Husband Material (London Calling #2)(107)

“It’s sort of…” I tried to pin my thoughts down but, thematically enough, it was like trying to nail shit to the wall. “We’re arguing kind of…kind of constantly about everything? And we never used to, not like this. And this morning we had the biggest fight we’ve basically ever had, and if you put a gun to my head, I’m not sure what it was really even about and just…is that what it’s going to be like? Is that what being married will be like?”

With typical sangfroid, Mum shrugged. “Probably not. Probably that is what organising big, life-changing events with lots of guests and rules and expectations together will be like. And you don’t do that very often.”

“We did it fine for the funeral,” I pointed out.

“That was not the same. It was his father and so he had the right to be a… What was it? A steamrollery tyrant if he wanted to. But your wedding, that is for both of you.”

“Oliver doesn’t seem to have got that memo,” I told her glumly.

Mum turned to look at me. There was an interrogatey expression on her face I felt quite ambivalent about. “Are you sure you sent it to him?”

“Well, I think so.”

“Because the Luc I know, he is not the sort of boy who would get cut out of his own wedding.”

That was kind of her. The Luc I knew would get cut out of his own funeral. Except if Oliver was cutting me out in order to create the heteronormative marriage of his dreams, you’d think he’d be…

happier about it? “I’m not even sure it’s that,” I said. “I’m involved, we’re both involved… It just doesn’t feel like us anymore.”

“Ah.” Mum looked sage. “Perhaps it is too many chefs. They are spoiling the sauce.”

“There’s not even that many chefs. Like, I know the wedding cliché is everybody else is trying to get you to do their thing. But normally that’s the families and my family is you, and Oliver’s family isn’t even speaking to him, so this is totally on us. We’re fucking up our own sauce.”

There was a long silence. Mum’s sage look had intensified.

“Luc.” She frowned solemnly. “Why is there a wolf in a wig in this picture?”

“You’re the one who bought a Moomin jigsaw. The only Moomins I know are the one in the hat and the other one. Now can we get back to my catastrophically overboiled sauce–wedding?”

“I thought you would appreciate the distraction.” Mum slotted a bit of wig-wolf into place. “As for the sauce-wedding, well, have you thought that maybe—maybe not every dish is meant to have a sauce?”

I turned from the jigsaw. “What are you saying?”

“Well, for example, there is a nice Chinese place in the next village, and they do this sort of dry chilli and garlic chicken and it is very good.”

“No, I mean, what is this metaphor implying about me and Oliver?”

For a moment, Mum seemed to genuinely resent my pulling her thoughts back from the dry chilli and garlic chicken. “I mean, mon caneton, that you and Oliver may not be the sort who are good at being married.”

Inside, I mega-winced. The comparison here was obvious. “Like you and Dad, you mean?”

“No, Luc.” Mum looked at me like I was six and had just told her I thought cats were made of marzipan. “Your father and I were not bad at being married, we were bad at him not being a lying, cheating sack of broken penises who only thinks about himself.”

“But if we’re not good at being married, what can we be good at?”

Another of Mum’s trademark shrugs. “Being not married? After all, you don’t need to, not really.”

I tasted something bitter, a mix of superfood salad and bile. For a moment Miriam Blackwood popped up at the back of my mind saying, I don’t understand why gay people want to get married at all.

Sitting back on the sofa, I shuffled slightly farther away from Mum.

Things had got uncomfortable suddenly, and I wasn’t used to Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold being uncomfortable. “That’s…” My stomach was making wurbling motions, and I didn’t like it. “That’s not okay to say.”

“Why not?” Mum seemed genuinely shocked.

My skin was feeling crawly in a way I didn’t want to be associating with my mum’s house. “Because that’s…that’s what people like Oliver’s parents say. Why do you have to get married?

It’s not like you can have babies.”

“Oh, Luc.” She didn’t come any closer—she was usually pretty good at respecting personal space, probably from years of talking people down from bad trips—but her body language got all nonthreatening. “I did not mean it in that way. I only meant that there are some people who are very good together but are not so good at weddings or at being married. Look at Judy. She has had very many boyfriends, all very happily, but her marriages, they never last.”

I tried to let myself calm down. “Isn’t that mostly because her husbands keep getting murdered or disappearing mysteriously somewhere on Dartmoor?”

“Oh, now be fair, that only happened twice.”

Now that I was recovering from my brief was-Mum-a-stealth-homophobe scare, I realised she was trying to comfort me. And then I realised the reason she was trying to comfort me was because I might be too sucky to get married. “But…but…” I flailed. “Everybody is married. My best friend is married. My dickhead ex is married.