by Alexis Hall
So I rang Mum. And she made some concerned French noises, and then suggested I come over. Which I knew meant it was bad news. The question was, which bad news was it? And an hour or so later, I was getting out of a taxi on Old Post Office Road while my mum hovered anxiously in the doorway.
“He better not be dead,” I told her as I marched into the living room. “I’m going to be so annoyed if he’s dead.”
“Well, then there is good news, mon caneton. Because he is not dead. In fact, he is probably not going to be dead for many years.”
I threw myself onto the unusually dog-less but still faintly dog-smelling sofa. There was only one way this was going. There was only one way this had ever been going. “He never had cancer, did he?”
“The doctors had said some worrying things, and you know these old men. They are very nervous about their prostates.”
I put my head in my hands. I’d have cried but I was cried out already.
“I’m sorry, Luc.” She squeezed in beside me and patted me between the shoulder blades like I’d swallowed a penny. “I don’t think he was lying exactly. I’m afraid this is what it is like when you are famous. You’re surrounded by people who are paid to agree with you, so you get these ideas in your head and you forget they’re not necessarily true. Also, don’t get me wrong. The man is a total prick.”
“So…what? Now he’s not dying, he doesn’t want to know me anymore?”
“I mean”—she sighed—“yes?”
Turns out, that old saying about expecting the worst and never being disappointed super doesn’t work. Jon Fleming behaving exactly like Jon Fleming had no right to hurt this much. “Thanks for not sugarcoating that.”
“Well, look on the bright side. Now you know for certain he’s a worthless sack of shit that you don’t want in your life at all.”
“Yeah”—I looked up, slightly wet-eyed and not sure what my expression was doing—“I guess I knew that going in.”
“No, you felt it. There’s a difference. Now, you’ll never wonder. And your father cannot pull this bullshit on you ever again.”
“Mum, if that’s your idea of a life lesson, it sucks.”
“Bof. Sometimes life sucks.” She paused. “He still wants to do the album, you know.”
I stared at her. “Seriously?”
“He’s surprisingly dependable where fame and money are concerned.”
Obviously, this was the last thing I wanted. It was bad enough when he’d walked out on us. Now, apparently, he was just walking out on me. And it was stupid and selfish, but I did not want to share my mum with Jon Fucking Fleming. He did not deserve that. “It…it’d be a great opportunity for you.”
“Maybe, but I’m probably going to tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Is that,” I asked, “a good idea?”
She made another French noise. “I was going to say, ‘No but it will be extremely satisfying.’ But, actually, yes. It is a good idea. I don’t need the money and neither do you. You won’t take anything from me as it is. So I’m sure you wouldn’t if it had your father’s cockprints all over it—”
“Thanks for that image.”
“And if I wanted to be making music, I’d be making music. I don’t need anyone’s permission for that, especially not Jon Fleming’s.”
“I know it’s none of my business, which is why I’ve never brought it up but, why did you never make another album?”
She offered one of her most expressive shrugs. “Lots of reasons. I’m still very rich, I’ve said what I needed to say. And then I had you, and I had Judy.”
“Um.” My mouth opened and closed a few times. “Judy? Mum, are you coming out to me? Have you been A Gay all this time?”
“Oh, Luc”—she gazed at me in disappointment—“you are so narrow-minded. Judy is my best friend. And when you have lived the kind of life I have, you realise that the big sexy love is not the kind that really matters. Besides, I’m a famous older French lady. If I want to get laid, I can.”
“Please stop. Just stop.”
“You were the one who wanted to know if you’d grown up in a secret lesbian fuck palace.”
“Okay. Never ever say that phrase again.”
“The point is, I loved making music. And I loved your father. And I love Judy. And I love you. In very different ways. I have never wanted to have sex with my guitar or watch Drag Race with Jon Fleming.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Honestly, I think it would threaten his masculinity. He once said he was going to glass Bowie for looking at him funny. I was very embarrassed. I told him, David’s not a gay. He’s just pretty.”
I covered my mouth with my hands and gave a sobbing sort of laugh. “Oh, Mum, I love you. And I know it’s not about me, but if you did change your mind about the album thing, I’d…I’d, y’know…be fine with it.”
“Even if I wanted to work with your father again—which I very much do not—he has treated my son incredibly badly, and I am very angry with him about that. Also Judy and I are getting into Terrace House so we are going to be extremely busy.”
We fell into silence, which was something Mum usually reserved for special occasions so she was probably more concerned about me than she was letting on. Problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure what to say. Or, for that matter, how I felt.
Eventually, she nudged her shoulder lightly against mine. “What of you, mon caneton? I am sorry you have had to go through this.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure? You do not have to say that if it is not true.”
I did something that, on a better day, I would have been thinking about. “I don’t know…it could be. Maybe it’s because I half knew it was coming—I mean not the ‘oh I’m totally fine, fuck you’—but the being let down. It hurts like hell, but not in the way I thought it would. Not in a way that changes anything.”
“That is good. I know it’s a cliché, but he really isn’t worth it. He’s just an old bald man with a leaky prostate who’s on TV sometimes.”
I grinned. “They should make that his intro package.”
“And yet, for some reason, they never even asked me to give them a quote. Though I still get royalties every time they use one of our clips.”
We were quiet again for a moment.
“I think,” I said finally, “what’s weirding me out is that I’ve spent my whole life wondering why Jon Fleming didn’t want me. And now I’m annoyed that I spent such a long time trying to understand this complete arsehole when there are so many people around me who…aren’t complete arseholes.”
“Yes, it’s funny how arseholes do that to you.”
“How do you stop them?”
“You don’t. You just get on with things and eventually it’s…fine. And you’re fine. And you feel briefly bitter you spent so long not being fine. But then you’re fine.”
“I’m…I’m pretty sure I’m in the bitter stage.”
“Eh. That’s good. It’s better than the ‘Oh no, what did I do wrong, am I terrible person’ stage. And the next step you will hardly notice because you will be fine and you will have a lovely son and a best friend and you can watch Drag Race with her dogs. I mean, that’s me, obviously, not you. But you can do the you version.”
I slumped back on the sofa. “I guess. But what with, y’know, everything, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a chance to work out what the me version is.”
“Maybe it’s whatever you’re doing right now.”
Great in principle. But, unfortunately, what I was doing right now was losing someone I actually did care about, not just my wankstain of a father. “Oliver dumped me.”
“Oh, Luc.” She gave me a genuinely sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I think we got too close and he got too scared.”
“Really? That sounds more li
ke what you would do.”
“That’s what I said,” I complained. “But he still walked out.”
“Well, then.” Another of Mum’s shrugs. “Fuck him.”
As advice went, it was surprisingly flexible and worked for my dad, because fuck him. But…but this was different. “Normally I’d agree, but Oliver was good for me, and I don’t want to throw that away.”
“Then don’t.”
I blinked a few annoyingly persistent tears from my eyes. “Okay, now you’ve gone from chill to unhelpful.”
“I don’t mean to be. But you had a boyfriend, and he made you happy for a while, and now it is over. And if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things.”
“That is way more enlightened than I am capable of being right now.” There was no point getting angry at my mother, but it was easier than being sad about my ex. “Oliver was pretty much the best part of my life, and I fucked it up, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and that feels fucking terrible.”
She did the ineffectual shoulder pat, which was somehow way less ineffectual when she did it. “I’m sorry you feel terrible, mon caneton. I am not saying that this will not hurt or that it will be easy. But you did not fuck it up. This Oliver clearly has, as the young people say today, the issues.”
“Yeah, and I wanted to help him with them, like he helped me.”
“That is his choice, though. Some people, they do not want to be helped.”
I was about to protest, but then I remembered that I’d spent five years not wanting to be helped. And it had taken nearly losing my job, dating a guy I would never have considered dating, roping all my friends into a two-day flat-cleaning party, and having some dick from a nightclub feel sorry for me in the Guardian for me to realise that I hadn’t been as safe as I thought I was. “So where does that leave me? He’s still…everything I want, and I can’t have him.”
“As Mick used to say, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ And you know, Luc, Oliver was a nice boy and I’m sure he liked you very much and I was wrong about him being engaged to a duke. But I think maybe he just came along at the right time. He is like”—she waved her hand like the world’s most raddled fairy godmother—“the feather in that elephant movie.”
“Are you trying to tell me that not being a total fuckup was inside me all along?”
“I mean, I used to be a professional songwriter, so I wouldn’t say it in such a boring way but…yes? I don’t think Oliver changed your life, mon cher. I think he helped you to see it differently. He has gone now, but you still have the job you pretend you don’t like, and the friends who have stuck by you through all of your bullshit, and you have me, and Judy, and we love you very much, and will always be here for you until we are both dead.”
I squidged along and she put an arm around me. “Thanks, Mum. That was lovely until the crushing reminder of our mortality.”
“Since your father is not dying anymore, I thought it was a good time to remind you to appreciate me while you can.”
“I love you, Mum.” This was embarrassing but, well, sometimes you had to. “Is it okay if I stay tonight?”
“Of course.”
Half an hour later, I was lying in my childhood bed, staring at a ceiling whose every crack I already knew by heart. It was weird how, in a month, Jon Fleming had gone from being this idea I’d grown up with to a real person to an idea again—and, while that hurt, my life was already healing around him like skin closing over a cut. Oliver, though, was a whole different kettle of misery fish. But Mum had been right, hadn’t she? I couldn’t take everything he’d shown me and given me and shared with me and lose it in the…the shittiness of now. He’d helped me see that my life was better than I’d thought it was—that I was better than I’d thought I was. And I could hold on to that. Even if I couldn’t hold on to him.
Chapter 50
“Okay,” I said to Alex.
He glanced up happily. “Oh, are we doing a joke? What larks. We haven’t done one in ages.”
“Right. What’s a pirate’s favourite letter of the alphabet?”
“Well, I suppose the average eighteenth-century seaman wouldn’t have been literate, so probably most of them wouldn’t have had one.”
“Fair point. But, that aside, if you were thinking of a generic movie pirate, what would his or her favourite letter of the alphabet be?”
He wrinkled his nose. “I can honestly say I’m not certain.”
You sometimes got a guess with this joke. You sometimes didn’t. “You might think it’d be arrrrrr,” I explained in my best pirate voice, “but my first love shall always be the sea.”
There was a long silence.
“Why would you think it would be r?” asked Alex. “I mean, pirate begins with a p. As do plunder, pillage, purloin, privateer, and Port au Prince.”
“Arrrrrrrrrrr. Like a pirate.”
“No, pirate begins with p.”
My phone went. Thank God. I answered on my way back to my office.
“Luc,” cried Bridge, “there’s a crisis.”
What was it this time? Had they accidentally sold a set of film rights for five magic beans? “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Oliver!”
Suddenly I was paying attention. “Is he all right? What’s happened?”
“He’s moving to Durham. He’s there right now. He’s got a job interview tomorrow morning.”
We’d broken up. And I’d come to terms with being broken up—okay that was sort of a lie, but I was certainly moving in a termward direction. Even so, my heart still felt like it was going to vomit. “What? Why?”
“He said he wanted a fresh start. Somewhere far away.”
I was very inclined to panic. But this did not sound like Oliver. “Bridge, are you completely sure? He loves what he does. And, if I had to pick a word to describe him, it wouldn’t be ‘impulsive.’”
“He’s been weird for ages. I know I’m not supposed to talk about you to each other, but this is an emergency.”
“It’s certainly odd,” I agreed. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it.”
“You have to stop him, obviously. I mean, it’s your fault for letting him go in the first place.”
Ow. Not okay, Bridge. “I did not let him go. I begged him to stay. I even talked about my feelings and he dumped me anyway.”
She sighed heavily. “Oh, you can both be so hopeless sometimes.”
“That is unfair. I really tried.”
“Then try again.”
“Again? How many times do you want me to throw myself at a guy who doesn’t want me?”
“More than once. And you know he wants you. He’s always wanted you, Luc.”
I collapsed into my desk chair, accidentally activating the tilt so that I nearly slid off under my workstation. “Maybe. But he’s convinced himself it can’t work, and I don’t know how to unconvince him.”
“Well, neither do I. But just sitting there while he runs away to the North is probably not a good start.”
“So you want me to what? Get on a train to Durham and stand in the city centre shouting ‘Oliver, Oliver, I love you’ on the off chance he hears me?”
“Or,” she suggested, “you could go to Durham and meet him at the hotel he’s staying at—which I know because he told me—and then you could say ‘Oliver, Oliver, I love you’ to his face. Also…oh my gosh, you totally love him. I told you. This is going to be the best thing ever.”
“No, it’s a terrible idea. And Oliver will think I’m deeply creepy.”
She thought about this for a moment. “What if I come with you?”
“I think that will look more creepy.”
“I’m coming with you.”
My phone buzzed ominously. And the WhatsApp group—now Bridge
Over Troubled Waters—flicked into life with a message from the Bridge in question.
WE HAVE TO TAKE LUC TO DYRHAM
*DURHAM
BECAUSE OF TRUE LOVE!!!
This is your way of asking for my truck isn’t it?
No, I typed quickly.
YES VERY TRUCK MCUH EMERGENCY WOW
I wish, came James Royce-Royce, someone would teach our Bridget a new meme
This was getting out of hand, and there’d only been seven messages. Look everythings okay. No one needs to be driven anywhere. Please go about your lives. Thank you and goodnight
And, of course, an hour later—having taken a personal day that I’d really hoped someone would care about or challenge me on—I was sitting in the back of Priya’s truck, with Bridget, Tom, and the James Royce-Royces.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “You’ve got jobs, some of them quite important. You can’t seriously want to drive five hours up to Durham just to watch me get shot down by a barrister.”
“Nope”—Priya glanced into the rearview mirror—“we are all up for that. It’s because we care-slash-hate you.”
“This is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done, Luc darling,” said James Royce-Royce. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I gaped at them. “And you’re going to…stand around and watch while I…while I…”
“Tell Oliver you looooooooove him,” offered Bridge.
“While I try and ask a guy who’s already turned me down to go out with me.”
“You’re right.” Thank God Tom was on my side. “Standing around and watching would be a bit ridiculous. Let’s stop at a Welcome Break and grab some popcorn first.”
Priya grinned. “I’d high-five you right now, but I like my truck far too much to take my hands off the wheel.”