If I Never Met You: A Novel
If I Never Met You: Chapter 32

Dad

Darling, just seen this, sorry to hear—his loss!! ☹ The wedding piss-up is at Cloud 23 a week this Friday, we’ve hired the place out so give them your name on the door. Bring a friend if you want. Can’t wait to see you! Nic’s gone completely fucking bridezilla by the way, she’s absolutely spanked the plastic. She’ll probably look like something out of the Moulin Rouge with fuckin’ ostrich feathers. So get your glad rags on. Love you, darling. Austin. Xxx PS no gifts, ta, we’re drowning in towels

A wedding reception, notice given, “a week Friday.” On a Wednesday. So, what, nine days? Her dad had outdone himself.

And Laurie wasn’t going to tell him that the way modern messaging services worked, “just seen this” no longer cut it as a fob off. It had never cut it anyway. “His loss” and a sad face emoji, after eighteen years, wow.

Laurie wanted to get through this party as fast as possible, merely showing her face, without the encumbrance of a plus one.

She and Jamie had no dates in the diary other than the Christmas party now, and she felt them both giving each other breathing space as they geared up for it. Was he replaceing it hard to keep himself away from whoever he was falling in love with?

Laurie bumped into Jamie, in the middle of the following week, as he was leaving court and she was on her way in. She hadn’t seen him in the Atticus Finch glasses for a while, maybe her teasing had put him off.

After an awkward hello where neither of them knew quite how to greet each other physically, and ended up settling for a chaste cheek-kiss, Jamie asked after her weekend plans.

“Oh, it’s a doozy, this one. My dad’s got married, and the party is at Beetham Tower bar this Friday night. In case anyone asks about it, now you know, but don’t worry about coming along.”

“Uhm, if it’s your dad’s wedding reception, shouldn’t I go?” Jamie said.

“Oh, nah. No one here’s going to know it’s happening. You’re safe to swerve it.”

“There’s still a chance it could get out that I wasn’t with you. I’m not doing anything on Friday and I’m only going to need a cover story for not being there, and one good enough that if anyone asks me, it fits with whatever’s been on social media if they check up.”

Laurie kept forgetting that asking some people to keep a low profile online for a weekend was akin to requesting them spending it locked in a cupboard.

“Coming along seems easier. Unless you really don’t want me to?” Jamie said.

“No, sure, come!” Laurie said. She finally saw Jamie was looking slightly hurt. “It’d be good to have the company, actually.”

Why hadn’t she asked Jamie from the off? Having expected him to put a distance after Lincoln, was she doing that herself, rejecting him before he could reject her? Maybe.

It could also be because fake boyfriend and forever-faking-it father was too much fake for one event. And yet Emily thought Emily was the fake?

But when she was with Dan, he’d have felt like an anchor. Jamie Carter was like holding on to a balloon.

And yet . . . which one of the two recently had been completely attentive in a room where she didn’t know anyone? And had heard her story of her childhood and treated it like proper testimony, not a little bit of a sob story she should get over?

“Hmmm. I feel like I am forcing myself on you now,” Jamie said, and Laurie sensed he was hinting, I will do this, but you need to make up for not inviting me from the start.

“No, seriously Jamie, please come,” Laurie said, more imploring and certain now. She put her hand on his arm. “My reluctance was nothing to do with not wanting you there—my dad is just . . . a basket of snakes for me, I guess, and I thought it was simpler to deal with it alone rather than put someone else through it.”

“After what you did for me in Lincoln, don’t you think I want to repay you?”

Laurie beamed. “Yeah, of course. But I didn’t do that so I could hand you a bill afterward. It didn’t come with any strings.”

“I know,” Jamie said, and gave her a quick hard hug that shocked the air out of her lungs.

On Friday night, she met Jamie at a rowdy pub on Deansgate for a resolve stiffener and they walked to Beetham Tower together. Jamie was in a blue suit that matched his eyes—that flash wardrobe of his was coming in handy—and Laurie, a black jumpsuit and red lipstick. She’d consulted her feelings and gone with strong-defiant rather than a flouncy dress, plus, the Ivy-date maxidress now felt too special to want to waste on her father, wedding or no.

“It’s the whole bar? Hiring this must’ve cost a fortune,” Jamie said, squinting at the skyscraper slab of glass, slicing upward into the Manchester evening sky.

“Yeah, my dad’s always liked to spend money. Nicola’s not short of a few bob either.”

After a soaring, seasick lift ride, they were welcomed into Cloud 23, trumpeted as “the highest point in Manchester.”

“This works, because my dad is usually the highest in Manchester,” Laurie whispered, and Jamie laughed, looking the way he did at her on the train. As if she was . . . what did his mate call her? Exotic. Don’t admire me for this, she thought. None of it is about me.

Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” was on loud, the room a hubbub of dressed-up people, pretty much none of which Laurie knew.

They handed their coats over. Floor-to-ceiling windows displayed the city beyond at dusk, inside it was mink velvet modern sofas and white leather chairs, vertical tombstones of mirror breaking up the space. It was like a VIP airport lounge. A waitress with a tray of lowball glasses full of amber liquid and orange peel appeared, Laurie and Jamie lifted one each, sipped. It tasted to Laurie like three fingers of Cointreau.

“There she is! My little girl!”

Laurie heard her father’s familiar buoyant tones and allowed herself to be pulled into a hug, mumbling “congratulations, congratulations” on repeat as substitute for anything more meaningful to say. You didn’t need to be told Austin Watkinson made his money in a creative field: a very-well-preserved late fifties in immaculate designer labels, the mod hair, trim figure, violently expensive chestnut brogues.

She did the same with Nicola, who tottered over in a cloud of fruity perfume, clad in a rainbow sequin dress, volumized hair fanning out like a lion’s mane.

“God, you’re a bit of all right, who are you?” she said to Jamie, who smiled and shook hands with her. Laurie noticed Nicola was wearing an engagement diamond the size of a grape next to a wedding band.

“I’m with Laurie,” he said.

“Ahhhh, so you found someone!” her dad said. “I was ready to set you up with Harry over there, after you said you were going to be on the hunt tonight.”

Laurie blinked and realized what he was referring to—a remark on WhatsApp months ago: “Maybe I’ll meet someone at your tear-up.” Tactful of him to repeat it in front of her date. Laurie scratched her neck and tried to avoid Jamie’s pointed oh well whaddya know look.

“Good to meet you, son.” Austin pumped Jamie’s hand. “Hammer that bar, it’s free all night. Heeeeeeyyyy!” Her dad’s attention was pulled away by someone else behind them.

“I guess that solves the mystery of why I wasn’t needed for maneuvers, then,” Jamie said.

“Hardly! My dad talks a lot of rubbish.”

“Mmmm. Harry best not try anything.”

Laurie laughed.

Having been skeptical at first, Cloud 23 actually came into its own when there were no clouds, and the scene beyond the glass was a winter’s night. The streets were long sweeps of yellow, bluer lights from buildings, a jewel box of illuminations amid soft black. It made the city look so full of potential, so exciting.

“Wow,” Laurie said, nose almost to pane. “The view is really something. Like a Michael Mann film, huh.”

She turned to see if Jamie enjoyed the reference, and he was looking intently at her, not the great outdoors.

“Did you really not want me to come tonight? Have I clipped your wings?”

“No! That thing my dad said, he was repeating a message I sent before you and I had even”—she waved her hand—“you know. Started doing this.”

“Yeah, but given we’re not ‘doing this’ . . . I don’t like to think I’m closing off avenues to you.”

Was Jamie worrying he’d taken on a project with Laurie, one that wouldn’t end when the dating scam did? That they’d have to go through the motions of still socializing? That he was already trying to gently detach? She’d sort of known all along this was how it would feel when it came to an end, and yet it still made her feel empty.

“Jamie, I’m not your responsibility. You know that, don’t you? You don’t have to worry.”

Jamie frowned. Now safely through the door, she’d briefly thought they might have fun tonight, watching the Hogarthian gin hall scenes and squalid tableaus of her father’s life unfold. Looking at Jamie and his taut expression, she knew it was one of those nights when communication doesn’t flow and drink sits heavy.

“Are you regretting this? The showmance,” Jamie said, taking a swig of his welcome cocktail.

Laurie paused, before the glib automatic denial sprang to her lips. “Yes. A bit. But that’s nothing to do with you. It’s the situation at work, Dan and Michael’s paltry attacks.”

“You know they’re both in love with you, right?”

“What?” Laurie said, screwing up her face. “Nah. A fifty percent hard ‘nah,’ given what Dan did.”

Jamie was undeterred. “Don’t let them make you think that their problems are your problems. They are trying to do a head-wrecking number on you, to undermine you, and you have to resist.”

“Hah. I told my best friend something very similar the other day.”

“Were you right?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

Laurie had plans to slink out of the party in full swing and go for a late drink with Jamie elsewhere, but the lure of “just one more here” after they’d seen off two welcome cocktails was too strong. It was a long way down.

Laurie was at the bar when a late-middle-aged man at her elbow turned toward her. She felt she recognized him, and he said: “Hello, you,” as if he knew her.

Laurie didn’t reply.

It wasn’t often in life that a revelation came in an instant. They were usually delivered in stages, sometimes across years, and you had to do some self-assembly to make sense of them. But this man’s features, a ghost from Christmas past—he in a split second summed up why she had been so reluctant to come tonight. He encapsulated what was wrong with spending time in her father’s world.

Looking him in the face, she realized there was something she’d not looked at directly in a long, long time. Since it happened, in fact.

“What’re you having?” said the barman, and Laurie couldn’t remember a thing.

“Gin . . . and tonic and lager.”

“Which one?”

“Whichever,” Laurie said dully.

“Let me get these,” the man said.

“Are you . . . Pete?” Laurie said dumbly.

“Yeah! Crikey, how do you know that? Are you? Hang on, you’re not Austin’s girl, are you?”

It had downloaded from nowhere. He was called Pete. The sensation of looking at him was that of the bogeyman threat appearing in a nightmare, a leering ghostly visage between the bedstead posts. You tried to scream for help, but nothing came out.

A voice inside her said: You don’t have to stay here, you know. So she walked away.