Unfortunately, I’d been working on the assumption that our non-gender-specific animal parties would be fairly low-key and wrap up before midnight. And Oliver’s had: he’d been for a nice dinner with his nice friends, read a couple of chapters of Real Life, and gone to sleep. I, by contrast, had drunk more than I’d drunk in years, partied until dawn with a bunch of artists, had breakfast in—I couldn’t remember, been deposited at my flat by kindly strangers, and woken at three in the afternoon with creases on my face from the sofa cushions where I’d apparently passed out.

All of which meant I was hungover and already late for the emotionally significant, relationship-bookending date I had myself arranged when my dad called.

If I’d been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t even have picked up, especially since the last time we’d spoken he’d made me yet another empty promise and then fucked off out my life. But see above re late and hungover.

“Have you got cancer?” I asked. “Actually, even if you do, I don’t care.”

“I’m doing well,” he told me as if I’d made a sincere enquiry into his health instead of strongly implying I didn’t give a shit whether he lived or died. “Thanks for asking.”

“I didn’t.”

There was the teeniest tiniest of pauses. “I was talking to NME today, and they wanted to know what I was doing for your wedding.”

Turning onto Dean Street, I paused because barging into a restaurant late, hungover, and on the phone was the wrong kind of triple threat. “I don’t know, Dad. What are you doing for my wedding?”

“Well”—a still teenier, still tinier pause—“that very much depends on you.”

I’d say this was Jon Fleming all over, but everything Jon Fleming did was Jon Fleming all over. As far as I could tell, being yourself all over at all times was basically how you got to be his brand of famous. “Sorry, do you want to come to my wedding?”

“I thought you might want me to come.”

“Sorry, do you want to come to my wedding but also not want to say you want to come to my wedding because you have the emotional maturity of a…of a…a complete wanker?”

“If you don’t want me there, I’ll understand. I’m sure you still have a lot of complicated feelings.”

Oh, fuck him. He was going down this road again, and while this time I didn’t have Oliver with me to call him on his bullshit, that was okay. “Actually,” I told him, “my feelings are pretty simple.” For a start, I was one hundred percent confident that this was one hundred percent about him thinking it would be good PR to be seen at his gay son’s gay wedding and zero percent about anything else.