How We Met (5 page)

There was a sheepish mumble of apology from the crowd. Fraser was staring at the piece of paper in his friend’s hand.

Norm looked at him, realization crossing his face.

‘Oh. Totally innocent, mate, found it in the pocket of my old parka that Liv must have borrowed some time.’

Fraser smiled and waved his hand away. He didn’t care where he’d got it from. He had a list. A list with Liv’s handwriting on.

‘Can I have that?’ he said, stepping forward. Norm handed him the piece of paper.

Mia piled banana-and-mango purée into Billy’s mouth, most of which he then regurgitated back onto the spoon, too busy watching
Peppa Pig
to concentrate on swallowing. She looked over at her friend on the sofa – just a tuft of brown, slightly matted hair poking out of the top of her orange sleeping bag
– and felt a warm rush of nostalgia. When was the last time she’d had anyone stay the night on her sofa? (Except Eduardo after a row.) Or talked to someone in a sleeping bag late into the night? God, must have been years ago. University probably. They were always talking late into the night in sleeping bags back then.

Who did she talk to now? NatWest Debt Management Centre (although technically, that was more shouting), Virgin Media, Ashley at the Benefits Office. In fact, Ashley at the Benefits Office probably knew more about her life than her friends did. Definitely more than her mother did. No, if she really thought about it, Mia didn’t really talk to anyone these days. Not
proper
talking, anyway, just for the sheer fun of it. These days, talking always had to have a purpose.

She had a sudden memory – these were coming more often, like now the heavy numbness of early motherhood was lifting, clarity was gradually returning and, with it, memories and feelings, some of which she’d kept down for a reason. V Festival in Leeds – 2000, or was it 2001? She wasn’t sure, but she knew Coldplay were headlining and that Melody pooh-poohed them as dullsville. Now Melody couldn’t get enough of Coldplay.

It was warm and getting light – 4.30 a.m. or there
abouts – and she, Liv and Fraser were the only ones awake, sitting in their sleeping bags outside their tent, talking in hushed voices and drinking flat lager, the sound of Norm’s pneumatic snoring coming from the tent next door.

‘Let’s play a game,’ said Liv, suddenly. ‘I know a brilliant game.’

Mia and Fraser had groaned: Liv was always coming out with new, strange games and ‘takes’ on things. Once, she’d tried to combine strip poker with the children’s game Frustration – moving little men around a board in their bras and pants. Liv and Fraser were big on taking their clothes off when drunk – it was one of the many traits that made them perfect for each other. Whereas, Mia? Good God, no. She’d rather chew off her own arm than reveal her body to her friends. And that was before she’d had a baby.

‘It’s called I Have Never,’ Liv continued. ‘And it’s a bit like Truth. Basically, the person whose turn it is says something they’ve never done in their life. For example, I might say
…
anal sex.’

Fraser had laughed. It sounded extra-loud in the soft dawn. ‘Do you have to be quite so crude, Olivia?’

‘So if you’ve done whatever the person whose turn it is is saying – i.e. you have had anal sex,’ she carried on, ignoring him, ‘then you have to down your drink, and then it’s your turn, and so it goes on.’

They went through the usual repertoire: saying I love you when you don’t mean it (they’d all done that one); threesomes – nobody had had one of those, which seemed a bit of a poor show. Mia had felt disappointed that at twenty-one, nobody in the group had fulfilled this particular rite of passage
, but had comforted herself in the knowledge that good old Anna would no doubt have had one, if not that very evening in her tent.

Then it was Mia’s turn: ‘I have never … snogged anyone famous,’ which Fraser drank to because Floella Benjamin, a distant family friend – they all thought this was hysterical in itself – had once given him a peck on the cheek at a country fair when he was eight. They’d all agreed that didn’t really count.

It was almost light now; a rosy mist hovered above
the field, illuminating their faces. Norm’s snoring from the
tent was reaching crescendo levels. Then Liv said, ‘I have
never … snogged any other member of our group of friends except Fraser.’

‘What, not even Anna?’ Mia blurted out, almost on automatic. ‘Everyone’s snogged Spanner.’ Which was true. She’d kissed her back in their first year at Lancaster, at the height of her very fleeting foray into lipstick-lesbianism, which she was quite proud of if truth be told.

‘No, I have
not
snogged Anna!’ said Liv, outraged, and yet Mia suspected, ever so slightly jealous. ‘When the hell did you snog Anna?’ Mia was in the midst of answering when it all came flooding back, it dawned on her. She glanced at Fraser, whose face was covered with the can of lager he was now drinking from.

Liv looked at Mia, then at Fraser.

‘Oh, my God,
you’ve
snogged Anna?’ she said, smiling, but it was a sliding smile – half intrigue, half … what was that look? Appalled? Mia didn’t like to think about it too much.

Fraser had spluttered beer everywhere.

‘What? No. I haven’t snogged Anna. Or anyone else for that matter. Sorry, I was just drinking my beer, is that allowed? I just forgot the rules.’

Then they’d all sort of moved on, the question lost in booziness and early morning confusion, but Mia was thinking about it now as she shovelled banana-and-mango purée back into Billy’s mouth. It was coming back to her. Lots of things were coming back to her now.

Fraser stirred, made some sort of grunting sound – an attempt at speech, and Billy, on cue, did the same, which made Mia laugh.

‘Morning, Fraser Morgan.’ She’d been up since 5.50 a.m. with a grizzly baby, but then grizzliness was more or less Billy’s default mode. It was now 9 a.m. and she felt as though she’d lived a day already.

‘What?’ He stuck his head out of the sleeping bag and grimaced at her, squinting into the light that flooded through the Velux window, a look of pure confusion on his face.

‘How you doing?’ Mia dodged a bit of purée as Billy smacked his podgy little hands up and down on the high-chair top. ‘’Coz you look shocking, to tell you the truth.’

‘I didn’t ask for the truth, but cheers, I feel like death,’ croaked Fraser, easing himself up on his elbows. There was a brief pause before they both registered what he’d said and laughed awkwardly.

‘Well, I can tell you, you’ve done very well indeed.’ Mia turned her back to carry on feeding Billy. ‘You’ve slept through a box-set of
In the Night Garden
, a phone row with Eduardo and a meltdown from Billy who lobbed a rusk at your head at one point and you still didn’t wake up.’

Fraser laughed weakly, then coughed – he’d smoked last night and could feel it on his lungs – and pulled the sleeping bag up around his chin, staring blankly out at the bare trees, dark and arrested as if frozen in time. The stark whiteness of another winter’s day.

And I do feel like death, he thought. I really fucking do. He remembered this from last year, the days after the anniversary of Liv’s death and her birthday.

The actual anniversaries themselves weren’t that bad; they certainly weren’t that good, either, but he was drunk for much of them. Also, they were occasions and, like all occasions, there was a momentousness, some degree of specialness involved. People called and fussed around him, Mia especially. On the first anniversary, she’d called practically every hour to check he was out of bed and dressed. Actually, he was in the Bull by midday, halfway down his second pint, Karen listening patiently as he blathered on. His parents, Carol and Mike, had called too. That was one good thing to come out of Liv’s death, he supposed: he’d become closer to his parents. Before he lost Liv, their relationship was stuck in teenage mode, where he told them nothing except the absolute essentials and they didn’t ask much except about when he was going to get a proper job like his brother (Shaun Morgan ran
Top Financial Solutions
. Why he’d never come up with a ‘top solution’ to his little brother’s financial problems, Fraser would never know).

Fraser was a dutiful son – i.e. he did the bare minimum, visiting them in their spotless ex-council house in Bury every few months, where he’d sit and read the paper whilst Liv talked to Mike about his job in the world of tap fittings and to Carol about her gallstones, but they weren’t close. They didn’t really know each other. In fact, if Carol Morgan were honest, she’d lost her youngest son the day he went to university, when his friends and his girlfriend became his family.

But that was before grief dismantled Fraser, ripped him open then hurtled through him like a freight train, making him furious and self-destructive and self-pitying. That was the worst. After his mother had to pick him up from Manchester Royal Infirmary,
where he was admitted with a broken ankle after being so drunk he had fallen down a fire escape at a club in Manchester, Fraser knew the game was up. There was no room for his teenage self, full of misplaced pride and embarrassment. He needed her again like he had when he was a blond, corkscrew-haired five-year-old, and he’d curled up in her arms that night and cried like one.

So, in a strange way, the actual anniversaries were doable. At least everyone was there. But this – the day after – was worse, because what now? Where now? Life still carried on, but the phone stopped ringing, and when the specialness had gone, what did he have left? Except himself. And he was a mess. He couldn’t settle anywhere; his flat scared the shit out of him, a place he just rattled around in, wandering from one room to another, in some state of intoxication most of the time. He had told himself, countless times, he’d use this time alone to learn to cook, because Liv was a fabulous cook, but eventually got bored of buying lemon grass only to stop off at the Bull on the way back and leave it there. the Bull in Kentish Town must have the biggest stock of lemon grass in north London.

He couldn’t watch TV any more, couldn’t concentrate on films – something he and Liv had loved to do; daft comedies were their favourite, cuddling up on a Sunday to watch
Meet the Fockers
. Nowadays, he’d totally lost the ability to look at a screen for any length of time and, sometimes, although he never admitted this to anyone, he went to bed at 8 p.m. because he couldn’t deal with any more day.

Then there was the job, or excuse for one, really, since life as a freelance sound engineer – holding a fluffy mike whilst some geezer did a piece to camera about local history, or a party political broadcast
– didn’t actually require much skill, and it was a far cry from being a sound engineer for bands, too, wasn’t it? Let’s face it. That dream, along with his dream to be an actual rock star himself had shifted, as he moved through his teens to his twenties, from a dead cert to still doable if he really pulled his finger out, to now, aged thirty, simply a comforting fantasy he liked to indulge in occasionally.

The worst thing was, it had been over a year now, he should really have pulled himself together. But life had become one big long promise to himself that tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow he’d get it together. Sometimes he wondered if his grief was becoming a habit rather than a need, but it didn’t matter because now he was breathless with it – the emptiness – as if he’d woken up entombed in concrete.

‘Fancy a tea? Bacon sandwich?’ Fraser could hear Mia’s voice and he could see her but couldn’t really compute what she was saying; it was all muffled as if he were looking at her through a glass screen, and yet he was so glad she was here, suddenly overcome with gratitude in fact because it occurred to him – what the hell would he have done with himself today if she
wasn’t
? For a second he wanted to reach over and grab onto her legs. He shook the feeling away.

Billy was sucking on a bottle of milk now, not very enthusiastically, and Mia took it off him for a second to shake it, so he started wailing, a cry that turned into a raspy scream. It reminded Fraser of something and he was aware of his heart pounding as though it might leap right out of his chest. Mia gave Billy the bottle back and he immediately stopped crying. Fraser could still see his little flushed cheeks sucking greedily and happily, and yet he could still hear something. He could still hear a terrible noise.

‘Oh, God, Frase. Oh, shit …’

It wasn’t until Mia had her arms tight around him, that he realized the noise was coming from him.

Mia got Fraser up and out of the flat as soon as possible – which in reality, Fraser had noted with some amusement, took about an hour, half of that trying to get an incensed Billy into his snowsuit. ‘Told you I lived with Mussolini,’ Mia shouted over the racket, whilst Fraser looked on, gobsmacked. She was right. Bloody hell. How could such a small thing make so much noise? Did Mia really have to do this every day, just to get out of the door? In the months that followed Liv’s death they’d spent a lot of time together – first when Mia was preg
nant and then those difficult months after Billy was born,
but he didn’t have a clue about the day-to-day, the reality of which now shocked him.

Still, Billy looks like I feel, thought Fraser.

‘Can I do that now, please?’ he said. ‘Roll onto my back and scream whilst someone puts me into a straightjacket?’

They went directly into town to the Sunbury Café. It was bitingly cold, the sky sharp and blue as stained glass. The Sunbury Café – housed in one of Lancaster’s sandstone Georgian houses down a cobbled alley – was where they used to go as students. They’d have millionaire’s shortbread and cappuccinos, sit out the back on the terrace on wrought-iron chairs, like they were ladies who lunched, not poverty-stricken students, discussing the big topics of the day (back when talking was just for the fun of it): whether Phillip Schofield dyed his hair, whether Prince Harry was the love-child of James Hewitt
, but also marriage, kids, what order they’d do everything in.