How We Met. Katy Regan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 wind blowing so hard from behind, it made her break into a run. It was one of her greatest fears: accidentally letting go of the buggy and watching helplessly 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 СКАЧАТЬ