by Alexis Hall
“Sorry. It’s…complicated.”
“Complicated can be interesting.” He went up on tiptoes to smooth a lock of hair behind my ear for me. “And we’ve got the kissing down. We’ve just got to work on the talking.”
I gave what I hoped wasn’t a sickly grin. “I’d rather stick with what I’m good at.”
“Tell you what. I’ll ask you a question, and if I like the answer, you get to kiss me again.”
“Um, I’m not sure—”
“Let’s start small. You know what I do. How about you?”
My heart was racing. And not in a fun way. But, as questions went, that was harmless, right? It was information at least two hundred spambots already had. “I work for a charity.”
“Wow. Noble. I’d say I’d always wanted to do something like that, but I’m far too shallow.” He turned his face up to mine, and I kissed him nervously. “Favourite ice cream flavour?”
“Mint choc chip.”
Another kiss. “Book that literally everyone else has read but you haven’t.”
“All of them.”
He drew back. “You’re not getting kissed for that. It’s a total cop-out.”
“No seriously. All of them, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, anything Dickens ever wrote, All Quiet on the Western Front, that one about the time-traveller’s wife, Harry Potter…”
“You really do own your illiteracy, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”
He laughed and kissed me, staying close this time, body pressed to mine, breath against my skin. “Okay. Weirdest place you’ve ever had sex.”
“Is that for number eight?” I asked, with a bleaty laugh that was meant to show I was incredibly cool and unconcerned.
“Number eight what?”
“You know, twelve celebrities’ kids who like to fuck in weird places. Number eight will shock you.”
“Wait.” He froze. “Do you honestly think I’m kissing you for a listicle?”
“No. I mean…no. No.”
He gazed at me for a long, horrible moment. “You do, don’t you?”
“I told you it was complicated.”
“That’s not complicated, that’s insulting.”
“I… It’s…” I’d pulled this back before. I could pull it back again. “It wasn’t meant to be. It’s not about you.”
This time, there was no ear tweaking. “How is it not about me if you genuinely have this concern about my possible behaviour?”
“I just have to be careful.” For the record, I sounded extremely dignified when I said this. And not at all pathetic.
“What the hell would I even write? I Met a Has-Been’s Kid at a Party? Celebrity’s Gay Son Is Gay Shock?”
“Well, it sounds like it’d be a step up from what you usually write.”
His mouth fell open, and I realised I might have gone the tiniest bit too far. “Wow. I was about to say I wasn’t sure which of us was the arsehole here, but thanks for clearing that up.”
“No, no,” I said quickly, “it was always me. Trust me, I know.”
“Really not sure that helps. I mean, I can’t figure out what’s worse. That you think I’d fuck a mildly famous person to get ahead. Or that you think if I was going to make such a profoundly degrading career choice, the person I’d pick to make it with was you.”
I swallowed. “All good points. Very well made.”
“Shit on a hot tin roof, I should have listened to Angie. You are a world of not worth it.”
He stalked off into the crowd, presumably to find someone less fucked up, leaving me alone with my lopsided bunny ears and a profound sense of personal failure. Although I guess I’d accomplished two things tonight: I’d successfully demonstrated my support for a man who in no way needed it, and I’d finally proved beyond all reasonable objection that nobody in their right mind would date me. I was a cagey, grumpy, paranoid mess who would find a way to ruin even the most basic human interaction.
I leaned against the bar and stared at the basement full of strangers having a far better time than me, at least two of whom were probably having a conversation right now about what a terrible human being I was. The way I saw it, I had two options. I could suck it up, act like an adult, find my actual friends, and try to make the best of the evening. Or I could run home, drink alone, and add this to the list of things I was unsuccessfully pretending had never happened.
Two seconds later, I was on the stairs.
Eight seconds later, I was out in the street.
And nineteen seconds later, I was tripping over my own feet and landing flat on my face in the gutter.
Well, wasn’t that just the ill-fitting crown on my inbred Hapsburg prince of an evening? And no way was it coming back to haunt me.
Chapter 2
It came back to haunt me.
And the way it haunted me was a Google alert that threatened to vibrate my phone off the bedside table. And, yes, I’m very aware that tracking what people are saying about you on the internet is generally the act of a tosser or a narcissist, or a narcissistic tosser, but I’d learned the hard way that it’s better to know what’s out there. I flailed, sending a different piece of vibrating technology—for gentlemen wishing to explore a more sophisticated kind of pleasure—spinning to the floor, and finally managed to close my fingers round my phone with all the grace of a teenager trying to hit second base.
I didn’t want to look. But if I didn’t, I was going to throw up the sticky mess of dread, hope, and uncertainty that had turned my insides to baby food. Probably it was less bad than I feared. Usually it was less bad than I feared. Except occasionally it…wasn’t. Peeping through my eyelashes like a small child braving an episode of Doctor Who from behind the sofa cushions, I checked my notifications.
And I could breathe again. It was okay. Though obviously in an ideal world, pictures of me lying in the gutter outside The Cellar in my bunny ears wouldn’t have been splashed across every third-rate gossip site from Celebitchy to Yeeeah. And in a truly ideal world my definition of okay wouldn’t have sunk quite that low. But, with my life being a never-ending pit of suck, my dismaydar has gone through some serious recalibrations over the years. I mean, at least the pictures showed me fully clothed and without anybody’s cock in my mouth. So, y’know, win.
Today’s nail in the coffin of my digital reputation had a strong “like father, like son” theme, because there’s a magic porridge pot’s worth of footage of Jon Fleming making a tit of himself out there. And I guess “Bad Boy Jonny’s Wild Child Son Collapses in Drugs Sex Booze Shame” is a better headline than “Man Trips Over in Street.” Sighing, I let my phone thunk to the floor. Turns out, the one thing worse than having a famous father who blew up his career like a champagne supernova is having a famous father who’s making a fucking comeback.
I’d just about learned to live with being compared to my reckless, self-destructive absentee father. But now he’d cleaned up his act and was playing the wise, old mentor every Sunday on ITV, I was being compared unfavourably to my reckless, self-destructive absentee father. And that was a level of bullshit I was not emotionally prepared for. I should have known better than to read the comments, but my eyes slipped and fell on wellactually69, who’d been massively upvoted for suggesting a reality TV show in which Jon Fleming tries to put his junkie son back on the straight and narrow—a show which theotherjillfrompeckham declared that she would “watch the shit out of.”
I knew, in the grand scheme of things, none of this mattered. The internet was forever, and there was no getting away from that, but by tomorrow, or the day after, I would be below the fold, or whatever the e-equivalent of the fold was. As good as forgotten until the next time someone wanted a twist on the Jon Fleming story. Except I still felt fucking terrible, and the longer I lay there
, the fucking terribler I felt.
I tried to take some comfort in the fact that at least Cam hadn’t put me on a list of Twelve Pricks Who Will Freak Out on You in a Nightclub. But as comfort went, that landed somewhere between “cold” and “scant.” Truth be told, I’d never been the best at self-care. Self-recrimination, I had down. Self-loathing, I could do in my sleep, and often did. So here I was, a twenty-eight-year-old man suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to call his mother because he was sad.
Because the one upside of my dad being who he is, is that my mum is who she is. You can Wiki this stuff, but the tl;dr version is that back in the ’80s she was essentially a French-Irish Adele with bigger hair. And at about the time Bros were wondering when they’d be famous and Cliff Richard was spilling mistletoe and wine on a million unsuspecting Christmases, she and Dad were caught up in this love-you-hate-you-can’t-live-without-you thing that produced two collaborative albums, one solo album, and me.
Well, technically I came before the solo album, which happened when Dad realised he wanted to be famous and wasted more than he wanted to be in our lives. “Welcome Ghosts” was the last thing Mum ever wrote but, honestly, it was the last thing she had to. Nearly every year the BBC, or ITV, or some movie studio uses a track from it over a sad scene or an angry scene or a scene it doesn’t fit, but we’ll cash the cheque anyway.
Stumbling out of bed, I adopted out of long-ingrained habit the Quasimodo pose required for anyone over 5’6” to move around my flat without getting clocked in the face by an eave. Which, given I’m 6’4”, is the accommodational equivalent of having chosen to drive a Mini Cooper. I’d leased the place with Miles—my ex—back when it had been romantic to live in the twenty-first century equivalent of a garret in Shepherd’s Bush. Now it was rapidly becoming pathetic: being alone, stuck in a job that was going nowhere, and still unable to afford a home that wasn’t mostly the underside of a roof. Of course, it might also have helped if I’d tidied it, like, ever.
Shoving a pile of socks off the sofa, I curled up and got to FaceTiming. “Allô, Luc, mon caneton,” said Mum. “Did you see your father’s whole package last night?”
I gave a gasp of actual horror before remembering The Whole Package was the name of his stupid TV show. “No. I was out with friends.”
“You should watch it. I’m sure it will be on the catch-up.”
“I don’t want to watch it.”
She gave the most Gallic of shrugs. I’m convinced she plays up the French thing, but I can’t really blame her for it because all she got from her father was his name. Well, that and a pallor Siouxsie Sioux would envy. In any case, even if having a dad who runs out on you isn’t genetic, in our family it’s definitely hereditary. “Your father,” she declared. “He has not aged well.”
“Good to know.”
“His head is bald as an egg now and a funny shape. He looks like that chemistry teacher with the cancer.”
This was news to me. But then I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to keep in contact with my old school. To be honest, I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to keep in contact with people who live on the wrong side of London. “Mr. Beezle has cancer?”
“Not him. The other one.”
Another thing about my mum: relationship to reality, questionable at best. “Do you mean Walter White?”
“Oui oui. And you know, I think he is too old to be hopping around with a flute these days.”
“We’re talking about Dad, right? Because otherwise Breaking Bad got hella weird in its later seasons.”
“Of course your father. He will probably break a hip.”
“Well.” I grinned. “We can hope.”
“He bid on a young lady with a harmonica—it was a good choice, I think, because she was one of the most talented—but she went with one of the boys from Blue instead. I enjoyed that very much.”
If left unchecked, Mum could talk about reality TV basically forever. Unfortunately—with wellactually69 and friends buzzing around my head like internet hornets—my attempt to check her came out as “I got papped yesterday.”
“Oh, baby. Again? I’m sorry.”
My own shrug was very non-Gallic.
“You know how these things are.” Her tone softened reassuringly. “Always a squall in a…a…shot glass.”
That made me smile. She always does. “I know. It’s just every time it happens, even when it’s trivial, it, well, it reminds me.”
“You know it was not your fault, what happened. What Miles did, it was not even truly about you.”
I snorted. “It was specifically all about me.”
“Someone else’s actions may affect you. But what other people choose to do is about them.”
We were both quiet for a moment.. “Will it…will it ever stop hurting?”
“Non.” Mum shook her head. “But it will stop mattering.”
I wanted to believe her, I really did. She was, after all, living proof of her words.
“Do you want to come round, mon caneton?”
It was only an hour or so away if I cadged a lift from Epsom (1.6 stars on Google) Station. But while I could more-or-less justify ringing my mum every time something bad happened to me, literally running back to her literal house slipped under even my low bar for self-respect.
“Judy and I have found this new show that we are watching,” offered Mum in a way that I think was intended to be encouraging.
“Oh?”
“Yes, it is very intriguing. It is called RuPaul’s Drag Race—have you heard of it? We were not sure we would like it at first because we thought it was about monster trucks. But you can imagine how happy we were when we discovered it was about men who like to dress as women—why are you laughing?”
“Because I love you. Very much.”
“You should not be laughing, Luc. You would be very impressed. We are often gagging on their eleganza. That means—”
“I’m familiar with Drag Race. Probably more familiar than you.” This was what happened when you won an Emmy. Your audience became your audience’s mums.
“Then you should come, mon cher.”
Mum lives in Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold—this tiny, chocolate box of a village where I grew up—and spends her days getting into scrapes with her best friend, Judith Cholmondely-Pfaffle. “I…” If I stayed home, I could try and achieve grown-up things like plates and clean clothes. Although in practice, I would probably pick at my Google alerts until they bled.
“I am making my special curry.”
Okay, that settled it. “Fuck no.”
“Luc, I think you are very rude about my special curry.”
“Yes, because I prefer my arsehole not on fire.”
Mum was pouting. “For a gay, you are far too sensitive about your arsehole.”
“How about we don’t talk about my arsehole anymore?”
“You brought it up. Anyway, Judy loves my curries.”
Sometimes I think Judy must love Mum. God knows why else you would brave her cooking. “Probably because you’ve spent the last twenty-five years systematically murdering her taste buds.”
“Well, you know where we are if you change your mind.”
“Thanks, Mum. Talk to you soon.”
“Allez, darling. Bises.”
Without Mum talking nineteen-to-the-dozen about reality TV, my home was suddenly very quiet, my day very…long seeming. Between work, friends, acquaintances, and sporadic attempts to get laid, I usually managed to use my flat as an overpriced, badly maintained hotel. Turning up only to crash out and leave again the next morning.
Except Sundays. Sundays were tricky. Or had got tricky as the years had got away from me. At university they’d been for brunch and regretting what you’d done on Saturday and sleepy afternoons. Then, one by one, I’d lost my friends to dinners with in-laws or decorating the
nursery or the pleasures of a day at home.
It wasn’t that I blamed them for their changing lives. And I didn’t want what they had. I wasn’t cut out for it. Since, as far as I could remember, Sundays with Miles had spun pretty quickly from marathon sexfests to smouldering resentathons. It was just moments like these. When it felt like my world was notifications on my phone.
Notifications I was trying very hard to ignore. Because I knew Mum was right: if I could get through today, they wouldn’t matter tomorrow.
Though, as it turned out, we were both wrong.
Super, super wrong.
Chapter 3
Monday started out as it usually did—with me late for work and nobody caring because it was that kind of office. I mean, I say office. It’s actually a house in Southwark that’s been half-arsedly converted to the headquarters of the charity I work for. Which happens to be the only charity or, indeed, organisation of any kind that would hire me.
It’s the redheaded step-brainchild of an elderly earl with a thing for agriculture and a Cambridge-educated etymologist who I think might be a rogue AI sent from the future. Their mission? Saving dung beetles. And, as a fundraiser, it’s my job to convince people that they’re better off giving their money to bugs that eat poo instead of pandas, orphans, or—God help us—Comic Relief. I wish I could tell you I’m good at it but, really, there are no metrics to measure something like that. I mean, we haven’t gone bust yet. And what I tend to say at interviews for other jobs I don’t get is that there isn’t another faeces-based environmental charity that raises more money than we do.
Also, we’re called the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project. The acronym for which is definitely pronounced CEEARAYPEEPEE. And definitely not CRAPP.
Working at CRAPP has a number of drawbacks: the central heating that blazes all summer and cuts off all winter, the office manager who never lets anybody spend any money on anything for any reason, the computers so old they still run a version of Windows named after a year, to say nothing of the daily realisation that this is my life. But there are some perks. The coffee is pretty decent because the two things Dr. Fairclough cares about are caffeine and invertebrates. And every morning, while I’m waiting for my Renaissance-era PC to boot up, I get to tell jokes to Alex Twaddle. Or rather, I get to tell jokes at Alex Twaddle. While Alex Twaddle blinks at me.