How We Met

Fraser laughed, properly, for what felt like the first time in ages, and once again felt a rush of gratitude that his friend was here, that he wasn’t alone.

‘Anyway, he’d been at it, nonstop all weekend. It was round about the time of Liv’s anniversary last year and I was desperate to have just twenty minutes on my own, so I took him round there in desperation, practically chucked him in her doorway like a rugby ball. She’s stone deaf anyway, so an ideal child-minder.’

They both laughed.

‘Anyway, as I was saying …’ said Fraser. Mia could see he was eager to get back to his point. ‘You know last night when I was in that taxi? I’d fucked up, I was hungover, nearly an hour late because the stupid train didn’t stop at Preston and you know what? I blamed Liv. I actually believed,’ he said, enunciating his words as if this was the most preposterous idea ever, ‘that she was stirring things up from heaven, having a laugh at me. At one point, I said out loud in the taxi – the taxi driver had his screen up so he didn’t hear: ‘“Right, enough now, Olivia, you’re not funny any more.”’

Mia smirked with recognition. On the day of the funeral, all sorts of nonsense had gone on, and she’d said the very same thing. For starters, in one of those ‘you couldn’t make it up’ moments, the night before, Eduardo had been walking home from the pub, fallen through an open trap door in the street, into the beer cellar of a pub, and broken his leg, so didn’t even make it to the funeral. Then the battery of Mia’s car was found to be flat for no apparent reason and she’d had to get a lift with Fraser instead. Yeah, that was Liv, always the practical joker. But that was the day of the funeral, that was eighteen months ago. The most strange and dark day – like a scene in a film: she still couldn’t believe it had actually happened.

She said, ‘But that’s kind of nice, isn’t it? To feel she’s still with us? The Olivia Jenkins effect?’

‘Yeah, but I’m finding myself blaming her for loads of stuff,’ Fraser said. ‘How I feel, what I do – or don’t do, which is more to the point. But it’s not her fault, is it?’ he continued. ‘None of this: how I feel, how you feel, the total pig’s ear I seem to be making of my life – it’s not her fault she left us, is it? Or …’

He stopped.

‘Or what?’ said Mia.

‘Nothing. You know.’

‘Fraser, you have to give that up, seriously.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’

‘I know it’s hard – I think about it too – but it’s really unhealthy. Plus,’ she leant over to check on Billy who had fallen asleep, his head lolling to the side, ‘it’s bollocks and it’s irrelevant.’

Fraser didn’t say anything.

‘Isn’t it?’ she said again, peering into Billy’s buggy. ‘It’s irrelevant?’

‘Yeah, guess so. Survivors’ guilt and all that. And anyway, it changes nothing.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mia. ‘So, no, it’s not her fault, Fraser. The wallpaper in your lounge is her fault and the fact we saw in the new Millennium in a queue for a kebab, but nothing else.’

Fraser rolled his eyes.

‘You’ve never forgiven her for that, have you?’

‘Nope and I never shall,’ she said, a twinkle in her eye to tell him she didn’t mean it.

She watched him as he drank his coffee in the crisp, winter sun, feet up on the chair – he could look like someone enjoying après-ski if he didn’t look so shocking. His hair had obviously not been washed for days so that the waves clung together in a greasy mess, gathering in an unsightly duck’s arse at the nape of his neck. His skin had a deathly pallor today and definitely lacked the elasticity a man barely turned thirty should possess. But she couldn’t deny, he was attractive too. Or appealing, maybe that’s what it was. Whatever it was, Mia found herself inexorably drawn to his face. Maybe it was the symmetry thing she was always reading about in the vacuous magazines she liked to numb her brain further with after Billy had gone to bed. Maybe he looked like her dad – not that she knew what her dad looked like.

There was something real about him, something, what was it …? Northern, perhaps? He certainly didn’t look like the Home Counties rugger-buggers she’d been to school with, or even the artsy lot with their foppish hair and ‘ironic’ jumpers. No, he was definitely more real than that. You’d never cast him in a Richard Curtis romcom, she thought, but maybe a Mike Leigh.

He had charm rather than being beautiful or ruggedly handsome, or even particularly good-looking, now she came to think of it. Thick, darkish hair that had a nice, almost wartime wave to it when he actually washed it. Blue, almond-shaped eyes – his best feature – if it weren’t for the fact they were half blind, but he never got round to getting his eyes tested, meaning he was permanently squinting. This often got misread as a scowl by people who didn’t know him, which was something Mia thought was a great shame and easily remedied, but Fraser seemed to prefer to go through life with impaired vision.

He had a cute, sort of squishy nose, which was scattered with freckles and, she noted today, broken capillaries, hinting at the excessive drinking he’d been doing of late. A nice mouth. The teeth a bit discoloured after a long and intense affair with Silk Cut, but a nice mouth all the same, with expressive lips. This morning, sporting a shocker of a coldsore.

‘What?’ said Fraser suddenly.

‘What?’ She came to. ‘Nothing. You’ve got a coleslaw, that’s all.’

He smiled – that’s what Liv always called them – and put his finger to it, self-consciously. ‘I know. I started with it last night.’

‘You make it sound like labour and don’t touch it! You’ll spread herpes all over your face.’

Fraser tutted.

‘Anyway, I was just thinking,’ she continued, ‘about what you said, about Liv having a laugh at you. I mean, besides it being a bit morbid, why would she want to have a laugh at you? She loved you.’

Fraser took a deep breath; there was no point dragging this out any longer, it was killing him. He covered his face. ‘Oh, God, I slept with someone.’

Fraser didn’t know what he expected Mia’s reaction would be, but three small words that conveyed neither sense nor feeling, and a face like he’d just told her he had a fungal infection, wasn’t really it.

‘What? Oh. Eeeew …’ She was actually recoiling, screwing her face up.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.

Mia didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean. They were just the first noises that came out of her mouth.

‘Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just … God, OK.’ Something strange was happening to her facial muscles and her voice but there seemed little she could do about it. She attempted to smile. ‘So who was it?’ she slapped her knees with her palms. ‘Come on!’

‘Karen,’ said Fraser.

‘Karen?’

‘Yes, you know, Karen from the Bull.’

A cruel ‘Ha!’ escaped from Mia’s mouth. That didn’t seem like something she could help either. ‘What? The really old one who looks like Ness from Gavin and Stacey?’

‘She’s not really old, she’s forty-two.’

Mia felt her eyebrows rise involuntarily and put them back, sharpish.

‘And she looks nothing like Ness from Gavin and Stacey.’

‘She so does!’ Rein it in, rein it in. ‘A bit. I mean in that she’s got dark hair and she’s, you know … curvy …’ REIN. IT. IN.

‘You mean fat.’

‘I did NOT say fat, you did. Also, she’s …’

Fraser cocked his head.

‘What? Easy. Bit of a slapper?’

‘I did NOT say slapper, you did! No, I was going to say bubbly, actually.’

‘Bubbly,’ said Fraser, flatly.

‘Yes, bubbly. You know, outgoing, chatty …?’

‘Mmm,’ said Fraser, unconvinced. ‘Anyway, crucially, she’s not Welsh, she’s from Hull.’

There was a long and sudden pause.

‘Well, I’m sure she’s very nice,’ Mia said, eventually.

‘She is and she’s got a very pretty face.’

‘Well, we all know what that means.’

Fraser’s mouth dropped open.

‘Oh, Fraser. It was a joke!’

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Fraser was confused and yet he wasn’t even sure what he was confused about; he just knew he’d expected a proper discussion or even a motherly telling off about one thing – i.e. the fact he’d slept with someone, anyone, the night before Liv’s reunion – and he’d got something else entirely.

‘I just think it’s a bit disrespectful,’ Mia blurted out when she’d tucked Billy in as much as she could and the silence was getting too much. ‘Not just to Liv but to Karen. I mean it’s not like you intend to see her again, is it?’

Fraser felt sick. What was it about girls that meant they could always do that? Psychologically strip you in a flash – it really pissed him off. This was exactly how he felt, exactly what was driving his guilt, but still, the way this whole conversation was going … it was making him defensive.

‘I was drunk,’ he said. ‘I was pissed. I didn’t know what I was doing, did I? And she’s been really good to me. She’s a nice person.’

Mia looked at him. ‘But you don’t fancy her.’

‘I don’t not fancy her.’ Fraser was getting more agitated. ‘Anyway, what’s with the double standards?’ This was another thing girls did that really got his goat. Double standards, left, right and centre. ‘I mean look at you and Eduardo. He’s such a tit, Mia, he lets you and Billy down constantly and yet you still let him sleep on your settee.’ He jabbed a finger in her direction. ‘And I bet it’s not your settee every time, young lady.’

Mia fidgeted uncomfortably – how could he possibly have deduced that when all she ever did was slag Eduardo off? He was far more perceptive than she gave him credit for. Still, she was riled now. She hardly thought him sleeping with Karen and her letting Eduardo – the father of her child – stay over now and again were quite the same thing.

‘Fraser, it is actually quite hard on my own, you know. Really bloody hard, actually.’ She hated doing the poor single mother thing, but she was really hacked off now. ‘If I had the luxury of being able to wipe Eduardo from my life, then I would, course I would, but, as it happens, I rely on every scrap of support and help I can get.’

‘Oh, God, look, I’m sorry,’ said Fraser, getting up. ‘I’m going for a fag.’

‘I thought you’d stopped,’ Mia called after him.

‘I started again.’

Fraser walked around the front of the café and leant against its façade, cupping his hands to light his cigarette. Well, that went well. Clearly, he’d been deluded to think Mia would ease his guilt – she’d basically just made him feel worse! And the awful thing was, she was the most objective and reasonable of the group (except Norm perhaps. Norm was Switzerland. But that was more down to being stoned than any political decision to remain neutral.) If she thought what he’d done was bad, there was no hope for everyone else. And yet, it had to happen some time, didn’t it? Presumably, he couldn’t swear himself to celibacy all his life? Become a monk, one of those shaven-headed ‘Tibetan’ ones he often saw in Lancaster town centre, who weren’t Tibetan at all; more ex-drug dealers from Skerton – Lancaster’s answer to Moss Side – who wanted to turn their life around and still spent all day hanging outside Greggs, waiting for food handouts. Presumably, he had to get laid some time? Surely, Liv would have wanted that? Wouldn’t she? He didn’t know any more.

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 15TH, 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!’

FIVE

April

London

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?