Page 14 of If I Never Met You

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 abouthow 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, fileit 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 own 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 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, handsome woman with her own jewellery business, who wore a lot of animal print and liked a party as much as her dad, which was saying something.

‘He always said marriage was a rotten institution, a place people went to die!’

‘Yeah. Well this is his journey, I guess. What his heart is telling him.’

Laurie was being sarcastic but it evidently didn’t register. She could hear her mum fidgeting on the other end of the phone, and pictured the frown that usually accompanied mentions of her father.

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