Alexis Hall

“Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”

“Hi,” I said, trying not to dig a hole in the grass and wriggle into it like an endangered dung beetle.

“You’re trying to be emotionally supportive,” she said. “I’m trying to be useful.”

“Emotional support is useful, you Technicolour reprobate.”

Oliver was much as I remembered him: a cool, clean, modern-art piece of a man entitled Disapproval in Pinstripes. And handsome enough to annoy me. My own face looked as if Picasso had created it on a bad day—bits of my mum and my dad thrown together without rhyme or reason. But Oliver had the sort of perfect symmetry that eighteenth-century philosophers would have taken as evidence for the existence of God.

. I stared at the crisp, white tablecloth, wanting to die.

“Okay,” I said, once I’d inhaled it. “I was too hasty. That was so good I could pretty much marry you now.”

“I’ve got to say, you play one hell of a hard-core game of footsie.”

“Okay, I know you can’t see it, but I’m holding up the fetishisation card.”

“What does that card even look like?”

“It looks like two adorable men in sweaters holding hands under a rainbow.”

“I thought you wanted to hold hands with an adorable man under a rainbow.”

“I do, but the fact you want it almost as much as I do is what makes it creepy.”

ed. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want to say over the phone.”

“Mum,” I asked, “have you been kidnapped?”

“No. Then I would be saying, Help, I have been kidnapped.”

“But you couldn’t say that, because the kidnappers wouldn’t let you.”

She made an exasperated noise. “Don’t be silly. The kidnappers would have to let me tell you I’d been kidnapped; otherwise what would be the point of kidnapping me in the first place?” A brief pause. “What you should have asked is, Have you been replaced by a robot policeman from the future who wants to murder me?”

I blinked. “Have you?”

“No, but that is what I would say if I had been replaced by a robot policeman from the future who wants to murder you.”

“You do know I have an actual date. With an actual man.”

“And I’m very happy for you, but this cannot wait.”

“Mum,” I said firmly, “this is getting weird. What’s going on?”

There was a pause, which a paranoid part of me did think felt like the kind of pause you’d leave if you had to nonverbally ask a kidnapper for instructions. “Listen to me, Luc. This is not the same as when I said you had to come immediately because my life was in danger, and it turned out that I just needed you to replace the battery in my smoke alarm. Although I do maintain that I could have died. I am old and I am French. I fall asleep with a cigarette all the time. Also it was making a very annoying noise. It was like Guantanamo Bay.”

“How was it like Guant… Actually, never mind.”

“Please come over. I’m sorry to do this, but I am playing the ‘You have to trust me’ card. Because you have to trust me.”

Well. That was that. When it came down to it, there was me and Mum, and then there was everybody else. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

. She slammed her foot down with an enthusiasm that, had I not been fully aboard, would have left me smeared all over the road