If I Never Met You(13)

‘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 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.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised at your father being a shit by now, and yet somehow I always am.’

‘He says they did it for tax breaks.’

‘Ever the romantic,’ she sniffed.

Of course, had Laurie said he’d done it for love, her mum would’ve scorned that too.

‘Please warn me when he’s having his reception because I do not want any chance of running into him and this woman. Wanda and I were going to come over for an exhibition at the Whitworth.’

‘Mum, I don’t mean to sound mean-spirited …’ Laurie knew she was about to start a fight, even while she intellectually, rationally, wanted a fight with her mum like she wanted a hole in the head. Yet emotionally, it was somehow an inevitability. ‘I tell you my boyfriend of eighteen years dumped me and it was, oh well Dan must have his reasons to follow his lodestar and I’ve told you Dad’s got married, and he left you thirty-seven years ago, and you’re now pissed off and angry. Why can’t I be pissed off and angry at Dan?’

‘You can! When did I say you couldn’t be?’

‘The whole “he must be doing the next part on his own and listening to his heart” stuff wasn’t exactly saying I had a right to be upset.’

‘Of course you do, but he’s not cheating on you, he’s not lied to you? What do you want me to say, Laurie? Do you want me to criticise him?’

‘No!’ She didn’t. Infuriatingly, she still felt defensive of him. ‘It’d just be nice if …’ she trailed off, as what came next was harsh.

‘What?’

‘… As if you sounded like you cared about my break-up anything like as much as you care about Dad’s rubbish.’

‘That’s a dreadful thing to say, I care much more about you than I do about him!’

Hmmm yeah, not what Laurie was saying, but how did Laurie think it would go, pointing out her mum’s hypocrisy in the sting of her dad’s news?

Her mother and father were opposite perils, Laurie realised: her dad said the right things and didn’t mean them and her mum might feel it, but she never said so.

They finished the call with terse politeness so they could go away and boil resentfully on the things the other had said.

As Laurie replaced the receiver she thought: well that was ironic, wasn’t that the ultimate moment to be bonding over similar experiences? You wouldn’t get this on the bloody Gilmore Girls.

Her mum was still heavily marked by what her dad did almost four decades ago; Laurie felt the tremor his name caused. Was that going to be Laurie’s fate where Dan was concerned, too?

At some point, you have to give up wishing for your parents to be who you wanted them to be and accept them as they are, Dan once said.

Easy for him to say, with his kind, dependable mum and dad who thought he was a prince among men and would drop anything and do anything for him.

As Laurie sat on the stairs, hugging her knees and nursing her bruised emotions, there was muttered cursing in the distance as someone tripped over a step, the scrape of a key in the lock, and Dan came in the door.