Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

This edition published by Harper360 2015

Copyright © Mhairi McFarlane 2014

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Jacket design by Jessica Lacy Anderson

Cover images © CSA-Images/iStock

Mhairi McFarlane asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007549474

Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008130213

Version: 2015-04-16

Dedication

For Tara

One of the most heroic women I know

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Keep Reading – New Mhairi

Keep Reading – You Had Me at Hello

Keep Reading – Here’s Looking at You

Read on for more from Delia, Adam and Mhairi …

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Mhairi McFarlane

About the Publisher

One

Ann clomped over in her King Kong slippers, with a yoghurt, a spoon and a really annoyed expression.

‘Is that stuff in the Tupperware with the blue lid, yours?’

Delia blinked.

‘In the fridge?’ Ann clarified.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s stinking it out. What is it?’

‘Chilli prawns. It’s a Moroccan recipe. Leftovers from what I made for dinner last night.’

‘Well its smell has got right into my Müller Greek Corner. Can you not bring such aggressive foods into work?’

‘I thought it was just confident.’

‘It’s like egg sandwiches on trains. You’re not allowed them on trains. Or burgers on buses.’

‘Aren’t you?’

It was a bit surreal, being snack-shamed by a woman who was 1/7th mythical monkey. Ann wore the slippers because of extreme bunions. Her feet looked like they didn’t like each other.

‘No. And Roger wants a word,’ Ann concluded.

She went back to her seat, set the contaminated yoghurt down and resumed typing, hammering blows on the keyboard with stabbing forefingers. It made her shock of dyed purple-black hair tremble. Delia thought of the shade as Aubergine Fritter.

Ann’s policing of the office fridge was frightening. Despite being post-menopausal, she decanted her semi-skimmed into a plain container and labelled it ‘BREAST MILK’ to ward off thieves.

She was one of those women who somehow combined excess sentiment with extreme savagery. Ann had a framed needlepoint on her desk with the Corinthians passage about love, next to her list of exactly who owed what to the office tea kitty. For last year’s not-so-Secret Santa, she bought Delia a rape alarm.

Delia pushed out of her seat and made her way to Roger’s desk. Life as a Newcastle City Council press officer did not provide an especially inspiring environment. The pleasant view was screened by vertical nubbly slatted blinds in that porridge hue designed to make them look dirty before they were dirty, to save on cleaning costs. There were brown-tipped spider plants that looked as if they were trying to crawl off the shelving and had died, mid-attempt. The glaring yellow lights, built into the ceiling tiles’ foamy squares, made everything look like it was taking place in 1972.

Delia got on well enough with the rest of the quiet, predominantly forty-something staff, but geographically she was trapped behind Ann’s wall of misery. Conversations conducted across her inevitably got hijacked.

Delia crossed the office and arrived at Roger’s desk at the end of the room.

‘Ah, Delia! As our social media expert and resident sleuth, I have a game of cat and mouse for you,’ he said, pushing a few A4 printouts towards her.

She wasn’t sure about being christened the office’s ‘resident sleuth,’ just because she’d discovered the persistent odour in the ladies lavatory had come from an ‘upper decker’ left in one of the cisterns by a discontented male work experience placement who might have deep-rooted issues with women. It was a eureka! moment Delia could’ve done without.

Roger steepled his hands and drew breath, theatrically. ‘It seems we have a goblin.’

Delia paused.

‘You mean a mole?’

‘What do you call a person who goes on to the internet intentionally trying to annoy people?’

‘A wanker?’ Delia said.

Roger winced. He didn’t do swears.

‘No, I mean a concerted irritant of a cyborg nature.’

‘A robot?’ Delia said, uncertainly.

‘No! Did I mean cyborg? Cyberspace.’

‘Being rude to people online … A troll?’

‘Troll! That’s it!’

Delia inspected the printouts. They were local-interest-only stories based on council reports in the local paper. Nothing particularly startling, but then they usually weren’t.

‘So this individual, rejoicing in the anonymous moniker “Peshwari Naan”, starts trouble in the conversations underneath the Chronicle’s online stories,’ Roger said.

Delia scanned the paper again. ‘We can’t ignore it? I mean, there are a lot of trolls online.’

‘Ordinarily, we would,’ Roger said, holding a pen horizontally, as if he was Mycroft Holmes briefing MI6.

He took his job deathly seriously. Or rather, Roger took nothing lightly. ‘But it’s particularly vexatious in its nature. He invents quotes, fictitious quotes, from members of the council. It makes a mockery of these councillors, damages their reputations and derails the entire debate, based on a falsehood. The unwitting are sucked into his vortex of untruths. Take a look at this one, for example.’

He tapped a piece of paper on his desk – a recent story from the Newcastle Chronicle.

‘Council Set to Green-light Lapdancing Club,’ Delia read the headline aloud.

Roger picked the printout up: ‘Now, if you look at the comments below the story, our friend the sentient Indian side order claims—’ he put his glasses on, ‘I am not surprised at this development, given that Councillor John Grocock announced at the planning meeting on November 4th last year: “I will be first in the queue to get my hairy mitts on those jiggling whammers.”’

Delia’s jaw dropped. ‘Councillor Grocock said that?’

‘No!’ said Roger, irritably, taking his glasses off. ‘But that false premise sparks much idle chatter about his proclivities, as you will see. Councillor Grocock was not at all happy when he saw this. His wife’s a member of the Rotary club.’

Delia tried not to laugh, and failed when Roger added: ‘And of course, the choice of Councillor Grocock was designed to prompt further juvenile sniggering with regards to his name.’

Her helpless shaking was met with disappointed glaring from Roger.

‘Your mission is to find this little Cuthbert, and tell him in the most persuasive terms to cease and desist.’

Delia tried to regain her self-composure. ‘All we have to go on are his comments on the Chronicle’s website? Do we even know he’s a “he”?’

‘I know schoolboy humour when I see it.’

Delia wasn’t sure Roger could tell humour from a shoe, or a cucumber, or a plug-in air freshener for that matter.

‘Use any contacts you have, pull some strings,’ Roger added. ‘Use any means, foul or fair. We need to put a stop to it.’

‘Do we have any rights to tell him to stop?’

‘Threaten libel. I mean, try reason first. The main thing is to open a dialogue.’

Taking that as a no, they had no rights to tell him to stop, Delia made polite noises and returned to her seat.

Hunt The Troll was a more interesting task than writing a press release about the new dribbling water feature next to the Haymarket metro station. She flipped through further examples of Peshwari Naan’s work. Mr Naan seemed to have a very thorough knowledge of the council and a bee in his bonnet about it.

She toyed with the phone receiver. She could at least try Stephen Treadaway. Stephen was a twenty-something reporter for the Chronicle. He looked about twelve in his baggy suits, and had a funny kind of old-fashioned sexism that Delia imagined he’d copied from his father.

‘Ditzy Delia! What can I do you for?’ he said, after the switchboard transferred her.

‘I was wondering if I could beg a favour,’ Delia said, in her brightest, most ingratiating voice. Gah, press office work was a siege on one’s dignity sometimes.

‘A favour. Well now. Depends what you can do for me in return?’

Stephen Treadaway was definitely a little Cuthbert. He might even be what Roger called ‘a proper Frederick’.

‘Haha,’ Delia said, neutrally. ‘No, what it is, we have a problem with someone called Peshwari Naan on your message boards.’

‘Not our responsibility, you see.’

‘It is, really. You’re hosting it.’

Pause.

‘This person is posting a lot of lies about the council. We don’t have any argument with you. We’d like an email address for them so we can ask what’s what.’

‘Ah, no can do. That’s confidential.’

‘Can’t you just tell me what email he registered with? It’s probably Pilau at Hotmail, something anonymous.’

‘Sorry, darling Delia. Data Protection Act and all that jazz.’

‘Isn’t that what people are supposed to quote at you?’

‘Haha! Ten points to Gryffindor! We’ll make a journalist of you yet.’

Delia did more gritted-teeth niceties and rang off. He was right, they couldn’t give it out. She didn’t like being in the wrong when tussling with Stephen Treadaway.

She tried Googling ‘PeshwariNaan’ as one word, but she got tons of recipes. She attempted various permutations of Peshwari Naan and Newcastle City Council, but only got angry TripAdvisor reviews and a weird impenetrable blog.

She had welcomed a challenge, but this was suddenly looking like a nigh-on impossible task. She could go on the message boards and openly request him to contact her, but it wasn’t exactly invisible crisis management.

And was he a crisis? Peshwari was active but hardly that evil. Scrolling through the Chronicle’s news stories, it was clear that most people got he was joking and the replies were similarly silly.

Under a report about ‘Fury Over Bins’ Collection “encouraging rats”’, Peshwari claimed that Councillor Benton had started singing ‘Rat In Mi Kitchen’ by UB40.

Delia sniggered.

‘Something’s amusing you,’ Ann said, suspiciously.

‘It’s a troublemaker on the Chronicle site. Roger’s asked me to look into it.’

‘New frock?’ Ann added, uninterested in Delia’s response. Her eyes slid disapprovingly over Delia’s dragonfly-patterned Topshop number.

Ann clearly thought Delia’s outfits were unprofessionally upbeat. Aside from medicinal novelty slippers, she believed in simple, sober attire. Delia wore colourful swingy dresses, patterned tights and ballet shoes, and a raspberry-pink coat. Ann wore plain separates from Next. And gorilla feet.

People said Delia had a very distinctive, ladylike style. Delia was pleased and surprised at this, as it was mainly borne of necessity. Jeans and androgyny didn’t work well on her busty, hippy, womanly figure.

Years before she reached puberty, Delia realised that with her ginger hair, she didn’t have much choice about standing out. It wasn’t a tame strawberry blonde, it was blazing, rusty-nail auburn. She wore her long-ish style tied up, with a thick wedge of fringe, and offset the oyster-shell whiteness of her skin with wings of black liquid eyeliner.

With her wide eyes and girlish clothes, Delia was often mistaken for a student from the nearby university. Especially as she rode to work on her red bicycle. At thirty-three, she was rather pleased about this error.

Delia drummed her fingers on the desk. She had a strong feeling that Peshwari was male, bored, and thirty-ish.

His references were songs and TV shows she knew too. Hmmm. Where else might he be online? In her experience, message board warriors had always practised elsewhere. Twitter? She started to type. Wait. WAIT.

Yes – complete with avatar of a speckled flatbread, there was a Peshwari here. And he mentioned being a Geordie in his bio. (Snog On The Tyne.) She hit the GPS location on the tweets, praying to a benevolent God. They were sent from the web, and not only that – BAM! – a café in the city centre, Brewz and Beanz. A most distressing name for likers of proper spelling and good taste, she’d always thought. She knew the place – her boyfriend Paul called it Blow Your Beans.

She scrolled through the Naan’s timeline and noted they were usually posted at lunch hours and weekends. This was someone in an office, firewalled, annoyed, bored. She empathised. Project Naan kept her occupied for two hours, until the weekend’s start point arrived. Friday afternoon productivity in her office was never Herculean.

Well, Monday’s lunch destination was assured. A stake-out, that was much more exciting than the usual fare. She wouldn’t tell Roger just yet: no point bragging and then realising she’d happened across a different talking Naan altogether.

Delia headed into the loos to get herself ready for her evening out. She’d left the bike at home and got the bus in today. She changed into a small heel and a 50s-style rock’n’roll petticoat she’d brought with her to work, stuffed into a plastic bag. She shook it out and wriggled it on under her date-night attire dress.

The ruffled taffeta was a dusky lavender that poked out an inch below the hem and picked up on the pattern of the fabric. She was self-conscious once back among her colleagues, and bolted for her coat.

But not fast enough to evade Ann’s gimlet gaze.

‘What are you wearing?!’ she cackled.

‘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

‘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

‘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. But we’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.’

Delia paused. You can’t try to run the whole show. Let him have his way. She took his hand and followed him back down the bridge, arm once more through his, their pace now quicker, thoughts buzzing. Engaged.

Paul had once said to her, about the loss of his parents: you can still choose whether you’re going to be unhappy or not. Even in the face of something so awful, he said he’d started to recover when he realised it was a choice.

‘But what if so many bad things have happened to you, you’re unhappy and it’s not your fault?’ she said.

Paul replied: ‘How many people do you know where that’s the case? They’ve chosen gloom, that’s all. Every day, you get to choose.’

Delia realised two things during that conversation. 1) Part of the reason she loved Paul was his positivity. 2) From then on, she could spot Gloom Choosers. Her office had one or two.

So tonight, Delia thought, she could either dwell on the fact she’d never got a proposal, and that her offer to him instead had been met with some reluctance. That Paul was simply never going to be the kind of man to gaze into her eyes and tell her she set his world alight.

Or she could concentrate on the fact that she was walking hand-in-hand with her new fiancé to a pub in their wonderful home city to drink champagne and chatter about wedding plans, on a stomach full of coconutty curry.

She chose to be happy.

Four

‘They only do champagne by the bottle,’ Paul said, after they burst in to the warmth of the Crown Posada. Paul didn’t drink in places that hadn’t won CAMRA awards. They rubbed their hands and studied the laminated drinks menu as if they were at The Ritz.

‘Shall we bother with the fizz? Booze is booze is booze,’ Paul said.

Delia realised the evening as she’d imagined it wasn’t quite going to happen, but don’t force it, she thought to herself. You have your wedding day planning for all this stuff. (Wedding day planning! It was possible that Delia had a secret Pinterest board, covered with long-sleeved lace dresses and quirky licensed venues in the Newcastle area, and hand-tied bouquets of peonies, paperwhites and roses in ice-cream colours. At last, she could now go legit.)

She acquiesced cheerfully and Paul readied sharp elbows among the crowd to get their usual order, a bottle of Brooklyn Lager for him and a Liefmans raspberry beer for her. Paul sometimes worried they were ageing hipsters.

He motioned for Delia to grab a table and she retreated across the room to watch him waiting his turn at the bar, one eye on the action, the other playing with his phone. Nat King Cole’s ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)’ was crackling on the Posada’s ancient gramophone, competing with a roomful of lively inebriated conversation.

Paul’s scruffy good looks were even better when offset by something smarter, she thought, like tonight’s fisherman’s coat. She had an idea for a Paul Smith suit, tie and brogue combination for the wedding (the Pinterest board was busy), but she’d have to broach it carefully so Paul didn’t feel emasculated. She wanted him to be completely involved.

She knew the right way to pull him in – interest Paul in the drinks, then the music, and finally, the food.

Think of it as dinner at theirs, writ large, she’d say. Paul and Delia were big on having people to dinner. When Delia had moved into the house in Heaton, she’d been free to indulge all her nesting urges. Paul had invested in the house as a blank canvas, but with no particular idea of what to do with it. He liked that she liked decorating, and a perfect deal was struck.

When other people her age were spending on clothes, clubs and recreational drugs, Delia was saving for a fruit-picker’s ladder she could paint the perfect sailboat blue, or trawling auctions for mirrored armoires that locked with keys that had tassels. She knew she was an old-before-her-time square but when you’re happy, you don’t care.

Delia was also an enthusiastic home cook, and Paul always had wholesaler-size piles of drink from the bar. Thus they were the first among their peers with a welcoming, grown-up house.

Many a Saturday night ended in a loud, messy singalong with their best friends Aled and Gina, with Paul acting as DJ.

In fact, Delia had wondered whether to throw an engagement party. She had recently ordered some original 1970s cookbooks and was enjoying making retro food: scampi with tartare sauce, Black Forest gateau. She fantasised about a kitsch Abigail’s Party buffet.

Should her family come to that do? Delia would wait to call her parents, leave it until tomorrow. She would love to tell them now, to make it more real. But she couldn’t bear the thought that Paul didn’t have an equivalent call to make. Not even to his brother, what with the time difference.

Her phone rippled with a text. Paul. She looked up in surprise. He was playing it cool, pocketing his phone as he gave their order to the bar man.

Delia grinned an idiotic grin, feeling the joy roll through her. Oh ye of little faith. She had her moment. He’d needed time to get used to it, that’s all. There was a romantic in him. She slid the unlock bar, typed her code (her birthday, Paul’s birthday) and read the words.

C. Something’s happened with D and I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else. She’s proposed. Don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow? P Xx

Delia sat stock still, the weight of the phone heavy in her palm. Suddenly, nothing made sense. She had to work through the discordant information, line by line, as her stomach swung on monkey bars.

‘Don’t know what to do’ punched her in the heart.

Then there were the kisses at the end of the message. Paul was not an electronic kisser. Delia was privileged to get a small one. And she was his closest family.

But what was so frightening was the intimate tone of the message. A voice coming through it that wasn’t Paul’s, or Paul as she knew him.

She spoke sternly to herself. Delia. Stop being wilfully stupid. Add the sum up to its total. This is clearly meant for another woman. The Other Woman.

‘I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’ Some faceless, nameless stranger had this size of a stake in their lives? Delia felt as if she was going to throw up.

Paul put the drinks down on the table and dragged the chair out opposite her.

‘I like the ale in here but they need to step the service up. They’ve no rush in them.’ Paul paused, as Delia stared dully at him. ‘You OK?’

She wanted to say something smart, pithy, wounding. Something that would slice the air in two, the same way Paul’s text had just karate-chopped her life into Before and After.

Instead she said, glancing back down at her phone, ‘Who’s C?’

Paul looked at the mobile, then back at Delia’s expression again. He went both red and white at the same time, the colour of a man Delia had once sat next to on a National Express coach who’d had a coronary in the Peaks.

She’d been the only passenger who knew First Aid, so she ended up kneeling in mud at the roadside doing CPR, trying not to retch at tasting his Tennant’s Extra.

She would not be giving Paul mouth-to-mouth.

‘Delia,’ he said, with an agonised expression. It was a sentence that started and stopped. Her name and his voice didn’t sound the same. From now on, everything was going to be different.

Five

Art didn’t prepare you for the smaller moments between the big moments, Delia thought. Life had no editing suite to shape the narrative into something that flowed.

If the arrival of Paul’s text had happened onscreen, after the close-up of Delia’s horrified face there’d have been a jump cut to her bowling away down the street, stumbling on her heels (rom com), slinging plates around their kitchen (soap opera), angrily filling a battered clasp-lock suitcase (music video), or staring out across the blustery Tyne (art house).

Instead, what happened next undercut the momentous awfulness with boring practicality.

It was established in words of few syllables that Paul had sent the message to the person it was about, rather than the person it was for. A fairly common cock-up that usually had less dramatic impact. There was a surreal moment when a wild-eyed Paul rambled about only sending it to Delia the second time when he thought it hadn’t sent, or something. As if that could make it better and it could somehow be un-seen.

It begged a lot of other questions and answers, ones they could no longer exchange in a busy pub.

Delia managed to quell her urge to vomit. Then she had to get home.

While she considered leaving Paul on his own, looking at two full glasses and a swinging pub door, he’d only follow her. If she succeeded in storming solo into a taxi, all she’d do at home was wait to confront him anyway. It seemed a self-defeating gesture of defiance that would achieve nothing more than a double cab fare.

So she had to endure a silent, agonising journey in a Hackney, pressed against the opposite side of the seat from Paul, staring through the smudged window, occasionally catching the curious face of the driver in his rearview mirror.

When she put her key in the door, there was the familiar bump, scrape and snuffle of their dog Parsnip on the other side. Paul, obviously glad of the distraction, shushed and petted him, making Delia want to scream: Don’t be nice to the dog, you huge bastard faker of niceness.

Parsnip was a tatty old incontinent Labrador-Spaniel cross they’d got from a rescue centre, seven years ago.

‘We can’t place this one, he pisses,’ the man had told them, as they stroked the sad, googly eyed, snaggle-toothed Parsnip. ‘Could that be because you tell people he pisses?’ Paul said. ‘We have to,’ the man replied. ‘Otherwise you’ll just bring him back. His name should be Boomerang, not Parsnip.’

‘No bladder control and named after a root vegetable. Poor sod,’ Paul said, and sighed, looking at Delia. ‘I think he’s coming home with us, isn’t he?’

And right there was why Delia fell in love with Paul. Funny, kind, Paul, who understood the underdog – and was sleeping with someone else.

Delia pulled her clanking work bag from her shoulder and dropped onto the leather sofa, the oxblood Chesterfield she’d once spent all day pecking at an eBay auction to win. She didn’t have the will to take her coat off. Paul threw his on the arm of the sofa.

He asked her in hushed tones if she wanted a drink, and again she felt like she hadn’t been given a copy of the script.

Should she start screaming now? Later? Was the drink offer outrageous, should she tell him he couldn’t have one? She simply shook her head, and heard the opening of cupboards, the plink of the glass on the worktop, the clink of the bottle. The glug of … whisky? She could tell Paul took a hard swig before he re-entered the room.

He sat down heavily on the frayed yellow velvet sofa, at a right angle to where she was sitting.

‘Say something, Dee.’ He sounded gratifyingly shaky.

‘What am I supposed to say? And don’t call me Dee.’

Silence. Apart from the clatter of Parsnip’s unclipped toenails on tiles, as he skittered back from the kitchen and settled into his basket in the hallway.

She was expected to open this conversation?

‘How did it start?’

Paul stared at the fireplace. ‘She came into the bar one night.’

The same way I did, Delia thought.

‘When?’

‘About three months ago.’

‘And?’

‘We got chatting.’

There was a pause. Paul had a cardiac arrest pallor again. It looked as if giving this account was as bad as the original discovery. Good.

‘You got chatting, and next thing you know, your penis is inside her?’

‘I never meant for this to happen, Dee … Delia. It’s like some nightmare alternate reality. I can’t believe it myself.’

‘How did you end up shagging her?!’ Delia screamed and Paul almost started with fright. Offstage, Parsnip gave a small squeak. Paul put his glass down with a bump, and his palms together in his lap.

‘She kept coming in. We flirted. Then there was a Friday lock-in, with her friends. She came and found me when I was bottling up. I knew she liked me but … it was a total shock.’

‘You had sex with her in the store cupboard?’

‘No!’

‘You did, didn’t you?’

‘No, I absolutely didn’t,’ Paul said, without quite enough conviction, shaking his head. Delia knew the answer he wouldn’t give: not full sex. But more than a kiss. What Ann called mucky fumbles.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Celine.’

A sexy name. A cool name. Celine created visions of some bobbed, Gitane-smoking Left Bank beauty in black cigarette pants.

Oh God, this hurt. A fresh wound every time, as if she was being whipped by someone who knew exactly how long to leave the sting to burn before lashing again.

‘She’s French?’

‘No …’ He met her eyes. ‘Her mum likes Celine Dion.’

If Paul thought he could risk cute ‘you’d like her, you’d be friends’ touches, with information that had come from pillow talk, Delia feared she’d get violent towards him.

‘How old is she?’

Paul dropped his eyes again. ‘She’s twenty-four.’

‘Twenty-four?! That’s pathetic.’ Delia had never disliked her own age, but now she boiled with insecurity at the twenty-fourness of being twenty-four, compared to her woolly old thirty-three. She’d never worried that men liked younger women, and yet here they were, living the cliché.

Twenty-four. One year older than Delia had been when she met Paul. He’d traded her in. Ten-year anniversary – time to find someone ten years younger.

‘How many times have you had sex?’

Delia had never wondered if she was the kind of person who’d want to know nothing, or everything, when in this situation. Turned out, it was everything.

‘I don’t know.’

‘So many you’ve lost track?’

‘I didn’t keep count.’

‘Same thing.’

A pause. So much sex Paul couldn’t quantify it. She could probably tell him how many times they’d slept together this year, if she thought about it.

‘Where did you have sex with her?’

‘Her house. Jesmond. She’s a mature student.’

Delia could picture it; she’d lived there as a student too. Lightbulb twisted with one of those metallic Habitat garlands that looked like a cloud of silvered butterflies. Crimson chilli fairy lights draped like a necklace across the headboard. Ikea duvet. Bare bodies underneath it, giggling. Groaning. She felt sick again.

‘How did you hide it? I mean, where did I think you were?’

To have had no idea was genuinely startling. She’d always been so proud of the trust between her and Paul. ‘All that opportunity, aren’t you ever worried?’ some women used to say. And she’d laugh. Not in the slightest. Cheating wasn’t something they did.

‘I’ve been leaving work earlier some nights. Delia, please, can we …’ Paul put his face in his hands. Hands that had been in places she’d never imagined.

She looked down at her special anniversary dress with the dragonflies. She and Paul shared a home, a wavelength, a pet, a past. They were always honest, or so she thought. Any passing fancies on either side were running jokes between them, and could be admitted in the safety of knowing there was no real risk. There was leeway, trust, a long leash. Paul and Delia. Delia and Paul. People aspired to have what they had.

‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia said.

‘Can we not …?’

‘Can we not be having this awkward conversation about all the times you’ve had sex with someone else? That relied on you, not me, didn’t it?’

She felt as if Paul had let an intruder into their lives, a third person into their bed. It was a total, bewildering, senseless betrayal from the one person she was supposed to be able to count on. Why? She didn’t want to question herself – it was Paul who should face interrogation – but she couldn’t help it.

Would it have been different if I’d been different? Made you feel less secure? Lost a stone? Gone out more? Gone on top more often?

‘When it started, it was like an out-of-body experience,’ Paul said, and Delia opened her mouth to say something about it surely being a very in-body experience, and so Paul rattled on fast. ‘It was disbelief at what I was doing, that I even could do it. I wasn’t looking for it, I swear. You and I, we’re so solid …’

‘We were,’ Delia corrected him, and Paul looked anguished.

‘And – I don’t know what happened. It was as if all of a sudden I’d crossed a line and there was no going back. I hated myself but I couldn’t stop.’

Yeah, they’d come back to that, the stopping, Delia thought.

‘What’s she like in bed?’ Delia persisted.

Paul squirmed.

‘I’ve never compared.’

‘Start now.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was she like me?’

‘No!’

‘So, different?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Better?’

‘No.’

‘Would you tell me if she was?’

‘… I don’t know. But she isn’t.’

‘Is this something you’ve wanted for a while?’

‘No! God, no. It just happened.’

‘It doesn’t happen. You make a decision to do something like that for a reason. I mean, other women must’ve come on to you and you’ve said no? You told me you did.’

‘I did. I don’t know why this happened.’

‘She was too attractive to pass up?’

Paul shook his head.

‘I didn’t see it coming I guess, and then somehow, when I was drunk, it was on.’

‘What were you going to say to her tomorrow?’

For once Paul looked nonplussed.

Delia quoted: ‘“She’s proposed and I don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow?”’

Paul looked at the floor.

Right on cue, there was a tiny treacherous little mechanical hiccup from the direction of Paul’s discarded coat. They both knew what it was: Celine’s reply.

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.

Eight

‘I see you’ve got something less smelly,’ Ann said, by way of Monday-morning greeting.

A wan Delia was unpacking her lunch on to her desk: cling-filmed ham and gherkin sandwich squares, salt and vinegar Hula Hoops, waxy Granny Smith.

‘Oh. Yeah,’ Delia said absently, registering Ann’s triumphant smile and belatedly remembering the spicy prawn bollocking.

Delia wouldn’t be explaining that all her pots and pans and exotic odorous ingredients were back at her house in Heaton which she’d fled on Saturday morning. This was a Hexham cupboards’ effort.

She still couldn’t eat but she didn’t want to worry her mum. She felt her concern when Delia’s gluey bowl of macaroni cheese was returned having been vaguely tampered with, as opposed to eaten.

Delia usually turned up with a Ziploc bag of spices to customise her parents’ cuisine to her tastes. Her parents obviously wondered who this floppy, quiet, appetite-less imposter was.

She placed her phone on her desk and saw she had a text: the umpteenth from Paul.

Please answer my calls. We need to talk. Px

The standard issue one small kiss, Delia thought, remembering how Celine merited the frankly promiscuous hand-in-the-bra quantity of one big, one small. She felt revolted.

Would it always be like this? Could she ever see their relationship free of this stain? She only knew there was a huge hole in her middle that you could see the sky through, like a surrealist painting.

Delia gave thanks that she was nowhere near close enough to anyone in her office to have confided Friday’s plan.

No one was asking to see the Art Deco square emerald and diamond cluster she wasn’t wearing, no one was demanding to hear how she had worded her proposal, or Paul’s reaction, or the hoped-for date of the wedding that wasn’t happening.

There was only one person who knew about Delia’s plans last Friday, and the inevitable email arrived within an hour. They’d have talked during the weekend, but Emma was in Copenhagen for a whistle-stop three day holiday. She did that a lot. They mostly conducted their friendship via email nowadays.

From: Emma Berry

Subject: Well …?!

How did it go, future Mrs Rafferty? (I’d like to think you’d keep Moss but I bet you won’t, you surrendered, cupcake apologist Stepford.) Can I see my bridesmaid dress yet? (No bias satin with spaghetti straps that’s designed for fatless flamingos, I look like Alfred Hitchcock at the moment.) X

In another universe, one where Paul had concentrated harder on who he was sending his texts to, or better still, was turning round to twenty-four-year-olds and saying ‘Woah, I’m taken,’ Delia was giggling in purest delight at these words, rather than wincing.

Delia didn’t want to tell Emma. Emma adored Paul, Paul adored Emma. ‘Can’t you clone him, or do some lifelike android thing,’ was Emma’s refrain.

He’d sweep her into a bear hug when she visited and make her his special recipe scrambled eggs, always keeping her glass topped up. Delia would spend the whole time refereeing good-natured debate between two highly opinionated people, enjoying every second. There was nothing as satisfying as two people you loved independently, loving each other.

Pulling Paul’s statue down was no pleasure at all, although it seemed like the kind of savage cold comfort she should be entitled to.

With heavy heart and hands, Delia opened a reply she could scarcely believe she was typing.

Hi E. It went like this: I proposed. Paul said yes, not particularly enthusiastically. Then we went for drinks, and he sent a text to his mistress saying ‘oh fuck, Delia wants to marry me’ to me by mistake. Turns out he’s been shagging a student for the last three months. So I’ve moved out to my parents and he’s asking for me to stay, but I’m not really sure what’s going on. Hard to tell what Paul wants. Or what I want, now. How was your weekend? (BTW, just to be clear – the wedding is off.) (But for the record, I’d never dress you badly, what are we: amateurs?) Xx

The reply was sent from BlackBerry, within three minutes.

Delia, what? Seriously? What?! Can I call you? Ex

Thanks but maybe not right now. Sour tits Ann would die of schadenfreude earwig joy. Maybe at lunch? 1.30? X

Yes. FUCK. E X

Delia wasn’t sure she should be spending her lunch hour sobbing on the phone, but Emma wouldn’t be put off for long. Emma was a corporate lawyer for a big firm in London and pursued an agenda with a dedication Delia reserved for pursuing Crème Eggs when in season.

Their lives had taken very different directions since university and Delia was so grateful they’d met in that little window of egalitarian opportunity. That brief space between adolescence and adulthood when it didn’t matter that Emma was high-powered alpha and Delia was domesticated beta, only that they’d been put in rooms next door to each other in halls of residence. Delia would be completely terrified meeting Emma, as they were now. As it was, she remembered younger Emma trying to bleach her cut-off denim mini by pouring lemon Domestos over it, or getting off with a gentleman at the Student Union known as Captain Tongue, three Fridays in a row.

Delia stared unseeing at words on a screen about the council’s new tree-planting drive until noon approached, and the chance to stalk Peshwari Naan. She’d forgotten about him in all the turmoil, and was hugely glad of the excuse to escape the office and breathe fresh air. It’d be an opportunity to call Emma. Although as soon as she was on her way to the café, she felt the risk of thinking, and weeping. Oh no – and she was passing the university, and its students.

Every single girl who entered her line of sight was a possible Celine. Delia’s eyes darted left and right as her nerves snapped. Did Celine know who she was? Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us?

Her. Us.

Delia nearly broke into a run to reach the coffee shop, wrenching open the door as if pursued by wolves.

She got herself a flat white and took a seat in the window with a good view of the room. There was a trustafarian-looking girl with dreads, typing on a MacBook Air, and three Japanese students huddled round an iPhone – no one with plausible Naan potential. Before, she thought she’d love a stake-out; today, she was listless. It was a countdown to speaking to Emma.

Delia’s mind drifted, as she toyed with her sugar wrapper.

Clichés about the aftermath of being cheated on were coming true, she noticed.

For example, she used to think the ‘it’s the lying that hurts’ line about affairs was slightly wishful. Really? Pretty sure it’d be the tongues and the hands and the frantic pulling at clothes and the groping and licking and gasping and grasping and sharing a shuddering climax that’d most bother me.

And while the thought of Paul having illicit intercourse with Celine was so horrific as to make her nauseous, unexpectedly, it wasn’t the worst pain. He’d had plenty of girlfriends before Delia – the thought of him having sex with another woman could be assimilated, however agonising it was. What Delia couldn’t begin to reconcile was the eerie, disorientating sense that she hadn’t known Paul the way she thought she had.

Take the conversation on their anniversary meal in Rasa, for example. He’d blithely mocked the younger generation’s dating habits and implied he’d be at sea if he was back on that scene. Meanwhile, he was confidently knocking off a twenty-four-year-old. Oh my God: and the remarks about intimate waxing. He knew this from a firsthand encounter with a lady’s bald part? Delia couldn’t bear to contemplate it.

That discussion had been gratuitous. Paul had voluntarily done an impersonation of a person he wasn’t, for her benefit. She tried to tell herself he’d been so scared of her finding out, that he’d overdone it. But it was more than that. It was treating Delia as a dupe.

She now recalled a few times recently that he’d grumped about being left to do all the bottling up at the end of a shift. I’m too nice a boss. These were times the too-nice boss had been in bed across town with another woman.

It was accomplished, bravura bullshittery. His deceit had been conducted so artlessly, all as part of Paul’s charming patter. Who exactly was she in love with?

Did any of his staff know? They might’ve had some idea, at these lock-ins. Did Aled and Gina know? Aled and Gina. She couldn’t believe it had taken this long to wonder. They’d declined the last dinner party, she remembered.

Had they cancelled out of awkwardness? Had Paul told Aled, in a drunken ‘Mate, I’ve messed up’ confidential?

She couldn’t pretend she was on her A-game, as time alone meant time thinking about her broken engagement, yet she saw precisely no one who could conceivably be Naan for the hour that she staked out Brewz and Beanz.

The only gang on a laptop now was a shoal of squawky teenage girls in private school uniforms, and whenever she passed them, ostensibly to get a stirrer or a sugar, she saw Facebook on their screen.

The Naan could be a member of staff, she supposed, tapping away out of sight in a backroom office. But his or her activity was unlikely to be confined to between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., if so. She checked his timeline her phone: no Naan tweets.

The search for answers would continue, in more than one area of her life. How ironic: Delia the ‘resident sleuth’, who hadn’t noticed her other half had another life.

Nine

‘I’m struggling to get my head around this,’ Emma said down the phone, as Delia wiped tears from under her eyes and sniffed loudly and snottily as she plodded back to the office.

‘Me too.’

‘Why? Early midlife crisis?’

‘I don’t think he’s in any crisis. Or he wasn’t. I think a hot student threw herself at him and he went for it.’

How long would it have gone on if she hadn’t found out? Even if he was going to break it off after the proposal, that was led by Delia’s decision-making, not Paul’s. Perhaps her proposal forced him into ending it with Celine, when he didn’t want to.

‘Did you see any signs at all?’ Emma said. ‘I thought everything was as good as ever between you.’

Emma had a squeaky baby voice. Every single clue about her was misleading. The cute name, the cherubic, wholesome tavern wench face with rosy cheeks, the sleek ‘lacrosse at Malory Towers’ yellow bob. In fact, she was one part raucous socialite to two parts terrifying litigator.

Emma knew that her forcefulness came as a surprise and she used it to good effect in her job. She even played up to it, with her Boden dresses and Mary Jane shoes. ‘They think they’re dealing with Shirley Temple and discover it’s more Temple of Doom.’

‘Nope, no signs at all. Zero. Which makes it worse. I’m officially stupid and he’s a really devious liar,’ Delia said.

‘You’re not the first person to not know your partner’s being unfaithful. It’s not your fault. Paul, though. I can’t believe it. I’m so bloody angry with him. He knows what he’s got in you.’

‘Does he?’ Delia said, miserably. She was ashamed of him, and annoyed she felt the pang of protectiveness. ‘Everything I thought I knew was a lie.’

‘Not everything. You’re staying at home?’

‘For the time being.’

‘Do you want him back?’

‘I don’t know,’ Delia raised her eyes to the cloudy heavens. ‘I honestly don’t know. He says he’ll end it with her, but I don’t know what to think.’

‘Does he say it was only sex?’

‘Yeah,’ Delia said with a shrug. It wasn’t how that text sounded. ‘Oh my God, you’re getting married to her? What does this mean for us?’ Delia had never had an affair – perhaps they were always this febrile and needy, even when they were only about banging.

‘But he would, wouldn’t he?’ Delia continued. ‘It’s a lot less trouble to choose me rather than her. That’s the awful thing. I’m not sure of him in any way.’

‘You do have ten years of history and a home. He loves you.’

‘Ten years that’s culminated in me wanting to marry him, and him wanting to sleep with someone else. The reviews are in.’

‘How easy will it be to get your money out of the house, if you do split up?’

Emma knew how much Delia loved the house, and that Delia had co-paid the mortgage for long enough that a chunk of it was hers. Her lawyerly mind usually leaped straight to practicalities.

‘Not very. I don’t think Paul has the money set aside to give me my equity. The bar’s needed a lot of work recently.’

‘And then there’s calculating what you spent doing it up. Oh, I am so sorry for you, Delia. This is so shit. Can I come and visit?’

‘I’d love you to but there’s no space in Hexham. Shall I come down?’

‘Definitely. As soon as you like. This weekend! I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to run into a meeting …’

‘No, go!’ Delia made her farewells as her mobile pipped at her with a waiting call from Aled. She switched to answer it before she knew what she was doing.

‘Hi, Dee. How are you bearing up?’ he said, stiffly.

‘Hi,’ Delia said. ‘So Paul told you?’

‘Yeah. Only about a month ago. I told him to knock it on the head.’

Pause. ‘I meant he told you I knew.’

‘Oh. Fuck,’ Aled said.

Unlike his best mate, dissembling wasn’t Aled’s forte. A big bear of a man with black hair and beard and hands like shovels, he had the unlikely job of wedding photographer. It happened by default: he started as general freelance, then most of the work he got was nuptials. Delia had been going to ask him to cover theirs.

‘You knew a month ago, and you didn’t tell me?’ Delia said, warm with resentment and shame. Here was another stage of the post-revelation process. Humiliation.

‘I know, I’m so sorry. He would’ve killed me. I couldn’t get in between you.’

‘Why did he tell you?’

Delia could hear Aled’s reluctance and discomfort whooshing right down the phone line, but he’d not left himself with an escape route.

‘He. Err. He didn’t exactly choose to tell me. I saw him with her. Then he had to tell me what was going on.’

‘What? When?’

Delia came to a standstill, open-mouthed. Paul had been that indiscreet?

‘I caught them in a store room. I went in for last orders.’

‘Caught them?’ Delia said, feeling faint. ‘Shagging?’

‘No! Kissing.’

The store room was obviously Paul and Celine’s enchanted kingdom. Delia had only been in there when heaving dusty crates full of mini bottles of mixers around. An overwhelming desire to know what Celine looked like gripped her, to complete the picture. The picture of her and Paul locked in a passionate tongue-wrestling session, her back pressed against a shelf of Britvic tomato juice and soda.

Delia was speechless. If she tried to speak, the noises would be hysterical and indistinct.

‘Me and Gina both thought he was an idiot.’

Gina knew? Their closest friends in this city? Delia already knew it didn’t matter what time passed or what rationalisations they gave her. Nothing would ever be quite the same between them again.

She felt as if everything in her life had belonged to Paul, that she was only sharing with him. In separation, when you had to divvy up your possessions, the fact of his ownership was unavoidable.

Uncovering an affair wasn’t a one big fact headline story. It was like Matroyshka dolls, lies inside lies inside lies.

‘Paul’s told me he doesn’t want to lose you,’ Aled said.

‘Oh yeah, he obviously doesn’t want to lose me, you can see that. So, so careful. I feel like a precious crystal vase.’

‘Gina is worried you’ll blame her, too.’

Delia muttered that it was only Paul’s fault, while feeling slightly rankled she was doing the excusing and the ‘make feel better’ of the conversation.

‘Really though, Delia, think about it. We couldn’t take sides. We had to let Paul tell you.’

‘Did he tell you he was going to tell me?’

Aled paused. ‘He said he’d finish it with this girl and that was that.’

This answered the question about why Aled was making the condolence call, not Gina. She knew the lack of female solidarity was too glaring. They were both going to keep schtum about this, forever. Sitting there through the speeches on their wedding day, clapping and toasting them and knowing that Delia had been betrayed.

She wanted to say: You did pick a side – Paul’s. But she didn’t have the stomach for more fallings-out.

Then, with nonchalant brutality, Aled added: ‘The Paris trip is incredibly stupid, I told him that.’

‘The what?’ Delia said, flat with dread.

‘Some plan, Cel— she – wanted him to go to Paris, to get over this. You have to talk to Paul about it. I’m sorry.’

Aled sounded as if he’d have given anything not to have had this conversation now. How did he think Delia felt?

Delia could only make a ‘Nmmm, hmmm, yep, bye’ sound before she ran to the undergrowth in the gardens by the office and retched black coffee and bile into the earth, hearing birds tweeting around her and the odd murmur from an onlooker.

Somewhere behind her, a middle-aged woman said, ‘Monday afternoon! The amount students drink these days is disgusting, Stanley.’

‘I’ve got gastric flu, actually,’ Delia said, turning round, eyes pink, but the woman was shaking her head and walking away.

Delia briefly contemplated pulling a sickie – she looked bad enough for even Ann to give her the afternoon off – then imagined going home and staring at four walls in her old box bedroom in Hexham. With her worried parents knowing she was psychically, not physically, ill.

Delia repaired the damage as best she could, squinting into her compact with the sunlight behind her, and rootling out an Extra Strong mint to combat the vomit smell. She drifted back into the office like a pale wraith.

Paul was going to Paris? Did he mean what he’d said about ending it, or did he simply feel he had to say it was her he wanted, when confronted?

Delia had to now admit something else to herself. She’d always sensed she didn’t quite have his full attention. She doubted that Paul would have picked her out, or fought for her, or even been too cut up if she’d wobbled on her way in those red shoes, a few months down the line.

Deciding to propose fitted a pattern she’d not wanted to examine until now. She had built a life around Paul, but he hadn’t moved an inch. The decorating told the story in microcosm: he was happy for her to get on with it, but that wasn’t the same as properly participating.

He was a showman and a show off, and he was a little more in love with himself than he was with her.

It would take something fairly startling to concentrate Delia’s mind on her work: a bomb scare, or Ann being pleasant. However, at not long after five o’clock, she got something startling enough. An email so strange, she started in her seat, and turned to scan the room behind her.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

Are you looking for me?

Ten

It was one thing to search for someone who used the phrase ‘womble’s toboggan’ – Delia had to consult the Viz Profanisaurus on that one – in comments on newspaper message boards.

It was entirely another thing to suddenly find yourself in the crosshairs of some sort of omniscient online troublemaker. The back of Delia’s neck grew cold and she shivered.

She couldn’t think of any possible way this man (was it a man?) had found her. Yes, she’d been in the café, but how had he known she was looking for him? She’d not committed a single keystroke to discussing him online, so even if he’d hacked her email (and how would he do that?) there was no smoking gun. And how would s/he recognise her anyway?

The principle of Occam’s Razor, Delia told herself; the simplest answer was usually the right one.

So the Naan could be one of her colleagues, who’d overheard the briefing with Roger?

Only thing was, there was surely no one in this office of long-servers and clocker-offers who had anything approaching that level of disrespect for their salary.

I mean, was it polite Gavin, forty-three, who liked Dire Straits, wakeboarding, his kids, and hated his wife? Nope. Or maybe Jules, fifty-one – married, no kids, saving for a Greek Island hopping month off to celebrate her thirtieth wedding anniversary soon? Hardly.

The idea they were firing up private email in office hours to endanger their income stream was downright crazy. And they certainly weren’t Viz readers.

And yet. Peshwari Naan’s words glowed stark black and white in front of her. Delia could go straight to Roger with this email address evidence, and say ‘Voila, here’s a way to talk to him.’ But something stopped her, and she wasn’t sure what. Possibly pride. A little longer, and she might solve this mystery and produce a stellar result.

After fifteen minutes internal debate, Delia opened a reply.

Yes I am. How did you know I was looking for you?

No reply, though she nervily hit refresh on her inbox every two minutes until it was time to go home. Home to Hexham.

Her phone rang mere minutes after she left the office, and she realised Paul was watching the clock, anticipating her being free. She answered. They had to speak some time.

‘Delia, at last.’

‘What do you want?’

‘To see if we can meet up.’

‘I don’t want to. We haven’t got anything to discuss.’

‘I understand how angry you are but I don’t agree that we don’t have anything to talk about.’

‘Like Paris, you mean?’

There was a rewarding moment of stunned silence, then Paul muttered:

‘Jesus, Aled, you absolute twat.’ Louder: ‘Yes, Paris, we can talk about that. How I’m not going. I’ve finished with Celine.’

‘Sorry to hear. Hope you’re both OK. Hugs.’

Paul sounded shocked, and Delia wondered how small a mouse she must’ve been in this relationship for him to not expect this depth of fury and hurt at him sleeping with another woman. Did he think she’d sling the Le Creuset set about a bit, sob, and then eventually allow him to put his strong arms around her? She felt more like committing a blunt trauma head injury with the cast-iron casserole dish.

‘I know you need time. I’m here if you want to talk,’ Paul said.

‘You seem to assume I’m coming back, one time or another.’

‘I’m not assuming anything! I’m letting you know what’s happened and where I stand. Glad I did, given Aled’s obviously not a reliable go-between.’

So winning, so plausible, so very Paul. The Paul who’d lied through his teeth. What had Aled said? ‘I told him Paris was a stupid idea.’ It sounded as if Paul had initially told Aled he’d considered going, even if he’d rejected it later.

‘Aled said he’d had to talk you out of it.’

‘That’s … ! What? I’m so angry at Aled for this. I can only think he blurted and then thought he had to say that to you, to compensate. You know what he’s like, tact’s like a foreign language to him sometimes.’

‘Who knows? Not me. Bye, Paul.’

Delia couldn’t act as if she and Paul still had that shared ground, and were confidantes.

She had considered Paul’s explanation already: that Aled, conscious he’d put his not-inconsiderably-large feet in it earlier in the phone call, was trying to win brownie points by making Delia think he’d disapproved enough to intervene.

Delia knew what she was doing. She was trying to knit the wound back together almost instantly: to find a way out, so Paul’s behaviour wasn’t as bad as she feared. Delia wanted to believe him, rather than Aled. She stopped herself, but not before she’d shown that her instincts to side with Paul remained in place.

Delia was going to have to subdue impulses like this. She’d trusted him absolutely, without question, and look where it had got her. Now, she had questions – and absolutely no trust.

Eleven

Ralph was behind his closed bedroom door, rapping ‘Dis dat prime SHIT!’ to himself and bumping into furniture, so Delia decided he sounded quite caffeine-wired and was probably OK for a cup of tea.

She would’ve asked him to help her to track down Peshwari Naan, only Paul had always gently mocked her for thinking Ralph was an I.T. supremo. ‘He plays loads of games, Dee, he’s not an expert. That’s like expecting someone who has the telly on all day to write you The Sopranos, or fix the reception.’

As she turned to head back downstairs, she saw that their mum had washed his royal-blue-and-yellow-striped chip shop tabard and left it neatly folded outside his door.

Delia had tried to have motivational talks about seeking alternative employment with Ralph, but they always fell on deaf ears.

‘Do you enjoy work?’ was one tack she used. ‘No, that’s why they call it work,’ Ralph gurgle-shriek laughed.

‘Wouldn’t you like to use your brain more?’ Delia said, and Ralph shrugged. ‘Do you like your work?’

He had her there.

Delia wasn’t fired up by writing press releases about school litter-picking drives or changes to the traffic light signalling in Gosforth. Her job paid for her life when she wasn’t at work, that was all.

Ralph said he was doing the same, it was just that his occupation involved adding the green dye to vats of grey marrowfat peas, or dunking wire baskets of raw potato slices into bubbling fat.

From time to time, Delia appealed to her parents to help her cause. Their view was that Ralph wasn’t in any trouble, and seemed happy: he’d move out eventually. They weren’t ambitious for their kids, and Delia usually liked that.

On occasion though, she mildly resented it. A boot up the bum wasn’t always a bad thing, but hassling Ralph felt like prodding a gentle creature through the bars of its cage, and it’d never bite you back.

She plodded downstairs and headed towards the sticky-sealed UPVC back door, cup of tea in one hand – tea was the currency at her parents’; like Buddhists bringing gifts, you must always bear tea – and crossed the garden to her dad’s shed. It was more of a small summerhouse, and full of the forest floor smell of wood shavings.

Her dad was at his workbench with a piece of oak that had been smoothed and planed into a crest, presumably one day to be part of a bed or a wardrobe.

‘Thanks, love,’ he said, putting his goggles on his head and accepting a mug of milk-no-sugar with sandy hands.

‘Mum’s not home yet. I thought I might make spag bol for tea?’

‘Sounds nice. Are you OK?’ her dad said.

‘A bit sad,’ Delia said. ‘I’ll get better.’

‘You’re always so cheerful, usually,’ her dad said. He blew on his tea and paused. ‘Did he not want to get married?’

‘He said he’d get married,’ Delia said, then stopped. She’d only said she and Paul had been arguing and needed some space. (She’d told Ralph the truth, but Ralph wouldn’t pass it on, nor would they ask him.)

She was conscious that if she said Paul had been unfaithful, she might never restore his reputation in their eyes. It was one thing eventually deciding to forgive your cheating partner, but adjusting wasn’t so easily accomplished by your parents. Better to keep them in the partial dark until you’d decided. Once again, the scorned woman’s sour rewards seemed to be denied to her. ‘I don’t think he was very happy with me. Or as happy as I thought. I’m not sure.’

Her father nodded; perhaps he’d deciphered this code. ‘You make everyone else happy though.’

Delia nodded, smiled, and gulped down the threat of a sob.

‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ her dad concluded, fixing her with watery blue eyes, the pouchier version of Ralph’s. ‘No rush.’

‘Thanks, Dad. Good to know,’ Delia said, and she meant it.

Back in the galley kitchen, she chopped onions and garlic, fried mince, and slopped a tin of chopped tomatoes into the pan, rinsing the residue out with water and adding that too – a student ‘make it go further’ trick that had stuck. It occurred to her how reassuring cooking could be, even though she wasn’t hungry.

It was ironic: without her usually very healthy appetite, Delia could feel herself tightening and shrinking inside her clothes. As if she might end up disappearing entirely into a deflated dress, like the Wicked Witch melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

If she was still getting married, Delia would have been delighted: the corsets on some of the vintage gowns she’d admired looked worryingly constrictive. As it was, it didn’t matter. She could be any size she liked – Paul had still slept with Celine.

Once the Bolognese sauce had coalesced into something orange-brown instead of red-brown, she turned the gas down, put a lid on it and went up to her bedroom.

Delia hesitated, once she’d closed the door. She could hear Ralph’s singing and her dad’s saw. Her mum was at the allotment. She opened the wardrobe. There at the bottom, under the old clothes and mothballed coats, were flat, clear plastic storage boxes with handles.

She slid them out, hauling them onto the bed, and opened the top one. Delia was oddly anxious, excited, and self-conscious. It was so long since she’d looked at any of this.

Delia had started The Fox when she was a teenager. It was an idea borne of daydreaming at school, when life had been getting on top of her. She was teased for her red hair. She wasn’t an exceptional student, she wasn’t an athlete, or cool, or popular.

She was lonely. So she fantasised another life for herself. One where she was all the things she wanted to be in the real world – special, fantastic, heroic, brave, exciting, useful. As a child, she was fascinated by a fox that visited the family garden, and bombarded her parents with questions. Why did it only come out at night? Did all the foxes know each other? Where were they hiding during the day? Delia had decided her invented answers were preferable to their explanations.

When the idea to draw a comic book occurred in her teens, she knew straight away it had to involve that fox.

As a superhero, The Fox lived in a subterranean lair, travelled on a super-fast bicycle and had an actual talking fox sidekick, called Reginald. Her network of bushy-tailed spies told The Fox what was going on in the city, and she used this information to uncover wrongdoing and fight crime.

When she’d told Paul about it once, he said: ‘LSD is a helluva drug.’

Delia had always been creative and never quite known how to channel it: in writing and drawing The Fox, she found herself fulfilled in a way she’d never been before. She bought herself fine-nibbed pens and A3 drawing pads with her pocket money and escaped into the frames of the story, spending hours cross-legged on her bed, sketching away. Everyone in her family had their magical outlet from mundanity, and now Delia did too.

She felt too foolish to show any of her friends, but luckily having a brother as offbeat as Ralph meant she had a non-judgemental audience. When she’d first shyly showed him The Fox’s escapades, she half-expected even him to laugh at her. Instead, he was fascinated – and with Ralph, you always knew you were getting a genuine reaction.

‘Can I see more?’ Ralph would ask. ‘What happens next?’

What happens next? might’ve been the most thrilling thing anyone had ever said to Delia. Someone cared what might happen in a fictional universe she’d made up, simply to entertain herself, as if it had a life of its own. As if The Fox existed.

Somehow, though The Fox had started as a Delia alter ego, it became instructive to her. If there was something happening and Delia didn’t know how to deal with it, she punted it over to The Fox, presented the challenge in a universe where she could make the courageous choice.

She carried on writing and drawing it at university, when she studied Graphic Design, but shelved it when she graduated, lacking the self-belief to launch a career. ‘What I learned on my course is that everyone else is more talented than me,’ she told Emma, who thought her work was incredible and called her a raving idiot. Delia complained she had all kinds of technical deficiencies compared to her peers. Emma vehemently disagreed. ‘You have something very special that sets you apart from most people: you have charm,’ Emma had said.

Instead of trying and failing, Delia never tried. She told herself that failure was inevitable and she’d only look silly in the process. It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation. So Delia fell into the kind of jobs that educated young women with a nice phone manner in the twenty-first century fall into, because that’s what she told herself she was good for.

This evening, a dozen years since university, Delia felt faintly daft returning to the escapism of her youth. However, as she turned the pages, she found herself grinning despite herself. It was sparky and joyful in a way you so often weren’t, in adulthood.

What did Ralph say? ‘You’re in charge.’ She was surprised at how inspiring those three words felt. Perhaps Ralph was much better at motivating her, than vice versa.

She was lost in re-reading The Fox’s adventures until her mum, who’d somehow returned home without Delia noticing, called up the stairs to ask if she should put the spaghetti on.

After dinner, Delia picked up a pen and tentatively began a fresh page of The Fox. It came to her immediately, like mouthing the lyrics to an old song you’d not heard in years, and yet instinctively knowing the next line.

Twelve

Had Delia not told Roger about Peshwari Naan’s surprise appearance in her inbox because the search was a welcome distraction from her misery?

The thought only occurred to her as she turned her computer on the next morning, and felt a shiver of excitement wash up and down her arms. It was an analgesic for the pain of thinking about Paul.

Sure enough, she had a Naan e-communiqué waiting for her, from a Peshwari Naan Gmail address.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

Why are you looking for me?

Delia typed:

From: Delia Moss

You didn’t answer my question! Quid pro quo.

Would she have to wait another day for the response? That would be deeply frustrating. No, she had it within ten minutes. Another thought: the Naan had an office job. The log-off time yesterday had been consistent with that.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

I knew because I am quite good at this ‘computers’ thing. Now you …?

Delia wasn’t supposed to be hiding her intent, she supposed. She’d better chuck in an emoticon to keep everything friendly.

From: Delia Moss

That’s not really an answer, is it? I want to discuss why you’re so negative about the council. A lot of your comments on the Chronicle site are pretty scathing! (assuming there isn’t another potty-mouthed, fruity Naan out there) (why ARE you called Peshwari Naan?)

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

I’m not negative, really. I post things that make me laugh. (It’s the most troublesome of the Naans. Why put fruit in it? I know you’ll be with me on this.)

From: Delia Moss

OK, but … they don’t always make other people laugh. Some of the councillors have got quite upset. (Yep, agree on the Peshwari wrongness. Chilli and/or garlic, every time. Coriander for a curveball.)

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

That’s because they’re hairy old cornflakes who wouldn’t know humour if it dry-pumped them from behind with a strap-on while grunting their name. (I also like cheese, and keema.)

Delia did a small bark-laugh at her desk, and Ann, busy see-sawing a bent big toe with her special chiropractic elastic band, looked over suspiciously.

‘Something on Buzzfeed,’ Delia mumbled, while typing a reply.

From: Delia Moss

Whether that’s true or not … would you consider toning it down?

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

Is there any reason why I should?

Delia drummed her fingers on the desk.

From: Delia Moss

As a favour to me? I’ve been tasked with getting you to stop. It’d hugely help me if you did. Or minded your manners a bit more. My boss would be happier.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

Maybe your boss should grow a bigger pair of plums and tell these councillors to get a sense of perspective. I’m entertaining people and adding to the sum of bliss in the universe.

From: Delia Moss

You can be entertaining and not go so far as to suggest Councillor Hammond told the AGM he bleaches his bumhole.

From: peshwari.naan@gmail.com

That one wasn’t a lie. Check the meeting minutes. He described it as looking as fresh as a grapefruit half afterwards.

Delia nearly guffawed at her desk and stifled it in time, as Ann’s eyes slid towards her again.

Delia reckoned she could talk this Naan round. She’d established a rapport, now to see if she could gently dissuade him from Viz-quoting anarchy.

The mystery remained: how the hell did he find her? That part was spooky and baffling.

Her mobile pinged with a text; Emma.

I will be calling you in five mins. I have an idea. Move to a secure area and open your mind to incoming magnificence. E X

Delia smiled to herself and slipped the phone into the pocket of her chambray pinafore dress, making her way to the gardens outside. Park, if you were being fancy: a strip of green between the council and the rest of the world.

As Delia kicked her heels, she thought how she’d forgotten – to her chagrin – how much she and Emma meant to each other.

Something in Delia’s good-humoured unfussiness matched up very well with Emma’s ebullient smarts. Delia was all about home, Emma was all about work, yet they equally enjoyed sitting around giggling at stupid things while wearing loose pyjama trousers. They found the bitchier shades of female gatherings hard to take. They weren’t snipy, or competitive with each other, and neither of them ever gave the other grief for a lapse in correspondence. They instinctively got each other, in the way of great friendships. In their differences, they learned from each other.

So while Delia was wilting and fading in the face of Paul’s loss, Emma wasn’t saying poor you and plumping her cushions and making chicken soup. She was right there in the sinking boat, trying to bale the water out.

It occurred to Delia that she was also part of another long-term double act, a still-devoted couple, and the thought comforted her.

Nevertheless, Delia did worry what scheme this might be. No matter what worked for Emma in resolving a dispute, she was not going to host an air-clearing round table summit with Paul and Celine.

When Delia answered her mobile, she heard a soundtrack of ambient traffic bustle and the heavy breathing of someone walking fast. Emma’s whole existence moved at a different mph to Delia’s.

‘I can’t talk long! I’ve had a huge brainwave. You’re going to say no at first and then you’re going to think on it and say yes.’

‘Oh, kaaay …’

‘You know we were saying you should come down? Why not move in for a while?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, move in here with me. I have a spare room and you could resolve my guilt about not looking for a lodger. I didn’t want one and I can afford not to but Dad’s been on at me about it. Live here for free, sort yourself out, make me dinner. Do that mysterious thing you do where you make a place feel homely. We could be a comfort to each other, like the two old spinsters in A Room with a View. Your room doesn’t have a view, by the way.’

Delia hadn’t yet seen Emma’s new flat in Finsbury Park. With the hours Emma worked, Delia suspected she hadn’t seen much of it either. Delia lifted her face to the sun and enjoyed being out of doors, not in her office, a place that smelled of carpet and disappointment.

‘The small issue of my employment? I can’t leave my job,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s the only job I have, and I need the money?’

‘You always said that job wasn’t a job for life thing, and how long have you been there now? Seven, eight years? When are you going to leave?’

Delia grimaced. True, but. You didn’t get two broken legs and then decide the time was right to do a parachute jump. Or something.

‘I know. However, having lost my home and my partner, I’m not in the mindset of binning the job.’

‘I knew you’d say that. It seems like the worst time to do it, when actually it’s the best time. Everything’s upside down, anyway. Also, if you want Paul back …’

‘That’s a big if,’ Delia said, thinking Emma had her sussed. Her eyes drifted to a woman bending down, fussing with a moon-faced churlish baby in a buggy.

‘If you do want him back, coming down here will ensure you have his complete attention. Trust my instincts. I know the difference between a small fix and a big fix. What’s happened between you and Paul needs a big fix. Make him miss you.’

‘Won’t I clear a path for him and the shag piece?’

‘False. You’re already out of the way, if he wants that. But while you’re in Newcastle, you can return to him any time. In London, you’re suddenly out of sight and very much in heart and mind. If there was maybe a little too much routine before …’

Delia’s stomach flexed. She’d thought that routine was what happiness felt like.

‘… You doing something dramatic and unexpected will completely focus his mind. He’ll be running after you. You’ll have the proof it’s you he wants.’

Delia tried this idea on for size. Paul would be startled, it’s true.

Domesticated Delia disappearing to the Big Smoke. She wasn’t sure that doing rash things because of how they’d look to Paul was very healthy, mind you. And it could backfire spectacularly.

‘My boss has a saying,’ Emma said. ‘When the fight comes, don’t turtle up.’

‘Turtle up?’

‘Go into your shell.’

Emma loved management-speak neologisms.

‘So you want me to be your housekeeper?’ Delia said.

‘No! Well, yes. If you want to be. Mainly I want you to keep me company and put yourself back on track.’

‘I couldn’t not work and live off you. That’s mad.’

‘Then look for a job! You’re qualified in comms, PR. There’ll be tons more opportunities here. I’ll start sniffing around.’

Delia nearly said they were plenty of jobs in the north too, they weren’t living in black and white. But Emma didn’t generally do that London superiority thing, so Delia forgave her the odd slip.

‘Don’t! I’ll think about it,’ Delia said, ‘I promise.’

She wouldn’t, she was pacifying Emma. It was nice to think she was wanted. And it had been nice to toy with the idea of making Paul sit up and take notice. Realistically, there was no way Delia was adding ‘unemployed’ to her tick list of life achievements. London intimidated her. It was so gigantic. You were supposed to feel like you were in the middle of things, but you were never in the middle of it.

As she rang off and raised her eyes from the ground, they met those of a girl with a liquorice-black pudding basin haircut, bright pink lippy and a nervous, expectant expression. She’d been waiting for Delia to finish her call. She could quite conceivably be twenty-four.

Delia felt she might faint. Not here. Not now.

‘Excuse me?’

Delia’s mouth was dry and her heart pulsing: zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom zha-zhoom.

‘… Yes?’

‘Where did you get your dress? I love it.’

Relief flooded out of Delia like rainbow cosmic energy.

‘URBAN OUTFITTERS! IT WAS AGES AGO THOUGH, SORRY! Hahahaha,’ she squealed, while the girl looked politely startled at Delia being drunk. ‘Maybe try eBay?’

The girl smiled, clearly thinking: and maybe Betty Ford for you.

Even if she wasn’t going to London, Delia thought, as she trudged back into the office, shaky with fight-or-flight adrenaline, she couldn’t pretend Newcastle felt the best place for her either.

Thirteen

Delia lay in the avocado bath and braced her toes on the taps, as she’d done a thousand times in her youth, looking at her burgundy nail varnish. She always wore dark red on her pale feet; it reminded her of a childhood fairy story about drops of blood on snow.

The house was quiet: Ralph was on a shift and her parents were at their weekly pub quiz.

In her reflection in the plastic-framed mirror at the end of the tub, she could see the hollows of her eyes as charcoal smudges, after flannelling off her black eyeliner. She’d worn make-up like it for so long, even she thought she looked peculiar without it, like a newborn mole.

Hmmm. Not so newly born any more. Not long till thirty-four. Delia hadn’t wanted to think about this until now, but there was something about being naked that forced her into stark honesty.

Here was the thought that had buzzed like a wasp at the edge of her thoughts, ever since the revelation about Celine.

If she wanted kids, Paul was still probably the safer option than re-launching herself back into the dating scene in her mid-thirties, hoping to find another solid prospect.

Even if Delia met someone else soon – and this seemed unlikely – she had to factor in the time to get to know and be sure of him, before taking the step into parenthood. She hated to give in to outmoded ideas about being a single woman of a certain age – no choice should be made in desperation, or it wasn’t a choice at all. She’d be the first to tell a friend she had all the time in the world. But you said things like that to make those without a choice feel better. If she was honest, her situation as it stood felt perilous.

As she and Paul discussed the other night, where would you even start, dating now? Deeply unfairly, at thirty-five, he was still young enough to be the cool rather than creepy older guy to a twenty-four-year-old. He could wait till she was, say, thirty and ready to be thinking about a family.

Delia didn’t have similar leeway.

She’d been out of circulation so long, the mindset required to make polite conversation over a gin and tonic with a stranger you might want to sleep with seemed utterly alien and overwhelming.

Before Paul, she’d pinballed from boyfriend to boyfriend without ever having to consider the getting of them. They’d always been there when required, and sometimes when not required. Modern dating, it needed practice – it wasn’t something you could start from cold and expect instant success. You weren’t without baggage, and neither were your prospectives.

Emma was long-term single, with the odd dishonourable exception of posh, brusque men she met through work and had brief, brusque flings with. Delia had always shivered slightly at the brutality of it all. Emma had been dumped a couple of times by social media, seeing Harry or Olly with someone else in a ski resort selfie. (Though Delia put these cruelties down partly to Emma’s self-confessed questionable taste in men.)

Emma had been looking for her Paul online and through friends-of-friends all her life, and had yet to encounter one.

Then there were further hurdles, if Delia miraculously hit it off with a potential in a drink at The Baltic. New person sex. Gulp.

Delia looked down at her body.

She hadn’t needed to assess its aesthetic value quite so bluntly before: it did its job, and it was loved. She might want a flatter stomach, but as long as there were A-line skirts, creamy blue cheese and Paul around, it wasn’t a priority.

Now she wondered at what restoration work might be needed before it could be opened to the public again. She gazed despondently at the white orbs of her breasts, bobbing in the water. In clothes, they got a fair bit of interest. Double D-cups were popular enough with menfolk.

However, cosmetic surgery had come in during Delia’s decade off the market. Frighteningly, she had seen the word ‘saggy’ cruelly hurled at women she thought of as aspirationally pert. A larger chest size inevitably meant she had some ‘hang’, when out of a bra. The thought of pinging the clasp on one and being assessed by someone she didn’t know all that well was frightening.

Delia shivered: Emma had once been hard-dumped right after the first time with someone. Imagine that. Even Emma’s buoyant demeanour had taken a bad knock.

Delia wasn’t thin, or sculpted. She had little silvery shoals of stretchmarks on her hips. And she had hair.

Would being a natural redhead startle some? Given that extreme waxes were the near-norm? She used to get teased for having a Ronald McDonald wig in the games changing rooms at school. She didn’t fancy discovering the prejudice was alive and kicking, two decades later, right when she and what she could quaintly call a new lover were about to get down to it.

A new lover – it seemed impossible. Paul and Delia. Delia and Paul. They belonged to each other. Yet he’d loaned himself out.

She added more scalding hot water to the bath, to make up for how cold she felt.

Was this how it worked, coming to terms with an affair – like passing through the stages of a death: anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance?

Yes, a bereavement was exactly what it was. Accepting that the old relationship with Paul, the one where he’d never be unfaithful and she had unshakeable belief in him, was dead. If they got back together, it would be a new relationship. Many features of the old, but not the same. Realising that gave her much sadness, but some peace.

What if she went to London? Got away from all this and gained some perspective with distance? Only that would mean becoming unemployed. As much as she was indifferent towards her job, Delia couldn’t quite countenance it.

Delia dipped her head under the water and let her hair float in a warm halo of snakes around her skull, thinking of herself as a modern-day Ophelia, submerged in Radox pine bubbles. Her feelings for Paul hadn’t vanished over the course of one ugly evening.

She could see a time she would go back to him. She also knew she had a giant lump of stone inside her stomach, a dead hard weight of hurt and resentment that would have to dissolve, slowly, until she could feel love towards him again.

Delia didn’t know how or when or if she’d be able to rid herself of it. It seemed a big enough challenge to have admitted that she would try.

Fourteen

‘We’ve had a major security breach and this Peshwari Naan pest has ratcheted up to Threat Level: Amber,’ Roger barked at Delia, causing everyone to look at them both, obviously wondering how words in their native language could be strung together to form something so incomprehensible. ‘There have been some developments.’

Delia looked at him blankly.

‘Are you, or are you not meant to be updating and monitoring our Twitter feed?’

‘Yes,’ she said, bewildered.

‘When did you last tweet?’

‘Erm, an hour or so ago?’

‘Then log on to our account,’ Roger said, leaning over Delia and heavy-breathing decaf Caffe Hag down the neckline of her sweater. He adopted the hand-on-hip lean-in pose, with the self-importance of a security spook briefing the POTUS at a COBRA meeting.

Delia obliged, feeling a significant prickle of fear. Should she mention the Naan emails yet?

She brought up the council’s timeline and instantly clenched her jaw to keep the muscles in her neck from spasming in laughter.

It was full of fake tweets.

Comrades! It’s Awards Season Again! Please nominate in the following categories …

Ugliest Planning Decision

Most Harrowing Public Toilet Experience

Hottest Councillor

Best Dogging Spot

Delia said: ‘Oh dear,’ and cleared her throat. Do not laugh, do not laugh …

‘You hadn’t seen this?’

‘Of course not!’ Delia said, hastily moving to the Edit Account Settings section. ‘I’ll change the password right now.’

‘We’ve been hacked?’ Roger said, pushing his science teacher glasses up his nose.

No. I thought it might be fun to pretend the council has an award for Most Specific Graffiti.

‘How do we know it’s Peshwari Naan?’ Delia said.

‘Same M.O.’ Roger took the mouse from Delia and scrolled down the page. ‘The fictionalised quotes.’

Coun. Janet Walworth said: ‘The awards are a chance for you to tell us which of our policies really twat you off.’

‘This has never happened before. That password change may hold him off for now but in light of this, I wonder how many vulnerabilities the system has. I will put our I.T. team on it. Now, please take a look at what’s happening over at the Chronicle.’

Roger was absolutely loving this, Delia realised.

Delia pulled up the Chronicle site and under Roger’s guidance, put ‘city council’ into its search engine. The first story that came up was about an unemployment seminar.

Delia scrolled the comments, not expecting to see anything, but there, third down was Peshwari (did this person really have a job?).

Hey guys: got to let you know that the Powers That Be and pen pushers up at City Hall are on to me. Guess some people don’t like The Sheeple to see with their own eyes. I’ve been asked to ‘mind my manners’. Well, this truther won’t be silenced! The chief executive sits on a throne of lies. And signs off expenses for big platters of Ferrero Rocher at receptions. This genie is OUT of the BOTTLE.

Roger’s lips moved as he read the words, and cogs turned. He looked at Delia with scarily maniacal eyes, like a Blue Meanie in Yellow Submarine.

‘Thoughts?’

Delia had very little time to decide what to do. In the brief window afforded for calculation, she concluded that playing completely dumb was not going to work. The Naan was describing her approach, right after Roger had asked her to make it.

‘I had … opened a dialogue,’ she said.

‘How?’ Roger said. The air of menace could be cut with a potato peeler and Delia knew every single one of her colleagues were watching the show avidly.

‘On email. I …’

‘Forward me the correspondence!’ Roger bristled. Literally bristled. He looked like a Quentin Blake illustration: scribbly hair, beard made of hay, thunderous brow, pinprick eyes, magnified behind thick, square teacher glasses.

He stalked back to his screen to await the evidence and Delia felt sick.

The playful exchange between her and Naan only looked acceptable on two conditions: 1) she had time to present it carefully and sympathetically and 2) Naan had indeed backed off.

Given neither applied, she was fucked.

She looked at the discussion again and tried to tell herself, well at least you’re not outright saying HAHAHA GOOD ONE STICK IT TO THE OLD SCROTES. She didn’t think she came off as issuing the sort of schoolmarm admonishments that Roger’s wrath demanded though, to put it mildly.

Delia hit forward with the heavy heart of the condemned woman and prefaced it:

Hi Roger. As you can see, I am making the first steps in gaining his trust here.

It was a craven ‘Please do not bollock me’ plea. She also offered a brief explanation of staking out Brewz and Beanz. It didn’t really help Delia’s cause that the whole interaction started with the Naan spotting her, not vice versa. Or that Roger’s testicular fortitude as a boss was alluded to.

Some extremely tense minutes ticked past. Roger was hunched over his screen, Delia trying not to look over at him.

Ann said: ‘Was that to do with the things you kept laughing at?’ loud enough that Roger’s head jerked up.

What an absolutely traitorous cow, Delia thought. Ann probably only found natural disasters and jihadist attacks funny.

The appearance at her shoulder took less than fifteen minutes. It felt as if Roger appeared with a gust of icy air and the opening chords of ‘Enter Sandman’.

‘Follow me,’ he said.

Roger took Delia into an airless deserted office down the corridor, full of filing cabinets and an old whiteboard, with FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES = ACTION? -> FACILITATION marker-penned on it.

‘Any idea what I want to talk to you about?’

‘Peshwari Naan?’ Delia said, hoping her tone didn’t sound insubordinate.

‘I’d like you to explain the rationale behind the informal correspondence you’ve entered into with someone who is a declared enemy of this organisation.’

Oh for goodness’ sake, why did Roger always have to talk as if he was in a Tom Clancy? The battle fleet will never be ready!

‘I was winning his trust by speaking to him in his own language,’ Delia said.

‘The impression you gave the Naan – and myself – was that you found the tenor of his contribution acceptable. No doubt emboldening him to commit his latest infraction.’

He was officially the Naan now, like the Zodiac or the King of Pop.

‘I had to be careful about steaming in and saying “You can’t do that,” because technically, he can do that. I thought the softly-softly approach would work better.’

‘We’ve seen how well it worked. Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough, Ms Moss, but as a representative of the council you were not expected to engage in ribald badinage and casually ask he “tone it down a bit”.’

This was so unfair. Roger had said: any means, foul or fair.

‘I don’t think he would’ve responded to a simple cease and desist request or I would have made it.’

Roger’s nostrils flared.

‘You could’ve come to me at several points to have me sign off on what was best to do. Instead you saw the trust I placed in you as licence to indulge in sophomoric sniggering and inflame the situation further. Do you have any idea how this is going to look when I have to explain it to Councillor Grocock?’

And there it was. Roger had a flea in his ear, so he was bloody well going to pass the flea on to Delia. Only by this time, the flea had become the size of a walrus.

‘Do we have to say we’ve been in touch at all?’ Delia said.

Roger went puce.

‘Yes, we do. Your attitude towards what constitutes proper disclosure is extremely worrying. I’m giving you a written warning and it will go on your file,’ Roger said.

‘That’s not fair,’ Delia said. ‘I was working undercover with special rules …’

‘You were not undercover when he contacted you on your email here! Do you have any idea how he knew you were looking for him?’

Delia miserably shook her head.

‘Your achievements are exactly nil. Game, set and match to the Naan.’

It occurred to Delia that the Naan might not have finished making her look bad. The Twitter account hack signalled unlocking a new mischief achievement level.

When Delia got back to her desk, she started as she saw she had an email from the Naan waiting for her. She felt considerable anger towards this invisible architect of her misery, and had absolutely no freedom to say so.

Hey: what if Councillor Hammond meant his bleached bumhole looked like a RUBY grapefruit? Make you think.

She hit delete.

Fifteen

Delia doubted her day could get any worse.

Then mid-afternoon, everyone uncharacteristically got out of their chairs. Delia glanced around in confusion.

‘Fire drill?’ she asked Mark.

‘Team-building thing,’ he mumbled, apologetically.

Delia noticed he was sheepish because she was getting the sotto voce tone reserved for someone in trouble. She had been branded with The Dark Mark, and no one wanted to be seen colluding and fraternising with her for the time being. It was vaguely ridiculous.

Roger might favour a degree of quivering melodrama – Delia wondered if it was his way of offsetting a very quiet life of chess and golf – but she didn’t see why proper adults had to play along.

They trooped down to a meeting room on the next floor. There was another whiteboard at one end, this time with a list of commandments, an agenda for discussion. (No.4 was ‘Overcoming Diversity’, which Delia was pretty sure was meant to be ‘adversity’, but she wasn’t going to mention it.)

Once they’d all been herded in the doorway, a woman in a plum two-piece skirt suit with a badge bearing the name LINDA addressed them all. She had the air of worn down but persistent jollity that could only have come from twenty years ploughing the ever-decreasing returns of the regional training circuit.

They couldn’t sit down because the desks had been dragged around into a formation that Delia couldn’t fathom, with one sat on its own in the middle.

‘Good afternoon! Are we happy campers?’

Muttering.

‘Oh dear, that’s not very upbeat. I said, ARE we all HAPPY campers?!’

Slightly louder mumbling.

‘We’re here today to run a workshop that’s going to leave you all with an invigorated sense of what you do, and who you do it with!’

Delia glanced sidelong at Ann. She didn’t want an invigorated sense of Ann.

‘First up, the purpose of the Table Fall exercise is to create a sense of trust in co-workers.’

Oh God no, they were doing the ‘falling backwards and being caught’ trust thing? Had the city council finally got wind of this decade-old fad?

‘This is about how we support each other and co-operate to create a real physical sense of togetherness as a team.’

Delia didn’t want that either.

‘Who would like to go first, and win extra bravery points?’ Linda twinkled merrily, in the manner of all perky sadists.

Delia’s colleague Jules put her hand up.

‘Right, so if we have the volunteer step onto this chair, and everyone else stands like so, with arms outstretched and linked, to create a net …’ Roger said, suddenly Linda’s helper. Delia betted he’d done that to distract from the fact he wouldn’t be doing it, and risking them all dropping him.

Delia reluctantly joined the group who’d made a hammock with overlapped arms and winced at how embarrassing this was going to be. She was in a flared cotton skirt, what if it flew up when she flew down? She had a phantom shiver at the memory of aggressive, knicker-flashing birthday bumps at primary school. In fact, this situation bore uncanny resemblance – the pretence of positivity masking intent to humiliate, with no option to decline.

Nice, obliging Jules was helped onto the chair, and the desk.

She looked nervous. To be fair, everyone looked nervous; Jules had done Lighter Life last year and then relapsed badly.

Jules turned round, tried to lean back. Everyone tensed. She squealed: ‘I can’t let myself!’

‘Harder than you think, isn’t it!’ trilled Linda, delightedly. ‘It can be surprisingly difficult to let go.’

‘It’s not advisable to mimic fainting from furniture, is why,’ Delia said. She knew she was getting herself into more trouble but she felt too mutinous to care.

Linda turned the swivel eyes of a fanatic upon her.

‘Exactly! Unlearning our inhibitions is real work. De-inhibitisers bring us closer together: emotionally, socially, even spiritually.’

‘I’m the only Christian,’ Ann said.

‘Spirituality can take many forms,’ Linda said, sweetly.

‘That stuff with the aliens that the actors do isn’t religion,’ Ann retorted. ‘Jesus was the son of God, not the son of Zod.’

Linda looked confused and Delia found herself unexpectedly giggling at a bona fide Ann zinger.

After two false starts, Jules let herself drop backwards onto their arms, the slippery sweatiness among the interlinked hands palpable.

As Jules fell towards them, Delia had an awful premonition they’d fail her and she’d perish in the world’s most ludicrously unnecessary death. Spin that, council.

As it was, they staggered slightly but they supported her with ease. Or, they thought they had, until a bloodcurdling scream was emitted.

At first, Delia thought it was Jules, but Jules was still horizontal, blinking up at them. She looked as frightened as everyone else.

As they set her on her feet, Delia turned to see Ann sat on a chair, holding her arm out in front of her, face contorted in a rictus of pain.

‘My arm! My arm!’

‘Heavens above, what’s the matter?’ Roger said.

‘It’s a fracture. I’ve not got the support bandage on today.’

Someone stepped forward to try to examine Ann and she let out another howl.

‘Don’t TOUCH IT!’

‘What did you do to it?’ Delia said.

‘It got shut in a fire door in Chapel St Leonards,’ Ann said. ‘It’s never been right since.’

Delia remembered that tale. The gruesome incident happened in 1989. Ann was only obsessed with expiry dates for food, obviously.

‘Was I that heavy?’ Jules said, quietly, and Delia said quickly, ‘Not at all! Not even slightly! Ann has an old injury.’

Yeah, a sprain of the manners.

‘Do you need First Aid?’ Roger said to Ann.

‘No, I am used to pain,’ Ann said, with a whiff of burning martyr.

‘Who’s our next volunteer?’ he said, trying to restore focus.

‘Shouldn’t you do exercises where I can take part?’ Ann said, beady eyes on a wary Roger. His eyes were suddenly full of: oh my God, I am going to be sued up the pipe on a discrimination and disability ticket.

Delia nearly laughed out loud. Ann truly was a rattlesnake in a Per Una waterfall cardigan.

Roger went into hushed conference with Linda and when they concluded, Linda said: ‘OK, we’re going to move on to a great fun exercise, my favourite. We all tell everyone one fact about ourselves that the group doesn’t know, for discussion! Here’s mine, to kick you off. I’ve seen Del Amitri nearly fifty times in concert and am a founder member of a fan club, The Del Boys and Girls.’

‘Never heard of them,’ Ann said.

Sixteen

After the excitement of Ann squawking, Delia’s hot resentment of the team-building games returned with full force.

Then irritation turned to boredom. Feigning interest in a colleague’s car-booting hobby or childhood sporting achievement wasn’t easy.

As they discussed her diffident gay colleague Tim’s trip to Reykjavik, Delia’s mind roamed the room and wandered out of the window. And then – KABOOM – something suddenly burst into her front brain at the most inappropriate moment.

Like a music hall act leaping through the curtains with splayed jazz hands – ta dah! – while an audience sat in sepulchral silence.

It had happened in the first days of February, earlier this year. Paul had slung his fisherman’s coat over the banister and Delia had seen a card in an inside pocket slide out. She wouldn’t usually have been nosy, but she could spy a teddy bear face. It couldn’t have been for Paul’s nephews – Delia ran the birthday admin for him.

‘What’s that?’ She’d tweaked it out, and found a Valentine’s card, a tooth-rottingly sweet, teenage sort of one with teddies stood in a pyramid formation, their rounded bellies each carrying a letter B-E-M-Y-V-A-L-E-N-T-I-N-E.

Paul had blushed damson. Paul never blushed.

‘For me? Aww! Getting slushy in your old age,’ she teased him.

She’d thought it was odd – Paul thinking of Valentine’s Day for once, the choice of that card. He sometimes came home with a bottle of Amaretto on the 14th of February, the choice of beverage in honour of their first meeting, but cards and flowers weren’t Paul’s way.

‘I’ll get you a different one. Not much of a surprise,’ he’d demurred. Sure enough, Delia received Monet’s lilies instead, although she insisted she liked the cheesy teddies.

Delia added the clues together. It had been for Celine. She had been getting romantic gestures long denied to Delia. And February to May: they’d been seeing each other longer than three months.

She felt as if she’d been disembowelled with a melon baller.

‘Delia. Now you,’ Roger said, turning to face her.

‘What?’ she said, blankly. It wasn’t meant to be insolent; she just felt so howlingly empty. She thought it didn’t matter that work didn’t mean anything because home was everything. Now, she had nothing.

‘Please tell everyone here a fact about you we don’t know.’

Delia blinked. That they didn’t know? Her life?

Her mouth was dry.

‘Last Friday, I proposed to my boyfriend. Then he sent a text meant for another woman to me. It turned out he’s been having an affair. We’ve split up.’

The circle of faces registered a mixture of fascination and astonishment.

‘That’s hardly appropriate,’ Roger said, into the ensuing silence.

‘You said something you don’t know?’ Delia said.

‘Yes! Something we don’t know. Not … that.’

‘Was it meant to be something work related?’ Delia said. She was in a space beyond caring about professional interests or social embarrassment. It was like that time on a campsite when she was so hideously ill with flu she didn’t care about doing a noisy Portaloo poo.

‘No!’ Roger said.

She dispassionately noted that even though she wasn’t trying to be clever, he looked wrong-footed and maybe even intimidated.

‘It should be something innocuous. We don’t need to know about your dirty laundry.’

Dirty laundry?

Delia swallowed and assessed her surroundings. This room, these people, this job. What was it all for, this putting up and shutting up and sucking up? Where did it get you?

‘Well, that’s bullshit. You asked for something personal you didn’t know and I told you something. Now it’s not good enough. Being cheated on isn’t good enough either but I have to live with it. Don’t play stupid “getting to know you” games and then complain about getting to know someone.’

Roger boggled. Everyone else sat bolt upright and poised, perfectly immobile, like Red Setter bookends. Linda looked like she’d been slapped. Ann was enthralled, having forgotten about her osteopathic agony.

‘Here’s something else you don’t know about me. I’m leaving.’

Roger snorted. ‘Then I need you to follow me upstairs and we’ll discuss your notice period.’

‘I’ve saved all my holiday for the honeymoon I’m not having any more, which is offset against my notice period. So I don’t have a notice period. This is it.’

Silence.

Roger stared at Delia. The room’s attention had now switched to him, like Centre Court at Wimbledon, to see his return volley. Roger pushed his glasses up his nose. He cleared his throat.

‘The council has only just paid to send you on that health and safety course. We’ve nursed a viper at our breast.’

Seventeen

Delia was going to call ahead and say ‘Surprise! I’ve left my job and will be walking into our house at an unusual time of day,’ then asked herself why she was doing it.

She didn’t owe Paul the courtesy. In fact, who was Delia really protecting? If there was anything to interrupt, she needed to know. She didn’t think Paul would risk doing it in their bed when she still had her key, but her parameters for what was or wasn’t Paulness had changed.

Delia felt cold trepidation as she opened the front door, but there was no noise inside. No Parsnip to greet her, either. Paul must be walking him, or he’d taken him to the pub. Delia wondered if Celine had ever petted him, and the rage surged again. She’d be checking Parsnip’s fur for any unfamiliar perfume.

Her phone beeped – a nervous text from Aled’s partner Gina, asking if she was OK. Too little, too late. Delia fired off a brief reassurance that didn’t invite more conversation.

Delia had asked herself what she’d have done if she’d had word of Aled cheating on Gina, and she decided she’d have insisted Aled tell her. She certainly couldn’t have sat there with them and run double books. And condolences-wise, she wouldn’t have limped in with a text, days after the fact, either. It would’ve been bringing a bottle and a box of pastries, and swearing, like a proper friend.

Delia avoided looking round the house, and bolted up the stairs. She heaved the largest trolley case out of the wardrobe, the dark blue one with the hummingbirds on it that Paul complained made him look unmanly in the arrivals and departures hall. A notional unmanliness, as they never went abroad. Parsnip’s infirmity and the pub were powerful draws to stay home.

What should she pack? Delia started flinging underwear and clothes into the case. Had she really left her job? Had the Paul shock made her manic? Was she going against the advice she’d heard more than once, about not making any major decisions in the first six months after a life-changing event?

The front door banged and gave her a thunderclap of the heart. Paul was home, chatting to Parsnip. She heard their dog yap and do his usual three revolutions, chasing his own tail, before settling in his basket. Parsnip didn’t so much sit down as let his legs collapse underneath him.

Delia paused over the suitcase. She knew Paul was staring at her discarded pink coat.

‘Delia? Dee?’ he shouted up the stairs.

She zipped the case and heaved it off the bed, her work bag on her shoulder. Along with everything she had in Hexham, this would do for now.

She pulled it along the first-floor landing as Paul bounded halfway up the stairs.

‘Delia,’ he said, line of sight dropping to the suitcase as he eyed her through the banister spindles.

He looked tired, with a shaving cut on his chin. He was wearing that grey John Smedley jumper that Delia bought him to match his grey eyes, but he wouldn’t win any brownie points because of it.

‘You’re going to Hexham for longer?’

It was strange – Delia realised she hadn’t definitely decided, until that moment. Seeing Paul standing there, she knew she had to leave Newcastle. There were so few certainties now, Delia had to rely on the rare convictions she had. She surprised herself with her resolve.

‘I’m going to London.’

‘What? For the weekend?’

‘For the foreseeable future. I’m going to stay with Emma.’

‘How long have you got off work?’

‘I’ve left my job.’

‘What?’

Paul’s aghast expression was sour satisfaction. She could do surprises too.

‘How come? Are you OK?’

‘Because I got told off for how I run social media and participate in team-building events, and I needed to leave anyway. I haven’t been OK since our anniversary.’

Delia left her luggage trolley for the bathroom raid, filling a toiletry bag with jars and tubes. Paul and his confusion loitered behind her.

‘Do you not think we should talk before you move to the other end of the country indefinitely?’

‘Do you?’ Delia said. ‘Is there new information?’

She zipped up the vinyl flowery wash bag, then did a mental inventory: favourite dresses, liquid eyeliner, laptop. Those were the can’t-live-without essentials, she could buy anything else.

‘We’ve been together ten years, yes, I think there is more to talk about.’

‘So, talk,’ Delia said. ‘I’m going to call a taxi.’

She produced her mobile and booked one for ‘as soon as possible’ while Paul frowned.

‘Come downstairs while you wait for it?’ Paul said.

Before she could stop him, he’d darted round, got hold of her trolley case and bumped it down the staircase, standing it upright in the hall.

Delia followed him and bent down to pet Parsnip in his basket, making it quick so she didn’t cry. She kissed the top of his head, rubbed his ears and inhaled his biscuity smell. He blinked baleful chocolate eyes and did what passed for a wonky Parsnip smile, before resuming snoring. Paul would take good care of him in the interim, she still trusted him that much.

‘Are you leaving for good?’ Paul asked, once Delia had made it clear she wouldn’t be sitting down.

‘I’m leaving for a while. I don’t know how long,’ Delia said.

‘Does this mean you don’t want to stay together?’

‘All I know is, I can’t live here with you for the time being.’

‘… OK. Can I call you from time to time?’

‘You still have my number.’

‘You’ll be looking for work in London?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll probably be there for a while, then.’

Delia simply shrugged.

‘Can I ask you some questions?’ she said, after a short pause.

Paul nodded.

‘When did you start seeing Celine?’

Paul coloured, instantly. ‘As in a date …? I don’t know …’

‘You went on a date?’ Delia said, to increase the discomfort, folding her arms.

‘No. I mean as in, the day it started.’

‘Was it before February this year?’

Paul frowned. ‘No …?’

‘Later, then?’

‘Yeah. Like I said, about three months ago.’

‘You bought a Valentine’s card. I saw it, and you never gave it to me.’

Paul frowned. ‘You saw one before you were meant to, so I had to buy another one. You still got one.’

‘You never buy me Valentines’ cards.’

‘I know. It being the twentieth anniversary with my parents … it made me more sentimental than usual.’

If he was invoking his parents’ death to get Delia to back down, it was the most craven gambit imaginable. If he wasn’t? Delia’s former feelings finally stirred.

‘So, what date did you get together with Celine? I find it hard to believe that it wouldn’t stick out in your memory.’

Paul ruffled his hair, shifted from foot to foot.

‘Late March,’ he said, gruffly.

‘You know that, how?’

As with the text, Delia had the sense that Paul was trying to edit his reply to filter out sensitive content, but had no time.

‘It was Mother’s Day, the next day.’

‘You said you never even noticed when it was Mother’s Day. Did you go to the graves after all?’

She and Paul had a whole conversation about how he never celebrated Mothering Sunday when his mum was alive, so it had no particular meaning for him. They’d planned to do something for the anniversary of the crash, in November, though it had been fraught, discussing it with his brother. Michael felt differently about that date: he saw marking it as according importance to a senseless, horrible event.

Delia didn’t know how it felt to lose your parents but suspected you never get to choose which dates in life are significant for you, bar your wedding.

‘No. We talked about it. She asked if I had got my mum a gift.’

Ah. Now Delia got it. Paul’s emotive orphaning had got Celine into bed? The idea that Paul might’ve seduced Celine occurred for the first time, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t properly considered it before.

‘Where did it happen, the first time? The store cupboard? It’s your happy place.’

‘No, I told you. I’d never … do that, in the pub. It was at hers.’

‘She said, fancy a nightcap?’

‘Not exactly. I was locking up on my own after that … and she came back. I was outside.’

‘You went home with her, that easy?’

‘It had been building up. Then there she was.’

‘I need the words. I need to know what was said.’

Paul cast his eyes heavenwards and ground his teeth. ‘Dee, I get this is the grimmest thing. Why torture yourself with the details? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.’

‘It matters, because it’s the only way I can start getting my head around how you could do this. It’s such a mystery to me, I need to know how you went from “I don’t shag twenty-four-year-olds I meet in my bar” to, “yeah sounds fun, whereabouts in Jesmond?”’

Delia hated how bitter he’d made her sound.

‘She came up and said she couldn’t stop thinking about me and we should do something about what was going on between us. She said you only live once.’ He rattled it out.

Delia sensed what wasn’t being said.

‘She used your parents’ deaths as an argument for why you should cheat on me? I assume she knew there was a me.’

‘Yeah, not much, but she knew.’

‘That is …’ Delia shook her head, ‘Tasteless isn’t even the word, is it?’

‘It sounds worse than it was. Pissed people talking nonsense …’

‘Nonsense that was good enough to see you going back with her.’

‘Yes.’

Paul looked beat. Not much hope of gilding the lily.

‘And that was enough, what she said?’

‘In that moment, yes. It was a take the red pill, follow this thing and see where it leads. It was about risk taking, I guess.’

‘Was it monkey sex?’

‘What?’

Paul looked befuddled.

‘Was it wild? Give me some idea of what you did.’

‘It was sex. Plain, average sex.’

‘Who on top?’

Paul’s jaw tightened further.

‘Her on top.’

Delia’s stomach contracted.

‘Lights on? Off?’

‘Off. Well, she had some of those lights on a string, they were on.’

Delia felt the triumphant sizzle of being proven right.

‘Why did Aled say he talked you out of a trip to Paris?’

‘I honestly have no idea,’ Paul said, visibly relieved at being allowed his own anger at last. ‘I’d already finished with Celine by the time I spoke to him about it. If he ever answered my calls, believe me, we’d have words.’

Outside, there was the roll of a car’s engine and a beep.

‘Look, Delia …’

‘What’s Celine’s last name?’ Delia said, to cut Paul off.

‘Roscoe. Why?’

‘In case I ever need to know,’ Delia said. ‘Look after Parsnip.’

She reclaimed her luggage trolley and flew out the front door before Paul could persuade her to stay. Before she could see her dog wake up, before she could look around and think about what she was leaving behind, possibly forever.

Halfway to Hexham, her phone pinged.

I got you the Valentines card on impulse, thinking about how much my mum would’ve liked you. Please come home. Px

Eighteen

In that moment between sleep and wakefulness where you remember who you are, where you are and what you do, Delia spent longer than usual arranging all the pieces. It made a strange picture.

As the sun leaked through her bedroom blinds and she sensed she’d slept beyond nine, Delia felt the weightless weirdness of having no job to go to.

She imagined her old desk with the pink Post-its framing the computer screen, the photo of Parsnip in the paddling pool no longer there. Life continuing without her. Delia felt oddly bereft – it’d be strange not to, she thought, after seven years at the same office.

Then she thought of how Ann would still be wailing about her arm and Roger glowering at her, and told herself better late to leave than never. She had no wedding to be saving for, any more. Someone else could do battle in the middle ground between the Naan and Roger.

She’d had a big glass of red before she told her parents the night before, and gave them some white lies. Her boss had known of her intentions for a while, everyone was fine with it. She had savings, she reminded them. The wedding fund was a pretty healthy size, in fact.

Nevertheless, their uneasy expressions communicated: Should we be paying more attention to you? Are you unravelling before our eyes?

For all her efforts to act casual, obviously most people who moved from one end of the country to the other didn’t usually make the decision in the space of an afternoon. Or go the next day.

Delia got herself together for a mid-afternoon departure, thinking, at least hanging around workless in Newcastle is of short duration.

She knocked and pushed her head round Ralph’s door.

‘See you later. I’m off to London to stay with Emma for a bit.’

‘Cool. Go to Big Ben!’

‘Is it a favourite spot of yours?’

‘It’s where they fight the Ultranationalists in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.’

Delia laughed.

‘You could come visit me, while I’m there?’

Ralph shrugged and made non-committal noises. Ralph didn’t travel. Neither did her parents. There was an annual tussle to get them all to come into Newcastle city centre for a birthday. Last time they went to a nice restaurant, her mum had complained at the plate having ‘cuckoo spit and frogspawn’ on it.

‘Wait. Take this,’ Ralph said, rummaging around his fold-up sofa and producing a slightly crushed box of Fondant Fancies.

She gave him a hard hug and a kiss on his soft cheek and didn’t meet his eye.

Her dad was in the kitchen, having a cup of tea as her mum bustled around finding the car keys. Delia got the feeling she’d been spoken of, before she entered the room.

‘Off then, Dad! See you soon.’

He gave her a kiss on the cheek and then held out two twenty-pound notes.

‘Oh no, no no,’ Delia said, as her throat and stomach tightened. ‘I’ve got plenty of cash, Dad, honestly.’

‘You might want a sandwich when you get there,’ her dad said, and Delia realised he’d feel better if she took it.

‘Be careful. London’s full of thieves and chancers, and they’ll see you’re a nice girl.’

It was such a kindly fatherly idea that London would see anything about Delia at all, before it spat her back her out again.

Delia smiled and nodded.

‘So you’re staying with Emma?’

‘Yes.’

‘She lives on her own?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not …’ he hesitated. ‘There’s not a young man involved, is there?’

It was so unexpected a question that Delia had to stop herself snorting.

‘Of course not!’

She looked at her mum, who was fussing with her handbag and avoiding Delia’s eyes. This was what they’d come up with, in their concern. She was chasing a boy.

‘I promise you, there’s nothing to this but needing to get away for a while. I’ve barely seen Emma in the last few years, let alone had time to get to know anyone else.’

Her father nodded. As they hustled out of the hallway, her dad huffing and puffing, holding her case at waist height – fathers didn’t acknowledge the wheels on trolley cases, they had to be picked up – Delia felt sodden with guilt for worrying them like this.

Her mum drove her to the station in the old Volvo, with Delia anxiously trying to play down the whole unemployed peril with nonsensical chatter. If she talked fast enough, surely her mum wouldn’t notice.

‘This whole break Paul and I are having, it was the right moment,’ she said, hoping echoing Emma would be the charm.

‘You’re moving to London permanently?’ her mum asked, timidly. Her parents pretty much never lost their tempers or exerted their will. Something in their quiet forbearance was so much more shame-inducing than any shouting or outright disapproval.

It was a good question. It gave Delia stomach snakes. It’d been her right to be vague with Paul, not with her mum.

‘No! I don’t know. It’s more to get away from things for a while.’

The parental relationship loop: fibbing to protect them from worry, and them sensing being fibbed to, and worrying. The truth – that she had no idea what she was doing – would be more worrying, so Delia had no choice.

On the train she sat next to a short old man in a bulky coat, who started a conversation about pollution, which Delia politely tolerated, while wishing she could listen to her iPod.

As they got to Northallerton, he pointed to the tracks and said: ‘See those pigeons?’

‘Yes …?’

‘Pigeons know more than they’re letting on.’

‘Do they?’ Delia said.

‘Think they carried all those messages and never read any of them?’ the man said, incredulously.

Delia said she was going to the buffet car and switched carriages.

Arriving in London, she taxied from King’s Cross to Finsbury Park and told herself she’d definitely economise from tomorrow onwards. It was late, she was tired, and full of Fondant Fancies, cheese toastie, acidic G&T and a mini tube of Pringles, all picked at in nerves and boredom.

As Delia left the station, the evening air in the capital smelled unfamiliar: thick, warm, petrol-fumed. She was hit by a wave of home sickness so hard it was in danger of washing her away.

Nineteen

Emma’s flat was the first floor of one of those haughty, draughty Victorian houses with drama in its high ceilings and cold in its bones. There were bicycles crammed under the plaster arch in the narrow hallway, and subsiding piles of mail for the various residents stacked on a cheap side table by the radiator.

It was a leafy, residential street, yet still felt slightly overrun and run down.

Delia had warned herself not to be shocked by the space that a wage as intergalactic as Emma’s could buy here. But she still was.

She bumped her case up the steep worn-carpeted stairs to the door that separated Emma’s territory from the rest of the building and knocked. Music was humming on the other side and she hoped she wasn’t arriving into a cocktail party. She didn’t feel up to meeting the London society yet.

The door was flung open and all five foot three of Emma Berry filled it to the jambs, in a pale green party dress with circle skirt, pointy salmon satin heels and bouffanted Marilyn-blonde hair. Despite constantly bemoaning imaginary obesity, she had one of those Tinkerbell figures where any weight gained went to the pin-up places.

‘Hey there, Geordie girl!’ she sing-songed.

Delia grinned ‘Hello!’ and did an awkward fingertips-only wave, with her luggage.

There was some fussing and clucking as Emma tried to reach round and take Delia’s case on the vertiginous steps and it became obvious Delia would probably be killed in the attempt. Emma shuffled back into the flat to allow Delia to make a very laborious entry instead.

‘I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ Delia said.

‘No, I was waiting for you! I admit I possibly started on the booze a bit early. Let me get a hug at you! This is so ridiculously exciting.’

Emma smelled of gardenias and her dress had watery silver sparkles across knife pleats. It rustled with the crispness of new and expensive fabric as Delia leaned in. To Delia’s fairly expert eye, it was not of the high street.

‘I can’t believe you’re here!’ Emma squealed and then it settled in both their faces that it was incredibly well-meant but possibly not the most tactful thing to say.

Delia replied: ‘Neither can-fucking-I,’ and they laughed, breaking the tension.

‘It’s going to be so great.’

Because Delia couldn’t share her confidence but didn’t want to offend with a lack of enthusiasm, she said: ‘Your dress is spectacular.’

‘It’s a Marchesa design.’

Delia gasped. ‘Like the Oscar dresses?!’

‘It’s a replica I got on Etsy for a song. It smells a bit dodgy. So I’ve covered it in Marc Jacobs,’ Emma said. ‘The hair’s backfired a bit too,’ she said, stroking it. ‘I was going for Doris Day bubble flip, I think it’s more New Jersey mob wife.’

Delia giggled.

‘Do you want the tour? It takes less than two minutes.’

‘Yes!’

Delia followed Emma – noisy on the hard floors in her clippy-cloppy shoes – around the flat. It was so very Emma to dress up for Delia’s arrival.

Delia’s weary soul gave a little sigh of relief that the flat was nothing like as ragtag and anonymous as the hallway downstairs.

In fact it was tiny, but beautiful. The floorboards were stripped and varnished Golden Syrup yellow, and the doors were an artfully washed out, distressed chalky aqua with Mercury glass handles.

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