How We Met (30 page)

It’s also, if he’s honest, a chance to get away from his parents’ house in Bury where he has been staying this past week. Since it ended with Karen, four weeks ago, those old feelings of loneliness have come back to haunt him, and he has spent as little time as possible at home, even taking the train all the way to Lancaster for the weekend a fortnight ago to see Mia (and stay with Norm and Melody, when they were still speaking, that is), where it was such a relief to see real, close friends. They’d gone to Williamson’s Park, for beers and a picnic, like old times, and he’d met Emilia – Mia’s Portuguese teacher – who, as well as being about six feet tall, played rounders in a pair of tiny shorts that went right up her bum and told Mia she thought Fraser was ‘beautiful’. Which was all a bonus, and a much-needed confidence boost.

Alas, after that it was straight back home, and he has even started to take on jobs that go on late, just to avoid that awful stretch from 4 p.m. till bedtime. Last week, when he could take no more, he turned up unannounced at his parents’ neat ex-council house in Bury. On Monday, Fraser’s thirtieth birthday went past without so much as a drink with friends. There were, of course, many people not happy about this, not least Mia.

‘Pull yourself together, Fraser. Billy and I will come down and see you. We can just go to all-you-can-eat at Mr Wu’s like old times.’

But Fraser wasn’t interested. There didn’t seem anything to celebrate about being thirty. He was single, living off Uncle Ben’s Savoury Rice and forced to take jobs making promo videos for children’s entertainers for pennies. So he went out for a Chinese with his parents instead – tragic enough, and made worse by the fact that his brother, Shaun, insisted on paying.

Since then, he’s mainly watched TV with his parents and been grilled by his mother:

‘What happened to that nice girl, Karen? I can’t believe you let that one go. There’s not every girl who would take on someone with baggage like you’ve got.’

If he has to hear that one more time, he swears, he will scream. Will he always be the bloke whose girlfriend died?

He tries Norm’s mobile again, with no luck, and drives on into the darkening evening. As the built-up sprawl of the outskirts of Manchester gives way to the fields of Lancashire, the motorway empties, as if leaving the sad stragglers of the party, and Fraser begins to feel more alone, like it’s just him and the sweeping, cloud-whipped sky. He’s not wanted to turn the radio on, for fear he might miss Norm’s call, but he does, just for company now, and his whole body jolts when the song that’s playing transports him instantly and with no warning to the summer of 2006. This has happened several times since Liv died, and every time he immediately turns off the radio for fear of what it might unlock. But this time he dares to hear it out and finds he remembers not the sirens, or the balcony, or the revolving beam of the ambulance light, or even the kiss, but before that, the penultimate night at the beach bar. The six of them dancing, happy, freshly tanned. When it was just the beginning.

And now he can see Liv’s face. The cats’ eyes of the motorway dance off his windscreen like he remembers the swirling disco lights dancing off her sun-kissed skin.

He remembers her making a beeline for him from across the dance floor, then her warm, sweet breath in his ear: ‘I’m going
down to the beach, going to swim in Lake Me! Look at the sea, Fraser, isn’t it beautiful?’ It strikes him, as the last chords of the song fade and the presenter starts talking, in a mellow, drive-time voice, that this is the last thing he can remember her saying to him, and then she’s gone. Whoosh. And when Fraser blinks again, all he can see is the endless stretch of motorway shimmering through the film of his tears.

He comes off at the next exit – Preston – and pulls into a layby. He opens the car door and sits, smoking a cigarette, his first in five days, blowing the smoke up into the cool, damp air, not really aware of the tears still falling down his cheeks, just thinking the only person in the world he wants to see right now is Mia and – possibly, just possibly – could he ring her again? She’s only two junctions away, would she come with him?

He stubs his cigarette out on the floor, and scrolls down to her name before he thinks about it too much.

‘Mia, it’s Fraser.
Again
,’ Eduardo yells from the lounge.

In the bathroom, Mia pretends to bang her head on the side of the bath in despair, making Billy chuckle.

‘OK,’ she hollers. ‘Can you come and watch Billy?’

There’s an exaggerated sigh and then exaggerated slaps on the laminated hallway as Eduardo drags his feet from the lounge with the phone. It’s the third time Fraser has called this evening, updating her on the Norm and Melody fiasco, and Eduardo is not impressed. Tonight he is conjuring one of his rare, grand gesture dinners with his new culinary toy, and the world must come to a standstill in the face of the pasta-maker.

He appears at the bathroom door, tea towel slung over a naked shoulder, holding the phone out with one hand. Mia takes it. ‘Thank you,’ she says, with a sarcastic smile. ‘Now
,’ she whispers in his ear, ‘I cannot help when my friends decide to have a marital breakdown, OK? So do try and wipe that grimace off your face. The amount of shit I put up with from your friends.’

Then she saunters through to the kitchen, turning back to narrow her eyes at him.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s me again with an update.’

Fraser sounds nervous to be calling back again and Mia smiles, she finds this endearing.

‘Hello, me again with an update, any news?’

‘Norm rang again – about fifteen minutes ago. He still can’t get through to Melody.’

‘Oh, OK.’ Mia wonders if this could be classed as an update.

‘… and now it’s practically dark, so he’s really shitting it.’

‘Fuck.’

‘I know, fuck
.
’

‘What shall we do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did he say anything else?’ asks Mia.

‘Just that she was really drunk, they’d drunk a bottle of Bollinger apparently, oysters on ice from room service. I mean, the waste is just tragic …’ He stops as if he’s holding something back.

‘And?’

‘She’s only wearing a basque and suspenders.’

‘What?’ Mia stands up.’ Is that ALL?’

‘And one of those Chinese silky dressing gowns.’

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then!’

‘I’m not saying it’s all right, I’m just giving you the facts to work with.’

Down the phone, Mia can hear Fraser sucking eagerly on a cigarette.

‘How did Norm sound?’

‘Drunk, incoherent, dramatic, you know how Norm gets.’

Mia smiles and resists the urge to make any comparisons. ‘She’s probably in the hotel bar and he’s walked straight past her,’ she says.

‘That did occur to me. The problem is, I can’t get a signal. I’m hoping the closer I get up North, the better it will be.’

‘And where are you now?’

‘Galgate, just fifteen minutes from you.’

There’s a rather long pause, Mia looks at her reflection in the kitchen window, the alabaster complexion of the tired, harassed mother.

‘Oh, great, so you’ll be there in an hour …’

‘Actually, I was—’

‘Mia! Can you get in here, please? I want to show you something.’ Mia walks into the hallway and cranes her neck to see what all the fuss is in the bathroom.

‘OK, Fraser …?’ she says.

‘MIA – NOW!’

‘EDUARDO YOU ARE SO RUDE. I’M TALKING TO FRASER! YOU’LL HAVE TO WAIT’

‘THIS IS IMPORTANT!’

Honestly, what was he like?

‘OK, Frase, I have to go, something with Billy.’ Mia sighs, making her way to the bathroom. ‘I’ll call you back in a min, OK?’

When she gets to the bathroom, Eduardo is sitting with a naked Billy on his lap, dripping wet from the bath.

‘What’s this?’ says Eduardo, accusingly.

‘What’s what? Aren’t you going to put a towel on him, Eduardo, he’s going to get cold.’

‘I wanted you to see this first,’ and he points to a few tiny speckles on his thighs, so small Mia has to strain to see.

‘Have you been giving him strawberries? Because you know he’s allergic to strawberries.’

Mia blinks hard, lets out an incredulous blast of air and walks into the lounge so she doesn’t bloody well throw Eduardo in the bath and DROWN HIM. How dare he tell her what her son is allergic to?

‘Well?’ yells Eduardo from the bathroom.

‘Oh, yes, I forgot about the cream tea we had yesterday,’ Mia yells back, ‘and the two punnets of strawberries I force-fed him yesterday after his strawberry yoghurt, which preceded a strawberry MOUSSE.’

She stops. She didn’t know she had this facetiousness in her.

‘I’m just asking, Mia,’ says Eduardo. ‘I am allowed to ask, you know. He is …’

And Mia mouths it, she knows what’s coming. ‘… my son after all.’

Oh, GOD. It drives her crazy.

And this is what domestic life is like for Mia these days – an exhausting round of accusations and sanctimonious declaration. She can’t cook, she doesn’t know what to feed her son. He told her off for the way she was ironing the other day. This is from the man who has not – to her knowledge – picked up an iron in his life. She knows why it is: Eduardo feels ‘frustrated’ and ‘insulted’ in his role as head waiter at Bella Italia and, therefore, clearly, it’s all her fault.

In his mind, he should be head designer at a design studio by now – this is what he was studying at Goldsmiths when Mia met him. The problem is, Eduardo has always been of the mind that someone would hand him this incredible job, without him actually having to do anything as humiliating as work for it. He would never lower himself to do work experience like she had, hours and hours of working for free, sixteen-hour shoots in the freezing cold, just to get a runner job – then have a baby and watch it all turn to mush.

So, Eduardo’s ego is suffering and he is sinking to new lows to get his boosts, even arguing with her in Portuguese: ‘Seven weeks of Portuguese and you
still
can’t understand a word I’m saying!’

If he were still turning up at all hours, letting her down where Billy is concerned, she would end it now, course she would. But he is playing just closely enough to the rules to make this impossible.

Mia has what she’s nagged for over months: commitment. And perhaps Eduardo loves her, in his own way – she’s pretty sure he does. It’s just, has she ever stopped to ask herself if she loves him back?

Eduardo moodily hands Mia their son, now smelling sweetly and ready for bed, and goes back to the kitchen to continue with his masterpiece.

Mia gives Billy his bottle and puts him to bed; all the time, Eduardo chopping things as if he’s dismembering someone in the kitchen.

She wanders, exhausted, into the lounge, flops down on the sofa, flipping open a magazine, and eventually he speaks.

‘What did
Frase
want?’ he jeers. Eduardo can’t say ‘Fraser’ in a normal fashion, but then he never has. Eduardo has never liked Fraser and this was made far worse last week when he found his letter in Mia’s shirt pocket: dog-eared, treasured. Clearly read a thousand times.

When Mia came back from town he was standing with it in his hand:

‘What’s this?’

‘A letter from Fraser, why?’

‘It’s very … slushy …’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Eduardo.’ How dare he rifle through her shirt pockets? And why the sudden possessiveness after years of ambivalence?

‘But why did he give it to you?’

‘I don’t know – ask him – because he’s proud of me? Because he thinks I’m a good mum? It’s more than you’ve ever said.’

Eduardo snarled, unable to come up with an answer to this.

‘So why are you carrying it around in your pocket, like a locket or a fucking lock of hair?’

Mia is thinking about this conversation as she looks at him now, bent over, the heels of his hands pushed dramatically into his eyes, smarting from the onions, and feels a weariness wash over her.

‘He’s worried, actually,’ she says, calmly, ‘about Melody, about our friend. She and Norm have had a massive row, and now she’s lost in the middle of the Lake District – could be drowned in a lake for all we know.’ (On
reflection this was slightly overdramatic.)

Eduardo stood up and gave a sarcastic little laugh.

Just then, the phone rang again.

Twenty minutes later, Fraser sat with the engine running, waiting for Mia in the car park of her block of flats, feeling like a disapproving father. He had already had a run-in with the boyfriend; something, if he’s completely honest, he had half engineered. Whilst she was sorting herself out, he couldn’t resist knocking on the door to ask how long she’d be. Eduardo had answered but, rather than invite him in, he’d then stood, intimidatingly, in the doorway, his underarm hair in Fraser’s face. ‘When you have located your friends,’ he said, menacingly, ‘just bring her back, OK?’

Fraser wanted to say something clever and sarcastic – or alternatively punch him in the face – but his mind had gone blank and all he’d managed was, ‘I’ll be in the car,’ something he was now kicking himself for. He revved his engine, loudly, to compensate, and a few seconds later, Mia appeared at the door. He watched with interest through the wing mirror as she kissed Eduardo goodbye – he could have sworn he saw her wince. Finally, she got in the car.

‘Any danger?’ said Fraser. It was something he used to say as a joke when Liv or any of the girls took ages to get ready. ‘Are we ready to pick up our friends from their porn video gone wrong in the Lake District?’ he added, putting his arm behind her and looking behind him to reverse out of the car park.

Mia gave a half-hearted laugh.

‘God, our lives are a joke, aren’t they?’ She sighed, flopping her head to the side and looking at Fraser. He looked tired and pale.

‘It’s all just a joke,’ said Fraser. ‘That’s what I’ve worked out.’

They drove through Lancaster’s one-way system and out towards
Carnforth and the North. It was almost 8 p.m. now and, as they crossed the Greyhound Bridge, the last of the day’s sun was reflected in the low tide of the River Lune, turning the high sandbanks a deep, burnt orange.