If I Never Met You. Mhairi McFarlane

her, and you’re having a baby?’ Laurie said. Dan nodded and she saw his tears and she wanted to punch him in the face. ‘You told me you didn’t want kids?’

      He was grey-white. ‘I didn’t. I don’t. It’s an accident.’

      Enough. Laurie stood up, grabbed Dan by the shoulders and manhandled him out of the room and into the hallway, shrieking, ‘Get out! Get the fuck out!’ while Dan made useless vague noises of objection.

      ‘You do this to me, you tell me you don’t want kids, and you do this?!’

      She pushed Dan out of the door so hard he stumbled and nearly fell over. Laurie didn’t care if the whole street heard, or saw.

      She slammed the door with much force and noisily slid the bolt. It wasn’t exactly likely he’d risk his life by using his key to get back in, but it felt the right thing to do all the same. Final.

      She leaned her head on the glass for just a moment and then turned and raced up to the bathroom, vomiting into the loo, retching again and again until there was nothing left, then slumped back down on the floor. She had a good view of the underside of the bowl and the whiskers that coated it – Dan was gone forever, but still here recently enough she’d still be cleaning up his mess. Mess? Devastation.

      Baby. He was having a child, with someone called Megan. He had been having an affair for some time, that was certain, emotionally if not physically. He’d celebrated his first nights of freedom by impregnating someone else. Laurie was going to have to recite these utterly harrowing, bizarre facts until they sunk in for her.

      He was going to be a dad. But not with her. An image sprung into her head, a pink turnip-faced newborn with froggy eyes, wrapped in a cocoon of white crochet blanket eyes, Dan cradling it, looking up at the camera with the shell shocked, Cloud Nine expression of an hours-old parent. He would do this, without her. She would not be the mother of his children. He would not be the father of hers.

      Hers. Hah.

      Laurie made a noise that sounded peculiar to her, in the quiet of the house, a kind of strangled whimper, shading into an animalistic howl. It echoed, unanswered, in her empty house.

       9

      Laurie rang in sick the next morning. It helped her voice was barely a croak as she spoke to the receptionist to claim upset stomach and the sweats.

      ‘Ugh yeah you sound like shit, don’t come in and give it to us,’ said Jan on reception, who no one had ever confused with a bleeding heart liberal.

      Laurie crawled back to bed and lay staring at the white star-shaped ceiling lampshade as the hours drifted past.

      She felt certain Dan had gone in to the office because 1. he’d have guessed she might not, and they couldn’t both be off without questions and a cover story about food poisoning or something, which was a falsehood too far now, and 2. he wasn’t shattered by what was happening.

      The only communication she received was an email from hyper efficient Jamie Carter: Hey sorry to bother when you’re on your sick bed but do you know anything about the adjournment in the Cheetham Hill robbery?

      Oh, go swivel. ‘If ambition was hair, he’d be the Yeti,’ as Bharat once said.

      Laurie pretended to herself she was ill and therefore allowed herself to doze.

      When she rejoined consciousness for a spell in the last afternoon, she had a text from Bharat – WTAF, YOU ARE NEVER ILL! It was Di’s baking day so I saved you a jam tart, but a fly got stuck in it xxx – and another, from Dan.

       Hi. Hope you’re OK. Can’t imagine how shit you feel Laurie and I’m so so so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen. I don’t know what to say. Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me.

      When Dan dropped his initial bombshell – she couldn’t think of that partial account of a conversation now without clutching her chest, like she might have a coronary with the rage – she’d wondered if he’d become an arsehole. She now knew the answer to that. Or if he’d not become one, maybe he’d always had this tendency, it had got worse, and somehow Laurie had blinded herself to it.

      ‘Call me if you want to, even to shout at me’ was revolting – the preening self-regard and false big-hearted performative good guyness of go on, I know I deserve it, once you’d swaggered clear of the blast.

      He’d very likely robbed Laurie of her chance of parenthood herself with his indecision, walked out the door and immediately inseminated someone else. She hadn’t even begun the work of working out how upset she was about her odds of motherhood being dramatically slashed, after a lifetime of thinking it was there for her at the time of her choosing.

      Dan hadn’t been sure about taking this huge step with the love of his life, but with Megan, it had happened instantly. He gave to her what he’d withheld from the woman who’d washed his socks for the last decade.

      Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.

      The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she had barely registered it passing.

      Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.

      She now saw that hobby for what it was – getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.

      They used to talk so openly, it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to one another. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.

      Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.

      That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realised. What she called Dan’s moodiness – and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate – was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.

      At some point, he turned away from her, he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.

      That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution, together.

      On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan – simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself – turned on a sixpence.

      Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.

      It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week, too.

      With shaky hands and weak body – when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime – Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name, fairly unusual, would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.

      Nothing.