How We Met
Katy Regan
There are some people you can’t imagine life without.What, at the end of it all, is really important?Liv and her friends can’t imagine a life different from now: freedom, lifelong friendships, and dreams that are still within their reach.Then, Liv dies.For those left behind – Mia, Fraser, Anna, Norm and Melody – everything stops. Their lives and dreams are frozen in time.In the years that follow, they decide to meet on Liv’s birthday to raise a toast and celebrate her life, even though none of them are living their own – not really. Time marches inexorably on, and yet without Liv, the lynchpin of the group, they are all flailing. Mia and Fraser are quietly falling apart because of the secret they share and, as truths are unearthed and their friendships are tested to the limit, they have to ask themselves – is it time to get on with the business of actually living?
KATY REGAN
How We Met
For my friends, with love.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ua85ec936-980f-5488-b422-c281922ab5bf)
Dedication (#ub1181792-68d7-5707-a6ce-50b7e3ea6d3c)
Prologue (#ucbb21d39-9ce6-517d-9e6a-9ea0eabb6dbe)
Things To Do Before I Am Thirty (#u24dcaa8e-29f5-5ca4-9e87-d01683898e56)
Chapter One (#u5508b090-dcbf-5fc1-a717-d9c40fbf4b36)
Chapter Two (#u67cccc15-0a47-5f88-b034-144532bcd1ac)
Chapter Three (#u68abecb0-c25e-563b-8479-33f6060e4a06)
Chapter Four (#u2d32e23c-385a-5979-9f31-e01c56d1bd1f)
Chapter Five (#uf13901d2-e30f-50dd-aedf-fe27b0efc965)
Chapter Six (#u49ebbd9c-dc22-50ab-9a89-403cc4751c9f)
Chapter Seven: then (#ua5085c65-1bc4-5af5-9f8b-069a7fc69fc3)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Katy Regan (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
August 2006
Ibiza
Outside the bar, the silence rings in my head; like the delayed echo of a lone guitar string. The air is warm and gluey and smells of sea salt and those flowers again – they’re everywhere you go. Cancan skirts of frothy pink blooms.
I kick off my shoes and, carrying them, take the stone steps down to the sand. It’s still warm and sugar-soft after another baking day. Behind me, I can still hear the throb of the music. Ba-doom! Boom! Faint laughter from further down the beach. Lasers streak the sky.
I’m walking quickly towards the sea now. The moon is high and fat as a pumpkin. It’s bleeding pearly light across the sky and across the water but there’s not much time left for it now, today will soon be gone. And then there’ll be tomorrow. Another brand-new day.
I don’t bother to take off my clothes at first, I just wade straight in. The water’s cool and delicious around my thighs, my stomach, my chest, and now I am swimming out, out towards the light.
And it’s beautiful. So beautiful. The cool water; the black, silky sky. At either side of me, the cliffs rise up and glitter in the moonlight, like giant-sized precious stones. The water dances with a million needles of white light. It makes me think of music, of notes alive on paper, and every molecule of me tingles with pleasure, so much that I have to stop and catch my breath.
Push, glide, I am swimming beneath the water with every stroke now – like a mermaid. Except I’m not a mermaid because my white dress has ballooned around me so that I must look like a giant jellyfish, shifting and morphing, a glowing orb in the middle of the sea; alone but not lonely. Not wanting now. I’m swimming further out now, I slide the straps of my dress down and slip out of it, as if I’m shedding a skin. And suddenly I am totally free, the water caressing every inch of me, my dress floating alongside me, in my hand. I can still hear the throb of the music back on shore and when I put my head beneath the water, the b-dum-dum of my heart. I turn onto my back; I am floating, weightless. I imagine the stars are tiny pinprick holes, windows into another universe, a world where people are dancing and smiling too and don’t know, don’t care, where one day starts and another begins. And then they start to go off – the small explosions, deep in my belly, little bubbles of light working their way to my throat and out across my mouth and I make a mental note that this, THIS is what it tastes like. For the first time ever, I know this is it.
Life has brought me so much more than I ever imagined. So much more than I ever thought possible. Friends I could marry, whom I’d die for. What did I do to deserve that? I imagine them now, dancing like those in the world above me; one great universe of dancing people and me, in the middle, dancing in the sea. I think of him back at the bar, hands pumping the air now. That grin across his face, the beautiful almond-shaped eyes. Lost in music. It makes me smile.
I swirl and tumble, feel the seaweed feather my skin. The moon is sending iridescent rays of light through the water; it’s like electricity darting through my legs.
I should feel tiny out here but I don’t, I feel bigger than ever, every last cell of me filled right up. I imagine the deep green bed beneath me, and the domed sky above, and imagine I am suspended, held in the centre of it all. A tiny being, spinning in orbit.
The music has stopped now, so it’s just the sound of the waves and me and everything feels perfect. Everything feels right.
Above me, stars are going out, one by one. Night is giving way to day. Any time now, a brand-new day and I can’t wait. I CAN’T WAIT.
THINGS TO DO BEFORE I AM THIRTY
1 Sleep with an exotic foreigner – (in an ideal world, Javier Bardem). Night of heady, all-consuming passion: getting lost, snogging amongst lemon groves and being drunk on something thick and hugely alcoholic that I can’t pronounce. (*Do this without becoming completely neurotic about what it’s supposed to ‘mean’.)
2 Learn to do SOME sort of dance: jive, tango, birdie … Don’t tell anyone am having classes then wow them at random event and watch as they go, ‘Oh, my God, Liv, you didn’t tell me!’
1 Learn a foreign language.
2 Learn how to make a Roman blind.
3 And the perfect Victoria sponge …
4 Read all works by William Wordsworth and be able to recite lines at will. (Not including ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.)
5 Use up all seven Scrabble letters in one fell swoop! BUFFOON, for example, which would be great.
6 Go to Venice, properly this time, and have a bellini at Harry’s Bar.
7 French kiss in Central Park.
8 Climb Great Wall of China and learn a bit of Chinese (should be able to do this whilst climbing the Great Wall).
9 Vegas, baby!
10 Live in Paris, listen to Edith Piaf, smoke Camels, drink pastis and have a torrid affair. Then leave, crying eyes out in Paris Gare du Nord.
11 Learn how to pluck eyebrows so that they ‘frame the face’.
12 Swim naked in the sea at dawn.
13 Get a six-pack (or at least a two-pack) Something better than the one-pack I currently sport.
14 Learn how to meditate. To live in the moment.
15 Have a massive party for my wonderful, wonderful friends. Just because …
16 Learn how to use chopsticks. Asking for cutlery is getting embarrassing at twenty-seven.
17 Go to airport, close eyes and pick a destination at random, then GO! Even if it’s to Stuttgart or Birmingham.
18 Make homemade porn video. Can’t believe I just said that.No really, I can’t.
ONE
6 March 2008
Williamson’s Park, Lancaster
Mia put the brake on the buggy, walked around the front and checked on Billy. Thank God for that, finally he was asleep. His fat little cheeks red with cold, a puddle of drool collected in his chin.
With any luck, she might have time for a cheeky half outside the Sun on the way back home. It was her best friend’s birthday after all and, ‘be rude not to, Woodhouse, be rude not to …’ She knew what her best friend would have to say about that.
‘Hi, Liv.’
Mia took off her rucksack, sat down on the bench and took in the view for a second, once again congratulating herself on finding this corker of a spot, Ashton Memorial white and gleaming in the sun, like a provincial version of the Taj Mahal. The whole of the city laid out below; the River Lune a snaking, silver ribbon through the middle of it all and, in the distance, the Lakeland hills. She often thought they looked like big hairy mammoths from some ancient land.
She took the pint glass and bottle of water out of the rucksack and the tulips from the Morrisons bag. She set the glass down on the floor, poured in the water and tried to arrange the yellow flowers. She tutted at herself for not thinking to bring scissors, since the stalks were too long and so they didn’t sit in the glass at all, but splayed all over the place, most of them toppling out onto the grass.
She leant back on the bench and looked at them.
‘Well that looks shit, doesn’t it?’ Then she laughed, mainly at the predictability of it all. Where was Olivia Jenkins when you needed flowers arranging?
Mia moved right to the other end of the bench so she was nowhere near the buggy and took the packet of Golden Virginia and the Rizlas out of her jacket pocket. She pulled her hoodie over her knees – bloody hell it was freezing, why hadn’t she worn a coat?
She was often doing this of late, already being out somewhere before realizing she was wearing completely inappropriate clothes for the weather. Last week, she’d looked down in the Post Office to see she was wearing odd shoes.
She rolled a cigarette, glanced at the back of the buggy, felt a slight tug of guilt but pressed on. ‘Must press on!’ as Olivia would say. Frankly, what with Billy’s fascist policy regarding sleep lately (i.e. allowing her to have none, ever), it was either the odd fag to keep her sane, or adoption. Put like that, she felt much better and lit it.
‘So it’s your birthday today, Olivia Jenkins. Happy bloody Birthday.’
She blew the smoke up into the clear March sky, which seemed to hum, it was so cold.
‘Now, I know what you’re going to say. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mia Woodhouse, smoking now you’re supposed to be a responsible mother. But honestly, Liv, after the week I’ve had with David Blaine over there – the baby that resists sleep for so long, he should do a show so people could come and watch – you’d let me off. And actually I can now inform you with confidence …’ she inhaled enthusiastically … ‘this is what you would, at one time, have called a twenty-quid fag.’
She laughed, then began to cry when with no warning whatsoever – this was also happening more often of late – she had a sudden memory: Liv, lying on Fraser on the beach in Ibiza, topped by that ridiculous visor she’d insisted on wearing for the whole fortnight, so she looked like an OAP from Florida, coming out with just that: ‘Twenty-quid fag, this.’ A fag so good she’d pay twenty quid for it.
Everyone had laughed and laughed.
‘D’you remember how you always used to say that, Liv?
‘Anyway, I’ve got news on that front.’ She pulled herself together. It could easily go one of two ways up here, especially when she was suffering from acute sleep deprivation and she wanted to keep it light and entertaining. It was Liv’s birthday, after all. ‘Fraser’s given up! Would you believe it? I’d be happy for him if he wasn’t so smug. Honestly, it’s killing me. The other day, he called me at seven a.m. – just as Billy had gone back off to sleep; I could have murdered him had he not been two hundred and fifty miles away – to say, “Guess where I am? Go on, guess, guess!”
‘I was like, “Dunno, a police station? The zoo? Buckingham Palace?” And he was like, “No. Hampstead Heath.”
‘And so I said, “Oh, well done. So clearly you haven’t been to bed yet after some brilliant night out and are just ringing to nauseate me. That’s not very nice.” But he said, “No. I’m at Hampstead Heath Running Track.” Then he said it again, just in case I hadn’t heard: “RUN-NING TRACK. I’ve just been for a RUN.”
‘He didn’t sound very out of breath, which I pointed out, and then he hit me with it: “Ah, but then I wouldn’t be, would I? Because I’ve given up smoking. Three weeks, and five days!”
‘Which turned out to be the real reason he was calling me at that hour.’
‘Like I said, just unbearable. Horribly, horribly smug. It was all I could do not to be sick in a bag.’
‘So that’s Fraser.’
She looked around just to check she was alone. She had to admit, she did feel moronic on occasions, sitting here, talking to herself. But it was the only real place she had to come – a place that was Liv’s (unless she wanted to traipse all the way to the cemetery in Peterborough every month. She knew what Liv would have to say about that too.) She also knew, if this were the other way round, Olivia would have rallied the troops, weeks in advance, marched them all up that killer hill to Williamson’s Park, bringing cake, candles – probably a personal choir, knowing her. She could picture them all now: Liv at the front carrying everything, Melody struggling behind in heels and a slightly too-tight skirt-suit, complaining that the cake was too chavvy, why didn’t we get one from Marks’s? Norm at the back, breaking into a light jog, Anna … Well, Anna probably wouldn’t be there yet, having only left some random bloke’s bed in Tooting about an hour ago, and finally Fraser – lovely Fraser Morgan … what would he be doing? Probably pegging it to the nearest offy, having decided right at the last minute that this occasion called for booze.
Mia thought of Fraser now, alone in his flat in Kentish Town – the one he used to share with Liv – and felt a rush of love. Poor Frase – she must give him a call as soon as she was finished up here, because today would be extra tough for him. She imagined him waking up, the date hitting him and then the aching absence of Liv in the flat and the memories, flooding back, more acute and painful than ever. It was at times like this that she wished Fraser would move back to Lancaster, just so she could keep an eye on him.
‘So what else is new …?’ Mia pulled her sleeves down over her hands and blew on them to keep them warm.‘Oh, yes … Billy. My son. Almost forgot! He’s almost eight months old now, I can’t believe it, Liv. Where the hell has the time gone since July? I look back and I can’t remember anything. Must have blanked it out. Anyway, the good news is, he hasn’t got my bacon ears or prominent chin – yet … although it’s hard to tell since currently his entire jaw line is covered in fat. The bad news is, he’s got Eduardo’s everything else. Literally, he is his double, which as you can imagine, I am seething about: same beautiful green eyes, same Brazilian monobrow, same permanent look of wounded entitlement. I just hope to God he doesn’t inherit total disrespect for women, too.
‘Oh, Olivia, why didn’t I listen to you when you said never trust a man who wears sunglasses inside?
‘So, Eduardo has turned out to be a useless cock – no surprises there – although I suppose, in some part of my tiny pea-brain I did, at one point, think he might change. Sadly not. Since I’ve had Billy, he’s seen him eight times. Eight times in nearly eight months! Pathetic or what …?’
Mia could feel the familiar rage bubbling up inside her, the sort that made her want to punch a wall – no, actually, just Eduardo’s stupid, face; the maddening sense of injustice she always got when she thought about Eduardo. What really got her goat was that Eduardo was meant to be a summer fling, not the (useless-at-that) father of her child. She’d been seeing him for getting on a year by the time she fell pregnant, but Mia had always just thought he was ‘good enough for now’, that they’d eventually fizzle out. If she were really honest, she was kind of banking on that.
They rowed constantly for a start, but although she was ashamed to admit it now, part of her had thought that was cool and romantic. If she couldn’t have a tumultuous, impulsive relationship with a hot-headed Latino in her twenties, when could she? She imagined them in one of those black-and-white foreign films she dreamed of writing one day, where nothing much happened except for two, very beautiful people shouting at each other in a spartan room in Provence or Andalucia or, well … somewhere very hot, anyway. It didn’t quite translate into a flat in Acton that smelled permanently of ragù, but then she’d got pregnant. If it had been up to her she would have had a termination, but Eduardo’s Catholic upbringing had suddenly made an appearance. It made her feel guilty: It’s a life, Mia, as soon as those cells start to divide. She’d fallen for it at the time, she thought he actually wanted this baby, that it might even bond them. Now she realised he was calling her bluff. Well that backfired pretty spectacularly.
‘Anyway …’ She told herself to rein it in. She’d promised herself this birthday visit to Liv’s bench today was not just going to turn into a rant-athon about Eduardo but, look at her, she was at it already.
‘… The thing is, whatever I think of him, he’s still Billy’s dad, isn’t he? And I want Billy to have a relationship with his dad. It’s just I’m not that sure his dad wants to have a relationship with him, which is the most heart-breaking thing of all, do you know what I mean?
‘But hey, let’s see, he’s promised me he’ll be here at five p.m. today to take Billy off for the night because everyone’s arriving for YOUR do.
‘Which brings me onto everyone. I guess you’ll be wanting an update:
‘One. Anna. You’ll be glad to know everything is exactly as it was in Twelve Station Road days, Livs, except she’s gone north of the river now and inflicts it on some other poor, unassuming flatmates in Islington. She still has dubious hygiene, walks round with toothpaste on her spots, picks plaque from her teeth when she thinks you’re not looking and eats gherkins straight from the jar. And yet still scrubs up to look like Florence Welch – how is that?
‘She still reads The Economist in bed, too – like we were ever impressed – and I still maintain she hasn’t got the faintest clue what it’s on about, but we love Anna Spanner, she’s good value. Oh, and she’s still single, obvs.
‘Who else? Melody and Norm … Well, it’s all change in that camp, Melody having almost completed her total transformation from Indie mosher to hotshot lawyer (as you will know, Norm was far more impressed with the Indie mosher version). They’re doing really well for themselves: Norm’s ‘Entertainment Correspondent’ for the Visitor these days. I know! Get him. It pays peanuts, of course, and occasionally he has to go and cover groundbreaking front page stories about people turning a hundred, but the rest of the time he gets to go to free gigs, so he’s not complaining. They’ve got a swanky, three-storey townhouse up on that posh estate by the university. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before all those rooms are filled up with mini-Normantons. Fraser reckons they’ll have twins: a boy who looks like Melody and a girl who looks like Norm.
‘It’s bizarre though, Liv, it’s like Melody came back from travelling and Ibiza, started her law course and said, “Right, I want to be a grown-up now.” The fags went, the drugs went – although you’ll be pleased to know she still drinks inordinate amounts of cider. Nowadays, if you go round to theirs, it’s like a beauty spa waiting room.
‘She’s got that room-fragrance, joss-stick thing going on – you can smell lily of the valley from half a mile away and everything’s beige, sorry stone. And I do not just mean the house. Gone are the Arctic Monkeys and Green Day and the Foo Fighters, now it’s Norah Jones all the way. Even I – musical Philistine – know you would not be impressed.
‘Oh, and she does these “Pampered Chef” parties now, sort of Tupperware parties but with kitchen implements where you’re forced to pay fifty quid for a garlic press. Norm’s still the same, thank God – he’s usually in some mild stage of intoxication to block it all out – but the “change” has already begun on him too. She’s started buying him clothes from places like Aquascutum and Gap (she calls it THE Gap) and so you’ve got Norm, 90s but cool with his lamb-chop sideburns in a chino and a moleskin jacket. Wrong, in so many ways.
‘Other than that, motherhood’s treating me well, even if it’s like living with a fascist dictator, and sometimes I actually catch a whiff of my own BO because it’s very hard to have a shower of a morning with a baby hanging off you, I can tell you. But he does make me laugh, Liv. And he is really cute, even if he looks like his dad. If I was to describe motherhood to you, I’d say imagine what it’s like to want to throw someone out of the window one second, and eat them up with love the next. And as Mrs Durham said to me the other day (Mrs Durham is an old dear I look after on a Tuesday. She’s pretty revolting. I found a pellet of cat poo in her knicker drawer the other day …) “You’re never—”’
Then Mia stopped. She stopped because what Mrs Durham had said hit her. ‘You’re never really a grown-up until you’ve had a child yourself.’
But then, of course, some people didn’t get the chance to grow up at all.
Billy was still asleep when Mia left the bench. It was 1 p.m. – he’d been asleep half an hour; if she played her cards right, she probably had another half-hour yet. She held tight onto the buggy as she walked down the steep hill from Williamson’s Park, the wind blowing so hard from behind, it made her break into a run. It was one of her greatest fears: accidentally letting go of the buggy and watching helplessly as Billy careered into the traffic. It made her breathless with panic just thinking about it.
She walked down through town. It was the start of the Easter holidays and all the students had gone home. Mia liked Lancaster best like this – vacated of eighteen-year-olds with far too much confidence for their own good. Then she could pretend this was her town again; theirtown, when the six of them had been brimming with confidence and it felt like they owned it all too.
Same day
Kentish Town, London
‘Sssh, don’t move.’
Still half asleep, Fraser Morgan had the vague notion that he was being held up at gun point in his own bed. Something was pressing firmly into his back. And he had an erection, which was a bit odd. He could even get an erection when his life was in danger?
‘That nice hun? Mm?’
It was only when the voice spoke again, whispered into Fraser’s ear, a warm flood of breathiness that Jesus Christ that stank of booze, that he woke up, with a start, the awful truth hitting him in the face. Or was that the back?
KAREN. Fraser’s eyes shot open.
Karen from the Bull was in his bed. She was naked, pressing her pelvis into him and playing with his cock, which went without saying was really quite pleasant.
Fraser lay there, motionless, blinking into the half-light, staring at the radio alarm clock on his bedside table: 10.53 a.m., 6 March 2008.
Sixth of March.
He closed his eyes again.
How? How could he have let this happen? Exactly at what point of last night did he everthink this was a good idea?
‘I said, is that nice …?’ She was purring, kissing the nape of his neck now. Breathing pure alcohol fumes into his skin. Fraser tried to speak but it came out a couple of octaves higher than intended, so that he sounded like a pre-pubescent boy on the brink of his voice breaking. He cleared his throat and tried again.
‘Yeah, that’s um, yeah, very nice.’
Fuck it. Fuck IT! Panic consumed him. How the hell was he going to get out of this? How had he even got into this?
‘Good, good, very glad to hear it. Well don’t go away, handsome, I’m just popping to the loo but I’ll be right back to carry on the good work.’
Karen leant over, pecked him on the cheek and got out of bed.
Fraser turned his head, very slowly. Ow, that killed. Why did his neck hurt? Just in time to see what was – it had to be said – a rather sizeable arse disappear round his bedroom door.
Thank fuck for that. Fraser turned onto his back, pulled the duvet over his head and let out the breath he’d been holding since he woke up. GOD he felt tragic. His heart was palpitating, his head throbbing as he tried to piece together the events of last night. It was all very vague, involving beer, wine, tequila and, at one point, her showing him her yogic headstands, which he’d then tried too, before breaking the coffee table, and very nearly his neck. Oh, that’s why his neck hurt.
He vaguely remembered coming to his senses for one brief moment after that – must have been the rush of blood to the head – to say to her, ‘Come on, you don’t want to go to bed with some drunken stranger …’ just as she was removing her blouse (he’d noted with some alarm that that was definitely what you’d call a blouse). But she’d just sat on his bed in the white bra that Fraser imagined he could fit his head into and said: ‘Oh, I think I do.’
So at least he’d made some effort to avoid this. However, the fact remained that he’d slept with her. He’d slept with Karen from behind the bar of the Bull – was this really the end of the world? She wasn’t a horror story; in fact she was a perfectly lovely girl. God knows, she’d scraped him off the floor of that pub enough times in the past eighteen months, chucked him in a cab well past closing time after another night of him drowning his sorrows and talking shit to whoever he could find in there – mainly her.
But she was also forty-two. Shitting hell, forty-two! That was practically middle-aged. Old enough to be his mother in some parts of her home town of Hull, Fraser felt sure. As old as … Fiona Bruce.
He winced as he remembered a conversation – the bit where she’d asked him how old he thought she was and he’d said (thinking he was being flattering, this was before beer goggles took over and he’d even considered doing anything with a woman in her forties), ‘Don’t know, Forty-two? Forty-three?’ And she’d blinked at him and said, ‘Forty-two,’ which was followed by a nasty silence before he moved swiftly onto … DOLPHINS! Oh, God, how could he forget the dolphins? Karen from the Bull had two-inch nails with dolphins painted on them. Was this a normal girl thing to do and he’d just never seen it before?
He winced again as bits of that particular conversation also came back to him: her telling him she’d adopted a dolphin from a sanctuary in Florida, that this dolphin was like the baby she’d never had, and he, in an effort to appear interested and engaged, telling her he once swam with dolphins in Zanzibar. Which was a lie. A pointless, outright lie. He’d never even been to Zanzibar. Why the fuck had he saidthat?
Oh, God, she was back now, padding towards the bed, naked except for a pair of lacy, black knickers that had largely disappeared up her behind and clutching her massive, Christ, GIGANTIC breasts. Fraser sat up, pulled the duvet right up to his chin and arranged himself in the most asexual, un-come-to-bed position he could muster. But she got in anyway, so he moved right up against the wall.
‘So,’ he said, brightly. ‘Coffee?’
Brilliant. There was no better feeling, decided Mia, ten minutes later, than sitting down with a half of Carling and a baby still asleep – even if it was minus five and blowing a gale. This is how she got through the week, these days, by finding the odd little pocket of time to herself and guarding it with her life. At least there was that about being a single mother – you really got to appreciate your own time. What on earth had she done with it all before she had a baby? Work and drink she imagined. And lots of face-packs.
Sometimes, Mia dreamt of her old life, before she’d moved in with Eduardo in Acton – not one of her better ideas – and Liv had moved in with Fraser to start her new teaching job in Camden, when she, Liv and Anna had shared a flat in Clapham and she was working all hours God sent for Primal Films as an art department assistant.
She’d wake up when it was still dark, thinking she was back in her old bedroom on the Ikea futon and that she had ten minutes to chuck on some clothes before jumping in the car and driving through the silent city to Shepperton Studios for another thirteen-hour day. She’d loved those days. She loved the exhaustion she’d felt, an excited kind of exhaustion, totally different to the tiredness that comes with motherhood.
Barely conscious, she’d then imagine the noise she could hear was Liv and Anna making a racket downstairs in their gloomy Victorian kitchen with the huge table all six of them had spent so many hours drinking at. Then she’d come to, realize it was Billy crying and that it was just the two of them, alone in their boxy new-build flat in Lancaster with its woodchip and ubiquitous laminate.
Still, things had improved lately. Yes, definitely, things had improved. She still wondered occasionally if her son didn’t rate her that much, or wasn’t that impressed with the whole set-up, really, what with it being just the two of them in a poky flat and a dad who only turned up when he felt like it.
She still didn’t really know how to talk to him and found herself stuck for words when it was just him and her. She marvelled at mothers who seemed to be able to coochie-coo so naturally in public, whereas she just felt like a dick a lot of the time. Then Billy would get that look of wounded entitlement on his face as if to say, ‘Seriously, is this all you’ve got?’ And she’d wonder if she was really cut out for this motherhood thing at all.
But at least the panic had gone. She didn’t worry about him dying every night any more, which was something, and now Melody and Norm had moved back up North to Lancaster, they sometimes offered to help, which was really sweet, even if Melody drove her mad by suggesting single motherhood was somehow ‘romantic’, that Mia was like J. K. Rowling, writing an award-winning film script in a freezing cold flat she couldn’t afford to heat, when in reality she wasn’t writing anything at all, was reading OK! magazine and tucking into the wine in a flat she couldn’t afford to heat and feeling thoroughly guilty that her brain was probably half dead by now.
Mia put her hood up, took a sip of her lager and took her mobile out of her pocket so she could text Fraser to see if he was still on track for tonight, and check he was surviving the day so far. When she looked at her phone, however, there was a text from Anna:
was at a party in Kidderminster last night so there’s a SMALL chance I might be late but WILL BE THERE I promise. Start without me.
Spanner x
Mia rolled her eyes; she knew ‘a SMALL chance’ translated as ‘am still in Kidderminster and will be two hours late’, and composed her message to Fraser, wondering whether she had time for another rollie.
Then her mobile went. It was Eduardo. Her heart sank. Do not do this to me, she thought. Please, please, do not do this to me. Not tonight. To add insult to injury, him calling had also woken Billy.
She picked up.
‘Hi, Eduardo.’
‘It’s me.’
‘I gathered that.’
She told herself to keep the tone neutral, but it was hard – so very, very hard.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
Oh, fuck off, she wanted to say. Why did he always have to use that accusatory tone?
‘Nothing’s “going on”.’
‘Why is Billy crying then?’
Because I’m strangling him, what the hell?! He was a baby. Babies cried. He’d know that if he spent any time with one.
‘Where are you?’ said Eduardo, sharply, before she had time to answer.
‘At the pub.’
He snorted.
‘The pub?’
Yes. We’re having a pint – three in fact – and we might follow that with a tequila chaser. She thought better of it. She wasn’t in a position to piss Eduardo off. She needed him, that was the most galling thing of all.
Eduardo sighed, in that martyred way he did. She knew just from that sigh what was coming next.
‘Anyway, look Mimi …’
Mimi? Stop calling me bloody Mimi.
‘… work have just called and—’
‘Er, NO.’ Mia felt the rage rise like bile in her chest. ‘Come on, Eduardo, you are not doing this to me.’
Billy was wailing now, rubbing his eyes. Mia pushed the buggy back and forth.
‘You know how important tonight is, what day it is today, you’ve known for ages.’
Silence.
‘Mia, this is not about choice, is it?’
She hated how he did that. Always put ‘is it?’ on the end of everything, so subtle and yet so successful in making her doubt herself. ‘I need the money. I’m late on my rent, I’m fucking desperate here, I don’t have the luxury—’
Luxury? HA! Don’t fucking talk to me about luxury, thought Mia, you total lying, manipulative bastard, but she stood there, the wind howling, Billy crying now, and she knew it was pointless.
‘Whatever, Eduardo,’ she said. ‘I can’t be arsed any more. Go. You go to work.’
Then she hung up, tears of frustration already running down her face. And what she really wanted to do was to call her best friend, but of course she couldn’t.
Where were those fags? He could have sworn he’d hidden a couple in here. Fraser was now in his freezing kitchen, rummaging futilely in the kitchen drawer in his dressing gown. The fridge. Maybe he’d put them on top of the fridge? Right at the back so he wouldn’t be tempted but they’d still be there, just in case of real emergencies like this one he was currently facing, a moment of true, genuine need.
He patted his hands on top but couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps they’d fallen down the back? He steadied his feet and wrapped his arms around the fridge to move it, giving it an enormous hug, relishing the coolness against his hot, toxic skin, thinking maybe it would be nice just to stay here for a few minutes, just him and the fridge in their cool embrace. He pulled and pulled but he was too weak, too sleep-deprived, too fucking hungover to manage it. When he finally let go, the door flew open and a cucumber shot out, hitting him on the chest like a missile.
He gave up, leant against the kitchen worktop, breathless, his head pounding, thinking what to do next. Maybe he could go to the corner shop for cigarettes? Then just do a runner? Just not come back! Ah, that only really worked when you were in someone else’s house though, didn’t it?
Fuck it. Fuck it, you moron.
He was giving himself a talking-to now, firm but sort of kind. He knew who that reminded him of.
He held the heels of his hands to his face, stretching the skin outwards, watching his reflection in the greasy microwave door as if, if he did it for long enough, he might actually be able to escape his own skin. He thought of tonight, of approximately eight hours from now, of walking into the pub to face his mates. God, he wanted to hurl.
What was really bothering Fraser was how comfortable Karen seemed to be in his bed. How happy. No sign of post-bender jitters whatsoever.
If she’d just been some flirty barmaid who’d wanted a bit of sexy time then that would have been fine. Not fine, but finer; he would have felt less guilty. But she liked him, she’d liked him for ages, she’d told him last night. Which was just brilliant, just the absolute best.
He considered his options:
Be nice, go for breakfast with her, ask for her number then never call her. Of course all this meant that he could never drink in the Bull again; or, if he did, he’d have to wear a disguise. He briefly went through how this might work in his head and decided it never would.
Say he was going out (which he was, just not for another four hours but Karen didn’t need to know that …) wait till she was safely out of view then go back to bed. The thought of bed, alone, right now, was amazing. Truly amazing.
Tell her the truth: Say he’s sorry, she’s a lovely girl but he was drunk, he’s still grieving his girlfriend and it should never, ever have happened. Can they be friends?
Fuck that. He didn’t want to be friends!
Anyway, right at this point, all three sounded hideous. Especially the last. He felt sure the last would guarantee tears and the last thing he could handle today – especially today – were tears from a barmaid he barely knew.
Norm. That’s who he wanted right now: simple, unjudgemental, chilled-out Norm. Norm, who he’d known since he was nine.
He took his phone off the side, sank down onto the kitchen floor in his dressing gown and texted him:
So guess who woke up today in bed with Karen from the Bull? What a cock. Head in bits. Need some Norm wisdom.
A reply buzzed immediately:
You cock.
Fraser groaned and half laughed at the same time – he knew Norm didn’t really mean it, that that level of genuine harshness was beyond him.
He texted back:
I know, it’s not normal. Today. Any day but today! What’s wrong with me?
He held the phone in his hand, waiting for a reply, and something caught his eye: the photo of Liv held against the fridge door with a magnet in the shape of a beer bottle. He reached forward and took it in his hand. This was his favourite photo of her. They were at a fancy dress party – Anna’s twenty-third birthday. It was a ‘come as a London Underground Station’ party and Liv had gone as Maida Vale.
‘I simply made myself a veil …!’ she’d said, standing on his front doorstep, in a voice like a posh, wooden TV presenter from the 1970s . It made Fraser giggle even now.
He stared at the photograph. She was wearing her homemade veil and a French maid outfit that revealed her comely thighs – she always had fantastic legs – and which plunged at the neck (her cleavage was pretty fantastic too). She was holding a cocktail with an umbrella in it and standing in a naughty-postcard-type pose, doing an exaggerated wink, her wide mouth half open, revealing her lovely teeth. Liv had the best teeth: big, naturally white teeth with a tiny gap in the middle. That was his favourite bit of her – that little sexy gap. Fraser smoothed out the frayed corners of the photo, kissed it and put it back.
A text from Norm:
Mate, chillax. Nothing’s normal for any of us today. See you at 8 in the Merchants, you oaf. Cuddles and kisses Norm x
Fraser smirked and shook his head. Cuddles and kisses? Norm was such a plonker. Then he stood up, rather too quickly so that the blood rushed to his head and he had to put his head between his knees so he didn’t pass out, climbed the stairs to his bedroom, and prepared to face the music with Karen.
TWO
That evening
Lancaster
Mia walked into the Merchants with Billy at gone eight. For some reason, she was thinking of the film Look Who’s Talking, and winced as she imagined what her son must be thinking now: The pub, twice in one day, Mother, and now for the evening? Classy! And wished so much she could explain without sounding embittered and abandoned. This is what Mia most resented about this whole situation, the opportunities it held for mental behaviour: screaming in the middle of the street at Eduardo, slamming phones down, revenge plots and murderous thoughts. She spent far too much of her time, these days, feeling like a character from Coronation Street.
Of course it pissed her off whenever Eduardo let her down, but tonight felt especially cruel. Although she was not one to drag out self-pity too long, she couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for herself as she pushed Billy past the cosy, candlelit arches, looking for her friends.
This was one night, one night out of the whole year,for remembering her best friend whom she didn’t even have any more, and he thought the customers of Bella Italia needed him more than she did? And she’d had a baby with this man?
She had considered cancelling – there was nobody else she could call to look after Billy, after all, since Melody was coming too – but she was too angry, too sad, too at risk of binge-drinking alone if she stayed in tonight and, anyway, she wanted to come, she had to come. Surely, Bruce, the landlord, would relax the rules on the baby front just this once?
But then perhaps not; not after last year’s reunion, which had been utterly grim. Melody and Anna had drunk far too much, got far too maudlin and ended up literally rocking, clinging onto each other in a sentimental sobbing wreck, people openly gawping at them, and Mia had found herself actually cringing at her friends’ display of grief.
Norm had been unusually quiet – said barely a word, in fact, and spent the entire night at the jukebox putting Green Day on a loop (he and Livs were bonded in their mutual love of Green Day), until he got shouted at to literally ‘fucking change the record!’ by some hard-nut local who Fraser – also steaming drunk – then decided to punch, resulting in two broken fingers and them all getting chucked out.
Through all of this, of course, Mia was four months pregnant with Billy, and sober. She’d tried to reason with them that perhaps that second round of sambucas was not the best idea, that Fraser had had enough to drink, that quite possibly, Liv wouldn’t have wanted him to take a swing at a bloke twice his size on her behalf, but they wouldn’t listen. Of course they wouldn’t listen, they were steaming and Mia had gone home feeling utterly deflated, sure that two broken fingers and a police caution was definitely not how her best friend would want her birthday to be marked.
Also, perhaps due to being pregnant, she felt blocked. She couldn’t let her grief run riot like the rest of them. Everything was too much – life event overload – and even though everyone else had piled back to Melody and Norm’s, she’d gone home to Eduardo (who was still with her at this point, preferring to wait until she was thirty-six weeks pregnant to tell her, actually, this whole baby thing wasn’t really going to work for him …) and lay in bed, staring into the dark.
But tonight was a whole year later, wasn’t it? Their grief was less raw; it would be more of a celebration, a celebration of her life! A chance to reminisce about the good times – so many good times – and a chance to get together. Then she located Melody and Norm at the end of the final tunnel, clearly already in the throes of a row, and her heart sank.
Melody turned dramatically when she saw Mia, who thought, if she were turning into a character from Coronation Street, then her good friend Melody Burgess was fast becoming one from Ally McBeal. All power dressing and courtroom drama.
‘Nobody’s here yet,’ she said, breathily, with what Mia couldn’t help but feel was a slightly staged flick of her hair. ‘Twenty past eight and not a peep out of anyone.’
‘Well, I’m here,’ said Mia, brightly.
‘Right, yes, I suppose so and er … Billy,’ said Melody, somewhat begrudgingly, clocking the buggy, as if Mia had a choice in this matter. Mia gritted her teeth.
Norm groaned. ‘I’ve told her to take a chill-pill,’ he said. ‘I’ve told her this is about Olivia, REMEMBER?’ He fired daggers at Melody, and Mia found herself thinking – not for the first time in the last year: what happened to my friends? Jolly old Norm and Melody? Inseparable. Bonded for years in their love of cider and singing appalling indie anthems on karaoke?
Melody folded her arms indignantly. ‘Well, I’m disgusted, frankly. I mean, Anna’s no surprise but Fraser? Liv was his girlfriend, remember?’
‘I think we do,’ said Mia, in a way that was supposed to be helpful and calm her down but didn’t.
‘So why the fuck isn’t he here then? No phone call, no text, nada!’
‘Um, do you mind putting your foot down, mate?’ Fraser was sitting in the back of a black cab travelling from Preston to Lancaster, jiggling his legs up and down, which he always did when he was nervous. Honestly, what was wrong with these provincial types? No sense of urgency. Liv was doing this, he thought. She knew all about his overactive conscience and she was having a laugh. He imagined her looking down at him now, sweating and toxic and wracked with guilt, and thinking, you muppet, Fraser Morgan. All this guilt for a fumble with a barmaid? Deep down of course, so deep down he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, Fraser Morgan knew this tardiness and stress was entirely of his own making. In fact, the last twenty-four hours were entirely of his own making.
He was supposed to have caught the four o’clock from Euston – which would have got him to Lancaster and the Merchants in plenty of time, but because he was far too nice and far too hungover to put up a fight, he’d somehow become embroiled in a Tarot reading from Karen, which overran (he wasn’t sure how long the average Tarot reading was, but felt sure an hour and a half was overrunning), missed the four o clock, so had to catch the five o’clock, and only realized when he was on the train that it didn’t go further than Preston.
He now felt wretched, having thrown up in the train toilets and fielded three texts from Karen – are you on the train yet? How’s the hangover? He’d finally broken when she’d told him what she was having for tea and switched off his phone.
Still, at least in the end he’d told her the truth; he’d been nothing but a gent. At least there was that.
‘Unfortunately,’ (he was now somewhat regretting the ‘unfortunately’ line. You give these people an inch and they take a mile) ‘I can’t hang out all day because I’m going to a reunion with my university mates – we do it every year.’
All true, nothing but the truth. But even that had backfired when Karen had propped herself up on her elbow, shaken her head slowly and given him that look – the look of love – and said, ‘Do you know what? That doesn’t surprise me one little bit. I can tell that Fraser Morgan is the sort of person who, once he is your friend, is a friend for life, do you know what I mean?’
Oh, Jesus Christ.
‘So this is Ollie. Ollie, these are my friends …’
Fraser practically skidded into the Merchants, locating his mates in the last arch, just as Anna was introducing some new … boyfriend/fuck-buddy/future husband – it was hard to know what to expect where Spanner was concerned.
‘Ollie,’ thought Fraser, standing in the doorway of the arch, they’re always called Ollie and I bet he works in the media and lives in Ladbroke Grove.
It took him another few seconds to register the reality of the situation. Spanner had brought some idiot in red skinny jeans – no doubt last night’s conquest, a bloke nobody knew from Adam – to Liv’s birthday reunion? He felt a sudden, overwhelming blackness of mood that crashed down on him like a tonne of rock involving anger on Liv’s behalf, fury at his friend’s audacity, mixed with a horrible, horrible wave of self-loathing – an ugly sense of his own double standards as the reality of what he’d done last night hit him again.
What Anna had done seemed suddenly outrageous, and yet, was what he’d done actually any better? And these were his friends, his best and oldest friends. They’d just know.
Nobody said hello to Ollie, who had the most unfortunate hairstyle Fraser had ever seen: dyed a reddish-pink and pulled forward around his face, like a giant crab-claw had him in a headlock.
‘Right, wicked … well, er, I’ll just go to the bar then?’ he said, eventually, to nobody in particular.
Anna stroked his arm repeatedly as if he was a cat. ‘Can I have a vodka and lime, please? Proper lime juice, not lime cordial?’ she added, lowering her lashes at him, and Ollie nodded, locking eyes for far longer than was natural. (Or necessary, or fucking appropriate, come to think of it, thought Fraser. Who did he think he was? Playing out his postcoital dance, here?) And went to the bar.
‘So you got here then?’
Fraser was still boring a hole in Ollie’s back when he realized, back inside the arch, that Melody was talking to him.
‘A call would have been appreciated, Fraser, we’ve been worried sick.’
Ha! this was rich. What about Anna? Why was nobody angry with Anna, who was busy removing her various bags (Anna always seemed to be carrying an assortment of bags, since her life was one big impromptu sleepover) like nothing had happened? Anna had always been flaky and selfish and Fraser had always forgiven her, not least because Liv always had (‘I understand her, Fraser,’ she always said. ‘She’s a mass of insecurity inside.’) Also, Anna compensated by being gutsy and fearless; she appealed to Fraser’s passionate side. Anna came from a socially aspiring, lower-middle-class family who had as good as bankrupted themselves to send her to private school. She and Fraser would have awesome ‘heated debates’, i.e. blazing slanging matches, in the kitchen of 5 South Road, where she would accuse him of being an inverted snob and he would accuse her of being a shameless social climber with a massive chip on her shoulder.
They disagreed on many things: Fraser incensed her with his tendency to always play devil’s advocate. But Fraser loved her passion, how she wasn’t remotely interested in life’s subtle emotions: it was all pain and death and love and torture with Anna. But these days, she seemed to be using Liv’s death as an excuse to be even more flaky and selfish, and Fraser wasn’t having it.
He felt rage rise within him.
‘Um, Anna.’ He rubbed at his head hard, as if this would somehow get rid of it. ‘Can I have a word with you? Like, outside? In private, please?’
Anna froze. Everyone had gone quiet and was staring into their drinks.
‘Why?’ she said, defensively.
‘Why? Fucking hell, Anna. If you don’t know why, then there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Oh, look, we’ll just leave,’ Anna snapped, standing up and gathering her stuff. ‘Jesus Christ. If I’d thought this was going to be such a big deal … if I’d thought—’
‘Anna,’ Melody broke the silence. ‘How can you say that? Of course this is a big deal, this is Liv’s birthday.’
Anna let out an incredulous little gasp.
‘Oh, my God, you’re at it too! What is this? Gang up on Anna night? You lot have such double standards. HE was forty-five minutes late.’ Anna was standing up now, pointing at Fraser. ‘Later than me, and Liv was his girlfriend!’
‘She does have a point, Fraser,’ said Melody, grimacing, but Fraser didn’t want to know about logic or who had a point; he was just angry, really fucking angry, and he didn’t know why but it was taking over him, becoming bigger than him, as if he was being engulfed by a fireball.
The words came out in a torrent before he could help himself. ‘God, you’re selfish.’ Anna stood there open-mouthed as he laid into her. ‘You’re like a fucking teenager. You want so much back, and yet YOU, you, just do what you want, when you want. Bring who you want – twats in red jeans … some bloke you probably shagged last night.’ He was on a roll now and he didn’t care. ‘No respect for Liv, for me …’
Out of the corner of his eye, Fraser clocked Norm staring at him and looked away.
‘Fraser come on …’ It was only when he heard her voice, alarmed but still soft, that Fraser clocked that Mia was with Billy – why was she with Billy? Oh, he knew why she was with Billy. Eduardo. Such a useless pile of shit. Why she’d ever got together with him was beyond him.
Then Mia got up – Billy was crying now – and went over to him, putting her arm around Fraser as if trying to soothe him.
Anna exploded. ‘Oh, that’s nice, that is. You just take sides, Mia, go on – you always look after him, don’t you? Have you noticed that?
‘Anna, I do not … I—’ Mia tried to defend herself, but Anna cut her dead.
‘It’s not all about you, you know, Fraser. I know Liv was your girlfriend, but she was our friend too; we all miss her. She wouldn’t have given a shit if I had wanted to bring a friend along, or someone I shagged last night for that matter …’ She was shouting now and Billy was crying harder. ‘I’m sure she would have liked Ollie actually.’ Ollie had come back from the bar now, and Fraser could feel him looming behind him. ‘She liked new people, unlike some people I know. Some very angry and tormented people.’
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
She carried on and all hell broke loose. Anna was shouting at Fraser, Melody joined in and Fraser was shouting back. Then Mia was arguing with the landlord, Bruce, who said she couldn’t bring a baby in a pub after 7 p.m., to which she shouted, ‘DO YOU THINK I WOULD UNLESS I HAD TO? Unless it was a very special occasion? Do you not remember last year?’ Then ate her words when a look of realization crossed Bruce’s face as last year’s escapade came flooding back. In the middle of all of this, Fraser had a flash of lucidity, something he found very uncomfortable when he got like this, which was getting more, not less, often, because he knew, deep down, that they’d done it again, he’d done it again. He thought of Liv. Jesus wept, you lot, get a grip,and he felt a trickle of shame run down his spine.
It was Norm who finally snapped and got them all to shut up. Including Billy.
‘Look, people …’He slammed his pint down, a good deal of which splashed all over his shirt. ‘Shit,’ he mumbled, wiping it away. ‘Don’t you think this is pretty lame?’
He shifted on his feet, looking slightly uncomfortable. Voice of authority and reason was not a natural role for Norm, but circumstances called for it.
‘I mean, if Livs could see us, you know, if she was looking down on us now – on her twenty-ninth birthday, in case you’ve all forgotten; if she had her feet up watching Countdown, having one of her cheeky Tia Maria coffees and maybe a twenty-quid fag …’ There was a murmur of laughter and recognition from the group. ‘Do you think she’d be impressed? Do you reckon she’d be like. Awesome. Look at my mates, aren’t they just the best?
‘I don’t think so somehow.’
Fraser looked at his friend and felt a bloom of pride in his chest. Norm must think I’m a dick, he thought. I AM a dick. Norm had been so good to him in that text, going out of his way to make Fraser feel better, and then he’d stilllet the side down: rocked up an hour late, hungover, taking his guilt out on everyone else. He really hated himself sometimes.
‘Look …’ said Norm eventually.
Everyone was shuffling and staring at the ground, as if they were being told off by the headmaster.
‘I found this.’
He reached inside his pocket and pulled out a tatty piece of A4.
‘It’s a list that Liv wrote – Things To Do Before I Am Thirty. I thought it might be nice for us all to read it later, pass it around or whatever and raise a drink to her. But since everyone’s being idiots now …’
There was a sheepish mumble of apology from the crowd. Fraser was staring at the piece of paper in his friend’s hand.
Norm looked at him, realization crossing his face.
‘Oh. Totally innocent, mate, found it in the pocket of my old parka that Liv must have borrowed some time.’
Fraser smiled and waved his hand away. He didn’t care where he’d got it from. He had a list. A list with Liv’s handwriting on.
‘Can I have that?’ he said, stepping forward. Norm handed him the piece of paper.
THREE
Lancaster
Mia piled banana-and-mango purée into Billy’s mouth, most of which he then regurgitated back onto the spoon, too busy watching Peppa Pig to concentrate on swallowing. She looked over at her friend on the sofa – just a tuft of brown, slightly matted hair poking out of the top of her orange sleeping bag – and felt a warm rush of nostalgia. When was the last time she’d had anyone stay the night on her sofa? (Except Eduardo after a row.) Or talked to someone in a sleeping bag late into the night? God, must have been years ago. University probably. They were always talking late into the night in sleeping bags back then.
Who did she talk to now? NatWest Debt Management Centre (although technically, that was more shouting), Virgin Media, Ashley at the Benefits Office. In fact, Ashley at the Benefits Office probably knew more about her life than her friends did. Definitely more than her mother did. No, if she really thought about it, Mia didn’t really talk to anyone these days. Not proper talking, anyway, just for the sheer fun of it. These days, talking always had to have a purpose.
She had a sudden memory – these were coming more often, like now the heavy numbness of early motherhood was lifting, clarity was gradually returning and, with it, memories and feelings, some of which she’d kept down for a reason. V Festival in Leeds – 2000, or was it 2001? She wasn’t sure, but she knew Coldplay were headlining and that Melody pooh-poohed them as dullsville. Now Melody couldn’t get enough of Coldplay.
It was warm and getting light – 4.30 a.m. or thereabouts – and she, Liv and Fraser were the only ones awake, sitting in their sleeping bags outside their tent, talking in hushed voices and drinking flat lager, the sound of Norm’s pneumatic snoring coming from the tent next door.
‘Let’s play a game,’ said Liv, suddenly. ‘I know a brilliant game.’
Mia and Fraser had groaned: Liv was always coming out with new, strange games and ‘takes’ on things. Once, she’d tried to combine strip poker with the children’s game Frustration – moving little men around a board in their bras and pants. Liv and Fraser were big on taking their clothes off when drunk – it was one of the many traits that made them perfect for each other. Whereas, Mia? Good God, no. She’d rather chew off her own arm than reveal her body to her friends. And that was before she’d had a baby.
‘It’s called I Have Never,’ Liv continued. ‘And it’s a bit like Truth. Basically, the person whose turn it is says something they’ve never done in their life. For example, I might say … anal sex.’
Fraser had laughed. It sounded extra-loud in the soft dawn. ‘Do you have to be quite so crude, Olivia?’
‘So if you’ve done whatever the person whose turn it is is saying – i.e. you have had anal sex,’ she carried on, ignoring him, ‘then you have to down your drink, and then it’s your turn, and so it goes on.’
They went through the usual repertoire: saying I love you when you don’t mean it (they’d all done that one); threesomes – nobody had had one of those, which seemed a bit of a poor show. Mia had felt disappointed that at twenty-one, nobody in the group had fulfilled this particular rite of passage, but had comforted herself in the knowledge that good old Anna would no doubt have had one, if not that very evening in her tent.
Then it was Mia’s turn: ‘I have never … snogged anyone famous,’ which Fraser drank to because Floella Benjamin, a distant family friend – they all thought this was hysterical in itself – had once given him a peck on the cheek at a country fair when he was eight. They’d all agreed that didn’t really count.
It was almost light now; a rosy mist hovered above the field, illuminating their faces. Norm’s snoring from the tent was reaching crescendo levels. Then Liv said, ‘I have never … snogged any other member of our group of friends except Fraser.’
‘What, not even Anna?’ Mia blurted out, almost on automatic. ‘Everyone’s snogged Spanner.’ Which was true. She’d kissed her back in their first year at Lancaster, at the height of her very fleeting foray into lipstick-lesbianism, which she was quite proud of if truth be told.
‘No, I have not snogged Anna!’ said Liv, outraged, and yet Mia suspected, ever so slightly jealous. ‘When the hell did you snog Anna?’ Mia was in the midst of answering when it all came flooding back, it dawned on her. She glanced at Fraser, whose face was covered with the can of lager he was now drinking from.
Liv looked at Mia, then at Fraser.
‘Oh, my God, you’ve snogged Anna?’ she said, smiling, but it was a sliding smile – half intrigue, half … what was that look? Appalled? Mia didn’t like to think about it too much.
Fraser had spluttered beer everywhere.
‘What? No. I haven’t snogged Anna. Or anyone else for that matter. Sorry, I was just drinking my beer, is that allowed? I just forgot the rules.’
Then they’d all sort of moved on, the question lost in booziness and early morning confusion, but Mia was thinking about it now as she shovelled banana-and-mango purée back into Billy’s mouth. It was coming back to her. Lots of things were coming back to her now.
Fraser stirred, made some sort of grunting sound – an attempt at speech, and Billy, on cue, did the same, which made Mia laugh.
‘Morning, Fraser Morgan.’ She’d been up since 5.50 a.m. with a grizzly baby, but then grizzliness was more or less Billy’s default mode. It was now 9 a.m. and she felt as though she’d lived a day already.
‘What?’ He stuck his head out of the sleeping bag and grimaced at her, squinting into the light that flooded through the Velux window, a look of pure confusion on his face.
‘How you doing?’ Mia dodged a bit of purée as Billy smacked his podgy little hands up and down on the high-chair top. ‘’Coz you look shocking, to tell you the truth.’
‘I didn’t ask for the truth, but cheers, I feel like death,’ croaked Fraser, easing himself up on his elbows. There was a brief pause before they both registered what he’d said and laughed awkwardly.
‘Well, I can tell you, you’ve done very well indeed.’ Mia turned her back to carry on feeding Billy. ‘You’ve slept through a box-set of In the Night Garden, a phone row with Eduardo and a meltdown from Billy who lobbed a rusk at your head at one point and you still didn’t wake up.’
Fraser laughed weakly, then coughed – he’d smoked last night and could feel it on his lungs – and pulled the sleeping bag up around his chin, staring blankly out at the bare trees, dark and arrested as if frozen in time. The stark whiteness of another winter’s day.
And I do feel like death, he thought. I really fucking do. He remembered this from last year, the days after the anniversary of Liv’s death and her birthday.
The actual anniversaries themselves weren’t that bad; they certainly weren’t that good, either, but he was drunk for much of them. Also, they were occasions and, like all occasions, there was a momentousness, some degree of specialness involved. People called and fussed around him, Mia especially. On the first anniversary, she’d called practically every hour to check he was out of bed and dressed. Actually, he was in the Bull by midday, halfway down his second pint, Karen listening patiently as he blathered on. His parents, Carol and Mike, had called too. That was one good thing to come out of Liv’s death, he supposed: he’d become closer to his parents. Before he lost Liv, their relationship was stuck in teenage mode, where he told them nothing except the absolute essentials and they didn’t ask much except about when he was going to get a proper job like his brother (Shaun Morgan ran Top Financial Solutions. Why he’d never come up with a ‘top solution’ to his little brother’s financial problems, Fraser would never know).
Fraser was a dutiful son – i.e. he did the bare minimum, visiting them in their spotless ex-council house in Bury every few months, where he’d sit and read the paper whilst Liv talked to Mike about his job in the world of tap fittings and to Carol about her gallstones, but they weren’t close. They didn’t really know each other. In fact, if Carol Morgan were honest, she’d lost her youngest son the day he went to university, when his friends and his girlfriend became his family.
But that was before grief dismantled Fraser, ripped him open then hurtled through him like a freight train, making him furious and self-destructive and self-pitying. That was the worst. After his mother had to pick him up from Manchester Royal Infirmary, where he was admitted with a broken ankle after being so drunk he had fallen down a fire escape at a club in Manchester, Fraser knew the game was up. There was no room for his teenage self, full of misplaced pride and embarrassment. He needed her again like he had when he was a blond, corkscrew-haired five-year-old, and he’d curled up in her arms that night and cried like one.
So, in a strange way, the actual anniversaries were doable. At least everyone was there. But this – the day after – was worse, because what now? Where now? Life still carried on, but the phone stopped ringing, and when the specialness had gone, what did he have left? Except himself. And he was a mess. He couldn’t settle anywhere; his flat scared the shit out of him, a place he just rattled around in, wandering from one room to another, in some state of intoxication most of the time. He had told himself, countless times, he’d use this time alone to learn to cook, because Liv was a fabulous cook, but eventually got bored of buying lemon grass only to stop off at the Bull on the way back and leave it there. the Bull in Kentish Town must have the biggest stock of lemon grass in north London.
He couldn’t watch TV any more, couldn’t concentrate on films – something he and Liv had loved to do; daft comedies were their favourite, cuddling up on a Sunday to watch Meet the Fockers. Nowadays, he’d totally lost the ability to look at a screen for any length of time and, sometimes, although he never admitted this to anyone, he went to bed at 8 p.m. because he couldn’t deal with any more day.
Then there was the job, or excuse for one, really, since life as a freelance sound engineer – holding a fluffy mike whilst some geezer did a piece to camera about local history, or a party political broadcast – didn’t actually require much skill, and it was a far cry from being a sound engineer for bands, too, wasn’t it? Let’s face it. That dream, along with his dream to be an actual rock star himself had shifted, as he moved through his teens to his twenties, from a dead cert to still doable if he really pulled his finger out, to now, aged thirty, simply a comforting fantasy he liked to indulge in occasionally.
The worst thing was, it had been over a year now, he should really have pulled himself together. But life had become one big long promise to himself that tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow he’d get it together. Sometimes he wondered if his grief was becoming a habit rather than a need, but it didn’t matter because now he was breathless with it – the emptiness – as if he’d woken up entombed in concrete.
‘Fancy a tea? Bacon sandwich?’ Fraser could hear Mia’s voice and he could see her but couldn’t really compute what she was saying; it was all muffled as if he were looking at her through a glass screen, and yet he was so glad she was here, suddenly overcome with gratitude in fact because it occurred to him – what the hell would he have done with himself today if she wasn’t? For a second he wanted to reach over and grab onto her legs. He shook the feeling away.
Billy was sucking on a bottle of milk now, not very enthusiastically, and Mia took it off him for a second to shake it, so he started wailing, a cry that turned into a raspy scream. It reminded Fraser of something and he was aware of his heart pounding as though it might leap right out of his chest. Mia gave Billy the bottle back and he immediately stopped crying. Fraser could still see his little flushed cheeks sucking greedily and happily, and yet he could still hear something. He could still hear a terrible noise.
‘Oh, God, Frase. Oh, shit …’
It wasn’t until Mia had her arms tight around him, that he realized the noise was coming from him.
FOUR
Mia got Fraser up and out of the flat as soon as possible – which in reality, Fraser had noted with some amusement, took about an hour, half of that trying to get an incensed Billy into his snowsuit. ‘Told you I lived with Mussolini,’ Mia shouted over the racket, whilst Fraser looked on, gobsmacked. She was right. Bloody hell. How could such a small thing make so much noise? Did Mia really have to do this every day, just to get out of the door? In the months that followed Liv’s death they’d spent a lot of time together – first when Mia was pregnant and then those difficult months after Billy was born, but he didn’t have a clue about the day-to-day, the reality of which now shocked him.
Still, Billy looks like I feel, thought Fraser.
‘Can I do that now, please?’ he said. ‘Roll onto my back and scream whilst someone puts me into a straightjacket?’
They went directly into town to the Sunbury Café. It was bitingly cold, the sky sharp and blue as stained glass. The Sunbury Café – housed in one of Lancaster’s sandstone Georgian houses down a cobbled alley – was where they used to go as students. They’d have millionaire’s shortbread and cappuccinos, sit out the back on the terrace on wrought-iron chairs, like they were ladies who lunched, not poverty-stricken students, discussing the big topics of the day (back when talking was just for the fun of it): whether Phillip Schofield dyed his hair, whether Prince Harry was the love-child of James Hewitt, but also marriage, kids, what order they’d do everything in.
Even though Mia liked to think of her style as ‘thrown together arty’ (although admittedly, of late, it was more single mum on benefits), she was a traditionalist at heart and had said yes to both, in the right order. Liv had said yes to marriage but definitely no to kids, ‘Over my dead body!’ How those phrases came back to them now.
Mia had loved those times, when everything was hypothetical, when it felt like life was a game and they could press ‘reset’ at any time. These days, of course, it all felt so real.
Mia walked back towards the terrace from the café, carrying a large black coffee for Fraser and a cappuccino for herself and eyed him in a motherly way. This was the thing: she had no problem feeling naturally maternal towards her friends; it was just her son she sometimes struggled with.
Fraser was all wrapped up in his parka like a duvet and was pushing Billy back and forth in his buggy – a bit too hard if Mia was the sort to be pernickety, which she wasn’t – trying to get him off to sleep, and Mia thought what a cute dad he’d make and whether, if Liv had still been around, he might even have changed her mind and they might have made a baby together by now.
‘So basically, I’m a mess,’ he said suddenly. It took Mia by surprise. Fraser wasn’t one for outbursts of self-awareness, it was all going on inside with him, all being secretly brooded about.
She put the coffee down in front of him.
‘Um, yeah, I’d say so. But that’s OK, that’s workable with.’
He smiled, weakly.
‘Can I come clean about something?’ he said.
Mia sat down.
‘You’re in love with me. That’s OK.’
Fraser sighed, wearily.
‘Sorry.’ Mia grimaced. She knew she did this; this was her coping mechanism – humour in dark times. In some ways, she often thought Fraser was more in touch with his raw emotions, that his were somehow closer to the surface than hers, Norm’s, Melody’s and Anna’s put together.
‘I’ve stooped low,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘With the whole grief, mess, not coping thing, I’ve stooped low, Woodhouse, Really low.’
‘Well, it can’t be as low as I’ve stooped in the last twelve months,’ said Mia, scooping the froth from her coffee onto the saucer (Fraser noted this, and once again wondered why she insisted on ordering cappuccino when she hated the frothy bit, the whole point of a cappuccino, surely?). I once left my son with a seventy-eight-year-old batty old woman who lets her cat poo in her knicker drawer.
He blinked and shook his head.
‘What?’
‘Mrs Durham. You know the old lady I look after on Tuesdays? Billy was teething – well, that’s always been my excuse, but I just think he’s one of life’s screamers, to tell you the truth. He’d have about ninety-two teeth by now if he’d really teethed at the rate I had people believe …’
Fraser laughed, properly, for what felt like the first time in ages, and once again felt a rush of gratitude that his friend was here, that he wasn’t alone.
‘Anyway, he’d been at it, nonstop all weekend. It was round about the time of Liv’s anniversary last year and I was desperate to have just twenty minutes on my own, so I took him round there in desperation, practically chucked him in her doorway like a rugby ball. She’s stone deaf anyway, so an ideal child-minder.’
They both laughed.
‘Anyway, as I was saying …’ said Fraser. Mia could see he was eager to get back to his point. ‘You know last night when I was in that taxi? I’d fucked up, I was hungover, nearly an hour late because the stupid train didn’t stop at Preston and you know what? I blamed Liv. I actually believed,’ he said, enunciating his words as if this was the most preposterous idea ever, ‘that she was stirring things up from heaven, having a laugh at me. At one point, I said out loud in the taxi – the taxi driver had his screen up so he didn’t hear: ‘“Right, enough now, Olivia, you’re not funny any more.”’
Mia smirked with recognition. On the day of the funeral, all sorts of nonsense had gone on, and she’d said the very same thing. For starters, in one of those ‘you couldn’t make it up’ moments, the night before, Eduardo had been walking home from the pub, fallen through an open trap door in the street, into the beer cellar of a pub, and broken his leg, so didn’t even make it to the funeral. Then the battery of Mia’s car was found to be flat for no apparent reason and she’d had to get a lift with Fraser instead. Yeah, that was Liv, always the practical joker. But that was the day of the funeral, that was eighteen months ago. The most strange and dark day – like a scene in a film: she still couldn’t believe it had actually happened.
She said, ‘But that’s kind of nice, isn’t it? To feel she’s still with us? The Olivia Jenkins effect?’
‘Yeah, but I’m finding myself blaming her for loads of stuff,’ Fraser said. ‘How I feel, what I do – or don’t do, which is more to the point. But it’s not her fault, is it?’ he continued. ‘None of this: how I feel, how you feel, the total pig’s ear I seem to be making of my life – it’s not her fault she left us, is it? Or …’
He stopped.
‘Or what?’ said Mia.
‘Nothing. You know.’
‘Fraser, you have to give that up, seriously.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’
‘I know it’s hard – I think about it too – but it’s really unhealthy. Plus,’ she leant over to check on Billy who had fallen asleep, his head lolling to the side, ‘it’s bollocks and it’s irrelevant.’
Fraser didn’t say anything.
‘Isn’t it?’ she said again, peering into Billy’s buggy. ‘It’s irrelevant?’
‘Yeah, guess so. Survivors’ guilt and all that. And anyway, it changes nothing.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mia. ‘So, no, it’s not her fault, Fraser. The wallpaper in your lounge is her fault and the fact we saw in the new Millennium in a queue for a kebab, but nothing else.’
Fraser rolled his eyes.
‘You’ve never forgiven her for that, have you?’
‘Nope and I never shall,’ she said, a twinkle in her eye to tell him she didn’t mean it.
She watched him as he drank his coffee in the crisp, winter sun, feet up on the chair – he could look like someone enjoying après-ski if he didn’t look so shocking. His hair had obviously not been washed for days so that the waves clung together in a greasy mess, gathering in an unsightly duck’s arse at the nape of his neck. His skin had a deathly pallor today and definitely lacked the elasticity a man barely turned thirty should possess. But she couldn’t deny, he was attractive too. Or appealing, maybe that’s what it was. Whatever it was, Mia found herself inexorably drawn to his face. Maybe it was the symmetry thing she was always reading about in the vacuous magazines she liked to numb her brain further with after Billy had gone to bed. Maybe he looked like her dad – not that she knew what her dad looked like.
There was something real about him, something, what was it …? Northern, perhaps? He certainly didn’t look like the Home Counties rugger-buggers she’d been to school with, or even the artsy lot with their foppish hair and ‘ironic’ jumpers. No, he was definitely more real than that. You’d never cast him in a Richard Curtis romcom, she thought, but maybe a Mike Leigh.
He had charm rather than being beautiful or ruggedly handsome, or even particularly good-looking, now she came to think of it. Thick, darkish hair that had a nice, almost wartime wave to it when he actually washed it. Blue, almond-shaped eyes – his best feature – if it weren’t for the fact they were half blind, but he never got round to getting his eyes tested, meaning he was permanently squinting. This often got misread as a scowl by people who didn’t know him, which was something Mia thought was a great shame and easily remedied, but Fraser seemed to prefer to go through life with impaired vision.
He had a cute, sort of squishy nose, which was scattered with freckles and, she noted today, broken capillaries, hinting at the excessive drinking he’d been doing of late. A nice mouth. The teeth a bit discoloured after a long and intense affair with Silk Cut, but a nice mouth all the same, with expressive lips. This morning, sporting a shocker of a coldsore.
‘What?’ said Fraser suddenly.
‘What?’ She came to. ‘Nothing. You’ve got a coleslaw, that’s all.’
He smiled – that’s what Liv always called them – and put his finger to it, self-consciously. ‘I know. I started with it last night.’
‘You make it sound like labour and don’t touch it! You’ll spread herpes all over your face.’
Fraser tutted.
‘Anyway, I was just thinking,’ she continued, ‘about what you said, about Liv having a laugh at you. I mean, besides it being a bit morbid, why would she want to have a laugh at you? She loved you.’
Fraser took a deep breath; there was no point dragging this out any longer, it was killing him. He covered his face. ‘Oh, God, I slept with someone.’
Fraser didn’t know what he expected Mia’s reaction would be, but three small words that conveyed neither sense nor feeling, and a face like he’d just told her he had a fungal infection, wasn’t really it.
‘What? Oh. Eeeew …’ She was actually recoiling, screwing her face up.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
Mia didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean. They were just the first noises that came out of her mouth.
‘Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just … God, OK.’ Something strange was happening to her facial muscles and her voice but there seemed little she could do about it. She attempted to smile. ‘So who was it?’ she slapped her knees with her palms. ‘Come on!’
‘Karen,’ said Fraser.
‘Karen?’
‘Yes, you know, Karen from the Bull.’
A cruel ‘Ha!’ escaped from Mia’s mouth. That didn’t seem like something she could help either. ‘What? The really old one who looks like Ness from Gavin and Stacey?’
‘She’s not really old, she’s forty-two.’
Mia felt her eyebrows rise involuntarily and put them back, sharpish.
‘And she looks nothing like Ness from Gavin and Stacey.’
‘She so does!’ Rein it in, rein it in. ‘A bit. I mean in that she’s got dark hair and she’s, you know … curvy …’ REIN. IT. IN.
‘You mean fat.’
‘I did NOT say fat, you did. Also, she’s …’
Fraser cocked his head.
‘What? Easy. Bit of a slapper?’
‘I did NOT say slapper, you did! No, I was going to say bubbly, actually.’
‘Bubbly,’ said Fraser, flatly.
‘Yes, bubbly. You know, outgoing, chatty …?’
‘Mmm,’ said Fraser, unconvinced. ‘Anyway, crucially, she’s not Welsh, she’s from Hull.’
There was a long and sudden pause.
‘Well, I’m sure she’s very nice,’ Mia said, eventually.
‘She is and she’s got a very pretty face.’
‘Well, we all know what that means.’
Fraser’s mouth dropped open.
‘Oh, Fraser. It was a joke!’
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Fraser was confused and yet he wasn’t even sure what he was confused about; he just knew he’d expected a proper discussion or even a motherly telling off about one thing – i.e. the fact he’d slept with someone, anyone, the night before Liv’s reunion – and he’d got something else entirely.
‘I just think it’s a bit disrespectful,’ Mia blurted out when she’d tucked Billy in as much as she could and the silence was getting too much. ‘Not just to Liv but to Karen. I mean it’s not like you intend to see her again, is it?’
Fraser felt sick. What was it about girls that meant they could always do that? Psychologically strip you in a flash – it really pissed him off. This was exactly how he felt, exactly what was driving his guilt, but still, the way this whole conversation was going … it was making him defensive.
‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘I was pissed. I didn’t know what I was doing, did I? And she’s been really good to me. She’s a nice person.’
Mia looked at him. ‘But you don’t fancy her.’
‘I don’t not fancy her.’ Fraser was getting more agitated. ‘Anyway, what’s with the double standards?’ This was another thing girls did that really got his goat. Double standards, left, right and centre. ‘I mean look at you and Eduardo. He’s such a tit, Mia, he lets you and Billy down constantly and yet you still let him sleep on your settee.’ He jabbed a finger in her direction. ‘And I bet it’s not your settee every time, young lady.’
Mia fidgeted uncomfortably – how could he possibly have deduced that when all she ever did was slag Eduardo off? He was far more perceptive than she gave him credit for. Still, she was riled now. She hardly thought him sleeping with Karen and her letting Eduardo – the father of her child – stay over now and again were quite the same thing.
‘Fraser, it is actually quite hard on my own, you know. Really bloody hard, actually.’ She hated doing the poor single mother thing, but she was really hacked off now. ‘If I had the luxury of being able to wipe Eduardo from my life, then I would, course I would, but, as it happens, I rely on every scrap of support and help I can get.’
‘Oh, God, look, I’m sorry,’ said Fraser, getting up. ‘I’m going for a fag.’
‘I thought you’d stopped,’ Mia called after him.
‘I started again.’
Fraser walked around the front of the café and leant against its façade, cupping his hands to light his cigarette. Well, that went well. Clearly, he’d been deluded to think Mia would ease his guilt – she’d basically just made him feel worse! And the awful thing was, she was the most objective and reasonable of the group (except Norm perhaps. Norm was Switzerland. But that was more down to being stoned than any political decision to remain neutral.) If she thought what he’d done was bad, there was no hope for everyone else. And yet, it had to happen some time, didn’t it? Presumably, he couldn’t swear himself to celibacy all his life? Become a monk, one of those shaven-headed ‘Tibetan’ ones he often saw in Lancaster town centre, who weren’t Tibetan at all; more ex-drug dealers from Skerton – Lancaster’s answer to Moss Side – who wanted to turn their life around and still spent all day hanging outside Greggs, waiting for food handouts. Presumably, he had to get laid some time? Surely, Liv would have wanted that? Wouldn’t she? He didn’t know any more.
Fraser put his lighter back in his coat pocket and, as he did, felt the piece of folded-up paper – Liv’s List, the Things To Do Before I Am Thirty – that Norm had given him the night before. He must have felt pretty special to find that, it must have been a big deal for Norm, and yet he’d just nabbed it from him. He felt a twinge of guilt at his crassness and, not for the first time recently, wondered if he was just not that nice any more.
He unfolded it, JULY 15TH, 2005 it said at the top – two and a half years ago, she would have been twenty-six – and read downwards, touching Liv’s elegant, left-handed writing that sloped to the right. Liv Jenkins woz ’ere. He said it quietly. She was here and now she’s not. It was the maddest concept ever.
He read on and, for a moment, standing outside the café, the cold numbing his fingers, it felt like she was there; he could hear her voice in the writing and yet he also felt disloyal, as though he was snooping. They always discussed everything. Liv couldn’t go for a wee without informing him first. How come she’d never discussed making this List with him?
He read on: Sleep with an exotic foreigner (in an ideal world, Javier Bardem). He smiled, whilst vigorously fighting a niggling dent to his ego. What’s so special about this Javier Bardem character? He sounded like a knob. And what did he have that Fraser didn’t? Besides an international film career and millions in the bank?
Learn how to make a Roman blind. Fraser frowned, genuinely puzzled. She’d never shown any interest in home furnishings when she was around, hence the disastrous wallpaper choice with the embossed bunches of grapes all over it – a sort of wine-induced migraine in wall-covering form.
Climb Great Wall of China and learn a bit of Chinese (should be able to do this whilst climbing the Great Wall).
Fraser sniggered at that one. He could really hear Liv now. Her very specific breed of deadpan, random humour.
Vegas, baby! Swim naked in the sea at dawn … A picture of Liv and her phenomenal legs and her glorious boobs was just coming into view when Mia appeared with the buggy.
She looked up at him, shielding her face from the sun.
‘You OK?’
Fraser nodded, sheepishly.
‘Yeah, just about.’
‘Give us a drag on that, will you?’
Fraser did as he was told and Mia inhaled, blew the smoke sideways, then stubbed it out.
‘Oi, I hadn’t finished that!’
‘You gave up,’ she said. ‘I’m helping you.’
A group of five or six teenagers – almost certainly students – arrived at the café, chatting and laughing. They went inside and Mia and Fraser looked at each other, both knowing instinctively they were thinking the same thing.
‘Anyway, what you up to?’ said Mia, eventually.
‘Oh, just reading this …’ Fraser folded the piece of paper up self-consciously. ‘It’s that List that Liv wrote, the one Norm had last night?’
Mia knew exactly what it was. She’d already had an idea about what to do with it, too. Looking at Fraser’s face now, she was even more convinced it was a good one.
She put the brake on the buggy and went to stand next to him, leaning against the wall, lifting her face to the sun.
Fraser sighed.
‘It’s just shit, basically, isn’t it? All these things she’ll never do. All this life she’ll never live.’
‘The world is certainly going to be a much darker place without Liv’s perfect Victoria sponge and her homemade porn video, that’s for sure,’ said Mia, and Fraser couldn’t help but laugh, although Mia inwardly chastised herself. She was doing it again.
Fraser said, ‘I just think … I think we were robbed. Life’s just not the same any more, is it?’
‘No,’ shrugged Mia. ‘And yes, we were robbed, course we were, but without sounding harsh, nothing’s going to bring her back, Frase, is it?’ She looked across at him. ‘So what are we going to do about it now?’
It was a suggestion rather than a statement, since she had one idea about what they might do.
For a moment, Fraser said nothing. There was the sound of plates clattering inside the café, orders being called from the kitchen. Life. Then he slowly unfolded the List again and read it through.
‘It’s not exactly, get married, get a pension, get a Tesco’s Clubcard, is it?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ said Mia.
‘I mean these ideas are Blue Sky, ambitious.’
‘It’s like the annual schedule from Red Letter Days.’
‘Well exactly,’ said Fraser. ‘And yet it’s all I can do to get up in the morning.’
The idea nagged urgently in Mia’s head. Would he just think it was silly and pointless? Or naff, even? Nothing would bring Liv back, that was true, but at least this would be a project and a distraction, something for them all to focus on. She could definitely do with some focus in her life.
‘Can I say something?’ she said.
‘Go for your life.’
‘Promise you won’t take offence?’
‘No, but I’ll try.’
‘Well, it’s just you say that. You say you can’t get out of bed in the morning, but it wasn’t you who died, was it?’
Fraser frowned. ‘No. If it had, I definitely wouldn’t be getting out of bed, would I?’
‘I don’t think that’s my point,’ said Mia, thinking God, he could be facetious when he wanted to.
‘So what is your point?’
‘My point is, we are still alive, aren’t we?’
‘Yeees …’
‘We still have our lives so, in a way, all we can do is get on with it. Liv would have wanted that. I know she won’t be able to do all those things on the List but maybe …’
‘What?’
‘Well, maybe we can do them for her?’
She looked at him, unsure. Fraser pulled a face.
‘If you think I’m making a Roman blind or learning how to meditate, you have got another thing coming.’
Mia rolled her eyes.
‘Well, nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but don’t you think it would be a laugh? A bit of structure at least. A project? We could get everyone else roped in too.’
Fraser considered this for a second. ‘What, Norm and Melody making a homemade porn film at some dodgy B&B in Morecambe?’
‘Yes, if you think that would work for you, put a smile on that face.’ She got hold of his cheeks and tugged them.
Fraser stuck his tongue out.
‘Promise me Spanner will not get the swimming naked in the sea one. She’d love it too much and we’d never get her out – which would defeat the object.’
‘If you insist. You can be List secretary if you like.’
‘Hey, we could all go to China together! We could all climb the Great Wall together – me and you, what do you reckon?’
‘I reckon this is much more like it.’ Mia smiled.
And so they went on. They ordered more coffee, they stayed at the café and they hatched their plan. Fraser baggsying, ‘Vegas, baby!’
FIVE
April
London
Fraser stands outside Top Shop on Oxford Street, occasionally craning his neck to see if he can make out Karen coming towards him, out of the crowds. They’ve been seeing one another for five weeks now, although Fraser doesn’t quite know how this happened. One minute, Karen was just a friendly, regular face behind the bar, someone who listened patiently as he got more drunk and morose; the next, she was his girlfriend, all seemingly without him having experienced any cognitive processes whatsoever.
As he stands there, April blossom scurrying around his feet, Fraser suspects it’s happened simply because he couldn’t come up with a good enough, fast enough reason why it shouldn’t.
Karen called him the night after he got back from Lancaster, asking him if he fancied going for a curry as she had a two-for-one voucher at the Taj Mahal. Fraser said yes, mainly because he had no food in the house and somehow the voucher thing made it seem more innocuous, and that was that. They went for a slap-up Mexican the week after that, then ‘a beer’ one Monday night that somehow ended up in Karen’s bed, her giving him a back massage to the strains of Enya and, before he knew it, he had himself a girlfriend – as well as, he feared, the onset of heart disease. Karen isn’t really one to pick at lettuce leaves, put it like that, but then he’s always liked that in a girl.
And it’s nice to have someone to go out for curries with. He likes having another body in the house, someone who calls him at work, who comes round and cooks for him – finally, someone who knows what to do with lemon grass. It’s comforting and grounding.
However, she started, about a fortnight in, to buy him random ‘love gifts’, as she calls them, which makes Fraser feel special and anxious in equal measure: a four-pack of Ambrosia Devon custard, for example, after he said this was his favourite childhood dessert (this is the sort of question Karen likes to ask, often after sex: What was your favourite food as a child? If you were an animal, what animal would you be?), and a photo frame in the shape of a guitar, which was disgusting, truly foul, but which he felt pressurized to fill with a picture of him and Norm. He just hoped to God he remembered to hide it if Norm ever came round.
Fraser knows Karen is a ridiculously kind, thoughtful and giving woman, and he lives in hope that one day, preferably this week, he might wake up to find he has fallen in love with her, even if he cannot shake the feeling when he is with her that all his dreams are going up in smoke.
Not that he really believes his dreams will come true any more, but they are still there, lurking at the back of his mind like forgotten treasure on a sea bed: the one about him writing that one incredible song that will get the Fans signed. They’d started one before Liv died – called ‘Hope and Glory’ – about youth – all their songs seemed to be about youth, and living forever, back then – and never finished it. But Norm doesn’t even live in the same city any more, so band practice is out of the question. These dreams feel idiotic and delusional when he is with Karen, and he doesn’t know if this is just because he’s growing up or because she is wrong for him, but it suits him fine at the moment because feeling the way he does, so depleted and traumatized, his dreams feel too scary to contemplate, like gigantic, terrifying foreign lands that he has neither the strength nor motivation to conquer.
He looks down at his filthy running trainers and wonders if he’s wearing the right footwear for a salsa class – what do people wear at a dance class anyway? God forbid it’s bare feet. Fraser felt, in his bones, he would be against any physical activity that warranted bare feet.
He moves away from the doorway of Top Shop so he’s standing in the middle of the pavement and he can see her now, grinning, her dark head bobbing down the road, weaving her way through the evening crowds with her arms above her head, carrying several shopping bags.
Karen is an enthusiastic shopper – and enthusiastic, thinks Fraser, is the word. He’s always presumed all girls were born shoppers, like boys were born knowing how to put up shelves, but Karen seems to be the exception to this rule, bringing home something new to wear, or getting a delivery from eBay on an almost daily basis but then promptly sending it back.
Evenings at Karen’s largely consist of Fraser sitting alone on her sofa, the TV drowned out by the sound of masking tape being pulled then torn with teeth, like she’s performing some sort of medieval operation next door.
Fraser waves slowly at her and she gives him a big smile back since she can’t wave due to the number of bags hanging off her arm. He walks towards her; she holds his face in her hands and kisses him when they meet.
‘Hello, Fred …’
She has a sheen of sweat on her top lip from the effort of rushing but is also flushed and bright-eyed, which Fraser is encouraged to note makes her look pretty and fecund in a milkmaid kind of way.
‘Fred …?’ says Fraser, lost.
‘Astaire, innit.’ She laughs, looking up at him with that look again – he really wishes she wouldn’t do that – and, despite his best efforts not to (it’s a daily battle), Fraser cringes.
Karen has taken to putting ‘innit’ on the end of sentences but, like other little nuances of hers, she is slightly slow on the uptake – wasn’t Ali G famous in about 2005? Immediately he has this thought, Fraser chastises himself for it. This is the other thing he is finding about Karen. She brings out the petty in him; small, inane things make his toes curl and he hates himself for it. Who are you anyway, he thinks, the Cool Police?
He says, ‘Oh, right! Yeah. Got yer. Fred Astaire, mmm …’ He raises an eyebrow, as if to say, I don’t think so somehow. ‘Well, I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’
But Fraser knows he’ll never be ready for this. Ever. In his life. In fact, right now, standing in the street on a warm Tuesday evening in April, every molecule in his body is telling him he’d rather be doing anything – undergoing a life-threatening operation, for example – than going to a salsa class.
But ‘Learn to do SOME sort of dance’ is one of the four tasks he’s been allocated from Liv’s List to complete and he is determined to do this for her.
After he and Mia hatched their plan that awful day after Liv’s birthday, they got everyone over to Mia’s, where they tried, for a fruitless hour, to give free rein and let everyone choose four things each from the List.
But this resulted in nothing but shouting and Melody and Norm almost filing for divorce when it was decided, as the only couple, that they should do the homemade porn movie one and Melody burst out laughing: ‘Chance would be a fine thing. We haven’t had sex since October!’ Norm was not amused.
They’d gone round in circles, until finally, Mia had the ingenious idea that they should write down all the tasks on bits of paper, put them in a hat and let fate decide.
So this was the outcome:
Fraser: Learn to dance; sleep with an exotic foreigner: do this without becoming completely neurotic about what it’s supposed to ‘mean’ (Fraser felt – at a push – he could probably manage this); use up all seven Scrabble letters in one turn; make a Roman blind.
Norm: Learn how to make the perfect Victoria sponge; Vegas, baby!; get a six-pack; climb Great Wall of China.
Mia: Go to Venice, properly this time, and have a bellini at Harry’s Bar; swim naked in the sea at dawn; learn a foreign language; learn how to pluck eyebrows.
Anna: Read all works by William Wordsworth, learn how to meditate, to ‘live in the moment’; live in Paris for a while; learn how to use chopsticks.
Melody: French kiss in Central Park; make a homemade porn film; have a party for all my wonderful friends.
Number nineteen, they planned to do as the very last one, together as a group:
Go to airport, close eyes and pick a destination at random, then GO! Even if it’s to Stuttgart or Birmingham.
Of course, Fraser hasn’t told Karen about the List, which he does feel guilty about, since if there were no List – if there were no Liv, essentially – there’d be no way he would voluntarily sign up for a salsa class. Today, against his better judgement and only to liven up the most boring day at work this year (eight hours spent holding a microphone to someone’s head as they made a party political broadcast about obesity outside McDonald’s), he’d told the boys at work – John and Declan – and they’d ribbed him mercilessly, said they didn’t know anyone less likely to be going to a ‘gay’ salsa class …
But Karen doesn’t know this and what she doesn’t know, he’s reasoned, can’t hurt her. Besides, she was ecstatic when he asked her.
‘Really? You’re not jesting me?’ (‘Jesting’ is one of Karen’s favourite ’90s expressions, along with ‘mint’ and ‘yes way’.) ‘You actually want to go to dance lessons – with me?’ She looked dumbfounded, as though he’d just asked her to marry him, and squealed before hugging him so tight she almost suffocated him with her enormous, no, really enormous, amazing and wondrous breasts. It doesn’t matter how many times she says ‘innit’, Fraser doubts he will ever get irritated by those.
So, he felt absolved of his guilt, but now, what with Karen’s obsession with Strictly Come Dancing and calling him Fred Astaire, he is starting to worry she might think he can actually dance. After all, who suggests starting a hobby they don’t already have some aptitude for?
Fraser clings to the hope that salsa might just be his big, untapped talent, but realistically, chances are slim. Small children have been known to laugh at him at wedding receptions.
‘Been shopping again?’ says Fraser, cheerfully.
They’re walking side by side up Oxford Street now, towards the class, which is somewhere tucked behind Little Portland Street.
‘Ohmigod, have I been shopping.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘You’ve really been and done the shopping thing this time?’
She squeezes his arm. ‘Just you wait and see.’
They are prone to little exchanges of inane conversation like this, where Fraser feels as if he’s in that programme, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but just can’t think of any good lines.
He lights a cigarette for want of something better to do.
‘So … do you wanna see then?’ says Karen, after Fraser clearly hasn’t taken the hint.
‘Yeah, why not, go on then.’
She moves to the side of the street and opens up one of the plastic bags, which is pink and has the word FREED written on it. Fraser’s hands go clammy, his throat goes suddenly dry. It’s a shoebox and inside the box is a pair of leather dance shoes with a strap across and a square heel. The leather looks soft – he can smell it – and, even with his untrained eye, he can tell they cost a fortune.
Karen holds them up proudly, like a cat making an offering: ‘I just thought, do you know what? Bugger it. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly. I’m telling you, this dance thing is like a whole new world of retail opportunity!’
Thank you, Lord, they’re not for me.
‘Do you like them? The lady in the shop said they were the same as professionals wear.’
Fraser isn’t really au fait with dance shoes or what there is to like about them, so says the first thing that comes into his head: ‘They’ve got a very nice heel.’
Her face lights up.
‘Really? Do you think so?’
‘God, yeah, totally, a really, really good heel. Really good heel.’ Jesus. I hope you can see me, Olivia Jenkins, he thinks, and I hope you’re happy.
Fraser has seen adverts on Sky TV for salsa classes – in fact, he’s done a broadcast for one before; something about multicultural London – and they are always held in a dimly lit, buzzy bar, throbbing with Latino beats and unfeasibly attractive people: taut-bottomed men wearing cumberbunds and raven-haired beauties, that sort of thing. Not this one. This one is held in a mirrored studio, four flights of stairs above a shop selling bridal wear, and is complete with sprung floor and ballet barres around the edges – so bright, it makes you squint when you come in from the outside. Fraser may as well be naked, he feels so exposed, and wishes he’d done a bit more research than googling Salsa Classes in London and booking the first that came up.
To make matters worse, they’re early, so have to hang around whilst everyone arrives.
‘Gosh, this is very proper, isn’t it?’ whispers Karen excitedly as she takes off her trainers and gets changed into her new, professional shoes. ‘Takes me right back to dancing classes when I was little.’
Fraser feels a bit sick.
‘You didn’t tell me you’d done dance classes.’
‘Didn’t I? Oh, yeah. Distinction in Advanced Modern, me. Intermediate Ballet, gold medal three years running at the Hull Festival, I’ll have you know. I was going to audition for ballet school at one point before these buggers grew …’ She turns around and pushes her boobs together and Fraser has a flash of hope, once more, that maybe he is already a little bit in love with Karen after all.
It seems to take forever for everyone to arrive. Karen goes straight to the front where she starts chatting to a tall man in small, round glasses, whilst Fraser loiters at the back, feeling like a twelve-year-old at an adults’ party. He dares to look at himself in the mirror and regrets it. He looks ridiculous, like a youth offender brought in for ‘dance therapy’. He had no clue what to wear, so went for general fitness attire and is wearing shiny tracksuit bottoms, his running trainers and a FILA T-shirt bought in about 1991 which is too big for him and smells of his bedroom floor.
Everyone else is wearing normal, fashionable clothing, or professional dancewear. In particular, there’s a woman next to him who looks as if she’s pirouetted straight in from the set of Fame.
He smooths down his hair in a vague attempt to make himself look more presentable and sees Karen smile warmly then wink at him through the mirror. She seems to be getting on famously with the tall man in glasses. This is something Fraser greatly admires in Karen: her ability to be sociable and chirpy at all times – it’s why she makes such a good barmaid. Fraser has always found that hard, even more so these days. They are quite high up here and for some reason, as he looks out of the window, over the treetops thick with blossom, the evening spring sunshine glinting through the branches, he has a brief rush of something he remembers as happiness. Or hope. Is it hope? He closes his eyes, feels the warmth of the sun on his eyelids. He can do this. He can. He will do it for Liv.
‘OK, if you’re ready, shout, “SALSAAA!”’
Fraser nearly jumps out of his skin. Suddenly there is really loud music and a man at the front wearing a headset and wiggling his hips in a way that looks unnatural, not to mention painful.
‘SALSA!’ everyone shouts back, including Karen. How the hell does she know when to shout salsa?
‘Are we HAPPY?’ yells the man again – obviously the teacher or coach or instructor – what did they call them in the World of Dance? Fraser has no idea. The man’s gyrating his hips and shouting into the no-hands microphone that comes around the front of his face and reminds Fraser of the head-brace Norm used to have to wear at night when they were kids because his front teeth stuck out.
There’s a weak, affirmative dribble from the group.
‘Not GOOD ENOUGH!!!’ he tries again. ‘I said are you HAPPYYYYYY!!!?’
‘YES!’ everyone shouts, much louder this time.
Fraser remembers something Mia always tells him: ‘Fake it till you make it.’
Still, he can’t quite bring himself to shout ‘Yes’ back.
The instructor’s name is Calvin. He has a glorious Afro like a lion’s mane, a disgustingly toned body, which he is showing off to full effect in a tight, white vest, and buttocks that – as Liv would say – ‘you could crack a nut with’. Fraser could well hate his guts, were he not also in possession of the sunniest, most disarming smile he’s ever seen.
Calvin’s beauty, decides Fraser, is the sort that transcends a lifetime’s sexual orientation and he wonders if he might actually fancy him, just a tiny bit.
‘OK, hands up people if this is your first time today.’
His accent is hard to place – transatlantic mixed with something Latino: Brazilian perhaps, or Columbian. Whatever it is, it’s very, very cool.
Fraser puts his hand up, along with Karen, and is relieved to see at least ten other people out of the class of twenty or so doing the same.
‘Cosmic. Awesome. Right then, guys, well, we’re not going to worry, yeah?’ says Calvin, and Fraser can’t help but nod and smile. This man is like the sermon-giver of salsa. ‘We’re not going to cry, or let aaaanything get us down. We are going to salsa ourselves happy, OK?’ He flashes another amazing smile and lets out a laugh that sounds like pure sunshine. Again, Fraser feels the sides of his lips turn up – amazingly beyond his control.
‘I said, OK?’ He cups his ear, still shaking his hips, and this time Fraser manages at least to say the word ‘OK’.
‘Good. Awesome, my friends. THIS is what I like to hear.’
Five minutes in, any hopes Fraser had of possessing some untapped talent for salsa are dashed when it becomes clear he has no natural ability whatsoever. He is an appalling dancer – so appalling, it’s even a surprise to him. He’s musical; he can play the guitar and sing in tune, so how come this does not translate to his limbs, which are making erratic and alarming jerking movements, as if he’s desperate for the toilet or suffering from a neurological disorder. He catches sight of himself in the mirror again, blinks in disgust and looks the other way, only to be greeted by his red-faced reflection once more, his mouth hanging open in concentration. This is like a grim exercise in public humiliation.
He looks over at Karen. She’s a natural, of course she is, her hips and the rest of her body working in harmonious, fluid movements, which make her look sexy and stylish. He’d be proud of her if he wasn’t so busy being bitter. Why didn’t she tell him she was some Darcey Bussell wannabe as a kid? That gives her a totally unfair advantage. Not that this is a competition or anything.
He looks up, just at the moment that she does, and she gives him a tight-lipped smile that kills Fraser because he knows it’s a sympathy smile, and there’s nothing worse than a sympathy smile, except perhaps a sympathy snog.
He wouldn’t mind, but they’re only trying to master the ‘basic salsa step’ on their own as yet. If he can’t do that, what hope does he have for proper dancing in a pair? Or of ever achieving his goal?
Fraser is not a gracious loser and has a tendency to become despondent quickly when he can’t do something, especially in a public situation like this where his dignity is on the line. He remembers – just as the mood descends – that he also tends to become sullen; get a ‘face on like a smacked arse’, as Liv used to say, and he doesn’t want Karen to see him like that. ‘Smacked arse’ is one thing in front of your long-term girlfriend, but quite another in front of your new squeeze. He tells himself to get a grip and imagines what Liv would say if she could see him now: ‘Wipe that look off your face, Fraser John Morgan. It’s deeply unattractive.’
It’s not helping that the woman next to him in a leotard – a fucking leotard, for crying out loud – is muttering something and giving him funny looks. Fraser’s sure she’s trying to get his attention, but he’s choosing to ignore her. If it’s just so she can tell him he’s cramping her style, she can bugger off. How rude. He perseveres, concentrating as much as possible on Calvin’s feet and encouraging smile, but then she jabs him in the side with her bony little elbow.
‘Ow!’ He turns round, annoyed. ‘What?’
She’s pointing at the floor, jabbering on about something in a foreign language, but he can’t tell which one because the music’s too loud.
He frowns at her, shrugs his shoulders, and tries to turn back the other way, but she starts pointing more angrily, throwing her hands in the air, and Fraser begins to think she must just be mad, until the next thing he knows, Calvin is beneath his feet with a dustpan and brush.
It’s only then that he looks down and sees that all over the floor are little clumps of dirt – like molehills or animal dung. All sorts of terrible, unspeakable things come to mind, until Fraser realizes it’s just mud, mud that his filthy trainers have been depositing for the last fifteen minutes; half of Hampstead Heath all over the pristine white floor.
By the time they have a break, halfway through the class, Fraser has fought the sullen mood all he can and is in the full grip of smacked arse.
After the humiliation of the muddy trainers scenario (Calvin said not to worry but Fraser still feels mortified), they did pair work, the girls moving round the circle so that they got a chance to dance with every bloke. Woman-in-a-leotard refused to look at him when it got to her turn because he stepped on her toe by mistake. She was lucky he didn’t stamp on both feet, silly cow. There was some light relief when it came round to Karen, who was sweet and encouraging, but all in all, he feels like a loser.
‘Buddy, don’t worry, it is much, much harder than it looks.’
Now he is having to go through the further humiliation of perfect strangers sympathizing with him. And calling him ‘buddy’.
Joshi – the tall man with the glasses that Karen seems to have struck up an immediate rapport with, has been coming for six months and is certainly proficient, but only in the way that anyone who’d done the same steps for six months would be. There wasn’t much in the way of natural flair.
It may just be his foul mood, but Fraser also finds Joshi really annoying. He’s wearing one of those cheesecloth ‘granddad’ shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons and a plaited, raffia bracelet – both of which tell of time spent in Third World countries, probably with Raleigh International building schools or wells. Not getting off his face at full-moon parties, that’s for sure. And also, what’s with ‘Joshi’? What’s wrong with Josh? Or Joshua? Why the name like an Indian guru healer?
He also has the most enormous Adam’s apple Fraser has ever seen, and which he can’t take his eyes off when he speaks, as it goes up and down like a giant walnut in a lift.
They’re sitting down now, sipping free Liebfraumilch in plastic cups and eating Twiglets like they’re at a sixth-form party.
‘Calvin’s phenomenal, isn’t he?’ says Joshi, rather unnecessarily. ‘He’s an awesome teacher, I think, especially good with the weaker students. If you watch, he doesn’t patronize, do you know what I mean?’
Karen agrees and looks at Fraser, as if urging him to say something, which he does, mainly to stop Joshi before he gives him any more patronizing words of encouragement.
‘So, er … Josh, how come you decided to come to salsa classes then?’
‘Well, it’s interesting you should ask, buddy, actually.’ Joshi swallows the Twiglet he’s eating and Fraser stares as his Adam’s apple goes up and down. ‘Because I’m going to Bolivia next month – three months on a volunteer project doing irrigation systems – and I wanted to learn salsa beforehand. I think it’s so important to embrace the culture. To have the authentic experience, do you know what I mean?’
‘Wow,’ says Karen, shaking her head in a wowed kind of a way. ‘An irrigation system? In Bolivia? That is amazing. Amazing, isn’t it, Fraser?’
Fraser downs his wine.
‘Wouldn’t it have been better to do a course in plumbing?’
It’s an innocent enough question, he thinks. OK, maybe a little facetious, but it’s funny, too, and he couldn’t resist it.
Joshi stares at him blankly, biting into a Twiglet. Karen lets out a nervous giggle.
‘I think what Fraser’s getting at is that maybe you won’t have time to go out salsa-ing if you’ve got so much other, more important stuff to be doing.’
That’s not what I was getting at all, thinks Fraser, but anyway, he’s lost interest now, so that when Joshi eventually says, ‘I think the irrigation systems in Bolivia are somewhat different to those in the UK,’ he’s busy filling up his cup with more wine.
Joshi goes to the toilet leaving him and Karen alone, and Fraser detects a rather awkward silence. She looks up at him over her cup, swinging her hips in a strange, coy sort of way.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she says, and Fraser fights the little frisson of anxiety he gets whenever she looks at him like that from under her heavily mascara-ed eyes.
‘Sure, go for it.’
‘Have you got a problem with …?’ She makes a strange jerking movement with her head.
‘With what?’
‘With a certain someone,’ she hisses, nodding towards the door.
‘What, Joshi? No. Why would I have a problem with him?’
‘Well, no, you wouldn’t.’ She blushes, as if she’s backtracking now. ‘I mean not that you have, obviously. It’s just if you think there’s anything going on, like you know, I fancy him or he’s flirting with me …’
Fraser frowns at her. ‘No, not at all …’
‘What I guess I’m saying is that, if you’re jealous, Fraser, you don’t need to be, all right, hun?’ She takes his hand and squeezes it. ‘Because I don’t fancy him. Like, what-so-ever.’
Fraser can’t help but think she doth protest too much, but a little part of him still dies inside because he wishes he were jealous: that’s the problem.
The second half of the class is a definite improvement on the first, with Fraser at least managing the basic salsa without injuring himself or a third party.
By the time it ends, he’s almost enjoying himself, and he and Karen decide to go for a drink to celebrate. Drinking, Fraser is finding, is the key to his relationship at the moment. As long as there is booze, he can just about manage to put any doubts to the back of his mind. It’s only at 3 p.m. on a rainy Sunday, the two of them stuck for conversation, that he really starts to panic.
They go to Las Iguanas on Dean Street, have three – Fraser has four – Coronas, so that by the time they emerge out into the cool evening and make towards Oxford Street for their bus, he’s feeling much better, much more carpe diem and que será and other foreign phrases he often vows, when he’s drunk, to live his life by.
He takes her hand in his. Soho is quiet, almost deserted at this time on a Tuesday evening, and he knows it’s probably because he’s a bit pissed, but he feels a bloom of affection for Karen. This is OK, he thinks, this is enough. It’s not Liv, it’ll never be Liv, but I’ve got someone.
He thinks of arriving at Karen’s, getting into bed with her and nestling his head into her pillow-soft breasts. Then he thinks of the alternative: going home alone, opening the door to that God-awful silence, broken only by the beep of the smoke alarm that needs its battery replacing, and he thinks, Thank fuck, basically. Thank fuck.
She squeezes his hand. ‘I’ve had such a good time tonight,’ she says.
‘Me too,’ says Fraser, and he means it, he really does.
They walk to the end of Dean Street and around Soho Square, where two wasted homeless people are having a row.
They continue along Oxford Street in a tired silence to the bus stop, and have only been there a few minutes, huddled on the red plastic bench, when a drunken figure seems to loom out of nowhere.
‘Karen?’ The man is staggering he’s so gone. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
He’s got a hard face with a lazy eye – a face Fraser knows instinctively he would do well not to get on the wrong side of.
‘Darren.’ Karen lets go of Fraser’s hand and, even in that small gesture, Fraser knows this situation has the potential for disaster and bloodshed. That doesn’t stop him giggling, however. Fraser has a tendency to laugh at inopportune moments and this is one of them. The ‘Darren–Karen’ thing has tickled him for some reason, and there’s not much he can do about it.
‘Is he laughing at me? Why is he laughing at me?’
The smirk is wiped clean off his face, however, when Darren starts jabbing a finger in his direction.
‘Sorry, Darren, this is Fraser, Fraser this is Darren,’ says Karen.
It doesn’t really answer the question and Fraser suspects he and Darren aren’t ever going to be on first-name terms, but he holds his hand out anyway. But Darren rejects it so he is left with it sticking out, feeling absurd. He eventually scratches his head for something to do.
‘Is this your new boyfriend then?’
Karen sighs and looks the other way.
‘Darren, pack it in.’
‘What? All I asked was if this was your new boyfriend. Nice trainers anyway, mate,’ he says to Fraser. ‘I see you really made an effort for a night out in town.’
‘Actually we’ve been to a dance class,’ says Fraser, flatly. He’s getting a little weary of this pissed, shaggy-haired imbecile intimidating him at a bus stop.
Darren laughs out loud. ‘A dance class, eh?’
‘Yes,’ says Karen, ‘a dance class, OK? Fraser and I go to salsa lessons. Now will you leave us alone.’
There it goes again, that shiver of anxiety. It’s the way she says, ‘Fraser and I …’ Like she’s boasting. It makes him feel pressurized.
‘Go on then,’ says Darren. ‘Show us yer moves.’
Karen sighs again. ‘Sorry about him,’ and she gets hold of Fraser’s arm. ‘Let’s move along.’
But Darren’s not having any of it.
‘Where you going, you wanker?’ he shouts after them. ‘Where are you going with my fucking girlfriend?’
Fraser sighs and looks skyward. He’s knackered; he’s used up all the concentration he possesses in the dance class, and now he’s a bit drunk and all he wants to do is to get on the bus and to get home and go to sleep, his head resting on those soft, pillowy boobs. But Darren has other ideas.
‘Oi. I said, where are you going, dickhead?’
Karen’s grip tightens on Fraser. ‘Just ignore him,’ she whispers, hurrying him along. ‘He just can’t handle it, he really, really can’t.
‘You just can’t handle it, Daz, can you?’ and she turns round and shouts at him. ‘I’m with Fraser now, OK? You thought I’d never get a boyfriend again, didn’t you? You thought you’d ruined me, scarred me for life, but you were wrong!’
I should be saying something now, thinks Fraser – what should I be saying? He becomes queasily, acutely aware he is saying nothing.
‘Whatever, you’re still fat!’ Darren shouts back. ‘You’re welcome to her, mate.’ And inwardly, Fraser winces, because now he knows he really should be saying something, that there’s no call at all for that sort of behaviour.
‘I don’t think there’s any call for that,’ he says, turning around. ‘You’re pissed, mate. Now go home.’
But it seems this is perfect ammunition for Darren, who is not pissed, no he fucking well is not, and he is certainly not going to be told to go home by some Northern wiener in crap trainers.
Fraser isn’t prepared for what happens next; all he knows is that he hears the sudden, quickening sound of shoes on the ground and then is wrenched – him letting out a sudden and involuntary sound like he’s being choked – by the hood of his top and pulled to the ground. Then he feels a dull ache in the head – no, actually a really, really sharp pain in the head, and can hear Karen screaming, ‘Darren get off him! Get off him now!’
Fraser has never been the fighting type – the odd scrap as a teenager but he could never be bothered and, anyway, deep down he knew he had a pathetically low pain threshold, and would he – this is the question – would he be able to stop his eyes watering if it really hurt? But this time, from somewhere deep inside of him, the adrenaline kicks in, the male instinct that he is supposed to make an effort here. He can’t shout: ‘Ah, you’re fucking hurting me and please don’t break my nose! It’s buggered enough as it is!’ So he at least has a go at pushing him off, tries to summon every manly, fearless cell in his body to dodge a punch, even throw a couple back, but he loses out and suddenly his back is against a wall and he hears something crack and feels a stab of pain that gets him right in the throat. There’s the familiar trickle at the back of his nose and then splosh, splosh. Fat splashes of vibrant red on the floor.
‘Oh, my God, Fraser! Oh, God. You fucking bastard, Daz!’
Then Karen has rushed over to him and is kneeling down beside him, a look of pure horror on her face, but Fraser is seeing stars, far too dazed to say anything, except eventually, ‘Ow. I don’t think there was any need for that.’
‘No, there was not. There was NOT, Darren. You total fuck-head!’
Karen screams at Darren who is walking off now, swaggering, coolly, not even breaking into a jog, thinks Fraser. That’s how menacing I am.
‘Fraser, baby, are you all right?’ Karen kneels right down beside him and the look on her face just kills him.
‘Are you OK, sweetie?’ She’s brushing the hair from his face.
‘Yeah, yeah, just a bit of blood,’ says Fraser, sitting up, feeling quite pleased with himself for the phrase ‘just a bit of blood’, when what he really wants to scream is, FUCK ME THAT FUCKING KILLED!! His top is already covered in the stuff.
‘OK, pinch your nose at the bridge and put your head back and I’ll clean you up a bit. I once did St John Ambulance, I know what I’m doing …’ Karen roots in her handbag and comes up with a packet of handy wet wipes. ‘Might sting a bit.’
‘Thanks, Karen, thanks. I’m sorry about this …’ says Fraser, practically gurgling on the blood that’s now running down his throat.
Karen takes his face in her hands and he tries not to say ‘Ow’ because his whole head kind of hurts right now. She dabs at him with her wet wipe. ‘Now you listen to me, Fraser Morgan, you have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing at all, OK? In fact …’ She stops.
Oh, God, here it comes again, that look.
‘I should be thanking you.’
She looks straight into his eyes
‘You know it really meant a lot to me what happened there, it really showed me something, you know?’
‘No,’ says Fraser. ‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Well, you took a punch for me back there, didn’t you? You nearly bloody broke your nose for me! Maybe you have actually broken your nose!’
Fraser smiles, weakly. Great, he thinks. What a hero. ‘And I appreciate it, hun, that’s all I’m saying. I was touched, Fraser, like, really touched.’ She pauses for a minute, for her words to sink in, then she says, ‘Right, let’s get you home.’ And yet another little part of Fraser dies, right there on the pavement, because he realizes he has just spent one of the most humiliating hours of his life (and that was just the dance class) and probably broken his nose, all for someone he really is not sure about. He didn’t bargain for this.
SIX
The next morning
Lancaster
Careful to hold in her post-baby belly, Mia rolls off Eduardo, reaches for the water on her bedside table, downs the glass and flops back down on the pillow.
‘Ow! Cramp!’ Then she sits bolt upright, clutching her right thigh, which has gone into involuntary spasm.
Eduardo laughs his low, maddening laugh.
‘You always do this, you always get the cramp,’ he says, yawning, as if it’s some sort of personality flaw, like always picking a fight when drunk.
‘That’s because I’ve been straddling you for the last ten minutes and in case you’d forgotten, I had a baby nine months ago,’ she says, trying desperately to keep an air of humour. ‘My hip flexors aren’t what they used to be, you know.’
He rubs her back, then places a lingering kiss on her shoulder. ‘I’m going for a smoke,’ he says, pulling back the covers, and Mia watches as his tiny, brown Brazilian bum – like a hazelnut she always thinks – disappears around the bedroom door, and she is left clutching her rounded, white one.
The pain eases and she lies back down, feeling that familiar dread wash over her: he will come back up, get dressed, perhaps stay for a polite cup of coffee and then leave, and it will be just her and Billy again, till bedtime. Oh, Lord, roll on bedtime.
It’s the second time she and Eduardo have had sex this week and the sixth since Billy was born. Mia knows this because she keeps tabs. It’s a bit like notches on the bedpost, although she’s painfully aware it doesn’t quite hold the same air of bragging arrogance as the teenage version.
This tab – at least at first – was more for herself. Somehow by writing down when they had sex, she could pretend it didn’t mean anything, that he was just ‘servicing’ her – and what woman living in 2008 shouldn’t be serviced, if she so desired? It kept things clinical, like a nurse keeping medical notes: frequency of urination, blood pressure, that sort of thing.
Lately, however, there’s been a shift. The tab she keeps is no longer so she can tell herself it means nothing, as it means something. Twice in one week – this is starting to become a habit – and part of her hopes it will become more than a habit for Eduardo, that he will find it in him to love her, properly, like she deserves to be loved. The other part of her, of course, wishes he’d fuck off and die, and it’s a constant source of fascination to Mia how the two can exist in unison.
He is at least starting to make an effort, she thinks. Historically, he would turn up drunk, at midnight, with no consideration for the fact she had to go to work, or now, get up with their son.
Since Liv’s birthday reunion, however, and leaving her in the lurch, he has actually turned up at the designated time to have Billy, and last night they had fun – proper, actual fun. They drank wine and talked about movies. She modelled her new Primark sundress for him, then they drank more wine and – when they ran out of that – some more, because woo-hoo! there was someone to go to the off-licence!
Then they snogged and danced to the Buena Vista Social Club in her kitchen, occasionally breaking to smoke out of the window, the view of Lancaster Castle high up on its hill, floodlit, like something out of a child’s dream.
Now, of course, hungover and with the prospect of looking after a baby all day, Mia regrets it. In fact she despises him for coming over here on a Tuesday night, taking her away from Holby City and a macaroni-cheese-for-one and corrupting her with his heady, Latino ways.
But she also needed it like a person needs air.
Last night, pressed close to him, dancing barefoot in her new summer dress, albeit one probably made in a sweatshop in Latin America, she felt alive; she felt primitive and sexual.
And she needs to feel primitive and sexual, she thinks, looking at their clothes strewn all over her laminated bedroom floor, otherwise she will go mad and life will feel like one big washing machine cycle. She needs to know she can do things with her body other than feeding a child, or hauling him up on her hip a thousand times a day, and if, right now, it is only the often flaky, unreliable father of her child that can give her that, then she is going to take it.
Also, sex with Eduardo is doubly exciting, because it is forbidden, after all. If any of her friends found out, they would go mad– wouldn’t they? Now she thinks about it, she wonders if they aren’t too wrapped up in their own lives to give a toss about who she’s sleeping with these days. Except Liv. Oh, Liv. It makes her suck air through her teeth just thinking about it. ‘He wears sunglasses inside, darling, he’ll bring you nothing but grief.’ And look at her now. Liv would have her guts for garters.
Then there’s Fraser … he already knows something’s afoot; if he knew the whole truth. God. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Fraser can’t stand Eduardo. He has tolerated him in the past – just, the effort etched on his face, but ever since he walked out when Mia was pregnant, she can’t mention his name without Fraser practically spitting on the floor, something she feels is slightly over the top. After all, it’s not his life, is it? And anyway, what does he care now since he’s seeing ‘Karen’? Mia has to try really, really hard not to make a face when she says the word ‘Karen’. It’s just, even the name has a desperate, over-the-hill air to it, and she suspects Fraser is using Karen as a crutch, that she’s not making him happy or vice versa. Which would be a terrible thing to do. Terrible.
She listens to Eduardo clattering around downstairs, probably making the polite coffee that he will drink whilst sitting on the side of the bed, before announcing he is leaving – stuff to do/mates to see/a shift to get ready for. She has no idea what he does with his day and has given up asking – and anyway, even though her friends would be shocked to hear it, deep down she wonders if this whole situation is partly her fault.
She went batty when she was pregnant. Batty. Did she drive Eduardo away? Did her hormones warp everything so that she demonized him, made him out to be worse than he actually is? As she lies in bed listening to the kettle, the clinking of china, the comforting sounds of another body in the house, she gets an image in her head, a memory: her, seven months gone, huge already and haring through Shoreditch on her bicycle at 2 a.m. Ha! What a bloody nutcase! The Wicked Witch of the East End! So fat she could barely turn the pedals for her bump.
She’d become convinced Eduardo was having an affair and decided to catch him out. She knew he’d be at the MOTHER bar – oh, yes, the MOTHER bar – and she burst through those doors, bump first, practically fighting the bouncers to the ground, a force of nature in maternity jeans. She stampeded around, Billy kicking inside her, alarmed at the sudden onslaught of hardcore techno. When she finally located him in a darkened corner, he was topless, wearing sunglasses and writhing around with another man who was also topless.
So he was gay! That was what all this was about. She had almost felt a rush of relief that it wasn’t just because he was a complete bastard.
But no, he was not gay, he said; he was just off his face, and apparently this was what one does when off one’s face. He was also scared and overwhelmed by the prospect of being a father and he just wanted some fun whilst he still could – was that so bad?
It seemed so at the time, but now she’s not sure, and when she pictures that scene now – him, bare-chested in Ray-Bans, chewing the inside of his cheek whilst she stood before him, a mountain of a woman, bicycle clips around the bottom of her maternity jeans, shouting ‘I hate you; I fucking hate your guts!’ – she starts to giggle, then really laugh, until she is doubled over in a fit of hysterics.
‘What are you laughing at?’ Eduardo stands in the doorway of her bedroom, naked, a mug in each hand, laughing at her laughing.
‘Oh, nothing, nothing … come to bed,’ she says, stretching out a hand. He bends down, puts the two mugs on the floor and almost jumps down beside her.
‘Eduardo! Bloody hell! About four of the slats in this bed are broken, you’ll break it even more if you’re not careful.’
‘Have you still not got round to getting a new bed?’ he says, snuggling up to her.
WELL I WOULD IF I HAD A MAN IN THE HOUSE TO ERECT ONE. She fights the urge to shout, but it’s so very hard.
‘No, I have still not got a new bed.’ She smiles, inhaling his smoky, musky scent. ‘But perhaps you could buy one for me. It’s the least you could do.’
Eduardo ignores that comment and tidies a strand of hair behind her ear. Here it comes, she thinks, the ‘better be going’. But he doesn’t. Instead he starts to kiss her tenderly, ever so gently, so she thinks she might cry, and she once more becomes aware of how much she needs this to stay alive, to feel alive. Mia Woodhouse – you’re still in there, aren’t you?
He softly pushes her hair back. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he whispers and she doesn’t say anything but she smiles and looks up at him. ‘I want to make love again. Can we make love again?’ If an English man said that I’d be laughing my head off by now, thinks Mia. But somehow a Brazilian gets away with it. Somehow from him, it’s irresistible. It’s 6.45 a.m., the early morning sunshine is turning the room golden, and Mia closes her eyes, throws her arms behind her in abandon as Eduardo presses his pelvis down onto hers.
Then ‘waaaaaaaahhhhhhh!’ Nine months on and it still rips right through her. Still feels like an assault.
‘Billy,’ she sighs, staring up at the ceiling.
‘He’ll stop, he’ll stop,’ says Eduardo, kissing her neck. ‘He’ll go back to sleep, come on, relaaax.’
She tries, she does, but it’s no use.
‘No, he won’t, unfortunately.’ She gently pushes Eduardo off her and drags herself out of the bed. ‘Believe me, that’s Billy for the day now.’
When Mia comes back from the kitchen where she has been preparing Billy’s breakfast, leaving him fastened to the high chair in the lounge, she half expects Eduardo to have gone. It’s the sort of shitty thing he does all the time, after all. But as she approaches the lounge door, she can hear talking.
For a moment she’s confused – whose is the other adult voice she can hear? – and then she realizes, it’s Eduardo’s. She freezes, the dish of porridge in her hand. Then, spying through the crack in the door, holding her breath, she watches them.
Eduardo has pulled up a chair and is leaning on the tray of Billy’s highchair, playing with his small plastic animals – Billy’s all-time favourite toys.
‘And this is a sheep,’ he’s saying. ‘In Portuguese we say “ovelha” … Can you say “ovelha”, Billy? That’s pretty cool, ha? Which is your favourite, Billy?’
Billy’s transfixed: wide-eyed, perfectly still, a string of drool hanging from his mouth, and Mia has to bite her lip to stifle a giggle. Poor baby. Never known a man in the house to talk to him like this, let alone his own father. Well this is a turn-up for the books, she imagines him thinking, I could get used to this.
She could get used to this.
This is how it should be, too. This is how she imagined family life: her wandering about of a morning in Eduardo’s shirt, sexy and yet homely at the same time, with tanned bare limbs (in her case, pale ones with a huge bruise up the side where she continually bangs into the coffee table, but never mind), and daddy, handsome and bare-chested, playing with his son, the smell of coffee wafting through the house.
Then her mobile goes on the sofa and she nearly jumps out of her skin.
‘Ooh, I’ll get that!’ she says chirpily, trying to make it look as though she literally arrived at the door just then, that she wasn’t spying.
‘Hello?’
Eduardo is still playing with the animals – perhaps even more enthusiastically now he knows he’s being watched, and Billy has started to do hiccupping giggles.
‘Mia, it’s me, Fraser.’
‘Fraser!’ Eduardo turns around and looks at her and she doesn’t know why but she smiles and waves at him. ‘How are you? OK? Actually you don’t sound OK.’
‘No, I’ve been better. I got punched in the face last night.’
‘What? Why?’
Mia takes herself off into the kitchen to talk.
‘Oh, God, long story, involving ex-boyfriends and salsa classes and Karen.’
‘My God, Karen didn’t punch you, did she?’
‘No, no, GOD no …’
‘Oh.’
She should really try to sound less disappointed to learn that he hasn’t been punched by his new girlfriend.
‘It was her ex-boyfriend.’
‘Really? Gosh. You are quite the threat then?’
She shakes her head. Why did she say that?
Silence. Mia turns round and looks out of her kitchen window.
‘Frase, are you OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m OK. Just look a bit like an old alky at the moment, bright red, fat nose …’
She closes her eyes. Poor Frase.
On the other end of the phone, Fraser is examining his face in Karen’s bathroom mirror. He looks dreadful; the bridge of his nose is so swollen that it’s closing up his eyes, so they’re piss holes in the snow, and he’s got a fat top lip.
Karen is at the shop getting milk and more frozen peas. She has taken to her role as Florence Nightingale with gusto and has woken him up several times in the night to check for signs of concussion and to clear his nasal passages of dried blood, so that he is now exhausted, as well as injured.
‘I take it Karen is looking after you?’ says Mia.
‘Oh, yeah, not wanting on that front. Karen is looking after me.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That’s really, really good. So um, what was the salsa class like?’
‘Yeah, great,’ says Fraser. ‘Well, actually, I made a complete and utter tit of myself, but that’s OK, ’coz it’s all for Liv.’
She laughs. ‘And Olivia wouldn’t have it any other way, as we know. In fact she would be disappointed if you didn’t make a tit of yourself. So come on then, what happened?’
‘Well, besides getting my head kicked in at the end of it all, I was an appalling dancer, so bad it wasn’t funny.’
‘Oh, I bet it was.’
‘I assure you it was not, and I wore totally inappropriate footwear, basically my knackered, filthy running trainers, which then deposited little piles of mud all over this pristine white dance floor.’
Mia covers her eyes and smiles. ‘Oh, God, Fraser, only you.’
‘To top it off, Karen was a brilliant dancer – turns out she was some sort of semi-pro when she was a kid.’
‘Oh, come on, I’m sure she wasn’t that good.’
There was a long pause.
‘So listen,’ she says, before she can help herself. ‘Have you actually told Karen you’re doing the salsa class as part of Liv’s List? That you’re actually doing it for Liv?’
Fraser stands back from the mirror. ‘No, course I bloody haven’t.’
‘Well, don’t you think you should? Just out of courtesy? I mean, she’s going to find out sometime, Fraser, and then she’s going to feel really hurt and really used.’
Fraser frowns; he thinks about this for a minute. Right – so why would he tell her? So she can feel hurt and used now? Did he not have the right to a relationship whilst he was doing the List for Liv? He felt a wave of guilt and panic. She would be back in a second to shower him with unconditional love and frozen peas again. This was twisted; maybe Mia was right, maybe he should just tell her now and get it over and done with. No! No. He couldn’t do that to himself or to her, he was giving this a go and that was that. So he says …
‘Look, I’m not gonna tell her, Mia – is that wrong?’ He really didn’t know any more. ‘Because if I do, it would be the end of us.’
‘That is kind of my point. But it’s up to you. I just don’t think it’s fair if you use her, that’s all.’
Fraser sighs. ‘I’m not using her, I like her.’
‘Well, that’s OK then.’
The door goes and Eduardo comes in, dishevelled and bare-chested, wearing just his boxer shorts and holding a crying Billy at arm’s length. ‘He’s missing his mama,’ he says. ‘You’ve been on that phone for hours.’
For God’s sake, would she ever learn? In Karen’s bathroom, Fraser shakes his head and tuts. That was definitely Eduardo he just heard in the background. There weren’t many people who made Fraser’s blood boil, but Eduardo was one of them. Such a spineless, cocky, useless little twat. Fraser had a feeling he was trying to worm his way back into Mia’s life and here they were – caught out! Why would he be there so early if he hadn’t stayed over? Mia could be really thick sometimes, not to mention a hypocrite. And there she was on her moral high horse about Karen.
‘Is that Eduardo?’ he says.
In her kitchen, Mia thinks for a split second about lying – shit – Fraser would really not be impressed; nobody would be impressed, not after everything they’d been through with her on the Eduardo front. But also, her friends weren’t on their own with a baby, were they? And Eduardo was making an effort, she should give him a chance. I mean, look at him, he was still here, wasn’t he? Standing in her kitchen holding his own son like he was a bomb about to go off?
‘Yes,’ she says eventually, sheepishly.
‘Oh, Mia.’
He sounds so disappointed, that’s the worst bit.
‘What?’
‘Mimi, can you get off the phone NOW?’
‘Eduardo, don’t call me Mimi!’ she shouts, suddenly stressed by everything: him being annoying, Billy crying, and now Fraser getting at her. She should go back to bed.
‘Look, Frase—’ she says.
‘Oh, it’s Frase.’ Eduardo rolls his eyes dramatically, Billy’s still wailing. ‘The handsome Fraser Morgan …’
Mia sighs heavily and puts her hand somewhat dramatically on her forehead. She was doing it again; she was acting like a character in Coronation Street.
‘Oh, God, God, will both of you just bugger off!’ she says eventually, more because she doesn’t know what else to say than because she doesn’t think each of them has a point. ‘Fraser, I hope your nose goes down. I’ll call you later. I’m going back to bed!’
And she does, and as she draws the cool, white sheets around her, leaving Eduardo to settle Billy without asking her how every five minutes, like he’s a new DVD player and only she has the instructions, she thinks just for this, if only for this, it’s worth giving him another chance.
Fraser hears the front door go. ‘Couldn’t get any frozen peas but they did have broad beans so I just got those,’ calls Karen down the hall. ‘Now are you feeling sick or dizzy at all?’
And Fraser looks at himself. Yes, I am, he thinks, I am feeling sick. It’s a type of sickness he’s felt before.
SEVEN
Then
December 1996
Lancaster
Fraser sloshed more wine into his glass and leant over the recipe book again: Assemble the Moussaka: Place a layer of potatoes on the bottom, top with a layer of aubergine, add meat sauce on top of aubergine layer and sprinkle with …
Bloody hell, this was like something off The Krypton Factor. It didn’t help that he had now consumed the best part of a bottle of wine and the words were beginning to swim: Potatoes, aubergine, meat. Or was it potatoes, meat, aubergine? He had no idea; all he knew was that she would be here very shortly and he had yet to make something called a béchamel sauce.
He lit a cigarette, wafting the smoke with his hand so that it mixed to form a miasma of Silk Cut, fried mincemeat and Fruits of the Forest, courtesy of the scented candles Melody was constantly buying for the house, because ‘candles create atmosphere’. It would seem so. On an average evening, Number 5 South Road could pass for the Sistine Chapel.
He surveyed the kitchen; it looked as if they’d been burgled and he quietly cursed himself for choosing a dish that somehow used up every utensil in the house. Why hadn’t he gone for something simple like a chilli or a curry?
Presentation was going to be key. He reached in the cupboard above and got out the big guns: Melody’s huge terracotta casserole dish. He set about arranging a layer of aubergine he’d grilled, wishing he’d actually followed the instructions and cut the aubergine lengthways rather than just chopping it into big chunks, which now sat mushy in the middle of the huge expanse of terracotta looking somewhat forlorn, like a mound of cow dung.
He only chose moussaka because moussaka was what Melody cooked for the last dinner party at their house a month ago and that seemed to go down well. (Although he didn’t like to think about that night much past the actual dinner stage, when it all sort of degenerated.)
Melody was a worldly, confident girl with an impressive chest, who Fraser thought had some peculiar ideas that didn’t seem to sit with her student status, like ordering the Sunday broadsheets to be delivered to their student hovel and having Greek-themed dinner parties where mates from her law course came wearing ball gowns, only to get shit-faced on bottles of cider.
But Melody was also kind and she was capable and at times like this, Fraser was very glad he lived with someone who owned cookery books. Now, though, as he eyed his moussaka and compared it with the one in the picture, he realized he hadn’t been aware of the ‘layers’ component; the layering part was something he had not allowed time for and it was these that were foxing Fraser right now. Far too much to think about for a man who, despite his resolve, was already half cut at barely seven o’clock.
And at nineteen years old, Fraser Morgan was also layered, or at least his mother was always telling him so (such a complicated child, we’ve no idea where we got him from …) and this was how he experienced life: it came in peaks and troughs that he couldn’t predict or control very successfully and, in one day alone, he could go from a moment of intense joy – like those few seconds between finishing a gig and the applause; was there a finer moment in life than that? – to bouts of melancholy, which saw him take to his room to strum on his guitar and listen intently to lyrics and maybe to write some. He came up with his best work when in the throes of melancholia.
He doubted he had ever really experienced ‘happiness’ as such, if happiness was the sort of unquestioning confidence he saw in his peers on his philosophy course. He had chosen philosophy, not because he had done it at A level (he’d done sciences) but because to him, it was the sort of subject you could only do at university.
He was the first of his family to go; most of his mates were staying back in Bury to resit their A levels or get jobs in plumbing or as fitness instructors and he wanted something that sounded impressive and brainy when they asked. ‘Computer science’ didn’t quite cut it, but philosophy? Now that was good.
Fraser loved his mates back home but sometimes he did yearn for something slightly more than the pub, and hoped that in a philosophy course he’d find that. He imagined it would be full of cool, interesting people who possibly wore scarves and scurried across campus carrying piles of ancient books and having ‘ideas’. Fraser very much liked ideas, he saw himself as relatively deep and sensitive. In reality, though, philosophy seemed to be a course chosen by earnest and yet alpha types with whom Fraser had nothing in common, and he felt a bit lost in lectures, scared to participate in case he said something rubbish and sounded too northern.
Those guys seemed to know instinctively what they wanted out of life. Fraser wanted to be in a band: he sang and played guitar and imagined that first album cover where he and Norm (drummer) and the two other members of the Fans (Fraser, Andy, Norm and Si – an acronym of the four members; they thought that was pretty slick) would be photographed in some ironically old-fashioned living room looking moody and emaciated, although he wasn’t sure Norm would quite be able to pull off that look at present.
That was it, he didn’t have a back-up plan. He had no further plans for life. These people, his peers, seemed to know exactly where they were going, whereas life to Fraser was an ever-unfolding mystery, exhilarating at times, but which all too often disappointed him. This was because he had not yet cultivated the art of making himself happy and still made terrible, often catastrophic choices based on fear, not having any better ideas (the moussaka being one such example) and flattery. This had always definitely been the case with girls.
Fraser was good looking; maybe not everyone’s cup of tea with his unrefined looks but definitely attractive. He was tall, in possession of a good head of hair and (so girls had told him) a pair of ‘beautiful, almond-shaped eyes’, which was a compliment he wafted away only to go home and peer at them in the mirror from different angles. Were they beautiful? Wasn’t that just a cliché handed out by girls when they were drunk and sentimental, which in his experience was pretty much all the time?
Whatever, Fraser Morgan was never short of female attention, never short of girls throwing themselves at him and telling him he was funny, yes, and ‘layered’, and had lovely eyes.
Although Fraser was bemused by all this attention, he was also flattered, and it seemed ungrateful and downright rude not to take them up on their offers. So far in one and a half years at Lancaster University, he’d been out with a Becca – one of Melody’s law-course mates, posh and a little bit terrifying. Being with Becca was like some sort of endurance test for the character and, Fraser had to admit, the challenge gave him a twisted thrill.
After Becca, there was Steph: sweet, clever and thoughtful. She was on his course and was everything Fraser had fantasized that a philosophy student would be like, as in she wore scarves and glasses and sat cross-legged a lot. (Actually this really disturbed him in the end. There is only so long a man can stare at a women’s crotch in tights before they just don’t find them attractive any more.)
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