“Not Baby J,” said James Royce-Royce. “I’d never hear the end of it.”
“And I don’t recommend the twins.” Wow, Oliver was going with this. There were very few things he wouldn’t do to comfort his friends. “They’ve made me genuinely question my belief in the concept of ontological evil.”
“How about that one?” Peter elbow-pointed. “He’s been trying to put a manzanilla olive up his nose for the last three minutes. I can’t imagine his parents would miss him.”
“Hard pass,” said Jennifer. “I’d rather go live in the tent.”
“Personally,” Oliver began, and I felt simultaneously reassured and terrified that he was so ready to have personal feelings about this, “I’d go for the one sitting on the edge of the fountain readingA Hat Full of Sky.”
Jennifer hugged herself, her eyes lighting up. “Oh, she’s perfect. I love kids who hate other kids.”
Normally this was exactly the kind of insensitive bullshit I’d have been all over, but I was still trying really hard not to climb into my own head over the wholeAre you and your now unmistakably long-term partner planning for children yet?thing. Once upon a time, I—along with everyone else who wasn’t a heterosexual cis woman—would have been safe from that kind of crap. See, this was the problem with equality. Apparently, if you told a society it wasn’t okay to treat one group of people worse than another, it would consider the situation carefully, weigh up its options, and then start treating everyone equally badly.
And the thing was, it’s not like me and Oliver hadn’t had the conversation. We’d had it multiple times. I just wasn’t quite ready to be fantasy-casting my domestic future with other people’s kids,so I politely snuck away. All right, I impolitely snuck away, and my friends were too polite to call me on it. Of course, that left me at a loose end at a children’s party, which felt a whole lot worse than being at a loose end andnotat a children’s party. For about thirteen seconds I watched an—I was guessing—either highly under- or highly overpaid man in a top hat blasting a stream of shimmering bubbles over the heads of thirty indifferent six-year-olds. Which was a shame because I normally felt bubbles enhanced an event. Then again, in my experience, the events they’d enhanced had involved a pit of half-naked adults on poppers.
“Tarquin”—a voice drifted across the lawn—“stop putting hummus in Petunia’s hair.”
Oh God, I was in hell. So I did what I always did when I was in hell and went to wallow in misery with Priya. She was sitting on a blanket, surrounded by makeup palettes and brushes and, before I could even get out a “Well, isn’t this awful,” a little girl had dashed past me, knelt in front of Priya, and declared it was her turn now.
“Sure,” said Priya, laconic as usual, but a flavour of laconic that made me feel a bit cockblocked, wallow-in-misery-wise. “What do you want to be?”
“A shark,” replied the little girl more decisively than I’d ever replied to anything in my entire life. “Because my brother’s scared of sharks.”
This felt like a good opportunity to be a grown-up. “That doesn’t sound very nice,” I tried.
The little girl gave me theI resent how little you are comprehending melook I was used to seeing on children. “My brother’s not very nice.”
“Hi, Luc.” Priya was already gathering her shark colours, a mix of blues, greys, whites, and—worryingly—reds. “Also, her face, her choice. What kind of shark do you want to be?”
“A ghost shark who lives under your bed and will bite your hand off if it sticks out of the covers in the night.”
“Are you actually trying to give your brother nightmares?” I asked.
“Yes,” Priya and the girl said simultaneously, with Priya adding, “Obviously.”
I eyed her dubiously. “Isn’t that a little bit irresponsible?”
Priya grinned like a ghost shark who lives under your bed and will bite your hand off if it sticks out of the covers in the night. “Not my kids. Not my problem.”
“I never wanted a brother,” explained the little girl tragically. “I wanted a chinchilla.”
And so today joined the long list of days in which I failed to quit when I was ahead. “Isn’t a brother better than a chinchilla?”
“No,” said the little girl and Priya, once again in unison.
“Chinchillas can jump six feet in the air,” the little girl went on. “My brother can’t jump six feet in the air.”
Having assembled her various ensharkening implements, Priya set about applying a base coat of silvery-blue. “I always knew there was a reason I didn’t like boys.”
“Speaking of not liking boys”—I made what even I could tell was a shit attempt at changing the subject—“where are your girlfriends?”
“Theresa’s done the kids thing already. Andi’s allergic to children. So they’re”—Priya hesitated for a nanosecond—“shopping at IKEA, and I’m here.”
“It sounds like you got the bad end of that deal.”
“Luc, it’s fine. I can go to IKEA whenever I want.”
I stared at her, wondering who this woman was and what she’d done with Priya. “Are you saying you deliberately chose face painting at a children’s party for no money over a long, luxurious, strangely intense trip to IKEA on a Saturday afternoon?”
