“My mum’s sort of Odile O’Donnell. Not sort of. Actually. Just. She is. She’s Odile O’Donnell. I don’t know if you rememberWelcome Ghosts—you’re probably not old enough,I’mnot really old enough but, yeah, that’s her. And my dad’s Jon Fleming, one of the original judges onThe Whole Package, won a Grammy forPendulum of the World, made the final ofStrictlylast year.”
Esther was still nodding.
I was still dying. “He walked out when I was really young, and then a little while ago he thought he had prostate cancer so he was all like, ‘Son, I totally want you back in my life,’ and then he foundout he didn’t have prostate cancer, so he was all, ‘Actually, you know what, forget it.’ So that…sucked.”
“It sounds like it would.”
“Yeah,” I said, spiralling into the whirlpool of Esther’s unreadable niceness. “It made me feel really shit and worthless at the time. But I had Oliver. And my mum is great. Like the best. Like my favourite person apart from Oliver. And Spud. I mean, Spud’s a dog. But, like, he’s part of the family, and I don’t want him to feel devalued.”
“Ruff.” Spud wagged his tail, valuedly.
“It’s good you had that,” said Esther.
“Spud?”
“Your mother.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry. That makes more sense. Anyway, she raised me in a really normal, healthy way in a tiny village near Epsom with a weird old lady who’s had about ten million husbands and still has about ten million spaniels.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Esther again.
My words were swirling in the air like flies around a bin you really, really needed to take outside. “Okay. Now I’m saying that, it’s sounding a bit less normal than I might maybe have billed it. But it was all like loving and shit. And I could have come out a lot worse.”
“It seems like you’ve been through a lot.” Esther’s tone was so nonjudgemental that, in the end, it proved fatal.
“Kind of.” And, before I could stop myself, I careened on like my disclosure car had hit a patch of reassurance ice. “About a decade ago, the then love of my life sold me out to one of the shittier tabloids for an annoyingly small amount of money, and it basically destroyed my ability to trust anybody for pretty much all of my twenties, but then I got better and I even went to his wedding to show him I didn’t care, and Idostill kind of hate him but in this empowered chill way now.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, laying his chin on my knee supportively.
I needed to stop saying things. I urgently needed to stop saying things. Preferably ten minutes ago. “So,” I said carefully. “Yeah.”
Esther finished making notes on my trash fire of a life. “Anything else I should know?”
My whole body tried to sink into the sofa cushions. I had fucked this. I had fucked this so badly. Oliver was looking at me, not with anger or disappointment, but in a way that clearly said,You have fucked this. You have fucked this so badly. And that also said,But if that’s what we’re doing, we’re doing it together.
“When Lucien and I first got together,” he said, completely deadpan, “we were only pretending to date because he needed an appropriate boyfriend to prevent homophobic press coverage affecting his work, and I’d been secretly into him for a long time and thought it was the only chance I’d ever get. Then three years ago, we ran out on our own wedding. We’ve never been happier.”
I squeezed Oliver’s hand so tightly it was probably sending Esther red flags. Well, redder flags than the very red, very flaggy flags I’d already flagged. At this point, though, I’d made a choice, and, from the way he was squeezing back, it seemed Oliver was making the same choice right along with me. That it was better to get rejected for who we were than accepted for who we weren’t. Because this right here—this messy improbable beautiful shit show—was me and Oliver, and I loved me and Oliver and I wouldn’t change that for anything.
* * *
“She saidwhat?” I asked Oliver. I sayasked. Honestly I was mostly exclaiming again.
It was two days later and we were in Oliver’s study, where he’d taken the follow-up call from Ester, while I’d been hiding in the bedroom, like the extremely mature and grounded person I am.
“She said,” he repeated, “it went well.”
“She saidwhat?” I also repeated.
Oliver raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, my mistake. What she actually said was that you were a hot mess and the last person in the universe who should be around children.”
“I mean, thatwouldbe more likely.”
“Demonstrably not true since it’s not, in fact, what happened. What happened was, it wentwell.”
“It didn’t feel like it went well.”
“Apparently it’s very normal to be nervous—”
