struggling behind in heels and a slightly too-tight skirt-suit, complaining that the cake was too chavvy, why didn’t we get one from Marks’s? Norm at the back, breaking into a light jog, Anna … Well, Anna probably wouldn’t be there yet, having only left some random bloke’s bed in Tooting about an hour ago, and finally Fraser – lovely Fraser Morgan … what would he be doing? Probably pegging it to the nearest offy, having decided right at the last minute that this occasion called for booze.
Mia thought of Fraser now, alone in his flat in Kentish Town – the one he used to share with Liv – and felt a rush of love. Poor Frase – she must give him a call as soon as she was finished up here, because today would be extra tough for him. She imagined him waking up, the date hitting him and then the aching absence of Liv in the flat and the memories, flooding back, more acute and painful than ever. It was at times like this that she wished Fraser would move back to Lancaster, just so she could keep an eye on him.
‘So what else is new …?’ Mia pulled her sleeves down over her hands and blew on them to keep them warm. ‘Oh, yes … Billy. My son. Almost forgot! He’s almost eight months old now, I can’t believe it, Liv. Where the hell has the time gone since July? I look back and I can’t remember anything. Must have blanked it out. Anyway, the good news is, he hasn’t got my bacon ears or prominent chin – yet … although it’s hard to tell since currently his entire jaw line is covered in fat. The bad news is, he’s got Eduardo’s everything else. Literally, he is his double, which as you can imagine, I am seething about: same beautiful green eyes, same Brazilian monobrow, same permanent look of wounded entitlement. I just hope to God he doesn’t inherit total disrespect for women, too.
‘Oh, Olivia, why didn’t I listen to you when you said never trust a man who wears sunglasses inside?
‘So, Eduardo has turned out to be a useless cock – no surprises there – although I suppose, in some part of my tiny pea-brain I did, at one point, think he might change. Sadly not. Since I’ve had Billy, he’s seen him eight times. Eight times in nearly eight months! Pathetic or what …?’
Mia could feel the familiar rage bubbling up inside her, the sort that made her want to punch a wall – no, actually, just Eduardo’s stupid, face; the maddening sense of injustice she always got when she thought about Eduardo. What really got her goat was that Eduardo was meant to be a summer fling, not the (useless-at-that) father of her child. She’d been seeing him for getting on a year by the time she fell pregnant, but Mia had always just thought he was ‘good enough for now’, that they’d eventually fizzle out. If she were really honest, she was kind of banking on that.
They rowed constantly for a start, but although she was ashamed to admit it now, part of her had thought that was cool and romantic. If she couldn’t have a tumultuous, impulsive relationship with a hot-headed Latino in her twenties, when could she? She imagined them in one of those black-and-white foreign films she dreamed of writing one day, where nothing much happened except for two, very beautiful people shouting at each other in a spartan room in Provence or Andalucia or, well … somewhere very hot, anyway. It didn’t quite translate into a flat in Acton that smelled permanently of ragù, but then she’d got pregnant. If it had been up to her she would have had a termination, but Eduardo’s Catholic upbringing had suddenly made an appearance. It made her feel guilty: It’s a life, Mia, as soon as those cells start to divide. She’d fallen for it at the time, she thought he actually wanted this baby, that it might even bond them. Now she realised he was calling her bluff. Well that backfired pretty spectacularly.
‘Anyway …’ She told herself to rein it in. She’d promised herself this birthday visit to Liv’s bench today was not just going to turn into a rant-athon about Eduardo but, look at her, she was at it already.
‘… The thing is, whatever I think of him, he’s still Billy’s dad, isn’t he? And I want Billy to have a relationship with his dad. It’s just I’m not that sure his dad wants to have a relationship with him, which is the most heart-breaking thing of all, do you know what I mean?
‘But hey, let’s see, he’s promised me he’ll be here at five p.m. today to take Billy off for the night because everyone’s arriving for YOUR do.
‘Which brings me onto everyone. I guess you’ll be wanting an update:
‘One. Anna. You’ll be glad to know everything is exactly as it was in Twelve Station Road days, Livs, except she’s gone north of the river now and inflicts it on some other poor, unassuming flatmates in Islington. She still has dubious hygiene, walks round with toothpaste on her spots, picks plaque from her teeth when she thinks you’re not looking and eats gherkins straight from the jar. And yet still scrubs up to look like Florence Welch – how is that?
‘She still reads The Economist in bed, too – like we were ever impressed – and I still maintain she hasn’t got the faintest clue what it’s on about, but we love Anna Spanner, she’s good value. Oh, and she’s still single, obvs.
‘Who else? Melody and Norm … Well, it’s all change in that camp, Melody having almost completed her total transformation from Indie mosher to hotshot lawyer (as you will know, Norm was far more impressed with the Indie mosher version). They’re doing really well for themselves: Norm’s ‘Entertainment Correspondent’ for the Visitor these days. I know! Get him. It pays peanuts, of course, and occasionally he has to go and cover groundbreaking front page stories about people turning a hundred, but the rest of the time he gets to go to free gigs, so he’s not complaining. They’ve got a swanky, three-storey townhouse up on that posh estate by the university. Clearly, it’s only a matter of time before all those rooms are filled up with mini-Normantons. Fraser reckons they’ll have twins: a boy who looks like Melody and a girl who looks like Norm.
‘It’s bizarre though, Liv, it’s like Melody came back from travelling and Ibiza, started her law course and said, “Right, I want to be a grown-up now.” The fags went, the drugs went – although you’ll be pleased to know she still drinks inordinate amounts of cider. Nowadays, if you go round to theirs, it’s like a beauty spa waiting room.
‘She’s got that room-fragrance, joss-stick thing going on – you can smell lily of the valley from half a mile away and everything’s beige, sorry stone. And I do not just mean the house. Gone are the Arctic Monkeys and Green Day and the Foo Fighters, now it’s Norah Jones all the way. Even I – musical Philistine – know you would not be impressed.
‘Oh, and she does these “Pampered Chef” parties now, sort of Tupperware parties but with kitchen implements where you’re forced to pay fifty quid for a garlic press. Norm’s still the same, thank God – he’s usually in some mild stage of intoxication to block it all out – but the “change” has already begun on him too. She’s started buying him clothes from places like Aquascutum and Gap (she calls it THE Gap) and so you’ve got Norm, 90s but cool with his lamb-chop sideburns in a chino and a moleskin jacket. Wrong, in so many ways.
‘Other than that, motherhood’s treating me well, even if it’s like living with a fascist dictator, and sometimes I actually catch a whiff of my own BO because it’s very hard to have a shower of a morning with a baby hanging off you, I can tell you. But he does make me laugh, Liv. And he is really cute, even if he looks like his dad. If I was to describe motherhood to you, I’d say imagine what it’s like to want to throw someone out of the window one second, and eat them up with love the next. And as Mrs Durham said to me the other day (Mrs Durham is an old dear I look after on a Tuesday. She’s pretty revolting. I found a pellet of cat poo in her knicker drawer the other day …) “You’re never—”’
Then Mia stopped. She stopped because what Mrs Durham had said hit her. ‘You’re never really a grown-up until you’ve had a child yourself.’
But then, of course, some people didn’t get the chance to grow up at all.
Billy was still asleep when Mia left the bench. It was 1 p.m. – he’d been asleep half an hour; if she played her cards right, she probably had another half-hour yet. She held tight onto the buggy as she walked down the steep hill from Williamson’s Park, the