How We Met (13 page)

She practically skipped back to his bedroom and it was only as she closed the door that she noticed the obligatory clip-frame of photos on the back of it. How predictable. Every student bedroom in the land must have one of those, but they were also fascinating and Mia couldn’t resist. She crouched down on the floor and studied it.

There was one of Fraser and his brother, obviously as a little boy – the same opal eyes and a head of white-blond curls. She looked away before she started imagining their children. There was one of him at school – a
Grange
Hill
-style portrait of playground mayhem. Then, Mia felt an unpleasant flip of her stomach – Fraser with a girl. A very pretty girl. It was obviously a party or a sixth-form ball because Fraser was wearing a DJ and dicky bow and she was in a black velvet strapless number. They were on a sofa or chaise longue, the sort you get in the entrance of a hotel, and Fraser was leaning back, knees open, arm around her, brimming with boyish confidence; she was leaning into him, her hand on his chest.

Mia leant in and peered at it, just at the moment that Fraser stumbled drunkenly through the door …

‘Ow!’

… and hit Mia in the face, sending her backwards.

‘Oh, God, sorry I’m so sorry!’ Fraser put the bottle of wine down, and suddenly he was holding Mia’s face. They gazed at each other. ‘Are you all right?’ She got the chance to look at him properly now, something she’d been dying to do all night. Yep, she still fancied him. Ridiculously, in fact.

Kiss him. Kiss him now …

But she seemed suddenly paralysed, suctioned to the carpet.

‘Yeah, I’m fine …’

And all too soon the moment was over.

‘Serves me right for nosying at your photos.’

They both sat up against the wall and Fraser poured more wine.

‘So who’s that girl?’ said Mia. She was drunk now, what the hell?

‘Oh, that’s Amanda.’

Fraser had only glanced at the photo but clearly he knew who ‘that girl’ was.

‘She’s very pretty,’ said Mia.

‘Pretty mad.’

Mia laughed. ‘She doesn’t look mad. Was she a serious girlfriend?’

‘Oh, yeah, like I say, seriously mad.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mia huffed and rolled her eyes with pretend annoyance.

‘I went out with her for a year and a half and when I dumped her, she used to stalk me, wait outside school, outside football practice, outside my house. I had to threaten her with legal action in the end.’

Mia nudged him in the side. ‘Fraser Morgan, you heart-breaker, you.’

He looked at her. ‘Hardly, but I can spot a mad one from a mile off now. Now I’d like a sane one, a really down-to-earth one. Someone low-maintenance who you can really have a laugh with, do you know what I mean?’

Close up, she was even prettier, he thought. Her skin was dewy and totally flawless, she had these deep-set, dark, wise sort of eyes. He was laying it on thick now, he knew that, but she didn’t seem to notice. She carried on talking.

‘So is that you at school?’ she said.

‘Yeah, worst school in the world. There’d be an article in the paper if someone got an A. Lunch was going halves on a packet of Silk Cut and maybe a bag of scraps from the chippy.’

‘Wow. Really?’ Mia couldn’t imagine a school where everyone was not expected to go to university, where everyone didn’t think it was their God-given right.

‘Anyway what about you? I bet you went to a dead posh school, you. Everyone who does
meed-yah
studies went to private school.’

Mia gave him a dead arm. ‘Fraser! You are such an inverted snob!’

‘I’m only kidding.’ He laughed. ‘I’m only pullin’ your leg.’

‘Actually I hated it,’ she said. ‘All those rugger-buggers, those really bitchy girls. I left as soon as I could and went to a normal sixth form.’

‘Ah,’ he squeezed her hand, ‘so that’s where you get your down-to-earthiness from then?’

There was a pause, a really long pause, and Mia wracked her brains as to what to fill it with.

‘So, er … how long have you known Melody and—’

But she couldn’t finish her sentence, because Fraser had leant over and was kissing her passionately and fully on the lips. Mia had had many unsatisfactory kisses in her life, especially first ones, but this
. This.
This was exquisite. Soft at first, almost tender bites, then full-on passionate snogging, there was no other word for it. It was
neither too fast, nor too slow. His eyes never left hers. Their tongues and lips seemed to work in perfect rhythm, without either of them having to say a thing. They carried on like that for a good five minutes. Mia felt a bloom in her chest, her throat, her lips. She worried the feeling might come out, like she might actually have made a sound. Nothing, ever, in her life had ever felt this good.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said, when she could finally come up for air. ‘Is that to make up for accosting you?’

He got hold of her chin and brought it towards him to kiss her again. ‘I thought you said you couldn’t remember accosting me.’

‘Hello-o!’ Ten seconds later the front door suddenly went and they sprang apart.

‘Who the fuck is that?’ hissed Mia, wiping her mouth.

‘Hello-o! It’s us. We’re back …’

‘Shit, it’s Norm and Melody. I thought they weren’t back till tomorrow!

‘Fraser?’ Mia and Fraser froze in his bedroom. Downstairs they could hear footsteps going into the kitchen.
‘Jesus – what a state – and have you been using my terra
cotta pot without asking?’ Melody shouted upstairs.

Mia winced sympathetically at Fraser.

‘Actually, also …’ There was a bit of stomping around now.

‘Oh, God,’ groaned Fraser, ‘we’d better go down.’

‘Have you fucking well been helping yourself to my wine – again?’

Fraser stood up and opened his bedroom door. Melody was already at the bottom, Norm standing behind her pretending to slash his throat.

Fraser attempted to look sober.

‘Mels, I’m really sorry, we’ll tidy up. We only drank one bottle of wine, didn’t we?’

‘We? Who else is there?’

‘Oh, Mia came over for a bit – she’s still here, actually, I attempted to make moussaka—’

‘I can see that,’ said Melody, and her face softened. ‘Fraser, why didn’t you just call me?’

‘
Mia came round for a bit.
’

That sounded a bit ‘matey’, Mia thought, standing in Fraser’s bedroom. (Mind you, what was he supposed to say? Mia came over, I seduced her and we were snogging each other’s faces off, just as you arrived?) And they weren’t strangers; she’d met Melody and Norm loads of times before. They knew she and Fraser were mates
, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that she should be in his bedroom, but what to do now? Did she go outside and hold his hand? Carry on like nothing happened? Just leave? Either way she had to show her face. She flattened her hair down in Fraser’s mirror, just to check she didn’t look too bed-head, and opened the door.

‘Hi, Melody.’ She smiled, apologetically. ‘So sorry about the mess and I’m mortified about the wine, I mean obviously we’ll replace it, and more …’

Melody waved her hands about, embarrassed. Mia was embarrassed. This was so embarrassing.

‘So, er … right, I need a waz.’ Fraser excused himself, and Norm smirked at his friend. He knew that look, the look of a man in deep trouble.

Melody looked at Norm, shame-faced, and stuck her bottom lip out. ‘Oh, God, Mia’s going to think I’m a dragon now.’

Norm laughed. ‘No, she doesn’t.’

‘No, I don’t at all,’ said Mia, following them downstairs. ‘I’m just mortified about the wine, I didn’t know about the wine. I mean, I’m not blaming Fraser as such, but I should have checked …’

‘Mia, honestly …’ Melody was in the kitchen now, bottom in air, making a start on the tidying up. ‘I wouldn’t mind normally, it’s just he’s not in my good books as it is. I had a dinner party a few weeks ago – I cooked moussaka funnily enough – and Fraser, as well as embarrassing me in front of my mates by taking virtually all his clothes off and dancing around in the kitchen with a colander on his head …’

Mia tried not to laugh

‘… then proceeded to get off with a very good mate of mine, drink loads of my wine and then chuck her after three dates. She was DEVASTATED.’

‘He shagged her in the bath, too,’ added Norm, who was sitting quietly in the living room rolling a fag. ‘Dirty bugger.’

Mia’s stomach plummeted. She didn’t know what to say, she knew she just had an overwhelming desire to get the hell out of there.

‘So, anyway,’ said Melody, turning around, cloth in hand, ‘Needless to say, she is now “Sara Moussaka”.’

Well, I am not going to be Mia Moussaka, thought Mia. Mia Moussaka I am not.

Fraser came downstairs and grabbed his coat from the banister.

‘Right, so shall we go to the offy?’ he said, smiling at Mia. ‘Get some more wine?’

Why did he have to be so bloody sexy?

‘Um, actually, look I’ve got to go now… . It’s later than I thought.’

She didn’t look up but she thought she heard a short exhalation of disbelief, or was it disappointment?

‘I’m already way too drunk. But here, here’s some money towards it.’

She reached inside her coat pocket for her purse and handed him a fiver.

‘But thanks for the moussaka!’ And she made for the door.

Venice in May and Mia has never in her life seen anything as jaw-droppingly beautiful. Right at this moment – 10.30 a.m. on a cloudless morning – she, Melody and Anna are reclined on the seats of a gondola, shaded by the crumbling terracotta houses on either side, the water lapping as Lorenzo, their gondolier, navigates the narrow emerald straits of the Grand Canal, which occasionally open up into glittering lagoons.

Mia put a lot of thought into her wardrobe for her first-ever trip away from Billy and now feels a sudden surge of pleasure, so rare these days when it comes to clothes, that what she had in her mind’s eye – Italian Riviera, circa 1955 – has actually been realized, and that her ensemble of cropped white trousers, sheer blouse tied at the waist and gold-rimmed Ray-Bans – albeit £4.99 fake ones from Lancaster market – could not be more perfect for the occasion. For the first time in her post-baby life, she has achieved fashion Nirvana.

She slips down further in the gondola, tipping her head towards the fierce blue, Venetian sky, and thinks about Fraser and Norm, wondering if they too are under an unforgiving sky right now, the one that lays bare the Nevada Desert. Mia has never been to the Nevada Desert, but she imagines those two, lost in the middle of a red, dry expanse; sweating, fretful, probably intoxicated, and she smiles to herself.

(Actually, as fate would have it, they’re also in a gondola, only theirs is electronic and drifting down a different Grand Canal – the fake one on the second floor of the ‘Venetian’ Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas strip, an ostentatious monstrosity where they have spent all evening and most of the afternoon drinking Jack Daniel’s because, you know, that’s what you do in Vegas, and are now (Mia got this bit right, at least) well on their way to being impressively drunk.)

When Mia pulled Number Eight on Liv’s List out of the hat:
Go to Venice, properly this time, and
have a bellini at Harry’s Bar
,
she thought this was one they could all do together, a trip to Venice! Just like old times! All the girls had been in 2001 when they were InterRailing (just saying that word these days made her feel ancient), although ‘been’ was a loose description by anyone’s standards, since they’d got off the train, gone on a gondola, eaten some extortionate spag bol at a place just off St Mark’s Square, then got on the train again, considering they’d ‘done’ Venice, and moved on to Pisa to take pictures of themselves holding up the leaning tower.

Maybe this time they could do it properly, then. Like old times only better. Although, as Anna had pointed out, or rather snapped in front of everyone, nothing would ever be like ‘old times’, which made Mia blush because she was well aware of this, of course she bloody well was. These were new times, brave (perhaps not-so-brave in her case) post-Liv times. Everything had changed.

‘Why do you want the boys to come anyway?’ Anna had said with a face like she was sucking on a lemon. ‘Can’t we do anything on our own any more? Just us girls go on holiday?’

Lately, Anna – beautiful, passionate, reckless Anna – often had a face like she was sucking on a lemon and Mia has begun to wonder if this is about to set, bitter at twenty-nine. ‘Course we can,’ said Mia, suddenly humiliated, ‘it was just an idea.’
And so it was decided that they’d go on a girls’ weekend to Venice whilst the boys would go to Vegas to fulfil one of the tasks Norm had pulled out (
Vegas, baby!
). For once in his life, Norm had seriously lucked out.

Still, she was determined to enjoy herself, to make this a tribute to Liv. So far, she knew she’d approve: Prosecco for breakfast, on a gondola before midday …

‘Right, well,’ she says, ‘all we need now is one Cornetto.’

‘Mm, preferably a strawberry one served by him,’ says Melody, nodding towards Lorenzo, who has his back to them, and is wearing the obligatory gondolier strip of striped top and straw boater. ‘Honestly, will you just look at that sensational butt?’

Mia and Anna both look at one another, Anna from over the top of her
Buddhism for Life
manual, which she bought at the airport as part of her recently emerged lifelong passion for Buddhism.

Since they arrived, late yesterday evening, Melody has taken to making these bizarre, oversexualized comments using words like ‘butt’ and ‘sensational’, as if merely being in the country of romance and love has suddenly turned her into a bitch on heat. Or Joan Rivers.

Mia wouldn’t mind – hell, this holiday feels all about reinvention, and if she’s going to fancy herself as a 1950s film star, then Melody can be Joan Rivers – but it’s just that it’s so out of character. Melody has only ever had eyes for Norm, surely, and, as Norm’s mate, Mia finds herself wincing, wanting to shout, ‘Oi!!’ every time Melody comments on some waiter’s ‘ass’. It makes her sad because it’s just another sign, one of many in the last few months, that all is not well between the couple everyone thought were going to be forever together, and if Norm and Melody, college sweethearts, don’t make it, what hope is there for everyone else?