Page 9 of If I Never Met You

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 over Dan, and vice versa, that’s why they fell for each other. If she wanted to pull him back from this brink, she must be able. She only needed to try hard enough, to find the way to persuade him.

But to fix it, she had to grasp what was going on. Laurie prided herself on cold reading people like she was a stage magician, and yet the person closest to her sounded like a stranger.

‘How long have you felt this way?’ she asked.

‘A while,’ Dan said, and although his body showed tension, she could already tell he had relaxed several notches. Announcement made, the worst was over for him. She hated him, for a second. ‘I think I knew for sure at Tom and Pri’s wedding.’

‘Oh, that was why you spent the whole night in a strop, was it?’ Laurie spat. And realised the lunacy of that sort of point scoring, when the whole game had been cancelled. He wouldn’t go through with this. Surely.

Her stomach lurched. It was utterly ridiculous to take him seriously, and wildly reckless not to.

Dan made a hissing noise, shook his head. Whether he was dismayed at Laurie or himself wasn’t clear.

‘I knew none of that wedding fuss was for me. I knew that’s not where I was at, mentally.’

A painful memory came back to Laurie, because it turned out her senses hadn’t entirely failed her.

She recalled that the couples present had been corralled by the DJ for the first-dance-after-the-first-dance. She and a half cut, sullen Dan were forced into a waltz hold to Adele. She felt a sudden total absence of anything between them, not even a comfortable ease with each other’s touch, in place of a spark. It was like their battery was dead and if you pressed the accelerator it’d only make an empty phut-phut-phut. They shuffled round the floor awkwardly, like brother and sister, not meeting each other’s gaze. Then as soon as the song was over she forgot about it, and put it down to Dan not liking ‘Someone Like You’,or being told to do things.

He’d made a passive-aggressive show of going to sleep in the cab on the way back. Laurie felt she’d committed an unspecified crime all day, but when asked ‘What’s up with you?’ she’d got a belligerent ‘… NOTHING?’

But crap days in a long-term relationship were a given. You no more thought they might spell the end than you feared every cold could be cancer.

‘Is there someone else?’ Laurie said, not because she thought it possible but you were supposed to ask this, weren’t you? In this weird theatre they were playing out, at Dan’s insistence. They worked together – on a practical level alone, this seemed improbable.

‘No, of course not,’ Dan said, sounding genuinely affronted.

‘I don’t think you get to OF COURSE NOT me, doyou?’ Laurie shrieked, anger breaking, causing Dan to flinch. ‘I think OF COURSE NOT is pretty much fucking unavailable to you right now, don’t you? We’ve stopped having any shared reality from what I can see so fuck off with your patronising OF COURSE NOTS.’

Dan was completely unused to seeing her this incandescently angry. In fact, the last time she hit these heights, they were twenty-five and he’d lost her car keys in the healing field at Glastonbury. They’d been able to laugh about it later, though, alchemise it as an anecdote. Comedy was tragedy plus time, but there’d never be enough distance to make this amusing.

‘Sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘But no. Like we always said. No cheating, ever.’

‘Ever?’ she said, with a knowing intonation.

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