Chapter 7 #2
Alex shook his head. “No. Eaten by an alligator.”
I gritted my teeth and tried not to ask myself why I kept doing this, because it never stopped me. “Doctor, Doctor—”
“Yes?”
“—I’ve broken my arm—”
“And we’re dashed sorry for you.”
“—in three places—”
“I really think we should be doing something more productive.”
“‘Well, don’t go back to those places,’” I finished, utterly exhausted.
“What?” said Alex.
I gave the deepest sigh I had given since the last time I’d told Alex a joke. “Doctor, Doctor, I’ve broken my arm in three places. ‘Then don’t go back to those places.’”
Silence on a Zoom call was the worst-possible silence.
“And that’s a joke?” asked Alex.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
This was not, and had never been, worth it. “Okay. First of all, the Doctor, Doctor format is a well-known joke structure, based around the premise that the first speaker is a person with a medical complaint, and that the second speaker is a doctor giving them advice.”
Dr. Fairclough popped up again. “That wasn’t at all clear from context.
It was far more natural to assume you were reporting a single speaker.
” She went still and quiet just long enough I thought her connection had frozen, then added, “Perhaps you could use some kind of hand signal. Or modulate your voice. Or adopt a system of hats.”
“I’m not adopting a system of hats,” I just-short-of-yelled. “I don’t even have a hat.” Well, technically I did have a hat, but it had a vulva on it so wasn’t really appropriate for a professional Zoom call.
“So”—Alex was holding up one finger thoughtfully—“in this joke, the imaginary patient says, ‘Doctor, Doctor.’ Then is it the doctor or the patient who says the next bit?”
“Obviously, it’s the patient who’s broken their arm in three places.”
“Well, one doesn’t like to assume,” Alex replied. “Doctors have ailments too. Medice, cura te ipsum and all that.”
“Nobody is curating anybody’s ipsums. The patient says, ‘I’ve broken my arm in three places—’”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Rhys Jones Bowen had finally managed to connect. “Very dedicated of you to be coming into work anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it is.”
“Sorry I’m late, chaps, chapesses, and chapnonbinary people,” Rhys Jones Bowen continued. “I had a bugger of a time getting on the Wi-Fi. Forgot the password, you see.”
“Would you not just connect automatically?” I asked, ill-advisedly.
Rhys Jones Bowen shook his head. “Oh no, Luc. As social media and data security manager”—Rhys Jones Bowen’s suite of responsibilities had expanded after GDPR came in—“it’s important for me to set an example.”
Since the pandemic, we’d had a lot of Zoom meetings. Honestly, this one was going better than most. We were also, by my count, reaching the point where Dr. Fairclough would consider herself to have exceeded her allocation of time spent interacting with human beings before noon.
Dr. Fairclough’s face appeared in the centre of the screen, pushing the rest of us into a little sidebar.
“I consider myself,” she said, “to have exceeded my allocation of time spent interacting with human beings before noon. Therefore, I shall convey the information I have convened this meeting to convey, we will briefly discuss it, and we will conclude. Any questions?”
“What’s that on the wall behind you?” asked Alex.
If someone had said that to me, I’d have assumed they were talking about a monster or a spider and whipped around to look.
Dr. Fairclough, though, wasn’t scared of monsters, and her only problem with spiders was that arachnids fell outside her field of study.
“It’s a print of a VW Beetle,” she explained.
“I am currently engaged in a romantic and sexual relationship. We have had a slight miscommunication about my interests.” She paused again, for about a third of a second.
“Does anyone have any questions pertinent to the format of the meeting?”
To my intense relief, nobody had any questions pertinent to the format of the meeting. Or any questions they had mistakenly decided were pertinent to the format of the meeting.
“Good,” said Dr. Fairclough. “Our patron is dead.”
In hindsight, it was not my finest work moment to respond to this news with, “What? The Earl of Spunkwhistle?”
“Spitalhamstead,” Barbara Clench corrected me, either out of respect for the dead or because—as she’d told us in several long email chains—she found the Spunkwhistle thing both childish and inappropriate.
Alex’s face reflected its usual confusion. “Gosh. It seems like a lot of earls are dying recently. I hope there hasn’t been a revolution.”
“I think if there was a revolution,” I said, as diplomatically as I could, “you would be among the first to know.”
“Jolly kind of you, Luc. Still, it’s a deuced queer thing because I was at an earl’s funeral only the other day. Friend of the family. Excellent fellow, absolute riot.” He paused, frowning. “I mean, not so much now, obviously.”
“Can we focus on one earl at a time, please?” asked Barbara Clench.
And, somehow, my status as third-least professional person in the room was dragging me back on Team Barbara. “When did this actually happen?”
“Last Friday,” said Alex. “Lovely ceremony. Very tasteful.”
I just about managed not to face-palm on camera. “No, when did the earl die?”
“About two weeks ago,” replied Alex and Dr. Fairclough simultaneously. “But,” Dr. Fairclough went on, “I’ve only recently been informed. The estate has shown a shocking lack of regard for our research into and reintroduction of ecologically vital strains of coleoptera.”
Something was nagging at me. “Alex,” I asked. “This earl friend of yours…”
“Hilary?” Alex volunteered. “Yes?”
“Where was he earl of again?”
“Spitalhamstead, I think. Though one knows such a lot of earls these days, it’s a little hard to keep track.”
That was what I’d thought. “So you were at the funeral of our patron then?”
Alex looked genuinely offended. “Certainly not. I wouldn’t skip out on old Hilary for a work do. What kind of chap do you think I am?”
“No, I mean Hilary was—”
“Luc,” interrupted Rhys Jones Bowen sternly, “this isn’t the time to be badgering Alex about his dead friend. We’ve just lost our patron—which is very sad but also very worrying. And I really think we need to be talking about that.”
Ordinarily, Dr. Fairclough paid zero attention to the non-insect-related parts of running CRAPP.
But at the end of the day she was an academic, which meant that the one thing she could bring herself to care about as much as her research was funding her research.
“I agree,” she said. “This leaves the future of the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project uncertain. I do not like the future of the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project being uncertain.”
“By uncertain”—there was no sign of Barbara Clench’s mocktail at this point—“do you mean we might lose our jobs?”
“Oh, I hope not,” piped up Alex. “What would I do with my weekends?”
Dr. Fairclough used her second blink. “I understand that this is a shock, but I need you all to retain a sense of proportion. Our jobs are far less important than long-term soil aeration.”
“Of course,” said Barbara Clench with a level of sarcasm I was jealous of and everyone else was oblivious to.
“Let me rephrase. What is the likelihood that the earl’s death will lead to C.R.A.P.P.
”—Barbara always said See Arr Ay Pee Pee, and always said it so you could hear every dot—“having to end its vital work and also lead, secondarily, to us all losing our jobs?”
“Unknown,” replied Dr. Fairclough.
And probably, if it had been left up to her, the call would have been over, which would have sucked for the slim majority of us who needed to work for a living. “Okay,” I put in quickly, “but can you speculate?”
Dr. Fairclough was still radiating end-meeting energy.
“Logically, there are three possibilities. Either he has provided for us in his will and we can continue as normal, or his heir will provide for us and we can continue mostly as normal. Or they will not, and our research will cease and the species we protect will go into an irrevocable decline, leading ultimately to the complete collapse of agriculture and the extinction of the human species.”
“Shit,” I cried.
“Yes.” Dr. Fairclough gave a brisk nod. “The stakes are, in fact, existential.”
“No, I mean—”
Spud had spent the call doing puppy things in the pen and around my feet, but now he was doing the very specific kind of puppy thing which I’d learned came just before he did the puppy thing that we on no account wanted our puppy to do indoors.
I leapt to my feet. “I need to take my dog outside.”
If there was any response, I didn’t hear it because I’d jumped up quickly enough to yank my headphones out of the computer. With the wire trailing behind me, I scooped Spud up, wrestled open the patio doors, and plonked him in the designated shitting area.
He looked up at me in some confusion.
“You know what to do,” I told him. “You were doing it yesterday with Oliver repeatedly. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten or that this is weird.”
Spud kept looking at me like I’d lost my mind.
I sighed. “Just poo, will you? I’m in a meeting.”
“Ruff.” Spud thumped his tail on the ground happily.
“Look, if you don’t go in the next thirty seconds, I’ll have to take you back inside.”
“He’s not got a watch.” A small, familiar, deeply irritating voice drifted over the garden fence. It was followed by a small, familiar, deeply irritating face. Both belonged to Next Door’s Kid. “Also, you’re talking to a dog. Dickhead.”
In my heart of hearts, I knew it was beneath me to trade insults with an eleven-year-old. “Better than talking to you,” I said. “Bum-face.”
“That’s not a real swear.”
“Well, you’re not a real…” Fuck. I’d already fucked it.
“Not a real what?” asked Next Door’s Kid, even more smugly than his normal baseline of smugness, which was, let’s be clear, unbearable.