This funeral stuff was hard. Not the logistics. They were pretty straightforward, I guess because it wasn’t supposed to be the happiest day of anyone’s life. But playing this constant game of emotional politics—where I wanted to support Oliver and Oliver wanted to support his family and Oliver’s family wanted him to stand up and lie his arse off about what a great guy David Blackwood had been—was exhausting. Especially because I always felt I was losing. “Okay,” I said. “But you’re allowed to think about yourself as well.”

“It’s a three-minute speech.” At this point, I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince me or convince himself. “That’s three minutes out of my entire life.”

I sat on my hands to stop myself from getting all frustrated and gesticulatey. “That’s not how negative experiences work. And you’re a lawyer. You don’t need me to tell you that.”

“Your point is well made, but this isn’t a trauma, it’s an inconvenience. I’m going to say some things I don’t entirely mean—although to give myself credit, I don’t think anything in the speech is strictly untrue…”

“Yeah,” I couldn’t help interrupting, “you got a lot of mileage out of ‘wouldn’t be the men we are today.’”

Oliver gave a sassy little nod. “Thank you. I’m glad you noticed. But nevertheless, all I have to do is to stand up and pretend for a very short period of time that my relationship with my father was less complicated than it actually was. That’s what everybody has done at every funeral that has ever happened.”

I stared at him in his black suit and his black tie. He’d got that faintly hollowed-out look he got when he’d been at the gym more than was probably psychologically healthy for him. “But don’t they also say that funerals are, you know, for the living? And you’re…the living.”

“Yes”—he nodded—“and so is everyone else.”

“Yeah, but there’s, like, a…” I pulled my hands out from under my arse and did the balancing scales mime. “Like, you’re doing something that hurts you a lot that might help other people a little bit, and that’s like giving blood but giving all of your blood. And, yeah, you might save two people’s lives but you’d be dead. And if you give a little bit of your blood…” I suddenly realised I’d run up against an analogy that, for most of our lives, neither of us had access to “…whenever you’re allowed to—”

“So,” said Oliver, “in my case not at all until the guidelines changed?”

“Okay, leaving aside homophobic medical policies and my failure to rhetoric properly, tell me honestly and tell yourself honestly how doing this speech will make you feel.”