If I Never Met You: A Novel

Laurie found her way back to where Jamie stood, on legs that felt like the bones in them had dissolved.

“We have to go,” Laurie said. “Now.”

“OK,” Jamie said. “You’re very pale, are you OK?”

“If we go, I will be,” Laurie said.

“Understood.”

Unfortunately, leaving involved collecting their coats, which attracted the attention of Laurie’s new stepmother.

“You’re not leaving?!” Nicola shrieked.

Laurie didn’t know what to do, as she had momentarily lost the power of normal speech.

“Going to get some fresh air, then we’ll come back up,” Jamie said swiftly. “Too cold to go without coats. Laurie’s had a lot very fast.” He gestured a tipping-glass motion at Nicola, as Laurie stood mute.

“Oh, right!” Nicola said, squinting her eyes in sympathy. “Do a tactical barf, darling, then have a Smint. See you both in a bit.”

“Thank you,” Laurie said in a small voice to Jamie, as they otherwise descended in silence in the lift.

At ground level, Laurie calmed somewhat. She’d felt trapped up there, as though her skin was two sizes too small.

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on, or do you just want to go home?” Jamie said.

Laurie breathed out.

“Yes, but not here.” She took Jamie by the hand to lead him to somewhere on the street they wouldn’t be jostled by the Friday night crowds, and Jamie squeezed her hand back reassuringly. She felt relief from him somehow, despite the unnatural interruption, and wasn’t sure why.

Once they were in St. Peter’s Square, she turned to face him, tucking her hands deep into her pockets and hunching her shoulders against the chill. She was suddenly very cold.

“There was a man, at the bar,” she said. “One of my dad’s friends. He brought a memory back.” Laurie shook her head. “Until ten minutes ago, if you’d said, did I repress any memories from my childhood I’d say ‘Haha, I wish.’ But I had. I’m kind of . . . stupefied, to be honest. It’s like I knew it was there, but I’d never looked at it. Like having something in your loft storage.”

She wasn’t just cold, she realized she was shaking. Actual physical shaking, like she’d been plunged into subzero-temperature water.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Jamie said, and Laurie nodded, then shook her head again. I can, I will be OK.

She breathed and steadied herself. “I want to. Ummm. When I was about eight, I went to visit my dad for the weekend. One of the few times he did turn up. He took me to his old flat.” Laurie paused. “His mates came ’round. They got wankered. My dad disappeared off somewhere ‘to see a man about a dog.’ He does that a lot. He left Pete and another guy to watch me. I knew I wasn’t safe, I knew . . .”

Laurie steadied herself so she could continue. Jamie put his hand on her shoulder. That was the worst of it: before she knew, she knew.

“Pete said . . . Oh God. I haven’t told anyone this, or thought about it, for so long.”

“Not even Dan?”

“No. Not that I was consciously keeping it from him. I was keeping it from myself.”

Jamie nodded.

“That guy Pete said to me: ‘Come sit on my lap and show me what color knickers you’re wearing.’”

Jamie’s face changed. “What the . . . To an eight-year-old?”

Laurie nodded.

“Fuuuu—”

“I don’t know if he was joking, trying to frighten me. What would’ve happened. I said I needed the loo, and I went and let myself out of the flat. This would be about eleven at night. I walked through the city until I found Piccadilly station . . .”

“On your own? Aged eight?”

“Yes.”

“You must’ve been petrified.”

“I was. I think it was fireworks night, you know. Explains why I hate fireworks. And drunken people who didn’t mean any harm were shouting ‘Where are you going?!’ and trying to talk to this little kid wandering through the streets, and I was hyperventilating.”

Laurie was as still as a statue as she recounted this. Jamie looked stricken.

“. . . I made it to Piccadilly, I asked them to sell me a ticket to go home to my mum. Of course, they flagged me as a lost child. The transport police turned up, they found a number for my mum and called her. I had to spend a night in a room at the station until she could get the first train in the morning to pick me up.”

“Oh, Laurie.”

“She was furious with me, Jamie.” Laurie welled up now. “She thought I’d wandered off. I mean, she was more furious with my dad, but he made up some story about how he only went to the corner shop for five minutes and I had no reason for what I’d done.”

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

Laurie wiped away tears. “She’d have never let me see my dad again. I might’ve been eight, but that much I knew. He wasn’t coming back from having left me with a pedophile, was he?”

Jamie blew his cheeks out. If nothing else, Laurie had succeeded in taking the shine off the largesse and larging it upstairs. This was the unattractive reality, the dysfunction. Her dad didn’t care about her, or care for her, at all. That was why she hung back from him: she didn’t want the contagion of the pretense. She didn’t want to be suckered in by the money and the connections and then hate herself for it. She didn’t want to become him. She had to hold on to the truth.

“Fuck, Jamie. Seeing Pete. It’s summed up so much for me. I feel like . . . this is where I’ve been stuck, my whole life. Between my mum’s anger and his indifference. The cross fire. I’ve got this vivid memory of sitting in McDonald’s with a hash brown in a little paper sleeve, and an orange juice, and her saying, Why did you do it, why did you run away, how can you expect me to trust you won’t do it again, to me, over and over. I couldn’t tell her. Should I have told her?”

It felt oddly incredibly freeing to simply ask someone this. She didn’t know the answer, and she had beaten herself up for not knowing it, without even realizing, for so long.

Jamie held her by the shoulders: “Laurie. You had to escape someone threatening to assault you, get yourself to safety and then decide if you wanted your relationship with your dad to rest on reporting it? Do you know how many thirty-eight-year-olds wouldn’t know what to do, let alone an eight-year-old?”

“When you put it like that . . .”

“There was no right or wrong answer. Whatever you did had a cost. There was only survival.”

Jamie hugged her and said: “Also, remember this. You’re safe now.”

Laurie buried her face in the wool of his coat and leaned on him and said: “Betcha wish you didn’t come now, eh, Jamie Carter. I did warn you.”

He leaned down and said, close to her ear: “No, now I couldn’t be more glad that I did.”

Laurie’s heart gave a squeeze and she couldn’t immediately look at him.

When they separated again, she said, “No point ever telling my dad, anyway. He’d minimize it, say, Oh, Pete’s got a sick sense of humor, sorry you were startled by him, princess. And I was just ’round the corner buying some cigarettes. Even if he wasn’t. He’d never join the dots and be like, I left my child with a nonce, I am a disgraceful person! That would mean some reflection and taking responsibility, and that can’t happen to him.”

“Can I make a suggestion? Tell your mum.”

“Now? It’d only upset her. She can’t do anything about it.”

“You’re upset. You’ve never told her: let her in. Give her a chance to help you. Stop making it your responsibility alone.”

Laurie gave a morbid laugh.

“When did you get so wise?!”

Jamie sighed. “I had counseling. At university. I was living in reckless ways, trying to hurt myself. Which I came to realize was about punishing myself.”

Laurie stared. “Oh.”

“One of the things those sessions taught me is, you need to speak up, ask for help. If you don’t tell people why you’re suffering, or even that you’re suffering, they can’t help you.”

“I’m not suffering!” Laurie said. “Missing the end of that party sure ain’t suffering.”

“Yes, you are,” Jamie said. “You are standing here crying, frightened, about something that happened that was so bad, you blocked it out. You’re suffering.”

Laurie nodded and sniffed and wiped her nose on her coat sleeve.

He hailed her a taxi.

“Look. You were there for me. Do you want me to come back to yours?” Jamie said, and Laurie’s mouth opened in surprise.

“Not like that!” Jamie said hastily, at her widened eyes. “If you don’t want to be alone, I mean.”

“Thanks. I’ll be OK.”

Afterward, lying in bed, she thought about how that would’ve worked, and how it would’ve felt, and whether she wanted him to. Did he mean a drink? Did he mean he’d hold her all night like she did for him? She sensed the latter. Was it any kind of good idea to have someone playact that depth of feeling for you, wasn’t it the kind of innocent sweetness that could turn into a slow-acting poison?

She didn’t want him to do things like this: for her to come to feel he was there for her when she wanted, and then for it to be abruptly revoked in the New Year, when he’d gotten things going with the new love.

But as she admonished herself about how it wouldn’t have been at all sensible, Laurie knew she was rationalizing, because she wished she’d said yes.