Here was Megan at the end of a 10k run for breast cancer research, everyone pink faced in their Lycra gear, linked arms and holding their medals up to the camera. Laurie burned at the grinning women flanking her, the sense of sisterhood in their female cause – some for me would’ve been nice, eh, ‘Megs’? (She was Megs on her tabard.) Hell hath no fury.
She came to the end of what she was able to see. The Add Friend button taunted her and she closed the window, a dampness gathering on her brow. Laurie fantasised the catastrophe of hitting it by mistake, Megan seeing the request.
Hah, Laurie was worried about that gaffe, when Megan had a foetus half made of Dan’s DNA to explain?
She shut her laptop and lay down on the sofa again.
There had been a secretive alternative universe, a budding romance, alongside Laurie’s normal life with Dan, the two timelines eventually to intersect in the most explosive way.
Laurie knew how it must have been steadily built, for them to be ready to leap into bed together as soon as the Getting Rid Of Laurie admin was complete. (Assuming that it was true they waited, of course.)
Shared glances, momentary, supposedly insignificant touching of hands, or knees, under tables. Innocent coffees after court, in which perhaps a little too much was said about their respective private lives. Rueful humour, that suggested maybe it wasn’t a bed of roses. Tiny hints that you might be open to alternatives. Texts at the weekend, only light jokes, but making it clear you were thinking about someone out of hours. Testing responses, plausible deniability always there if you got nothing back.
Knowing this had happened felt to Laurie like thinking you were healthy, going about your normal days, and not knowing a fatal cancer was flowering somewhere, unfelt, in an organ. Had Megan cheated on her partner, too? There was no sign of a significant other, but Laurie could only see a dozen or so images.
When did it start? How did it start? They were questions to which Laurie would very likely never know answers.
In a few short years, or even months, it would be past the point anyone would even think it was her business. A page had turned for Dan, and Laurie was now part of his past tense. Laurie was someone who’d appear fleetingly in shadowy form in dinner party anecdotes. Dan dandling an infant on his lap: Oh Santorini? Yeah I went there with my ex. Eighteen years, and she’d be worth a two-letter descriptor.
While Laurie did some exhausted sobbing in lieu of being willing to throw her nice crockery around the room, a clear thought solidified in her mind: I am not only a sad woman. I am a bloody lawyer. I want to know when it started. I want to get this bastard for provable infidelity, even if not sexual. So there will be evidence. THINK.
Megan was into running. And Dan had taken up running, which Laurie was sure wasn’t a coincidence. When he ran, he listened to music. She was confident he was running and not off on any rendezvous, as he regularly came back a beetroot shade and showed her his route on Runkeeper, before dramatically collapsing and saying Laurie best fetch him a medicinal beer.
Laurie was rarely online, so the place he could interact with Megan was Facebook, and the topic they’d bond over was their stupid jogging. Running groups? Laurie used her old profile to check Dan’s activity. Nothing. He wasn’t the sort of person to be fair, the NIMBYs of Chorlton Community site drove him round the bend.
Music, though. Running. She’d glimpsed a playlist on his phone screen, as he wound the earphones round it.
A combination of her professional cunning and her instincts about Dan meant the answer came to her, in a second: they made running playlists together. She was sure of it. Dan used to give her endless ‘mix tapes’ when they were first going out, it was his kind of courtship. Song choices could covertly yet powerfully declare all kinds of things you’d never dare say outright.
Laurie opened her laptop, logged in to Spotify. She’d only ever had Dan’s user name for that, and she betted he thought she’d never check in, and if she did, wouldn’t know what she was looking at.
Well, she did now.
Laurie’s skin prickled with the successful detective ‘Gotcha!’ sensation, coupled with horror at seeing it laid out, as if she’d torn back the covers on writhing bodies.
Among Dan’s playlists, there was one made six months ago, called I Wanna Run 2 U. Nice wordplay, twat. There it was, halfway down: a song added by a different user, one calling herself meggymoon. Ugh, UGH.
The track was called ‘When Love Takes Over’.
Dan’s next was ‘Go Your Own Way’ by Fleetwood Mac. Another from meggymoon: ‘Not Afraid’. It was straight call and response of two people panting for each other; Laurie hardly needed to be a Bletchley code breaker.
Dan’s next: the Stones’ ‘Start Me Up’. Puke. Laurie was embarrassed for him.
It was a very modern way to transact cheating and yet it was an age-old dynamic – over caffeinated, adolescent excitement, egging each other on by degrees.
And hiding in plain sight, because if Laurie had queried this playlist, they would be a bunch of songs, and – DUH! – loads of songs are about sex and love, dummy. She wondered how Dan would’ve denied it. Or would he have broken down, used it as a chance to tell the truth? She’d never know.
Laurie picked up her phone, not in full control of herself, and texted Dan.
I know you were messing around with her six months back, I have the proof. I have no idea who you are anymore, and I don’t want to know.
Then she turned onto her side and went to sleep. When she briefly awoke, she had three messages in reply, and managed to delete them without reading them.
10
‘Laurie, I’ve had a science fiction film pitch from my cousin Munni. Listen to this …’
As Laurie took her seat on Monday morning, her office mates, Bharat and Di, were shriek-chortling at each other in a way that was both a reminder that life went on, and at the same time seemed to be happening behind a wall of glass.
Bharat’s eccentric cousin Munni in Leamington Spa was a regular source of amusement and delight to Bharat. Munni once tried to get himself nominated for a Pride of Britain award for karate chopping a shoplifter running away with a frozen chicken in Morrisons, and according to a horrified Bharat, dried his willy in the Dyson Airblade after a shower in the gym.
‘It is the year 2030 and scientists have found a cure for death. Good news, you’d think? No. Because now because with no one dying, there are too many people. So there are two choices: kill old people, or sterilise the young. War breaks out between the breeders and the geriatrics. At first, thanks to better strength, bone density and joint mobility, plus understanding smart phones, the youth prevail.’
Bharat paused to hunch double, laughing over his keyboard.
‘Poor Munni! Does he know you share his emails?’ Laurie said.
‘He’s sent it to the head of Paramount film studios! He can stand for a few people in Manchester to hear it too.’
Laurie switched her computer on, slung her bag down, unwound her scarf.
Bharat, a Sikh man of thirty-two with a frenetic social life and love of disco, and Di, a fifty-something divorcee who adored her Maine Coon cats and Ed Sheeran, were unlikely banter partners, and yet they were devoted to each other. It was practically a marriage.
Today, Laurie was painfully grateful for the background hubbub they’d created, as she wanted minimal scrutiny of what she’d done at the weekend. It was easy enough to lie, but harder to keep her emotions totally steady while she did so. It was hard not to appear as she was – hollowed out.