How We Met (32 page)

‘Is it me, or do you feel like you are the police?’ said Mia, quietly. ‘That you have just completed a successful car chase and brought them back in for questioning.’

‘No, I feel like a very stern father,’ said Fraser, ‘who’s just dragged my errant teen back into the house after they broke their grounding rule.’

‘Remind me never to have children with you, if that’s the normal sort of thing they get up to. Pornography, smashing the place up, inebriated.’

Fraser sighed. ‘Shall we go and get a drink?’

‘Yes, why are you whispering?’

‘I don’t know, I feel a bit like this is an old people’s home.’

‘You know, we could always get a room,’ Fraser said, grinning, when they were sitting at the bar: an unforgiving, overlit ‘hotel’ bar, manned by one po-faced man in a dicky bow.

‘You’re a bit ahead of the game, aren’t you?’

Fraser rolled his eyes. ‘Separate ones, thank you. Eduardo would never forgive me.’

‘No, he would slay you.’

Mia thought how much she’d love to get a room – even a separate one; how nice it would be to have breakfast in a hotel, with Fraser, looking out over the view of Bowness behind them. She briefly worked out how this could work in her head, and then dismissed it as ridiculous and fanciful. She hadn’t told Billy for a start, and Billy would wonder where she w
as in the morning.

‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘I have to get back. You could stay though and I could get a taxi.’

‘Yeah,’ said Fraser, ‘because that would be a lovely relaxing breakfast, those two sitting on either side of the room and me, in the middle, ducking as they chucked croissants at one another.’

‘It’s such a long drive home to Bury, though, I’m worried about you. You could stay at mine.’

‘Yes, because that would also be a nice breakfast,’ he said, and they smiled shyly at one another.

They had a coffee together; then, because it was late and Fraser had a long way to go, decided to just get in the car and drive.

Mia sat in the passenger seat. It was pitch-black outside,
the sort of unfathomable darkness one only gets in the countryside; the only decipherable contrasts in colour were between the sky and the mountains, which seemed like mysterious sleeping giants that would only stir when the sun came up. Mia looked up at them; they seemed to hug them on either side, making her feel content and cocooned. They sat in perfectly comfortable silence for five minutes or so, the road winding, the headlights once catching a rabbit, making them both jump.

Mia felt safe and relaxed, as if she could say anything.

‘So what happened between Karen and you, then?’ she said.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ said Fraser, keen to avoid the subject, since they sometimes still slept together. ‘She just wasn’t right, that’s all, she just wasn’t The One, I guess.’ Mia looked at him
. ‘Or even “A” One, come to that. But she was nice.’

‘Relationships are impossible, aren’t they?’ She sighed. ‘Even when you marry the one you think is The One, they turn out not to be.’

‘I s’pose that’s just life, just growing up,’ said Fraser.

‘I know, but I still feel a bit sad,’ she said, suddenly.

‘Really? Why?’

‘Well, because it’s like an era is over, isn’t it? That time of Norm and Melody, Melody and Norm …’

‘Nothing stays the same.’ Fraser shrugged. ‘You never know what’s around the corner – we both know that more than anyone.’

Mia turned to look at him in the darkness. She could just make out the shadow of his face in the light of the headlamps, when he turned and smiled at her, the lovely shape of his eyes.

‘Do you ever wonder?’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘About where we’d be if Liv hadn’t died?’

He was quiet, then he said, ‘Course, all the time, what do you mean?’

‘Well, would Norm and Melody still have broken up? Would you and Liv have a baby by now? Would I not have a baby?’

If he knew what she was getting at, he didn’t show it; he just frowned and carried on driving.

‘I s’pose life’s just what it is, isn’t it?’ he said eventually, after a long pause. ‘Life is basically what happens to us, we can’t then spend it wondering what would have happened if
other things
had happened to us.’

Mia looked out of the window, the view suddenly clouded.

‘Do you think so?’ she said. ‘Because I wonder that all the time.’

When she looked straight ahead again, she could feel Fraser’s eyes burning into her.

‘I’m past my sell-by date, that’s the truth of it.’

Mia tried to stop her eyes from rolling as she passed Mrs Durham a glass of water and two paracetamols. ‘I should have been killed off years ago.’

Mia stood with her hands on her hips, sucking her cheeks in, not sure whether to laugh or cry. ‘Now, Mrs D—’

‘I’m only being honest,’ she said, grumpily, knocking back the pills. ‘Only saying what we’re all thinking, sitting in our armchairs all day, bored witless, wondering how long we have to carry on this charade for …’ Morecambe, of Morecambe and Wise, the most humourless of Mrs Durham’s two humourless cats, leapt languidly off her lap, as if to say, ‘Give me strength,’ and wandered out of the room.

‘I’m half blind, I’m deaf, this shoulder is giving me no end of nonsense.’ Mrs Durham wagged her glass of water in Mia’s face, not so much as a sign of an arthritic shoulder. ‘I say this to you, dear: make the most of your time now, because past fifty, all you’ve got to look forward to is pain and death.’

Mia rubbed hard at her forehead. ‘And that’s if you’re lucky, I imagine, Mrs D.’ Unable to bear it any longer, she got up and went out of the room.

She stood with her back against the kitchen wall. ‘I don’t think I’ll bother cleaning the fridge this week. I’ve checked and it doesn’t seem to need it,’ she shouted. Then, she waited.

‘No, give it a wipe-down, please!’ Yes, as she strongly suspected, the only hearing problems Mrs Durham was suffering from were selective. ‘And a cup of tea would be nice. You could die of thirst in this house.’

Mia went over to Mrs Durham’s old-fashioned kitchen sink, so old-fashioned, in fact, with its fabric curtain wrapped underneath, that it was now back in fashion, if certain vintage-style interior magazines were anything to go by. She filled up the kettle, looking out at the row of enormous knickers hanging from the washing line.

Christ, she felt like Cinderella.

‘There’s a perfectly good kettle in here. You don’t have to hide yourself away in there, you know,’ shouted Mrs Durham.

‘Maybe I want to hide myself away in here,’ Mia muttered as she waited for the kettle to boil and rummaged around in Mrs Durham’s cupboards for some biscuits.

She’d been visiting Mrs Durham for almost a year now and was just about used to her eccentricities. In fact, rather alarmingly, it felt almost normal to find custard creams and other food items in amongst old plugs, packets of
hosiery and tubs of Bisto granules that had gone out of
date in 1987. Mia had tried countless times to organize Mrs Durham’s cupboards, at least into perishable and non-perishable, but had always been caught in the act: ‘Are you meddling with my things, again?’ she’d shout from her armchair. ‘Well, don’t, please. I won’t be able to find a thing.’ So Mia was left trying to extract packets of biscuits from underneath electrical appliances; tins of cat food from drawers of clothes. There was still an inexplicable number of bits of off cake, wrapped in tinfoil, dotted around the house.

Perhaps she could understand there not being any individual cupboards as such, if there were individual rooms, but Mrs Durham had just gradually moved various bits of other rooms into the front room where she spent most of her time, so that she might as well be living in a bedsit.

As well as the armchair – a sort of fur-ball in furniture form
– where she sat, clutching Morecambe and Wise to her chest all day, as if the RSPCA were circling in a helicopter overhead and might swoop at any time, there was now her single bed (‘made my life so much easier, it means I’ve barely any reason to go upstairs at all …’), a two-ring hob where she heated up insipid soup, a kettle, a chest of drawers where she kept her clothes and in which Morecambe and Wise occasionally went to the toilet, and various other bits of junk. Come rain or shine, the gas fire was always set on ‘sweltering’, threatening to melt her collection of royal memorabilia, which surrounded the hearth. There were also some Christmas decorations: tinsel strung across the window and door and five glass snowmen in ascending size on the mantelpiece.

‘Don’t you think you ought to take those down?’ Mia had said, many a time, as she’d been doing the polishing.

‘Whatever for? I’ll only have to put them up again in a few months’ time.’

This was what she was dealing with.

Still, most of the time, Mia looked forward to her visits to Mrs Durham. Yes, she could be a difficult battle-axe with little regard for personal hygiene or manners, but she could also make Mia laugh out loud (largely unintentionally, but still), and she could be fascinating. Mia loved to hear, again and again, the story of how her husband, Reg, proposed on the top deck of a London bus, with only three days to go of his leave from his job in the mines, and so they’d decided to get hitched that afternoon, Mrs D wearing the bridesmaid dress that she’d worn for her sister’s wedding, because there was no time to get anything else.

Just lately, however, and especially today, she had been extremely difficult. There didn’t even seem to be much in the way of inappropriate emissions of gas to keep Mia amused. If she wasn’t banging on about her various ailments, she was counting down the days till death, or counting her dead friends. Poor Barbara had been dead several months and she still hadn’t forgiven her for not visiting her enough, whilst suffering from terminal cancer.

Morecambe sauntered into the kitchen and swished his tail, firing Mia a dirty look. Mia stuck her tongue out at him and opened the fridge, taking out a half-open tin of cat food. She thought it quite unsavoury to keep cat food in the same place as human food, for the simple reason that Mrs D’s eyesight being what it was, she feared it was only a matter of time before she arrived to find her digging into a tin of Sheba, thinking it was one of her rancid tins of Batchelors Steak – not that there was much difference when you put it like that.

She spooned the food into a bowl and pushed it with her foot towards Morecambe, who gave her a look as if to say, ‘I may depend on you now, but I shall get you back in another life.’

Then she made a cup of tea, stirred in the obligatory three sugars, placed it on a tray with the biscuits and went back into the front room.

Mrs Durham looked listlessly towards the plate.

‘You can take the biscuits away,’ she said. ‘I’ve no appetite, Mary, no appetite at all.’

Mia took one of the biscuits and stuffed it in her mouth, finding too late that it was far too big, so she had to turn away to take it out again and bite it in two.

‘Right,’ she said eventually, brushing crumbs from her jeans, ‘I’m going to ring Dr Yelland, to see if he can do something about this shoulder and possibly your lack of appetite.’

She went towards the phone.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Mrs Durham said in that infuriatingly self-satisfied way she had of late, ‘it’s a waste of his time and resources and he’ll only say the same thing: “Wear and tear, Mrs Durham, wear and tear.”’

Mia felt she might tear her hair out.

‘Look, let me just call him. At least he might be able to prescribe you something stronger than paracetamol.’

Mia heard Mrs Durham take a long breath in through her nose, and when she spoke, it was in an exasperatingly mournful tone.

‘I think I’m further down the line than that, dear. I don’t think pills can save me now …’

Mia hung up the phone. ‘Well, what about alternative therapies, have you thought about that? They say hypnotherapy is very good for arthritis. Aromatherapy?’

‘Roaming therapy? I can barely walk down the street, dear. Be reasonable.’

Mrs Durham had a recorded episode of
Cash in the Attic
on – her favourite programme. She turned the TV up louder, and slurped her tea.

Mia sighed.

‘What about a little walk then? Get some fresh air? It’s a lovely day.’

‘I think I’ll just sit here, thank you. I like
Cash in the Attic
.’

Mia stood in a shaft of autumnal sunshine at the window, the phone in her hand, looking out at the crisp, blue-skied day, and felt a sudden wave of depression. Here she was – they were – in a boiling hot front room
that smelt of custard creams and cat wee, whilst a beautiful October day went on outside. Well, she wasn’t having it any more. Quite simply, what Liv would have given to see another year of her life, never mind the seventy-eight Mrs Durham had had. She could have another ten, possibly even twenty years left too, if God were feeling cruel, and yet she seemed intent on sitting in her smelly little front room and rotting. No, she was not having it.

She walked over to the TV and switched it off.

‘Now put that back on! I was watching that.’

‘Yes, well, I want to talk to you,’ said Mia.

Mrs Durham switched it on again. Christ, this was like minding a child. Mia went over, snatched the remote from her armrest and switched it off again.

‘Mrs Durham,’ she started. Now she had, her heart was going ten to the dozen. ‘I’m going to say this for your own good. With all due respect, I’m getting a little tired of your attitude. I want to help you but you resist every offer of help I give you. You don’t want to see a doctor about the pain, you don’t want to go out and yet, just days ago, you went to a funeral and seemed happy as Larry, actually. Up and about.’ This was true, she had received the call about the funeral on the Monday evening (someone she’d worked with back in the seventies) and then, quite miraculously, like a leper healed at Lourdes, had got up and dressed the next day, taken the bus to Heysham and walked to the funeral with just her stick.