I looked at my phone. “Fuck.”
“Bye.”
I bolted.
Chapter 15
“Fuck,” I said as I opened the door. Then I repeated “Fuck” as I yanked off my shoes in the hall and threw in a “Fuck, fuck, fuck” for good measure as I made my way to the front room. “I’m sorry I’m late,” I called out. “Traffic was murder. The social worker isn’t here yet, are th—”
“She is,” said a woman I assumed was the social worker, who was sitting beside Oliver on the sofa. She seemed…about as reassuring as somebody who was here to nitpick all your flaws could look. Younger than I’d expected, with a warm smile and a trace of a Nigerian accent.
“Hi!” I definitely actually did exclaim, sticking my hand out like I was doing the world’s weirdest martial art. “I’m Luc. And sorry about the—thefucks—and the smelling of manure. I don’t normally smell of manure. Or sayfuckquite that much.”
She took my hand and shook it. “Hi, Luc. I’m Esther.” Then, when my arm barely moved, she added, “Please relax. Just a bit. I’m sure everybody has manure days.”
“I really don’t!” I kept exclaiming unrelaxedly. “I very rarely go near manure at all. Not to, like, a neurotic extent. I’m fine with manure. As in fine, like a normal person. Not, like, someone with a fetish or anything.”
There was a silence. Not a long silence but a noticeable silence.
“Lucien is very keen to make a good impression,” Oliver explained. “Which I admit might be hard to tell from the look of him.”
“And the smell,” I added.
“And the smell,” Oliver agreed.
Esther nodded a gentle, used-to-working-with-weirdoes nod. “I understand. It can be a bit worrying having somebody come into your house, look at all your things, and ask you a lot of questions. But remember this really is just a chat.”
A chat that would probably end with her writing a report about what a fuckup I was.
“I’m not here to judge you,” she went on. “Or any one-off manure-related incidents that you may or may not have been involved in.”
“Oh good,” I said, trying very hard to believe her.
For some reason best known to himself, Oliver—who had never in his life patted his knees—patted his knees and stood up. “Shall we do the tour first?” he asked, with a compensating-for-my-manure-covered-boyfriend brightness. “It’s not the biggest house, so it shouldn’t take long.”
“That sounds good.” Esther, sans knee pat, got up to join him. “I mostly need to see the basics. Sitting room”—she made a slightly exaggerated show of looking around—“check. I’ll want to look at the kitchen, see the spare room, your room, any bathrooms, and, you know, make sure you don’t have a cellar full of dead bodies or anything.”
“Ahahahaha,” I said and immediately hated myself. “No. We don’t. Do we, Oliver?”
Oliver did an incredible job of pretending I was behaving reasonably. “I think I’d have noticed. Also I’m pretty sure I’d have been disbarred.”
With an insightfulness that I felt boded extremely badly for me, Esther glanced at Oliver. “Oh, so you’re a lawyer.”
“Barrister,” he clarified.
“I bet if I said, ‘Great, mine’s a cappuccino,’ you’d have heard it before?” She flashed him a disarming smile that would have disarmed anybody who wasn’t already a paranoid ball of nerves and self-loathing.
“Just once or twice,” Oliver lied.
She turned back to me cheerfully. “So that means you’d be the primary caregiver?”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. “I suppose,” I managed, realising half a second too late that a primary caregiver should probably at least be comfortablesayingthat they were a primary caregiver.
“We both work full-time,” added Oliver, “but Lucien mostly works from home. He looks after Spud as well.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, who’d been sitting angelically by Oliver’s feet this whole time.
I silently sent him good-boy vibes as we led Esther into the hall and then showed her up to the spare room. It was a good-size space—at least, I hoped it was a good-size space—with a single bed and a little desk. We’d mostly used it for guests, and so it looked quite bare just then, which I pencilled in under my lateness, my swearing, my being covered in manure, and my inability to say what my role in the family would be on the list of things I’d somehow convinced myself she’d use against us.
