If I Never Met You. Mhairi McFarlane

Kids had a way of automatically curing excess self-pity, from what Laurie could tell. At least for the initial five years.

      3. Yes. The same, but better! (Actually, Laurie had no idea about the last answer. If they procreated, it would be the best part of two decades before this household belonged to the two of them again, and inviting a tyrannically needy midget intruder to disturb their privacy and contented status quo was scary.)

      But the done thing in a couple was to pretend to be sure about the imponderable things, whenever the other person needed comfort. If necessary, deploy outright lying. Dan could pay her back when she asked tearfully after returning from a failed shopping trip, whether her body would ever look like it did before.

      ‘I don’t know how to say any of this. I’ve been sitting here since you left trying to think of the right words and I still can’t.’

      This was hyperbole, because Laurie left him having a shower with the Roberts radio broadcasting the football game, but she didn’t say so.

      ‘Look,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve realised. I don’t want kids. At all. Ever.’

      The silence lengthened.

      Laurie sat up, with some effort, given her foolish shoes – strappy silver slingbacks she fell for in Selfridges, that ‘look good with plum toenails’ according to the sales girl – weren’t anchoring her to the floor very steadily.

      ‘Dan,’ she said gently. ‘This doubt is totally normal, you know. I feel the same. It’s frightening, when it’s about to become real. But we can do it. We’ve got this. With having a kid, you hold hands, and jump.’

      She smiled at him, hoping he’d snap out of it soon. It felt like a role reversal, him demanding a deep talk, her wanting to do enough to make him feel taken seriously so she could go to bed. Dan was flexing his fingers, steepled in his lap, not looking at her.

      ‘And it’s me who has to push it out,’ Laurie added. ‘Don’t think I haven’t googled “third-degree tearing”.’

      He wouldn’t be easily joked out of this, she realised, looking at the depth of his frown lines.

      She felt them running at different speeds, her carrying the noise and trivia of the night out with her like a swarm of bees, him evidently having spent a pensive period staring at the shadows in the sombre Edward Hopper print they hung over the fireplace, worrying about the future.

      ‘It’s not just having kids. I don’t want anything that you want. I don’t want … this.’

      He glanced around the room, accusingly.

      Stripped floorboards?

      ‘What do you mean?’

      Dan breathed in and out, as if limbering up for a feat of exertion. But no words followed.

      ‘… You want to put it off for a few years? We talked about this. I’m thirty-six and it could take a while. We don’t want to be mucking about with interventions and wishing we’d got on with it … you know what Claire says. If she knew how great it would be, she’d have started at twenty.’

      Invoking this particular member of their social circle was a stupid misstep, and Laurie immediately regretted it.

      Claire was both a massive bore about her offspring and a general pain in the hoop. Ironically, if they hadn’t suffered her, they might’ve have reproduced already. Occasions with her often concluded with one or other of them muttering: you’d tell me if I ever got like that, right?

      ‘You know what they say. There’s never a perfect time to have a baby,’ Laurie added. ‘If you—’

      ‘Laurie,’ Dan said, interrupting her. ‘I’m trying to tell you that we don’t want the same things and so we can’t be together.’

      She gasped. He’d say such an ugly, ridiculous thing to get his point across? Then she did a small empty laugh, as it dawned on her: this was how much men could fear maturity. It ought not to be a revelation to her, given her dad, and yet she was badly disappointed in Dan.

      ‘Come on, are you really going to turn this into a full-blown emergency and make me say having a family is a deal breaker, or something? So it can all be my fault when it’s had us up five times in a row?’

      Dan looked at her.

      ‘I don’t know how else I can say this. I’m not happy, Laurie.’

      Laurie breathed in and out: Dan wasn’t bluffing, he wanted a direct assurance from her she’d not come off the pill. She’d have to hope they revisited the idea in a year. She was aware that it could mean their window of opportunity closed completely. And she could end up resenting Dan. There’d be no playing tricks, pretending to take the pill when she wasn’t and whoops-a-daisy. That was how Laurie was conceived and she knew the consequences were lifelong.

      ‘Is this purely because I want kids?’

      She would take it off the table to stay with him, she knew that in a split second’s consultation with herself. It was unthinkable to do anything else. You didn’t lose someone you loved, over hypothetical love for someone who didn’t yet exist. Who might never exist.

      ‘That, other things. I’m not … this is not where I want to be any more.’

      ‘OK,’ she said, rubbing her tired face, feeling appalled by how extreme he’d been prepared to be, in order to get his way.

      She felt like she might cry, in fact. They’d had fights before where very occasionally one or the other of them had vaguely threatened to leave, usually when drunk and in their dickhead twenties, and whichever of them had said it felt sick with guilt the next day.

      Pulling this now, at their age, was beneath Dan, however much he was bricking it over the responsibilities of fatherhood. It was really unkind.

      ‘… OK, you win. Regular pill-taking for the time being. Christ, Dan.’

      Dan looked at her with a stunned expression and Laurie froze, because again, she could read it.

      He wasn’t stunned she’d agreed. It wasn’t a gambit. He wanted to split up.

      She finally understood. Understood that he meant it, that this was it.

      Absolutely everything else was completely beyond her comprehension.

       4

      When people did monumentally awful things to you, it seemed they didn’t even have the courtesy of being original, of inflicting some unique war wound, a lightning-bolt-shaped scar. These reasons were prosaic, dull. They were true of people all the time, but they weren’t applicable to Dan and Laurie. They were going to be together forever. They agreed that openly as daft lovestruck teenagers and implicitly confirmed it in every choice they’d made since. No commitment needed checking or second thinking, it was just: of course. You are mine and I am yours.

      ‘But nothing’s changed?’ Laurie said. ‘We’re like we’ve always been.’

      ‘I think that’s part of the problem.’

      Laurie’s mind was occupying two time zones at once: this surreal nightmare where her partner of eighteen years, her first and only love, her best friend, her ‘other half’, was sitting here, saying things about how he’d sleep in the spare room for the time being and move out to a flat as soon as possible. She had to play along with it, because he was so convinced. It was like colluding with someone who’d become delusional about a dream world. Follow the rabbit.

      Then there was the other time zone, where she was desperately trying to make sense of the situation, to manage it and defuse it. He was only using words – no tangible, irreversible change had occurred. Therefore words could change it back again.

      She’d always had a special power