Husband Material (London Calling #2)(106)

She shrugged. “A bit of both. In different ways, they are very creepy men.”

“Doctor Who’s a woman now.”

“Oh no, Luc, spoilers. I am only up to the one with the big scarf.

Anyway”—she stood aside—“you had better come in. I’m afraid I did not know you were visiting so I have not made the special curry.”

I followed her into the living room, which always had a faint air of Judy and dogs despite, at the moment, containing neither. “I think I’ll live.”

“You should eat something, mon caneton. Food is important when you’ve had a shock.”

“Just to clarify,” I said, adopting a position of sofaly slumpitide, “I’ve had a shock because I’ve had a fight with Oliver about the wedding. Not about him being a time traveller. We’re on the same page there, right?”

“You know”—Mum sat down beside me and dragged the coffee table towards us—“I am very happy for you to come here and talk to me about anything you like, even if Oliver is not a time traveller, but you are going to have to make yourself useful for once and help me with my jigsaw.”

I stared at the coffee table, which was strewn with little clumps of a partially assembled picture in a sea of pieces, many of them upside down. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Jigsaws are good for people of my age. They stop you getting the Alzheimer’s.”

“Okay but…” I kept staring, pushing back a rising suspicion that I was very much the Oliver in this room. “Why are you not starting with the edges?”

“Why would I do that?”

Embarrassingly, I had to think about it. “Everybody starts with the edges. It gives you something to—to… It’s more efficient.” Oh my God, I was Oliver. Or maybe it was jigsaws. Were we all, deep down, an Oliver and all it took to bring it out was a disassembled picture of the Moomins?

“No,” Mum said firmly. “Efficient is not cutting the picture up in the first place. Doing a jigsaw is not about efficiency, it is about the journey.”

I gave her a look. “You mean, the real jigsaw is the friends we make along the way?”

She gave me a look back. “No, Luc. A jigsaw is a jigsaw. Your friends are your friends. You cannot be friends with a jigsaw. What are you even talking about?”

“It’s just a thing people say.”

A light of what was probably misplaced understanding glimmered in her eyes. “Ah, bon. Then, yes, it is about being, as they say, friends with a jigsaw. One is not efficient when one is being friends with a jigsaw. Now”—her tone grew brisk—“help me be friends with this jigsaw because I am quite stuck.” She squinted at her various clusters of Moomin. “I am looking for the last piece of Papa’s hat.”

“And you don’t think it’d be better to—” I let it go. And started combing through the nine hundred and twenty-six pieces that remained in the thousand-piece jigsaw to find the one bit that had a fragment of Moomin top hat on it.

To Mum’s credit, it was quite a relaxing process. I mean, I don’t think I became friends with the jigsaw. But I did get to know a reasonable amount about it.

“So,” asked Mum, holding a piece to the light like she was checking it wasn’t a forgery, “what has happened with you and Oliver?”

Obviously, it was complex, and there were two sides to every story, and Mum cared about both of us, and if I wanted her to give me good advice, I’d present the situation in the fairest, most impartial way I could. “He was just a dick,” I explained. “He’s been a dick for months.”

There was a pause, Mum carefully finishing Moomin Mama’s bowl of fruit. “Are you sure? Because you know I love you, but between you and Oliver, if I had to guess who was the bigger dick, I would not normally expect it to be him.”

“Thanks. And…and…I’ve been very reasonable. While he’s turned into some kind of steamrollery wedding tyrant.”

Another pause as Mum either thought about this or got distracted by weird blue-eyed children. “Marriage is complicated, and weddings are complicated, but most importantly weddings are not marriages.”

“Are you sure?” I demanded. “Because you know what they say.

Steamrollery wedding tyrant me once, shame on you. Steamrollery wedding tyrant me for the rest of my life, shame on me.”

“I do not like that idiom as much as be friends with a jigsaw.”

Mum sighed. “I can see why you are concerned, but you have been with Oliver for more than two years, and he has never been like this before—”

“Actually,” I admitted, “he’s quite like this. But I thought I liked it.”

“And you don’t anymore?”

I tried to wedge a piece of top hat into place, but it turned out to be part of a cat’s arse. “It just feels different now. Everything is all…I don’t know.”

“He’s also just lost his father,” Mum pointed out. “That can be very hard.”

“Yeah, but…but…I felt that made us closer. Like, if anything was going to break us, it should have been that and it didn’t. So why is it going to shit now?”

Mum put a consoling arm around me. “It is hard to say without knowing what type of shit it is. There are lots of different types of shit, and they are all shit in different ways.”