“I’ll just shove off,” announced Judy. “Got to see a chap about his bullocks. Rather fancy them, to be honest.”

And, with that, she roared away into the distance, spaniels barking.

Unlatching the gate, I made my way through the slightly overgrown front garden and let myself into the house. I’m not entirely sure what I’d been expecting.

But it definitely wasn’t Jon Fleming.

At first, I thought I was having some kind of hallucination. He’d been around when I was very young, but I had no memory of him. So this was effectively the first time I’d seen my, you know, father in person. And I had no way of processing it—just a vague sense of a man wearing a scarf indoors and getting away with it. He and Mum were sitting at the opposite ends of the living room, looking like two people who ran out of things to say a very long time ago.

“What the fuck,” I said.

“Luc…” Mum stood, actually wringing her hands. “I know you won’t remember him very well, but this is your father.”

“I know who he is. What I don’t know is why he’s here.”

“Well, that’s why I called. He has something to tell you.”

I folded my arms. “If it’s ‘sorry,’ or ‘I’ve always loved you,’ or some bullshit like that, he’s about twenty-five years too late.”

At this, Jon Fleming also got to his feet. As the saying goes, nothing says family like everyone standing around, staring awkwardly at each other. “Lucien,” he said. “Or, you prefer Luc, is that right?”

I would have been happy to live my entire life without having to look my dad in the face. Unfortunately—as with so much else—he wasn’t giving me the choice. And I will tell you now, it was the weirdest fucking thing. Because the way someone seems in a photograph and the way they really are is this horrible uncanny valley of recognition and strangeness. And it’s even worse when you can see bits of yourself in them. My eyes looking back at me. That strange not-quite-blue, not-quite-green.

There was an opportunity here to take the high road. I chose not to. “I’d prefer you didn’t talk to me at all.”

He sighed, sad and noble in a way he had no right being. That was the problem with being old and having good bone structure. You got this giant whack of unearned dignity. “Luc,” he tried again. “I’ve got cancer.”

Of course he did. “So?”

“So it’s made me realise some things. Made me think about what’s important.”

“What, you mean the people you abandoned?”

Mum put a hand on my arm. “Mon cher, I would be the first to agree that your father is a shady caca boudin, but he could die.”

“Sorry to repeat myself but so?” On some level, I was aware that there was a difference between “not taking the high road” and “taking a road so low that it involved tunnelling straight to hell,” but right then, nothing felt even 2 percent real.

“I’m your father,” said Jon Fleming. Which his gravelly rock-legend voice somehow transformed from a meaningless platitude into a profound statement of mutual connectedness. “This is my last chance to know you.”

There was a buzzing in my head like I’d snorted bees. A lifetime of manipulative movie bullshit had taught me exactly how I was supposed to behave here. I was allowed a brief flash of unconvincing anger, then I’d cry, then he’d cry, then we’d hug, then the camera would pan out and all would be forgiven. I looked him straight in those wise, sorrowful, too-familiar eyes. “Oh, fuck off and die. I mean, fuck off and literally die. You could have done this at any time in the last two decades. You don’t get to do it now.”

“I know I’ve let you down.” He was nodding sincerely, as though he was trying to tell me he understood what I was saying better than I understood it myself. “But it’s taken me a long time to get to where I always should have been.”

“Then write a fucking song about it, you arrogant, narcissistic, manipulative, bald wanker.”

Then I got the hell out of there. As the door swung closed behind me, I caught Mum’s voice saying, “Well, I think that could have gone a lot worse.” Which was her all over really.

Pucklethroop-in-the-Wold did, technically, have a taxi service—or at least it had a bloke called Gavin who you could call, and he’d come and pick you up in his car, and charge you about a fiver to take you to one of the three places he was willing to go. But it was actually only a forty-minute walk across the fields to the station. And I was having the sort of hot-ragey-cryey feelings that made avoiding other humans a pretty high priority for me.

I was very slightly calmer by the time I was on a train, whooshing back to London. And, for some reason, I decided that would be a good moment to pick up Oliver’s voicemail.

“Lucien,” he said, “I don’t know what I was expecting, but this clearly isn’t going to work. There isn’t going to be an ‘in future’ but if, in some imaginary future, you were thinking of standing me up again, at least do me the courtesy of inventing a decent excuse. And I’m sure you’re finding all this very funny, but it isn’t something I need in my life right now.”

Well. That was…what it was.

I listened to it again. And then immediately wondered why the fuck I’d done that to myself. I guess maybe I was hoping it would be better the second time around.

It wasn’t.

The carriage was mostly empty—it was a funny time of day to be heading into the city—so I tucked my face into the crook of my arm and shed some surreptitious tears. I didn’t even know what I was crying over. I’d had an argument with a father I didn’t remember and been dumped by a guy I wasn’t dating. Neither of those things should have hurt.

Didn’t hurt.

I wasn’t going to let them hurt.

I mean, yes, I was probably going to lose my job, and probably be alone forever, and my father would probably die of cancer, but you know what, fuck everything. I was going to go home, put on my dressing gown, and drink until nothing mattered anymore.

There was fuck all I could do about the other stuff. But I could do that.

Chapter 11

Two hours later I was in Clerkenwell, standing outside one of those dinky Georgian terraces with the wrought-iron railings and the window boxes, holding down Oliver’s doorbell as if I was worried it would fall off the wall.

“What,” he said, when he finally answered, “is wrong with you?”

“So many, many things. But I’m really sorry and I don’t want to fake break up.”