Page 151 of Boyfriend Material
I did something that, on a better day, I would have been thinking about. “I don’t know…it could be. Maybe it’s because I half knew it was coming—I mean not the ‘oh I’m totally fine, fuck you’—but the being let down. It hurts like hell, but not in the way I thought it would. Not in a way that changes anything.”
“That is good. I know it’s a cliché, but he really isn’t worth it. He’s just an old bald man with a leaky prostate who’s on TV sometimes.”
I grinned. “They should make that his intro package.”
“And yet, for some reason, they never even asked me to give them a quote. Though I still get royalties every time they use one of our clips.”
We were quiet again for a moment.
“I think,” I said finally, “what’s weirding me out is that I’ve spent my whole life wondering why Jon Fleming didn’t want me. And now I’m annoyed that I spent such a long time trying to understand this complete arsehole when there are so many people around me who…aren’t complete arseholes.”
“Yes, it’s funny how arseholes do that to you.”
“How do you stop them?”
“You don’t. You just get on with things and eventually it’s…fine. And you’re fine. And you feel briefly bitter you spent so long not being fine. But then you’re fine.”
“I’m…I’m pretty sure I’m in the bitter stage.”
“Eh. That’s good. It’s better than the ‘Oh no, what did I do wrong, am I terrible person’ stage. And the next step you will hardly notice because you will be fine and you will have a lovely son and a best friend and you can watchDrag Racewith her dogs. I mean, that’s me, obviously, not you. But you can do the you version.”
I slumped back on the sofa. “I guess. But what with, y’know, everything, I’m not sure I’ve ever had a chance to work out what theme versionis.”
“Maybe it’s whatever you’re doing right now.”
Great in principle. But, unfortunately, what I was doing right now was losing someone I actually did care about, not just my wankstain of a father. “Oliver dumped me.”
“Oh, Luc.” She gave me a genuinely sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I think we got too close and he got too scared.”
“Really? That sounds more like what you would do.”
“That’s what I said,” I complained. “But he still walked out.”
“Well, then.” Another of Mum’s shrugs. “Fuck him.”
As advice went, it was surprisingly flexible and worked for my dad, because fuck him. But…but this was different. “Normally I’d agree, but Oliver was good for me, and I don’t want to throw that away.”
“Then don’t.”
I blinked a few annoyingly persistent tears from my eyes. “Okay, now you’ve gone from chill to unhelpful.”
“I don’t mean to be. But you had a boyfriend, and he made you happy for a while, and now it is over. And if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things.”
“That is way more enlightened than I am capable of being right now.” There was no point getting angry at my mother, but it was easier than being sad about my ex. “Oliver was pretty much the best part of my life, and I fucked it up, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and that feels fucking terrible.”
She did the ineffectual shoulder pat, which was somehow way less ineffectual when she did it. “I’m sorry you feel terrible, mon caneton. I am not saying that this will not hurt or that it will be easy. But you did not fuck it up. This Oliver clearly has, as the young people say today, the issues.”
“Yeah, and I wanted to help him with them, like he helped me.”
“That is his choice, though. Some people, they do not want to be helped.”
I was about to protest, but then I remembered that I’d spent five years not wanting to be helped. And it had taken nearly losing my job, dating a guy I would never have considered dating, roping all my friends into a two-day flat-cleaning party, and having some dick from a nightclub feel sorry for me in theGuardianfor me to realise that I hadn’t been as safe as I thought I was. “So where does that leave me? He’s still…everything I want, and I can’t have him.”
“As Mick used to say, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ And you know, Luc, Oliver was a nice boy and I’m sure he liked you very much and I was wrong about him being engaged to a duke. But I think maybe he just came along at the right time. He is like”—she waved her hand like the world’s most raddled fairy godmother—“the feather in that elephant movie.”
“Are you trying to tell me that not being a total fuckup was inside me all along?”
