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 the house, someone who calls him at work, who comes round and cooks for him – finally, someone who knows what to do with lemon grass. It’s comforting and grounding.
However, she started, about a fortnight in, to buy him random ‘love gifts’, as she calls them, which makes Fraser feel special and anxious in equal measure: a four-pack of Ambrosia Devon custard, for example, after he said this was his favourite childhood dessert (this is the sort of question Karen likes to ask, often after sex: What was your favourite food as a child? If you were an animal, what animal would you be?), and a photo frame in the shape of a guitar, which was disgusting, truly foul, but which he felt pressurized to fill with a picture of him and Norm. He just hoped to God he remembered to hide it if Norm ever came round.
Fraser knows Karen is a ridiculously kind, thoughtful and giving woman, and he lives in hope that one day, preferably this week, he might wake up to find he has fallen in love with her, even if he cannot shake the feeling when he is with her that all his dreams are going up in smoke.
Not that he really believes his dreams will come true any more, but they are still there, lurking at the back of his mind like forgotten treasure on a sea bed: the one about him writing that one incredible song that will get the Fans signed. They’d started one before Liv died – called ‘Hope and Glory’ – about youth – all their songs seemed to be about youth, and living forever, back then – and never finished it. But Norm doesn’t even live in the same city any more, so band practice is out of the question. These dreams feel idiotic and delusional when he is with Karen, and he doesn’t know if this is just because he’s growing up or because she is wrong for him, but it suits him fine at the moment because feeling the way he does, so depleted and traumatized, his dreams feel too scary to contemplate, like gigantic, terrifying foreign lands that he has neither the strength nor motivation to conquer.
He looks down at his filthy running trainers and wonders if he’s wearing the right footwear for a salsa class – what do people wear at a dance class anyway? God forbid it’s bare feet. Fraser felt, in his bones, he would be against any physical activity that warranted bare feet.
He moves away from the doorway of Top Shop so he’s standing in the middle of the pavement and he can see her now, grinning, her dark head bobbing down the road, weaving her way through the evening crowds with her arms above her head, carrying several shopping bags.
Karen is an enthusiastic shopper – and enthusiastic, thinks Fraser, is the word. He’s always presumed all girls were born shoppers, like boys were born knowing how to put up shelves, but Karen seems to be the exception to this rule, bringing home something new to wear, or getting a delivery from eBay on an almost daily basis but then promptly sending it back.
Evenings at Karen’s largely consist of Fraser sitting alone on her sofa, the TV drowned out by the sound of masking tape being pulled then torn with teeth, like she’s performing some sort of medieval operation next door.
Fraser waves slowly at her and she gives him a big smile back since she can’t wave due to the number of bags hanging off her arm. He walks towards her; she holds his face in her hands and kisses him when they meet.
‘Hello, Fred …’
She has a sheen of sweat on her top lip from the effort of rushing but is also flushed and bright-eyed, which Fraser is encouraged to note makes her look pretty and fecund in a milkmaid kind of way.
‘Fred …?’ says Fraser, lost.
‘Astaire, innit.’ She laughs, looking up at him with that look again – he really wishes she wouldn’t do that – and, despite his best efforts not to (it’s a daily battle), Fraser cringes.
Karen has taken to putting ‘innit’ on the end of sentences but, like other little nuances of hers, she is slightly slow on the uptake – wasn’t Ali G famous in about 2005? Immediately he has this thought, Fraser chastises himself for it. This is the other thing he is finding about Karen. She brings out the petty in him; small, inane things make his toes curl and he hates himself for it. Who are you anyway, he thinks, the Cool Police?
He says, ‘Oh, right! Yeah. Got yer. Fred Astaire, mmm …’ He raises an eyebrow, as if to say, I don’t think so somehow. ‘Well, I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’
But Fraser knows he’ll never be ready for this. Ever. In his life. In fact, right now, standing in the street on a warm Tuesday evening in April, every molecule in his body is telling him he’d rather be doing anything – undergoing a life-threatening operation, for example – than going to a salsa class.
But ‘Learn to do SOME sort of dance’ is one of the four tasks he’s been allocated from Liv’s List to complete and he is determined to do this for her.
After he and Mia hatched their plan that awful day after Liv’s birthday, they got everyone over to Mia’s, where they tried, for a fruitless hour, to give free rein and let everyone choose four things each from the List.
But this resulted in nothing but shouting and Melody and Norm almost filing for divorce when it was decided, as the only couple, that they should do the homemade porn movie one and Melody burst out laughing: ‘Chance would be a fine thing. We haven’t had sex since October!’ Norm was not amused.
They’d gone round in circles, until finally, Mia had the ingenious idea that they should write down all the tasks on bits of paper, put them in a hat and let fate decide.
So this was the outcome:
Fraser: Learn to dance; sleep with an exotic foreigner: do this without becoming completely neurotic about what it’s supposed to ‘mean’ (Fraser felt – at a push – he could probably manage this); use up all seven Scrabble letters in one turn; make a Roman blind.
Norm: Learn how to make the perfect Victoria sponge; Vegas, baby!; get a six-pack; climb Great Wall of China.
Mia: Go to Venice, properly this time, and have a bellini at Harry’s Bar; swim naked in the sea at dawn; learn a foreign language; learn how to pluck eyebrows.
Anna: Read all works by William Wordsworth, learn how to meditate, to ‘live in the moment’; live in Paris for a while; learn how to use chopsticks.
Melody: French kiss in Central Park; make a homemade
