I leave London, I don’t have anywhere to go. Well, Bristol, but Tamsin’s there.’ Emma pulled a face at mention of her forceful sister. ‘I hope I meet someone from
somewhere good.’

  ‘You can always come back up to Newcastle with me. Show those lawyers how it’s done. You could start your own practice! Imagine what kind of house you could buy.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Emma perked. ‘That’d be amazing.’ She paused. ‘Somehow, I always thought I’d have a better chance meeting my soulmate here. Economies of scale and all that. Now I think London life doesn’t do soulmates. Did I tell you about the SnapChat wanker?’

  ‘The what-what?’

  ‘You know what SnapChat is, right?’

  Delia nodded: vaguely. ‘It automatically self-destructs, like in Inspector Gadget?’

  ‘A while back I met a nice man on Match Dot Com. We were planning our first date and he was like oh are you on SnapChat? And I said yes I am on SnapChat. He says I want to send you something. I open it and it’s a clip of him …’ Emma did a kind of frantic mime with curled fist, shaking her right hand.

  ‘No?’ Delia said. ‘No?!’

  ‘YES,’ Emma returned to the remains of her salmon.

  ‘Why would he think you’d want to see that?!’

  ‘I don’t know. This trading dirty images black market is beyond me. I’m a lawyer, I know people like me end up sifting through them before it ends up in court.’

  ‘Maybe he meant to send it to someone else?’

  ‘He sent me messages afterwards asking what I thought.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Great watch, is it a real Rolex?’

  Delia laughed, although she had a nasty twinge of wondering whether Paul and Celine had done this sort of thing. Her instinct was Paul would run a mile – but that was the Paul of before.

  ‘You can’t help think we’ve lost something, compared to our grandparents’ generation. It’s bad enough we don’t do proper dancing, but wanking videos instead of love letters! Whoever gets a love letter now? Yet they’re so much hotter than seeing someone fapping away like a monkey.’