Page 41 of Boyfriend Material
Minutes or hours crept by. Determined to be a good sleeping partner, I was assailed by a thousand itches, niggles, and a terrible fear of farting. Oliver’s breath was steady enough that I became hyperaware of my own, which was on the edge of going full Darth Vader. And then my brain started thinking stuff, and wouldn’t stop.
“Oliver,” I said. “My dad’s got cancer.”
I was fully prepared for him to tell me to shut up and go to sleep, or to kick me out entirely but instead, he rolled over. “I imagine that’s going to take some getting used to.”
“I don’t want to get used to it. I don’t want to know him at all. And if I do have to know him, it’s deeply unfair I have to know him as a bloke with a cancer.” I snuffled in the darkness. “He opted out of being my father. Why does he expect me to opt in just for the shit bit?”
“He’s probably scared.”
“He was never there whenIwas scared.”
“No, he was clearly a bad father. And you can punish him for it if you want to, but do you honestly think that will help?”
“Help who?”
“Anyone, but I’m thinking mainly of you.” Under the plausible deniability of the bedclothes, his fingertips brushed mine. “It must have been hard to go through life after he abandoned you. But I’m not sure it’ll be easier to go through life after you’ve abandoned him.”
I was silent for a long time. “Do you really think I should see him?”
“It’s your decision, and I’ll support you either way, but yes. I think you should.”
I made a plaintive noise.
“After all,” he went on, “if it goes badly, you can walk away at any time.”
“It’s just…it’s going to be all hard and messy.”
“Lots of things are. Many of them are still worth doing.”
It was a sign of quite how fucked up I was feeling that I didn’t try to make a joke out ofhard, messyor, indeed, worth doing.
“Will you,” I asked, “will you come with me? If I go.”
“Of course.”
“You know for…”
“Verisimilitude,” he finished.
He still hadn’t moved his hand. I didn’t ask him to.
Chapter 15
“Okay, Alex,” I said. “How do you get four elephants in a Mini?”
He thought about this for longer than it should have required. “Well, I mean, elephants are very big so normally you wouldn’t expect that even one of them would fit in a Mini. But if they were very small—if they were, for example, baby elephants—then I suppose you’d put two in the front and two in the back?”
“Um…y-yes. That’s right.”
“Oh good. Have we got to the joke yet?”
“Nearly. So how do you get four giraffes in a Mini?”
“Once again, giraffes are very large but we seem to be ignoring that for the purposes of this exercise. So I’d expect two in the… Oh no, wait. Of course, you’d have to take the elephants out first, assuming it was the same Mini.”
My universe was imploding. “Also right. Okay, final question.”
“This is splendid. It’s making a lot more sense than the jokes you usually tell me.”
