Father Material (London Calling #3)

Chapter 1

I have, in fact, always seen the point of children’s birthday parties.

For children. Not for their adult parents to invite their adult friends to, even if those adult friends don’t have kids of their own.

Because for adults, children’s birthday parties fucking suck.

You can’t swear. You can’t have sex in the toilet.

You can’t get wasted or high or pass out in the corner.

You can’t do any of the things that make parties bearable.

Thinking about it, maybe I’ve just never liked any kind of party ever. I’d always known my mid-twenties fuckboy clubkid phase had been self-destructive. But it had never occurred to me I might have been trying to annoy myself to death.

“You’re hating every second of this, aren’t you?” said Oliver, making me feel both seen and taken-the-piss-out-of.

“Not at all. I love being surrounded by tiny balls of snot and chaos.”

He gave me an amusperated smile. “Children are just in a developmental stage that makes controlling nasal flow difficult. There’s nothing to—whoa there.

” With typically Oliverian expertise, he scooped up an errant child who had somehow acquired a terrifyingly large, terrifyingly sharp pair of scissors. “Those are not for you.”

“They are,” protested the child, chaotically if not snottily. “I found them. So they’re mine.”

Deftly separating infant from implement, Oliver flipped the scissors and held them with the blade tucked responsibly against his forearm. “Contrary to popular belief, possession is not, in fact, nine-tenths of the law.”

Before Oliver Blackwood’s Jurisprudence for Six-Year-Olds could get into full swing, we were interrupted by Ben, of Ben-and-Sophie, one of the many sets of straight married people who had somehow become my friends as a consequence of their having gone to university a decade ago with the man I’m in love with.

As usual, Ben was five foot ten of stress and finger paints wrapped in dad jeans and a garishly coloured shirt.

“Oh my God,” he cried. “Luc, Oliver, have either of you seen Twin A come this way with an actual murder weapon?”

Oliver turned slightly, displaying weapon and twin both.

“Thank fuuuuuuu—goodness.” Ben looked at his kid with an expression that was slightly too harried to be stern. “What were you thinking? Where did you even get those?”

Twin A wriggled futilely under Oliver’s arm. “They were in the big wardrobe on the top shelf at the back in the box in the other box, but I found them. And then”—he tried to glare at Oliver but couldn’t quite turn his neck far enough—“he stole them.”

“You stole them first,” Ben pointed out. “And someone could have been hurt.”

“Technically,” I said, channelling my inner Oliver, who unfortunately had far worse judgement than the real Oliver, “he just took them without consent.”

With a triumphant kick, Twin A disentangled himself from Oliver. “You see. They’re mine.”

Ben took his hand with parental aggression. “Nothing’s yours. You’re a child.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Well, life’s not fa—” Ben’s gaze floated up to Oliver and me. “Shit, I’m turning into my mother.”

“Daddy said shit,” yelled Twin A, pulling free before dashing out of the kitchen. “Mummy, Daddy said shit.”

“Shit,” sighed Ben. “I’d better—” Something bright and fast-moving caught his eye through the kitchen window. “Oh my God, is that Twin B? I think he’s got matches.”

As Ben parented off, Oliver and I were left alone, listening as the merry babble of kids at a party was cut through by Ben shouting “No, those are for grown-ups” and Sophie adding “You can commit arson when you’re older.”

“You know,” I told Oliver, “I used to be cool before I met you. I did cool stuff.”

“Did you?” Oliver raised a bullshit-calling eyebrow.

“Because to my recollection, the first time we met, you ignored everybody and spent the evening talking to Priya in the kitchen, the second time we met you were blackout drunk, and the third time—on an actual date—you pretended to speak French to either impress or vex me. I’ve still not worked out which. ”

I did that embarrassing thing you do when you’ve been with someone a long time and you just naturally drift closer to them like the last two Maltesers in a packet.

“So what you’re saying is that the first time I was busy with my extremely interesting artist friend, the second time I was sexily self-destructive, and the third time I was a man of mystery. ”

“And look at you now.” Surrendering to his inner Malteser, Oliver drew me to him. “Ruined by domestic bliss.”

“I know. It’s awful. How dare you make me happy.”

He stretched up and kissed me in a sweet-and-totally-appropriate-for-a-children’s-birthday-party kind of way. “How dare you make me happy back.”

I had one of those flashes where you see yourself from a distance or from above or through the eyes of a person you used to be. “Fuck,” I said. “We’re legitimately disgusting.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Oliver murmured, his eyes all soft and silver and never leaving mine, “I’m about to make you miserable again.”

“You’re going to say we have to circulate, aren’t you? Be sociable. 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 just slightly towards Jennifer and Peter.

And that was why I was glad I’d brought Oliver.

Because he knew how to say Hi, we haven’t spoken since your latest unsuccessful round of IVF without sounding like a complete shit-heel.

“Not bad,” replied Jennifer with a very British nod. “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 the teensiest bit 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.”