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Maybe bad weird.
I put my guinea pig on the tree with everybody else’s, and me and Jonathan both make sure not to tell anybody we paid twelve quid for the thing. And the whole evening’s just…nice. Quiet, or as quiet as it can get with that lot, and everything just working and fitting and making sense in a way I’m not really used to, or I’ve not been used to in a while.
And now I’m in bed. In Jonathan’s room while he’s downstairs trying to get comfortable on a sofa that’s not really long enough for him and which honestly looks like it was picked for style by an overpaid interior designer and not comfort by somebody who actually expected to sit on the thing.
And I’m not sleeping.
I’m not sure if I’m feeling guilty or just—honestly I’m not sure what the just might be. Maybe Jonathan’s bed is lumpy, except of course it isn’t because he owns a chain of bed and bath retailers and he’d never sell a lumpy mattress, and he’d never use a mattress he wouldn’t sell. He’s changed the sheets for me, but I half-imagine I can still smell him—that Radox shower gel that doubles as a shampoo for men who are too busy to take even one and a halfbottles into the shower, and the clean, sharp notes of his cologne. Whatever it is, though, I can’t get comfy. And in the end I get up and creep downstairs, trying not to wake anybody else.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I hear voices. Not family voices, though. Mostly Geordie voices. DimlyrecognisableGeordie voices, from the TV.
Then I do hear Les. “You’re going to have to set us up with this digital telly.”
“You’ve already got one.”
“Aye, but we can’t work it. You’ll need to come round show us how to do the”—there’s a gap in which I think it’s likely Les is miming his failure to engage with technology—“you know, the app thing.”
“I’m very b—” But Jonathan cuts himself off. “I’ll swing by after the pipes are fixed.”
“Or you could send Sam if you’d rather,” says Les. “I’m sure he’d not mind, he’s a good lad.”
“I’m not sending Sam. He isn’t my—I don’t get to just send him places.”
“I still think he’d not mind.”
Another voice comes from the television. It’s unmistakably Brummie and unmistakably Timothy Spall, and I take it as my opportunity to show myself and act like I’ve not been very mildly spying. “Don’t mean to interrupt but are you watchingAuf Wiedersehen, Pet?”
“You can join us if you’d like,” offers Les.
Now I’m in the room, I can see them. They’re both on the sofa, picking at an enormous bowl of mixed nuts that Wendy brought with her and insisted on laying out. Because apparently it’s not Christmas without a bowl of mixed nuts.
I dither on the threshold in my pjs like a kid up past his bedtime. “I don’t want to intrude. I couldn’t sleep is all.”
“It’s been a busy day,” says Jonathan. And I peer at his face, trying to work out if he’s giving mecome ineyes orleave me alone with my dadeyes, but he’s giving me neither. So in the end I make my own decision and, not wanting to go and lie upstairs feeling restless and messed up, I come and sit down in the free armchair.
“I’ve not seen this in years,” I say. “I used to watch it with my nan.”
“Not recently, though?” asks Les.
“She passed away,” I explain. Which is true, and long enough ago that remembering it doesn’t spoil my amnesia story.
Les and Jonathan both reflexivelysorryme and I reassure them that it happened a while back and at any rate she’d had a good run. Because it’s what you say, isn’t it? And she had.
We settle into the episode. And even though this is the first time I’ve seen Les and Jonathan spend more than six minutes together without things getting difficult, it feels familiar. Perhaps it’s just that sitting in front of an '80s TV show long after the '80s are over is such a dad thing that it’d feel normal no matter who I was and no matter who they were. I’m pretty sure I could be on the international space station with an actual alien and the actual alien’s zyborg pod-father and as long as we were watching old episodes of'Allo 'Allo!it’d still be the most natural thing in the world.
Every so often I lean forwards and grab myself a nut.
“It’s funny,” I say in the next ad break, “watching this post-Brexit. You don’t often think of Brits being migrant workers.”
Les gives one of those imperceptible shrugs that’s often as close as he gets to body language. “Knew a lot of lads who did, back in the day. Even more in the early '90s. Lot of demand for construction with reunification.”
“You ever go yourself?” I ask.
“No. Back then I was at—well it would have been British Steel in them days. And it paid better than construction.”
I’d not intended to springboard off a forty-year-old comedy-drama series from the creator ofThe Likely Ladsinto a detailed discussion of Les’s employment history, but what’s done is done and I watch Jonathan closely for his reaction. Thing is, he’s not having one. Least not one he’s showing.
“And I suppose you didn’t have to live in a hut with six other colourful characters,” I say.
