Chapter 13
We,d looked at some Literature (Oliver always had Literature) that evening, and it had turned out that fostering, while not as long and complicated a process as adopting or surrogacy, was still a pretty long and complicated process.
Over the next couple of days, we’d talked about it some more, then talked about it some more some more, because it wasn’t a decision to be uncertain about, and then filled out some application forms, and now we were… waiting, I guess.
Waiting, looking after our dog, and going back to work. Before work exploded forever.
“Okay,” I said to Alex over Zoom, a good couple of weeks into the waiting process. I was wearing trousers this time because I do sometimes learn from my mistakes. “What cheese do you use to lure a bear out of a cave?”
Alex, once more dressed as somebody from a historical era mostly notable for its extraordinarily tight trousers, made an intense, thinking face.
“I suppose it depends on the bear. What you’d probably want to do is find a chap who has a bear hound, maybe round up a few fellows who are handy with a rifle, and just wait for it to come out on its own.
Unless it’s in the winter, of course; then you can catch the blighter napping. ”
Note to self: Don’t try to tell Alex a joke about something a posh person is likely to have actually done. Like bear hunting. Or polo. Or throwing poor people in rivers for fun. “Okay, but suppose that in this scenario, you’re not aiming to kill the bear—”
“Bit of a rum hunting party if you aren’t.”
“Let’s assume you’re with Greenpeace.”
“Bunch of interfering stick-in-the-muds if you ask me.”
I hadn’t been asking him especially. “Okay, but let’s say that in this imaginary, purely-for-the-joke situation, you’re not trying to kill the bear. You’re just trying to get it to come out of its cave. Using cheese.”
Alex thought again. “Well, it takes rather a lot of bait to lure a bear anywhere, and you’d probably need to leave it around for some time, and that’d be a deuced waste of good cheese.
But”—he raised a finger in a misguided gesture of confidence—“assuming we’re also ignoring that for joke purposes, I suppose you’d want something strong-smelling. Maybe a Camembert?”
Why did he always do this to me? Why did I let him do this to me? Did I just hate myself even more than I thought? “Umm,” I said. “Yes. Sort of.”
“Sort of? Is it supposed to be more a gouda or a Port Salut? Humboldt Fog?”
“No, I mean Camembert is the right answer, but you need to say it properly.”
“Camembert?” said Alex in a surprisingly good French accent.
“No, more like”—this was going to end badly. It was going to end incredibly badly—“Cam-on-bear!”
Alex looked genuinely appalled. “Luc! Your French master must have been ghastly. How do you talk to people on the Riviera?”
“Slowly and loudly,” I replied, then followed it up at once with, “But no, it’s the joke. It’s… It’s Cam-on-bear. Because it sounds like come on, b—”
“Did I miss anything important?” asked Barbara Clench, logging in from what looked like the front porch of a cottage with climbing roses around the door.
“Absolutely not,” I replied at the same time as Alex said, “Luc’s going bear hunting.”
“No,” said Barbara Clench, witheringly. “He isn’t.”
“He was looking for tips about bait.”
“No,” said Barbara Clench, witheringly. “He wasn’t.”
Alex looked borderline affronted. “He was asking what kind of cheese was best to get a bear out of a cave.”
“Cam-on-bear,” Barbara Clench said. “Now, are we here to discuss bear cheese or have a meeting?”
“Have a meeting,” replied Dr. Fairclough, who had logged on at exactly 10:00 and zero seconds. As usual.
“Shouldn’t we wait for Rhys?” I didn’t especially want to, but I thought we should at least reject the idea formally.
Dr. Fairclough blinked once. “No. Now, I suggest we commence. Given our circumstances, these proceedings should be rather short. We will continue with our existing commitments as normal, and, in the event that a new patron is not forthcoming, we will go our separate ways a year from now.”
It was a bit of a downer—okay, check that, quite a lot of a downer—to have the boss being quite so calm about the end of all our jobs, her own career, and, given the way she talked about the importance of dung beetles, all life as we knew it.
Then again, that was Dr. Fairclough for you.
Being calm about things was basically her whole deal.
“C.R.A.P.P. will begin implementing redundancy consultation immediately,” added Barbara Clench. “Any of you—any of us—who feel we may need support in seeking new work shouldn’t hesitate to ask for it.”
“What sort of support?” I asked, partly because I might need it, partly because I didn’t have a lot of faith in the kind of support I was going to get from an organisation that would hire Alex, Rhys Jones Bowen, or, for that matter, me.
“Interview practice,” she said. Normally, I resented Barbara Clench doing her job, but today I could tell she resented it as much as I did, and that took a lot of the fun out of it. “CV tips. References, obviously. I know it isn’t a lot, Luc, but we really are doing what we can.”
I’d normally have had a witty comeback. Okay, a snappy comeback. Okay, a pissy comeback. But right then I was just too sad and defeated.
“Arroou?” said Spud at my feet. And I nodded.
“I know,” I told Barbara. “I’m just—this is really it, isn’t it?”
Dr. Fairclough nodded. “Definitionally.”
“Pour one out, I guess?”
A look of flummoxation settled onto Alex’s face, displacing its previous look of bafflement. “One what?”
Fuck me, I think I was actually going to miss this. “A drink, I think?”
“Really, Luc,” replied Alex with a tone of admonishment. “This isn’t a time to be celebrating. We’re losing our jobs.”
“I didn’t mean in a celebrating way,” I tried to explain. “Pour one out is—”
Explaining idioms to Alex never went well for me, so it was actually kind of a relief when Rhys Jones Bowen appeared on-screen.
He was wearing a T-shirt with a photorealistic picture of a much-more-shredded-than-the-real-Rhys-Jones-Bowen chest and abs printed on it.
“Hello,” he said cheerily. “What did I miss?”
“Luc was asking about bear hunting and celebrating us all losing our jobs,” Alex informed him, pouting indignantly.
“I was doing neither of those things,” I said, then, to forestall an argument, followed up with, “Technical issues?”
For a moment the assembled CRAPPers tried to figure out who I was saying technical issues to, but Rhys eventually concluded I meant him and, over a slightly laggy connection, said, “Oh. No actually, everything worked like a dream this time. But you see, the thing is, I was eating a chocolate mousse. Then as I leaned over to adjust my camera to a more flattering angle, I spilled the blooming thing all down my front.”
That explained maybe half of the current situation, but I needn’t have worried because nobody at CRAPP ever stopped a good anecdote before it had gone on way, way too long.
“And,” he continued, “I didn’t think it would be very professional to come to a meeting with chocolate mousse all down my front, so I went to get changed, but the thing is, it’s the day before wash day so I spent ages trying to find something and wouldn’t you know it the best I could do was this.
” He indicated the fake-naked-chest T-shirt.
“And I’ll be honest, I was a bit concerned it might create something of the wrong impression—”
“You think?” I said.
“I did think. But then I remembered that time you showed us all your hedgehog underpants and I decided, ‘Well, it can’t be much worse than that,’ so here I am.”
I guess the advantage of CRAPP closing in a year was that it put a strict time limit on how long I was going to have to live with my hedgehog boxers being a regular element of workplace banter.
“Barbara was just explaining,” I tried in a vain effort to distract people from the topic of my underwear, “the things that CRAPP will be able to do to support us through redundancy.”
Rhys Jones Bowen looked shocked. “Redundancy?”
“You do remember that we’re losing our funding at the end of the year?” I reminded him.
“I know we might,” replied Rhys Jones Bowen. “But I’m buggered if I’m letting this place shut down without a fight.”
That had…genuinely not occurred to me.
“We might be able to find alternative sources of income,” observed Dr. Fairclough, “but the most probable outcome is that they will not be sufficient to compensate for the loss of the trust, and thus our operations will in all likelihood become untenable.”
“Well then, let’s keep the trust,” said Rhys, as if it was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world. “My mum always says, ‘You’re not beat until they’re shoving sawdust up your bum,’ and that’s how I’ve always lived my life and how I always will.”
In so many ways, he was making sense. In so many ways, he was saying what I’d not quite let myself want to hear. In other ways he was talking about sawdust in bums. “Until they’re doing what?”
“Shoving sawdust up your bum,” Rhys Jones Bowen repeated. “I think it means, you know, until you’re dead.”
“Do they shove sawdust up dead people’s bums?” I asked, even though I was certain I didn’t want to hear the answer.
“I think it’s an embalming thing,” Rhys told me with the airy confidence that had allowed him to bring a different date to every company event I’d ever seen him at. “You know, they pickle you and stuff sawdust up your bum.”
It was fucked up that I was going to miss this. “I really don’t think that’s how embalming works.”
Rhys Jones Bowen folded his arms in the manner of a man about to die on a very silly hill. “I didn’t realise you were such an expert in the field, Luc.”
“I’m not claiming expertise. I just don’t feel sawdust-up-the-bum is generally a part of funeral preparation.”