It’s Not Me, It’s You

Six

‘Read it,’ Delia said, and Paul shook his head.

Delia felt a determined venom pulse through her veins. ‘Read it out,’ she said, steadily.

Paul pulled the phone from his coat pocket. She waited in case a look crossed his face that told her it wasn’t Celine, but she could see from his unchanging scowl of dread that it was.

‘I’m not reading this.’

‘If you ever want any trust between us again, read that text aloud.’

Paul grimly swiped the text open, jaw clenched. When he spoke, he sounded strangled. Delia knew she’d never forget the strangeness of hearing her fiancé’s lover’s voice coming through his. She could see him desperately trying to edit it and not quite having the time to do it and still make it sound natural.

‘If I think you’re leaving bits out, I’ll ask to see it,’ she said, hearing herself as if she was a stranger. The woman scorned wasn’t a role she ever thought she’d have to play.

‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us? Can you …’ Paul looked over, beseeching in his shame, obviously hoping against hope that Delia would burst into tears and let him off the rest of it. She shook her head and willed herself to wait. He continued in a funereal whisper: ‘Can you get away tonight at all to call me? Speak tomorrow. Love you. C.’

Love.

‘How many kisses?’

‘Three.’

With a gasp, Delia felt the tears start, warm water that gushed down her cheeks and partially blurred Paul from view. Her nose started running too; it was a full face explosion of liquid. Paul made to get up and comfort her and she shouted at him to get away from her. Delia wouldn’t allow him to hug her, to make himself feel better. As if right now, he was the person who could make her feel better.

Delia rubbed at her eyes and when she could focus, she saw Paul was crying too, albeit in less of a fountain-like way. He wiped at his face.

‘I’ll end it. It’s over. It was the most massive, insane mistake …’

‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’ Delia said, in a half-sob.

Paul shook his head, looking sorrowful that he kept being asked all these tricky questions.

‘Tell me the truth, or there’s no point. If you keep lying, there really is no point any more.’

‘I was going to say we were getting married and it was time to finish.’

‘No you weren’t. You said you didn’t know what to do.’

‘I didn’t want to break it off in a text. I was building up to it.’

Delia cleared her throat several times, and mopped herself up as best she could with her bare hands.

‘I don’t believe you. I think you hadn’t decided what you were going to say to her. You don’t want to get married.’

Paul muttered, ‘It was a surprise, I admit.’

‘I can imagine you weren’t in the mindset when you were busy throwing your nob up someone else.’

Paul looked at Delia with bloodshot eyes.

‘How would you feel if I’d done this?’

‘Devastated,’ Paul said, without hesitation. ‘Gutted beyond belief. I can’t tell you this isn’t shockingly unfair and awful shitty behaviour, because it is. I hate myself for it.’

Yet – was Delia imagining that he sounded as if he was recovering, ever so slightly? Some of the Paul self-assurance had already crept back in. The worst had happened for Paul – Delia had found out. So now he was already repairing, while Delia was still scattered in a hundred pieces.

Parsnip waddled into the room. For the first time since they’d brought him home, Delia resented their dog; she’d cleaned up a lot of piss. Petting him was a way of easing Paul’s discomfort, breaking the tension.

‘I know it’s going to take a huge effort to get past this, but please tell me we can,’ Paul said.

Paul wasn’t leaving her for Celine? She hadn’t framed the question quite so bluntly until now, but it was the big question, she supposed. However, it dawned on her what he was actually asking. If I end it with Celine, promise me you’ll still be here? He didn’t want to be left with neither of them.

She wasn’t ready, not by miles, to decide how she felt. Especially as she didn’t believe that he’d planned to end it with Celine. That text spoke of uncertainty, tell me what to do, the same way he was asking her now.

Delia saw the light glinting on the unused flute glasses in her open bag. They’d never even used them.

Ten years together, laden with guilt, and he hadn’t indulged her enough to drink the champagne. I mean, maybe the guilt was why he hadn’t wanted a spotlight on the whole engagement thing, but that hardly made matters better.

‘I don’t know if we can,’ Delia said, standing up, stiff underskirt rustling. She felt like a painted panto dame. ‘I’m going to stay in the spare room tonight.’

‘You don’t have to, I’ll stay in it.’

‘I don’t want to be in our bed. Tomorrow I’m going home to my parents. You can meet Celine and tell her whatever you like.’

‘We can’t leave it like this,’ Paul said.

Paul honestly expected some sort of pledge from her? Delia feared this said something about Paul, and something about her too.

‘I don’t know who I’m with any more, so how can I know if I want to be with him?’

‘I’m still the same, I’ve just done something that makes me a huge arsehole.’

‘No, you’re not the same. You’re a traitor, who I don’t trust.’

Delia left Paul with Parsnip, thundered up the stairs, pulled her dress off and went to bed in full make-up and her new underwear. She didn’t cry again. She was numb, only partly functioning: as if a chamber of her heart was no longer pumping blood round her body. Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ looped in her head.

She realised perhaps that failing to set a date wasn’t about what Paul was waiting for. It was who.

Seven

Ralph answered the door to Delia in a t-shirt saying Colorado Surf Club ’83, eating a floppy buttered triangle of Mighty White toast.

‘S’up,’ he said, grinning, and then remembered why his older sister was on the doorstep with a trolley case and puffy eyes. ‘Ehm. Are you … well?’

Delia smiled, despite herself. Ralph didn’t quite comprehend the subtleties of conventional interaction. Liberal, well-meaning teachers at their comprehensive had tried to get him diagnosed with this and that, so everyone could label it and feel better, but never succeeded. Ralph suffered from chronic Ralphness. It was a benign condition, in Delia’s view.

‘I’ve been better,’ she said, smiling, stepping inside and stretching up to make him hug her. Ralph bent his head in an awkward, touching way and circled her with his arms, looking like someone doing an impression of a hug they’d seen once in a Human Beings instruction manual.

Ralph was a mountain of a man, with Delia’s carrot-coloured tresses, worn haphazardly tufty.

A cruel onlooker might note that it wasn’t only the fact of Colorado being landlocked that’d prevent him being in Colorado’s Surf Club. Delia worried about his weight, but he worked in a chip shop and had never met a junk food he didn’t like, so it was a futile battle.

‘Mum’s at the allotment and Dad’s out back. Want some toast?’

Delia shook her head. She’d not eaten a meal since last night’s curry, so it was just as well that had been huge. Her stomach was now a balloon knot that tightened every time she spent more than a minute in contemplation.

‘I’ll put my stuff in my room,’ Delia said, fake-brightly, bumping her trolley case up the stairs, grateful her parents weren’t witnessing this sorry sight. The thirty-three-year-old wanderer returns.

She was supposed to be showing them an engagement ring.

‘How’s Parsnip?’ Ralph asked, to her back. Delia was glad she didn’t have to meet his eyes. Leaving wobbly Parsnip was a wrench. He’d been abandoned once and she’d promised him it’d never happen again.

‘Good!’

‘You could bring him, you know. He can sleep in my room.’

‘Thanks.’

Delia’s family lived in a semi in Hexham, a market town about twenty miles up the Tyne from Newcastle. Ever since she could remember, the house had looked like this; full of solid wooden furniture, patchwork and crocheted old throws, and rows of herbs in tubs that leaked earth along the windowsills. It was resolutely about function, not form, which was perhaps where Delia’s urge to prettify and home-make had come from.

It was welcoming and constant though. On the bricked mantelpiece, there was a framed photo of her parents’ wedding in 1971: her dad in giant chocolate-brown bell-bottomed suit, big ginger Open University beard. Her grey-blonde mum in that bowl cut that gripped the circumference of your head, and a post-hippy-era trailing veil with daisies.

Her family were … eccentric was the gentlest word, though Delia felt disloyal even using that. Paul used to sing the theme tune to Button Moon as they drove to visit, in affectionate reference to the fact her family home was its own planet, with its own customs.

Paul. Their team of two, that no longer existed. The stomach knot tightened.

Everyone in Delia’s family related best to something other than people: her mum to her allotment and garden, her dad to the timber, saws and planer in the shed, her brother Ralph to computer games and the television in his stuffy bedroom.

Delia was loved, but she was – she didn’t like to admit this, as she pushed open the door to her old bedroom – a little lonely in their midst. She was the only one with common sense, and a sense of the outside world.

She heaved her case onto the pine single bed and unzipped it, flipping the lid. Looking at the possessions she’d brought, she felt the tears swell in her chest. Oh God … this was even harder than she’d thought. Delia wanted to go home to Heaton. But she couldn’t. Her feelings completely forbade it. For all she knew, Paul was with Celine right this second, telling her he’d marry her instead. She didn’t know where she stood or what he wanted any more.

She’d got up very early, after a sleepless night, thankful that she kept lots of her clothes in the spare room and could pack and leave without seeing Paul. He’d obviously woken with the closing of the front door and the disturbance of Parsnip though because she’d had a missed call and a text offering her a lift shortly after, which she’d ignored.

Again, Delia wished she had someone to tell her what to do. Was leaving the right thing?

Her mum had made sympathetic noises when she’d called that morning to say they were having problems and that she was going to come home for a while, but Delia wasn’t surprised that she was out when she arrived. Her mum found emotions, especially raw ones, disconcerting. She would make her a cup of tea and rub her back, but Delia would know she’d be dying to get out to her cukes and radishes and not discuss the whole messy personal business. Ralph and her father were even less use.

No, there was only one person who’d have insight and sympathy about this, though she dreaded telling her.

Delia’s eyes moved to a familiar photo blu-tacked to the mirror. It was possibly her favourite picture in the world. It could stay here as she’d had copies made, framing them and sending one to Emma.

It had been taken in their second year at university, by some long-forgotten amorous boy. Delia and Emma wrapped around each other in a cheek-to-cheek embrace, huge Rimmel-lipsticked smiles, plastic pint pots of Newcastle Brown Ale in hands, toasting the camera-holder.

It wasn’t that they both had the moonshine complexion of the twenty-year-old, or that they were so happy. It’s that they both looked so confident. It brimmed with the ‘Look out, I’m coming to get you’ insouciance she used to have.

Delia wasn’t vain, but she thought she looked pretty in it. She had such heavy liquid eyeliner, she was practically in a bandit mask. She’d believed life was going to be full of adventures. Then she met Paul three years later, and was happy to give them up. All that she had, was suddenly his.

‘Hello, knock knock,’ said Ralph, his unkempt head, with its specs and watery blue eyes, appearing round the door. ‘Ehm. Would you like to play Grand Theft Auto?’

Delia smiled. Actually, that was exactly the sort of thing she wanted to do. Even though she didn’t know what it involved.

She followed Ralph to his bedroom. Ralph’s cluttered, natural-light-free, Star Wars memorabilia-strewn lair might conceivably be the HQ of some young pop culture website punk, or Pentagon hacker genius. Instead it was exactly what it looked like: the dream timewasting crib for a twenty-eight-year-old man who still lived at home.

He handed Delia a confusingly complicated control panel and motioned for her to take a place on one of the beanbags. She loved the way the video games reversed the roles between them: Delia asking stupid questions, Ralph gently chiding her for not grasping it fast enough.

It was strangely reassuring, concentrating on clumps of pixels instead of real things, in the bluish haze of Ralph’s eternal twilight mole hole.

‘Is Paul not coming here again, then?’ Ralph said, eyes fixed on the screen, as Delia’s avatar crouched behind a car in the middle of a firefight with some Mexican drug lord’s gang. Her parents had been licensed to pass this news on.

‘I’m not sure,’ Delia said. She had a sudden desire to share. ‘He’s been seeing someone else.’

‘Why?’ asked Ralph. ‘They’re dead now, you can move. Fast.’

‘I don’t know,’ Delia pushed a button and head-butted a wall.

‘Does he like her more than you?’ Ralph said. From anyone else, this would have been wounding. From Ralph, it was artless, childlike curiosity.

‘I don’t know that either. She’s younger than me. She might be cleverer and better and funnier and more attractive and … fresher.’

‘She’s still not The Fox, though,’ Ralph said, as he took the controls from Delia and expertly navigated her out of a dead end.

‘What?’ Delia had not heard that name in so long, it took her a moment to absorb its meaning.

‘The Fox. Like, Super Delia.’

‘You remember her?’ Delia said, taken aback and very touched.

‘Course,’ Ralph said.

‘She was retired a long time ago,’ Delia said, sighing and resting her head on Ralph’s arm, then realising it inhibited his gaming, and awkwardly moved it.

‘It was you who put her into retirement, so you can get her out of retirement. You’re in charge, like, here,’ Ralph said. ‘Oh YES! Let’s go rob a plane.’

Ralph had a high-pitched, cawing bird-like laugh that ripped from his larynx with no warning rumble and took people unawares.

Delia smiled. She could enjoy Ralph’s games for a bit, then she’d get bored. Ralph’s ability to have a complete immersion wallow for days at a time struck her as a male brain thing. Or maybe a Ralph brain thing.

‘Do you want a Swiss roll?’ Ralph said, and for a second, Delia thought this was gamer talk, but he reached over and picked up a cake box.

‘I’m alright, thanks,’ said Delia, frowning a little as Ralph unwrapped the cellophane and started eating a whole cylinder of buttercream-filled sponge like a baguette.

Her mum put her head round the door. Her upper half was clad in her grass-cuttings-flecked gardening gilet. ‘Oh you’re here, love.’

‘Yes,’ Delia smiled.

‘Macaroni cheese for tea?’

‘Sounds good.’

Her mum hesitated. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I will be.’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘Yes please.’

In terms of maternal advice, that – bar the odd stiff word as Delia helped clear up from the evening meal – would be that. The door closed and Delia turned back to the screen, where Ralph was racing across the fictional city of Los Santos to Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’, the wind in his virtual hair.

‘You really liked The Fox?’ Delia said to Ralph. ‘I worried it was silly.’

‘No way. Best thing you ever did,’ Ralph said, wiping some jam from his chin.

There was something to be said for having someone who would, with no spite whatsoever, give you the unvarnished truth.

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