Chapter 30 #2
“Fine in what way?” I asked, because from what I’d seen of Saint, his definition of fine was substantially different from most people’s.
He turned the screen to face me. Sure enough, the two most recent replies said: Love to catch up but really busy this month and what part of “never call me again you narcissistic shitbag” did you not understand?
“If I’m honest,” I began, “those don’t look super super promising.”
“I know the guys,” he said. “They’ll be solid.”
I let that go. But I made myself a private bet that they would be deeply, deeply unsolid.
* * *
I understand this is your job, said the latest in Oliver’s long line of texts, but I worry it’s setting a bad example for Jasmine.
I looked at Jaz. She seemed, more than anything, bored out of her skull. Which, given that we’d just been on a two-hour drive in an open-topped car in the middle of winter, said something for her resilience. I was feeling like my sinuses had been flushed through with dry ice.
Still, from a certain point of view, I had taken Jaz to school. Okay, to a school. Okay, to a road opposite the primary school that Michael “MagiMix” Giffard now worked at.
I think were okay there, I sent back. If anything I think saints boring her straight.
“Are you sure this is the right thing to be doing?” I asked. Again.
“MagiMix’ll be out soon,” Saint insisted. “And once he sees me, he’ll remember what it was like back in the day.”
I nodded ambiguously. “I’m sure he will.”
Parents began flooding through the school gates, and then children began flooding out.
We got some funny looks, but to my relief nobody actually called the cops on us.
And Spud handled the whole situation really well, sitting on Jaz’s lap, wagging his tail, and only barking at passers-by in a friendly way.
Then nothing.
Fighting very hard to keep my expression non-told-you-soey, I said, “How soon exactly?”
Saint waved at the passing crowds. “The kids are all gone. How much can a teacher have to do in an empty school?”
Despite never having worked in education, I strongly suspected the answer to that question was “Quite a lot, actually.”
“Spud needs a piss,” Jaz remarked to me, Saint, and the world in general. And then, without waiting for permission—which was fair in a way because it wasn’t like Spud was going to—she climbed out of Saint’s open-topped car without bothering to open the door and lifted Spud after her.
Saint followed her with his eyes for a moment. “Come on. She’s got the right idea.”
“Taking a dog to piss on a wall?”
“If MagiMix won’t come to us, we’ll go to him.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck. We were definitely going to get arrested. For trespassing at a school for five-to-eleven-year-olds. Fuck.
Saint was already striding onto school property, with Jaz watching him over the wall. And from the look on her face, yeah, I definitely didn’t have to worry about him being an undue influence on her.
Although I did have to worry about the fact that I was now effectively supervising two children, one of whom was in his sixties and both of whom I really needed to keep eyes on. “Jaz,” I called out, “once Spud has finished, you’re going to need to come with us.”
Jaz dutifully sauntered in the vague direction of the school building, Spud skipping merrily behind her. She was giving whatever vibes, but I had a feeling she did in fact want to see how this would play out. Not in a good way, but I’d take what I could get.
By the time I caught up with Saint, he was standing at the reception desk. Behind the desk sat the receptionist: a youngish man wearing a grey jumper and an expression of mild panic.
“Sir,” the receptionist was saying, “I don’t know who that is, and I’m going to have to ask you not to swear.”
“MagiMix,” Saint repeated. “Fucking MagiMix. He works here.” Then he turned to me. “Tell this dickless sellout to get MagiMix.”
Desperately wishing Saint had kept me out of this, I tried to smooth things over with the dickless sellout. “We’re looking for Michael Giffard.”
With the kind of relief that comes from dealing with somebody slightly less awful than the person you’ve just been dealing with, the receptionist nodded. “He’s the deputy head.”
“Tell him Saint’s here to see him,” said Saint.
Deciding that just-going-along-with-it was the better part of valour, the receptionist picked up the phone, dialled an internal number, and waited.
After long enough that Saint had begun to get visibly impatient, which, honestly, wasn’t that long at all, we heard the click of someone picking up.
And then, “Mr. Giffard? Sorry to bother you, there’s a Mr. Saint here for you. ”
“Just Saint.”
The receptionist listened to the other end of the phone for a couple of seconds, then put his hand over the receiver. “He says he can’t see you today.”
“Tell him that’s bollocks.”
The receptionist’s eyes widened. “I will no—hang on, I think he heard you.”
“Tell him to come out here.” Having realised that the primary school deputy headteacher formerly known as MagiMix could hear him over the phone, Saint had raised his voice into a natural posh-person bellow. “And look me in the eye like a man.”
“Girls’ve got eyes too,” Jaz pointed out, but Saint either didn’t hear or didn’t care.
Setting the handset down, the receptionist looked up at Saint as pleasantly as he could manage. “I think he’s on his way.”
“See,” Saint told me, or possibly the receptionist, or possibly fate itself. “That wasn’t hard, was it?”
“Mruff,” replied Spud.
Which meant the receptionist noticed him through the Saint-field for the first time. “I’m afraid you’ll need to take the dog outside.”
“That’s nice of you,” Jaz replied at once. “But he’s already had a piss, thanks.”
Before that conversation could go anywhere worse than it had already gone, a man who I assumed must be MagiMix appeared.
He did not, by any stretch of the imagination, look like a MagiMix.
He looked like a Mr. Giffard, deputy headteacher of Celvestune Primary School.
I mean, yes, he still had a pierced ear, just about visible after decades, but otherwise he was small, slim, balding, and wearing glasses chosen for practicality rather than fashion.
“Saint,” he said in clipped, polite tones that implied a way posher background than you’d expect from somebody co-running a state primary. “What are you doing here?”
And yet again, Saint pulled down his shades. “We’re getting the band back together.”
MagiMix—who, thinking about it, I should probably have been calling Michael or perhaps Mr. Giffard—peered at me and Jaz in a very, very headteacherly way. “Is this we?”
“No,” said Jaz emphatically.
“Not exactly,” I half agreed.
“Ruff,” explained Spud.
Saint put his hand between my shoulder blades in a way that felt way more invasive than it probably should have. “My friend Luc here—Luc Fleming—”
Mr. Giffard looked profoundly unimpressed. “Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Odile O’Donnell’s son,” Saint told him.
And the look that flowed, just briefly, over Mr. Giffard’s face was equal parts affirming and uncomfortable.
Because I hated trading on my mum’s name but I always kind of liked it when people remembered her.
“My friend here is putting together a music festival. Wants Sputum to headline.”
The idea that the son of a rock legend wanted a completely unknown and defunct punk band to headline a new music festival was already so sus that I wouldn’t have blamed Mr. Giffard for calling bullshit.
Add to that the fact that he’d actually met Saint, and it seemed very likely that his crapometer would be pinging off the charts.
He gave me a but-most-of-all-you’ve-let-yourself-down look. “Is that true?”
“I mean,” I hedged, “want is a strong word. I work for the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project and—”
For the second time in the short conversation, recognition gleamed in Mr. Giffard’s eyes. A much more comfortable, much more natural kind of recognition. But also a much less expected one. “Oh, you’re with C.R.A.P.P.?”
I consider it a massive tribute to how fucking great I am at my job actually that I took this completely in stride. “Yes. I don’t recognise you from the donor list, but…have we done outreach work with you?”
“Year six did a project on you last term,” he explained. “That Welsh guy who does your social media is amazing at getting kids excited about conservation.”
Okay, so being fair, I suppose I had to take that as a massive tribute to how fucking great Rhys was at his job as well. It didn’t mean I had to like it. “Yeah, I think it’s because he’s got the mind of a ten-year-old.”
Mr. Giffard took that more seriously than I intended. “It’s a good quality to have in some lines of work.”
“The beetles,” Saint explained with a level of contempt I could accept from Jaz but not from somebody nearly five times her age who owned half a county, “were the old man’s thing.”
“They were a good thing to have,” said Mr. Giffard, not helpfully from the point of view of someone who didn’t want Saint made incredibly angry. That someone being me. Then, even less helpfully by those standards, he went on, “At least he cared about something other than himself.”
Saint took that about six different kinds of badly. The only question was which he’d act on first. “You never really got Sputum, did you, Mix?”
Beside me, Jaz laughed the laugh of someone who found the idea of “getting sputum” as absurd as I did and didn’t have a job that relied on her hiding it.
I was beyond relieved that Saint ignored her.
I was less relieved that Mr. Giffard didn’t ignore him.
“First,” he said, “it’s Michael. Mike to my friends, which you aren’t.
” Saint looked like he was about to object to this, but Mr. Giffard didn’t give him time.
“I have a school to run. I have kids to look after. I’m sorry…
Luc, is it?”—he turned briefly to me—“I actually think C.R.A.P.P. does good work, but this man f—messes up everything he touches.”
At which point Saint shoved the deputy headteacher of Celvestune Primary School in Droitwich Spa full in the chest. “Fuck you, Mix.”
“Oi,” commentated Jaz from the sidelines, “manage your emotions, Granddad.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud.
I tried to deescalate, but deescalate wasn’t in Saint’s vocabulary, so I got as far as “I don’t think this is…” before Saint and Mr. Giffard had gone tumbling into a display of year three art and crashed to the ground amidst a cloud of brightly coloured cut-out hands.
“You fucking traitor.”
“You arrogant manchild.”
It was around the “arrogant manchild” stage of the encounter that Saint threw the first punch.