It’s Not Me, It’s You. Mhairi McFarlane
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.
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: [email protected]
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: [email protected]
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?
From: [email protected]
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