How We Met (15 page)

Anna sips her wine.

‘Yeah, I’m in.’

‘OK, good, I’ll start. I have never … faked an orgasm.’

Mia puts her glass down. ‘You’ve got to be joking—’

‘Just down it, down it!’ says Melody, wagging her finger bossily at Mia’s drink. ‘Don’t discuss, just down the hatch if you have done it.’

Mia does as she’s told, gagging as the wine hits her throat. ‘OK, but I still want this matter cleared up. You mean to say you’ve never faked an orgasm – IN.YOUR.LIFE?’

‘Never,’ says Melody.

‘Wow,’ is all Mia can say. ‘If I’d never faked an orgasm with Eduardo before, I’d never have got any sleep. Norm must be incredible.’

And she could see this in a way. Norm wasn’t the most conventionally handsome man in the world, but he had something – he was sparkly and optimistic, a constant sunny presence. He could really make you laugh.

Melody throws her wine back and scoffs at this. ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with Andrew. I’m just a very orgasmic woman.’

Mia and Anna look at one another. ‘She’s just a very orgasmic woman,’ they say, and promptly piss themselves laughing.

‘I am!’ protests Melody. Occasionally, especially when drunk, Melody Burgess finds it hard to laugh at herself. ‘Norm can’t keep up with me; he calls me Melody O.’

Euugh
, thinks Mia. Now she’s quite drunk.

‘So when are we going to see the fruits of all your hard work?’ says Anna. ‘When are you going to be making a mini-Normanton? We’ve been waiting long enough.’

Melody fills her and Mia’s glasses. ‘Oh, God, give over. Not for a long time. Two years at least. Although Norm would have one tomorrow if I let him, he’s desperate.’

There’s a resounding
ahhh
from the rest of the group. Norm is a natural with babies, one of those men small children gravitate to.

‘Seriously, it’s really annoying, he’s unbelievably broody, but I’ve told him, two years.’

‘But Billy needs a playmate,’ protests Mia. ‘I’m bored of being the only one with a kid. Get a move on, Burgess. I’m counting on you.’

Melody groans: ‘OK, time to change the subject. I gather both of you have faked an orgasm, then …?’

Anna says, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a real one, actually.’

‘
What?
’ say Mia and Melody.

Anna tuts. ‘With another person,
obvs …’

But Mia’s still staring at her, utterly stunned. Of all
the
girls, Anna has always been the most promiscuous, the
one you could rely on to come home with sordid stories
of drug-fuelled shagathons with nineteen-year-old
models,
of threesomes, weekend love-ins with millionaires, and mutual shaving with Kiwi art directors (actually, they’d all gagged at that one). And
none
of these had made her orgasm?

The thought translates directly to her mouth. ‘So
nobody
, of all the people you have bedded, Anna Frith, has ever made you come?’

Anna shrugs and pops an olive in her mouth. ‘As I said: yes, myself.
Men haven’t got a clue. Far better to accept that nobody can do it better than yourself and just have a laugh with blokes. Use them to get places …’

Mia’s jaw drops and Anna raises an eyebrow, as if to say that that last bit was a joke, but Mia’s not convinced.

‘Anyway,’ says Melody, slapping the table, ‘the fact remains that you have both faked an orgasm, so down your drinks!’

They both do as they are told and Melody refills their glasses.

‘Also, I’ve got another one,’ she says. ‘A really, really good one. I have never kissed anyone other than Norm. OK, I’ll rephrase that: I have never kissed any other bloke in our group – i.e. Fraser or Si or Andy,’ (The members of the Fans were still considered ‘in the gang’ even though they’d all moved to London and got married now and were only ever seen at weddings and christenings.)

There’s a long pause. Mia shakes her head and folds her arms.

‘Nor have I,’ says Anna eventually.

Nope, never, says Mia, ‘Well, except when under hypnosis so that doesn’t count.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ agrees Melody. ‘Oh, how boring! So, no goss there then.’

But Mia can feel Anna’s eyes on her.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ says Anna, ‘don’t look at me.’

‘So is that that then?’ says Melody, glass in hand, looking slightly disappointed. ‘Nobody’s got any juicy confessions? No juicy secrets they want to share …?’

Another pause. Mia’s aware now that there’s an atmosphere, a slight frostiness in the air – and she laughs, nervously – or maybe she’s just being paranoid? She really needs to hurry up and get drunk. The phone call from Eduardo has set her nerves on end.

‘So maybe we should be going to Harry’s Bar?’ she says, eventually. But Harry’s Bar has begun to feel a bit like New Year’s Eve now – full of pressure and anticipation and the secret knowledge between them that the law of averages means it’s bound not to live up to expectations. It was making her more tense.

Harry’s Bar is not what Mia was expecting, she has to admit. She doesn’t know what she was expecting – more of a jazz bar, more dingy and buzzy and smoky from the Internet pictures, perhaps, but this is not it. It’s small and fairly characterless, with hints at a cruise-liner feel with its panelled walls and marble floor, and pale yellow walls with black-and-white pictures of Italian celebrities – none of whom Mia recognises – who have frequented this Venetian institution. Waiters, stiff-backed in their ivory DJs and dicky bows, serve the famous bellinis on silver platters to the clientele who are largely locals, it seems: groups of glamorous women, gondoliers who have finished their shift, rotund men, their white hair slicked back, talking loudly and gesticulating in the way only Italians do that makes them seem as if they’re permanently having a row.

After wine and the somewhat awkward game of I Have Never, Anna announced she wanted to go and find a church, that she wanted a few moments on her own to meditate and think about Liv and that she’d join them later. This seemed totally random to Mia. (Although of course she and Melody said it was fine. They are all always careful to respect any way their friends care to deal with the event that ripped their twenties apart.)

However, Mia can’t relax; she cannot shift this feeling that Anna is in a mood with her and is reminded that travel is all well and good, save for the fact that you have to take yourself, and other people, with you.

She must admit, too, that these famous bellinis are a bit of a disappointment – just a flat, peach-coloured drink served in the tiniest of tumblers. No umbrella, no sparklers. She and Melody order one anyway, setting them back the best part of fifteen pounds.

A couple of Italians across the way meet their eye. Mia watches as they get up and make their way over.

‘Oh, shit,’ she whispers to Melody.

‘What?’ says Melody. ‘They look nice.’

Melody is drunk; she arranges her hair on her shoulders, lets her spaghetti strap – somewhat underdressed now in a place like this – fall off her shoulder and gives them a wave.

‘Hey, Engleesh?’ Mia’s heart sinks as one of them – tall, suave looking – sits beside her and the other – his much shorter sidekick, but with a sweeter, more attractive face, Mia thinks – takes his place next to Melody.

‘You guessed right,’ she says, moving along on her seat, aware that his thigh is touching her thigh and that she can smell what he had for lunch on his breath.

Melody leans forward, sunburnt bosom falling out of her top. ‘And you’re Italians, right?’ she says. ‘I knew it! I told you so! I mean, I know we’re in Italy so that’s kind of obvious and everything …’ She laughs, no,
guffaws
,
showing red-wine-stained teeth and most of her tonsils, and Mia cringes; God, she’s pissed. ‘But only the Italians know how to dress to impress.’

The evening wears on; there’s no sign of Anna, and Melody continues to flirt, with Bruno and Patricio from
Bologna, embroiling Mia in a very convoluted and
complicated drinking game involving trying to guess what number everyone has in their heads between five and ten, displaying the number on your fingers after counting one, two, three, and whoever is furthest off has to down their drink … Or something.

But still Mia can’t relax; still she has a knot in her stomach and still they haven’t raised a toast to Liv, or marked the fact they’re here in Harry’s, having a bellini – just as she would have wanted. That was the whole point!

Bruno and Patricio go outside for a cigarette and Melody leans in; she puts her arm around her friend. ‘Right, Bruno’s mine, but you can have Patricio.’ She giggles and Mia manages a laugh. (Look drunk, she thinks. At least
look
like you’re having fun.) W
hy isn’t she having fun? Why isn’t she flirting with Bruno and Patricio? It’s
not like she’s had the chance to flirt in the last few years.

Melody orders another round of bellinis and Mia is reminded of the gaping chasm between her and her friend’s income. Bruno and Patricio come back and Melody totters back from the bar, sets the drinks on the table. ‘Right, I know another really good drinking game!’

Mia has an overwhelming desire to call Fraser and wonders what time it is in Vegas.

On a pedestrian bridge straddling the Las Vegas strip, Fraser stands, sweating, toxic, his shirt ripped, the blood surging around his body.

It is midday, the blistering Vegas sun high in the sky, and he has one hand gripping the handrail and one holding his mobile phone and he has lost it, he knows this; gone way too far to pull himself back now.

He wants to shout out to whoever is listening down there, among the neon and the palm trees, in the twenty-four-hour party town: ‘This is like the good old days! The mad, bad early days when I was proper mental! PROPER mental!’

In some part of his logical, sane mind, the tiny part not drenched with alcohol, cigarettes and God only knows what else, the debris of a three-day bender, he knows this is something he himself has created, something self-inflicted, and he hates himself even more for this. You idiot, Fraser, he thinks. You stupid fucking idiot.

But it’s Liv –
he knew coming here might do this, he
knew a bender was a bad idea – he can’t get her out of his mind. Or rather he can’t get certain images out of his mind. He leans over the bridge and has to catch his breath because there she is again, lying broken, glassy-eyed on the floor. He’s never known if he saw this, or if it’s an image he’s seen on television and that his mind tortures him with, but in the early days it used to come to him, often in the small hours of the morning, and it’s coming to him now, a horrifying, mind-shattering image that makes him sway and gasp for air and cry out – ‘Liv! Liv! I’m sorry Liv!’ – as the traffic roars beneath him. He grasps onto the handrail tighter and squeezes his eyes shut in an effort to rid the pictures from his mind. There’s the ambulance siren, the awful, raspy scream he doesn’t know if he heard or he imagined, then the police walkie-talkies, the zip of a body bag. There’s the hospital morgue, the smell of it, scratching at the back of his throat. And then, in the middle of it all, the kiss, the most delicious kiss he’s ever known; and yet it comes at him like a nightmare because he has no doubt in his mind now that Liv saw it.

And so I get to finish my kiss at last …

There they are, standing in the villa kitchen, having to shout over the music – Moby, ‘One of These Mornings’. Her with her arms draped around him, him looking into her slate-
grey eyes, their pupils huge and black.

I get my kiss with Mia Woodhouse. We never did finish that kiss, did we? Me and you and I never knew why …

He can feel the kiss now, the urgency of it, their racing breaths as she almost melted into him. He wants to enjoy this feeling but then he remembers the window, the open window in the villa kitchen, the scent of those huge pink flowers. They were everywhere in Ibiza and
he has smelt those flowers in Vegas too, in the Venice
Hotel and Casino garden, and he almost retched, because he was right back there, in that kitchen in Ibiza, kissing Mia, and out of the corner of his eye, Liv, standing on the balcony, eyes wide, mouth open, looking straight at him.

He pulls his hands away from the handrail, scrambles down the steps and heads towards the twenty-four-hour bar where he left Norm, or rather lost him an hour or so ago, both of them in too much of a state to keep together. No sleep yet and it’s midday.

He walks along the strip. This place isn’t helping, he thinks, it’s messing with his mind: everywhere he looks, the Eiffel Tower, Venice, Caesars Palace, the buildings seem to loom out of the blinding daylight. But we’re not in Paris, he thinks, we’re not in fucking Italy! This is fucked! He doesn’t know what’s real any more. He gets his phone out of his pocket and he dials.

At Harry’s Bar, Mia’s phone goes in her bag. She scrambles for it: maybe it’s Anna, she thinks, come to save the day. When she sees Fraser’s name flash up, however, she looks for the exit and goes outside.

‘Fraser?’ She puts one finger in her ear to cut out
the noise from the bar, but all she hears is white noise, the
roar of traffic coming from the other end
.

‘Fraser?’ she says again. ‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s fucked!’ is all she hears. ‘It’s fucked, Mia. It’s totally fucked!’

She swallows, she suddenly feels sick, and she walks away from the bar towards the canal-side and the flickering lights. ‘Fraser, what’s fucked? Where are you? Speak to me.’

Fraser is sobbing; she can barely make out the words between breaths but she hears ‘Liv’ and ‘Kiss’ and she knows, she knows …

‘She saw!’ he says. ‘I know it, she saw! And it’s fucked, Mia,’ he says again. ‘Our lives, her life, everything!’

Mia closes her eyes. On the other end of the phone, she hears her friend’s awful wrenching sobs.