At this, my dad gave a wry smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “I know better than to argue with a lawyer.”

“You mean I’m right, but you can’t admit it, so you’re making a joke about my profession and hoping Luc will mistake it for a rebuttal.”

“Okay”—Jon Fleming made an everybody-settle-down gesture—“I can see things are getting heated.”

“They’re not getting heated at all,” returned Oliver coldly. “You and I are remaining perfectly calm. The problem is you’ve been profoundly upsetting your son for the last ten minutes.”

“You’ve said your piece, and I admire you for that. But this is between me and Lucien.”

I jumped up so sharply the chair fell over and crashed with incredible force onto what I’m sure were authentic Lancastrian flagstones. “You do not get to call me Lucien. And you don’t get to do”—I waved my hands in a way that I hoped encompassed the everythingness of everything—“this anymore. You reached out to me. Yet somehow I’ve wound up being the one who makes all the effort and the one who has to take responsibility when it crashes and burns.”

“I—”

“And if you say ‘I understand where you’re coming from’ or ‘I hear you’ or anything remotely like it, then even though you’re an old man with cancer, I will fucking deck you so help me God.”

He opened his arms in a way that looked half like he was channelling Jesus and half like he was saying ‘Come at me, bro.’ “You want to take a shot, go right ahead.”

I was strangely relieved to discover that I had no actual desire to hit him. “I can see,” I drawled out, in my best Jon Fleming voice, “why that might be something you want me to do. But I’m afraid I can’t give you what you’re looking for.”

Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought my dad looked almost disappointed.

“Look,” I went on. “This is on you. Either you make an actual effort to spend some actual time with me somewhere I can actually get to. Or I walk out of here right now, and you can enjoy dying of cancer alone.”

Jon Fleming was silent a moment. “I probably deserved that.”

“I don’t care if you did. It’s just how things are going to be. So, what do you say?”

“I’ll be in London again in a couple days. I’ll come see you then.”

I let out a really long breath. “Fine. Come on, Oliver. Let’s go home.”

Chapter 30

We got underway in silence.

“Do you mind,” I said, “if we skip Night Vale for now?”

“Not at all.”

The soft thrum of the engine filled up the car. And, beneath it, the steady rhythm of Oliver’s breath. I rested my head against the window and watched the motorway streaking past in a grey haze.

“Are you—”

“Can I put some music on?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I stuffed my phone into the dock and fired up Spotify. For some reason that might well have been a cry for therapy, I had this urge to listen to one of Jon Fleming’s old albums. Half-reluctantly, half-anxiously I swiped “Rights of Man” into the search bar. And holy fuck, my dad had been on a lot of shit over the years. Not counting several best-ofs, remixes, and decade-anniversary collections, there were about thirty albums there, including The Hills Rise Wild, which was one of the ones he’d done with Mum. And which I was never ever ever playing.

I dithered between the The Long Walk Home, which was his latest release, and Leviathan, which was the one everyone’s heard of and that won a Grammy in 1989, and eventually settled on Leviathan. There was brief pause as the title track buffered. And then the speakers began belting out a level of angry prog rock that they really hadn’t been designed to cope with.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’d been designed to cope with it either.

I’d gone through a phase when I was about thirteen of obsessively listening to Jon Fleming’s music. Then I’d decided I never wanted to listen to it again, which meant hearing it now was a fucking weird experience. Because I remembered it perfectly—not only the music, but how it had felt, being that age, and having a dad who was at once so accessible and so absent. He was completely in his music. And, even now, when I’d just spent an hour yelling at him, not in my life at all.

Oliver’s eyes slid briefly to mine. “Is this…”

“Yeah.”

“It’s, um. Loud.”

“Yeah, he was loud in the ’80s. In the ’70s, it was all trees and tambourines.”

Another interlude of cynical growling and heavy guitars.

“Forgive my ignorance,” said Oliver, “but what’s it even about?”

“According to Mum—and we can double-check on Wikipedia if you like, because it didn’t exist when I last listened to this album—it’s about Thatcherite Britain. Y’know, because everything in the ’80s in this country was about Thatcherite Britain.”

“Does it have anything to do with Hobbes’s Leviathan?”

“Um. Probably? I mean, unless we’re talking about the cartoon tiger, in which case, still maybe, I have no idea.”

Oliver gave one of his little chuckles. “Well, he called his band ‘Rights of Man.’ So I assume he had some interest in the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”

“Oh fuck.” I thunked back against the headrest. “Does everybody know more about my dad than I do?”

“I don’t know more about your father. I just know more about the Enlightenment.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure I’m finding that very comforting. It just means you know more about my dad and more about history.”

“You know”—another swift look—“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I do. But I enjoy poking your middle-class guilt.”

“In which case, you should be pleased to hear I’m feeling at the very least ambivalent right now for encouraging you to reach out to him.”

“You’re right. This was a disaster and it’s all your fault.”

He flinched. “Lucien, I—”

“I’m joking, Oliver. None of this is on you. It’s on Jon Fucking Fleming. And”—uh, why did he keep making me say this stuff—“I’m glad you were there. It would have been way worse without you.”