I sat on my hands to stop myself from getting all frustrated and gesticulatey. “That’s not how negative experiences work. And you’re a lawyer. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Your point is well made, but this isn’t a trauma, it’s an inconvenience. I’m going to say some things I don’t entirely mean— although to give myself credit, I don’t think anything in the speech is strictly untrue…”
“Yeah,” I couldn’t help interrupting, “you got a lot of mileage out of ‘wouldn’t be the men we are today.’”
Oliver gave a sassy little nod. “Thank you. I’m glad you noticed.
But nevertheless, all I have to do is to stand up and pretend for a very short period of time that my relationship with my father was less complicated than it actually was. That’s what everybody has done at every funeral that has ever happened.”
I stared at him in his black suit and his black tie. He’d got that faintly hollowed-out look he got when he’d been at the gym more than was probably psychologically healthy for him. “But don’t they also say that funerals are, you know, for the living? And you’re…the living.”
“Yes”—he nodded—“and so is everyone else.”
“Yeah, but there’s, like, a…” I pulled my hands out from under my arse and did the balancing scales mime. “Like, you’re doing something that hurts you a lot that might help other people a little bit, and that’s like giving blood but giving all of your blood. And, yeah, you might save two people’s lives but you’d be dead. And if you give a little bit of your blood…” I suddenly realised I’d run up against an analogy that, for most of our lives, neither of us had access to “…
whenever you’re allowed to—”
“So,” said Oliver, “in my case not at all until the guidelines changed?”
“Okay, leaving aside homophobic medical policies and my failure to rhetoric properly, tell me honestly and tell yourself honestly how doing this speech will make you feel.”
There was a long silence. Then Oliver came and sat next to me.
“Frankly, Lucien, it will make me feel miserable. I’m still very much working through what my relationship with my father was or meant, and so putting it into a neat little box and tying that box with a neat little bow and attaching a neat little label that says ‘Beloved husband, devoted father’ is…” He broke off and then finished in a resentful rush. “Fucking with my head.”
“It would,” I told him. “It’s a heady-fucky thing to have to do.
Which is why I’m telling you, one last time, if you want to nope out, you can.”
“But—”
“No buts.” I produced the assertive finger and waved it in the air.
“Blah blah family blah blah expectation. Even with all that, if this is bad for you, that’s the most important thing.”
Oliver heaved a sigh packed with so many different emotions that if I’d wanted to, I could have sorted them alphabetically, starting with angry and ending with woeful. “I’m sorry, Lucien. I wish I could be that brave or that selfish but, ironically, it’s not how I was raised.
And I’m working on that, but my father was inconsiderate enough to die in the middle of the process rather than at the end of it. So here I am, doing what is expected of me, because right here and now right, I cannot imagine doing anything else.”
“And,” I said, squeezing his hand tightly, “I support you a hundred percent.” I didn’t say, even if you don’t support yourself because that wasn’t what he needed to hear. Besides, coming from me, it would have been kind of hypocritical.
“If you supported me a hundred percent”—Oliver’s lips twitched —“you wouldn’t be wearing the same suit to my father’s funeral that you wore to your coworker’s wedding.”
I did, in fact, have exactly one suit, not counting the blue one I’d rented for Bridge’s blue-and-rose-gold marital extravaganza. “It’s a multipurpose item. It’s both frugal and ethical.” Standing, I gave
Oliver my most morally superior face. “Do you know how many litres of drinkable water go into producing a pair of formal trousers?”
“No,” said Oliver, looking—as I should have predicted— genuinely curious. “How many?”
“Well, I don’t know either. But I bet it’s a lot.” And that was about as far as my cheer-up-Oliver routine could run because if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be late.