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

She realised perhaps that failing to set a date wasn’t about what Paul was waiting for. It was who.

Ralph answered the door to Delia in a t-shirt saying Colorado Surf Club ’83 , eating a floppy buttered triangle of Mighty White toast.

‘S’up,’ he said, grinning, and then remembered why his older sister was on the doorstep with a trolley case and puffy eyes. ‘Ehm. Are you … well?’

Delia smiled, despite herself. Ralph didn’t quite comprehend the subtleties of conventional interaction. Liberal, well-meaning teachers at their comprehensive had tried to get him diagnosed with this and that, so everyone could label it and feel better, but never succeeded. Ralph suffered from chronic Ralphness. It was a benign condition, in Delia’s view.

‘I’ve been better,’ she said, smiling, stepping inside and stretching up to make him hug her. Ralph bent his head in an awkward, touching way and circled her with his arms, looking like someone doing an impression of a hug they’d seen once in a Human Beings instruction manual.

Ralph was a mountain of a man, with Delia’s carrot-coloured tresses, worn haphazardly tufty.

A cruel onlooker might note that it wasn’t only the fact of Colorado being landlocked that’d prevent him being in Colorado’s Surf Club. Delia worried about his weight, but he worked in a chip shop and had never met a junk food he didn’t like, so it was a futile battle.

‘Mum’s at the allotment and Dad’s out back. Want some toast?’

Delia shook her head. She’d not eaten a meal since last night’s curry, so it was just as well that had been huge. Her stomach was now a balloon knot that tightened every time she spent more than a minute in contemplation.

‘I’ll put my stuff in my room,’ Delia said, fake-brightly, bumping her trolley case up the stairs, grateful her parents weren’t witnessing this sorry sight. The thirty-three-year-old wanderer returns.

She was supposed to be showing them an engagement ring.

‘How’s Parsnip?’ Ralph asked, to her back. Delia was glad she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Leaving wobbly Parsnip was a wrench. He’d been abandoned once and she’d promised him it’d never happen again.

‘Good!’

‘You could bring him, you know. He can sleep in my room.’

‘Thanks.’

Delia’s family lived in a semi in Hexham, a market town about twenty miles up the Tyne from Newcastle. Ever since she could remember, the house had looked like this; full of solid wooden furniture, patchwork and crocheted old throws, and rows of herbs in tubs that leaked earth along the windowsills. It was resolutely about function, not form, which was perhaps where Delia’s urge to prettify and home-make had come from.

It was welcoming and constant though. On the bricked mantelpiece, there was a framed photo of her parents’ wedding in 1971: her dad in giant chocolate-brown bell-bottomed suit, big ginger Open University beard. Her grey-blonde mum in that bowl cut that gripped the circumference of your head, and a post-hippy-era trailing veil with daisies.

Her family were … eccentric was the gentlest word, though Delia felt disloyal even using that. Paul used to sing the theme tune to Button Moon as they drove to visit, in affectionate reference to the fact her family home was its own planet, with its own customs.

Paul. Their team of two, that no longer existed. The stomach knot tightened.

Everyone in Delia’s family related best to something other than people: her mum to her allotment and garden, her dad to the timber, saws and planer in the shed, her brother Ralph to computer games and the television in his stuffy bedroom.

Delia was loved, but she was – she didn’t like to admit this, as she pushed open the door to her old bedroom – a little lonely in their midst. She was the only one with common sense, and a sense of the outside world.

She heaved her case onto the pine single bed and unzipped it, flipping the lid. Looking at the possessions she’d brought, she felt the tears swell in her chest. Oh God … this was even harder than she’d thought. Delia wanted to go home to Heaton. But she couldn’t. Her feelings completely forbade it. For all she knew, Paul was with Celine right this second, telling her he’d marry her instead. She didn’t know where she stood or what he wanted any more.

She’d got up very early, after a sleepless night, thankful that she kept lots of her clothes in the spare room and could pack and leave without seeing Paul. He’d obviously woken with the closing of the front door and the disturbance of Parsnip though because she’d had a missed call and a text offering her a lift shortly after, which she’d ignored.

Again, Delia wished she had someone to tell her what to do. Was leaving the right thing?

Her mum had made sympathetic noises when she’d called that morning to say they were having problems and that she was going to come home for a while, but Delia wasn’t surprised that she was out when she arrived. Her mum found emotions, especially raw ones, disconcerting. She would make her a cup of tea and rub her back, but Delia would know she’d be dying to get out to her cukes and radishes and not discuss the whole messy personal business. Ralph and her father were even less use.

No, there was only one person who’d have insight and sympathy about this, though she dreaded telling her.

Delia’s eyes moved to a familiar photo blu-tacked to the mirror. It was possibly her favourite picture in the world. It could stay here as she’d had copies made, framing them and sending one to Emma.

It had been taken in their second year at university, by some long-forgotten amorous boy. Delia and Emma wrapped around each other in a cheek-to-cheek embrace, huge Rimmel-lipsticked smiles, plastic pint pots of Newcastle Brown Ale in hands, toasting the camera-holder.

It wasn’t that they both had the moonshine complexion of the twenty-year-old, or that they were so happy. It’s that they both looked so confident. It brimmed with the ‘Look out, I’m coming to get you’ insouciance she used to have.

Delia wasn’t vain, but she thought she looked pretty in it. She had such heavy liquid eyeliner, she was practically in a bandit mask. She’d believed life was going to be full of adventures. Then she met Paul three years later, and was happy to give them up. All that she had, was suddenly his.

‘Hello, knock knock,’ said Ralph, his unkempt head, with its specs and watery blue eyes, appearing round the door. ‘Ehm. Would you like to play Grand Theft Auto ?’

Delia smiled. Actually, that was exactly the sort of thing she wanted to do. Even though she didn’t know what it involved.

She followed Ralph to his bedroom. Ralph’s cluttered, natural-light-free, Star Wars memorabilia-strewn lair might conceivably be the HQ of some young pop culture website punk, or Pentagon hacker genius. Instead it was exactly what it looked like: the dream timewasting crib for a twenty-eight-year-old man who still lived at home.

He handed Delia a confusingly complicated control panel and motioned for her to take a place on one of the beanbags. She loved the way the video games reversed the roles between them: Delia asking stupid questions, Ralph gently chiding her for not grasping it fast enough.

It was strangely reassuring, concentrating on clumps of pixels instead of real things, in the bluish haze of Ralph’s eternal twilight mole hole.

‘Is Paul not coming here again, then?’ Ralph said, eyes fixed on the screen, as Delia’s avatar crouched behind a car in the middle of a firefight with some Mexican drug lord’s gang. Her parents had been licensed to pass this news on.

‘I’m not sure,’ Delia said. She had a sudden desire to share. ‘He’s been seeing someone else.’