Chapter 13 #2
“We’ve got a mummy in the Lancaster house,” Alex piped up. “Uncle Pongo brought him back from a dig somewhere, just before that nasty business with the shotgun. He’s full of sawdust.”
“Uncle Pongo?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen.
“The mummy.”
“Yes”—I joined Rhys on the silly hill, with roughly similar prospects of survival—“but did it go up his bum?”
Alex wrinkled his nose thoughtfully. “Couldn’t say for sure. But”—he raised a finger—“interesting story about Uncle Pongo and the shotgun.”
“Could we perhaps,” suggested Barbara Clench, whose status as office killjoy was incredibly useful in that moment, “stop talking about shotguns, bums, and sawdust in any combination?”
“We’re not talking about shotguns, bums, and sawdust,” retorted Rhys Jones Bowen. “We’re talking about my mum and how she’d never take something like this lying down and how we shouldn’t either.”
I couldn’t quite believe that Rhys Jones Bowen was being the voice of, not reason exactly, because the reasonable thing would’ve been to put the chairs on the tables, turn the lights out, and quietly update our CVs.
But the voice of…something. The voice of standing up for ourselves.
Of not being total pushovers. Of actually caring.
Except that wasn’t true. I could completely believe it. Getting passionate and enthusiastic about something noble but doomed was a completely Rhys thing to do. And, while shooting that down was a very me thing to do, it didn’t have to be.
“Okay,” I tried, “let’s say we don’t give up. What do we do instead?”
“Ah,” said Rhys Jones Bowen, confidently. “I’m glad you asked me that because…”
I waited.
We all waited.
“Well, the way I see it…”
We carried on waiting.
“You’re the fundraiser, Luc,” he finished.
“My area of expertise is social media management and data protection.” For a moment he went silent, consulting his expertise in social media management and data protection.
“I suppose we could try to start a hashtag. Something like #theearlofspitalhamsteadistryingtotakeawayfundingfromourdungbeetlecharityandthatsreallynoton.”
Barbara Clench, sipping tea on her idyllic cottage porch, looked far less flinty than usual. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. And maybe we should try to be less fatalistic. Dr. Fairclough”—she gazed earnestly out of the screen—“what do you think?”
“I think anybody who fails to recognise the importance of coleoptera is an irredeemable narcissist and not worth trying to engage with.” That was Dr. Fairclough’s answer to everything in one way or another.
Like a lot of extremely clever people, she assumed that not agreeing with her immediately was a personality flaw.
“Is it at all possible,” I suggested in my best Fairclough-whispering tone, “that the earl’s current failure to appreciate the vital significance of the more than five thousand global and more than sixty local species of dung beetle might be corrected if we adopt the right strategy?”
Dr. Fairclough fixed me, or rather her camera, with a steely—or perhaps chitinous—stare. “Elaborate.”
“Well…” I was thinking aloud now, but between them, Rhys Jones Bowen and Dr. Fairclough had switched on the part of my brain that, loath as I was to admit it, both enjoyed and was good at my job. “The read I get from Saint—”
“Please don’t call him that,” interrupted Alex. “The only thing worse than an oik is a titled oik, and the only thing worse than a titled oik is encouraging a titled oik in his oikishness.”
I held up one finger. “Okay. Yes. But also, more importantly. No. I think encouraging his oikishness is exactly what we want to be doing.”
Alex folded his arms and actually huffed. “I’d rather be made redundant.”
To my unexpected relief, Rhys Jones Bowen chimed in. “Well, I bloody well wouldn’t. If Luc has a secret plan to save CRAPP, then I’m all for hearing it.”
“It’s not really a secret plan—” I began.
“Really?” Alex unfolded his arms again and leaned forward in curiosity. “Who’ve you told?”
“Nobody, but—”
Rhys Jones Bowen was frowning. “Seems pretty secret to me then. Can’t get much more secret than not telling anybody. Practically what ‘secret’ means.”
“Although I will say,” added Alex, “that it’s rather shabby of you to have been keeping things to yourself all this time while we’re all fretting about losing our jobs.”
There we were again. This was the CRAPP I knew and loved. “There isn’t a plan.”
“Then why did you say there was?” demanded Alex. “Won’t do, old boy, won’t do, getting a fellow’s hopes up and—”
“I’m evolving a plan,” I said, “right now.”
Barbara Clench smiled. “How are you at expectorating?”
“Especially good.” And then before the less-in-command-of-their-faculties brigade could ask what that had to do with anything, I barged straight into my main point.
“Anyway, my read on the new Earl of Spitalhamstead is that he’s less a man of strong conviction than a man of strong attitude.
It really seems like he just wants to cut us off to stick it to his dad, and so all we have to do is convince him that he wants to”—how best to put this—“remake us in his image.”
I mentally counted down until Alex interjected. “I will not be remade in the image—”
“Of an oik,” I finished for him. “I know, I know. But here’s the thing.
We don’t actually have to change very much at all.
It might not seem like it, but the great advantage of being a tiny insignificant charity that deals with something most people”—I anticipated Dr. Fairclough’s objection before she could make it—“quite wrongly neither know nor care about is that they basically leave us alone. We’re the philanthropic equivalent of that streaming service subscription you never quite get around to cancelling. ”
Alex looked puzzled.
“To that shooting club you keep paying membership fees for?”
Alex stopped looking puzzled. “Ah, you mean, a chap barely ever thinks of us, but there’s just enough of interest on the calendar that he doesn’t want to drop out?”
“Exactly.”
“You know,” he mused, “I really should go back to the South Riding Gin and Pellets Club more often.”
Barbara Clench was eyeing some part of the screen—probably my part of the screen—with a calculating look. “Suppose we did go in this direction. What do you think we’d actually need to do?”
That, of course, was the $64,000 question.
Probably more like the $753,000 question, adjusted for inflation.
“I think what we’d need to do is for me to have a talk with him like I would with any other donor.
You know, butter him up and all that. And then I’d need to sell him on something.
Probably something big and shiny and superficially antiestablishment. ”
“Not sure I like the idea of being antiestablishment,” warned Alex. “Pretty sure the establishment got that way for a reason.”
“I did say superficially.”
This didn’t reassure him. “Still, slippery slope.”
Dr. Fairclough, though, seemed interested. I felt, over the years, that she’d come to rely on me as a kind of interpreter, helping her get her point across to anybody who wasn’t either an insect or an academic. She might almost even have trusted me. “Do you have specifics?” she asked.
I didn’t. But I was pretty good at bullshitting specifics on the fly. “Well, most of what we do is so under the radar that the earl won’t care at all. Which means if we want to do something big, we probably need to can the Beetle Drive.”
This led, predictably, to a chorus of no’s from the team.
“Best day of the year is the Beetle Drive,” protested Rhys Jones Bowen.
“Certainly our best day financially,” added Barbara Clench.
“And it’s tradition,” said Alex, as if this was the only thing that really mattered.
I nodded. “All true. And I love the Beetle Drive as much as anybody.” Hell, it was basically my and Oliver’s anniversary. “But the whole event screams ‘late Earl of Spitalhamstead.’ It’s formal, it’s got a slightly twee name—”
“Now hang on.” Alex was getting indignant again. “What’s wrong with Beetle Drive? Who doesn’t have fond memories of wandering down to the beetle drive on a summer’s morning to help raise money for the church roof and—”
“In the twenty-first century?” I said, “Most people. And more importantly, the one person we need to convince we’re worth giving tons of money to.
A man who probably has a Fuck the System bumper sticker on his Porsche doesn’t connect with church fundraisers and family-friendly party games.
He wants something—and I use this term knowing full well how dated it actually is—rock ’n’ roll. ”
From the look in her eyes, I couldn’t tell if Barbara Clench thought I was having a moment of brilliance or a complete break from reality. “What would be a more rock ’n’ roll alternative to the Beetle Drive?” she asked.
“Well,” I stalled, “the Beetle Drive is quite a sedate evening in a nice venue with a sit-down dinner and non-threatening entertainment, so I suppose the more rock ’n’ roll alternative would be…sort of the opposite of that?”
Barbara Clench raised an eyebrow. “So a high-energy, overcrowded day in a terrible venue with no food and threatening entertainment?”
“Yes?” I wince-replied.
“You mean, something in a field with a lot people and very loud noises?” suggested Rhys Jones Bowen.
I nodded.
“Like the Battle of the Somme?” piped up Alex.
“Hopefully not too much like that,” I told him. “I don’t think ‘Come sit in mud and let us shell you’ will be a great pitch, even for the earl.”
Alex frowned. “Pity. After all, beetles do have shells.”
“Carapaces,” Dr. Fairclough corrected him, sounding mortally offended.
Rhys Jones Bowen had a worryingly contemplative look. “Ooh, now that takes me back to my festivaling days. We used to say that was like the Somme.”
“Can we please drop the So—” I stopped. “Hang on, run that by me again.”
“Beetles,” Alex repeated, “have shells, so maybe we could do something—”
“Not you. Rhys.”
Rhys Jones Bowen had muted himself and was having a conversation with somebody off-screen. “What was that, Luc? Me? Oh. Right. The Somme. Yeah, like when I used to go festivaling, that was all mud and tents and loud noises, but it was a laugh, wasn’t it?”
And then, like Michael Caine at the end of The Italian Job, I had an idea. “That,” I said, sort of as its own sentence. “We’re going to do that.”
“A festival?” asked Rhys Jones Bowen.
“Yes.”
“About the Great War?” asked Alex.
“No.”
“Then what—”
“We’re going to pitch the earl a music festival.
It’s going to be big. It’s going to be in a muddy field.
It’s going to be alternative and edgy in exactly the kind of way that rich people will spend money on, and it’s going to be called”—the word slid into my brain like an unwelcome DM.
A word so absurd it was perfect and so-so-wrong-it’s-right that it might, in fact, have been just plain right—“CRAPPstonbury.”