Mhairi McFarlane - If I Never Met You

‘No.’

‘Do you want to be?’

‘Not really,’ Laurie said, shrugging. ‘I’m not madly pro or anti marriage.’

‘Maybe when you have kids?’ Suzanne supplied. Oh, subtle. Piss the piss off.

‘Are you married?’ Laurie said.

‘No!’ Suzanne shook her head and the lovely hair rippled. ‘I want to be married by thirty, for sure. I’ve got four years to find Mr Right.’

‘Why by thirty?’

‘I just kinda feel that I don’t want to be on the shelf.’ She paused. ‘No offence.’

‘Sure.’

Laurie briefly debated saying: you know that this is really rude, right? I mean you know you can’t stick ‘no offence’ on the end like it takes the curse off? And then made the usual British calculations about the ten seconds of triumph not being worth the hours of embarrassment and hostility afterwards.

‘Where are you from, Laurie?’ said Carly in the animal print top, sitting on the other side of Suzanne, and a familiar heavy lead settled in Laurie’s gut.

‘Yorkshire,’ she said, with a bright aw-hell-please-can-we-not smile, which she knew would be lost on the recipient. ‘You can probably tell from the accent.’

‘No, I meant where are you from ?’ she said, vaguely gesturing at her own face. Of course you did .

The usual fork in the road opened up: answer the question she knew they were asking, or pretend not to understand and prolong the agony. If you didn’t pander to it you were being ungracious, chippy, making a thing of it . You were the problem.

‘Yorkshire, seriously. I was born at Huddersfield Royal.’

A moment ticked past and Suzanne, to no surprise whatsover, pitched in. ‘She means where are your mum and dad from?’

‘My dad’s from Oldham …’

A fresh tray of cocktails arrived, cucumbers curls inside like ribbons, and Laurie’s genealogy was abruptly demoted in interest.

‘… My Mum is from Martinique,’ she said, but a distracted Carly and Suzanne had already forgotten they’d asked.

‘Y’what?’

‘Martinique! My Mum is from Martinique!’ Laurie said shrilly, above the music, pointing at her face.

‘Your mum’s called MARTINE EEK?’

Fuck it.

‘I’m getting an Old Fashioned,’ Laurie said, standing up abruptly. Make of that name what you will.

Then she saw them, a chance glimpse through the shifting throng. Laurie involuntarily grinned at the ignoble thrill of unexpectedly seeing something she definitely wasn’t supposed to see, huddled in a banquette, twenty feet away.

Her colleague Jamie Carter was out with a gorgeous young woman. So far, so predictable. But , rather than an unknown lovely, Laurie was ninety-nine per cent sure that the woman he was cosying up to was the boss’s niece, Eve, who he was specifically warned off going anywhere near, the day before she arrived. Office gossip dynamite. Possibly employment contract terminating dynamite, depending on just how protective Mr Salter was.

The warning had been the source of much mirth at the office: Jamie really was a ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ threat.

‘Might as well fit Carter with a GoPro, from what I heard,’ she’d guffawed, ‘The secret life of the neighbourhood tom.’

Laurie was picking at a bag of crimson seedless grapes at the time, and the office junior, Jasmine, unintentionally outed herself as yet another with a crush by blushing the same shade as the fruit.

Well, whatever had been said by his superiors, it obviously had a devastating impact. Jamie had the legal undergraduate and twenty-four-year-old babe out on her own after hours and sipping Havana Club within a week.

Laurie had to admire his balls. And no doubt she wouldn’t be the only one.

The risky choice of companion aside, The Refuge was exactly where she’d expect to see a man like Jamie on a Friday night. Chic’s ‘Good Times’ was blaring and an artwork directly above their heads, a factory chimney skyline picked out in black and white tiles, declared THE GLAMOUR OF MANCHESTER. He and Eve were suited to their subtitles.

A glittering cathedral of a bar inside a nineteenth-century hotel, it was only about fifteen minutes’ walk from their office on Deansgate. It wasn’t as if Jamie was in deep cover. Why take such a risk?

Perhaps he’d simply gambled he wouldn’t be caught here by any of the old sticks or suburban snipes among their colleagues. Yes, that would be it, as what little Laurie knew of Jamie suggested he’d enjoy playing the odds. It was unlikely he’d notice her, for more than one reason, in her vantage point among a gaggle of women at the other end of the room.

She could see Jamie was in his element, handsome face animated in storytelling, a palm theatrically clapped over forehead at one point to emphasise dismay or shame. Eve was visibly falling for him by another degree with each passing moment, her eyes practically star-shaped, like an emoji. (And didn’t he wear glasses, usually? Hah, the vanity.)

Jamie was clearly an expert at this, a completely practised hunter in his natural habitat. Whether Eve knew that she was this weekend’s antelope was another matter.

His hair was short and dark with a curl to it, his cheekbones like shoe moulds. They’d come straight from the office, him still in white shirt sleeves. And Eve … hmmm, Eve knew they’d be doing this, as she was in a navy pinstripe trouser suit, jacket discarded, with a red silk camisole, swinging earrings, matching spiky ketchup-coloured heels. No doubt her nine-to-five practical flats were crushed into that capacious bag (was that a Birkin? Oh to have rich uncles).

Laurie felt a shiver of awe at how well Jamie and Eve fitted in, amid the din and the crush of all these bright young things, their mating rituals, taut stomachs and brash confidence.

Imagine being single, she thought. Imagine being expected to go home and take your clothes off with someone you’d never met before. Horror. Doing it for a hobby, the way Jamie Carter did, felt alien to her. Thank God for Dan. Thank God for going home to someone who was home.

As Laurie waited in the four-person deep rabble at the bar, she pondered The Jamie Carter Phenomenon.

Jamie’s arrival had caused a stir from his first week at her law firm in the way conspicuously good-looking men were wont to do, and in the way anyone was wont to do in offices where people spent a lot of time in zoo captivity, feeding on distraction. The death of the fag break in the modern age, Laurie noticed, had been replaced by snouting round social media profiles for material for discussion. Laurie was constantly thankful her life was far too boring to make a sideshow.

At first there were excitable whispers at the water dispensers in Salter & Rowson solicitors that someone as fine as Jamie was single, wondering if he was an eligible bachelor, as if they were in an Austen novel. And, as Diana said, he was ‘without any baggage’, which Laurie always thought was a harsh way to refer to ex-spouses and children.

Then in time, the excitable whispers were about the fact he wasn’t apparently interested in dating anyone in particular, but that he’d disappeared off into the night with X or Y. (X or Y tended to be, like Eve, a beautiful intern, or a friend of an employee.) Laurie thought this was only a surprising turn of events if you’d never met a man with lots of options and nothing at stake before.

How old was he, thirty? And hungry for not just a plethora of dates but also professional advancement, if the second layer of whispers about him was to be believed.

The only unusual aspect to Jamie’s reputation as a stealth shagger was that he picked his targets cleverly. The interns had always finished their interning, the friend of a friend was never a close friend and what Russians called kompromat was scant. Therefore, while it was known he was a ladies’ man , he never got blamed for ladykilling, or suffered a poor testimonial about his sexual prowess from a scorned woman. Jamie Carter never got into any trouble. Until now, perhaps.