“You’re going to say we have tocirculate, aren’t you? Besociable. Support our friends.”
“I don’t need to. I just baited you into saying it for me.” With great ceremony, Oliver plucked a glittering rainbow party hat from a stack of glittering rainbow party hats and strapped it to my head. The elastic settled behind my ears in a way I was immediately worried would make me look like Prince Charles. King Charles. Fuck, we’d been together through two monarchs, and God knew how many prime ministers. “Come on.”
He took my hand in a half-affectionate, half-commanding way that, in other circumstances, I would have been extremely into, and led me outside. Where the first thing I noticed about the beautiful August afternoon he’d brought me into was that not a single other adult was wearing a party hat.
* * *
Other than me, looking like a prick, the garden also contained a squall of overexcited children, running backwards and forwards in that intense way you do when the world is too big, your legs are too small, and you don’t have to worry about taxes, mortgages, or the fact you’ll definitely die one day. Dotted amongst them were the usual trappings of a child’s birthday: balloons, trestle tables laden with party food, and little clusters of adults in various stages of fuck-giving.
We made our way towards the nearest cluster, which consisted of Jennifer and Peter from the Oliver side of the equation, and the James Royce-Royces from mine. I hoped it said good things about the stability of my relationship with Oliver that not only were my friends becoming his friends, and his friends becoming my friends,but that my friends seemed to be becoming his friends’ friends. Or maybe it was just that we’d all dissolved into a mush of thirtysomethings with jobs and responsibilities.
“How’ve you been?” Oliver asked. “It seems like forever.” He was addressing the whole group but had tilted the question justslightlytowards Jennifer and Peter. And that was why I was glad I’d brought Oliver. Because he knew how to sayHi, we haven’t spoken since your latest unsuccessful round of IVFwithout sounding like a complete shit-heel.
“Not bad,” replied Jennifer with a veryBritishnod. “Busy. Trying to convince a think tank that you can’t crack down on human trafficking by criminalising being trafficked.”
“While I,” added Peter, with his usual dryness, “am illustrating a book about a frog who learns to share his flies with other frogs.”
James Royce-Royce, meanwhile, was gazing out into the morass of infancy with the focused rapture he’d once reserved for perfectly roasted pigeons and now reserved for perfectly roasted pigeons and his child. “Just look at him,” he cried. “Riding that tricycle like a champion.”
Because it was easier than not looking, I looked, and beheld Baby J riding a tricycle in a perfectly adequate way. I had, however, learned not to say anything even remotely resembling that. “Wow,” I said, instead. “Look at him go.”
“The grace,” declared James Royce-Royce. “The panache. The élan.”
Baby J turned his handlebars to the left and steered diligently into a sandpit.
James Royce-Royce’s expression of adoration didn’t falter for a nanosecond. “You see. And now he’s exploring.”
“He’s upside down,” said James Royce-Royce. The second James Royce-Royce. The one who was married to the first James Royce-Royce. It was a whole thing.
“Such resilience.” James Royce-Royce whipped out his phone and started frantically scrolling. “This is probably an important developmental milestone.”
“He’s upside down,” said James Royce-Royce again.
“He’s…” Reality briefly slithered its way through James Royce-Royce’s defences. “Oh yes, maybe he does need theteensiestbit of assistance.” And, like Ben before him, James Royce-Royce parented off to make sure that his wonderful, perfect son was no longer being wonderful and perfect with his head in a pile of sand.
For a moment or two, we were trapped in a kind of stasis, watching James Royce trying to manhandle Baby J into an upright position.
“Wow,” I said, out of habit. “Look at him go.”
“Which one?” asked Peter, as Baby J—having apparently discovered his inner ostrich—squirmed out of James Royce-Royce’s arms and reinverted himself.
“Both?”
After that, we lapsed into a deeper, more awkward silence. And, as a general rule, I wouldn’t have relied on James Royce-Royce (the other James Royce-Royce) to be the lube in the social buttfucking because the man was so taciturn that when waiters told him to enjoy his meal, he never accidentally said, “You too.”
To everyone’s surprise, however, he gave Jennifer and Peter a searching look. “Sorry. Is this awful for you? I think James is going to have baby brain for at least the next fifteen years.”
Jennifer shrugged. “It’s fine. You see, we had a long discussion about whether we were going to cut all of our friends out of our lives completely or accept that sometimes people might talk about children in front of us.”
“I was in favour of cutting you,” added Peter. “I mean, what would we lose?”
“You’d lose…” I began, and trailed off partly for comedic effect and partly because I’d need a lot more booze and/or therapy to beable to say spontaneously positive things about myself. “Actually, you’re right. You should drop us.”
“Well”—Jennifer wasn’t quite smiling through the pain, but she was probably smirking around it—“if any more of you have kids, we might. We’re beginning to take it personally.”
Oliver had that look he got when he was about to unleash his secretly catty side. It was a look that saidYou are a bad influence on me, Lucien, and I loved it. “I’m not entirely sure the twins count as children. I think Sophie must have picked them up in one of her regular deals with the devil.”
Some of the strain faded from Jennifer’s eyes and she laughed. “As a bonus or a sanction?”
