If I Never Met You: A Novel

When Laurie’s phone rang on Sunday morning, she was trying and failing to make shakshuka, ending up instead with vegetable stew topped with a raw egg. Laurie squinted at her handset warily, as if she was in a clanking daytime television drama with a lot of face acting. Emily. But Emily didn’t call, Emily messaged. If Emily was going to call, she’d message to say she was going to call. Those were the rules.

“Hi.”

“Hi. Can you come ’round?”

Emily didn’t do can you come ’rounds, and she didn’t do that tone of voice. Low, beaten.

“Of course, now?” Laurie said, gathering “on the phone” wasn’t the way Emily wanted to be asked why.

“If that’s OK.”

Laurie Uber-ed to Emily’s flat in the Northern Quarter with a queasiness that wasn’t eased by heated seats and Capital FM and the driver singing along with “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” by Cutting Crew. It could be a bereavement, but she didn’t think so. Emily wouldn’t hold that sort of information back.

They’d had so many parties at Emily’s place, or drunken nights out in the city that had carried on at hers. Laurie got her thousandth pang for Dan. The woozy moment she’d look around at Emily with her head on Dan’s shoulder, and think of the two of them as her beloved family.

The split-level apartment had every trapping of “young, urban, fast lifestyle, moneyed”—the oil-spill dark flooring, red Gaggia machine, the mezzanine with modern staircase up to the huge bed, the fireplace you turned on with a remote control. It would’ve felt too showy, too hectic to Laurie. It wasn’t a place that could do “cozy” if it tried, with its vast windows onto a Manchester cityscape of cranes and concrete. It put you on show. It was purest Emily.

She answered the door in black silk paisley pajamas, hair fluffy from sleep, looking younger with no makeup. She nodded a greeting and led Laurie near wordlessly to the kitchen, pointing to a scattering of cherry tomatoes on the breakfast bar. Had Laurie been this worried for the sake of a split shopping bag? Was it going to be “SOS, we need to go out for brunch”?

But as Laurie drew closer, she realized the fruit was arranged into a pattern. She squinted. It spelled out the word F-A-K-E.

“Robert. From the tiki bar? He left before I woke up.”

Laurie paused in confusion, and thought confusion was justified. She hoiked her cross-body bag off and dumped it by the kitchen cabinets.

“I don’t get it. ‘Fake’? He did this?”

“Yeah. He stayed last night, left before I woke up. I found it when I got up.”

“What? Had you argued?”

Emily shrugged and ran her fingertips through a matted section of her hair.

“I dunno, kind of? He called my work superficial, bloodsucking, and parasitical and I kept laughing it off and then we had the sort of sex where there’s some pushing and pulling and mild slapping.”

Laurie inwardly shuddered at sharing bodily fluids with someone both so hostile and largely unknown.

“What a piece of shit,” Laurie said, exhaling in shock. “And what a PSYCHO. Who does this?!”

The tomatoes emanated a sinister force, as she looked at them again. You’d have to plan it, rifling through the salad in the fridge. Weighing up whether frozen peas would do the job.

“It scared me and then I realized, I’m supposed to be scared, aren’t I?” Emily said. “He’s with his friends on WhatsApp right now, taking sick pleasure in imagining me finding it, him having the last word. Hahahaha, guess what I did to this stuck-up bitch. Photo attached.”

Laurie’s stomach churned.

Emily dropped onto the L-shaped sofa and covered her face with her hands.

“The worst thing he’s right. He’s right.”

“What? How?”

“I am a fake.”

“In what way are you fake?”

“What’s not fake about me? This isn’t my hair color.” Emily yanked at a hank of what Laurie had learned was called balayage. “These aren’t my nails!” She waved shellacs the color of blood at her. On her pale small hands, they looked to Laurie like the Sleeping Beauty spinning wheel pinprick.

“And this?” Laurie said, gesturing at their grand surroundings. “A figment?”

“I’ve got a mortgage larger than the moon, Laurie, you know that. You are looking at debt. Debt with Hague Blue walls.”

“You have a big mortgage because you have an even bigger salary because you are CEO of your own very successful business.”

“Yeah, and there’s not a day that goes by I don’t think it might topple over.”

“That’s why you work so hard. That’s why you’re so good. You don’t take anything for granted.”

“I’m right not to. Lost two accounts last week.” Emily put bare feet on the edge of her coffee table and flexed her matching red toes. She was still every bit the overcaffeinated waif who buzzed around Laurie’s halls bedroom. Laurie hated her seeming so world-weary. Brought low by a total tosser.

“That’s work. That’s life. You’ll win three next week.”

“It’s not only that though, Loz! You think I’m thin because I’m thin, right? Maybe I was, once. Now, if I’m not eating with clients or eating with you or whatever, I skip meals.” She gestured over at a spotless kitchen. “It’s never seen a chopped onion. I’m not saying I have an eating disorder. I’m saying I’m thin because I work very hard at being thin and deprive myself and then pretend I don’t have to work at it. Even to you. I don’t know why. Why don’t I say, ‘I am thin because I try very hard to be’? Because my world runs on envy, you need to incite envy. Because I’m fake.”

“You’re not fake!” Laurie said, wilting a little in sympathy.

She sat down beside Emily and put her arm around her. Emily had the musky odor of the night before and it occurred to Laurie there were very few friends you could call before the shower.

“I wouldn’t get too close, I smell like a monkey’s handbag,” Emily said with a sniff.

“Aye, yeah, you do.” They both did the kind of weak stomach-laughing that sits right on the border with tears.

“You’re very real, Emily. You’re dynamic and clever as hell and you never complain. Just because you don’t discuss the effort it takes, doesn’t make you fake. Would a man do that? What would your twin brother do?”

Emily smiled wanly at mention of an old catchphrase. At university, discussing with righteous fervor the different treatment meted out to men, they always put it to this test—the hypothetical male twin in this man’s world, who had all the masculine advantages.

“People will always need lawyers,” Emily continued, voice tremulous. “They won’t always need what I sell. Or they won’t want it from some craggy fifty-something still cramming herself into her skinny jeans.”

“Right, stop. What does barman do?”

“. . . Work in a bar?”

“Right, works in a bar. There’s nothing wrong with that. But he’s, what, thirty?”

“Thirty-two.”

“You are four years older than him, Emily, you live here and you are a boss, and you depend on no one. Have you got any idea how threatening that is to the male ego, for women not to need them? Do you think it came from nowhere, Rob the thirty-two-year-old barman’s need to put you down, to break you in some way, to humiliate you?”

Laurie thought about her own working week. You were equal with these men so long as you didn’t make them feel unequal, lesser, challenged. If you stayed in your lane.

“This is pure misogyny. Those tomatoes are highly relevant to his therapist’s notes, not yours.”

Emily nodded.

“Then there’s the sex. What am I doing? The people I sleep with, we all have the same problem. The moment we find something is there for the taking, we don’t want it anymore. How fucked-up is that?”

“Is that what it is? You go off someone once they fancy you back?”

Emily nodded. “Kind of, yeah. I choose things that I know will short-circuit. There must be some psychological blockage or self-loathing, else why do I hate myself so much to sleep with someone like him?”

They both glanced back at the tomato art.

“You’ve had a scare,” Laurie said, “but some of this is bad luck, playing the odds. Sooner or later you were going to encounter a nutter.”

“Guess so. With my incredible numbers.”

“I didn’t mean that!”

“I know.”

“Can I ask something? Do you think the thing with men is, you’re frightened of needing someone, of relying on them?”

Jamie had given her an insight.

“Yeah, maybe?” Emily said, pulling her hair off her face.

“You always got the horror at your mum being so reliant.”

Emily had the most suburban, timid parents Laurie had ever met, and her mum used to have her housekeeping cash for the week put in a biscuit tin by her dad. In a way, no wonder Emily came blazing out of it like a comet. Her older sister had moved herself to Toronto, aged nineteen.

Emily sniffed. “I met a man through work recently and he asked me out and I said no, as I could tell he wanted a girlfriend. I liked him, but I thought, I’ll only mess it up. And: better I reject him and he carries on thinking I’m unattainable and great than finds out the bitter truth. That’s wildly messed up, isn’t it?”

“I think that’s something a lot of people do. What is the bitter truth?”

“That I’m fake. That I’m dull. That sometimes, when I go to do a wee I do an unexpected fart instead that sounds like a bear complaining.”

Laurie rolled onto her side with the force of the laughter.

“I’m serious!” Emily said, through her own laughter. “If he gets to know me, he won’t love me.”

“Or he’ll love you even more?”

“High stakes,” Emily said.

“That’s the deal, I think, with love,” Laurie said. “But I got to know you, and only loved you more.”

“Oh, you.”

They embraced.

“Can I suggest something?” Laurie said. “Can I suggest we spend a day in together, watching films, eating takeaway food, and completely erasing the lunatic tomato creep from memory?”

Emily nodded. “We could ask Nadia over too.”

“Yes!”

They put on music and Laurie made coffee and they did the kind of low-key chatting and pottering you could only really do with a very close, very long-term friend. Laurie felt there was a secret of how to live life buried in this unusual Sunday: they had turned a negative into a positive reason to spend time together, to remind themselves of how valuable they were to each other. Laurie had thought Dan was the source of the unconditional love in her life, but actually it was Emily: she wasn’t going to turn around and say sorry, she’d found a new Laurie.

It just happened. We shared Spotify playlists. She’s who I confide in now.

Nadia arrived half an hour later, in trademark hat. “Show me the crime scene,” she said.

They pointed her to the counter.

“Oh my God! Report him to the police at once!” Nadia bellowed.

“What for, GROCERY REARRANGEMENT?!” Emily shrieked.

When they’d finished laughing, Laurie said: “Did you get ’em?”

“Oh yeah,” said Nadia, disgorging three packets of cherry tomatoes from her backpack.

Laurie tore a packet open and started building an “R.”

“What are you doing?” Emily said.

“I’m writing ROB HATES WOMEN in tomatoes, which you are then going to take a photo of, send to him, and block him before he can reply. Nadia, you work on ‘women,’” Laurie said.

Laurie thought Emily might argue, but she observed their quiet industry in awe.

“This is . . .” Emily teared up. “Everything.”