If I Never Met You: A Novel

“Laurie, I’ve had a science fiction film pitch from my cousin Munni. Listen to this . . .”

As Laurie took her seat on Monday morning, her office mates, Bharat and Di, were shriek-chortling at each other in a way that was both a reminder that life went on, and at the same time seemed to be happening behind a wall of glass.

Bharat’s eccentric cousin Munni in Leamington Spa was a regular source of amusement and delight to Bharat. Munni once tried to get himself nominated for a Pride of Britain award for karate chopping a shoplifter running away with a frozen chicken in Morrisons, and according to a horrified Bharat, dried his willy in the Dyson Airblade after a shower in the gym.

“It is the year 2030 and scientists have found a cure for death. Good news, you’d think? No. Because now, with no one dying, there are too many people. So there are two choices: kill old people or sterilize the young. War breaks out between the breeders and the geriatrics. At first, thanks to better strength, bone density, and joint mobility, plus understanding smartphones, the youth prevail.”

Bharat paused to hunch double, laughing over his keyboard.

“Poor Munni! Does he know you share his emails?” Laurie said.

“He’s sent it to the head of Paramount film studios! He can stand for a few people in Manchester to hear it too.”

Laurie switched her computer on, slung her bag down, unwound her scarf.

Bharat, a Sikh man of thirty-two with a frenetic social life and love of disco, and Di, a fifty-something divorcée who adored her Maine coon cats and Ed Sheeran, were unlikely banter partners, and yet they were devoted to each other. It was practically a marriage.

Today, Laurie was painfully grateful for the background hubbub they’d created, as she wanted minimal scrutiny of what she’d done on the weekend. It was easy enough to lie, but harder to keep her emotions totally steady while she did so. It was hard not to appear as she was—hollowed out.

Her mum used to play Paul Simon’s “Graceland” on a loop, and Laurie kept thinking of the line about losing love being like a window into your heart. She wanted it shuttered. And she had to see him here, interact? The thought made her insides seize up.

It was with intense apprehension, aware that a longer absence would generate more interest, Laurie had come back into work today.

Only to find, thanks to a God with a sick sense of humor, Dan loitering outside at nine a.m., finishing a call with a client. It was harrowing, but better she faced him straightaway, and without them being watched.

“How are you?” he said, looking, it had to be said, completely shit scared of her.

“Fine,” she replied, and marched past. Knowing her seven-pound weight loss, haunted baggy eyes, and near palpable despair said different.

“Laurie”—Dan caught her arm, lowered his voice—“I said you had a stomach flu. People asked me.”

She gave a curt nod in response, because this wasn’t the time or place to be cutting or contemptuous, then pulled her arm away firmly and marched into the building.

Salter & Rowson was an old-fashioned law firm, a few streets away from Deansgate. It was a looming Victorian building housing criminal, civil, and family departments; a brace of legal secretaries; and four receptionists. Mr. Salter, sixtyish, and Rowson, fifty-something, had started the firm in the early 1980s when Salter still had hair and Rowson was still on his first wife and family.

A large portion of their business was legal aid. Laurie spent much time in the magistrates court defending individuals who Dan categorized as “toerags and scallies.” He was in civil, which, as the name suggested, offered a slightly more stately pace. Laurie was old enough not to have to do the on-call shifts, where she had to hack out at one in the morning.

The criminal department was the largest, and for reasons lost to the mists of time, when Laurie joined more than ten years ago she was seated in a crappy adjunct office next to Bharat—litigation, specializing in medical negligence—and Diana, secretary to Bharat and anyone else in the vicinity.

She was eventually offered a move into criminal next door but declined: she’d already struck up a friendship with Bharat and Di.

Climbing the stairs that morning, the idea she and Dan could convincingly feign being on friendly terms had been ambitious before, and was now worthy of cousin Munni’s sci-fi. But Laurie had no fortitude for making major personal announcements. Did they leave the Other Woman and the rogue conception out of it at first? How long would it take the office’s sleuths to uncover it, once the game was afoot? Even without the weekend’s trauma, it had been—count them—ten weeks now with no one getting a sniff at their breakup, but Laurie knew every day they were a day closer to inevitable discovery.

“I’m going out on a limb and saying the ‘cure for death’ idea’s probably been done, several times,” Bharat said. “However, this could still hinge on whether Liam Neeson is prepared to play the sexy sexagenarian warrior, Jeremiah Mastadon.”

Laurie forced a laugh. “I’m off to defend a Darren Dooley. You don’t get many heroes called Darren Dooley, do you?”

Alliteration, like Megan Mooney.

“What’s Munni calling this film?” Diana asked.

“PROLIFERATION. But with some sort of weird semicolon between ‘PRO LIFE’ and ‘RATION,’” Bharat said, scrolling his email. “Pro Life;ration. Geddit? No? Let’s hope the head of Paramount and Liam Neeson do. Oh God, he’s cc’d Liam Neeson!” Bharat collapsed in mirth again and Diana queried how Munni knew Liam Neeson’s email address—“he’ll have guessed it as ‘Liam dot Neeson at Hollywood dot com’”—while Laurie collected her files for court. The world had gone digital but courtrooms still required reams of A4 paper.

Jamie bloody Carter appeared in one of his narrow suits that looked like he was in a menswear advert and should be photographed laughing, sitting with his knees apart while holding a tumbler of malt whisky. Or walking down a cobbled street in a European city with a dickhead Rat Pack in tow.

He said, “I don’t mean to push”—Yes, you do, Laurie thought, giving him grit-teeth smile—“Could you update me on the Cheetham case?”

Laurie gave him a brusque rundown off the top of her head.

“You don’t need to check the file?” he said.

“No, I have this thing called a memory,” Laurie said. Patronizing git—he was how old, twenty-eight?

“Ooooh, summarily dismissed! Nicely done!” Bharat said, after Jamie raised his eyebrows and departed. “He’s a self-sucking cock of a man, isn’t he?” Di and Laurie chortled evilly.

This morning for Laurie held an assault on a kindly shopkeeper. Laurie really didn’t want to get her client a reduced sentence due to first-time offending and the context of peer pressure, and yet she probably would.

A sheaf of notes had gone missing and Laurie was delayed five minutes, hunting them out. A crucial five minutes, as it turned out.

Diana came back from the loo and stared directly at Laurie, in an unnerving way.

“When were you going to tell us you and Dan had split up?!”

“What?” Laurie said dully.

“What?!” Bharat shrieked.

“Dan’s talking to Michael and Chris about it. He said that it happened a while back. And he’s having a baby? With someone at Rawlings?”

Laurie suppressed a full-body shiver of despair, a fresh wave of stunned humiliation.

“Yeah, it’s true. All over a while back. I didn’t know how to break it. There it is.” That bastard. He couldn’t even give her a week to come to terms with it herself. To show her feelings would only inflame the office tattle, so she kept her face impassive and raised and dropped her shoulders. The seconds it took them to say anything lasted an eternity.

“Wait, how long ago was it that you separated, if he’s with someone else? And having a baby?” Bharat said; it was fruitless to downplay it.

“Months back. Don’t really want to discuss it. I’m due in court.”

She got up and strode out quickly, looking neither left nor right, trying to keep a poker face. She could still sense the heads snapping up and whispers from the receptionist’s viewing gallery as she passed.

A WhatsApp from Bharat.

Bharat

V sorry if that was an insensitive question, Loz, I blurted, wasn’t thinking. Are you OK? Xx

Laurie

Yep, thanks, don’t worry. As much as is possible, can you reassure people I’m fine? You & I can talk in private sometime. Can’t face Team Kerry’s gang of lookalike raptors in Charlotte Tilbury descending on me Xx

Bharat

LOL. Perfect description Sure Xxx

Bharat was raucous and silly, but he was good people, and she was deeply grateful for his friendship at that moment. He loved drama, but he was ethical about it: not at the expense of the feelings of those he liked.

Her phone rang with a call from Dan as she neared the magistrates court. He was breathless and discomposed, as well he might be.

“Laurie, Laurie, I didn’t decide to tell everyone. Someone at Rawlings saw Louise Hatherley from ours at the cop shop and she came straight back and blabbed it, and I had to face it down as best I could.”

“Megan’s told people at her place?”

“She’s got morning sickness and refused a drink at some do last week and apparently someone guessed.”

“Megan didn’t have to say it was true? Or tell people you were the dad, did she? Fuck, Dan, is this why you only told me this weekend?”

“She said she panicked, it came tumbling out. I was going to talk to you about how we handled it here . . . fuck.”

“Know something about your mistress, and soon-to-be mother of your child, Dan? She’s a fucking lying bitch,” Laurie said.

As she spoke, she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned. The pasty pale, grinning face of Darren Dooley was in front of her.

“All right, brief? Want me to sort her out for you?”

Trudging back to the office from court that afternoon was the longest walk. Darren Dooley pleaded guilty and got off with community service and a suspended sentence. By contrast to Laurie’s gloom, he was triumphant.

Coming second in a happiness contest with a boy who’d thumped a newsagent in a row over a resealable pouch of mini chocolates, what even was life? Laurie offered him a wan smile as they parted.

“Don’t rough up any more pensioners from now on. OK?”

Laurie had never felt the truth of the idea of work being a comfort before, and many people wouldn’t have found hers a comfort. But she was good at her job, and it always felt like an absorbing, necessary thing to be doing.

And she had high standing at Salter & Rowson. Laurie was not only talented, she was diligent and never rested on her laurels. Usually it was the plodders who were hardworking and careful, and the naturally gifted who did an Icarus. Not Laurie. She quickly learned that the scariness of standing in front of magistrates was directly proportional to how thoroughly you’d done your homework. She was often up against worse-for-wear posh lads for the prosecution, almost proud of winging it, using cut-glass vowels like a scythe. Well, Laurie thought it was way more rock ’n’ roll to know your case back to front and wipe the floor with them.

“Your Honor, I think you’ll find that, IN FACT . . .” was the most overused phrase in her work vocabulary.

Mr. Salter didn’t build an empire without being able to spot talent, and he had seen something in Laurie from the start.

“You have that rare adaptability,” he’d said at a Christmas do of years past. “You’re able to speak authoritatively in court and yet stay approachable with clients. Nor do you let the more ribald of your colleagues get a rise out of you, and without ever stooping to their level. You’re a one-woman master class in how to handle this job.”

Bharat had mimed two fingers down his throat behind Salter’s back, segueing into an audacious blow-job mime that only Bharat would risk, an inch from his boss.

Whenever Dan admired her dedication in this way, she’d joke that as a woman of color in a man’s world you had to work three times as hard to be thought of as half as good. A joke, except it was true. And she’d never gotten into trouble; she never fell over at the Christmas do.

Laurie also never asked for anything, perks or pay rises. Some male colleagues muttered that this was the key reason for her popularity with the bosses. But Dan’s getting ahead had been the win for both of them. Laurie had coached him and supported him and urged him on to get his departmental headship. She felt vaguely daft about that now, as a self-sufficient woman—it had never occurred to her that he might leave her, and she should be looking for advancement for her own sake. She’d not exploited her professional potential because her fulfillment was in her personal life.

Though in honesty, as much as Laurie knew Salter & Rowson thought the world of her, she still doubted they wanted the biracial woman in board meetings. Dan used to joke that you wouldn’t mistake them for a Benetton poster.

God, she missed him. Or, a version of him that was now consigned to history.

When she reached Salter’s, the oldest of the receptionists, Jan, came racing out from behind her desk to put an arm around Laurie, to tut and coo: “Are you all right, love?”

“Yes, thanks. Totally fine.”

“But no, are you all right?”

Laurie had to find a way to peel her off without seeming ungrateful, although Jan only wanted to get close enough to make a rudimentary assessment of her all rightness, to inform the next hour’s speculation.

The other three receptionists stared at her owlishly. Laurie shrugged Jan off as gently as she could and stumped up the stairs, considering that any further statement on how she was completely chill with her life partner now procreating with some ginger at Rawlings was only likely to make them suspect the opposite.

Partly what was fueling the fascination was the unlikeliness of her and Dan being caught up in this. The Boring Smug Marrieds, the butter wouldn’t melts, the ordinary ones, the basics. The schadenfreude could power a wind farm.

Upstairs was barely better.

Michael saw her from a distance, beyond the transparent separation of the criminal department, and came dashing out on to the landing, while Laurie internally screamed: NO, DON’T. They’d worked together for a long time in criminal, Michael also at her level. He’d always made it clear he esteemed Laurie, treated her as one of the few sane voices.

Whenever Laurie walked into the lion’s den that was the main criminal department, she’d learned to deal with any playful laddish verbals that were thrown her way with wit and unshockability, putting antagonists in their place. She’d mastered navigating the locker room without compromising herself, and she was held in a degree of special respect for it. Michael was foremost among her fans, he’d made a friend of her.

Once, at drinks in the pub after work, when a secretary was wondering aloud how a presentable man like him wasn’t taken (Michael was handsome, in a forbidding, Mr. Rochester way) he’d said: “Laurie Watkinson’s gone, so why bother? No one else will do” and thrown a knowing smile her way. She’d not much minded, more surprised to have his approval than anything: Michael was mostly bone-dry and pitiless. Now she’d been stripped of her protected Mrs. Dan status, she didn’t know quite how to deal with him.

“Are you OK?” Michael said, squeezing her shoulder.

“I’m fine, honestly,” Laurie said, uncomfortable at the physical contact but without a way to stop it that didn’t seem rude.

“I’m gobsmacked, I have to say,” Michael said, hot paw still gripping her, giving her an intense, unwavering look that said: Confide in me, I am on your side.

“It is what it is,” Laurie said with a brave soldier’s smile, hoping if she repeated enough meaningless banalities, she could eventually kill everyone’s interest with boredom. Death by cliché.

“Was he . . . was this going on while you were still together? It must’ve been. God. What a thing.”

Great, Michael, tactful. Laurie could already see how it was going to go; lots of prurient fishing, somehow made acceptable by first offering extravagant condolences. Claiming to care about someone or something, Laurie saw, could be highly manipulative. It was a way of ascribing yourself rights.

“I’m fine, honestly,” she said, ducking out of his line of sight as she pulled away toward her office.

Back at her desk, she saw Bharat was out, which was unfortunate as he’d have offered her protection and distraction. Diana said, after a tense silence which she spent near-audibly scheming how to raise it: “If you need to talk, Laurie, we’re here for you.”

“Thanks!” Laurie said with a tight, bright smile.

Silence descended and Diana darted looks at Laurie every so often, while tapping rapidly at her keyboard at brief intervals. Laurie was tempted to need something from the filing cabinet behind Di, forcing Di to click away at frantic speed from the G-chat about Laurie’s woes. It wasn’t that Di was anti Laurie, but this was hot off the presses and it had to be discussed.

Laurie WhatsApped Emily. She’d not told her yet.

Laurie

Don’t call me, as I’m at work, but Dan’s got an Other Woman, who he’s now got pregnant. No kidding. Instantly. Mr. “I’m not ready for you to stop taking your pill.” She’s a lawyer at another place here, and they were clearly good to go once he’d left me. He’s trying to claim it’s not an affair because they waited until then to sleep together.

Emily

HOLY SHIT? WHAT? I don’t know what to say. Or do. I actually feel sick. Oh my God.

Laurie felt a pinched, stinging sensation at the back of her throat that presaged tears, and waited it out before typing again.

Laurie

Be honest with me: Did you think he had someone else from the start? Have I been incredibly slow and stupid?

It was strange that plain old embarrassment should play a starring role in this shit show. Next to the decimation of love and hope, who cared about foolishness? And yet.

Emily

NO! Absolutely not, L. I thought he was having a midlife, and once he’d bought Sonos surround speakers, failed to work the multiroom function on them properly & maybe had a lackluster boff with a girl from the gym with a Martini glass–shaped bikini wax, he’d be crawling back. Pregnant? Seriously? Are you OK?

Laurie

I’m on my knees, to be honest. Can you believe I have to work with him?!! I must have been a genocidal warlord in a past life to deserve this. Or the kind of person who puts their bag on the seat next to them on public transport in rush hour.

Not only that, there was no way out. With a new responsibility on the way, Dan wouldn’t be getting a new job, never mind his blather about rethinking his professional choices. The results were in. And if Laurie went—and why should she?—the rules on being hired within a certain radius, within a certain time period, meant she could either accept a job at a tiny firm in Buttfuck, Nowhere, with a huge commute, or sell her house and leave Manchester entirely. Hey, maybe she could sell the house back to Dan and Megan! She jutted her chin upward in defiance in the pain at this thought, and her eyes met her reflection in the window. In uncharacteristic thinness and tiredness, she could suddenly really see her mother.

Emily

Repeat after me: You do not deserve it. I will come round as soon as I can. May I ring Dan and call him a piece of shit? I don’t want us to forget the proper formalities in the middle of this

Laurie grinned at her handset. Best friends knew humor was pretty much always welcome and needed.

Laurie

With my greatest pleasure xxx

This notion pepped Laurie up slightly, until she needed to check something on the board in the criminal office and the whole room fell into an awed hush when she entered.

She forgot whatever she was supposed to be inspecting, stared blankly at marker-penned words that were mere blue squiggles to her, and went back to her desk, wondering if, despite the impossibility, she was in fact going to have to find another job.

The day, which had lasted several months by Laurie’s reckoning, finally rolled to a close and Laurie got up bang on time to leave, intending to make as fast and clean an exit as possible. She was intercepted by Kerry, Salter’s ferocious personal secretary. Kerry was a forty-something bottle blonde and dressed and carried herself like a matriarch from a 1960s kitchen sink film: leopard skin, cigarette frequently on, and red pleather handbags. Laurie could’ve warmed to her if she didn’t know her to be a total viper.

“Laurie. I want you to know. We’ve all agreed . . .”

Laurie tensed her stomach muscles and waited for the inevitable nonsense about solidarity. Dan would receive the same, of course.

“You’re far more attractive than Megan Mooney. She looks like Prince Harry in drag.”

“Oh. Thanks,” Laurie said, completely at a loss for what she was supposed to say. Kerry was terrifying.

“Laurie! Call for you!” Di said, hanging out of the office doorway, and Laurie bit down her irritation that, strictly speaking, when someone had their coat on you should take a message.

“Hello, Mrs. Watkinson?” said an accented older male voice, after she accepted the receiver from Di.

“Miss,” Laurie said. “Or Ms.”

“This is Mr. Atwal, from Atwal’s News. The Doolally boy who beat me, you were his lawyer today?”

Laurie’s heart sank still further. It was rare she got shit-o-grams from the victims of those she defended, partly because the serious cases she dealt with got kicked up to crown court. It was uniquely unpleasant, explaining to someone why you’d done everything you could to minimize the impact of what they’d suffered, and put the best possible spin on the version of the person who’d inflicted it. Laurie didn’t think she was in the wrong, but at moments like that, she couldn’t feel it.

Oh God. Not today, Satan. She took a deep breath and prepared to justify her role in a fair and open legal process. “Yes?”

“I thought you might like to know, he came in and gave me a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates! I do not drink, but the thought was very nice. He said he was very sorry and your kindness has helped him see a better way. Well done, young lady.”

In a moment, Laurie’s ratty temper vanished. Not only was she very glad to hear Darren Dooley had made amends, there was something absurdly touching in him thinking Laurie doing her job in a courteous manner was some sort of inspirational tenderness. Poor lad. What a life he’d led.

“That’s great to hear. I’m very pleased he has apologized, Mr. Atwal. I hope this is a corner turned for Darren and that you don’t get any more trouble.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Mr. Atwal said in his lovely, musical, old-fashioned cadence, “There are some real, how do you say, dismal little cunts around these days.”

Laurie ended the conversation trying desperately not to hysterical-giggle. If life was entirely different, she’d be repeating that phrase to Dan tonight while they fell about.

Hell, maybe she would hire Darren Dooley to rough up him and Megan. It might give him a sense of purpose and a nice fee.

Laurie hated how powerless she was, the mask she had to wear that ate her face. Dan had done so much to her, and she could do nothing.