How We Met (7 page)

Fraser put his lighter back in his coat pocket and, as he did, felt the piece of folded-up paper – Liv’s List, the Things To Do Before I Am Thirty – that Norm had given him the night before. He must have felt pretty special to find that, it must have been a big deal for Norm, and yet he’d just nabbed it from him. He felt a twinge of guilt at his crassness and, not for the first time recently, wondered if he was just not that nice any more.

He unfolded it,
JULY
15
TH
, 2005 it said at the top
– two and a half years ago, she would have been twenty-six – and read downwards, touching Liv’s elegant, left-handed writing that sloped to the right.
Liv Jenkins woz ’ere.
He said it quietly. She was here and now she’s not. It was the maddest concept ever.

He read on and, for a moment, standing outside the café, the cold numbing his fingers, it felt like she
was
there; he could hear her voice in the writing and yet he also felt disloyal, as though he was snooping. They always discussed everything. Liv couldn’t go for a wee without informing him first. How come she’d never discussed making this List with him?

He read on: Sleep with an exotic foreigner (in an ideal world, Javier Bardem). He smiled, whilst vigorously fighting a niggling dent to his ego.
What’s so special about this Javier Bardem character?
He sounded like a knob.
And what did he have that Fraser didn’t? Besides an international film career and millions in the bank?

Learn how to make a Roman blind. Fraser frowned, genuinely puzzled. She’d never shown any interest in home furnishings when she was around, hence the disastrous wallpaper choice with the embossed bunches of grapes all over it – a sort of wine-induced migraine in wall-covering form.

Climb Great Wall of China and learn a bit of Chinese (should be able to do this whilst climbing the Great Wall).

Fraser sniggered at that one. He could really hear Liv now. Her very specific breed of deadpan, random humour.

Vegas, baby! Swim naked in the sea at dawn … A picture of Liv and her phenomenal legs and her glorious boobs was just coming into view when Mia appeared with the buggy.

She looked up at him, shielding her face from the sun.

‘You OK?’

Fraser nodded, sheepishly.

‘Yeah, just about.’

‘Give us a drag on that, will you?’

Fraser did as he was told and Mia inhaled, blew the smoke sideways, then stubbed it out.

‘Oi, I hadn’t finished that!’

‘You gave up,’ she said. ‘I’m helping you.’

A group of five or six teenagers – almost certainly students – arrived at the café, chatting and laughing. They went inside and Mia and Fraser looked at each other, both knowing instinctively they were thinking the same thing.

‘Anyway, what you up to?’ said Mia, eventually.

‘Oh, just reading this …’ Fraser folded the piece of paper up self-consciously. ‘It’s that List that Liv wrote, the one Norm had last night?’

Mia knew exactly what it was. She’d already had an idea about what to do with it, too. Looking at Fraser’s face now, she was even more convinced it was a good one.

She put the brake on the buggy and went to stand next to him, leaning against the wall, lifting her face to the sun.

Fraser sighed.

‘It’s just shit, basically, isn’t it? All these things she’ll never do. All this life she’ll never live.’

‘The world is certainly going to be a much darker place without Liv’s perfect Victoria sponge and her homemade porn video, that’s for sure,’ said Mia, and Fraser couldn’t help but laugh, although Mia inwardly chastised herself. She was doing it again.

Fraser said, ‘I just think … I think we were robbed. Life’s just not the same any more, is it?’

‘No,’ shrugged Mia. ‘And yes, we were robbed, course we were, but without sounding harsh, nothing’s going to bring her back, Frase, is it?’ She looked across at him. ‘So what are we going to do about it now?’

It was a suggestion rather than a statement, since she had one idea about what they might do.

For a moment, Fraser said nothing. There was the sound of plates clattering inside the café, orders being called from the kitchen. Life. Then he slowly unfolded the List again and read it through.

‘It’s not exactly, get married, get a pension, get a Tesco’s Clubcard, is it?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ said Mia.

‘I mean these ideas are Blue Sky, ambitious.’

‘It’s like the annual schedule from Red Letter Days.’

‘Well exactly,’ said Fraser. ‘And yet it’s all I can do to get up in the morning.’

The idea nagged urgently in Mia’s head. Would he just think it was silly and pointless? Or naff, even? Nothing would bring Liv back, that was true, but at least this would be a project and a distraction, something for them all to focus on. She could definitely do with some focus in her life.

‘Can I say something?’ she said.

‘Go for your life.’

‘Promise you won’t take offence?’

‘No, but I’ll try.’

‘Well, it’s just you say that. You say you can’t get out of bed in the morning, but it wasn’t you who died, was it?’

Fraser frowned. ‘No. If it had, I definitely wouldn’t be getting out of bed, would I?’

‘I don’t think that’s my point,’ said Mia, thinking God, he could be facetious when he wanted to.

‘So what is your point?’

‘My point is, we are still alive, aren’t we?’

‘Yeees …’

‘We still have our lives so, in a way, all we can do is get on with it. Liv would have wanted that. I know she won’t be able to do all those things on the List but maybe …’

‘What?’

‘Well, maybe we can do them for her?’

She looked at him, unsure. Fraser pulled a face.

‘If you think I’m making a Roman
blind or learning how to meditate, you have got another thing coming.’

Mia rolled her eyes.

‘Well, nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but don’t you think it would be a laugh? A bit of structure at least. A project? We could get everyone else roped in too.’

Fraser considered this for a second. ‘What, Norm and Melody making a homemade porn film at some dodgy B&B in Morecambe?’

‘Yes, if you think that would work for you, put a smile on that face.’ She got hold of his cheeks and tugged them.

Fraser stuck his tongue out.

‘Promise me Spanner will not get the swimming naked in the sea one. She’d love it too much and we’d never get her out – which would defeat the object.’

‘If you insist. You can be List secretary if you like.’

‘Hey, we could all go to China together! We could all climb the Great Wall together – me and you, what do you reckon?’

‘I reckon this is much more like it.’ Mia smiled.

And so they went on. They ordered more coffee, they stayed at the café and they hatched their plan. Fraser baggsying, ‘Vegas, baby!’

Fraser stands outside Top Shop on Oxford Street, occasionally craning his neck to see if he can make out Karen coming towards him, out of the crowds. They’ve been seeing one another for five weeks now, although Fraser doesn’t quite know how this happened. One minute, Karen was just a friendly, regular face behind the bar, someone who listened patiently as he got more drunk and morose; the next, she was his girlfriend, all seemingly without him having experienced any cognitive processes whatsoever.

As he stands there, April blossom scurrying around his feet, Fraser suspects it’s happened simply because he couldn’t come up with a good enough, fast enough reason why it shouldn’t.

Karen called him the night after he got back from Lancaster, asking him if he fancied going for a curry as she had a two-for-one voucher at the Taj Mahal. Fraser said yes, mainly because he had no food in the house and somehow the voucher thing made it seem more innocuous, and that was that. They went for a slap-up Mexican the week after that, then ‘a beer’ one Monday night that somehow ended up in Karen’s bed, her giving him a back massage to the strains of Enya and, before he knew it, he had himself a girlfriend – as well as, he feared, the onset of heart disease. Karen isn’t really one to pick at lettuce leaves, put it like that, but then he’s always liked that in a girl.

And it’s nice to have someone to go out for curries with. He likes having another body in the house, someone who calls him at work, who comes round and cooks for him –
finally
, someone who knows what to do with lemon grass. It’s comforting and grounding.

However, she started, about a fortnight in, to buy him random ‘love gifts’, as she calls them, which makes Fraser feel special and anxious in equal measure: a four-pack of Ambrosia Devon custard, for example, after he said this was his favourite childhood dessert (this is the sort of question Karen likes to ask, often after sex: What was your favourite food as a child? If you were an animal, what animal would you be?), and a photo frame in the shape of a guitar, which was disgusting, truly foul, but which he felt pressurized to fill with a picture of him and Norm. He just hoped to God he remembered to hide it if Norm ever came round.

Fraser knows Karen is a ridiculously kind, thoughtful and giving woman,
and he lives in hope that one day, preferably this week, he might wake up to find he has fallen in love with her, even if he cannot shake the feeling when he is with her that all his dreams are going up in smoke.

Not that he really believes his dreams will come true any more, but they are still there, lurking at the back of his mind like forgotten treasure on a sea bed: the one about him writing that one incredible song that will get the Fans signed. They’d started one before Liv died – called ‘Hope and Glory’ – about youth – all their songs seemed to be about youth, and living forever, back then – and never finished it. But Norm doesn’t even live in the same city any more, so band practice is out of the question. These dreams feel idiotic and delusional when he is with Karen, and he doesn’t know if this is just because he’s growing up or because she is wrong for him, but it suits him fine at the moment because feeling the way he does, so depleted and traumatized, his dreams feel too scary to contemplate, like gigantic, terrifying foreign lands that he has neither the strength nor motivation to conquer.

He looks down at his filthy running trainers and wonders if he’s wearing the right footwear for a salsa class – what do people wear at a dance class anyway? God forbid it’s bare feet. Fraser felt, in his bones, he would be against any physical activity that warranted bare feet.

He moves away from the doorway of Top Shop so he’s standing in the middle of the pavement and he can see her now, grinning, her dark head bobbing down the road, weaving her way through the evening crowds with her arms above her head, carrying several shopping bags.

Karen is an enthusiastic shopper – and enthusiastic, thinks Fraser, is the word. He’s always presumed all girls were born shoppers, like boys were born knowing how to put up shelves, but Karen seems to be the exception to this rule, bringing home something new to wear, or getting a delivery from eBay on an almost daily basis but then promptly sending it back.

Evenings at Karen’s largely consist of Fraser sitting alone on her sofa, the TV drowned out by the sound of masking tape being pulled then torn with teeth, like she’s performing some sort of medieval operation next door.

Fraser waves slowly at her and she gives him a big smile back since she can’t wave due to the number of bags hanging off her arm. He walks towards her; she holds his face in her hands and kisses him when they meet.

‘Hello, Fred …’

She has a sheen of sweat on her top lip from the effort of rushing but is also flushed and bright-eyed, which Fraser is encouraged to note makes her look pretty and fecund in a milkmaid kind of way.

‘Fred …?’ says Fraser, lost.

‘Astaire, innit.’ She laughs, looking up at him with that look again – he really wishes she wouldn’t do that – and, despite his best efforts not to (it’s a daily battle), Fraser cringes.

Karen has taken to putting ‘innit’ on the end of sentences but, like other little nuances of hers, she is slightly slow on the uptake – wasn’t Ali G famous in about 2005? Immediately he has this thought, Fraser chastises himself for it. This is the other thing he is finding about Karen. She brings out the petty in him; small, inane things make his toes curl and he hates himself for it. Who are you anyway, he thinks, the Cool Police?

He says, ‘Oh, right! Yeah. Got yer. Fred Astaire,
mmm …’ He raises an eyebrow, as if to say, I don’t think so somehow. ‘Well, I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

But Fraser knows he’ll never be ready for this. Ever. In his life. In fact, right now, standing in the street on a warm Tuesday evening in April, every molecule in his
body is telling him he’d rather be doing anything – undergoing a life-threatening operation, for example – than going to a salsa class.

But ‘Learn to do SOME sort of dance’ is one of the four tasks he’s been allocated from Liv’s List to complete and he is determined to do this for her.

After he and Mia hatched their plan that awful day after Liv’s birthday, they got everyone over to Mia’s, where they tried, for a fruitless hour, to give free rein and let everyone choose four things each from the List.

But this resulted in nothing but shouting and Melody and Norm almost filing for divorce when it was decided, as the only couple, that they should do the homemade porn movie one and Melody burst out laughing: ‘Chance would be a fine thing. We haven’t had sex since October!’ Norm was not amused.

They’d gone round in circles, until finally, Mia had the ingenious idea that they should write down all the tasks on bits of paper, put them in a hat and let fate decide.

So this was the outcome:

Fraser: Learn to dance; sleep with an exotic foreigner: do this without becoming completely neurotic about what it’s supposed to ‘mean’ (Fraser felt – at a push – he could probably manage this); use up all seven Scrabble letters in one turn; make a Roman blind.