After poking my head around upstairs, a bit warily as if anyone would be rude enough to sneak into Greg’s holy of holies for an illicit nap or heavy petting session (and bloody hell, I was never going to get the picture of Dad and Mike in the latter scenario out of my head), I looked in the study. Strictly speaking, it was supposed to be out of bounds for the duration, as most of Greg’s “family” of taxidermied animals had been moved into there to prevent any smaller guests from getting too handsy or trying to feed them wedding cake.
So of course, that was where Dad and Mike turned out to be hiding out.
Together.
Nestled in with Buster the dog, Greg’s surprisingly large badger, and sundry other woodland creatures who’d probably never imagined themselves ending up so far from home, Mike and Dad were comfortably settled on office chairs holding half-drunk mugs of tea. Talking about something that involved a lot of vigorous hand-waving on Dad’s part.
Oh crap.
I was wondering whether I should break it up or steer well clear, but Dad spotted me and waved me over with his gesturing hand. It was the one holding a half-eaten custard cream, and a couple of crumbs fell off onto the carpet. I glanced automatically at Buster, being used to mates’ dogs acting as impromptu hoovers, then remembered he was already stuffed. “There you are, Tom. We were just talking about you.”
Oh double crap.
Mike nodded seriously. “Yes. Gerald tells me you don’t plan to dress up for your own wedding.”
They were on first-name terms already? I s’pose it wasn’t like they didn’t have anything in common . . . I shuddered internally and squashed that line of thought pronto. “I’ll be wearing a suit.”
“But not the top hat and the tail coat?” He waved at my current ensemble, in a gesture unsettlingly like Dad’s.
“Uh, no?”
“But why not?” Dad demanded, and turned to Mike. “I haven’t seen him look this smart since he was five years old—he was a page boy back then, at his cousin Robin’s wedding. Or was it my cousin Hilary? Barbara would know. Tom, see if you can find Barbara, will you? No, wait, don’t bother, I remember now. It was my godson George’s wedding. You had a paisley waistcoat and bow tie. Quite the little gentleman, you were. I hardly recognised you. Until you ate too much cake and were sick all down yourself. So why not?”
“Why not what?” My head felt like someone had used it to smash open a bottle of champagne.
Dad rolled his eyes at Mike. “Morning coat. Top hat. Why not?”
“Uh . . . It’s not a church wedding. Wouldn’t be suitable. Gotta go.”
I legged it.
I found Mum rearranging vol-au-vents with some of Greg’s cathedral ladies, mixing in the chicken mayo ones with what was left of the more popular prawn cocktails ones. “Don’t go in the study,” I warned her. “Dad and Mike are in there. Conspiring.”
Mum’s face, which had been a rosy prawn-cocktail colour, paled to a chicken mayo hue. She swallowed. Then she straightened her back and pasted on a smile. “It’s good that they’re getting on together. It’ll make things easier for the summer. I’ve been meaning to ask you, actually. I know neither of you is really the bride, but seeing as Phil’s father is no longer with us, I assume you’ll be the one who’s given away?”
“What, like an unwanted Christmas present? Cheers, Mum. No. I’m pretty sure no one’s getting given away.”
“Oh. Well I suppose that does make it simpler. It’s such a shame, though.”
“It is?”
“Well, I suppose you won’t have any bridesmaids either. The wedding party is going to look awfully funereal, all men in dark suits.”
Great, Mum. Way to imbue my forthcoming nuptials with a sense of gloom and foreboding. “Yeah, but you’ll brighten it up, won’t you? I mean, you’ll be wanting to wear this again, right?” I gestured down at her burgundy mother-of-the-bride outfit, which had probably accounted for a sizeable portion of the wedding budget all on its own.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t wear this again. Besides, this was for a cathedral wedding.”
Uh-huh. “So what, it’s going to be jeans and a T-shirt for me and Phil’s bash?”
“Don’t be silly, Tom. I never wear jeans. Or T-shirts. I’ll find a smart skirt and top.”
The way she said it, I wondered where she’d be looking. The darkest recesses of her wardrobe? A car boot sale? “It’ll be July, Mum. You should get yourself a posh summer frock.”
Mum frowned at the vol-au-vents. “Are you sure? It’s not like it’s a . . .” She paused.
I bristled. “What, a proper wedding?”
“Church wedding, I was going to say. Do people dress up for civil ceremonies?”
“Are you telling me you’ve never been to one before? Haven’t you got, like, mates who’ve divorced and remarried?”
“In my day, you got married for life.”
Didn’t stop you having a bit on the side, though. I didn’t say it, because I’m only literally a bastard, but Mum turned as red as her outfit anyhow as if the thought had crossed her mind too. I coughed. “Mum, it’s the twenty-first century. People wear what they want. And seriously, you and Dad need to have a chat about this. He seems to think we’re going to be tarted up like the House of Lords. And he’s got Mike agreeing with him.”
“Oh.” Mum looked faintly queasy, then rallied. “Well, it would be nice to have a new dress. And perhaps a hat.”
Great. Apparently I was going to be shoehorned back into the penguin suit whether I liked it or not.
I broke the bad news to Phil over a last glass of bubbly (for me, not him, as he was the one driving today). He took it like a man who’d had Darren and Gary bending his ear about it already, which was rich seeing as how they’d worn normal clothes to their own do. “The idea’s growing on me,” he said, giving me an appreciative once-over, and if he kept that up, it wouldn’t be the only thing that was growing. “So it’s all happy families now, is it?” he went on. “Water under the bridge?”
“Dunno. I didn’t dare ask.” I glared at his expression. “Like you’d have been any braver.”
He laughed. “Maybe not.”
“Anyway, don’t change the subject. Are you seriously okay with all of this?” I gestured up and down at my over-the-top attire, then frowned. “What did you wear first go around?”
“Just a suit.” Phil’s face cut off any further questions on that thorny subject. He never seemed keen to talk about his first husband, the Mysterious Mark, who’d cheated on him, hurt him, then as if that wasn’t enough, died on him. Fair dues, it wasn’t exactly my favourite subject either. Then he heaved a sigh. “Look, I’d better warn you, Mum’s going to be comparing. So yeah, anything that makes our do different—better—it’s got to be a good thing.”
I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of what I wore on my wedding day being dictated by my fiancé’s ex. Then again, it was being dictated by every other bugger, so maybe it was only fair to give the dead bloke a shout and all. “Right. Fine. Tell you what, how about we cut our losses and take Mike home?”
Mike seemed worn out by all the excitement. He didn’t say a lot on the drive back to my house. Sorry, mine and Phil’s. We’d been living together for a whole week now, me and Phil, and I still found myself forgetting.
Originally, the plan had been for him to move into mine in time for Christmas, but like a lot of plans, that one had ganged well agley. My fault more than his, and don’t think that hadn’t led to a few uncomfortable conversations.
It wasn’t that I’d been getting cold feet, honest. We’d agreed he’d hold off giving notice at his flat until I’d got the house cleared out a bit, Phil’s wardrobe being (a) substantial and (b) not exactly the sort that’d take kindly to being kept in suitcases long-term. And then, well, I’d been busy—with Cherry’s wedding preparations, with our own wedding preparations, and occasionally even with actual paid work. So we’d pushed the date back to January, and then of course it’d been tax-return season. For me, that was, seeing as Phil had naturally got his sent in back in September, the smug git. I gave up expecting sympathy while I faffed about with shoeboxes full of invoices and receipts, fielding increasingly frustrated calls from my accountant about badly described business expenses dated over eighteen months ago.
I finally got it all sorted a couple of days before the thirty-first January deadline, which was when Phil informed me that he’d given notice a month ago and would be moving in the following weekend whether the house—and me—were ready for him or not.
I might or might not have had a few choice words to say at this point on the subject of unilateral decision-making.
But the make-up sex was worth it. And, a week in, while I might have the odd moan about him beating me to the bathroom in the morning, I had no real complaints about the new living arrangements. He’d been staying at mine most nights anyhow, so to be honest the only real difference was the amount of stuff in the house.
For a bloke who’d been living in a small attic flat, my Phil had a lot of stuff. Maybe it’d seem less once we got it all out of the boxes, which were currently stacked in the living room (the ones we were definitely going to unpack any day now), the hallway (the ones we were thinking about taking upstairs and hadn’t got round to yet) and our bedroom (the ones we didn’t have a flippin’ clue what to do with, like duplicated kitchen equipment and entertainment tech. They had been in the spare room, but it hadn’t seemed polite to ask Mike to stay in a bed he couldn’t actually get to without some serious mountaineering gear, whereas Phil was surprisingly un-put-out by having to climb all over me to get to his side of the bed). The cats were torn between appreciating the new sleeping and lurking places (mostly Arthur), and having a paddy over the unprecedented changes to their home environment (mostly, but not exclusively, Merlin).
Happy days.
Mike announced he was turning in soon after we got back from Greg’s, probably worn out from all that ganging up on me with my dad. He’d travelled up the day before, and we’d spent the previous evening making polite conversation and passing round the family photo albums—or, as might be, Mike’s phone and the new, turbo-charged laptop Phil had given me for Christmas, onto which I’d loaded a choice selection of pics of yours truly as a nipper, just on the off chance Mike might want copies. He had, as it happened, which . . . I dunno. I s’pose I still had mixed feelings about him having known from the word go that I existed, but never having got in touch. Maybe it was an older-generation thing—thinking a clean break was best for me and all that.
I mean, he was here now, wasn’t he? So he definitely cared about me.
It made for a funny old weekend, having Mike there. His presence, welcome as it was, definitely put a dampener on anything bedroom related. And while I felt strange talking to him about his family—the legitimate son and all—it didn’t seem right constantly interrogating him on the subject of my newly discovered Polish heritage.
Luckily I’m also half British, so was able to fall back on the weather, the England football team, and the state of the NHS as conversational topics.
We took him out for a Sunday roast at the Fighting Cocks, then put him on a train back west. Then it was time to start shifting all the boxes back into the spare room.
“When are we going to chuck out your old hi-fi?” Phil asked as, mission accomplished, we sat down on the sofa in front of the telly to enjoy a well-earned beer.
“What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Apart from being ten years old? I got mine less than a year ago. And it’s half the size. Doesn’t make sense for it to be the one sitting in a box.”
“Mine was here first.” Okay, I do realise that wasn’t the most mature argument I could have made.
“And it’s your house, your rules?” Phil said it so mildly there was a moment when I actually didn’t realise the big, deep pool of man-eating sharks I was hanging over by a thread that was fraying by the second.
“Course not!” I said—possibly a bit too heartily—once I’d clued in. “It’s our house, now, innit?”
Phil laughed, the bastard. “Nice save. So I’ll be getting my music system out of storage, then?”
I eyed my trusty old hi-fi sadly. It was looking a touch out-of-date these days, and at least this way I could stop feeling guilty about the dust piling up on top (and yes, I’m fully aware there was another potential solution, but trust me, it was never going to happen). “Fine,” I said in an appropriately martyred voice. “But we’re not chucking it out. What if, I dunno, your one breaks down?”
“Thought we’d make our own entertainment,” Phil said with a smirk. “In fact, why don’t we do that now?”
“Okay, you put the kettle on, and I’ll get out the Scrabble.”
Phil grabbed hold of me and started making his own entertainment there and then. And yes, there was a fair amount of knob-twiddling involved.
He’d known I wasn’t serious about tea and Scrabble. For one thing, my lack of enthusiasm for the game has been pretty clear since that time I got thrashed by him, Gary, and Darren over at their place, mostly because they knew all the obscure, high-scoring words and I didn’t. And for another thing, neither of us owns a set.