Chapter 17
Preparations for CRAPPstonbury had to go on hiatus over the holidays as we pivoted briefly towards our seasonal Adopt a Beetle programme.
Normally this wouldn’t have been required because, most years, we sold about six of them, and three of those were Dr. Fairclough shopping for Christmas presents.
Unfortunately—or, I suppose, fortunately—this year Rhys Jones Bowen had gone viral.
I’d mostly lost track of his career as an influencer because following his OnlyFans account had wound up doing weird things to my algorithm, but he’d come into my office one morning to tell me that he’d “done a Tick Tock” and that it had “got pretty popular, actually,” and suddenly we had an awkward shortage of adoptable beetles.
The TikTok that Rhys Jones Bowen had done turned out to be a series of short music videos in which he performed CRAPP-themed parodies of various seasonal favourites including “Ding Dung Merrily on High,” “Fairy Tale of Poo York,” and “All I Want for Christmas Is to Adopt a Dung Beetle Through the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project’s Adopt a Dung Beetle Scheme.
” Like a lot of things that get popular on the internet, I honestly couldn’t tell if the videos were amazing or terrible, but what I thought spectacularly did not matter.
People loved them enough that we wound up with one thousand seven hundred and thirty-three personalised Beetle Adoption Packages to lovingly source, assemble, and detail.
“That’s a Colin,” he’d say, and it would absolutely be a Colin. “Esmerelda. Monty. Godolfin.”
Sitting on the office floor making adoption certificates and drinking cocoa with the cold and dark safely outside the windows, I spent most of December feeling weirdly upbeat, weirdly positive, and weirdly not especially bothered by how fucking doomed we all were.
Then January rolled round, the cold and dark stopped being a novelty, Oliver and I got notice we’d been approved for an emergency placement, I remembered that I was still the barely adequate thread by which all our jobs were hanging, and things very much reverted to the status quo, doomed-wise.
“Did you hear,” I asked Alex over Zoom, a few days after New Year’s, “about the cheese factory that exploded?” And then, before he could go off about safety standards in the dairy industry, I went straight through to the punch line. “All that was left was de Brie.”
“No,” he replied with sincere concern. “I hadn’t.
That’s terri—” Then he stopped and seemed to realise something.
In a perfect world, that something would have been Luc is telling me a joke.
Hell, not even a perfect world. Just a mildly less annoying world.
That I did not live in. “Hold on a moment,” Alex went on.
“Might not have heard you right. Did you say all that was left was debris or all that was left was the Brie?”
“Yes,” I replied, wondering if this might finally be my moment.
Alex blinked. “Which?”
It was not my moment. “Both?”
“No, no.” Alex was looking into the middle distance like he was trying to remember something extremely complicated. “You definitely only said one of them.”
“But I meant both.”
“Well”—Alex turned his attention back to the camera, his expression a mix of betrayed and suspicious—“that seems wilfully obtuse.”
Less late than I’d been expecting, Rhys Jones Bowen logged on, interrupting the discussion of my wilful obtuseness. “Sorry I’m a bit delayed. The cat was interfering with the wireless. Anyway, what have folks been up to?”
“Telling jokes on company time,” replied Barbara Clench.
“Really, Barbara?” Rhys Jones Bowen stroked his beard in confusion. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“She means me,” I clarified.
“But,” added Alex, “he hadn’t got around to the joke bit yet because he was just telling us about this terrible explosion at a cheese factory. There was only Brie left.”
Rhys Jones Bowen shook his head solemnly. “Shocking, that is, really shocking. And you know the worst thing about it?”
“I suppose it depends on what the other cheeses were,” mused Alex. “Be criminal if they lost a supply of Stilton.”
That didn’t seem to be the direction Rhys Jones Bowen was going.
“The worst thing is that the bosses will have known about it. There’ll have been people on the factory floor telling them for years.
‘That’s an accident waiting to happen,’ they’ll have been saying.
‘It’s not right to make people work in these conditions.
’ They’d have pursued industrial action, I’d imagine, except of course the cheese industry is famously anti-union. ”
“So we’re all on the same page,” I tried, forlornly, “this whole situation is fictional.”
Rhys Jones Bowen gazed out of the screen knowingly.
“I’m sure that’s what they told you, Luc.
That’s what they always say when these kinds of issues come up.
‘Oh, you’re just scaremongering. We’ve had professional risk assessments done, and there’s nothing to worry about.
’ But it’s not them who have to pick up the pieces, is it?
It’s not the CFO who has to tell little Timmy that Mummy isn’t coming home from work today because she was killed by a catastrophic buildup of pressure in the curdling vats. ”
Too late, I made a token attempt at damage control. “Should we—”
“Not that they care,” Rhys was continuing. “You know why the Brie survived, don’t you? Because that’s what they serve at their shareholders’ meetings. So of course that would be safe. It’s the regular cheese for the working people they’ll have been cutting corners on.”
Alex stiffened, which looked particularly formal since he was still, several months in, wearing full historical costume. “Steady on, this is sounding dangerously like pinko talk.”
“How about”—Barbara Clench called us quietly back to order—“we set aside the controversial cheese tragedy and focus on C.R.A.P.P. business.”
“Fuck, God, yes please,” I blurted in desperate support. “I want to kick off the New Year by giving you a quick recap on where things stand with CRAPPstonbury.”
“Over budget already?” asked Barbara Clench. With how our relationship had evolved over the years, I couldn’t quite tell if that was playful banter or a serious complaint. Possibly it was both.
“Hey, the field was free,” I told her, and got an approving nod in return. “And I managed to keep the toilets under a grand.”
Barbara Clench looked unconvinced. “I still feel they should have been cheaper.”
“Maybe,” I conceded, “but look at it this way. If we’re going to skimp on anything, it probably shouldn’t be the thing that stops the whole event being awash with human faeces.”
Even Barbara Clench couldn’t quite find an argument for rolling the dice on that one. “Fair point. What about catering?”
“I’ve reached out to some local businesses, so that might actually not cost us anything. Plus”—I nodded towards Rhys Jones Bowen—“is Bronwyn still doing the pop-up?”
“She is,” Rhys confirmed. “She’s got very into street food lately, and she thinks that’ll go down well with a festival crowd.” He paused for a moment, then waved a finger in the universal gesture of just-remembered-something. “Oh, but there might be a bit of a problem with the choir.”
The Skenfrith Male Voice Choir had become something of a fixture at CRAPP events since their debut at the Beetle Drive five years ago.
I’d originally not planned to book them for CRAPPstonbury on the grounds that Saint would probably think they were too conventional, but I’d come to the conclusion that if I built the whole event to please Saint, it would completely bomb, we’d make no money, and we’d all lose our jobs anyway.
So Skenfrith were in. Or at least they should have been.
“What’s the issue?” I asked.
Rhys Jones Bowen looked grave. “Politics.”
“What sort of politics?”
“Well,” Rhys began. And it was not a good well. It was the kind of well that inevitably came before a long, detailed story about a large number of people you’d never met and couldn’t keep track of. “You know how Uncle Alan used to be managing director?”
The used to be was telling me pretty much everything I needed to know. Still I said “yes” and waited for the rest of the narrative.
“He’d been doing the job for years—and very well, too, if I’m any judge—but then Bill Thomas, who’d been after the position since ’97, over the holidays, he managed to stir up enough discontent amongst the regulars to force a vote of no confidence.”
“What did Uncle Alan do?” I asked and, to my horror, realised I was actually interested.
“Well, he didn’t take it lying down. He rounded up his supporters and he said if that’s the way you’re going to be, then you’ll be forcing me to go independent. So now there’s two Skenfrith Male Voice Choirs, and they’re both expecting a place at our next fundraiser.”
“We probably have room for two male voice choirs if it comes to it,” I suggested. “Actually, it might help because we’re a bit short on acts.”
Rhys Jones Bowen shook his head. “I don’t know, Luc. There’s bad blood there—the last thing you want is for your festival to be caught in the middle of a male voice choir feud.”
I was about to ask how bad it could be, but…we were talking about a group of middle-aged British men with a hobby they took seriously. It could be very bad indeed. “What if we just booked Uncle Alan?”
“That would look like nepotism,” Rhys warned me. “We might open ourselves to legal action.”
“Is that likely?” I asked, guessing the answer well in advance.
“Probably.” Rhys Jones Bowen gave an apologetic nod. “That Bill Thomas is a litigious bastard. He once sued the local pub for running out of crisps.”
Once again, some weird part of my brain wanted to know the rest of the story, but it was technically a workday and I technically had a festival to organise.
“From a wider perspective,” I segued, “do any of us know anybody who might get the word out? Because right now our headline acts are a Rancid Sputum reunion that might not happen, some guys who do Ed Sheeran covers that I once nearly booked for a wedding that didn’t happen, and one or both of the two male voice choirs from Skenfrith. ”
Silence answered. It answered at some length.
“Okay.” I tried to sound cheery. “We’ll work some things out. I’ll make some more phone calls. Alex, maybe ask if Miffy can—I don’t know—mention us on Instagram or something? Get photographed in front of a conspicuously placed CRAPP logo? Endorse dung beetles?”
Alex gave me an enthusiastic but painfully clueless salute. “Shall do, Captain. You can rely on me implicitly.”
I gave him a sceptical look. “Rely on you to do what?”
“Oh, you know”—he gave an affable hand wave—“whatever it was you were talking about just now.”
That was very much as I’d expected. “Cool,” I said. “Good to know you’ve got my back. Now”—around my ankles, Spud started yapping his somebody-at-the-door yap. I glanced down at the clock on my screen. “Fuck,” I said unprofessionally aloud, “they’re early.”
“Who’s early?” asked Barbara Clench.
I hadn’t discussed the fostering thing much with the CRAPP crowd.
It hadn’t seemed important, what with the whole we’re-probably-losing-our-jobs backdrop it was happening against. Unfortunately, that meant none of my coworkers really knew how to react when I said, “The, um, the people who are delivering my child?”