Mhairi McFarlane - It’s Not Me, It’s You

‘Definitely. As soon as you like. This weekend! I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to run into a meeting …’

‘No, go!’ Delia made her farewells as her mobile pipped at her with a waiting call from Aled. She switched to answer it before she knew what she was doing.

‘Hi, Dee. How are you bearing up?’ he said, stiffly.

‘Hi,’ Delia said. ‘So Paul told you?’

‘Yeah. Only about a month ago. I told him to knock it on the head.’

Pause. ‘I meant he told you I knew.’

‘Oh. Fuck,’ Aled said.

Unlike his best mate, dissembling wasn’t Aled’s forte. A big bear of a man with black hair and beard and hands like shovels, he had the unlikely job of wedding photographer. It happened by default: he started as general freelance, then most of the work he got was nuptials. Delia had been going to ask him to cover theirs.

‘You knew a month ago, and you didn’t tell me?’ Delia said, warm with resentment and shame. Here was another stage of the post-revelation process. Humiliation.

‘I know, I’m so sorry. He would’ve killed me. I couldn’t get in between you.’

‘Why did he tell you?’

Delia could hear Aled’s reluctance and discomfort whooshing right down the phone line, but he’d not left himself with an escape route.

‘He. Err. He didn’t exactly choose to tell me. I saw him with her. Then he had to tell me what was going on.’

‘What? When?’

Delia came to a standstill, open-mouthed. Paul had been that indiscreet?

‘I caught them in a store room. I went in for last orders.’

‘Caught them?’ Delia said, feeling faint. ‘Shagging?’

‘No! Kissing.’

The store room was obviously Paul and Celine’s enchanted kingdom. Delia had only been in there when heaving dusty crates full of mini bottles of mixers around. An overwhelming desire to know what Celine looked like gripped her, to complete the picture. The picture of her and Paul locked in a passionate tongue-wrestling session, her back pressed against a shelf of Britvic tomato juice and soda.

Delia was speechless. If she tried to speak, the noises would be hysterical and indistinct.

‘Me and Gina both thought he was an idiot.’

Gina knew? Their closest friends in this city? Delia already knew it didn’t matter what time passed or what rationalisations they gave her. Nothing would ever be quite the same between them again.

She felt as if everything in her life had belonged to Paul, that she was only sharing with him. In separation, when you had to divvy up your possessions, the fact of his ownership was unavoidable.

Uncovering an affair wasn’t a one big fact headline story. It was like Matroyshka dolls, lies inside lies inside lies.

‘Paul’s told me he doesn’t want to lose you,’ Aled said.

‘Oh yeah, he obviously doesn’t want to lose me, you can see that. So, so careful. I feel like a precious crystal vase .’

‘Gina is worried you’ll blame her, too.’

Delia muttered that it was only Paul’s fault, while feeling slightly rankled she was doing the excusing and the ‘make feel better’ of the conversation.

‘Really though, Delia, think about it. We couldn’t take sides. We had to let Paul tell you.’

‘Did he tell you he was going to tell me?’

Aled paused. ‘He said he’d finish it with this girl and that was that.’

This answered the question about why Aled was making the condolence call, not Gina. She knew the lack of female solidarity was too glaring. They were both going to keep schtum about this, forever. Sitting there through the speeches on their wedding day, clapping and toasting them and knowing that Delia had been betrayed.

She wanted to say: You did pick a side – Paul’s. But she didn’t have the stomach for more fallings-out.

Then, with nonchalant brutality, Aled added: ‘The Paris trip is incredibly stupid, I told him that.’

‘The what ?’ Delia said, flat with dread.

‘Some plan, Cel— she – wanted him to go to Paris, to get over this. You have to talk to Paul about it. I’m sorry.’

Aled sounded as if he’d have given anything not to have had this conversation now. How did he think Delia felt?

Delia could only make a ‘Nmmm, hmmm, yep, bye’ sound before she ran to the undergrowth in the gardens by the office and retched black coffee and bile into the earth, hearing birds tweeting around her and the odd murmur from an onlooker.

Somewhere behind her, a middle-aged woman said, ‘Monday afternoon! The amount students drink these days is disgusting, Stanley.’

‘I’ve got gastric flu, actually,’ Delia said, turning round, eyes pink, but the woman was shaking her head and walking away.

Delia briefly contemplated pulling a sickie – she looked bad enough for even Ann to give her the afternoon off – then imagined going home and staring at four walls in her old box bedroom in Hexham. With her worried parents knowing she was psychically, not physically, ill.

Delia repaired the damage as best she could, squinting into her compact with the sunlight behind her, and rootling out an Extra Strong mint to combat the vomit smell. She drifted back into the office like a pale wraith.

Paul was going to Paris? Did he mean what he’d said about ending it, or did he simply feel he had to say it was her he wanted, when confronted?

Delia had to now admit something else to herself. She’d always sensed she didn’t quite have his full attention. She doubted that Paul would have picked her out, or fought for her, or even been too cut up if she’d wobbled on her way in those red shoes, a few months down the line.

Deciding to propose fitted a pattern she’d not wanted to examine until now. She had built a life around Paul, but he hadn’t moved an inch. The decorating told the story in microcosm: he was happy for her to get on with it, but that wasn’t the same as properly participating.

He was a showman and a show off, and he was a little more in love with himself than he was with her.

It would take something fairly startling to concentrate Delia’s mind on her work: a bomb scare, or Ann being pleasant. However, at not long after five o’clock, she got something startling enough. An email so strange, she started in her seat, and turned to scan the room behind her.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

Are you looking for me?

It was one thing to search for someone who used the phrase ‘womble’s toboggan’ – Delia had to consult the Viz Profanisaurus on that one – in comments on newspaper message boards.

It was entirely another thing to suddenly find yourself in the crosshairs of some sort of omniscient online troublemaker. The back of Delia’s neck grew cold and she shivered.

She couldn’t think of any possible way this man (was it a man?) had found her. Yes, she’d been in the café, but how had he known she was looking for him? She’d not committed a single keystroke to discussing him online, so even if he’d hacked her email (and how would he do that?) there was no smoking gun. And how would s/he recognise her anyway?

The principle of Occam’s Razor, Delia told herself; the simplest answer was usually the right one.

So the Naan could be one of her colleagues, who’d overheard the briefing with Roger?

Only thing was, there was surely no one in this office of long-servers and clocker-offers who had anything approaching that level of disrespect for their salary.

I mean, was it polite Gavin, forty-three, who liked Dire Straits, wakeboarding, his kids, and hated his wife? Nope. Or maybe Jules, fifty-one – married, no kids, saving for a Greek Island hopping month off to celebrate her thirtieth wedding anniversary soon? Hardly.