If I Never Met You. Mhairi McFarlane

the cold light of morning, Laurie couldn’t believe he was keeping on with this charade, that he wasn’t going to be standing in some unloved, unfurnished two bed that smelled of plug-in air fresheners with a greasy estate agent and think: ‘what the hell am I doing?’

      Not that love or happiness was stuff, but Laurie had made them a great home and it still wasn’t enough. Or, she wasn’t. She felt so foolish: the whole time he’d been growing colder, quietly horrified, hemmed in and alienated by it. It was such a shallow thing, but Laurie felt so damn uncool for being satisfied by a life that Dan wasn’t.

      She listened to the ringing on the other end, replaced the receiver, and tried again. Her mum would be in the garden, and thought the first phone call was merely to alert you to the fact someone was trying to call you. She rarely answered until they’d made a second or even third attempt. It was a quirk that used to drive Laurie mad in her teenage years; they had flaming rows about Laurie always having to answer.

      Her mum was ‘out of the normal,’ as a plumber once said, surveying the kitsch art collage of Elvis on their pink bathroom wall in the 1990s.

      Her mother had very strict, controlling and conventional parents herself, and was determined to do things differently. Laurie admired this, while sometimes feeling she’d overcorrected to the other extreme.

      If you’d wanted a mother who was chill with you being out until all hours and your friends accidentally dropping the F-word, Mrs Peggy Watkinson of Cannock Road was the one. Plus, she looked and dressed like Supremes-era Diana Ross. Both Conventional and Unconventional Dads of the neighbourhood were fans. And she wasn’t Mrs Watkinson, either, because she’d never been wed to Laurie’s dad. Laurie chose it as her surname because at the time, her mum was using her stage moniker, Peggy Sunshine. And Laurie was no way going to have a wacky surname on top of being the only black girl in her year.

      When Laurie’s mum was addressed as Mrs Watkinson by a teenager, she smiled and did her characteristic hand wave. ‘In a past life, maybe.’ And mentioned there was wine open in the kitchen.

      Your mum is the best, her friends said, as they trudged up the stairs, glasses in hand, promises extracted – by Laurie – not to tell their mums.

      There were times when Laurie craved mums like everyone else had, who replaced lost PE kits, made chicken nuggets with beans and chips for tea instead of aubergine and pineapple curry, and didn’t have Egyptian birthing stools on display in reception rooms.

      She tried ringing her mum again, but was unsuccessful. She’d give it a last try and then give up.

      Whenever anything awful happened, no one ever considered the difficulty of the admin, Laurie thought. Someone had to broadcast it, manage the fall-out. How come there were so many services in modern society, and not this one? ‘Relationship Over? Let Us Round Robin!’

      ‘Working out how to tell everyone’ was a part of her and Dan’s separation that was going to be almost as gruelling a prospect as being left in the first place. It felt so unnecessarily cruel that you didn’t just have to go through the thing, you had to have a dozen conversations with people of varying closeness about the fact you were going through the thing.

      Dan did this, Dan should deal with all of it. But he couldn’t, even if she wanted him to.

      Some hip friends, a few years back, had posted up a witty archive photo on social media of themselves and made an official announcement to everyone they were divorcing.

      Laurie considered it, lying in bed last night, but it only really worked as a ‘ripping the plaster off in one go’ technique if you said it was fine, you were both OK, no hard feelings, no bombshell story to uncover here, move along. Essentially, hinted it was a joint decision. Those euphemisms that publicists deployed when famous people parted: ‘leading different lives’, ‘grown apart’ and Laurie’s favourite, ‘conflicting schedules’.

      Dan once said that mutual only ever meant: ‘one person has given up, and the other person concedes they can’t persuade them not to,’ and now that felt astute. Turns out, he was plot foreshadowing their own end. Where did he go, that Dan?

      The phone finally connected, third time lucky, ha ha.

      ‘Hi, Mum … yeah I thought you’d be in the garden. OK to talk? I’ve got some bits of news … No, not that.’ It really did put the tin hat on this that everyone would think she was about to announce the baby. She took a breath to gird her loins.

      ‘Dan and I have split up. It’s his decision.’

      She couldn’t bear to say ‘left me’, with all its sense of passive victimhood but she had to make it clear she wasn’t going to have answers. She recounted Dan’s reasons for going.

      ‘Oh dear, my darling. Sorry to hear this.’ Her mum had kept the strong Caribbean inflection from the island of her own childhood. ‘I know you will be very hurt but sometimes, paths diverge. He obviously has to do this next part of his journey on his own. Which is very painful for you, but it must be what his heart is telling him.’

      Laurie gritted her teeth. Maddening calm was one of her mother’s attributes, that could also feel like a weapon.

      She knew her mum, who lived outside society’s conventions in Upper Calder Valley with a fabulous kitchen garden and incense burners, wasn’t going to do the ‘what a bastard’ response, and in many ways, Laurie liked that her mum was an independent thinker.

      But right now she didn’t want this stuff about how nothing was good or bad, it was just a different choice. Hippyishness could feel heartless. She wanted her distress to be recognised.

      Laurie remembered her mum saying of her cousin Ray, who was in a serious motorbike smash, ‘That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ and Laurie asking how someone subsequently living in an adapted bungalow held together with metal pins was stronger. ‘Mentally stronger,’ came the answer. Tenuous, at best. It was uncomfortably close to telling Ray to see the upside. Here was her version of that. Laurie was often struck by how the arc of history was long, but bent towards nothing really changing.

      ‘Dan will be on his own on his “journey” for a while, and then he’ll be with someone else. I think that’s how this works? He’s not going to become a nomadic shaman monk, Mum. He’s on a good salary at a provincial law firm.’

      Unless you bought Dan’s blather about jacking it all in, which Laurie didn’t. Maybe her scathing cynicism was adding fuel to Dan’s theory they were no longer aligned, but still, file it under Believe It When I See It. She’d heard him kvetching about the state of Ryanair’s delays enough times, she couldn’t see him floating in tranquility down the Mekong Delta.

      ‘Well. So are you.’ That’s alright then. Jeez.

      Peggy sort of tutted, in a ‘there there’ way, and Laurie sucked air into her painful rib cage. She’d not eaten more than a few pieces of toast with peanut butter for days. She didn’t expect her mum to be upset on her behalf, and she had feared her mum would insist this was an opportunity in disguise. Not least because Peggy thought Laurie had settled down too young, and her feelings towards Dan had always been polite rather than enthusiastic. Laurie got the feeling that Dan had presented to her as a stereotypical Nice Young Man, but her mum had found him a little dull. Peggy liked characters, eccentrics and oddballs. Speaking of which … her dad’s news.

      ‘Is there anything I can do?’ her mum said, after listening to the practical arrangements of the dissolution of Dan and Laurie Inc.

      ‘No. Thanks though,’ Laurie said, refusing to bite at such a lacklustre offer. ‘Oh, also.’ Deep breath. ‘Dad’s got married to Nicola. In Ibiza, but they’re going to have a do back here in Manchester too.’

      Her mum was silent for a second. ‘Nicola? Is that the one from before?’

      ‘The Scouser, yeah.’

      Laurie had only met Nicola a few times before but she liked her: a garrulous,