Space, occasionally, sure, when work was demanding or when I was being annoying. But this was different. Like, I had no idea what he was thinking, and there was some tiny, messed-up part of my brain that was worried he was hating me. Because if going to bed angry was bad for your relationship, going to organise your father’s funeral angry had to be a whole other level of fucked up.
In any case, Oliver was in Milton Keynes, and I was backsliding with alarming rapidity. Which meant I was actually that guy: the one who could only keep it together if he had someone to keep it together for. And, at some point, Oliver was going to come home and find me unconscious in a pile of old socks and pizza boxes, and then be all, “Not only did you destroy my relationship with my family and question the authenticity of my identity over a rainbow balloon arch but you are also a human refuse pile with less self-respect than one of those fish that spends its whole life attached to a larger fish feeding on its leftovers.” Except he’d just say a remora and assume I knew what it was. And then I’d have to say, “What’s a remora?” and he’d say, “It’s a fish, Lucien, that spends its whole life attached to a larger fish feeding on its leftovers.”
Probably I needed to stop watching The Blue Planet while angsty.
Tipping what was left of my rice into what was left of my kung po sauce, I made a glum and futile pact with myself to stop being so shit. Because nobody who had recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday—and by celebrated I mean panicked about—should be going to pieces after less than a week of having to make his own French toast. Not that I made my own French toast. Even if I’d been able to make it as well as Oliver, it wouldn’t have tasted the same without him.
Fuck, I had to do something. So I pulled out my phone and messaged the WhatsApp group—currently called Stand by Your Pan.
Help, I typed. Oliver has gone away for, like, five seconds and I am eating takeaway in my pants.
Bridge responded immediately: HOW IS OLIVER??? I EHARD
ABOUT HIS DAD :（：（
Trying to talk about someone’s dead parents in all caps created tonal issues that even I was sensitive to. I think he’s okay. He’s not really talking to me.
Why, asked Priya, is there takeaway in your pants?
I’m in my pants. The takeaway is in my mouth.
If I come round to be supportive and shit, will you at least put trousers on?
HES SAD HE DOESN’T HAVE TO WAER TORUSERS IF HE’S
SAD
Sorry—that was James Royce-Royce—James can’t make it because he’s at the restaurant and I can’t make it because I have to look after Baby J.
BRING JBABY J IT’LL BE CUTE. LUC CAN’T BE SAD IF
THERE’S A BABY1!!!!
For someone who knew me better than anyone, sometimes Bridge didn’t know me at all.
Nobody is taking my baby boy to Luc’s flat—that was James Royce-Royce somehow texting from a professional kitchen—he’ll crawl into a pile of laundry and die.
My flat is clean these days, I protested.
An incredulous digital silence followed. Then a message popped up from Priya: Only because you don’t live there.
That was depressingly close to the truth. Keeping the flat clean by the cunning strategy of staying full-time at Oliver’s had worked remarkably well, but I’d been back for four days now and it was four days in which I had done approximately zero washing up.
HES SAD YOU ALWAYS LET THINGS SLIDE WHEN YOUR
SAD
Luc must have been sad a lot.
Well, I’m sad now, I typed. Come and comfort me.
Fine. Should I bring chocolate or bleach?
I winced. Maybe both?
I’M ON MY WAY RIGH TNOW. DON’T START WITHOUT ME.
Don’t start what? I asked.
ANYTHING!!!
I made the executive decision that “anything” in this context didn’t include putting on my trousers. So I did and made a desultory start on the washing up. Except washing up reminded me of Oliver, which probably said all kinds of weird things about my habits, both in the relationship and outside of it. I just missed him. And his three different types of sponges for washing specific types of things. And the way I’d hug him from behind instead of doing the drying, and we’d both pretend it was a hundred percent affection, instead of eighty percent affection and twenty percent laziness.
Definitely not crying, I threw away my takeaway container and realised I’d thrown the fork away with it. In retrospect, that might have explained why I had so few forks.
What if I was never going to wash up with Oliver again? What if he dumped me because every time he looked at me, he saw his dead dad? And then what if every time I looked at a bottle of Fairy Liquid I saw the guy who’d dumped me for yelling at him for caring too much about what his parents thought at the exact moment one of those parents was dying of a heart attack.