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Karen leant over, pecked him on the cheek and got out of bed.
Fraser turned his head, very slowly. Ow, that killed. Why did his neck hurt? Just in time to see what was – it had to be said – a rather sizeable arse disappear round his bedroom door.
Thank fuck for that. Fraser turned onto his back, pulled the duvet over his head and let out the breath he’d been holding since he woke up. GOD he felt tragic. His heart was palpitating, his head throbbing as he tried to piece together the events of last night. It was all very vague, involving beer, wine, tequila and, at one point, her showing him her yogic headstands, which he’d then tried too, before breaking the coffee table, and very nearly his neck. Oh, that’s why his neck hurt.
He vaguely remembered coming to his senses for one brief moment after that – must have been the rush of blood to the head – to say to her, ‘Come on, you don’t want to go to bed with some drunken stranger …’ just as she was removing her blouse (he’d noted with some alarm that that was definitely what you’d call a blouse). But she’d just sat on his bed in the white bra that Fraser imagined he could fit his head into and said: ‘Oh, I think I do.’
So at least he’d made some effort to avoid this. However, the fact remained that he’d slept with her. He’d slept with Karen from behind the bar of the Bull – was this really the end of the world? She wasn’t a horror story; in fact she was a perfectly lovely girl. God knows, she’d scraped him off the floor of that pub enough times in the past eighteen months, chucked him in a cab well past closing time after another night of him drowning his sorrows and talking shit to whoever he could find in there – mainly her.
But she was also forty-two. Shitting hell, forty-two! That was practically middle-aged. Old enough to be his mother in some parts of her home town of Hull, Fraser felt sure. As old as … Fiona Bruce.
He winced as he remembered a conversation – the bit where she’d asked him how old he thought she was and he’d said (thinking he was being flattering, this was before beer goggles took over and he’d even considered doing anything with a woman in her forties), ‘Don’t know, Forty-two? Forty-three?’ And she’d blinked at him and said, ‘Forty-two,’ which was followed by a nasty silence before he moved swiftly onto … DOLPHINS! Oh, God, how could he forget the dolphins? Karen from the Bull had two-inch nails with dolphins painted on them. Was this a normal girl thing to do and he’d just never seen it before?
He winced again as bits of that particular conversation also came back to him: her telling him she’d adopted a dolphin from a sanctuary in Florida, that this dolphin was like the baby she’d never had, and he, in an effort to appear interested and engaged, telling her he once swam with dolphins in Zanzibar. Which was a lie. A pointless, outright lie. He’d never even been to Zanzibar. Why the fuck had he said that?
Oh, God, she was back now, padding towards the bed, naked except for a pair of lacy, black knickers that had largely disappeared up her behind and clutching her massive, Christ, GIGANTIC breasts. Fraser sat up, pulled the duvet right up to his chin and arranged himself in the most asexual, un-come-to-bed position he could muster. But she got in anyway, so he moved right up against the wall.
‘So,’ he said, brightly. ‘Coffee?’
Brilliant. There was no better feeling, decided Mia, ten minutes later, than sitting down with a half of Carling and a baby still asleep – even if it was minus five and blowing a gale. This is how she got through the week, these days, by finding the odd little pocket of time to herself and guarding it with her life. At least there was that about being a single mother – you really got to appreciate your own time. What on earth had she done with it all before she had a baby? Work and drink she imagined. And lots of face-packs.
Sometimes, Mia dreamt of her old life, before she’d moved in with Eduardo in Acton – not one of her better ideas – and Liv had moved in with Fraser to start her new teaching job in Camden, when she, Liv and Anna had shared a flat in Clapham and she was working all hours God sent for Primal Films as an art department assistant.
She’d wake up when it was still dark, thinking she was back in her old bedroom on the Ikea futon and that she had ten minutes to chuck on some clothes before jumping in the car and driving through the silent city to Shepperton Studios for another thirteen-hour day. She’d loved those days. She loved the exhaustion she’d felt, an excited kind of exhaustion, totally different to the tiredness that comes with motherhood.
Barely conscious, she’d then imagine the noise she could hear was Liv and Anna making a racket downstairs in their gloomy Victorian kitchen with the huge table all six of them had spent so many hours drinking at. Then she’d come to, realize it was Billy crying and that it was just the two of them, alone in their boxy new-build flat in Lancaster with its woodchip and ubiquitous laminate.
Still, things had improved lately. Yes, definitely, things had improved. She still wondered occasionally if her son didn’t rate her that much, or wasn’t that impressed with the whole set-up, really, what with it being just the two of them in a poky flat and a dad who only turned up when he felt like it.
She still didn’t really know how to talk to him and found herself stuck for words when it was just him and her. She marvelled at mothers who seemed to be able to coochie-coo so naturally in public, whereas she just felt like a dick a lot of the time. Then Billy would get that look of wounded entitlement on his face as if to say, ‘Seriously, is this all you’ve got?’ And she’d wonder if she was really cut out for this motherhood thing at all.
But at least the panic had gone. She didn’t worry about him dying every night any more, which was something, and now Melody and Norm had moved back up North to Lancaster, they sometimes offered to help, which was really sweet, even if Melody drove her mad by suggesting single motherhood was somehow ‘romantic’, that Mia was like J. K. Rowling, writing an award-winning film script in a freezing cold flat she couldn’t afford to heat, when in reality she wasn’t writing anything at all, was reading OK! magazine and tucking into the wine in a flat she couldn’t afford to heat and feeling thoroughly guilty that her brain was probably half dead by now.
Mia put her hood up, took a sip of her lager and took her mobile out of her pocket so she could text Fraser to see if he was still on track for tonight, and check he was surviving the day so far. When she looked at her phone, however, there was a text from Anna:
was at a party in Kidderminster last night so there’s a SMALL chance I might be late but WILL BE THERE I promise. Start without me.
Spanner x
Mia rolled her eyes; she knew ‘a SMALL chance’ translated as ‘am still in Kidderminster and will be two hours late’, and composed her message to Fraser, wondering whether she had time for another rollie.
Then her mobile went. It was Eduardo. Her heart sank. Do not do this to me, she thought. Please, please, do not do this to me. Not tonight. To add insult to injury, him calling had also woken Billy.
She picked up.
‘Hi, Eduardo.’
‘It’s me.’
‘I gathered that.’
She told herself to keep the tone neutral, but it was hard – so very, very hard.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
Oh, fuck off, she wanted to say. Why did he always have to use that accusatory tone?
‘Nothing’s “going on”.’
‘Why is Billy crying then?’
Because I’m strangling him, what the hell?! He was a baby. Babies cried. He’d know that if he spent any time with one.
‘Where are you?’ said Eduardo, sharply, before she had time to answer.
‘At the pub.’
He snorted.
‘The pub?’
Yes. We’re having a pint – three in fact – and we might follow that with a tequila chaser. She thought better of it. She wasn’t in a position to piss Eduardo off. She needed him, that was the most galling thing of all.
Eduardo sighed, in that martyred way he did. She knew just from that sigh what was coming next.
‘Anyway, look Mimi …’
Mimi? Stop calling me bloody Mimi.
‘… work have just called and—’
‘Er, NO.’ Mia felt the rage rise like bile in her chest. ‘Come on, Eduardo, you are not doing this to me.’
Billy was wailing now, rubbing his eyes. Mia pushed the buggy back and forth.
‘You know how important tonight is, what day it is today, you’ve known for ages.’
Silence.
‘Mia, this is not about choice, is it?’
She hated how he did that. Always put ‘is it?’ on the end of everything, so subtle and yet so successful in making her doubt herself. ‘I need the money. I’m late on my rent, I’m fucking desperate here, I don’t have the luxury—’
Luxury? HA! Don’t fucking talk to me about luxury, thought Mia, you total lying, manipulative bastard, but she stood there, the wind howling, Billy crying now, and she knew it was pointless.
‘Whatever, Eduardo,’ she said. ‘I can’t be arsed any more. Go. You go to work.’
Then she hung up, tears of frustration already running down her face. And what she really wanted to do was to call her best friend, but of course she couldn’t.
Where were those fags? He could have sworn he’d hidden a couple in here. Fraser was now in his freezing kitchen, rummaging futilely in the kitchen drawer in his dressing gown. The fridge. Maybe he’d put them on top of the fridge? Right at the back so he wouldn’t be tempted but they’d still be there, just in case of real emergencies like this one he was currently facing, a moment of true, genuine need.
He patted his hands on top but couldn’t feel anything. Perhaps they’d fallen down the back? He steadied his feet and wrapped his arms around the fridge to move it, giving it an enormous hug, relishing the coolness against his hot, toxic skin, thinking maybe it would be nice just to stay here for a few minutes, just him and the fridge in their cool embrace. He pulled and pulled but he was too weak, too sleep-deprived, too fucking hungover to manage it. When he finally let go, the door flew open and a cucumber shot out, hitting him on the chest like a missile.
He gave up, leant against the kitchen worktop, breathless, his head pounding, thinking what to do next. Maybe he could go to the corner shop for cigarettes? Then just do a runner? Just not come back! Ah, that only really worked when you were in someone else’s house though, didn’t it?
Fuck it. Fuck it, you moron.
He was giving himself a talking-to now, firm but sort of kind. He knew who that reminded him of.
He held the heels of his hands to his face, stretching the skin outwards, watching his reflection in the greasy microwave door as if, if he did it for long enough, he might actually be able to escape his own skin. He thought of tonight, of approximately eight hours from now, of walking into the pub to face his mates. God, he wanted to hurl.
What was really bothering Fraser was how comfortable Karen seemed to be in his bed. How happy. No sign of post-bender jitters whatsoever.
If she’d just been some flirty barmaid who’d wanted a bit of sexy time then that would have been fine. Not fine, but finer; he would have felt less guilty. But she liked him, she’d liked him for ages, she’d told him last night. Which was just brilliant, just the absolute best.
He considered his options:
Be nice, go for breakfast with her, ask for her number then never call her. Of course all this meant that he could never drink in the Bull again; or, if he did, he’d have to wear a disguise. He briefly went through how this might work in his head and decided it never would.
Say he was going out (which he was, just not for another four hours but Karen didn’t need to know that …) wait till she was safely out of view then go back to bed. The thought of bed, alone, right now, was amazing. Truly amazing.
Tell her the truth: Say he’s sorry, she’s a lovely girl but he was drunk, he’s still grieving his girlfriend and it should never, ever have happened. Can they be friends?
Fuck that. He didn’t want to be friends!
Anyway, right at this point, all three sounded hideous. Especially the last. He felt sure the last would guarantee tears and the last thing he could handle today – especially today – were tears from a barmaid he barely knew.
Norm. That’s who he wanted right now: simple, unjudgemental, chilled-out Norm. Norm, who he’d known since he was nine.
He took his phone off the side, sank down onto the kitchen floor in his dressing gown and texted him:
So guess who woke up today in bed with Karen from the Bull? What a cock. Head in bits. Need some Norm wisdom.
A reply buzzed immediately:
You cock.
Fraser groaned and half laughed at the same time – he knew Norm didn’t really mean it, that that level of genuine harshness was beyond him.
He texted back:
I know, it’s not normal. Today. Any day but today! What’s wrong with me?
He held the phone in his hand, waiting for a reply, and something caught his eye: the photo of Liv held against the fridge door with a magnet in the shape of a beer bottle. He reached forward and took it in his hand. This was his favourite photo of her. They were at a fancy dress party – Anna’s twenty-third birthday. It was a ‘come as a London Underground Station’ party and Liv had gone as Maida Vale.
‘I simply made myself a veil …!’ she’d said, standing on his front doorstep, in a voice like a posh, wooden TV presenter from the 1970s . It made Fraser giggle even now.
He stared at the photograph. She was wearing her homemade veil and a French maid outfit that revealed her comely thighs – she always had fantastic legs – and which plunged at the neck (her cleavage was pretty fantastic too). She was holding a cocktail with an umbrella in it and standing in a naughty-postcard-type pose, doing an exaggerated wink, her wide mouth half open, revealing her lovely teeth. Liv had the best teeth: big, naturally white teeth with a tiny gap in the middle. That was his favourite bit of her – that little sexy gap. Fraser smoothed out the frayed corners of the photo, kissed it and put it back.
A text from Norm:
Mate, chillax. Nothing’s normal for any of us today. See you at 8 in the Merchants, you oaf. Cuddles and kisses Norm x
Fraser smirked and shook his head. Cuddles and kisses? Norm was such a plonker. Then he stood up, rather too quickly so that the blood rushed to his head and he had to put his head between his knees so he didn’t pass out, climbed the stairs to his bedroom, and prepared to face the music with Karen.
TWO
That evening
Lancaster
Mia walked into the Merchants with Billy at gone eight. For some reason, she was thinking of the film Look Who’s Talking, and winced as she imagined what her son must be thinking now: The pub, twice in one day, Mother, and now for the evening? Classy! And wished so much she could explain without sounding embittered and abandoned. This is what Mia most resented about this whole situation, the opportunities it held for mental behaviour: screaming in the middle of the street at Eduardo, slamming phones down, revenge plots and murderous thoughts. She spent far too much of her time, these days, feeling like a character from Coronation Street.
Of course it pissed her off whenever Eduardo let her down, but tonight felt especially cruel. Although she was not one to drag out self-pity too long, she couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for herself as she pushed Billy past the cosy, candlelit arches, looking for her friends.
This was one night, one night out of the whole year, for remembering her best friend whom she didn’t even have any more, and he thought the customers of Bella Italia needed him more than she did? And she’d had a baby with this man?
She had considered cancelling – there was nobody else she could call to look after Billy, after all, since Melody was coming too – but she was too angry, too sad, too at risk of binge-drinking alone if she stayed in tonight and, anyway, she wanted to come, she had to come. Surely, Bruce, the landlord, would relax the rules on the baby front just this once?
But then perhaps not; not after last year’s reunion, which had been utterly grim. Melody and Anna had drunk far too much, got far too maudlin and ended up literally rocking, clinging onto each other in a sentimental sobbing wreck, people openly gawping at them, and Mia had found herself actually cringing at her friends’ display of grief.
Norm had been unusually quiet – said barely a word, in fact, and spent the entire night at the jukebox putting Green Day on a loop (he and Livs were bonded in their mutual love of Green Day), until he got shouted at to literally ‘fucking change the record!’ by some hard-nut local who Fraser – also steaming drunk – then decided to punch, resulting in two broken fingers and them all getting chucked out.
Through all of this, of course, Mia was four months pregnant with Billy, and sober. She’d tried to reason with them that perhaps that second round of sambucas was not the best idea, that Fraser had had enough to drink, that quite possibly, Liv wouldn’t have wanted him to take a swing at a bloke twice his size on her behalf, but they wouldn’t listen. Of course they wouldn’t listen, they were steaming and Mia had gone home feeling utterly deflated, sure that two broken fingers and a police caution was definitely not how her best friend would want her birthday to be marked.
Also, perhaps due to being pregnant, she felt blocked. She couldn’t let her grief run riot like the rest of them. Everything was too much – life event overload – and even though everyone else had piled back to Melody and Norm’s, she’d gone home to Eduardo (who was still with her at this point, preferring to wait until she was thirty-six weeks pregnant to tell her, actually, this whole baby thing wasn’t really going to work for him …) and lay in bed, staring into the dark.
But tonight was a whole year later, wasn’t it? Their grief was less raw; it would be more of a celebration, a celebration of her life! A chance to reminisce about the good times – so many good times – and a chance to get together. Then she located Melody and Norm at the end of the final tunnel, clearly already in the throes of a row, and her heart sank.
Melody turned dramatically when she saw Mia, who thought, if she were turning into a character from Coronation Street, then her good friend Melody Burgess was fast becoming one from Ally McBeal. All power dressing and courtroom drama.
‘Nobody’s here yet,’ she said, breathily, with what Mia couldn’t help but feel was a slightly staged flick of her hair. ‘Twenty past eight and not a peep out of anyone.’
‘Well, I’m here,’ said Mia, brightly.
‘Right, yes, I suppose so and er … Billy,’ said Melody, somewhat begrudgingly, clocking the buggy, as if Mia had a choice in this matter. Mia gritted her teeth.
Norm groaned. ‘I’ve told her to take a chill-pill,’ he said. ‘I’ve told her this is about Olivia, REMEMBER?’ He fired daggers at Melody, and Mia found herself thinking – not for the first time in the last year: what happened to my friends? Jolly old Norm and Melody? Inseparable. Bonded for years in their love of cider and singing appalling indie anthems on karaoke?
Melody folded her arms indignantly. ‘Well, I’m disgusted, frankly. I mean, Anna’s no surprise but Fraser? Liv was his girlfriend, remember?’
‘I think we do,’ said Mia, in a way that was supposed to be helpful and calm her down but didn’t.
‘So why the fuck isn’t he here then? No phone call, no text, nada!’
‘Um, do you mind putting your foot down, mate?’ Fraser was sitting in the back of a black cab travelling from Preston to Lancaster, jiggling his legs up and down, which he always did when he was nervous. Honestly, what was wrong with these provincial types? No sense of urgency. Liv was doing this, he thought. She knew all about his overactive conscience and she was having a laugh. He imagined her looking down at him now, sweating and toxic and wracked with guilt, and thinking, you muppet, Fraser Morgan. All this guilt for a fumble with a barmaid? Deep down of course, so deep down he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, Fraser Morgan knew this tardiness and stress was entirely of his own making. In fact, the last twenty-four hours were entirely of his own making.
He was supposed to have caught the four o’clock from Euston – which would have got him to Lancaster and the Merchants in plenty of time, but because he was far too nice and far too hungover to put up a fight, he’d somehow become embroiled in a Tarot reading from Karen, which overran (he wasn’t sure how long the average Tarot reading was, but felt sure an hour and a half was overrunning), missed the four o clock, so had to catch the five o’clock, and only realized when he was on the train that it didn’t go further than Preston.
He now felt wretched, having thrown up in the train toilets and fielded three texts from Karen – are you on the train yet? How’s the hangover? He’d finally broken when she’d told him what she was having for tea and switched off his phone.
Still, at least in the end he’d told her the truth; he’d been nothing but a gent. At least there was that.
‘Unfortunately,’ (he was now somewhat regretting the ‘unfortunately’ line. You give these people an inch and they take a mile) ‘I can’t hang out all day because I’m going to a reunion with my university mates – we do it every year.’
All true, nothing but the truth. But even that had backfired when Karen had propped herself up on her elbow, shaken her head slowly and given him that look – the look of love – and said, ‘Do you know what? That doesn’t surprise me one little bit. I can tell that Fraser Morgan is the sort of person who, once he is your friend, is a friend for life, do you know what I mean?’
Oh, Jesus Christ.
‘So this is Ollie. Ollie, these are my friends …’
Fraser practically skidded into the Merchants, locating his mates in the last arch, just as Anna was introducing some new … boyfriend/fuck-buddy/future husband – it was hard to know what to expect where Spanner was concerned.
‘Ollie,’ thought Fraser, standing in the doorway of the arch, they’re always called Ollie and I bet he works in the media and lives in Ladbroke Grove.
It took him another few seconds to register the reality of the situation. Spanner had brought some idiot in red skinny jeans – no doubt last night’s conquest, a bloke nobody knew from Adam – to Liv’s birthday reunion? He felt a sudden, overwhelming blackness of mood that crashed down on him like a tonne of rock involving anger on Liv’s behalf, fury at his friend’s audacity, mixed with a horrible, horrible wave of self-loathing – an ugly sense of his own double standards as the reality of what he’d done last night hit him again.
What Anna had done seemed suddenly outrageous, and yet, was what he’d done actually any better? And these were his friends, his best and oldest friends. They’d just know.
Nobody said hello to Ollie, who had the most unfortunate hairstyle Fraser had ever seen: dyed a reddish-pink and pulled forward around his face, like a giant crab-claw had him in a headlock.
‘Right, wicked … well, er, I’ll just go to the bar then?’ he said, eventually, to nobody in particular.