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

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.