Chapter 16
As it turned out, getting an enhanced DBS check took less time and effort than getting a rich elderly punk wannabe to agree to a meeting to discuss your plans to save a minor environmental charity he didn’t give a shit about.
In the end, the enhanced DBS took the two to four weeks the website said it would and came out basically fine.
Finding a place and a time acceptable to the Earl of Spitalhamstead had taken over a month, and probably wouldn’t.
The last time I’d been to the Half Moon, I’d been seeing my arsehole dad, in the brief window when he thought he had prostate cancer and I thought he had redeeming features.
So I guess it was kind of fitting that I was sitting there now, waiting to pitch a slightly different flavour of arsehole a dung beetle–themed music festival with a whimsically improbable name.
To say I wasn’t in the mood was to grossly underestimate how vast the distance between me and the mood was right then.
I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t near the mood.
I couldn’t see the mood from where I was.
If I typed the mood into Google Maps, it would zoom out so far you could see national borders.
Part of it was that this was always the worst stage in any project.
The point where you’d done enough genuine work to prove that the thing you wanted to do was a thing you could actually do.
And you now had to put that genuine work in front of some arrogant prick with way too much money so they could spend ten seconds looking at the genuine work you’d done and decide whether the thing you could actually do was, in their judgement, worth doing.
And part of it was just that Saint was a colossal wanker.
And part of it was that, while my job involved a lot of pandering to colossal wankers, this particular colossal wanker had even more power over me than the colossal wankers I usually had to get money out of.
I sighed into my pint of Two Tribes Dream Factory, marginally relieved that I was no longer having to order Monkey’s Butthole or Zombie Squirrel Returns.
Since I’d been here with my dad, the place seemed to have pivoted back towards music venue and away from hipster-focused craft ale emporium.
Which was one of those take ’em where you find ’em victories and would hopefully convince Saint I was down with whatever he thought counted as the kids.
Eventually I heard the roar of Saint’s motorcycle, and a few minutes later, he swaggered in, peeling off his gloves with an air of superiority.
He half nodded at me, then went straight past me to the bar and, like I remembered my dad doing years ago, just pointed at what he wanted.
Then, enbeveraged, he swaggered back to the table and sat down opposite me.
“What’re you drinking?” I asked, because I thought he’d look down on something as bourgeois as hello.
He gave me a smug smile. “Lucky Saint.”
“Cute.”
Saint’s eyes narrowed and he gave me a look that was more challenging than disapproving. “That’s a funny way to talk to your patron.”
“I didn’t think you’d be into hierarchies.” Privately, I suspected he was extremely into hierarchies, but he’d probably have reacted badly if I’d said I’m gambling on you not being willing to admit what a hypocrite you are.
He laughed. “True that. True that. So what am I here for? You said you had a pitch for me.”
“That’s right.” I let it hang there for a while. I was hoping I was whetting his curiosity, but I might just have been pissing him off.
“You going to tell me what it is?”
I took a sip of my beer. “Well, we discussed things in the office, and we can all see why you don’t want to carry on with your father’s legacy.”
“Even the posh arsehole?” asked the posh arsehole.
“Even him. But we got to thinking, ‘Why should this be your father’s legacy? Why shouldn’t it be yours?’”
Saint didn’t look impressed. “Because,” he said, “and I really want to make this clear, I couldn’t possibly give less of a shit about beetles.”
Yeah. I’d been afraid of that. Fortunately, I’d also planned for it.
I leaned back, trying my best to look cool and rebellious.
And given that I’d once nearly been fired for being a sexually deviant party boy, looking cool and rebellious was actually something I was pretty good at.
“Do you want to hear a secret?” I asked.
There was a twenty to thirty percent chance he’d just say no. He was contrarian enough, at least. But I’d played the odds well. “Go on then.”
“Nobody gives a shit about charities.”
“My dad did.”
I had no idea if that was true or not, but it didn’t matter.
I could work with it regardless. “Your dad cared about being a charming eccentric. He cared about guys like Alex saying things like, ‘Oh, what? Hilary? Fearfully decent chap; dashed fond of beetles, you know, isn’t that queer?’ It was about the look of the thing. That’s all.”
“And you want me to be the same?”
“Not remotely. I want you to”—how to put this, because the real answer was I don’t want you to be the same; I’m just willing to bet you are—“think about the message you could send if you remade your dad’s pet project in your own image.”
He was tempted. I could tell he was tempted. “And what do you know about my image?”
“Nothing,” I said. Which wasn’t at all true.
By now, I’d done a lot of research on Hilary Topwith St. John Edmonton Bloom de Lancy.
I didn’t just know how he dressed, how he talked, and what bike he rode.
I knew he’d lived on three different communes, only two of which seemed to have been run by actual cults.
I knew he’d spent most of the ’80s and ’90s touring with a band called Rancid Sputum and that he’d been trying to get it back together as recently as 2016.
And I knew what his former bandmates said about him.
I didn’t want to say he was an open book, but you could figure out a lot from the Wikipedia summary.
“That’s the thing,” I went on. “It doesn’t matter.
You’d be the one in control. As long as we’re able to keep our core mission of researching and protecting coleoptera, you can do what you like with the rest.”
I was beginning to feel like a cut-rate Mephistopheles who really liked dung beetles because Saint was giving me a wary but tempted look. Unfortunately, I’d failed to account for the lazy rich bastard factor. “That sounds like a lot of work.”
“It wouldn’t have to be,” I course-corrected. “You could just”—I groped for a Saintism—“lay down your vision and then we’d make it happen. Or we put ideas together for you. And you could…” I extended my hand and did up a thumbs-up / thumbs-down gesture like a Roman emperor.
“Go on then,” said Saint.
“Go on then what?” I asked. I knew what he meant. But I needed him to think he’d gotcha-ed me.
“Ideas.”
Okay, this was it. I had to get this right, if not for myself, then for the—now I thought about it—minority of my coworkers who actually needed jobs.
“Well, for example,” I offered, incredibly casually, “I’m working on a whole new fundraising initiative.
Because I think you’re right…” I let that hang for a moment.
Everyone liked to be told they were right, even if the thing you were telling them they were right about was completely disconnected from anything they were actually saying.
“Our focus has been too narrow. I mean, the tweed-jackets-and-smoking-rooms model of philanthropy went out with fucking Live Aid.”
“Damn straight,” declared Saint, no longer pretending not to be interested. “You know Rancid Sputum would have been right there if Geldof hadn’t been such a cock.”
“Such a cock,” I echoed affirmingly.
For a moment, Saint just brooded on the cockishness of Bob Geldof. Then he fixed me with this intense stare. “So what you’re saying is we’re going to do Live Aid. But not shit.”
This had gone so much better than I thought it would that it was at risk of circling round into going badly. “In many ways,” I said. “Yes.”
He was nodding. Oh fuck, he was really in.
And I had some expectations to manage. “It might need to be”—don’t say smaller, don’t say less ambitious, don’t say worse and more insect-focused—“less mainstream.”
“Yah. Obviously. Sputum doesn’t do mainstream.”
The problem of pitching an ecological fundraiser headlined by a band named Rancid Sputum was a problem for future Luc to deal with. Future Luc wasn’t going to like me very much. I leaned in conspiratorially. “I think in terms of positioning, and attracting the right crowd—”
Saint was nodding again.
“—this needs to feel sort of grassrootsy. You know, authentic music, indie artists, more a down-and-dirty festival vibe than a slick, corporate concert vibe.” Because we literally could not afford a slick, corporate concert vibe. “Kind of more CRAPPstonbury than Beetle Aid.”
I didn’t know if it said encouraging things or terrible thing that Saint was the first person not to find the name completely laughable. “Okay,” he said. “I’m picking up what you’re putting down. But what makes you think you’re qualified to do this?”
There was, in fact, a pretty simple answer to that.
As unsexy as it was, organising a music festival was a whole lot like organising anything else.
It didn’t actually matter how boring or otherwise you were; it mattered if you knew how to book venues, stay on the phone to caterers, and send passive-aggressive follow-up emails to people who needed to be passive-aggressively followed up with.
“It’s fundraising,” I told him. “It’s literally my job. ”
Saint leant back. Shit, I was losing him. “And I can tell you’re passionate about your work. But Luc. This is not your job. This is rock ’n’ roll. It’s not a fête or a bake sale for a church roof.”