‘Well, besides getting my head kicked in at the end of it all, I was an appalling dancer, so bad it wasn’t funny.’
‘Oh, I bet it was.’
‘I assure you it was not, and I wore totally inappropriate footwear, basically my knackered, filthy running trainers, which then deposited little piles of mud all over this pristine white dance floor.’
Mia covers her eyes and smiles. ‘Oh, God, Fraser, only you.’
‘To top it off, Karen was a brilliant dancer – turns out she was some sort of semi-pro when she was a kid.’
‘Oh, come on, I’m sure she wasn’t that good.’
There was a long pause.
‘So listen,’ she says, before she can help herself. ‘Have you actually told Karen you’re doing the salsa class as part of Liv’s List? That you’re actually doing it for Liv?’
Fraser stands back from the mirror. ‘No, course I bloody haven’t.’
‘Well, don’t you think you should? Just out of courtesy? I mean, she’s going to find out sometime, Fraser, and then she’s going to feel really hurt and really used.’
Fraser frowns; he thinks about this for a minute. Right – so why would he tell her? So she can feel hurt and used now? Did he not have the right to a relationship whilst he was doing the List for Liv? He felt a wave of guilt and panic. She would be back in a second to shower him with unconditional love and frozen peas again. This was twisted; maybe Mia was right, maybe he should just tell her now and get it over and done with. No! No. He couldn’t do that to himself or to her, he was giving this a go and that was that. So he says …
‘Look, I’m not gonna tell her, Mia – is that wrong?’ He really didn’t know any more. ‘Because if I do, it would be the end of us.’
‘That is kind of my point. But it’s up to you. I just don’t think it’s fair if you use her, that’s all.’
Fraser sighs. ‘I’m not using her, I like her.’
‘Well, that’s OK then.’
The door goes and Eduardo comes in, dishevelled and bare-chested, wearing just his boxer shorts and holding a crying Billy at arm’s length. ‘He’s missing his mama,’ he says. ‘You’ve been on that phone for hours.’
For God’s sake, would she ever learn? In Karen’s bathroom, Fraser shakes his head and tuts. That was definitely Eduardo he just heard in the background. There weren’t many people who made Fraser’s blood boil, but Eduardo was one of them. Such a spineless, cocky, useless little twat. Fraser had a feeling he was trying to worm his way back into Mia’s life and here they were – caught out! Why would he be there so early if he hadn’t stayed over? Mia could be really thick sometimes, not to mention a hypocrite. And there she was on her moral high horse about Karen.
‘Is that Eduardo?’ he says.
In her kitchen, Mia thinks for a split second about lying – shit – Fraser would really not be impressed; nobody would be impressed, not after everything they’d been through with her on the Eduardo front. But also, her friends weren’t on their own with a baby, were they? And Eduardo was making an effort, she should give him a chance. I mean, look at him, he was still here, wasn’t he? Standing in her kitchen holding his own son like he was a bomb about to go off?
‘Yes,’ she says eventually, sheepishly.
‘Oh, Mia.’
He sounds so disappointed, that’s the worst bit.
‘What?’
‘Mimi, can you get off the phone NOW?’
‘Eduardo, don’t call me Mimi!’ she shouts, suddenly stressed by everything: him being annoying, Billy crying, and now Fraser getting at her. She should go back to bed.
‘Look, Frase—’ she says.
‘Oh, it’s Frase.’ Eduardo rolls his eyes dramatically, Billy’s still wailing. ‘The handsome Fraser Morgan …’
Mia sighs heavily and puts her hand somewhat dramatically on her forehead. She was doing it again; she was acting like a character in Coronation Street.
‘Oh, God, God, will both of you just bugger off!’ she says eventually, more because she doesn’t know what else to say than because she doesn’t think each of them has a point. ‘Fraser, I hope your nose goes down. I’ll call you later. I’m going back to bed!’
And she does, and as she draws the cool, white sheets around her, leaving Eduardo to settle Billy without asking her how every five minutes, like he’s a new DVD player and only she has the instructions, she thinks just for this, if only for this, it’s worth giving him another chance.
Fraser hears the front door go. ‘Couldn’t get any frozen peas but they did have broad beans so I just got those,’ calls Karen down the hall. ‘Now are you feeling sick or dizzy at all?’
And Fraser looks at himself. Yes, I am, he thinks, I am feeling sick. It’s a type of sickness he’s felt before.
SEVEN
Then
December 1996
Lancaster
Fraser sloshed more wine into his glass and leant over the recipe book again: Assemble the Moussaka: Place a layer of potatoes on the bottom, top with a layer of aubergine, add meat sauce on top of aubergine layer and sprinkle with …
Bloody hell, this was like something off The Krypton Factor. It didn’t help that he had now consumed the best part of a bottle of wine and the words were beginning to swim: Potatoes, aubergine, meat. Or was it potatoes, meat, aubergine? He had no idea; all he knew was that she would be here very shortly and he had yet to make something called a béchamel sauce.
He lit a cigarette, wafting the smoke with his hand so that it mixed to form a miasma of Silk Cut, fried mincemeat and Fruits of the Forest, courtesy of the scented candles Melody was constantly buying for the house, because ‘candles create atmosphere’. It would seem so. On an average evening, Number 5 South Road could pass for the Sistine Chapel.
He surveyed the kitchen; it looked as if they’d been burgled and he quietly cursed himself for choosing a dish that somehow used up every utensil in the house. Why hadn’t he gone for something simple like a chilli or a curry?
Presentation was going to be key. He reached in the cupboard above and got out the big guns: Melody’s huge terracotta casserole dish. He set about arranging a layer of aubergine he’d grilled, wishing he’d actually followed the instructions and cut the aubergine lengthways rather than just chopping it into big chunks, which now sat mushy in the middle of the huge expanse of terracotta looking somewhat forlorn, like a mound of cow dung.
He only chose moussaka because moussaka was what Melody cooked for the last dinner party at their house a month ago and that seemed to go down well. (Although he didn’t like to think about that night much past the actual dinner stage, when it all sort of degenerated.)
Melody was a worldly, confident girl with an impressive chest, who Fraser thought had some peculiar ideas that didn’t seem to sit with her student status, like ordering the Sunday broadsheets to be delivered to their student hovel and having Greek-themed dinner parties where mates from her law course came wearing ball gowns, only to get shit-faced on bottles of cider.
But Melody was also kind and she was capable and at times like this, Fraser was very glad he lived with someone who owned cookery books. Now, though, as he eyed his moussaka and compared it with the one in the picture, he realized he hadn’t been aware of the ‘layers’ component; the layering part