And the way it haunted me was a Google alert that threatened to vibrate my phone off the bedside table. And, yes, I’m very aware that tracking what people are saying about you on the internet is generally the act of a tosser or a narcissist, or a narcissistic tosser, but I’d learned the hard way that it’s better to know what’s out there. I flailed, sending a different piece of vibrating technology—for gentlemen wishing to explore a more sophisticated kind of pleasure—spinning to the floor, and finally managed to close my fingers round my phone with all the grace of a teenager trying to hit second base.
I didn’t want to look. But if I didn’t, I was going to throw up the sticky mess of dread, hope, and uncertainty that had turned my insides to baby food. Probably it was less bad than I feared. Usually it was less bad than I feared. Except occasionally it…wasn’t. Peeping through my eyelashes like a small child braving an episode of Doctor Who from behind the sofa cushions, I checked my notifications.
And I could breathe again. It was okay. Though obviously in an ideal world, pictures of me lying in the gutter outside The Cellar in my bunny ears wouldn’t have been splashed across every third-rate gossip site from Celebitchy to Yeeeah. And in a truly ideal world my definition of okay wouldn’t have sunk quite that low. But, with my life being a never-ending pit of suck, my dismaydar has gone through some serious recalibrations over the years. I mean, at least the pictures showed me fully clothed and without anybody’s cock in my mouth. So, y’know, win.
Today’s nail in the coffin of my digital reputation had a strong “like father, like son” theme, because there’s a magic porridge pot’s worth of footage of Jon Fleming making a tit of himself out there. And I guess “Bad Boy Jonny’s Wild Child Son Collapses in Drugs Sex Booze Shame” is a better headline than “Man Trips Over in Street.” Sighing, I let my phone thunk to the floor. Turns out, the one thing worse than having a famous father who blew up his career like a champagne supernova is having a famous father who’s making a fucking comeback.
I’d just about learned to live with being compared to my reckless, self-destructive absentee father. But now he’d cleaned up his act and was playing the wise, old mentor every Sunday on ITV, I was being compared unfavourably to my reckless, self-destructive absentee father. And that was a level of bullshit I was not emotionally prepared for. I should have known better than to read the comments, but my eyes slipped and fell on wellactually69, who’d been massively upvoted for suggesting a reality TV show in which Jon Fleming tries to put his junkie son back on the straight and narrow—a show which theotherjillfrompeckham declared that she would “watch the shit out of.”
I knew, in the grand scheme of things, none of this mattered. The internet was forever, and there was no getting away from that, but by tomorrow, or the day after, I would be below the fold, or whatever the e-equivalent of the fold was. As good as forgotten until the next time someone wanted a twist on the Jon Fleming story. Except I still felt fucking terrible, and the longer I lay there, the fucking terribler I felt.
I tried to take some comfort in the fact that at least Cam hadn’t put me on a list of Twelve Pricks Who Will Freak Out on You in a Nightclub. But as comfort went, that landed somewhere between “cold” and “scant.” Truth be told, I’d never been the best at self-care. Self-recrimination, I had down. Self-loathing, I could do in my sleep, and often did. So here I was, a twenty-eight-year-old man suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to call his mother because he was sad.
Because the one upside of my dad being who he is, is that my mum is who she is. You can Wiki this stuff, but the tl;dr version is that back in the ’80s she was essentially a French-Irish Adele with bigger hair. And at about the time Bros were wondering when they’d be famous and Cliff Richard was spilling mistletoe and wine on a million unsuspecting Christmases, she and Dad were caught up in this love-you-hate-you-can’t-live-without-you thing that produced two collaborative albums, one solo album, and me.
Well, technically I came before the solo album, which happened when Dad realised he wanted to be famous and wasted more than he wanted to be in our lives. “Welcome Ghosts” was the last thing Mum ever wrote but, honestly, it was the last thing she had to. Nearly every year the BBC, or ITV, or some movie studio uses a track from it over a sad scene or an angry scene or a scene it doesn’t fit, but we’ll cash the cheque anyway.
Stumbling out of bed, I adopted out of long-ingrained habit the Quasimodo pose required for anyone over 5’6” to move around my flat without getting clocked in the face by an eave. Which, given I’m 6’4”, is the accommodational equivalent of having chosen to drive a Mini Cooper. I’d leased the place with Miles—my ex—back when it had been romantic to live in the twenty-first century equivalent of a garret in Shepherd’s Bush. Now it was rapidly becoming pathetic: being alone, stuck in a job that was going nowhere, and still unable to afford a home that wasn’t mostly the underside of a roof. Of course, it might also have helped if I’d tidied it, like, ever.
Shoving a pile of socks off the sofa, I curled up and got to FaceTiming. “Allô, Luc, mon caneton,” said Mum. “Did you see your father’s whole package last night?”
I gave a gasp of actual horror before remembering The Whole Package was the name of his stupid TV show. “No. I was out with friends.”
“You should watch it. I’m sure it will be on the catch-up.”
“I don’t want to watch it.”
She gave the most Gallic of shrugs. I’m convinced she plays up the French thing, but I can’t really blame her for it because all she got from her father was his name. Well, that and a pallor Siouxsie Sioux would envy. In any case, even if having a dad who runs out on you isn’t genetic, in our family it’s definitely hereditary. “Your father,” she declared. “He has not aged well.”
“Good to know.”
“His head is bald as an egg now and a funny shape. He looks like that chemistry teacher with the cancer.”
This was news to me. But then I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to keep in contact with my old school. To be honest, I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to keep in contact with people who live on the wrong side of London. “Mr. Beezle has cancer?”
“Not him. The other one.”
Another thing about my mum: relationship to reality, questionable at best. “Do you mean Walter White?”
“Oui oui. And you know, I think he is too old to be hopping around with a flute these days.”
“We’re talking about Dad, right? Because otherwise Breaking Bad got hella weird in its later seasons.”
“Of course your father. He will probably break a hip.”
“Well.” I grinned. “We can hope.”
“He bid on a young lady with a harmonica—it was a good choice, I think, because she was one of the most talented—but she went with one of the boys from Blue instead. I enjoyed that very much.”