How We Met (41 page)

Fraser’s throat seemed to constrict a little.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘sure.’

Mia sat in the back of a taxi, feeling powerful and almost possessed. She was utterly resolute that this was the right thing to do. This didn’t happen very often – utter confidence in her decisions – and she was revelling in the feeling, the sheer novelty factor, spurring her on.

This is what they did in novels and films, wasn’t it? Mad dashes to airports to stop the objects of their desire in their foolish tracks? Except she wasn’t going to the airport, she was going to a pub, drunk, probably mad, and before that she had somewhere else to go, something else she had to do.

‘Will you wait for me?’ said Mia as they rolled up outside Williamson’s Park. ‘I just need to do something, I won’t be long.’

The taxi driver nodded, reluctantly. ‘Cost yer,’ he said. ‘I don’t sit here for nothing, you know.’

Mia got out of the taxi and ran towards the gates. They were locked – of course, it was 9 p.m. – she’d have to climb over. So she chucked her bag over, hitched her skirt up, prayed that this little decision of hers wouldn’t leave her impaled on a fence, because that would teach her to take control of her life, and jumped.

It was a bigger drop than she’d envisaged, and she landed painfully on her ankle. ‘Fuck ow!’ her voice echoed in the empty park. And then she was half limping, half jogging in the cool, dark stillness, the only sound, the wind rushing through the trees.

She arrived at the bench panting, and wasted no time.

‘Liv it’s me!’ she shouted from the bench on its place on top of the hill. Behind her, Ashton Memorial cast a pearly glow on the lawn in front.

The park was deserted now; she could talk as loudly as she wanted.

‘Listen, I’m going to say this now and I’m drunk, but as we always said, that is never an excuse, alcohol is never an excuse, and anyway, you know all my secrets, so it doesn’t matter.’

She suddenly had an image of herself in her fur coat, alone in a park, slurring slightly, talking aloud. This would possibly have been better if she’d been sober, but she’d started now, so she’d have to go on.

‘Liv, I love Fraser!’ She paused, then she shouted it out again, louder this time: ‘I LOVE FRASER! But you know that anyway, so I don’t know why I’m telling you.

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about this – I didn’t want to fall in love with your boyfriend, I really, truly did not. But it’s happened now and what I would love most in the world is your blessing. Just a sign, Livs. Your permission that I can do this, because I’ll take such good care of him. I’ll love and treasure him, I promise, I won’t let you down.’

She waited. Nothing.

‘Liv?’ she said again. ‘What do you think?’

What did she expect? Something to fall from a tree? An owl to swoop? A crash of lightning?

She waited and waited, but still there was nothing.

She sat down on the bench and smiled, quietly to herself.
You moron, Mia.

She knew what Liv would say. She knew what Liv would do.

She waited a few more minutes, gathering her thoughts. Then she got up, picked her bag up, ran to the gates, scrambled over the fence, feeling sure she’d ripped a hole in her jeans, and got back in the cab.

‘The Borough pub, please,’ she shouted through the screen. ‘And can you wait outside there too?’

Once there, she slammed the taxi door shut and ran in, straight up to the bar.

‘Have you seen a tall, dark guy with a drop-dead gorgeous girl in here?’ she asked the barman.

His face lit up. ‘Oh, yeah, right stunner, she was. He’d lucked out, he had. Dead ringer for that model, Giselle.

Mia closed her eyes for a second.

‘Went ages ago,’ said the barman. ‘Let’s just say he looked like he was in for a fun night.’

Mia covered her face with her hands. ‘OK, thank you. Thanks for that.’

She got back in the cab. Fuck it. FUCK IT. They must have gone back to Melody’s already. The thought entered her head for a second: you’re drunk, you’ve gone slightly batty, go home and sober up … But she was sick of being reasonable, she was sick of being mature. This was her
Fear and Loathing
moment. She was taking charge of her life, because nobody else seemed to be doing it for her.

The taxi pulled into Melody’s quiet cul-de-sac and outside Melody’s huge house and, this time, she paid the driver and told him to go.

She hammered on the door. ‘Fraser, it’s Mia. I know you’re in there! I know you’re in there, let me in.’

There was no answer so she just lifted up the letter-box flap and hollered inside.

‘FRASER! It’s me, Mia! Listen, you must
not
go through with it, you must
not
sleep with Emilia. I’ve been doing some thinking …
’ Her knees hurt with the bending down and she had to stand up to flex them. ‘You do not have to do this for the List. I’m sick of the stupid List. I’m sick of everyone telling me who I should love, who I shouldn’t love, all this feeling guilty, and you should be sick of it too. It is what it is, Fraser, and I can’t help it, I can’t help the way I feel. I thought I could control it but I can’t and also …’
She hesitated for a second: once this was out it was out. ‘I’m jealous –’ she was almost spitting the words – ‘like insanely, psychopathically jealous …’

Just then the door flew open. Fraser was standing in his dressing gown.

‘
Mia
.’

‘Who the fuck is that?’ someone called. ‘Oh …’

Then Emilia appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing nothing but her underwear.

Mia stood there for a second, unable to move. Thinking only that legs that long were not natural.

‘Shit,’ was all she said eventually. She looked at Fraser’s face. For a second, everything seemed to slow, everything seemed to stop. Then she turned and she ran.

Behind her she could hear Fraser, standing in the street, calling her name.

They were all to meet in Departures at London Heathrow Terminal One at 10.00 a.m. It had been a dawn start for most of them: Mia and Melody because they’d had to catch the 6.00 a.m. train from Lancaster, when it was still dark and Lancaster was just a collage of orange squares against a black sky, and Fraser, because he’d woken up at 4.38 a.m. which, when he’d looked at his alarm clock, blinking in the darkness, he’d remembered was the exact time they’d pronounced Liv dead.

He remembered he’d also done this on the very first anniversary of her birthday and, just like on that one and this one and the other anniversaries of her death and her funeral, from the moment he’d opened his eyes this morning, the world felt different. The air had changed.

It felt as if she was everywhere. He’d heard someone laugh like her on the bus on the way to the Tube this morning, seen the way she used to look when she was interested in something, in a face in the reflection of the window of the Heathrow Express, as the city flew by, beneath a bruised, dawn sky.

Her voice had seemed to whisper through the trees when he went jogging with Norm on the Heath first thing, Parliament Hill pushing a huge red sun high into the sky.

And now they were in the vast, white, strip-lit cavern of the Departures hall at Terminal One of Heathrow Airport, and she was even in the rumble of their suitcase wheels, her face flickered on the Departures board.

Today, on her thirtieth birthday, she was coming with them.

But where?

Where
were
they going, asked the assistant on the help desk, a meek-looking Asian girl with a severe parting and a strong Geordie accent who, to Fraser’s dismay, had the word
TRAINEE
on her lapel.

‘We don’t know yet, that’s what I’m trying to say,’ he said again.

They all stood behind him, craning their necks, resisting the temptation to take over. All except Anna, who – true to form – had not yet shown up.

‘We won’t know where we’re going until we pull one of the destinations out of a hat.’

A look of utter blankness met him and Fraser grew even more convinced they would be spending Liv’s thirtieth right here, at the Terminal One information desk.

The girl tapped a few keys on her keyboard, Fraser suspected just to look as if she was busy. ‘So, you haven’t booked anything, sir?’ she said eventually, very quietly.

‘No’ (finally,
finally
she got this much) ‘we haven’t booked anything.’

‘But you’d like to book something?’

‘Yes, we’d like to book flights, but only when we know where we’re going, which will be … drum roll …’ he gestured to Mia, who held up her floppy, purple woollen hat, and smiled, an encouraging children’s TV presenter smile, ‘when we’ve pulled it out of there!’

Fraser felt a wave of annoyance and guilt all rolled into one, when a look of panic crossed her dainty, heart-shaped face once more.

Melody shouldered her way to the front and Fraser thought how great it was, sometimes, to have a lawyer as a very close friend.

‘Basically, what we want to know is, can we get stand-by seats? Because we haven’t booked anything but we want to fly today.’

The girl’s face lit up.

‘Ah! You want to go on stand-by?’

‘YES!’ they all chorused.

She was suddenly animated. Clearly ‘stand-by’ was something she had covered on her training, whereas pulling stuff from woolly hats probably wasn’t.

‘Oh, yous shoulda said before,’ she said, in her thick northeastern tones. ‘I didn’t understand yous wanted stand-by. Right, no problem, so let me see. OK, where is it you want to go again?’

In the end, in order to explain the whole concept (that they’d put several destinations into a hat and were about to pull one out – did all flights this morning have a good chance of stand-by seats?),
they’d just told her about Liv. And she’d cried; she’d actually shed tears. ‘Wow, she was so, so lucky to have friends like you.’ They’d all practically climbed over the desk to hug her. ‘If I died, my mates’d
never
do this for me. My mates are shit, man. They’re all soddin’ off on bloody ’oliday to Lanzarote this week, leaving me in this shit-hole, because I can’t afford it.’

If they could have, they would have taken her with them.

But where were they going?

‘Well, we can’t pull anything out of the hat until Spanner gets here,’ said Fraser.

He was already angry and generally disappointed with Anna for a whole catalogue of reasons, including the fact that she’d been supposed to meet him and Norm at Paddington to get the Heathrow Express this morning and she hadn’t shown up, no phone call, nothing.

‘She doesn’t like to be called that any more,’ said Mia.

‘Well, I can think of far worse things to call her. Where the fuck is she? It’s nearly half past ten.’

They stood in the middle of Departures, with the hat. The airport still had that morning feel to it: children dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, pale-faced and clinging to their parents; couples, already staring into space, secretly wondering if two weeks alone with their spouse was actually a good idea after all. A baby screamed blue murder in its buggy. ‘Childcare with the sun,’ Mia had once described the prospect of a sun
’n’ sea holiday with Billy, and that phrase came to Fraser’s mind now – he could see where she was coming from.

But look around and there was also the lovely stuff, too, the stuff that made Fraser stand and stare: life’s mini-
joys and -heartbreaks, all under one roof. Man, if he wasn’t
so knackered, he would write a song. There was a group of foreign teenagers hugging their hosts goodbye
–
connections made for life, perhaps? A trip they’d remember forever? In the queue for the BA134 flight to Rome, a woman was kissing a baby goodbye, her son having obviously married some beautiful but insistent Italian, whose family she probably envied more than life itself.

In the middle of the concourse, a couple who couldn’t be more than twenty embraced, kissing passionately, the man wiping the girl’s copious tears with his thumbs; an aching departure.

Fraser watched them. The man, tall, scruffy and passionate,
reminded him of himself at that age and, as he looked away, he saw that Mia had been watching them too.

They caught each other’s eyes for a second. After the Emilia incident at the beginning of January, they had eventually spoken on the phone, but Fraser didn’t really know where it left them. It was almost as if, if ever there had been a moment (and Fraser suspected there’d been far too many), it was now gone. Over.

Mia had been mortified; something that was obvious from her silence. Fraser had tried to ring her several times, desperate to tell her, ‘I didn’t do it! I couldn’t do it! I couldn’t do it, because I love YOU, because I’m still screwed up, because I have so many emotions, I can’t decipher one from the other any more …’ But she never picked up and he felt a text didn’t quite cut it.

Eventually she had rung, one Wednesday, but it had all spilled out in the wrong order; he’d actually sounded as if he was lying and Mia had laughed as he
’d stumbled over his words.

‘Frase, shut up. Let’s talk about something else, shall we? For starters, we need to discuss Liv’s birthday.’

And so here they were.

Fraser looked at her, talking to Norm. Last time he’d seen her, she’d been standing on Melody’s front step, drunk, raw, mascara down her face. This time she was composed, wearing a neat, nautical-type jumper, her blonde hair tied back. She was back in control and she looked determined. The thing was, determination only made Mia Woodhouse even more beautiful.

‘Sorry, I’m here! I’m here!’

Suddenly a familiar voice echoed around the concourse, and they all looked around to see Anna, dressed in shades and a huge Afghan coat, like a member of the Russian super-rich, dragging her suitcase across the concourse at top speed.