Chapter 1 #2
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 be able 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 said You 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?”
“Probably as a bonus. Not even Lucifer himself could get one over on Sophie.”
Except now Jennifer was frowning again. One of those complicated frowns where it was hard to know what she was frowning at and hard to know if she knew either. “Sorry, I’m probably coming across as bitter and resentful.”
“We’re all resentful of Sophie,” replied Oliver, even though he definitely wasn’t because he didn’t have a resentful bone in his body. “She is, after all, a completely terrible human being whom we nevertheless love dearly.”
“And besides”—gently, Peter nudged his shoulder against Jennifer’s—“we can always spend our twilight years LARPing with Brian and Amanda.”
“You’re going to do what with them?” I asked. “No judgement, but is that one of those straight people things like swinging? Or swing-dancing?”
“I’ve never quite worked it out either,” admitted Jennifer. “I think it’s camping in fancy dress.”
“Well, if we’d gone with them this weekend,” said Peter, clearly glad they hadn’t, “we’d have found out.”
Jennifer’s expression turned wry again. “We may have to one day. I’m beginning to realise that all those times Brian and Amanda said they hated kids, they genuinely meant it, and so if we ever want to see them again, we might need to do something in a child-free environment.”
“Brian and Amanda have never invited us to go LARPing,” said Oliver, with a touch of dismay.
“Oliver,” I pointed out, “they’ve met me. Would you invite me to go LARPing? I still haven’t figured out what it is, and I know I’d be the literal worst at it.”
Oliver’s jaw was stubbornly set. “It’s still polite to invite people.”
“I suspect”—Jennifer had a gleam in her eye that was the offline version of trollface—“the main reason you haven’t been invited to go magic camping is Brian and Amanda aren’t sure what side you’re on.”
“What?” I asked. “Like orcs versus elves or something?”
“Like kids versus no kids.”
I reminded myself that Jennifer was going through a hard time right now and also that she and Oliver went way back, so she’d paid her needling dues many times over. On the other hand: red alert, panic stations, what the fuck, not ready to think about this right now. “Uhhhh,” I said.
Oliver, of course, handled it with aplomb. A massive plomb. A plomb so big it was faintly impractical. “As with many, many other choices in life”—he also had his lawyer voice on—“I think it’s rather important not to see children in terms of sides at all.”
“That means kids,” declared Peter.
“Uhhhh,” I said. “Uhhhh.”
Thankfully, Oliver was still amply supplied with plombs. “I think you’ll find, as with many, many other choices in life, I mean exactly what I said.”
“I’m sorry.” Jennifer’s shoulders slumped. “We shouldn’t be taking this out on you. I know it’s against your extremely admirable ethics to bitch about people behind their backs, but this is so typical of Brian and Amanda.”
It was the wrong moment to feel slightly smug that Oliver would sometimes compromise his admirable bitching ethics when we were alone. But I felt smug about it anyway.
Peter sighed. “It’s like they were rooting for us to have problems so we could be on their team. And now we do and we’re sad and they’ve pounced.”
“I suspect”—Oliver had replaced lawyer voice with very good friend voice—“that they’re trying to support you in their own way.”
“Well, their way sucks,” retorted Jennifer, with a childishness I deeply respected.
“I know they’re mostly saying, ‘You don’t have to want this,’ and that could be a helpful thing to say to some people in some contexts.
But the thing is, I do want it and I’m not ready to give up on wanting it. It’s just, right now, I… I don’t know.”
“Jenbee…” Peter had his arm around her in that helpless way you do when someone you love is hurting from something you can’t control. “This isn’t all on you. There’s always other options, of which living in a tent with Brian and Amanda is way, way down the list.”
The slump had progressed from Jennifer’s shoulders to a whole body situation. “I know, I know. There’s surrogacy or adoption or…or…kidnapping.”
“We could probably grab one of these,” suggested Peter, nodding subtly at the pack of young partygoers. “Nobody’d notice until at least four, and by then we’d be in zone six and they’d never be able to find us.”
Oliver flicked up a wry brow, and for once, I didn’t begrudge him flicking it at someone else. “That’s true. Ben and Sophie’s friends don’t leave Kensington if they can possibly help it.”
“We don’t even live near a Waitrose anymore,” added Jennifer. “They’d be fucked.”
Rubbing his hands with faux excitement, Peter started eyeing up the kids in what I want to make very clear was a satirical way. “All right. Which do we get?”
“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 reading A 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 whole Are 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 and not at 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 the I resent how little you are comprehending me look 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?”
“You seem to know a lot about my trips to IKEA. But yeah.” Priya shrugged. “This is fun. I love kids. I’m one of nature’s aunts.”
“I wish you were my aunt,” put in the little girl, whose new identity as a ghost shark who lives under your bed and will bite your hand off if it sticks out of the covers in the night was taking definite and disturbing shape. “My aunt’s Bethany, and she’s horrid.”
“Why’s she horrid?” asked Priya.
“She just is.”
Priya winced. “Oh, that’s the worst kind of horrid.”
“For the record,” I said, talking over a child like the classy motherfucker I was, “I’m feeling quite betrayed by this.”
“I’ll paint you next.”
Priya’s lack of time for my bullshit was the basis of our entire relationship, and, in theory, I appreciated it. “You’re supposed to be the person I complain about other people with. And I can’t do that if you’re enjoying yourself.”
The little girl had been glancing between us in a way that was making it somewhat difficult for Priya to fully realise her ghost-shark vision. “Is he your boyfriend?”
“Nope,” said Priya. “We’re both mega gay.”
“Okay,” said the little girl. “Can my ghost shark have blood on its teeth from all the little brothers it’s eaten?”
Priya gestured at her vast array of reds. “Way ahead of you, kiddo.”
“Betrayed,” I repeated.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Luc.” Without even sparing me a look, Priya started outlining the enormous teeth that would probably make an unsuspecting young boy piss himself later. “I got happy. Deal with it.”
Oh fuck, she had, hadn’t she?
“And,” she added belligerently, “in case you’ve forgotten, so did you.”
“But it didn’t make me a better person.”
“It hasn’t made me a better person either. I’ve always been fantastic, and I’ve always liked kids. You just never noticed because you’re profoundly selfish.”
“Hey,” I protested. “That’s…entirely fair.”
“Besides”—Priya was patron saint of kicking you when you were down—“you’re just freaking out because of tomorrow.”
I was not. “I am not.”
“What’s tomorrow?” asked the little girl.
Priya looked very, very serious—like the total dickhead I was pleased to realise she could still be. “Tomorrow, Luc and his boyfriend are doing something huge. Overwhelmingly huge. Life-changingly huge. Nothing will ever be the same again for them after tomorrow.”
“It’s not that big a deal,” I whimpered.
“That’s not what you said when you rang me last week. At three in the morning.”
“That was last week,” I told her. “This is now. Now I have a sense of perspective.” I took a deep breath. “And I’m fine.”