How We Met (34 page)

Out of the dry ice emerges a waitress with white, false ice lashes, like icicles, wearing a tiny fur-trimmed dress and balancing a tray of more drinks on her slender fingers.

‘Hey …’

She leans in and says something but Fraser can’t hear over the strains of ‘Ice Ice Baby’, which has been playing on a loop for the past hour.

‘Sorry, what was that?’

She pouts, coyly, and flutters her white lashes at him.

‘I said, hey, don’t be frosty, have a free Smirnoff – the perfect ice-breaker!’

Ah, the slick lines of the promotion girls, Fraser’s getting to know them well.

He takes one, no two –
‘Cheers, I’ll probably be needing these’
–
then he walks off, pulling the bearskin over his shoulders, with all the dynamism of a victim of man-flu shuffling bravely to the toilet wrapped in his duvet.

During the last month or so, this is becoming a normal midweek night for Fraser – maybe not the bearskin and the igloo bar – but the free drinks he doesn’t really want and definitely the AWOL friend.

After the hideous homemade-porn-vid-gone-wrong, there was a vague attempt by Melody and Norm to make it work – a dinner party to show they were ‘united’, which ended dreadfully with Melody drunkenly trying to start a debate about whether it was ‘morbid’ that Norm insisted on photos of Liv all over the house
– but everyone knew it was over and, a fortnight ago, like a royal couple, they ended weeks of speculation with a formal announcement that they were divorcing.

Norm came to stay with Fraser almost immediately, and there was a week of tears and beers and pizza deliveries and Fraser getting home from work to find Norm still with the curtains shut playing Call of Duty. And although it wasn’t nice, wasn’t nice at all, to see his friend in pieces, Fraser quite enjoyed that bonding bit; he enjoyed the responsibility of being the ‘carer’. God knows, it was about time. But now the initial shock has worn off, Norm is reborn, and Fraser’s not sure he’s liking this bit half as much.

In under a fortnight, Norm has quit his job back in Lancaster, moved to London for good (only staying at Fraser’s till he finds place to rent), and started temping at the
Metro
newspaper where, as the newbie, he is getting first option on all invites to launches and promo nights, which nobody else can go to because they have wives and families.

‘It’s gonna be wicked, Frase … free booze all night … pretty ladies … What’s not to like?’ he said, when he came home waving the Smirnoff invite in Fraser’s face, the second party of the week and it’s only Wednesday.

Ah, yes, the joys of the newly single best friend. This is a whole new world for Fraser, full of crippling midweek hangovers, strange, shame-faced women in his kitchen of a morning and nights ‘on the pull’. Fraser hasn’t had nights on the pull with Norm since they were about seventeen and feels, perhaps, it is something best kept to one’s twenties. But as Norm keeps telling him, they didn’t get to do this in their twenties; he is
reclaiming
his twenties!

You’re not wrong there, thinks Fraser, when he finally locates him, gyrating against a wired-looking redhead on the dance floor.

Fraser stands, the hand that’s wrapped around his bottle of Smirnoff slowly going numb with cold, watching his friend dance, and feels a chasm open up within him. He suspects it’s because deep down, despite the new haircut and the new life in London and the rack of girls he’s had in Fraser’s spare bed this month – a Poppy and a Kate and a truly mental Dutch girl who left in a rage at 3 a.m. and slashed the next-door neighbour’s tyres – that Norm is hurting, his friend’s grieving.

In typical, brush-it-under-the-carpet fashion, Norm hadn’t really gone into detail about what went on in that bedroom that fated night in the Lakes back in September, but there was talk of a voice-activated vibrator and ‘ovulation’ and that was more than enough detail for Fraser.

Basically, Norm had fallen out of love with Melody. Melody the girlfriend was a cider-loving, fun-loving, down-to-earth girl.

(‘This is the girl I went travelling with, Fraser. The one who didn’t bat an eyelid when I had dysentery.’)

‘Wow,’ Fraser had agreed, ‘now, that
is
a woman.’ He hoped one day to also meet someone who didn’t bat an eyelid at his dysentery.

The wife Norm ended up with was his mother – just with spikier heels and a Laura Ashley store card.

‘I just knew I didn’t want kids with her,’ he said. ‘I loved her – she was twelve years of my life – but I wasn’t in love with her any more.’

So here he is, ‘reclaiming his twenties’, doing what he ‘should’ have been doing when he was too busy being dragged around Ikea, and Fraser doesn’t know for sure, but he suspects it still hurts like hell. The future you thought was yours now gone, leaving a gigantic ‘now what?’ – he recognizes it in the way Norm staggers around the dance floor, the self-conscious, silly dancing, the recklessness.

He knows, because he’s been there.

And if he’s honest, Fraser’s sad about the divorce too – they all are – and he and Mia have had endless phone conversations about it, which has been a consolation, he supposes. But the bottom line is, THE couple, the couple all other couples (including Liv and Fraser) have always measured themselves against, are not going to be forever after all, and what, Fraser wonders, does that say about anything? Was anything for keeps? Anything at all?

He elbows his way through the dance floor, craning his neck, hoping to catch Norm’s eye. He should be the sensible one here, the leveller. He is suddenly quite taken with this sense of responsibility.

‘NORM!’ he shouts. ‘Normanton? Do you wanna go soon? I’m freezing my tits off in here.’

Norm waves his bottle at him and pouts – the self-aware pout of a man under the influence of something illegal. Fraser groans, inwardly. So, clearly, he’s not going anywhere for a good few hours.

‘Norm!’ he shouts again. ‘Let’s go somewhere else. Somewhere we can get a pint …’

Norm pulls a face like a child who’s been told he has to go in for tea, then flashes all fingers up twice, to indicate twenty minutes more.

Fraser shakes his head and laughs quietly to himself. Ah, yes, and there’s another thing about this grieving period: there’s nobody can tell you when it should start and when it should end. It just has to be gone through, like labour.

He goes to stand by the bar, watching Norm now – with his tongue down the redhead’s throat – with a mixture of mild embarrassment and awe. Fraser got the drinking bit, the wanting to obliterate yourself, but the pulling? How on earth did he do it? Move seamlessly from married to gigolo in a matter of weeks? Fraser has been technically single (although Karen still turns up on his doorstep now and again, and he’s not proud of this, but those boobs are hard to resist) for three months now, and he can’t muster any enthusiasm for pulling anyone. This getting off with girls required so much effort: all that flirting, all that making conversation. He looks around him and blows air through his mouth. Nobody takes his fancy. There was a time, perhaps, where girls would approach him, tell him he had ‘beautiful opal eyes’, but they didn’t do that any more. Maybe he was just getting old.

Just then, Norm careers off the dance floor, pulling the redhead behind him, laughing, fizzing, to Jimmy Somerville’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. She’s wearing very high heels, a ra-ra skirt and a grey, cropped, retro T-shirt with the words
FUN, FUN, FUN
… IN THE SUN
emblazoned on it. She also has enormous, googly eyes that are slightly too close together. She reminds him of one of the royal family. Princess someone – Beatrice, was it?

Norm drapes his arm drunkenly around his friend.

‘Fern, let me introduce you to Fraser Morgan. A lovely, lovely man – “
My best pal
”,’ and Norm does his best speaking-through-the-side-of-his-mouth Taggart accent, one of a repertoire he’s been pulling off for the ladies lately. Fraser downs the rest of his Smirnoff and starts on the next. ‘And this,’ he says to Fraser, ‘gorgeous young vision you see before you, is Fern …’ He breaks off, he turns to her, assuming an expression of enormous shock. ‘Actually, I don’t know your surname. Oh, my God. How fucking RUDE am I?’ And he laughs like this is the funniest, most interesting thing he’s ever said in his life.

‘Rude!’ agrees Fern. ‘Rude-erama!’ and she bats him on the bottom with her handbag.

‘So, Fern,’ Fraser tries, stupidly, to make normal conversation. ‘That’s an unusual name. Is that as in Fearne Cotton?’

She bats Fraser on the bottom too and chews the inside of her cheek. This gorgeous vision he sees before him also seems to be off her face.

‘Er,
no.
’

‘Fern Britton?’

‘Now, that is also rude. She’s like fifty years old!’

‘Fern …’ Nope, he can’t think of anything remotely funny to follow that.

‘Na, you don’t get it,’ says Norm, taking hold of the bottom of Fern’s T-shirt and pulling it out to the side. ‘She’s Fern, as in Fern, Fern, Fern … in the sun!’

Fern throws her head back as if to screech with mirth, but her jaw doesn’t seem relaxed enough and so she just ends up doing a strange faux-laugh, a ghoulish, horsey guffaw.

‘He’s hilaaaaarious. I totally heart him,’ she says, taking Norm’s face in hers and kissing him. ‘Everyone in the office totally hearts Andrew.’

Andrew. Who the fuck was Andrew? And what about me? thinks Fraser. Does nobody heart me? This sudden, juvenile line of thought, shocks even him – Why aren’t girls flocking to me like they seem to be flocking to Norm? Why is nobody snogging me on the dance floor?

‘Fern’s an intern in the fashion department at the
Metro
,’ says Norm.

‘I see, so you’re Fashion Fern?’ says Fraser.

‘Yeah, why, are you Fashion Fraser?’ she asks coyly, and he watches as she gives him the once-over. ‘Do you work in fashion?’

‘No, I’m a sound recordist.’

‘Cool-erama. Does that mean, like, you’re a singer? A pop star?’

Fraser laughs. ‘No, that’s a recording artist.’

‘Oh.’

Fern’s huge googly eyes seem to cloud with disappointment for a second.

‘Oh, I know. You, like, hold one of those big fluffy microphones for a living! Hilaaaarious!’

‘Yeah, I do that sometimes.’

‘So, do you work backstage for bands and stuff?’

Fern is clearly a budding fashion journalist because she asks a lot of questions. The problem is, she seems to get bored by the time the answer comes.

‘Not exactly.‘

‘Na, he does adverts for stuff like Tena Lady,’ pipes up Norm, suddenly bursting into one of his schoolboy chuckles. Fraser frowns at him. He could do this sometimes, Norm, make jokes at other people’s expense just to keep hold of the comedy baton, as it were, to keep people’s attention. It wasn’t one of his better qualities, but Fraser knew it was rooted in insecurity.

‘Noooo …’ says Fern, swinging her bag back and forth.

‘Yes, unfortunately,’ says Fraser, flatly.

‘Oh, my God, is that like incontinence pads?’

‘It’s not like incontinence pads, it is incontinence pads.’

‘Oh, my God,’ says Fern, for want of something better to say. ‘My cat’s incontinent, it’s hilarious.’

‘Wow, that er … doesn’t sound hilarious,’ says Fraser, and he knocks back at least half of his second bottle of Smirnoff.

‘Yeah, I went away on holiday, right? And when I came back she’d weed all over these new shoes I’d bought?’

‘Really? Hilarious.’

Fern gives three short snorts of disbelief. ‘Duderama, it was not. They were Louboutins. They cost four hundred English pounds!’

And with that, she downs the rest of her Smirnoff and slaps the bottle back on the bar.

‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘just popping to the loo,’ and then she kisses Norm on the lips, a long, at least ten-second snog with tongues
. Fraser looks away.

‘She’s nice, isn’t she?’ says Norm, as she stomps off to the Ladies’ in her ridiculously high shoes and her ra-ra skirt. ‘A stone cold fox.’

Fraser smiles. This is another thing he has observed about his friend of late, he’s started talking as if he was in an indie American stoner movie. Like he was Jack Black or Bill or Ted in their excellent adventure.

‘Look, can we go now?’ says Fraser. ‘I really think we should go now, Norm.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Norm slips a hand in his pocket and takes a tiny parcel from it and slips it into Fraser’s, with a wink. ‘A few lines of your finest devil’s dandruff in there. Go on, just save one for me.’

Fraser looks at his friend and Norm grins, then purses his lips, then grins again, then purses his lips. Oh, Jesus. A whole night of this?

Fraser puts his hands on top of his head, as if in preparation for surrender.

‘Mate, I’m trying to be good. You know what happened in Vegas.’

‘Yes!’ says Norm, grabbing him by the cheeks. ‘You fucking freaked out – we didn’t get our boys’ weekend because you were too busy being a mental case.’

‘Ah, but then you came to see me in London and you were too busy on your “Hunter Gatherer” diet and your six-pack to drink anything, you mental case!’

‘So, this is it,’ says Norm, not really getting the point. ‘This is it, Frase. Tonight’s the night. Come oooon … When do we ever get to go out, just me and you, hey? When is it ever the boys storming it any more? Like old times? When was the last time I had my best mate in the whole world, on form, all to myself?’

‘Last night?’

‘Oh, come on, that was a mere aperitif compared with tonight.’

They’d met after work in the Angel and drunk solidly until closing time.

‘I’m tired, Norm.’

‘You’re boring more like.’

‘I’ve got a sore throat.’

Norm covers his face with his hands in despair.

‘I’ll give you sore fucking balls in a minute, now stop being such a penis.’

And then Norm starts to laugh, and Fraser can’t help but laugh and then he’s walking to the Gents’, the tiny parcel in his pocket.

Fraser kneels, hunched over the toilet basin, cringing at what he can hear outside, in the full knowledge that, if he were to go mad tonight, which he does NOT intend to, he could well be spouting similarly coked-up drivel in a while.