How We Met

For my friends, with love.

Table of Contents

Outside the bar, the silence rings in my head; like the delayed echo of a lone guitar string. The air is warm and gluey and smells of sea salt and those flowers again – they’re everywhere you go. Cancan skirts of frothy pink blooms.

I kick off my shoes and, carrying them, take the stone steps down to the sand. It’s still warm and sugar-soft after another baking day. Behind me, I can still hear the throb of the music. Ba-doom! Boom! Faint laughter from further down the beach. Lasers streak the sky.

I’m walking quickly towards the sea now. The moon is high and fat as a pumpkin. It’s bleeding pearly light across the sky and across the water but there’s not much time left for it now, today will soon be gone. And then there’ll be tomorrow. Another brand-new day.

I don’t bother to take off my clothes at first, I just wade straight in. The water’s cool and delicious around my thighs, my stomach, my chest, and now I am swimming out, out towards the light.

And it’s beautiful. So beautiful. The cool water; the black, silky sky. At either side of me, the cliffs rise up and glitter in the moonlight, like giant-sized precious stones. The water dances with a million needles of white light. It makes me think of music, of notes alive on paper, and every molecule of me tingles with pleasure, so much that I have to stop and catch my breath.

Push, glide, I am swimming beneath the water with every stroke now – like a mermaid. Except I’m not a mermaid because my white dress has ballooned around me so that I must look like a giant jellyfish, shifting and morphing, a glowing orb in the middle of the sea; alone but not lonely. Not wanting now. I’m swimming further out now, I slide the straps of my dress down and slip out of it, as if I’m shedding a skin. And suddenly I am totally free, the water caressing every inch of me, my dress floating alongside me, in my hand. I can still hear the throb of the music back on shore and when I put my head beneath the water, the b-dum-dum of my heart. I turn onto my back; I am floating, weightless. I imagine the stars are tiny pinprick holes, windows into another universe, a world where people are dancing and smiling too and don’t know, don’t care, where one day starts and another begins. And then they start to go off – the small explosions, deep in my belly, little bubbles of light working their way to my throat and out across my mouth and I make a mental note that this, THIS is what it tastes like. For the first time ever, I know this is it.

Life has brought me so much more than I ever imagined. So much more than I ever thought possible. Friends I could
marry
, whom I’d die for. What did I do to deserve that? I imagine them now, dancing like those in the world above me; one great universe of dancing people and me, in the middle, dancing in the sea. I think of him back at the bar, hands pumping the air now. That grin across his face, the beautiful almond-shaped eyes. Lost in music. It makes me smile.

I swirl and tumble, feel the seaweed feather my skin. The moon is sending iridescent rays of light through the water; it’s like electricity darting through my legs.

I should feel tiny out here but I don’t, I feel bigger than ever, every last cell of me filled right up. I imagine the deep green bed beneath me, and the domed sky above, and imagine I am suspended, held in the centre of it all. A tiny being, spinning in orbit.

The music has stopped now, so it’s just the sound of the waves and me and everything feels perfect. Everything feels right.

Above me, stars are going out, one by one. Night is giving way to day. Any time now, a brand-new day and I can’t wait. I CAN’T WAIT.

1. Sleep with an exotic foreigner – (in an ideal world, Javier Bardem). Night of heady, all-consuming passion: getting lost, snogging amongst lemon groves and being drunk on something thick and hugely alcoholic that I can’t pronounce.
     (*Do this without becoming completely neurotic about what it’s supposed to ‘mean’.)
   
2. Learn to do SOME sort of dance: jive, tango, birdie
   …
     Don’t tell anyone am having classes then wow them at random event and watch as they go, ‘Oh, my God, Liv, you didn’t tell me!’
   

1. Learn a foreign language.
   
2. Learn how to make a Roman blind.
   
3. And the perfect Victoria sponge …
   
4. Read all works by William Wordsworth and be able to recite lines at will. (Not including ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’.)
   
5. Use up all seven Scrabble letters in one fell swoop! BUFFOON, for example, which would be great.
   
6. Go to Venice, properly this time, and have a bellini at Harry’s Bar.
   
7. French kiss in Central Park.
   
8. Climb Great Wall of China and learn a bit of Chinese (should be able to do this whilst climbing the Great Wall).
   
9. Vegas, baby!
   
10. Live in Paris, listen to Edith Piaf, smoke Camels, drink pastis and have a torrid affair. Then leave, crying eyes out in Paris Gare du Nord.
    
11. Learn how to pluck eyebrows so that they ‘frame the face’.
    
12. Swim naked in the sea at dawn.
    
13. Get a six-pack (or at least a two-pack) Something better than the one-pack I currently sport.
    
14. Learn how to meditate. To live in the moment.
    
15. Have a massive party for my wonderful, wonderful friends. Just because …
    
16. Learn how to use chopsticks. Asking for cutlery is getting embarrassing at twenty-seven.
    
17. Go to airport, close eyes and pick a destination at random, then GO! Even if it’s to Stuttgart or Birmingham.
    
18. Make homemade porn video. Can’t believe I just said that.
    No really, I can’t.
    

Mia put the brake on the buggy, walked around the front and checked on Billy. Thank God for that,
finally
he was asleep. His fat little cheeks red with cold, a puddle of drool collected in his chin.

With any luck, she might have time for a cheeky half outside the Sun on the way back home. It was her best friend’s birthday after all and, ‘be rude not to, Woodhouse, be rude not to …’ She knew what her best friend would have to say about that.

‘Hi, Liv.’

Mia took off her rucksack, sat down on the bench and took in the view for a second, once again congratulating herself on finding this corker of a spot, Ashton Memorial white and gleaming in the sun, like a provincial version of the Taj Mahal. The whole of the city laid out below; the River Lune a snaking, silver ribbon through the middle of it all and, in the distance, the Lakeland hills. She often thought they looked like big hairy mammoths from some ancient land.

She took the pint glass and bottle of water out of the rucksack and the tulips from the Morrisons bag. She set the glass down on the floor, poured in the water and tried to arrange the yellow flowers. She tutted at herself for not thinking to bring scissors, since the stalks were too long and so they didn’t sit in the glass at all, but splayed all over the place, most of them toppling out onto the grass.

She leant back on the bench and looked at them.

‘Well that looks shit, doesn’t it?’ Then she laughed, mainly at the predictability of it all. Where was Olivia Jenkins when you needed flowers arranging?

Mia moved right to the other end of the bench so she was nowhere near the buggy and took the packet of Golden Virginia and the Rizlas out of her jacket pocket. She pulled her hoodie over her knees – bloody hell it was freezing, why hadn’t she worn a coat?

She was often doing this of late, already being out somewhere before realizing she was wearing completely inappropriate clothes for the weather. Last week, she’d looked down in the Post Office to see she was wearing odd shoes.

She rolled a cigarette, glanced at the back of the buggy, felt a slight tug of guilt but pressed on. ‘Must press on!’ as Olivia would say. Frankly, what with Billy’s fascist policy regarding sleep lately (i.e. allowing her to have none, ever), it was either the odd fag to keep her sane, or adoption. Put like that, she felt much better and lit it.

‘So it’s your birthday today, Olivia Jenkins. Happy bloody Birthday.’

She blew the smoke up into the clear March sky, which seemed to hum, it was so cold.

‘Now, I know what you’re going to say. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mia Woodhouse, smoking now you’re supposed to be a responsible mother. But honestly, Liv, after the week I’ve had with David Blaine over there – the baby that resists sleep for so long, he should do a show so people could come and watch – you’d let me off. And actually I can now inform you with confidence …’ she inhaled enthusiastically … ‘this is what you would, at one time, have called a twenty-quid fag.’

She laughed, then began to cry when with no warning whatsoever – this was also happening more often of late – she had a sudden memory: Liv, lying on Fraser on the beach in Ibiza, topped by that ridiculous visor she’d insisted on wearing for the whole fortnight, so she looked like an OAP from Florida, coming out with just that: ‘Twenty-quid fag, this.’ A fag so good she’d pay twenty quid for it.

Everyone had laughed and laughed.

‘D’you remember how you always used to say that, Liv?

‘Anyway, I’ve got news on that front.’ She pulled herself together. It could easily go one of two ways up here, especially when she was suffering from acute sleep deprivation and she wanted to keep it light and entertaining. It was Liv’s birthday, after all. ‘Fraser’s given up! Would you believe it? I’d be happy for him if he wasn’t so smug. Honestly, it’s
killing
me. The other day, he called me at seven a.m. – just as Billy had gone back off to sleep; I could have murdered him had he not been two hundred and fifty miles away – to say, “Guess where I am? Go on, guess, guess!”

‘I was like, “Dunno, a police station? The zoo? Buckingham Palace?” And he was like, “No. Hampstead Heath.”

‘And so I said, “Oh, well done. So clearly you haven’t been to bed yet after some brilliant night out and are just ringing to nauseate me. That’s not very nice.” But
he
said, “No. I’m at Hampstead Heath Running Track.” Then he said it again, just in case I hadn’t heard: “RUN-NING TRACK. I’ve just been for a RUN.”

‘He didn’t sound very out of breath, which I pointed out, and then he hit me with it: “Ah, but then I wouldn’t be, would I? Because I’ve given up smoking. Three weeks, and five days!”

‘Which turned out to be the real reason he was calling me at that hour.’

‘Like I said, just unbearable. Horribly, horribly smug. It was all I could do not to be sick in a bag.’