Chapter 15 #2
I tried to not actively stare at Oliver.
It wasn’t that I’d expected him to say, My parents were arseholes who treated me and my brother like shit, only they did it in such a middle-class way that it took me nearly thirty years to notice.
But it was a little bit uncomfortable hearing him give Esther the exact same line he’d given me on our first date.
“Obviously,” I tried, “no one’s childhood is perfect.”
Probably Oliver didn’t want to lay into his dead dad in front of a random social worker, but I hoped he’d feel encouraged to, like, not lie for him?
“That’s true,” Oliver conceded. “My father…”
He paused, frowning, and I took his hand. Because, distracted as I’d been with my own bullshit, I’d kind of lost sight of how tough this was going to be for him.
“My father,” he repeated, “was a complicated man. He…he died a few years ago, and I suppose… I suppose it meant I had to do some thinking.”
“What kind of thinking?” asked Esther.
Another pause. “About myself,” Oliver offered, a little uncertain.
I squeezed his hand.
“About my values,” he went on. “The lessons he’d taught me and whether I was right to learn them.” His frown deepened. “Sorry, that’s all a bit vague and melancholy. I am actually seeing a therapist.”
I’d say this for Esther, she had a fantastic it’s-okay-really smile. Even my lizard brain was starting to come down off the ceiling. “No, no,” she said. “I asked, and everything helps.” And perhaps she could tell that Oliver needed a break, because she turned to me. “How about you, Luc?”
My ability to put Oliver’s needs above my own anxieties evaporated rapidly. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. You know. Basically like him. Only not. Normal, I mean. Very normal.”
A sharp little light crept into Esther’s eyes. Sharp but not unkind. “Normally when things are normal, people don’t say they’re normal quite that often.”
“I meeeean,” I replied, drawing the middle of mean out as long as I could in the vague hope that it would buy me some time. “Everybody’s got. You know. Circumstances and that. Ordinary normal ordinary circumstances.”
I was surprised and mildly reassured when Esther nodded. “Yes. They do. What were yours?”
“Well.”
“Yes?”
“Well.” I left it there. “Well.” I left it there again. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to pick it up or do anything with it. So at last I had to unleave it there and run as quickly as I could into: “Wellactuallymyparentsweresortofeightiesrocklegends.”
To my very mild irritation, Esther never stopped looking patient and gentle. If Oliver hadn’t been gay as a rainbow butt plug and my boyfriend who I wanted to keep, I’d have said the two of them should date. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not sure I got that.”
“My parents,” I repeated, my mouth going dry and my tongue feeling way too big all of a sudden, “were, you know, um. Eighties rock legends?”
Esther just nodded. “Mm-hmm?”
“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 remember Welcome Ghosts—you’re probably not old enough, I’m not really old enough but, yeah, that’s her.
And my dad’s Jon Fleming, one of the original judges on The Whole Package, won a Grammy for Pendulum of the World, made the final of Strictly last 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 found out 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 I do still 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 said what?” I asked Oliver. I say asked. 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 said what?” 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, that would be more likely.”
“Demonstrably not true since it’s not, in fact, what happened. What happened was, it went well.”
“It didn’t feel like it went well.”
“Apparently it’s very normal to be nervous—”
“But is it normal to dump your entire personal history and all your childhood trauma and, thinking about it, your adult trauma on a complete stranger who’s good at nodding?”
“I think,” said Oliver carefully, “normal might not be an applicable word in this context.”
“Um.” I stared at him. “Thanks?”
“I just mean that everything you said—we said—was pertinent information that Esther needed to know in order to make an assessment. But I suspect she’s used to it taking more work to get people there.”
“She threw me off guard by being nice and understanding.”
“Yes, that was dastardly of her.” He rose from his extremely ergonomic chair and rested his hands lightly on my hips. “Lucien, for the last time. It went well. Yes, we were nervous, but Esther said that we’d clearly been through our options. And that, while having a new dog was a slight concern—”
“Hey, what’s wrong with Spud?”
“As I said: that he’s new. That’s not a personal insult against Spud. It’s the reality of fostering with pets.”
“Okay”—I prodded Oliver in the chest—“because if she comes for Spud, I don’t care how nice and understanding she is. We will be enemies forever.”
“She specifically noted that Spud was clearly well behaved and unlikely to cause problems.”
“Good. Right. Good. But also, on a more general level, I’m still dealing with a whole lot of what here.”
“I mean, I could go into more detail if you like. But the gist is, and stop me if you’ve heard this one, it went well.”
Why was it that repetition only made things easier to believe when those things were bad?
“Was she in, like, a completely different room from me? Did you bribe her while I was making tea? Did she accidentally get our file mixed up with somebody else’s?
” There were, as far as I could tell, no other possible explanations.
“Respectively.” Oliver, who had, over the years, developed his own ways of reassuring me, began counting on his fingers. “Only for a few minutes. No. And if she did, it was another gay couple with a dog called Spud and our exact personal histories.”
“Oh.” I tried to let this information sink in. “Well, in that case we should find out who they are because we’d probably get on.”
Oliver gave me a look that was about sixty percent loving and forty percent the exasperated kind of loving. “Lucien.”
“Okay. Okay. It’s just…I’m finding it hard to believe that she looked at me and was all, like, ‘That’s the one, the guy whose rock star father walked out on him and then showed up twenty years later with fake cancer—he’ll be a good role model.’”
For some reason, Oliver didn’t seem to find this idea as ludicrous as I did. “We discussed that.”
“What, you discussed what an emotional wreck I am?”
“No, Lucien. We discussed the fact that, in her experience, people with very sheltered backgrounds can sometimes find it harder to empathise with the difficulties looked-after children experience. Whereas people who’ve been through hard times themselves are often better able to relate.”
“It’s true,” I said. “If we get a kid who’s stressed out because they had to watch their absentee father dance a rumba to ‘Blackbird on the Wire’ with Dianne Buswell, I’ll be all over it.”
“I feel obliged to point out that you didn’t have to watch that.”
“I still can’t fucking believe Craig gave him an eight.”
Oliver sighed with infinite patience. “What really matters here, according to Esther, is that we’re able to provide a strong, stable homelife. And she believes we can.”
“We can?”
“We can,” he said firmly. Then unfirmed. “Well, pending an enhanced DBS check.”
I looked blank.
“They need to look at court records and make sure we’ve never been investigated for anything…disqualifying.”
“Like what?”
He gave me a use-your-imagination look.
“Oh.” Then my brain caught up with my ears. “Hang on, did you say investigated? So even if it turned out we didn’t do anything, they’d still hold it against us.”
Oliver nodded.
“What about, you know, innocent until proven guilty?”
“That’s for criminal courts. The question here isn’t ‘Should you be allowed to go free,’ it’s ‘Should you be given privileged access to a vulnerable child.’ There’s a good reason it has a different standard of evidence.”
That probably made sense, although I was mostly just relying on my usual strategy of trusting that Oliver knew what he was talking about.
“It’s genuinely a formality in our case,” he added.
Only marginally reassured, I rested my cheek on his shoulder. “This is some real grown-up shit, isn’t it?”
“Despite how it may sometimes feel”—Oliver’s fingers continued to card soothingly through my hair—“we are, in fact, real grown-ups.”
Reflexively, I flinched. “I think I might be kind of scared.”
“So am I.” Oliver kiss-nuzzled my cheek. “But we’ll get through it. We always do.”