BY MICHAEL McCLELLAND
 Painting by Casey McClelland As the door shuts quietly behind Christopher I throw my bowl of raspberries and cream at it, hoping for a cathartic explosion of porcelain and blood red fruit pulp. But our damned loft is so huge the bowl arcs limply and thuds onto our wine-barrel floor, a single crack down its center releasing the little raspberries. They skitter across the floor like hermit crabs searching for a new home. After fifteen years, Christopher has just announced he is leaving me, saying he didn’t want to, but it was what we need for our next album to thrive. “We’ll be like Fleetwood Mac,” he said, casually, like saying “we’ll be like the Thompsons in 2B.” (We won’t actually be like the Thompsons in 2B. They smell like asparagus and are worth a hundred million.) “They were all breaking up and fighting when they wrote Rumours,” he said, staring at his phone screen, not me, “and it’s one of the best albums of all time.” “Their next album was Tusk, which means cock!” I screeched back at him. “I take it you’ll be writing that one?” Some context: We are the world’s first and only chart-topping gay-husband pop duo. I write the music; Christopher sings lead vocals. I also play the piano and sing back up. His job is to look and sound pretty. Our first two albums both went platinum. Our third, an ill-advised folksy tribute to our attempts to adopt a child, had flopped. Hence Christopher’s decision to join Grindr and move into our country house, leaving me alone in our Soho loft to write our fourth album, which was supposed to be about going back to our roots. |
