Can we make love again?’ If an English man said that I’d be laughing my head off by now, thinks Mia. But somehow a Brazilian gets away with it. Somehow from him, it’s irresistible. It’s 6.45 a.m., the early morning sunshine is turning the room golden, and Mia closes her eyes, throws her arms behind her in abandon as Eduardo presses his pelvis down onto hers.
Then ‘waaaaaaaahhhhhhh!’ Nine months on and it still rips right through her. Still feels like an assault.
‘Billy,’ she sighs, staring up at the ceiling.
‘He’ll stop, he’ll stop,’ says Eduardo, kissing her neck. ‘He’ll go back to sleep, come on, relaaax.’
She tries, she does, but it’s no use.
‘No, he won’t, unfortunately.’ She gently pushes Eduardo off her and drags herself out of the bed. ‘Believe me, that’s Billy for the day now.’
When Mia comes back from the kitchen where she has been preparing Billy’s breakfast, leaving him fastened to the high chair in the lounge, she half expects Eduardo to have gone. It’s the sort of shitty thing he does all the time, after all. But as she approaches the lounge door, she can hear talking.
For a moment she’s confused – whose is the other adult voice she can hear? – and then she realizes, it’s Eduardo’s. She freezes, the dish of porridge in her hand. Then, spying through the crack in the door, holding her breath, she watches them.
Eduardo has pulled up a chair and is leaning on the tray of Billy’s highchair, playing with his small plastic animals – Billy’s all-time favourite toys.
‘And this is a sheep,’ he’s saying. ‘In Portuguese we say “ovelha” … Can you say “ovelha”, Billy? That’s pretty cool, ha? Which is your favourite, Billy?’
Billy’s transfixed: wide-eyed, perfectly still, a string of drool hanging from his mouth, and Mia has to bite her lip to stifle a giggle. Poor baby. Never known a man in the house to talk to him like this, let alone his own father. Well this is a turn-up for the books, she imagines him thinking, I could get used to this.
She could get used to this.
This is how it should be, too. This is how she imagined family life: her wandering about of a morning in Eduardo’s shirt, sexy and yet homely at the same time, with tanned bare limbs (in her case, pale ones with a huge bruise up the side where she continually bangs into the coffee table, but never mind), and daddy, handsome and bare-chested, playing with his son, the smell of coffee wafting through the house.
Then her mobile goes on the sofa and she nearly jumps out of her skin.
‘Ooh, I’ll get that!’ she says chirpily, trying to make it look as though she literally arrived at the door just then, that she wasn’t spying.
‘Hello?’
Eduardo is still playing with the animals – perhaps even more enthusiastically now he knows he’s being watched, and Billy has started to do hiccupping giggles.
‘Mia, it’s me, Fraser.’
‘Fraser!’ Eduardo turns around and looks at her and she doesn’t know why but she smiles and waves at him. ‘How are you? OK? Actually you don’t sound OK.’
‘No, I’ve been better. I got punched in the face last night.’
‘What? Why?’
Mia takes herself off into the kitchen to talk.
‘Oh, God, long story, involving ex-boyfriends and salsa classes and Karen.’
‘My God, Karen didn’t punch you, did she?’
‘No, no, GOD no …’
‘Oh.’
She should really try to sound less disappointed to learn that he hasn’t been punched by his new girlfriend.
‘It was her ex-boyfriend.’
‘Really? Gosh. You are quite the threat then?’
She shakes her head. Why did she say that?
Silence. Mia turns round and looks out of her kitchen window.
‘Frase, are you OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m OK. Just look a bit like an old alky at the moment, bright red, fat nose …’
She closes her eyes. Poor Frase.
On the other end of the phone, Fraser is examining his face in Karen’s bathroom mirror. He looks dreadful; the bridge of his nose is so swollen that it’s closing up his eyes, so they’re piss holes in the snow, and he’s got a fat top lip.
Karen is at the shop getting milk and more frozen peas. She has taken to her role as Florence Nightingale with gusto and has woken him up several times in the night to check for signs of concussion and to clear his nasal passages of dried blood, so that he is now exhausted, as well as injured.
‘I take it Karen is looking after you?’ says Mia.
‘Oh, yeah, not wanting on that front. Karen is looking after me.’
‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it? That’s really, really good. So um, what was the salsa class like?’
‘Yeah, great,’ says Fraser. ‘Well, actually, I made a complete and utter tit of myself, but that’s OK, ’coz it’s all for Liv.’
She laughs. ‘And Olivia wouldn’t have it any other way, as we know. In fact she would be disappointed if you didn’t make a tit of yourself. So come on then, what happened?’
‘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
