Husband Material (London Calling #2)(108)

What does it say about me—about us—if we’re the only ones who can’t make it work?”

“I know this is not very helpful”—Mum had gone back to the wiggenwolf—“but I think it means what you let it mean.”

I vindictively returned a piece of Moomin Papa’s top hat to the pile. “You’re right, Mum. That isn’t very helpful. Because what it means to me right now is that I’m a gigantic failure who can’t make it work even with a guy as amazing as Oliver.”

Mum sighed. “You know I love Oliver and I think he is very good for you, but he is also—and there is no getting away from this—kind of a messy bitch.”

“Mum,” I yelped.

“It’s okay. I’m using it in the reclaimed sense.”

“I should never have taught you that.”

“All I am saying is”—she gave a little shrug, then pounced on the piece of top hat I’d tried to hide from her—“you both have your issues. This is not about your failure or his. It’s about what’s right for both of you.”

“Well,” I told her, in a voice that was definitely decisive and not at all huffy, “what’s best for me at the moment is going to fucking bed.”

And, for the second time that day, I treated myself to a storm.





BECAUSE I’D BEEN TOO LAZY to ever take anything down (except that one Rights of Man poster I’d put up and thrown away at least three times), the walls of my old bedroom were kind of a history of things I’d been into my whole life. Starting with the original 151

Pokémon poster from when I’d been about ten, moving up through Cary Grant from the classic movie phase I’d had when I’d been twelve and wanting to feel very grown-up. Then there was the Brokeback Mountain poster back from when “two cowboys shag once, then one of them dies” was the best rep you got in mainstream media if you weren’t old enough to watch Queer as Folk. Also, they weren’t even proper cowboys; they spent most of their time looking at sheep. Which, growing up in a place where looking at sheep was about the most exciting thing you could do on a Friday night, wasn’t the escapist fantasy I was hoping for.

I scowled moodily at Cary Grant and tried to shake the notion that I might have had a thing for stern-featured clean-cut guys that went back way longer than I thought. And it felt weird to be lying on my childhood bed thinking about adult problems. Because you didn’t get much more adult, either in the euphemistic-about-sex way or the realistic-about-bills-and-responsibilities way, than stressing over your wedding.

And, hoo boy, was I stressing. It was just so muddy and impossible. Because I loved Oliver and I wanted to be with him for, like, ever, but the more I thought about it, the more I got this hard-to-pin-down not-quite-sick, not-quite-scared, not-quite-something feeling that we were doing it wrong. Of course I’d been feeling like I was doing it wrong for…well, not my whole life. When I’d been young and full of unearned confidence, I’d been pretty convinced that I was nailing it and anybody who failed to nail it was suffering from a tragic case of not being me. But then Miles had happened and suddenly I’d realised that the young, confident me was full of shit, and then a whole lot of years had passed and now here I was, slowly getting better but still crushingly aware I was making it up as I went along.

Except even by my standards, the wedding had strong doing-it-wrong energy.

I’d proposed almost by accident. I’d nearly been put off buying a ring by a mildly rude man in a mid-range jeweller’s. Oliver’s parents had been so horrified that they’d made the whole thing feel less like a party than a protest, and then one of them had immediately dropped dead, giving everything a complex set of implications that I was nowhere near getting my head around. And now we were bickering over tiny details that neither of us cared about.

Seriously, though, what was going on with that? How could something that objectively did not matter become the hill you were most determined to die on? Because ultimately, if Oliver wanted a band, fine, we could have a band. We could hire Blue Honey or Felicity or the Corkscrews, and it would make no fucking difference and it would still be the happiest fucking day of our whole fucking lives because it fucking had to be.

Except the more I thought about it, the more I was determined to have a DJ. Because I did not want four men in cardigans, or three guys and a surprisingly attractive woman, doing a ska-punk remix of “Thinking Out Loud” over our first dance as a married couple.

Especially because Oliver couldn’t dance, and it would make a ska-punk remix of “Thinking Out Loud” our song. Fuck. We’d been together for nearly three years, and we didn’t even have an “our song.” Or worse, we did, and it was This American Life. We were going to have to have our first dance to Sarah Koenig following a series of small cases through a county courthouse in Cleveland.

To be fair, maybe that was a good argument against a DJ.

Because they’d ask, So what kind of music are you guys into? and we’d have to say “Well, my dad’s in a band but I hate his guts, and he listens to quirky horror podcasts and spoken-word media about complicated political topics.”

Perhaps Mum was right. We just weren’t people who were good at being married. Perhaps, given the fact that we—as this wedding was proving—had absolutely nothing in common and had only started dating as a literal hoax, we were the sorts of people who shouldn’t be together at all.