It's Not Me, It's You

by Mhairi McFarlane

‘It’s like unwrapping your Christmas presents early,’ Delia said, distractedly.

  ‘Hahaha!’ Emma squealed. ‘A WHITE Christmas …’

  ‘Enough!’ Delia said, looking into the leftovers of her eggs.

  Usually, Emma would sigh at this point and say how lucky Delia was to have her male counterpart in Paul. That was one thing about Delia’s new singlehood – she could ask questions without any risk of seeming smug.

  ‘Are you bothered about not having met anyone?’

  Emma pushed her lips out in an expression of uncertainty.

  ‘Yeah … but also not so much that as, I want the next part of my life to start. If I’m not going to meet anyone here, I need to decide what next. Workwise, I feel as if I’ve got to the top of the mountain and seen there’s nothing up there, you know?’

  Delia nodded. ‘Well, I don’t know, having never been successful,’ she laughed, and Emma laughed with her.

  ‘You’re very successful. You’re successful at being Delia. Did you mean it about me coming to Newcastle?’

  ‘Of course!’ Delia near-shrieked.

  They spent the afternoon wandering around Borough Market – ‘A bit of a cliché now, but I think you’ll like it.’

  When they got back to the flat, a small, thick envelope for Delia had been propped against Emma’s door.

  ‘Huh. Must’ve arrived yesterday and someone didn’t pass it on,’ Emma said, handing it over.

  Delia recognised the handwriting. Paul was still trying? She didn’t know if she wanted him to or not.

  She tore the parcel open and a CD single of Oasis’s ‘Live Forever’ tumbled out.

  ‘More Paul mail?’ Emma said, ‘What’s this one?’

  Delia held it up.

  ‘He sung it once at karaoke. For me. I’m not going to listen to it. Manipulative arsehole.’

  Emma nodded.

  It wasn’t mentioned for the rest of the evening. Emma got a call from her parents and went upstairs to take it, leaving Delia alone with the stereo. She stared and stared at the cover and eventually weakened to see if it had any effect and slipped the CD in, turning the volume down very low, sitting on the floor and hugging her knees.

  The crash of the drums started and Delia breathed hard through her nose to stop tears from starting.

  It had been a night at the pub, two years or so after they’d got together. Paul had closed on a Thursday evening to let Aled’s sister Rosie hold her hen do. Ordinarily, Paul wouldn’t let karaoke within fifty feet of his establishment, but in a typically generous Paul gesture he’d gone all out and let Rosie deck the place in pink, made banana daiquiris, the lot.

  Delia came to spectate towards the end of the night and help Paul clear up. The hen do girls had been heckling Paul to step up and sing a song. Paul eventually made a show of letting himself be corralled into it, sheepishly. Delia watched through her fingers, laughing and cringing in equal measure.

  After fiddling with the song library, announcing it was full of girls’ music, he selected Oasis.

  ‘I’m dedicating this to my girlfriend, Delia,’ Paul said, into the tinny microphone. ‘She’s somewhere in the crowd. Ah, there she is!’ He play-acted a rock-star wave across a throng. ‘This one’s for you, darling.’

  During the opening bars of the song he mussed up his hair, drawing it into his eyes in an approximation of Liam Gallagher’s, put his hands behind his back and let rip with a pitch-perfect impersonation of his lairy nasal Mancunian whine. It sounded just like the record.

  The hen crowd went wild. Delia’s mouth fell open. He could sing? Paul pointed at Delia during the track – and several hens, who had developed 0-to-60 crushes since the song started, turned to look at her.

  Song finished, he gave a little bow, resisting entreaties to perform another, blew a kiss to Delia, then the bride-to-be.

  After a few minutes he was by her side, arm snaked round her middle.

  ‘Didn’t embarrass you too much, did I?’ he said.

  His expression said he knew that Delia was in as much of a swoon as everyone else in the room with ovaries.

  Delia, stretched out on Emma’s sofa, could recall every last detail of that moment: the throb of the music, the heat and smell of Paul’s skin as he leaned in to kiss her.

  The nostalgia choked her.

  Alone in Emma’s front room, hundreds of miles away, she thought: charm isn’t enough any more.

  The following week, Kurt was having another one of his black mood spells, which was peculiar given that Twist & Shout alumni were doing very well for themselves.

  Lionel Blunt had won his by-election. Delia was horrified that even broadsheets had done ‘More to him than meets the eye’-type profiles, with photographs of him saving Bogdan through the bonding power of a bundle of tobacco.

  Gideon Coombes had got himself a TV show entirely designed around his special talents, called Food Sod. He ate in notoriously bad restaurants and then gave the kitchen team a detailed dressing-down afterwards. Delia had seen five minutes of him verbally decapitating a man who ran a Moroccan in Bridport called ‘It’s So Moorish!’ and had to turn it off.

  Shoo Number Two bathroom spray was the centre of a day-long Twitter storm when its female-targeted marketing – ‘Boys Shouldn’t Know When Girls Go’ – was spotted by a journalist as a result of their press release, and outed as obscenely sexist. A win-win for Twist & Shout as they weren’t responsible for the marketing, but were charged with getting the product attention. A female Guardian columnist wrote the think-piece ‘Poo: The Last Taboo?’ Sales rocketed and the manufacturers were delighted.

  Kurt was making a mint from crisis management due to Thom Redcar ‘inserting his meat thermometer’ into a front-of-house hottie instead of Mrs Redcar. It seemed to mainly involve calling journalists and wheedling, then threatening them, like a bipolar closing-time drunk.

  In short, the universe was unfolding as it shouldn’t.

  The best times in the office were when Kurt did one of his two- or even three-day Lord Lucan disappearing acts, and Delia and Steph had a laugh. Sadly this week he’d brought his brooding disgruntlement back into the office.

  When he mercifully shoved off one afternoon, Steph got to her feet and darted out of the room. Delia looked up from her keyboard curiously until she got back.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Steph said, slightly out of breath, back to the door she’d closed again. ‘OK. So he’s definitely looking at our computers.’

  Delia stopped typing and felt a chill.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I deliberately said one thing to Kurt, and then another to the journalist, and emailed them on my Gmail, not my work account. Then Kurt comes in the next day, and there’s an atmosphere …’

  Delia could see Steph had worked herself into a state waiting to say this. The thought that Kurt could see the contents of their inboxes was pretty horrifying.

  ‘He has been grumpy …’ Delia said.

  ‘I know, Delia, but seriously – you know when the air’s tight before someone says something that they’re busting to say? Like that. Trust me. There’s been other things, little things.’

  Delia rested her face on the heels of her palms.

  ‘I suppose the reason I thought this was impossible was the Adam West thing, yet that’s all out in the open now. You’re right, he didn’t seem as shocked as I thought.’

  Steph nodded, and re-took her seat.

  ‘We’re going to have to be so, so careful about what we send now.’

  Delia paused over her press release and imagined Kurt sat at some satellite office somewhere, her words filling his screen, and gave a shudder. She texted Joe. She hoped he didn’t mind being her unpaid IT helpdesk.

  OK, so my colleague is CERTAIN our boss can see what we’re typing on personal email. Any more thoughts? Dx

  Only that I want to know his secret if so! I’ve had a poke around since you raised this and honestly, if he is, I am foxed as to how. Foxed! Hah. Stay safe,
though. Jx

  Kurt’s laptop wallpaper was a photograph of him skydiving, goggles on, cheeks blown out. As time went on, Delia realised that Kurt was an adrenaline junkie in his work, too. What she’d thought of as comfortable lulls, when everything was ticking over nicely, had Kurt pacing his cage. Finally, the moods made sense.

  He needed stunts to keep upping the ante; he was restless when not walking the high wire. So she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised when he hit a new low.

  A recently acquired client, Terri Moody, wrote ‘Painful Lives’ – fictional misery memoirs about abuse. Her latest, Please Don’t Daddy, had stormed the bestseller charts. Delia looked at her canon, which included He Said It Was Our Secret and Fritzl-inspired The Miser’s Cave, and couldn’t possibly fathom why anyone would want to read them.

  ‘Her problem with the publicity is she’s not got any sob story of her own,’ Kurt explained. ‘She’s writing these “A Child Called Shit”-type things about being forced to eat pissed-in porridge, but she’s a happily married mum of two in Billericay. You need a narrative. I’ve not gone down this road before – I wondered if she should get cancer.’

  ‘She should … get cancer? She doesn’t have cancer?’

  ‘Yeah. Shave her hair, ask her to drop a few pounds. She could write the letters to her kids, do memory boxes and all that. Then go into miraculous remission.’

  Delia was speechless with horror.

  ‘What, tell her kids she might die?’

  ‘Nah, they wouldn’t know, they’re babies. Twins. Ugly ones actually, they look like haggis. Still, no refunds with IVF.’

  Delia swallowed hard and tried not to howl. She wanted to wash her brain.

  ‘I don’t think we should lie about cancer. It’s terrible karma, apart from anything else.’

  ‘Hark at the Delia Llama, here,’ Kurt chuckled. ‘Sling a press release together about it, I’ll talk to Terri in the meantime and see if she’s game. Her dad was a proper East End villain, knew The Krays: known as Kenny the Fingers. She’s a tough old bird, I reckon she’ll go for it.’

  The client’s willingness was the least of Delia’s objections. She was going to cross the Rubicon if she did this; she’d be doing something she couldn’t come back from. Everything she’d been party to until now was in poor taste, but this was unequivocally wrong.

  She didn’t incline her head and share any look with Steph, but she was desperate to talk to her. If she gave her notice over this, it’d leave Steph alone with Kurt. She didn’t like the idea; at the very least, she wanted Steph to have warning.

  ‘Red, nip out and get us a Starbucks would you?’ Kurt said, moments later, ‘I’ve got a tongue like Gandhi’s flip flop.’

  Delia asked herself why she was letting herself be treated as the tea girl in her mid-thirties, sighed inwardly and got on with it. On the way there, she thought about Terri posing in a headscarf, and whether this modern villainy was much less awful than whatever antics had earned her father the name Kenny the Fingers.

  Not for the first time, as she carried the drinks back, she thought about her fight with Adam West. She kept nervously checking his website, yet there was no article about Twist & Shout. Judging from the length of the comments and the frequency with which links appeared on Twitter, the site was getting a lot of traffic.

  She vacillated over whether his reason for castigating her to Freya was enough. If Delia put it in the context of Freya being a bitter ex – something had happened between them, of that she had no doubt – it made some sense. And if you examined actions instead of words, Adam had looked after her that evening.

  Without that conversation as motivation, what she did on Westminster Bridge looked like simple treachery. But, but! she said to herself. Adam was blackmailing you – he wasn’t looking down on you from a place on the moral high ground. He was blackmailing because he said his ends justified the means. Did they? Delia had gone round in these circles many times.

  She hated being hated by him, that was for sure. He’d said he’d never lie to her, and on careful review, she couldn’t find any evidence that he had.

  She imagined Adam’s reaction to the Terri Moody ‘conveniently timed cancer’ story, and wondered if even his cynicism would fall short of believing they’d invented a carcinoma.

  Delia carried the tray carefully down the steps into the basement, and set Kurt’s coffee down in front of him. Steph wasn’t at her desk.

  ‘Has Steph gone far?’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah, sorry, I should’ve said don’t get one for her. She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Gone. I let her go,’ Kurt said, not looking up from his laptop screen.

  ‘She’s been sacked?’ In the last ten minutes? Steph’s things had disappeared, the Sainsbury’s bag for life she had her trainers in was nowhere to be seen.

  Kurt glanced at Delia, irritable.

  ‘Yeah, you want to argue the point? You’re the boss now?’

  ‘No, I just … why?’

  ‘Nothing special about her. Girls like her are ten a penny. This isn’t a bus, we don’t carry passengers.’

  Steph was also diligent, bright, a fast learner, nice company and popular with the clients. Kurt was a bastard. Delia thought of the conversation they’d had previously about Kurt knowing what they were doing online. Had Steph done something to seal her fate? Why would she keep emailing once she knew – had she tried to bait him? Delia wouldn’t know until she could meet her. She pretend-fussed at admin tasks to avoid writing the Terri Moody release and felt like cheering when he finally left.

  She texted Steph a very vigorous commiserations and a demand to meet in the pub, and was pleased that Steph had indeed dawdled in the hope of a pint.

  When Delia left the building and hurried down the road, Google Maps open on her phone to find the nominated pub, she had the strangest sense of being followed. She turned and scanned the street; nothing. Gaaah, working at KurtCorps was making her a nervy wreck.

  Nevertheless, as a precaution she texted Steph to find a very quiet corner of the pub where they couldn’t be overheard.

  When Delia arrived in the fairly grotty boozer, populated by a smattering of alkies and a Scottie dog tied by its lead to a stool, a pink-cheeked Steph was clearly on her second or third drink. Her shock of curly hair was now loose and Delia had that jolt of seeing someone in their own garb when you’d only previously seen them in work mode.

  ‘This is so appalling, Steph,’ she said, over her first beer.

  ‘It was the way he did it, Delia. He said I’d failed to make an impression and I had to go. All I could say was OK. Then he threatened me about the non-disclosure agreement in our contracts. He said it was tied up tighter than a French gynaecologist’s wife and if I ever talked about my work at Twist & Shout, he’d take me to court.’

  ‘This is vile. You’ve done nothing wrong. Your work was excellent.’

  ‘I thought it might happen. We’re coming up to three months at the company, where he has to give us notice and we have some rights. He’s always preferred you. Also, I didn’t tell you this before, but I think you should know …’

  Delia tensed.

  ‘He asked me a lot of questions about whether you were seeing anyone and if you were online dating. At first I thought it was because he thought you might be seeing that journalist guy, but I reckon he’s after you. I think I’ve seen him looking through your Facebook pictures too. I can’t be sure, he closed it quick, but I saw red hair.’

  Delia felt sick. She’d accepted a friend request from Kurt early on: some spurious reason given about information about a client on his profile. She reasoned she was never on the site much anyway.

  ‘Oh, God. This was a while back?’

  ‘It was last week.’

  Delia squirmed. Kurt had been talking about entertaining a client in Manchester soon and whether Delia could block out an overnight stay, and she now got the jangly fear. She’d hoped Cock & Tail was an aberration.


  ‘Also …’ Delia paused, assuming Steph would’ve raised this straight away. It was possible shock and cider had slowed her faculties.

  ‘… You said that thing about Kurt knowing what we were doing online? Perhaps that could’ve prompted him to sack you?’

  Steph shook her head. ‘Yeah, I only said that to you. I never put a word of it online. In fact I emailed my sister and said how great it was going, to put him off.’

  Delia frowned.

  ‘This computer stalking. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve asked my IT friend. He surely he has more abilities than Kurt, and he doesn’t see how he’s doing it.’

  ‘Well, I tell you, he knows stuff somehow. Whenever I’ve done anything I wouldn’t want him to know – bang – I’m tellin’ you, Kurt’s eyes were on me the next day.’ Steph pointed her index and middle fingers at her own eyes in a forked ‘V’, then at Delia’s, and back at hers again. She got more Scouse when drunk.

  ‘Wait—’ Delia was having an unlikely epiphany, while staring at a brass coal scuttle, ‘WAIT. What if he’s not seeing what we’re doing online? What if he’s hearing us instead?’ What if he’s bugged the office?’

  Steph’s mouth fell open.

  ‘It’d explain why he knows some things and not others. It’s far more Kurt’s style than tech acrobatics, and easier.’ Delia thought on. ‘Where would he have the microphone?’

  They both drummed their fingers on the pub table. Then, eyes wide, locked on each other: ‘THE CAT!’

  ‘Oh my God, that creepy waving cat,’ Steph said.

  It was a fair bet: the office was bare of ornament otherwise.

  ‘Should I move it and see if he reacts?’ Delia said.

  They agreed she’d try, to confirm the hypothesis.

  ‘Only if I move the cat, right after he’s let you go, he might twig we know?’ Delia said.

  ‘How about this. Don’t move the cat, just take a look at it. See if you can find a microphone. Be careful as it’ll make the sound go muffly; make it look like you picked it up to dust it. Then we’ll find a way to get him back once we’ve thought on it.’

  Delia clinked her glass to Steph’s. She filled Steph in on Adam’s information about the care homes and Steph concluded, somewhat furry of speech thanks to the Bulmers, ‘We need to do something about him. I don’t wanna lose you your job.’