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

She scrolled through the Naan’s timeline and noted they were usually posted at lunch hours and weekends. This was someone in an office, firewalled, annoyed, bored. She empathised. Project Naan kept her occupied for two hours, until the weekend’s start point arrived. Friday afternoon productivity in her office was never Herculean.

Well, Monday’s lunch destination was assured. A stake-out, that was much more exciting than the usual fare. She wouldn’t tell Roger just yet: no point bragging and then realising she’d happened across a different talking Naan altogether.

Delia headed into the loos to get herself ready for her evening out. She’d left the bike at home and got the bus in today. She changed into a small heel and a 50s-style rock’n’roll petticoat she’d brought with her to work, stuffed into a plastic bag. She shook it out and wriggled it on under her date-night attire dress.

The ruffled taffeta was a dusky lavender that poked out an inch below the hem and picked up on the pattern of the fabric. She was self-conscious once back among her colleagues, and bolted for her coat.

But not fast enough to evade Ann’s gimlet gaze.

‘What are you wearing?!’ she cackled.

‘It’s from Attica. The vintage shop,’ she said, cheeks heating.

‘You look like a Spanish brothel’s lampshade,’ Ann said.

Delia sighed, muttered wow thanks and grimaced. Nothing between nine and five mattered today, anyway.

Today was all about this evening: when life was going to take one of those small turns, a change of direction that led onto a wide, new road.

‘If he’s making stories about the council worth reading, they should pay him, not sue him,’ Paul said, wiping his paratha-greasy hands on a paper napkin.

‘Yeah,’ Delia said, through a thick mouthful of spicy potato. ‘But when a councillor gets upset, we have to be seen to do something. A lot of the older ones don’t understand the internet. One of them once said to us, “Go on and delete it. Rub it out!” and we had to explain it isn’t a big blackboard.’

‘I’m thirty-five and I don’t understand the internet. Griz was showing me Tinder on his phone the other day. The dating app? You swipe left or right to say yes or no to someone’s photo. That’s it. One picture, Mallett’s mallet. Yes, no, bwonk . It’s brutal out there.’

‘Thank God we did dating the old way,’ Delia said. ‘Cocktail classes.’

They smiled. Old story, happy memory. The first time they met, she’d swept into his bar on a cloud of Calvin Klein’s Eternity with a gaggle of friends and asked for a Cherry Amaretto Sour. Paul hadn’t known how to make them. She’d volunteered to hop over the bar and show him.

She still remembered his startled yet entertained expression as she swung her legs round. ‘Nice shoes,’ Paul had said, about her Superman-red round-toe wedges with ankle straps. He’d offered her a job. When she said no thanks, he’d asked for a date instead.

‘In the current climate, we’d be marginalised freaks who’d have to be on a specialist site for gingers. Gindar.’

Delia laughed. ‘Speak for yourself.’

‘If there’s no female of my species on Gindar, who am I dating? Basil Brush?’

‘What a fish for compliments,’ Delia said. ‘You should be slinging a rod in the Angling Championships, Paul Rafferty.’ She giggled and glugged some beer.

Delia was biased, but he wasn’t short of appeal.

Paul had dark-red hair, a few shades less flaming titian than Delia’s. He had the lived-in, ‘all night poker’ fashionably dishevelled look, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and worn jeans that dragged on beer-slopped floors. There were no jokes about both being ginger that they hadn’t heard – the worst was when they were taken for brother and sister.

Paul caught the waiter’s eye. ‘Two more Kingfishers when you’re ready, please. Thank you.’

Paul’s manners when dealing with members of the service industry were impeccable, and he always tipped hard, largely as a result of running a bar of his own. Pub , Paul always corrected Delia. ‘Bars make you think of tiny tot trainee drinkers.’

Delia thought it’d be most accurate to say Paul’s place straddled the line between pub and bar. It had exposed brickwork, oversized pendant lamps, and sourdough bread on the menu. But it also had real ales, a no dickheads policy and music at a volume where you could hear yourself speak. It sat between the stanchions of the Tyne Bridge and in the Good Pub Guide, and was Paul’s beloved baby.

‘I’m grinding to a halt here,’ Delia said, surveying the wreckage of her dosa.

‘I’m still rolling, I’m a machine. A curry-loving machine,’ Paul said, poking his fork into some of her pancake.

They had pondered expensive, linen tablecloth restaurants for their ten-year anniversary and then admitted they’d much prefer their favourite Southern Indian restaurant, Rasa. It was a treat to have Paul out on a Friday night.

Perhaps it was daft, but Delia still got a thrill whenever she saw Paul in his element behind the bar; dishrag thrown over shoulder and directing the order of service with the confidence of a traffic policeman, pivoting and slamming fridges shut with his foot, three bottles in each hand.

When he spied Delia, he’d do a little two-fingers-to-forehead salute and make a ‘one minute and I’ll bring your drink when I’ve served the customers’ gesture, and she’d feel that familiar spark.

‘How’s Griz’s search for love going?’

Paul was always quite paternal towards his staff – Delia had turned her spare bedroom into a recovery ward for an inebriated youth more than once.

‘Huh. I don’t think it’s love. He’s bobbing for the wrong apples if so. Seriously, Dee,’ Paul continued, ‘there are some weird generations coming up underneath us. Girls and boys wax their pubes off and none of them listen to music.’

Delia grinned. She was well used to this sort of speech. It not only amused her; Paul had special dispensation to act older than his years.

It was in the first flush of passion that Delia had found out Paul’s past: he and his brother Michael had been orphaned in their mid-teens when a lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel and piled into their parents’ car on the A1. The brothers reacted differently to the event, and the inheritance. Michael disappeared to New Zealand by the time he was twenty, never to return. Paul put down all the roots he could in Newcastle – bought a house in Heaton and later, the bar; sought stability.

Delia’s tender nature could not have been more touched. When he’d first revealed this, she was already falling in love, but it pitched her head-first down the well. He’d been through such horror? And was so amiable, so fun? She knew instantly that she wanted to dedicate her life to taking the sting away, to being all the family Paul needed.

‘Ah, it was a shitty thing. No question,’ Paul always said whenever it came up, rubbing his eye, looking down, partly embarrassed in the face of Delia’s lavish emotion, partly playing the wounded hero.

‘Who’s written lyrics like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the last ten years?’ Paul continued now, still on modern music in the present day.

‘What’s the one about “that isn’t my name”? Na na na, they call me DYE-ANNE , that’s not my name …’

Paul made a sad face, and a gesture to the waiter for the bill.

‘You love playing the codger, despite being the biggest child I know,’ Delia said, and Paul rolled his eyes and patted her hand across the table. Kids. She imagined Paul as a father, and her heart gave a little squeeze.