as Billy careered into the traffic. It made her breathless with panic just thinking about it.
She walked down through town. It was the start of the Easter holidays and all the students had gone home. Mia liked Lancaster best like this – vacated of eighteen-year-olds with far too much confidence for their own good. Then she could pretend this was her town again; their town, when the six of them had been brimming with confidence and it felt like they owned it all too.
Same day
Kentish Town, London
‘Sssh, don’t move.’
Still half asleep, Fraser Morgan had the vague notion that he was being held up at gun point in his own bed. Something was pressing firmly into his back. And he had an erection, which was a bit odd. He could even get an erection when his life was in danger?
‘That nice hun? Mm?’
It was only when the voice spoke again, whispered into Fraser’s ear, a warm flood of breathiness that Jesus Christ that stank of booze, that he woke up, with a start, the awful truth hitting him in the face. Or was that the back?
KAREN. Fraser’s eyes shot open.
Karen from the Bull was in his bed. She was naked, pressing her pelvis into him and playing with his cock, which went without saying was really quite pleasant.
Fraser lay there, motionless, blinking into the half-light, staring at the radio alarm clock on his bedside table: 10.53 a.m., 6 March 2008.
Sixth of March.
He closed his eyes again.
How? How could he have let this happen? Exactly at what point of last night did he ever think this was a good idea?
‘I said, is that nice …?’ She was purring, kissing the nape of his neck now. Breathing pure alcohol fumes into his skin. Fraser tried to speak but it came out a couple of octaves higher than intended, so that he sounded like a pre-pubescent boy on the brink of his voice breaking. He cleared his throat and tried again.
‘Yeah, that’s um, yeah, very nice.’
Fuck it. Fuck IT! Panic consumed him. How the hell was he going to get out of this? How had he even got into this?
‘Good, good, very glad to hear it. Well don’t go away, handsome, I’m just popping to the loo but I’ll be right back to carry on the good work.’
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