скачать книгу бесплатно
Laurie had to tell herself to breathe before she could speak again.
‘I begged you to tell me what was going on, I begged you. And you gave me a load of WANK about finding yourself. You had met some other woman you wanted to bang, and you spun me this line about your existential angst?!’
‘All of that was true!’ Dan said, more vehement now, but Laurie knew he was only vehement in the way anyone in a corner was, with a near-hyperventilating woman shouting unwanted truths at him.
‘Was it too obvious, too LAMESTREAM, to admit you’d found a better option, like a million other boring ageing men who can’t keep it in their pants? Is she twenty-five, this mysterious someone who doesn’t make you feel trapped, and like there’s nothing worthwhile between here and death?’
‘Thirty-five.’
Instantly, despite her fury and humiliation at the idea some lissom ingénue had stolen Dan’s affections, this was worse – Laurie hadn’t been traded for a younger model. She’d lost to a woman of her own age, or thereabouts. It was a fair fight, this boxing match, they were in the same weight category with similar length of training. Laurie was simply too boring.
That fear was lurking behind it all, she knew that. Domesticated, exemplary employee, devoted to Dan, ticked so many boxes – but dull. Someone who could make you feel like life held no surprises anymore. Right now, she wanted to surprise the shit out of him, but the only ways she could think of involved petrol and matches.
‘I promise you, that’s not how it was. I was already unhappy, the thing with Megan came right out of the blue …’
‘This is such bullshit!’ Laurie shouted, reacting to hearing her name again like she’d been tasered. ‘Your whole thing was oh no I hate this conventional, being tied down, settled monogamy, it’s not for me, maybe I will go backpacking. And your first big gesture of freedom is getting another girlfriend?! Another lawyer, at that?’
Laurie had to pause for breath but she knew she was dying for Dan to say, she’s not my girlfriend, it’s a fling. He didn’t of course – if she was a fling, why would he be here? Which meant Laurie was still gambling, even now, they could come back from this.
Being confronted with how little you could accept from someone, when your heart was on the line and you were being tortured, was awful. Laurie hated herself too, in that very moment.
‘I don’t know what you expect me to say, Dan. Great, crack on, hope the sex is amazing,’ Laurie spat. ‘Why even tell me?’
There was a pause, as this had been a rhetorical question, and yet Laurie realised she’d hit on a very good point. Why had he told her? Fear of Salter & Rowson’s Stasi seeing them, perhaps? Except … this was a very ballsy move, nevertheless. Dan was the man who even after ten weeks had yet to tell his parents they’d separated (Laurie had stopped answering the house phone in case it was his mother calling); he didn’t go looking for trouble or difficulty, to put it mildly.
Dan said, haltingly, ‘Because …’
‘Because …?’
Another silence. ‘Because you deserved to hear from me’ or some other platitude wouldn’t warrant this hesitation, and the advocate in Laurie asked: why has he told you now? Why not wait a few months and look less of a bastard? Her whole body was coated in a thin layer of freezing sweat.
‘Oh, fuck … I have absolutely no idea how to say this and it’s still not real to me. I have no idea how to say this, no idea …’
He was gabbling.
Through a cascade of her tears, Laurie said, ‘What the fuck? What more is there? Are you getting married or something?’ Her heart was racing.
‘She’s pregnant,’ Dan heaved out. He buried his face in his hands, almost as a defensive move, as if he thought Laurie might physically attack him.
Time stood still for a moment, time in this world that Laurie didn’t understand or want to live in any more. Pregnant. Pregnant. It echoed through their thoughtfully decorated, tasteful, affluent Chorltonite couldn’t-stand-it-for-a-day-longer-could-you-Dan living room.
‘She’s …? What? It’s yours?’
Dan nodded and Laurie couldn’t absorb what he was saying.
If she’d been shocked before, it didn’t compare to this state of total standstill. Laurie simply stared. She couldn’t be. What? What?
‘It was an accident, she said she was on the pill. But she wants to keep it. Fuck, Laurie, I didn’t plan for this, I promise you, it’s happened out of nowhere.’
‘How …?’ No not how, she knew how. Don’t be sick, not yet. ‘When?’
‘Two months.’
‘You’ve only been moved out a little over two months. You jumped right into her bed?’
Dan stared at her levelly, and emptily, and Laurie snorted, a watery snort of horror and disgust and disbelief.
‘You’re staying with her, and you’re having a baby?’ Laurie said. Dan nodded and she saw his tears and she wanted to punch him in the face. ‘You told me you didn’t want kids?’
He was grey-white. ‘I didn’t. I don’t. It’s an accident.’
Enough. Laurie stood up, grabbed Dan by the shoulders and manhandled him out of the room and into the hallway, shrieking, ‘Get out! Get the fuck out!’ while Dan made useless vague noises of objection.
‘You do this to me, you tell me you don’t want kids, and you do this?!’
She pushed Dan out of the door so hard he stumbled and nearly fell over. Laurie didn’t care if the whole street heard, or saw.
She slammed the door with much force and noisily slid the bolt. It wasn’t exactly likely he’d risk his life by using his key to get back in, but it felt the right thing to do all the same. Final.
She leaned her head on the glass for just a moment and then turned and raced up to the bathroom, vomiting into the loo, retching again and again until there was nothing left, then slumped back down on the floor. She had a good view of the underside of the bowl and the whiskers that coated it – Dan was gone forever, but still here recently enough she’d still be cleaning up his mess. Mess? Devastation.
Baby. He was having a child, with someone called Megan. He had been having an affair for some time, that was certain, emotionally if not physically. He’d celebrated his first nights of freedom by impregnating someone else. Laurie was going to have to recite these utterly harrowing, bizarre facts until they sunk in for her.
He was going to be a dad. But not with her. An image sprung into her head, a pink turnip-faced newborn with froggy eyes, wrapped in a cocoon of white crochet blanket eyes, Dan cradling it, looking up at the camera with the shell shocked, Cloud Nine expression of an hours-old parent. He would do this, without her. She would not be the mother of his children. He would not be the father of hers.
Hers. Hah.
Laurie made a noise that sounded peculiar to her, in the quiet of the house, a kind of strangled whimper, shading into an animalistic howl. It echoed, unanswered, in her empty house.
9 (#ulink_031b6f9c-a3ba-50c4-afff-3d9726a32122)
Laurie rang in sick the next morning. It helped her voice was barely a croak as she spoke to the receptionist to claim upset stomach and the sweats.
‘Ugh yeah you sound like shit, don’t come in and give it to us,’ said Jan on reception, who no one had ever confused with a bleeding heart liberal.
Laurie crawled back to bed and lay staring at the white star-shaped ceiling lampshade as the hours drifted past.
She felt certain Dan had gone in to the office because 1. he’d have guessed she might not, and they couldn’t both be off without questions and a cover story about food poisoning or something, which was a falsehood too far now, and 2. he wasn’t shattered by what was happening.
The only communication she received was an email from hyper efficient Jamie Carter: Hey sorry to bother when you’re on your sick bed but do you know anything about the adjournment in the Cheetham Hill robbery?
Oh, go swivel. ‘If ambition was hair, he’d be the Yeti,’ as Bharat once said.
Laurie pretended to herself she was ill and therefore allowed herself to doze.
When she rejoined consciousness for a spell in the last afternoon, she had a text from Bharat – WTAF, YOU ARE NEVER ILL! It was Di’s baking day so I saved you a jam tart, but a fly got stuck in it xxx – and another, from Dan.
Hi. Hope you’re OK. Can’t imagine how shit you feel Laurie and I’m so so so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen. I don’t know what to say. Call me if you want to, even if it’s to shout at me.
When Dan dropped his initial bombshell – she couldn’t think of that partial account of a conversation now without clutching her chest, like she might have a coronary with the rage – she’d wondered if he’d become an arsehole. She now knew the answer to that. Or if he’d not become one, maybe he’d always had this tendency, it had got worse, and somehow Laurie had blinded herself to it.
‘Call me if you want to, even to shout at me’ was revolting – the preening self-regard and false big-hearted performative good guyness of go on, I know I deserve it, once you’d swaggered clear of the blast.
He’d very likely robbed Laurie of her chance of parenthood herself with his indecision, walked out the door and immediately inseminated someone else. She hadn’t even begun the work of working out how upset she was about her odds of motherhood being dramatically slashed, after a lifetime of thinking it was there for her at the time of her choosing.
Dan hadn’t been sure about taking this huge step with the love of his life, but with Megan, it had happened instantly. He gave to her what he’d withheld from the woman who’d washed his socks for the last decade.
Dan had said it wasn’t planned, but Laurie was at the stage where, if Dan said it was raining, she’d go outside to check.
The clock on Laurie’s bedside table hit six. A whole day had floated by and she had barely registered it passing.
Six months or so ago, Dan had taken up running. Laurie had been pleased, even impressed. She was quite good at keeping fit, going to the gym, walking everywhere; Dan had been the one glued to the sofa with his hand stuck in a bag of Tangy Cheese Doritos.
She now saw that hobby for what it was – getting match fit for wrestling with an exciting new prospect. Spending hours pounding the streets, music blaring, not having to interact with his long-term girlfriend, while he plotted a fresh course. Beginning to break away.
They used to talk so openly, it was something they used to privately congratulate themselves on, even boast about to one another. How come they don’t discuss this stuff? they’d say in wonder about friends, shaking their heads. You’re my best friend as well as my girlfriend, why would I not? Dan used to say, at whatever laddish thing a friend had said he’d never tell his other half.
Dan was a great talker, Laurie was a talker and a good listener; when something had bothered one of them, it got dealt with up front.
That had subtly changed in the last couple of years, Laurie realised. What she called Dan’s moodiness – and it was moods, even sulks, certainly extended silences which she couldn’t and wasn’t invited to penetrate – was also a closing off and a closing down, putting up a forbidding wall around what was actually going on in his head.
At some point, he turned away from her, he made the decision that the solution to his problems didn’t lie in Laurie.
That was the promise you made when you fell head over heels in love, really, she thought. Not that you wouldn’t have problems, but that no problem would be the sort where you couldn’t find the solution, together.
On the third day of mourning, Laurie’s utter horror at the thought of knowing anything about Megan – simply saying the name in her head was like repeating a curse, hexing herself – turned on a sixpence.
Laurie suddenly had a gnawing hunger to see everything. It must be some part of the stages of grieving, or the shock receding. Your appetite returning after a sickness.
It was a Saturday, but time had ceased to have much meaning for Laurie, since the Wednesday night of the announcement. She wondered if she could get a doctor’s note to not go in to work next week, too.
With shaky hands and weak body – when did she last eat? She thought she recalled finding half a squashed Twix in her gym bag, yesterday lunchtime – Laurie hauled her laptop onto her knees on the sofa. She opened her rarely used Facebook page, and searched for Megan. The first name, fairly unusual, would surely reveal the likeliest suspect.
Nothing. Not in Dan’s friends, not in the friend’s lists of those she knew at Rawlings. Megan must be one of those rare people who didn’t use social media.
Unless … Laurie lay on her back and stared at the filigree of spider webs along the picture rail, the parts of a house you rarely paused long enough to inspect, when not laid prone, in the twilight land of the unwell. Unless.
Unless Megan had blocked her? It seemed aggressive, unfair – surely it was for Laurie to block Megan, in the proper way of things. But if you knew your new boyfriend had told his very-recent-ex long-term girlfriend you were pregnant, you’d know a very, very scorned woman was coming hurtling your way. Why would you leave any of your business open to it?
Laurie opened a browser again, but this time, set up a fresh Facebook profile using her Gmail address, instead of the old Yahoo one.
Laurie wouldn’t need to add any friends or signal the existence of the second account in any way, she could use it purely as a stalking tool.
Once it was active and she launched her investigations again, Laurie didn’t know what to hope for.
Confirming you’d been blocked was disconcerting enough when it was just someone you didn’t rub along with brilliantly well at work, let alone the woman who stole the love of your life and was pregnant with his child. But if she wasn’t blocked and Megan really was a twenty-first century Greta Garbo, Laurie’s burning need to know more would go unmet.
With a dull thud, as she clicked on Dan Price’s profile – his photo, a throwback picture of himself in fancy dress at university on the night he met Laurie, salt into wounds – and then again in his friends, Megan Mooney sprang up in front of her. Profile photo, a jokey one of Lucille Ball.
She was blocked. The bitch had blocked her, while camping here brazenly in Dan’s friends. Laurie swallowed back bile, literal, physical bile.
She took a deep breath and braced herself before diving in. Megan Mooney. She sounded like a secretary in a 1940s screwball, or the quiet mouse ‘by day’ alter ego of a Marvel superhero.
Laurie checked herself: she could do this without sobbing or screaming, breathed again, and clicked.
Megan had shared some JustGiving links – OH YOU LIKE SUPPORTING CHARITIES, DO YOU, LIKE A GOOD PERSON? – Laurie internally spasmed: she might not be ready for this experience, like a wobbly patient on a ward trying to walk too fast and doing themselves a mischief.
Would she ever be ready?
What was publicly available on Megan’s profile wasn’t very informative, and when Laurie was scrolling birthday wishes from two years ago (was Dan there? Not that she could find) she moved to the photo galleries.
They were generally of groups, but Laurie clicked and clicked until she saw enough of the pictures so she could spot which was Megan, by her ubiquity.
She couldn’t help it; her first response was to compare herself.
Megan was a redhead, nothing like Laurie physically, properly Lucozade ginger. Laurie remembered something about gingerism being a ‘recessive gene’ and couldn’t remember if that meant Dan’s child would be one.
Megan had close-set eyes, a strong nose, and an intimidating, rather than pretty face. Laurie was easily conventionally prettier. Laurie both knew this to be true straight away and yet simultaneously didn’t trust it, doubted it, and hated herself for this being such a necessary measure. Laurie had never been someone who’d traded on her looks. But, as an acerbic female colleague once said to her regards the length of her coupledom, you’ve never needed to.
And much like Megan’s age, Laurie moved from a split second of relief, to confusion and intimidation. If she wasn’t a dazzling beauty, then how could a woman whose powers of attraction she couldn’t immediately see do this to her? Dan wanted her more than he wanted Laurie, so any bargaining and comparing now was futile. Megan was clearly killer sexy to Dan, as she’d killed their relationship. Her powers of attraction had annihilated an eighteen-year history.
Further poking around revealed Megan was sporty and had an incredible figure, a near-concave stomach (that was about to change. Laurie hated herself for expanding the picture with forefinger and thumb, staring morbidly at the space where Dan’s child was) and legs that went on for days.
If she needed to feel physically inferior to understand this, then Megan’s physique could do it. Laurie had a twinge of political outrage – if she’d left Dan for another man, was it likely he’d spend any time studying his rival’s calf muscles for clues as to why she’d strayed? Nope.
Here was Megan at the end of a 10k run for breast cancer research, everyone pink faced in their Lycra gear, linked arms and holding their medals up to the camera. Laurie burned at the grinning women flanking her, the sense of sisterhood in their female cause – some for me would’ve been nice, eh, ‘Megs’? (She was Megs on her tabard.) Hell hath no fury.
She came to the end of what she was able to see. The Add Friend button taunted her and she closed the window, a dampness gathering on her brow. Laurie fantasised the catastrophe of hitting it by mistake, Megan seeing the request.
Hah, Laurie was worried about that gaffe, when Megan had a foetus half made of Dan’s DNA to explain?
She shut her laptop and lay down on the sofa again.
There had been a secretive alternative universe, a budding romance, alongside Laurie’s normal life with Dan, the two timelines eventually to intersect in the most explosive way.
Laurie knew how it must have been steadily built, for them to be ready to leap into bed together as soon as the Getting Rid Of Laurie admin was complete. (Assuming that it was true they waited, of course.)
Shared glances, momentary, supposedly insignificant touching of hands, or knees, under tables. Innocent coffees after court, in which perhaps a little too much was said about their respective private lives. Rueful humour, that suggested maybe it wasn’t a bed of roses. Tiny hints that you might be open to alternatives. Texts at the weekend, only light jokes, but making it clear you were thinking about someone out of hours. Testing responses, plausible deniability always there if you got nothing back.
Knowing this had happened felt to Laurie like thinking you were healthy, going about your normal days, and not knowing a fatal cancer was flowering somewhere, unfelt, in an organ. Had Megan cheated on her partner, too? There was no sign of a significant other, but Laurie could only see a dozen or so images.
When did it start? How did it start? They were questions to which Laurie would very likely never know answers.
In a few short years, or even months, it would be past the point anyone would even think it was her business. A page had turned for Dan, and Laurie was now part of his past tense. Laurie was someone who’d appear fleetingly in shadowy form in dinner party anecdotes. Dan dandling an infant on his lap: Oh Santorini? Yeah I went there with my ex. Eighteen years, and she’d be worth a two-letter descriptor.
While Laurie did some exhausted sobbing in lieu of being willing to throw her nice crockery around the room, a clear thought solidified in her mind: I am not only a sad woman. I am a bloody lawyer. I want to know when it started. I want to get this bastard for provable infidelity, even if not sexual. So there will be evidence. THINK.
Megan was into running. And Dan had taken up running, which Laurie was sure wasn’t a coincidence. When he ran, he listened to music. She was confident he was running and not off on any rendezvous, as he regularly came back a beetroot shade and showed her his route on Runkeeper, before dramatically collapsing and saying Laurie best fetch him a medicinal beer.
