How We Met (28 page)

Then she went into the lounge and came back, grinning and carrying a pink bag with the word
FREED
written on it and Fraser’s heart dropped through his feet.

‘For you, from me. Just to make today easier,’ she’d said, perching on the side of the bed.

Fraser slowly took the box from the bag and slid off the lid as if he were uncovering a dead rodent, to find the very thing he was dreading: a pair of men’s dance shoes with a Cuban heel. A Cuban fucking heel …

‘I know how much you’re enjoying salsa these days,’ she’d said, ‘and I wanted you to have the proper shoes – his and her dance shoes. You can wear them tonight, they’ll give you something to look forward to …’

Fraser
was
still enjoying salsa. It had definitely not turned out to be the condemnation to torture he had feared when he first arrived (except for Joshi: talking to Joshi was still torture). Now he could perform a whole routine without looking as though he had a neurological disorder, which if Liv were alive, she’d think was a miracle, so he considered he’d done his job. But he didn’t ‘love’ it, and no way did he intend to carry on when the term they’d signed up for came to an end. But now Karen had bought him these shoes, and the guilt was becoming unbearable. The worst thing was, Mia called literally the nanosecond after he opened them and Karen stood there, turning one shoe over in her hand like a gun. He didn’t even mention them.

It was all too much, and so he sneaked out for some time alone, on the proviso of getting a ‘special’ breakfast for them both. But he doesn’t want anything about today to be special; he wishes he’d just gone to work. At the moment, he’s on a three-day corporate job, shooting a promo for the Tena Lady website (the UK’s No. 1 bladder weakness and incontinence expert, no less); holding a microphone up over some woman in a leotard, as she demonstrates exercises to stop you weeing yourself when you sneeze. Yesterday, he asked Brett, the director, if he could come in at lunchtime instead, on the grounds of compassionate leave. But now he wishes he hadn’t; now he wishes he was putting a mic down someone’s Lycra tights. At least it would take his mind off things.

He takes a deep breath and begins the short walk home, the plastic bag, full of breakfast things he has no memory of buying, banging against his shin. When he gets there, Karen is sitting at the kitchen table, picking at her lip, the phone in front of her, like the clichéd tableau of a wife who has just discovered a mistress. For a second, Fraser wonders if this actually could be the case. Whole events, relationships seem to happen in his life, after all, that he has no recollection of starting.

‘What’s this about a list?’ she says. Her tone is more worried than accusatory.

Fraser freezes.

‘What list?’ he says, idiotically.

‘A list. Anna just called. She said, “Can you ask Fraser to call me back about Wordsworth and the List? He’ll know what I’m talking about” – and I remembered Norm said something about a list at Billy’s birthday, too, and I just wondered, what is it?’

Fraser’s instinct is to lie. Lie, lie, lie. But then it dawns on him, why should he? If he played this coolly, there was no reason to and so he says:

‘Look
,’ and he sets the bag down and sits down oppo
site her for extra ‘cool’ effect. It’s a list for Liv, or rather, a list that Liv wrote – things she wanted to do before she was thirty. Norm found it in an old coat of his. She must have left it there one day …’

Karen’s eyes shift from side to side as she tries to compute this. ‘Right, and?’

‘And so we decided we’d do the things on the List – us lot, I mean: me, Mia, Norm, Anna and Melody. We decided it would be a nice tribute if we all split the things and tried to do them, before she’s thirty. Before next March.’

‘Okaaay … And is there any particular reason why you didn’t tell me about this List? ’Coz, hun, honest, I think it’s a lovely idea …’ She reaches out and takes Fraser’s hand and he is once more overcome with how it is possible for someone to be so lovely, SO lovely, and yet not the right sort of lovely for him.

She waits.

‘What? No! Course not. There is no “particular reason”,’ he says, slightly overzealously. ‘I just thought, it’s no big deal, just a thing between us. Why would you really
care
, you know?’

‘Well, of course I
care
, sweetie. But,
yes, yes.’ Fraser can see the cogs of Karen’s mind whirring. Karen often needs time to ‘get’ concepts like this: that’s what scares him, you never know what’s coming. ‘I can see it’s personal, just a private thing between you and your mates.’

‘Exactly,’ says Fraser. ‘Exactly that …’

She looks at him. Fraser thinks he sees a flicker of something like fear in her eyes.

‘OK. So what’s
on
the List?’

Fraser wasn’t expecting this and he needs to get his story straight, he needs to tread carefully.

‘Well, Vegas, for example,’ he says, assuming the tone of a man who has nothing to hide. Going to Vegas was one of the things on the list. But, obviously, I’d only just started seeing you then.’

Karen frowns and Fraser keeps on before she starts talking details or dates.

‘And, what else? Well, silly things, like learn how to use chopsticks, learn how to meditate
… Anna’s doing that one, that’s probably why she’s really into this Steve bloke. You know, gone all “Om” on us, spending all weekend in silence. I mean, Jesus, she wouldn’t have been able to keep her gob shut for ten seconds six months ago!’

And he laughs, and Karen laughs too and he thinks, Phew! Jesus Christ. That was close. But then her smile fades, her pale brown eyes cloud with worry.

‘So, is that it?’

‘Er … pretty much. There’s a few other odds and sods (odds and sods? He made it sound like a car boot sale). Mia’s learning a foreign language. I think I have to use up all the letters in Scrabble in one go at some point, and there’s the Great Wall of China thing – you know, that Norm was banging on about in the pub that time? But I’m not going to go on that, can’t afford it …’

Shut up. Shut up now. Quit while you’re ahead.

‘So, yes, that’s it.’

SHUT. UP.

But he’s about to start talking again, because he’s afraid of what might happen if he stops, but then she sighs. ‘Do you know what?’ she says. ‘Come here …’ and she gets up, goes round to the other side of the table and wraps her arms around him.

‘You are SO sweet, do you know that?’

And she squeezes him with her short, stocky little pint-pulling arms.

‘You’re so deep and sentimental … I love that about you, I really do.’

Fraser wonders how long till he can leave for work.

Mia arrives early at the park. Melody won’t be here for fifteen minutes, so, still breathless from the uphill cycle, she leans her bike against Liv’s bench and takes off her rucksack. It’s hazy now, a band of sun-infused cloud hovering above the horizon and, behind that, darker blue clouds gather, spelling imminent rain.

‘Hi, Liv, wow, look at me, eh? The peak of physical fitness. I brought you this,’ she says out loud, rummaging in her rucksack for her ‘offering’ – she’s not sure what else to call it – which she bought from Homebase, yesterday: a square, ceramic pot filled with stones and foliage.

She sets it down on the floor.

‘Don’t ask.’ The woman in the shop said it was an ‘autumnal collage’.

‘Wow, a year, hey?’ she says, sitting down. ‘And so much to tell! Firstly, the List is going well. Well, sort of. I also brought this …’ and she takes out the photo of them all in Melody’s back garden on Billy’s first birthday. ‘As you will see, my muffin top is very evident, but as I keep saying to people, “I’ve just had a baby.” I wonder if I’ll get away with that when he’s seven, what do you think?’

Mia looks at the photo. There’s someone missing and it takes her a few seconds to realize that that someone is Liv. This still happens to her from time to time – the realization that this is forever, that it just has to be managed, like a hole in your heart. She swallows. ‘And how’s the gang?’ Like someone visiting their old, infirm mother, she likes to ‘go round the family’, as it were, when she comes up to the bench. ‘Well, Anna is learning to meditate, as per your List, but we’re a bit worried, because she’s getting rather carried away. She’s met this bloke called Steve, who’s filling her head with bollocks about karma and reincarnation and the like and she’s just, well, turned into a bit of an odd-bod to be honest. Take today for instance: obviously it’s a tough day, but she’s taken herself off with Steve, or Buddhist Steve as we now call him, to a monastery for a silent weekend where you can’t talk for forty-eight hours! Can you imagine? Spanner with her mouth shut for FORTY-EIGHT HOURS? I’d have been less worried if she’d decided to abseil naked down the Gherkin.’ She laughs, somewhat pointlessly to herself, then she tips her head back and looks at the clouds, sailing across the sky. She sighs. This is what she really wants to tell Liv:

So, basically, Anna and I aren’t that close any more and it makes me sad, because I know you two were really close, I thought we were
all
really close but, without you, I’m not that sure it works, Liv. I’m not really sure there is an ‘us’ without you. I’ve tried to ‘get’ Anna, but I can’t – not like you did. I feel bad about that.

‘She misses you so much, I think. More than she lets on. So yeah, if you’ve got any tips on understanding Spanner – on carrying on your good work, you SAINT! – do pass on, won’t you? Send me some guidance.’

She leans forward, takes a bottle of Lucozade out of her bag, unscrews the cap with a fizz and takes a big glug.

‘So, now, Melody,’ she says, screwing the top back on. ‘OK, here goes, how long have you got?’

She tells Liv all about the party, how Melody didn’t have one ‘just because’ but for several reasons, and how their former friend – indie kid, militant lefty – was now becoming Hyacinth Bouquet before her very eyes. She wanders off on a tangent with the story about the poo in the paddling pool, the Portuguese lessons taken by a Giselle lookalike and how, last week, Mrs Durham had belched at full volume in the big-print section of Lancaster Library, and she’d been so embarrassed that she’d had to walk away from the wheelchair as Mrs D rattled on, barely noticing.

Norm?

‘Well, I’m afraid to say, it’s not exactly happy campers at the moment where Norm and Melody are concerned, but we’re hoping that’s going to change because this weekend …
ta-dar!
… they’re going to make a homemade porn vid. Oh, yes! That was your idea, Olivia, in case you’ve forgotten. Two nights in a Lakeside hideaway with “props”. The potential for disaster is palpable. In fact,’ she laughs quietly to herself, ‘me and Frase …’

She wants to tell her about all the names she and Fraser have been discussing for Norm and Melody’s film, the time they’ve actually given over to this, whole evenings spent on the phone, sniggering over spoof porn-film names:
Honey, I Blew
Everybody
,
Throbin Hood
… but she stops. It doesn’t feel right to talk about Fraser.

She crosses her legs and leans back. ‘So … Me. I’m fine. Billy is walking now and he’s lovely – my little friend. It used to annoy me when people said that. I used to think if you call a pint-size who you can’t even go to the pub with your friend, then you seriously need to get some. But he is, at least, my ally these days, rather than a dictator.

‘I have other news, too,’ and even though she is perfectly alone, she winces. ‘Eduardo and I are back together. But! Before you say anything, there are rules, Liv. Lots and lots of rules. I am laying down the law. No more chilled-out Mia, no more path of least resistance, it’s all R.E.S.P.E.C.T. in my house. I know you’d approve. The thing is, it seems to be working, which has scuppered things slightly. I’m really not used to it.’

She pauses, for a long time; she knows there’s still one person she’s avoiding and the more she thinks about this, the more uncomfortable she feels, until she finds she’s actually squirming, on Liv’s bench.

Thankfully then, from somewhere down the hill, she hears a familiar voice, like a foghorn.

‘WOODHOUSE!’

She turns around to see Melody striding, cleavage first, up the hill.

‘The first sign of madness is talking to oneself, you know.’

Mia squints at her friend.

And the second is wearing what looks like a bridesmaid dress to the park.

Mia stands up and starts walking.

‘Hey, gorgeous,’ gushes Melody when she gets to her, doing this strange hug involving no skin-to-skin contact.

‘Spray tan!’ she squeals. ‘No skin contact for an hour, they said. I just had it done in town. I’ll have to picnic standing up.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, I’m perfectly serious.’

‘So I’ve bought mini Scotch eggs that I now have to feed you by hand? Standing up?’

‘Well, no, I can use my hands. Look, palms all clear!’ and she waves her hands. ‘I just can’t sit down. I’ll probably already have it all over the dress, anyway, good job it’s a similar colour – do you like it?’

Lately, Melody’s eccentricities have been coming to the fore. There’s surfaced a new passion for ‘facial yoga’, for example – all the celebrities are doing it, apparently. Just last week, Mia had spent ten minutes trying to keep a straight face, as Melody had demonstrated what looked like her repertoire for the World Gurning Championships. ‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your wrinkly face,’ she’d said, ‘when I still have cheekbones you could slice ham off at sixty.’ There’re all sorts of strange diets, raw food, no food, Pampered bloody Chef parties and now turning up for a picnic in a peach satin mini and a spray tan. Mia wonders what happened to her friend who only wore black jumpers.

‘Wow, darling, you look, you look …’

‘Go on, what size?’

This is dangerous ground indeed, thinks Mia.

‘Dunno, a Twelve?’

‘Fourteen, but it’s gaping at the back … Look! I could fit my whole arm in there!’

And she turns around so Mia can see for herself that she can fit her whole arm in there.