If I Never Met You: A Novel

Laurie liked to go to noisy, busy venues with her father. It plugged any gaps in conversation or understanding between them like insulation foam.

Albert’s Schloss was everything Laurie expected: a barnlike space heaving with people who saw themselves as part of the city’s scene, firepits dotted around the room, a live jazz band on acoustics. The festive season reflected in some additional red-green napery and strings of gold bells.

“Is Nic joining us?” Laurie had texted, when making the booking.

“Nah, she’s got business to do in Liverpool.”

She’d never been asked about her premature exit from the wedding party, which she put down to (1) her dispensability and (2) neither of them being able to remember much the next day.

Laurie was glad she’d gone for a low-key showy-offy Sunday outfit, a floral dress with a biker jacket over the top, as the clientele here were very much sporting the Woke Up Like This look that took an hour to create.

She got seated bang on time at half twelve, asked for a beer. It was soon quarter to one: her dad was late, of course he was. Laurie relaxed into people watching instead. She thought back to doing the same in the Refuge in the summer, spying Jamie on his date with Eve. God, that felt like a lifetime ago.

It was one o’clock now. Her dad wasn’t only going to be late, he was going to be flamboyantly late. Laurie pushed down the rising querulousness inside her, the outrage of: How is thirty minutes late, when we hardly ever see each other, OK? How is it not a massive indication of indifference? Because whenever she got a height up, as Dan liked to call it, her dad would sweep in with bonhomie and fulsome apologies and a stupidly indulgent present of some sort, and in a finger snap, she had to convert her mutinous mood into a welcoming one.

How did you fall out with a parent you barely saw from the end of one year to the next? Arguments needed to be something out of the ordinary from generally getting on. If you had a row, then that was it for another year: the row defined the relationship. At some level her dad knew this, of course. He depended upon it. No wonder her mum hated him.

Laurie asked for another cider (“Did you want to order food?” “No, I’ll wait, thank you.”), then another. The third was a poor decision but it was now quarter to two and Laurie was half drunk and entertaining the possibility she had been stood up. By her own dad.

There should be a clever word, a German word, for that feeling when someone lets you down and it’s not remotely surprising and yet still shocking. She drained her glass. A fourth was probably crazy, though she could really fancy one. Because drunk.

“Excuse me?”

Laurie looked up at the Belfast-accented waitress with the cheekbones, through her slightly cider-fogged gaze.

“I’m really sorry. We need the table back?” She held her slender arm out and twisted the strap on her wristwatch so the clockface was visible to Laurie, to underline her point.

Of course, Laurie had forgotten the harsh table turning in popular places like this. She couldn’t squat here and get smashed even if she wanted to.

The waitress did indeed look really sorry for Laurie and Laurie was aflame with the heat of the room’s firepits for what her father had put her through. She left cash with a big tip for the beers and tore out of Albert’s Schloss without making eye contact with anyone.

Outside, Laurie checked her phone to see if her dad had messaged—lol, of course he hadn’t—and called him. It rang out, unanswered. Hi, this is Austin! I know we all hate talking into these things but speak after the beep if you can bear it. She could leave a stinging rebuke on answerphone but what would be the point?

When she glanced up, she started at Jamie walking toward her, looking like the essence of young gorgeous Manchester wanker in a black sweater, dark jeans, and black trainers. Jacket thrown over the crook of his arm, even though it was minty-fresh cold. Vanity, always.

He was with a heavyset young man in a red jacket and two girls, one with short dark hair and another with a ballet dancer’s bun. They were both, it was evident from a distance, gorgeous.

“Hi!” Laurie and Jamie both said in unison.

They mutually exchanged an alarmed look that said: If we are meant to be dating, then this should be handled a certain way but we’ve not really thought what that might involve.

“You go ahead, I’ll have the house beer,” Jamie said, fixing it hastily, gesturing his friends inside.

When they’d safely trooped through the door, he said, “That’s a mate from my Liverpool days and some other friends. Somehow I didn’t think when you said you were coming here, it’d be Sunday. You waiting for your dad?”

“Well I was.”

Laurie explained to Jamie why she was leaving, and Jamie grimaced and said: “That’s completely shit. And he’s not picking up? Wow.”

“Yep. Also, don’t turn ’round and look, but be aware they’ve given your friends seats in the window, and they have a direct line of sight to us right now.”

“I’ve never felt as guilty in my life as I do, doing absolutely nothing wrong with you.” Jamie grinned and Laurie tried to smile, but she couldn’t manage much of one.

It was good to see him, if in excruciating circumstances. Was he on a double date . . . ?

“Are you OK?” he said.

Being asked if she was OK, a friend seeing her not OK-ness, tipped the balance. Laurie’s eyes stung in the bright winter sunlight and she said, morose with alcohol on an empty stomach: “Was there something in Dan that was like my dad, that I unconsciously homed in on? I feel like I wore a please kick my arse some more sign. Without knowing it. Should I have treated them both differently?”

“No. Listen.” Jamie put his hand on her side and moved Laurie further out of the way of the door, as more customers arrived. “Listen to me on this, I know what I’m talking about. It’s got fuck all to do with you. I’ve let down some great people in my time and it was never, ever anything to do with them. In fact, sometimes the fact they were great sent me spinning off even harder in the opposite direction.”

Laurie gulped. She was on the precipice of tears and this sort of kindness could push her right over.

“They are messing up. This is their inadequacy. Don’t put it on yourself. That your dad can’t be a father and Dan can’t be a not treacherous dickhead are faults in their own stars. You’re over here.” Jamie gestured a circle around Laurie. “Doing you. And you are completely fucking great.”

“Thank you,” Laurie said tightly.

“If you ever believe that, you’ll be completely unstoppable. I kind of hope you don’t.”

He smiled and Laurie smiled back weakly.

“Jamie . . . ?” The ballet-bun-hair girl hung off the door in an insouciant way, like a child playing. Her skinny jeans showed she had a pelvis the size of a banjo. Laurie wondered if Jamie was playing it. She felt a pang of insecurity.

“We need to order food?”

“Get me the roast dinner thing. Do they have that? OK, one of those please.”

The girl lingered, looking to Laurie, then Jamie, then back to Laurie again, disconcerted.

“Can I have a moment with Laurie, please?” Jamie said to her, and her eyes widened.

The door slapped shut as she scuttled off inside. The girl watched them with bug eyes, from beyond a pane of glass, her mouth moving rapidly as she no doubt updated her tablemates.

“Are you seeing her?” Laurie said, blurting, slightly taken aback at the idea. What a tangled web this was: What about his fake girlfriend, and what about Eve?

“No,” Jamie said, frowning. “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t do that, while this was going on. Are you seeing anyone?”

Laurie shook her head, thinking, I should’ve thought that was obvious. Who’d date this gibbering wreck? She can’t get a date with her own dad.

“I’d not say what I just did to her, if I was, would I?” Jamie looked perplexed, even faintly annoyed, and Laurie couldn’t entirely read why.

“Sweetheart!”

They both turned at the male voice behind them.

Worse than her dad not turning up was her dad turning up now. So of course that’s what he’d done.

“We did say half two, didn’t we? Hello there, Jamie, was it?”

Slovenly. That’s what her father was. It was an odd word nowadays, you only ever heard it when detective sergeants read from their notebooks in court to describe the defendant.

Not in appearance, quite the opposite: another immaculate checked shirt, a bauble of a watch and spotless bomber jacket. Austin Watkinson was slovenly in his habits, in his attitude, his care for others. Slapdash. Blew one way and then the other.

“No. We said half twelve.”

“Oh.”

Her dad looked at Jamie, who was staring at him.

“Shall we go in?” he said.

“We can’t. Our reservation was for half twelve until half two. They’ve thrown me out after I sat waiting for you for the entire time,” Laurie said.

“Oh. Right. Whoops. Sorry, love. Let’s think about where else we can go, then. It’s on me!”

Her dad rummaged in his coat pocket, produced a pack of Marlboro Lights. He tapped one out and lit it behind a cupped hand. After he blew the smoke out sideways, he said, “Why are you both so glum and why are you looking at me like that?” He addressed Jamie, then Laurie. “Why is he looking at me like that?”

“Because you’re two hours late and short of one decent excuse?” Jamie was perfectly direct and steady and Laurie was quite impressed at him deciding to stay put, and stay in character.

“Oh dear!” Her dad clapped Jamie’s shoulder in a faux-matey manner. “Very chivalrous defense, young man. You have my approval.”

Jamie looked at Laurie in disbelief and Laurie almost winced at how cheap and glib her father was. When she was younger, she briefly thought the devil-may-care routine was impressive. It had aged badly.

“Do you think after I’ve sat staring into a beer for two hours, without you having had the basic courtesy to use your phone, I want to go to lunch like nothing happened?” Laurie said.

“I’m sorry! I wasn’t sure what time we said and then Linus called me and we were on the blower for an age and when I got off I thought it made more sense to race here than . . .”

“Translation, you didn’t give enough of a shit to check, or it didn’t suit you to be here at half twelve and you thought messing me around was a price worth paying for that convenience.”

“Oh, it was hardly that considered, it’s an honest mistake. Do we have to do this in front of him? I feel like I’m going to be finishing this conversation being tape-recorded in the nick. What is your problem?” He half laughed at Jamie. He didn’t like Laurie having support, she could tell, probably used to Dan smoothing over any gaps in realities in the past. And his manipulation had always worked better on her alone; he didn’t like a witness.

“My problem is wondering what you did to deserve a daughter like this, when you treat her like this,” Jamie said simply.

“Christ alive, I think you might be extrapolating hard based on one cock-up, don’t you? Hello, I’m Austin, we met a minute ago. Let’s start again, shall we?”

“We met at the wedding reception,” Jamie said.

“Oh? Look, that was a busy room, I met a lot of people. Bet you liked the free bar, though.”

Laurie took a deep breath. Somehow, she’d known this was coming, if maybe not this soon. She couldn’t face the Pete memory and not know this would be the consequence. “I don’t want to go for lunch with you.”

“Suit yourself. Let’s do this when you’ve calmed down. I’m in town for a couple of days next month, I think.”

“I don’t want to do it ever. What’s the point of pretending, when this sort of selfish bullshit is the total of our relationship? Let’s let this go. I don’t know what you get out of it—I certainly don’t get anything but humiliation and disappointment.”

Around them, happy carefree dressy people streamed past and into Albert’s Schloss to eat sausages and get ratted, in a hedonistic millennial version of the Sabbath.

Meanwhile, Laurie was terminating her relationship with her father, standing next to the man she was only pretending to be romantically entangled with, in order to hurt the man who had hurt her. Hashtag blissville.

Her dad finished his cigarette, threw the stub on the pavement, and ground it underfoot. “This wild overreaction based on one foot wrong is strongly reminiscent of your mother in her heyday, I’m sorry to say.”

Invoking her mum, thinking Laurie would hate the comparison with a woman he’d rejected. What an utter arsehole.

Those who said family mattered above all else were wrong. People you love, who love you back, matter above all. Crap people you happen to be related to: you need to stop thinking you owe them a limitless number of chances to hurt you.

Laurie inhaled deeply, tasting the freedom from expectation like the first tang of salt air at the seaside.

“I was a mistake, I know that. You didn’t want me. When I was a baby, you walked away and left Mum to deal with everything alone. Well, now I’m the one calling you a mistake, and walking away.”

Her dad said nothing for a moment, his eyes flicking from Laurie to Jamie and back again.

“Jeez Louise. OK. I’m going to have a pint in there.” He jerked his head toward BrewDog. “When you’ve calmed down, feel free to join me. If and when you and laughing boy detach yourselves from each other.”

Laurie belatedly noticed Jamie had his arm around her waist. It made her straighten her back.

Her dad thrust his hands in his jeans pockets and slouched off to the pub, with very much a careworn air of the things I have to put up with.

Jamie turned around and hugged Laurie to him. It felt like he absorbed her anxiety, defused it.

“That can’t have been easy. But I think you did the right thing,” he said, while Laurie breathed hotly into his jumper.

She got herself back under control as quickly as possible, not wanting to be street theater for Jamie’s gang. She’d stopped looking to see if they were looking.

“Do you want me to stay with you? That lot will understand. Or they’ll be told to understand it,” Jamie said with a winning smile. Those smiles were hitting Laurie harder lately.

“Ah. No,” Laurie said, fully disentangling, wiping her eyes. “Thanks but no, I’m fine. Walk home will do me good.”

“OK.”

Jamie leaned down and kissed her on her cheek, gave her shoulder a supportive squeeze, turned, and went into the restaurant.

Laurie walked down the road, past BrewDog where her dad was sinking Estrella, past the Midland where she and Dan once spent a hedonistic forty-eight hours, and drew her coat together against the cold. Why had she been in denial about her dad for so long, and accommodated so much? It was strange, but she realized, partly because Dan would’ve disapproved of her getting shot. Whenever her dad took the bare piss, Dan made the case for Not Making a Scene or Not Blowing It Up into Something or You Know What He’s Like, Though.

If he’d been here this time, he would’ve undercut Laurie, said: Not here, not now, let it go. Let’s have a pint. Come on, you two hardly ever see each other. Her dad would’ve divided and conquered.

Afterward whenever Laurie fumed, But, Dan, he deserved it, he’d have said, Oh true. But the moment had always gone.

Dan came from his lovely, safe middle-class parents, and Laurie’s dad was the rogue who’d offered Dan lines in the toilet the first time they met. Dan couldn’t take him seriously, in every sense.

When they still spoke in theory of a wedding, Laurie always said to Dan, “I’m not having my dad give me away, nope, no way.”

And Dan always protested, quite vociferously. “Come on, Lolly” (she was only ever babied as Lolly when he wanted to shut down a debate). “He’s your dad. Your dad gives you away. It wouldn’t be a day for grudges.”

No matter how many times she explained it, Dan didn’t get it.

Jamie got it. She could hear his voice in her head now, clear as a bell. Fuck him, why should he, why couldn’t it be your mum? She raised you. If it’s for any parent to “give you away,” it’s her. His lack of sentimentality about tradition had its uses. She smiled at the thought.

When this was over, she wanted to stay friends with Jamie. She’d been wrong about him—she suspected in part because Jamie had been wrong about himself. They might be chalk and cheese but he was a whole person, a grown-up, the real deal. She valued him, his perspective on things. She felt like he valued her.

Laurie felt her phone go brrrrp in her pocket and yanked it out. It’d be her dad saying: Where have you got to? Come on, let’s make up. Got some champagne in here and a pint for your fella.

The way he spent money was to guilt you, to indebt you, to bewitch and befuddle you. Only later you’d realize you’d been bought.

Jamie

If you’re a mistake you’re the greatest one ever made. I’m really proud to know you. xx

Laurie’s eyes pricked with tears and her heart soared and she remonstrated with herself, as cartoon stars started to dance around her head: this is a warm friendship. He cares. And you’re vulnerable, and cider isn’t meant to be hot.

He got two kisses after her thank-you, though.

A small voice inside her head whispered to her, and she hissed at it to shut up. The voice insisted: Jamie was there on purpose, to see you. He wanted to be there. He knew you were going for Sunday lunch. You said Sunday. Definitely.

Oh, shut up, Laurie nearly said out loud.

I’m not wrong, said the voice.