How We Met (11 page)

‘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.

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.)

He and Steph had really good ‘discussions and debates’, which he found genuinely interesting, about education and the rich/poor divide, but ultimately Steph had no sense of humour, and would get really offish when Fraser got drunk and took his clothes off – which was just something he did; it wasn’t meant to upset anyone and it certainly wasn’t sexual – and in the end he just got sick of her being angry all the time, and him having to constantly apologize.

Steph lasted five months and was followed by several back-to-back flings, the latest being Sara, of moussaka evening fame, who now of course was known as ‘Sara Moussaka’ and who he’d rather forget (another reason he was now asking himself why the hell he’d decided to make moussaka).

Fraser had started to get himself a reputation that he was a bit of a ladies’ man, although he thought this was unfair, he thought he just liked the company of girls. You could talk to girls and, also, he liked how girls did stuff. They went for walks and to restaurants – all the things he hadn’t yet had the chance to do in life – and it made him feel alive for a bit, say, after a breathtaking walk in the Lake District. But he’d discovered that feeling would soon fade because the person he was with was not the
right
person. He was finding he needed sparkly lights and a big hill and a beautiful day to enjoy their company. That was, until he met Mia, who frankly he would still love being with if they spent the day in Asda’s frozen fish section. Which, actually, they sort of did.

Mia stood in the damp, December evening outside Fraser’s front door and took a few deep breaths. She had been looking forward to this moment all week, even counting
the sleeps – oh, yes – and yet suddenly she was crapping it,
a total nervous wreck.

She had ummed and ahhed about what to wear and had settled on an emerald-green satin top and new (cheap) jeans, which she was now regretting not washing first, since on the half-hour walk from her house to Fraser’s (where she’d been wiping her clammy palms on them), they’d turned her hands blue so that she looked as if she’d spent several days in a morgue.

The wardrobe quandary hadn’t been helped by the fact that Fraser hadn’t given her any clear indication about what ‘tonight’ actually WAS. When he’d asked her to ‘come over’, they’d been buying a rotisserie chicken in Asda – hardly the foundations for a meaningful love affair. But then their fortnightly trip to Asda, in itself, was hardly the foundations for a meaningful love affair.

It was just that bulk-buying there was cheaper than shopping at the campus shop, so she and Fraser had started doing that, then sharing a taxi back from town with industrial-sized bags of rice. Dear God, listen to her. Had that actually been her idea? Effectively a Saturday afternoon spent at a cash ’n’ carry? No wonder he’d never asked her out before.