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‘It’s from Attica. The vintage shop,’ she said, cheeks heating.
‘You look like a Spanish brothel’s lampshade,’ Ann said.
Delia sighed, muttered wow thanks and grimaced. Nothing between nine and five mattered today, anyway.
Today was all about this evening: when life was going to take one of those small turns, a change of direction that led onto a wide, new road.
Two (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
‘If he’s making stories about the council worth reading, they should pay him, not sue him,’ Paul said, wiping his paratha-greasy hands on a paper napkin.
‘Yeah,’ Delia said, through a thick mouthful of spicy potato. ‘But when a councillor gets upset, we have to be seen to do something. A lot of the older ones don’t understand the internet. One of them once said to us, “Go on and delete it. Rub it out!” and we had to explain it isn’t a big blackboard.’
‘I’m thirty-five and I don’t understand the internet. Griz was showing me Tinder on his phone the other day. The dating app? You swipe left or right to say yes or no to someone’s photo. That’s it. One picture, Mallett’s mallet. Yes, no, bwonk. It’s brutal out there.’
‘Thank God we did dating the old way,’ Delia said. ‘Cocktail classes.’
They smiled. Old story, happy memory. The first time they met, she’d swept into his bar on a cloud of Calvin Klein’s Eternity with a gaggle of friends and asked for a Cherry Amaretto Sour. Paul hadn’t known how to make them. She’d volunteered to hop over the bar and show him.
She still remembered his startled yet entertained expression as she swung her legs round. ‘Nice shoes,’ Paul had said, about her Superman-red round-toe wedges with ankle straps. He’d offered her a job. When she said no thanks, he’d asked for a date instead.
‘In the current climate, we’d be marginalised freaks who’d have to be on a specialist site for gingers. Gindar.’
Delia laughed. ‘Speak for yourself.’
‘If there’s no female of my species on Gindar, who am I dating? Basil Brush?’
‘What a fish for compliments,’ Delia said. ‘You should be slinging a rod in the Angling Championships, Paul Rafferty.’ She giggled and glugged some beer.
Delia was biased, but he wasn’t short of appeal.
Paul had dark-red hair, a few shades less flaming titian than Delia’s. He had the lived-in, ‘all night poker’ fashionably dishevelled look, a permanent five o’clock shadow, and worn jeans that dragged on beer-slopped floors. There were no jokes about both being ginger that they hadn’t heard – the worst was when they were taken for brother and sister.
Paul caught the waiter’s eye. ‘Two more Kingfishers when you’re ready, please. Thank you.’
Paul’s manners when dealing with members of the service industry were impeccable, and he always tipped hard, largely as a result of running a bar of his own. Pub, Paul always corrected Delia. ‘Bars make you think of tiny tot trainee drinkers.’
Delia thought it’d be most accurate to say Paul’s place straddled the line between pub and bar. It had exposed brickwork, oversized pendant lamps, and sourdough bread on the menu. But it also had real ales, a no dickheads policy and music at a volume where you could hear yourself speak. It sat between the stanchions of the Tyne Bridge and in the Good Pub Guide, and was Paul’s beloved baby.
‘I’m grinding to a halt here,’ Delia said, surveying the wreckage of her dosa.
‘I’m still rolling, I’m a machine. A curry-loving machine,’ Paul said, poking his fork into some of her pancake.
They had pondered expensive, linen tablecloth restaurants for their ten-year anniversary and then admitted they’d much prefer their favourite Southern Indian restaurant, Rasa. It was a treat to have Paul out on a Friday night.
Perhaps it was daft, but Delia still got a thrill whenever she saw Paul in his element behind the bar; dishrag thrown over shoulder and directing the order of service with the confidence of a traffic policeman, pivoting and slamming fridges shut with his foot, three bottles in each hand.
When he spied Delia, he’d do a little two-fingers-to-forehead salute and make a ‘one minute and I’ll bring your drink when I’ve served the customers’ gesture, and she’d feel that familiar spark.
‘How’s Griz’s search for love going?’
Paul was always quite paternal towards his staff – Delia had turned her spare bedroom into a recovery ward for an inebriated youth more than once.
‘Huh. I don’t think it’s love. He’s bobbing for the wrong apples if so. Seriously, Dee,’ Paul continued, ‘there are some weird generations coming up underneath us. Girls and boys wax their pubes off and none of them listen to music.’
Delia grinned. She was well used to this sort of speech. It not only amused her; Paul had special dispensation to act older than his years.
It was in the first flush of passion that Delia had found out Paul’s past: he and his brother Michael had been orphaned in their mid-teens when a lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel and piled into their parents’ car on the A1. The brothers reacted differently to the event, and the inheritance. Michael disappeared to New Zealand by the time he was twenty, never to return. Paul put down all the roots he could in Newcastle – bought a house in Heaton and later, the bar; sought stability.
Delia’s tender nature could not have been more touched. When he’d first revealed this, she was already falling in love, but it pitched her head-first down the well. He’d been through such horror? And was so amiable, so fun? She knew instantly that she wanted to dedicate her life to taking the sting away, to being all the family Paul needed.
‘Ah, it was a shitty thing. No question,’ Paul always said whenever it came up, rubbing his eye, looking down, partly embarrassed in the face of Delia’s lavish emotion, partly playing the wounded hero.
‘Who’s written lyrics like Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” in the last ten years?’ Paul continued now, still on modern music in the present day.
‘What’s the one about “that isn’t my name”? Na na na, they call me DYE-ANNE, that’s not my name …’
Paul made a sad face, and a gesture to the waiter for the bill.
‘You love playing the codger, despite being the biggest child I know,’ Delia said, and Paul rolled his eyes and patted her hand across the table. Kids. She imagined Paul as a father, and her heart gave a little squeeze.
They settled up and stepped out into the brisk chill of an early Newcastle summer evening.
‘Nightcap?’ Paul said, offering her the crook of his arm.
‘Can we go for a walk first?’ Delia said, taking it.
‘A walk?’ Paul said. ‘We’re not in one of those films you like with the parasols and people poking the fire. We’re going to walk to the pub.’
‘Come on! It’s our ten-year anniversary. Just onto the bridge and back.’
‘Oh no, c’mon. It’s too late. Another time.’
‘It won’t take long,’ she said, forcibly manoeuvring him onward, as Paul exhaled windily.
They set off in silence – Paul possibly resentful, Delia twanging with nerves as she wondered if this surprise was such a good idea after all.
Three (#ubc002019-84f0-538f-bc75-9f4bfb570fe2)
‘What are we going to do when we get there?’ Paul said, with both humour and irritation in his voice.
‘Share a moment.’
‘I could be sharing the moment of being in a warm pub with a nice pint.’
Paul didn’t do showy romance or I love yous. (Delia had to ask him, months into their relationship. He blanked. ‘Why else did I ask you to move in?’ Because my lease was up on the other place? Delia had thought.)
Simple, self-evident, uncomplicated affection was all Delia needed, usually. Solidity and companionship mattered much more to her than bouquets or jewellery. Paul was her best friend – and that was more romantic than anything.
And she loved this city, with its handsome blocks of sandstone buildings, low skies, rich voices and friendly embrace. As she tottered down the steep street to the Quayside, breathing the fresher air near the river, clutching Paul’s arm to steady her, she knew she was in the right place, with the right person.
The sodium orange and yellow lights from the city tiger-striped the oil-black water of the Tyne as they arrived at the mouth of the Millennium Bridge. The thin bow, pulsing with different colour illuminations, was glowing red.
It felt like a sign. Red shoes, red hair, red bicycle. For some reason, the phrase date with destiny came into her head, which sounded like an Agatha Christie novel. There weren’t many people about, but enough that they weren’t alone. Whoops, why hadn’t Delia thought of that? All they needed was some persistent hanger-abouters and this plan would be sunk. But in this temperature, loitering on bridges at pushing nine o’clock was not a particularly popular choice.
She felt her heartbeat in her throat as they approached the midway point. The moment was arriving.
‘Do we have to walk the whole way or will this do?’ Paul said.
‘This’ll do,’ Delia said, disentangling herself from his arm. ‘Doesn’t the city look great from here?’
Paul scanned the view and smiled.
‘How pissed are you? Hang on, it’s not the time of the month? You’re not going to cry about that lame beggar seagull with one eye and one leg again? I told you, all seagulls are beggars.’
Delia laughed.
‘He was probably faking.’ Paul squeezed one eye closed and bent a leg behind him, speaking in a squeaky pitch. ‘Please give chips genewously to a disabled see-gal, lubbly lady. Mah situation is mos pitiable.’
Delia laughed harder. ‘What voice was that?’
‘A scam artist seagull voice.’
‘A Japanese scam artist seagull?’
‘Racist.’
They were both laughing. OK, he’d perked up. Deep breath. Go. It was stupid of her to be nervous, Delia thought: she and Paul had discussed the future. They’d lived together for nine years. It wasn’t like she was up the Eiffel Tower and out on a limb with a preening commitment-phobe, after a whirlwind courtship.
Paul started to grumble about the brass bollocks temperature and Delia needed to interrupt.
‘Paul,’ she said, turning to face him fully. ‘It’s our ten-year anniversary.’
‘Yes …?’ Paul said, for the first time noticing her sense of intent.
‘I love you. And you love me, I hope. We’re a great team …’
‘Yeah?’ Now he looked outright wary.
‘We’ve said we want to spend our lives together. So. Will you marry me?’
Pause. Paul, hands thrust in pockets, squinted over his coat collar.
‘Are you joking?’
Bad start.
‘No. I, Delia Moss, am asking you, Paul Rafferty, to marry me. Officially and formally.’
Paul looked … discomfited. That was the only word for it.
‘Aren’t I meant to ask you?’
‘Traditionally. But we’re not very traditional, and it’s the twenty-first century. We’re equal. Who made the rules? Why can’t I ask you?’
‘Shouldn’t you have a ring?’
Delia could see a stag-do group approaching over Paul’s shoulder, dressed as Gitmo inmates in orange jumpsuits. They wouldn’t have this privacy for long.
‘I know you don’t like wearing them so I thought I’d let you off that part. I’m going to get a ring though. I might’ve already chosen one. We can be so modern that I’ll pay for it!’
There was a small silence and Delia already knew this was not what she’d hoped or wanted it to be.
Paul stared out over the river. ‘This is a lovely gesture, obviously. It’s just …’
He shrugged.
‘What?’
‘I thought I’d ask you.’
Hmmm. Delia thought the sudden insistence on following chivalrous code was disingenuous. He didn’t like being bounced into it, more like.
She fought the urge to say, sorry if this is too soon for you. Butwe’ve been getting tipsy on holidays and talking about it happening maybe next year for the last five years. I’m thirty-three. We’re meant to be trying to start a family straight after: on the honeymoon, hopefully. This is our ten-year anniversary. What were you waiting for? When were you waiting for?
She shook the irritation off. The mood was already strained and she didn’t want to shatter it completely with accusations or complaints.
‘You haven’t given me an answer,’ she said, hoping to sound playful.
‘Yeah. Yes. Of course I’ll marry you,’ Paul said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t see this coming at all.’
‘We’re getting married?’ Delia said, smiling.
‘Looks like …?’ Paul said, rolling his eyes, grudgingly returning her smile, and Delia grabbed him. They kissed, a hard quick kiss on the lips of familiarity, and Delia tried to keep still and commit the feeling to memory.
When they moved apart, she said, ‘And I have champagne!’ She knelt and fumbled in her heavy bucket bag for the bottle and the plastic flutes.
‘Here?’ Paul said.
‘Yeah!’ Delia said, looking up, pink with exhilaration, Kingfishers and cold.
‘Nah, come on. We’ll look like a pair of brown-bag street boozers. Ground grumblers.’
‘Or like people who just got engaged.’
A look passed across Paul’s face, and Delia tensed her stomach muscles and refused to let the disappointment in.
Maybe he noticed, because he pulled her up towards him, kissed the top of her head and said into her hair: ‘We can go somewhere that serves champagne and has central heating. That’s my proposal.’
