Husband Material (London Calling #2)(101)

A similar something, and similarly small, seemed to shift in Oliver too. “I didn’t plan for this.”

“I know you didn’t. Just. Fuck.” Christopher pulled at his hair in frustration. “I really, really, really resent having to go here because I in no way want to validate your grandstanding bullshit, but you remember that thing you said about how the worst of it is you’ll never know how it would have been different if you’d called him on his bullshit earlier?”

“Unfortunately not,” Oliver admitted. “I’m afraid, looking back, it’s rather a blur. But it feels like something I remember wanting to say.”

“Well, how do you think I felt listening to that?” And there was the note of challenge in Christopher’s voice again. But under that, a note of pleading. “Don’t you think I wanted to know what my life might have been like if you’d stood up for me just fucking once before you were fucking thirty.”

Oliver went very still in that way he had when he was very angry or very devastated. “I wasn’t aware you needed to be stood up for.”

“I know you weren’t.” Christopher’s shoulders slumped and, with a stiffness that made him briefly look much older, he sat down where Oliver had just been sitting.

“I…” said Oliver finally. “I fear I may have been a bad brother. I apologise.”

Lifting his arm, Christopher dragged his wrist across his eyes, like he wasn’t sure whether he was about to cry or not. “I’ll be honest, I really thought it would feel better to hear that.”

“If it helps,” Oliver offered, “I thought it would feel better to tell Dad to go fuck himself.”

“Well”—Christopher gave a slightly helpless shrug—“thanks for saying it anyway. And I guess I was kind of a crappy brother too.”

Mia cleared her throat. “Or you had fucked up parents, and this isn’t on either of you.”

The seesaw of recrimination and self-recrimination hovered briefly in the middle. And, for a moment, it looked like the Blackwood brothers might get off the ride. Maybe even leave the playground entirely. But, then, there was only so much you could fix with one conversation. Eventually Oliver said, “I’m sorry I ruined the funeral.”

Christopher seemed to be deep in a think space so Mia gave a laconic shrug. “I wouldn’t say you ruined it. It was more interesting than most eulogies. Besides, half the crowd probably weren’t paying attention and the other half secretly knew you had a point.”

“I think that’s overly generous,” replied Oliver with reflexive modesty.

“Easy there.” Mia put up a hand. “I’m not saying it was the St.

Crispin’s Day speech. Just that not everyone who heard it thought you were a complete wanker.”

“That might still be overly generous,” observed Christopher, glancing up with a strained smile.

Oliver did something smile-like and tentative back. “Fuck off, Chris.”

The sky, which had been making passive-aggressive suggestions about rain all day, finally followed through, and a light drizzle began to descend on the courtyard. And for a while we sat there being wet and cathartically glum, but despite Oliver dropping a kiloton truth-bomb all over his father’s funeral, we weren’t done with social obligations yet. So I hauled myself to my feet and tried to hustle our little group in the direction of the cars. “Come on,” I told them, “we’re missing the death party.”

“I think they’re calling them wakes these days,” said Mia, taking Christopher by the hand.

As we walked away from the crematorium, Oliver turned to his brother. “How long are you in town for, by the way?”

Christopher cast him a slightly suspicious look. “A week or so.”

“We should…that is, if you’d like to catch up?” It wasn’t quite a suggestion, but Oliver’s voice sounded faintly hopeful.

After a moment, Christopher nodded. “That’d be nice.”

The four of us walked on in comfortable silence through the flower-strewn, not-too-corpse-factory-ish garden of the crematorium where even now David Blackwood’s body was being consigned to ashes. If I’d been in a poetic mood, I’d have said the rain made it feel like the sky was doing our crying for us. But this was Britain. Rain was just another fact of life. Like taxes. Or the other thing.





SO WAKES, HUH? THEY SUCKED. If funerals were easier than weddings because no one was expected to enjoy them, then wakes might have sucked harder because you sort of were. I mean, not in a Munchkin Village way, but in an “in the midst of death we are in life; the deceased would want us to be joyful” way. And that was a really specific mood. A really specific mood that was hard enough to achieve at the best of times, and even harder to achieve when the deceased had actually been kind of a dick and everybody knew it.

It was practically impossible to achieve when the deceased had been kind of a dick and everybody knew it, and his eldest son had stood up and said he was a kind of dick and everybody knew it, and now fifty people were united not so much in their shared grief as their shared determination to pretend that one particular thing had never happened. Which meant for Oliver the whole event was like a very low-key but ultimately merciful gaslighting as he went around his parents’ house shaking hands with the men, kissing the women lightly on the cheek, and saying, “Yes, a terrible loss, and so unexpected” roughly twelve times a minute.