Chapter 16 #2
If I lost this fucker at the last second, I was going to…to probably go home and sit on the sofa and be sad at my dog. I summoned all the rock and/or roll I’d inherited from both my parents and tried to blast them through my eyes at the new Earl of Spunkwhistle. “I can do this, Saint.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think you can.” He paused regretfully. “Sorry to crush your dreams, but I’m a man who knows his own mind, and this lady’s not for turning. It’s a hard no.”
Well, that was pretty unequivocal. “I appreciate your honesty.”
“If it’s any consolation, I respect you now.”
None whatsoever. “Thanks.”
I’d hoped he would at least have the good grace to fuck off and leave me with my respect and crushed dreams. But, to my horror, he went to the bar, casually ordered another pint, and came back to sit with me.
“This is a nice venue,” he remarked, looking around.
“Maybe if I get the boys back together, we’ll think about doing a gig here. ”
“I’m sure they’d love that,” said the robot who had subbed in for me while I dealt with my failure.
“Surprised you knew about it. This doesn’t seem like a”—he was clearly looking for a polite way to express how little he thought of my job—“middle-management-fundraiser-for-a-shit-beetle-charity kind of place.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant charity for shit-beetles or a charity for beetles that is itself shit. But, at this point, I guess it didn’t matter. “Thanks. My dad brought me once.”
“Your dad has good taste.”
I shrugged. “He played here in the seventies.”
And by some miracle of narcissism, Saint was looking interested again. “Who with?”
Shit. I honestly, honestly had not been meaning to play this card.
I hated playing this card. I didn’t even think of it as a card, more as an old receipt I’d stuck in my pocket absent-mindedly and then accidentally washed with my jeans and kept finding bits of every time I went for my keys.
But it was too late now. “Rights of Man.”
“He used to play with Jon Fleming’s band?”
“He, um, he is Jon Fleming.”
And to my incredible, unbelievable relief, Saint nodded, took a sip of his pint, and then said, “Fucking sellout.”
What with all professional hope being dead, I saw no reason to carry on being professional. “Oh thank God. For a horrible moment I thought I was going to have to pretend I liked him.”
“Jon Fleming”—Saint was going into full pontification mode—“was a legend. But then he got old and he got scared and he pissed it all away for a reality TV deal. And why?”
I didn’t think he was actually asking.
“Because he didn’t trust the music, that’s why.
Rights of Man will go down in history as one of the all-time rock greats, but Fleming?
He’s shat all over it because he wants his name in the Radio Times.
It’s like Ringo Starr becoming the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine, if Ringo Starr was John Lennon and the Beatles weren’t completely fucking overrated. ”
I nodded and made mm-hmm noises. I had a great line in mm-hmm noises. They were really useful for implying that I agreed with at least some of a donor’s weird bullshit opinions without committing to any given one of them.
“With Sputum,” Saint said, turning the conversation back to him, “there was none of that. We stayed true, right till the last.”
I wondered how aware he was that, of the four original members of Rancid Sputum, he was the only one still living the punk rock dream.
Rik Jism, lead guitar, had gone back to his original name of Richard Smoddle and now worked for Deloitte.
MagiMix, bass guitar, was teaching in a primary school in Droitwich Spa.
As for the drummer, Gary the Cosmic Fuckstone, he’d set up a well-respected raw foods blog and died from a bad mushroom in 2019.
“No money telling us what to do.” Saint was still in full flow. “No corporate sponsors. No censorships. No record labels. No pandering to Middle England just for radio spots. Hundred percent underground. Hundred percent real.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said again. “Yeah.”
Gradually, Saint percolated out of nostalgia for the glory days of Rancid Sputum. “Hey.” He looked at me closely enough that I felt uncomfortable, which, honestly, didn’t have to be that closely. “If you’re Jon Fleming’s kid, that means you’re Odile O’Donnell’s kid as well, right?”
I really wanted to keep Mum out of this, but there was no point lying about it. “Yeah.”
He was getting a glint in his eye. Nothing good ever came from old men with glints in their eyes. “Now she,” he proclaimed, “is true. Rock. And. Roll.”
“Mm-hmm.” I was really, really, really hoping that this wasn’t going to descend into an OAP creeping on my mum.
“Did her thing. Made her point. Fucked off. Class fucking act.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, with the hmm getting rather higher pitched than the mm.
There was a long pause, during which I went from being glad Saint had stopped talking about my mum to wishing he’d at least talk about something. “Maybe I was wrong about you,” he decided finally.
“Mm— What?”
“Maybe you are the right man to pull off CRAPPstonbury.”
At this point I had no idea what was happening. I was pretty sure I’d either won or lost or Saint was just trying to get into my mum’s pants. So, in desperation, I threw up devil horns and said, “Fuck yeah.”
“Fuck yeah,” agreed Saint. “Fuck the man. Fuck the system.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. And finally went with, “Mm-hmm.”
He downed his pint with a worrying first-of-many energy. Then he looked me right in the eyes and said, “Let’s go fuck shit up, Luc Fleming.”
* * *
I did not want to “go fuck shit up” with Saint.
I could, in fact, think of few things I wanted to do less than “go fuck shit up” with Saint.
But Saint was the kind of man who believed he had a will of iron when what he actually had was a lifetime of getting his own way.
Which meant he was the kind of man who would bully people he had power over into doing things they didn’t want to do, and still feel like he was being an antiestablishment rebel.
So I went and fucked shit up with Saint.
Because the alternative was to admit that I’d rather lie on a sofa with a puppy than spit off a bridge onto a policeman, and that would probably—scratch that, definitely—have made him declare me insufficiently rock ’n’ roll to be in charge of a beetle-themed music festival.
That had been my idea in the first place.
And that he hadn’t even known he wanted until I’d suggested it to him.
God, rich people sucked.
Fucking shit up with Saint wasn’t the worst night of my life.
In my twenties I’d spent a whole lot of nights doing awful things I hated with awful people I also hated.
It was up there, though. We almost got arrested twice, and almost got killed, now I think about it, literally every time we got on the motorbike.
Because he made me ride pillion and insisted that motorcycle helmets were, and I quote, “For fascists.”
The following morning, I peeled myself out of bed feeling worse than I had in a long, long time and stumbled downstairs determined to not let the pissing Earl of pissing Spital pissing Hamstead stop me giving my wonderful dog his morning walk.
I was intercepted by Oliver, who was, of course, already up, dressed, breakfasted, and on his way out the door.
Or at least he’d usually be on the way out the door.
This time he was waiting for me wearing his concerned-yet-compassionate face.
“Lucien,” he said at once, “you should probably know that you’re in the papers again. ”
I buried my face in my hands. “Fuck. Is it bad?”
The six seconds it took Oliver to respond didn’t fill me with confidence. Neither did the fact that when it came, his answer was, “Yes and no?”
My face remained steadfastly enhandenated. “Oh God, it’s going to be all ‘Wild Child Luc Is at It Again,’ isn’t it? ‘O’Donnell Falls off the Wagon, Strictly Star Son Saucy Shenanigans Shame.’”
“That last one was actually rather good.”
“Yeah, I missed my calling.”
Oliver was looking…actually how was he looking? Not grave. I almost wanted to say awkward. Except why would he be looking awkward? “The good news,” he said, “is that there’s nowhere near as much wild child framing as you might be worried about.”
“What’s the bad news?”
He unlocked his phone and held it in front of me.
I read the headline.
“‘Past It Party Boy Paints Town Dead’?” I snatched the phone from his hand and started scrolling. “‘Aging D-list no-lebrity Luc O’Donnell spotted in tragic attempt to recapture his glory days.’ Those utter bastards.”
“It does seem a little premature.”
“And they deliberately picked the most unflattering pictures.”
Oliver gave a little cough. “They’ve always picked the most unflattering pictures.”
“Yeah, but it used to be unflattering in a sexy, self-destructive way. Now it’s…
it’s…” I pointed at a picture of me yawning as Saint attempted to bum a cigarette off a young woman who was clearly vaping.
“This. I look like I’m trying to suck off a water buffalo and the water buffalo isn’t even interested. ”
“I think,” said Oliver, in mild bemusement, “you just look like you’re yawning.”
“What time was that even taken? It was, like, half nine. Why was I yawning at half nine?”
“Because you’d been forced to go drinking with a profoundly tedious man.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not because I’m an aging D-list no-lebrity who needs to be in bed with cocoa by eight o’clock or else he’s grumpy the next morning?”
To my profound unamusement, Oliver was beginning to look profoundly amused. “You know, you do sometimes rather enjoy going to bed with cocoa. And you usually are grumpy in the mornings.”
“Well yeah, because cocoa is great and mornings are the worst, but…”
Oliver placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye reassuringly. “They’re just pictures. Everybody has bad pictures.”
They did. And while I was pretty self-centred a lot of the time, I’d never really had the energy for full-on vanity. “And they’re not going to… This isn’t going to get in the way of fostering, is it?”
“A newspaper article that says you’re too grown-up and sensible to be partying all night?” Shifting his hands from my shoulders to my waist, Oliver drew me in for a kiss. “I don’t think that will be a problem, no. This”—he gently retrieved his phone—“means less than nothing. Truly.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, who had finished his breakfast and now wanted to know why his daddies were standing around looking at a funny shiny rectangle instead of taking him walkies like they were meant to.
And you know what? They were right. They were both right.
Aging Party Boy Luc had come out for one night to get a dickhead peer onside.
The press had been mean about him, like they always, always were.
And that was it. There in our hall with my boyfriend and our dog and our passed DBS checks and our about-to-be-foster-parents-ness, absolutely nothing else mattered.
Nothing else could possibly matter. Nothing could get in the way of—
Spud started sniffing the floor and walking in a circle.
“Okay,” I said, pulling somewhat reluctantly out of Oliver’s embrace, “this one definitely needs to go walkies. Have a good day in court.”
Oliver kissed me once more for luck. “Have a good day at home.”
And all at once I was overwhelmed by the thought, the strange but not unwelcome thought, that I would. That even with Saint, even with my job on the line, even with the tabloids saying mean things about my age, life choices, and body, I was going to have a good day.
I was going to have a whole lot of good days.
For a good long time to come.