“Well, maybe that’s why you don’t have a boyfriend.” He gave me a faintly wounded look. “You sound very demanding.”

“Look. I appreciate the offer. But don’t you think if you can’t remember you’ve got an actual girlfriend, you might have trouble remembering a fake boyfriend?”

“No, you see that’s the clever thing about it. I can pretend that you’re my boyfriend, and nobody will think it’s strange that I’ve never mentioned you before because I’m such an utter nincompoop that it could very easily have slipped my mind.”

Terrifyingly, he was beginning to make sense. “You know what,” I said. “I will genuinely think about it.”

“Think about what?”

“Thanks, Alex. You’ve been a big help.”

I made my way slowly back to my office, where I was relieved to discover I hadn’t driven off any other donors in the interim. Then I sat at my desk with my head in my hands and wished—

God. I was too fucked up to even know what I was wishing for. Obviously, it would have been nice if my father wasn’t on TV and I wasn’t in the papers and my job wasn’t in jeopardy. But none of those things, either together or individually, were really the problem here. They were just a few more dead seabirds bobbing on the outskirts of the oil spill that was my life.

After all, I couldn’t fix the fact my father was Jon Fleming. I couldn’t fix that he hadn’t wanted me. I couldn’t fix falling in love with Miles. And I couldn’t fix that he hadn’t wanted me either.

It was while I was wallowing that I came to the realisation that Alex hadn’t been entirely unhelpful. I mean, he hadn’t gone so far as to actually be helpful—small steps, small steps—but he was, broadly speaking, right in that people you knew were an effective way to meet people you didn’t know.

I grabbed my phone and fired up the WhatsApp group, which somebody had recently rechristened Don’t Wanna Be All Bi Myself. After a moment’s consideration, I sent a series of siren emojis followed by Help. Emergency. Queervengers Assemble. Rose & Crown. 6 tonight and was secretly kind of touched by how quickly the screen lit up with promises to be there.

Chapter 5

It was slightly selfish of me to choose the Rose & Crown for the meet-up because it was way closer to me than it was to anyone else. But since I was the one having the crisis, I felt entitled. Besides, it was one of my favourite pubs—a gawky seventeenth-century building that looked as though it had been airlifted in from a country village and plonked down in the middle of Blackfriars. With its disconcertingly expansive beer-garden and hanging baskets, it was practically its own little island, the surrounding office blocks almost leaning away from it in embarrassment.

I ordered a beer and a burger and staked a claim to a picnic table outside. As it was what passed for spring in England, the air was a bit nippy, but if Londoners let little things like cold, rain, a slightly worrying level of pollution, and getting crapped on by pigeons bother us, we’d never go outside at all. I was only waiting a couple of minutes before Tom showed up.

Which was ever so slightly awkward as fuck.

Tom isn’t, strictly speaking, a friend. He’s a friend-in-law, being the long-term partner of the group’s Token Straight Girl, Bridget. He’s both the hottest and the coolest person I know, on account of looking like Idris Elba’s cleaner-cut younger brother and being an actual spy. Well, not exactly. He works for the Intelligence Division of Customs and Excise, which is one of those agencies that exist but never get in the papers.

It gets even more complicated than that because, technically, I saw him first. We went on a couple of dates and I thought it was going really well, so I introduced him to Bridget, and she fucking stole him from me. Well, she didn’t steal him. He just liked her more. And I don’t resent it at all. I mean, I do. But I don’t. Except when I do.

And probably I shouldn’t have hit on him again when he and Bridget went through that bad patch a couple of years ago. They were on a break, so it was less shitty of me than it could have been. And, anyway, all it wound up doing was making him realise how much he loved her and wanted to fix things with her. So that felt great.

Basically Tom does to my self-esteem what he does to people traffickers and gunrunners. Although my self-esteem is way less entrenched.

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

Tom gave me a very continental and slightly soul-destroying kiss on the cheek, plonking his beer down next to mine. “Good to see you. It’s been a while.”

“Yeah. Hasn’t it.”

I must have accidentally looked traumatised because Tom went on, “Bridge is running late. I mean, obviously.”

I laughed nervously. Late is her default. “So. Um. What have you been up to?”

“This and that. Big commercial fraud case. Should be wrapping up fairly soon. What about you?”

From three years of hanging out with Tom, I knew that commercial fraud was industry code for something significantly more serious, although I’d never quite worked out what. Which meant having to tell him I was organising a party to raise money for poo bugs was the tiniest bit mortifying.

But, of course, he looked terribly interested and asked a bunch of really insightful questions, half of which I should probably have been asking myself. In any case, it kept the conversation going until the James Royce-Royces arrived.

I met James Royce and James Royce (now James Royce-Royce and James Royce-Royce) at a university LGBTQ+ event. In some ways, it’s strange the two of them work so well together because their name is pretty much the only thing they’ve ever had in common. James Royce-Royce is a bespectacled chef with a way of expressing himself that… Look, I’m trying to find a tactful way to put it, but basically he’s just phenomenally camp. James Royce-Royce, on the other hand, looks like a Russian hit man, has a job I don’t understand involving unspeakably complex mathematics, and is incredibly shy.

Currently they’re trying to adopt, so the conversation very quickly became about the “truly hellacious” (James Royce-Royce’s term) amount of paperwork involved in what I’d naively assumed was the straightforward process of getting babies from people who don’t want them to people who do want them. I honestly couldn’t tell if it was more or less alienating than talking about actual children.

Next we got Priya, a tiny lesbian with multicoloured extensions who somehow managed to pay her bills by welding bits of metal to other bits of metal and selling them in galleries. I’m sure she’s genuinely very talented, but I am totally unqualified to judge. She used to be the only other singleton in my immediate friendship group, and many were the evenings we spent drinking cheap prosecco, lamenting our mutual unlovability, and promising to cash out and marry each other if we were both still alone at fifty. But then she betrayed me by falling in love with a married Medievalist twentysomething years her senior. And then, even more unforgivably, making it work.