How We Met (31 page)

In the passenger seat, Mia looked out of the window, watched as the familiar urban landscape turned into fields and sheep and villages, and smiled to herself. She knew it was not vital for her to accompany Fraser on this mission to find Melody and that – if they were honest – they were camping up the probability of her being drowned in Lake Windermere or stranded on top of a mountain somewhere (she was far too sensible, too ‘daughter of an army major’ for that sort of behaviour), possibly to facilitate their going in the first place, and that she was probably fine.

Of course she was concerned, up to a point, but she knew Fraser was more than capable of going to help Norm himself. But no, he had gone twenty minutes out of his way to pick her up from her door and, right now, she couldn’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be than in a car with Fraser Morgan.

They finally got back on the motorway, the sun just red, smoky wisps on the horizon. Mia tried to get comfy but was struggling to move her feet among the Coke cans, the empty crisp packets, the landfill that was Fraser’s car.

‘I see you’ve kept the Elegance in good shape,’ she said.

The ‘Elegance’ was the model name, streaked in Eighties Flashdance font on the side of Fraser’s Vauxhall Corsa, a car he’d bought shortly after Liv died. T
hey had derived great amusement from this name when they had gone together to pick it up from some redneck in Tottenham Hale.

‘Do not knock the Elegance: she will take you in five-star comfort wherever you want to go.’

They drove on.

‘So, anyway, how did the Latino Stallion take it then?’ said Fraser.

Mia frowned. ‘Take what?’

‘Eduardo, how did he take it you coming with me tonight? You know how Eduardo loves me.’ He knew he was fishing dangerously, but he didn’t really care.

Mia badly
wanted to tell him the truth; she wanted to spew her metaphorical guts. She wanted to tell him how Eduardo was patronizing and cantankerous, how he sloped about HER flat telling her how to live her life and feed her son but gave her hardly any money for the privilege. She wanted to tell him how, when she’d told him Fraser was coming to pick her up, he’d practically spat in his pasta, accusing her of dropping everything if Fraser called.

However, she had had months of listening to the details of Fraser’s boring cohabitation: the weddings and the travelling the length and breadth of the country to make eBay collections and the times he had to go from their phone calls because they were ‘cooking together’. She was damned if she wasn’t going to have at least a short period of smugness.

‘Actually, he was really good about it.’

Fraser blew air sharply through his nostrils, knowing, categorically, this not to be the case.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, he knew this was about Melody and Norm, about my friends, about the List.’

In truth, Eduardo despises the List. Eduardo thinks the List is just a schoolboy construct by Fraser; an excuse for all her little cronies – ‘Liv’s Disciples’ – to spend yet more clique time together.

‘I felt a bit sorry for him actually,’ said Mia, laying it on possibly a little too thick. ‘He’d just made me this beautiful meal of homemade pasta; then you rang, the minute it was ready to be served.
Honestly!
’

She looked at him and smiled.

‘Ah, domestic cohabiting bliss,’ he said.

‘Oh, now, how the tables have turned!’ said Mia. She was being ungenerous but she didn’t really care. ‘How
is
single life treating you, Fraser?’

Fraser thought about this. He could tell her the truth; he could tell her how he hates it, how he is back living with the awful empty feeling as soon as he puts the key in the door. He could tell her how in the last few weeks, he was still occasionally sleeping with Karen when she turned up at his door, lonely and with wine, because he is weak and because she insists she maybe overreacted about the List and that she’s cool ‘with them having no labels’, which Fraser knows to be bollocks, deep down.

He could tell Mia how, despite his letter and good intentions, he still feels guilty about that night and the kiss. He still feels guilty about pretty much everything in his life, but that there is a growing realization that he’s sitting with the right person, right now, and that there’s nobody else he loves just being in a car with, and how his mood lifted, instantly, the second she got in next to him, but that he is too scared to ever take that plunge and that, left to him, he will eternally wuss out.

‘Do you know what? Actually, I love it,’ he says.

Mia laughed once. ‘Oh?’

‘I think it’s good for me.’

‘Really? Is that so?’

‘Yeah, you know, time on my own, not having to listen to the sound of industrial tape being torn next door, not having to go and meet her boring friends all the time, propping the bar up at the Bull, being able to listen to music I like now, not Enya. Fucking Enya. God, if I ever have to listen to Enya again, I will combust,’ and he laughs, somewhat hysterically.

Mia laughs too. ‘Well, she did, you know, have dolphins painted on her fingernails, Fraser; what do you expect?’

That’s enough, don’t go too far
,
she thinks to herself, but she can’t seem to help it.

‘And you didn’t seem to talk to one another much – at Billy’s birthday, for example?’

Fraser looks at her, amused. ‘Were you watching us?’

‘No!’

He raises his eyebrows at her in the wing mirror.

‘Are you
jealous
, Mia Woodhouse?’

Mia did her best outraged laugh. ‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’

‘Because it sounds like the green-eyed monster to me …’

She punched him on the leg. ‘I am very happy with Eduardo, thanks very much.’

‘Well, that’s good then.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Good for you.’

She huffs, looks out of the window. ‘Yes, good for me.’

It was a blessed relief when Fraser’s phone went and they both leapt to it.

‘I’ll get it,’ said Mia. ‘You’re driving. Hello? Norm?’

‘It’s not Norm, it’s me, Melody.’

‘Melody, thank God! Where are you?’

Melody sounded eerily composed.

‘I’m OK. It’s stunning here, actually. I’m sitting by Rydal Water. I’m perfectly fine. I just don’t know how to get back, that’s all.’

She was right about one thing, it was utterly stunning. When they finally found her, after a hair-raising 60
m.p.h. drive through higgledly-piggeldy lanes in the pitch-black, she was sitting on a rock, shivering uncontrollably in the Chinese dressing gown, before a mirror-still lake, the mountains reflected into it, huge and black.

Fraser stayed in the car and Mia walked, her feet crunching across stones, towards her friend.

‘Melody, shit, we were worried about you.’ Her voice echoed in the open space. ‘We thought you would be back at the hotel.’

Melody looked up and smiled, whimsically, at her. ‘I was just enjoying the view,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

Mia sat down beside her, took off her coat and wrapped it around her friend’s shoulders. There was the smell of burning wood and fresh water and she thought, how did it come to this? How did it come to her friend, shivering, alone in the middle of the Lake District?

‘What’s going on, Melody?’ she said.

Melody lay her head on Mia’s shoulder. There was a long pause.

‘You know, I was just thinking,’ she said, eventually, ‘just reminiscing before you got here.’ Mia saw that Melody had an open bottle of wine in her hand; she took it and took a slug. ‘I was thinking of what you said when we met in the park the other day, about me and Norm and the South Road days. It was funny, because I’d forgotten about all that, about the strawberries in the shower and Sade – “Your love is king …”’ She began to sing, drunkenly swaying, her breath smoking in the air. ‘“Drowning in my heart …”’

‘“Your wish is here”,’ Mia joined in. ‘“Ruler of my heart!”’ Until t
hey both petered out with nervous laughter.

They were silent for a while. It was so quiet, they could hear when a fish came up for air, see the rings of water it made. In the distance, Mia could just make out cars on the road that ran round the base of the mountains, so small, they looked like toys.

‘Norm was my first true love,’ said Melody, finally, her voice cracking. ‘I didn’t realize how lucky I was, how intense it was. I just assumed everyone’s relationship was like that. But it wasn’t.’

‘No,’ says Mia, putting her arm around her. ‘It wasn’t. You’re dead right there.’

‘I never worried about the future, about growing older or things changing, I just thought it would be like that forever. That he was the one.’

‘Everyone thought that,’ said Mia. ‘You were the It couple.’

Melody smiled, took the bottle of wine from Mia and took a big gulp.

‘You know, the day I married him was the best day of my life.’ She laughed, quietly. ‘I know everyone says that, but it absolutely was. I thought that was it, I’d never have to worry about anything. It would be me and Norm forever, and we’d have a couple of kids, live in our lovely house in Lancaster and everything would be sorted. And we were good, you know, we were OK. And then Liv died.’

She looked at Mia. Her eyes large and tear-filled.

‘And?’

‘And then everything changed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I haven’t told anyone this,’ she continued, ‘but Norm has been sad ever since; so sad, Mia, he distanced himself from me from that day.’ She started to cry. ‘Did you know he has practically a shrine to her in our house?’

Mia frowned. ‘Really, what do you mean?’

‘In the corner of our loft room, he has a little area with photos and trinkets, tickets from the Green Day concerts they went to together, this photo of a day out in Heysham they went on together, I don’t think I even remember them going. Of course, I accepted it. She was my friend too and I loved her, I
still
love her, I miss her so much, but Norm never seemed to recover. He went further and further away from me. We haven’t had sex in six months. I just didn’t feel he wanted me any more, that he didn’t even love me any more and I want a baby, Mia. I’m thirty next year. We’ve been married three years and he won’t even talk about it. I thought this weekend we could, you know … it’s such a beautiful setting …’

Remembering what Norm said to her, Mia bit her lip.

‘I thought … Oh, God …’ And she sobbed into Mia’s shoulder.

‘Promise you won’t tell anyone? Anna or Fraser?’

‘No, no, darling.’ Mia stroked the hair away from her face. ‘Of course I won’t tell anyone.’

‘Good, because I feel so stupid, but basically, the reason I booked this weekend so far in advance was because I was ovulating. God! It sounds insane when I say it out loud like that, doesn’t it?’

‘I hardly think you’d be the first woman in the world to book a romantic weekend away at a time when you thought you could get pregnant.’

Melody laughed. ‘I know, but it wasn’t a romantic weekend away, was it? It was supposed to be a sexy weekend away and there was I, after we’d done it, lying with my legs in the air.’

Mia swallowed.

Christ, Norm had predicted everything.

‘He came out of the toilet, and he asked me what I was doing. His face was horrified; he was actually
horrified
at the prospect of us having a child together. It all came out, the fact I’d come off the pill, I was trying to ‘trick’ him, apparently.

Mia couldn’t help but think that that
was
perhaps tricking him a little, but then she couldn’t talk, she was the scarlet woman of Lancaster, reckless and up the duff by the man who, really, was just her summer fling.

‘We had the most almighty row. I mean astronomical. I chucked all the bedding out of the window, Mia. I chucked a lamp at him, cut his head! I mean, God knows what the other guests must have thought, they must have heard it all.’

Mia didn’t know what to say. All these young couples in their twenties and their thirties, in their cosy flats and their boutique hotel rooms – were
any
of them having any fun?

Melody gave a huge sob.

‘Sssh,’ said Mia, rubbing her back, ‘come on, it’s not that bad.’

‘And do you know the worst thing?’ said Melody. ‘My voice-activated vibrator ran out of batteries, started making this whirring noise, like there was someone dying in our room. A fucking death rattle, in our room!’

There was nothing they could do but laugh.

After much persuasion, Mia eventually got Melody to walk back to Fraser’s car and back to the hotel, where Norm was waiting, Fraser having told him the news that Melody had been found alive and well.

Norm was sitting in front of the fire in the hotel lounge, turning a single malt whisky round in his hands, every inch the cross, righteous Victorian husband with the mad, hysterical wife who had just wasted an evening of his life. There was an awful pause, during which Mia and Fraser looked at one another, willing Norm to at least get up and give Melody a hug, but he didn’t move. Eventually, Melody gave him a cursory peck on the cheek. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said, ‘and I’m going to bed.’

People watched as she walked through the lounge in the dressing gown and Norm’s trainers.

‘I think I’ll follow her,’ said Norm getting up
. The atmosphere, thought Mia, was one of a party gone terribly wrong. Then he embraced both of them so that their heads were touching. ‘Thanks for being my best friends in the world,’ he said, choking on his words, drunk and overly sentimental. ‘But you can’t save this one …’ And then he kissed them both lightly on the head, turned and left for bed.

They both stood in the middle of the hotel lounge, a chintzy drawing-room affair with thick floral curtains and an open fire, and realized suddenly that the only sound was the crackling of burning wood. Everyone seemed to have their head buried in a book or a newspaper, trying desperately not to look at the two new arrivals, associates, no doubt, of this weekend’s hell-raisers.