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