Page 55 of If I Never Met You

Bharat

NO NO NO NO. I didn’t know you were ready, that’s all. Glad your having fun. You look TOTAL FIRE. WTF THE HAIR?? Gossip tomorrow please xxx

Laurie couldn’t deal with the agitation caused by the constant ping-ping-ping of new comments and likes and queries. Jamie inhabited a different online world to her, a busy, interactive one, in fact the man seemed to be a social hub, and Laurie found it overwhelming.

As the thread underneath wore on, friends outright asked if he and Laurie were ‘an item’, and Jamie replied ‘early days’, with a smiley emoji, and ‘if I’m lucky’ to another. He and Laurie agreed in hasty further messages, finessing their approach, that vague, non-committal positivity was the best bluster. Goodness, it felt odd.

He was right about the mixed messaging stimulating more fuss, as everyone tried to figure out if what seemed like an announcement, actually was one.

After a twitchy morning, Laurie found herself irresistibly drawn to putting on her tracksuit trousers, finding an old Couch To 5k app on her phone, and plodding round the streets, warily at first.

She could only tolerate so much of the female voice instructing her to now walk briskly for TWO MINUTES before she switched the app off, turned her music up and ran for herself, until the pace and the pounding of blood and the impact of her feet on the pavement was the only thing that existed.

Laurie ignored shouts from a car full of lads, dodged round pushchairs and urged herself onwards, and as she arrived back home, feeling exultant, thought; this is why Dan used it as springboard for leaving her. She felt ready to fight a polar bear. Unfortunately it also put Laurie in mind of what it readied Dan for. She got a flash image of grunting and pumping and wanted to die.

Was he going to ruin everything for her? It was hard to feel anywhere was her space when they were colleagues.

Laurie peeled off her clothes to shower, watching herself in the mirror, and thought of Jamie’s lairy mate calling herexotic totty.What a sham, a long con job made of shapewear and filters. She didn’t feel either exotic or like totty, she felt like a woman from Yorkshire in her late thirties with soft, malleable, untended parts, some of which were silvered with stretchmarks, and with unruly hair down there that definitely wasn’t sculpted into a martini glass shape.

She’d never put her naked form to any particular objective test of desirability because she was desired by Dan. She put her hands over her breasts and hoiked them up an inch: was that where they should be? Was that where they used to be? Laurie honestly couldn’t remember. If she asked Dan this sort of thing, as erotic memory keeper, he’d make a joke and then usually lunge and grapple with her.

Laurie hadn’t considered herself as being defined by what any man thought of her and yet there was no denying that her body, unwanted by her lifelong partner, felt like a body she had to reassess, and own for herself again.

The thought of being exposed in front of someone else ofthe opposite sex provoked abject terror, yet it was that or lifelong celibacy.

Last time Emily had shown her Tinder it was full of men called things like Kev and Daz sitting naked in hotel bidets, swigging from bottles of Peroni, declaring their ‘massive love for the sesh.’

Maybe Keanu Reeves films and a vibrator would be preferable, Laurie thought, turning the water on.

20

‘Morning!’ Laurie said, cheerfully, power-walking up the stairs on Monday, as the two receptionists present, Jan and Katy, both detained by phone calls, almost screeched with disappointment that they couldn’t bang down the receivers fast enough to commence interrogation.

It was also possible their round eyes and look of fascination was Laurie’s change of image. She’d pulled Honey’s curly hairdo up into a ponytail but it was still far more bushy than her usual more severe style. As Laurie had fretted about being conspicuous, she wondered if her mum had a point, back at school, that she could allow. Laurie’s afro curls weren’t a crass bid for attention, they were genetics, and yet she flattened them to move less observed in a mostly white world. To fit in. How much of her existence had been about trying – with varied success – to fit in? To keep her head down?

‘Morning, team,’ Laurie said heartily to Bharat and Di, and Bharat said, ‘Oh here she is, whoring her way to her desk as if she’s not Manchester’s most notorious slut. Careful she doesn’t try to shag you on her way past, Di!’

‘Things have come to a pretty pass when a woman can’t go for five mojitos, two toots of coke, a bump of ket and a game of strip Boggle in The Britannia Hotel without being called loose any more,’ Laurie said as Bharat chortled. ‘Honestly, you make one sex tape with a girthy dildo …’

‘Bit harsh to call Jamie Carter a girthy dildo but you know him best I guess,’ Bharat said.

Laurie and Bharat honked, and Di looked stunned. How many years had she sat opposite Laurie, and the biggest scandal Laurie had ever offered was admitting she’d never seenX Factor.

All three of them started at the sudden sight of Dan in the doorway. He was wearing that pale pink shirt of his she always liked. Laurie felt oddly pleased with the optics of him interrupting at that moment, because she’d been doing proper corpsing laughter. Dan shot Laurie a direct, purposeful look she couldn’t decipher.

‘Uh, do you have Mick’s sixtieth collection?’

‘Oh, yeah …’ Bharat rifled through his trays in a tense silence and handed over an A4 brown envelope, baggy at one end with coins. Laurie’s heart pounded.

‘Ta.’ Dan promptly departed and they all did a ‘hmm mm’ throat clearing at one another, as a way of communicatingnot sure what that waswithout saying so, in so many words.

It was a condition check, Laurie decided, a way of letting her know he’d seen the picture and wasn’t going to react.

But, this was the first time since they broke up that he’d found a pretext to visit her desk, so given actions spoke louder than (barely any) words, it had backfired.

Having run the gauntlet and survived, Laurie was feeling almost smug, until the first loo break of the morning ran her slap-bang into Kerry as she exited the cubicle. A one-woman gauntlet.

‘Oh, hello you. Belle of the ball. Apple of daddy’s eye.’ Laurie had long suspected Mr Salter’s fondness for her made her especially problematic to Kerry. Kerry’s snaky, wry tone always implied she’d caught you up to something, and was deciding whether or not to dob you in for it. It was very Lauren Bacall, the same delivery as:You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?

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