Chapter 31
To my unbelievable relief, only Saint got arrested. Because Mr. Giffard explained very kindly that I’d had nothing to do with my patron’s behaviour and had, in fact, been trying to smooth things over.
“Don’t worry, Luc,” Saint had told me as the police were telling him he had the right to remain silent and I was wishing to God he’d exercise it. “All part of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Now go get Rik Jism, and we can still make this happen.”
I gave a can-do nod. “Sure. But just to be clear, if by some strange million-to-one chance, the guy who called you a ‘narcissistic shitbag’ doesn’t want to be part of the big Rancid Sputum reunion?”
“Then”—Saint was giving me it’s-not-you-it’s-me vibes, which were not vibes you wanted to be getting from the guy in charge of whether you and your entire office would have jobs at the end of the year—“honestly, I might not be feeling the whole festival thing. Like, if you can’t make Sputum happen, how’re you going to pull together the rest of it? ”
I had a number of answers to that, but most of them involved pointing out to Saint that the other acts, caterers, and the like didn’t have specific reasons to hate him personally. But I didn’t think that would go down well. So I mustered a weary “You can count on me” instead.
As Saint vanished into the distance with his police escort, I realised that I wasn’t strictly—and by strictly, I mean in any way at all—insured to drive his car.
His car that Jaz was now fiddling with in ways I should probably have been worried about. “What are you—”
“Putting the top up. Not taking another two hours in that”—she indicated the very open-topped vehicle—“in this.” She indicated the wind, weather, and general miserable vibe of the day.
“And you know how?”
Apparently, that didn’t deserve an answer. She just wrangled the roof of Saint’s impractical, probably deadly, sixties convertible neatly into place, then jumped in the front with Spud on her lap.
Not sure what else to do, I got in beside her. After all, it wasn’t like we could walk home.
Jaz was watching me with even more suspicion than usual. “Is this,” she said, “like, your actual job?”
I nodded only a bit sheepishly. “Kind of? It’s usually a lot less weird.” I thought about it. “Slightly less weird.”
“How did you…just how?”
“Honestly,” I told her, “I ask myself that question most days.”
Most of the time, Jaz had absolutely zero engagement with me, my life, or my work. But most of the time, being engaged didn’t make me so obviously uncomfortable.
“And is that guy really going to fire you if you don’t get a bunch of old men who hate him to be in his shitty band?”
I nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Does he want you to bring the dead one back and all?”
“I think even Saint isn’t quite that unreasonable.”
Jaz looked out over the pleasant views of Droitwich Spa, Spud snuggling down beside her. “He’s a prick, isn’t he?”
“Yup.”
There was a fatal silence. “He’s going to fire you anyway, isn’t he?”
“Probably.”
There was an even more fatal silence. “And you’re still going to do everything he says?”
When you put it like that, it did sound like a pretty rubbish deal. “Looks like. But I spent most of my twenties giving up on everything. So I’m trying something different.”
“What? Failure?”
I thought about that. “Yes. Because… Oh, look, you’ve had all the ‘It’s better to fail than never try’ lectures. Don’t make me go there.”
She scowled. “You just did.”
“That wasn’t a lecture; it was a sentence. Now let’s go get Rik Jism.”
As I grappled with the reality of starting a car that was built in the 1950s, Jaz turned to me with a look of malicious innocence. “What’s Jism mean, anyway?”
I scowled. “You know, and I know you know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me.”
Jaz ruffled Spud’s ears. “We don’t know what he’s talking about, do we?”
Figuring I’d dodged the jism as effectively as I was going to manage, I got us back on the road to London, trying not to think too hard about the fact that I was driving a car that predated the Big Mac, the moon landing, and airbags.
Substantially longer than I would have liked later, I parked us opposite the overpriced London flat Richard Smoddle had presumably not bought with Rancid Sputum money.
In terms of “things to get arrested for loitering outside,” it was, I suppose, a slight upgrade from Celvestune Primary School and definitely a better bet than Deloitte, which would have put us on the wrong side of some very serious security types.
It took a while for Richard Smoddle to show up, and when he did I wasn’t really sure how to approach him. Which was probably why his first reaction to me was “Sorry, not interested” and his second was “Look, there’s laws against aggressive begging.”
Like Mr. Giffard, the artist previously known as Rik Jism was a skinny white guy in his sixties wearing a suit and tie.
Unlike Mr. Giffard, the suit was Savile Row and the tie was—okay, honestly, I don’t know much about ties.
It looked expensive and probably not made of polyester.
When he spoke, though, he had the traces of an Estuary accent, which I hadn’t expected after the wall of posh that was Saint and MagiMix, and his eyes were a cold grey that said I was wasting his time. And his oxygen.
“Okay,” I tried again, “but the thing is I’m looking for Richard Smoddle.”
“I’ll let him know if I see him,” Richard Smoddle replied, pushing past me.
And so, swallowing the smooshed, stained, slightly smelly remains of my pride, I fell back on, “I’m looking for Rik Jism.”
Richard “Rik Jism” Smoddle turned slowly to face me. “How the fuck did you hear that name?”
“Some old bastard,” said Jaz.
“I work with Saint,” I clarified.
“Fuck me.” Richard Smoddle looked like I’d just told him I’d run over his cat and also that I’d sliced it into thin strips, laid it over ciabatta, and served it to him at lunchtime as a prosciutto sandwich. “I thought I told him I never wanted to see him again.”
“You probably did,” I admitted. “But ask yourself this: Would he have remotely listened?”
Richard Smoddle glowered at me. “You’d better come up.”
He let us upstairs into his tiny but eye-wateringly swanky apartment.
Then we sat on an uncomfortable sofa in an open-plan kitchen-dining-sitting-living area that seemed as though nobody ever lived, sat, dined, or kitched in it while I explained to Richard Smoddle the farcical sequence of events that meant I now really badly needed him to rejoin Rancid Sputum for one last vomit-stained hoorah.
“So if I can’t get you and Magi—and Michael to reform Sputum, just for one day, it’s looking like Saint will pull my funding, and not only will I lose my job but so will a bunch of other mostly nice people. Plus, it’ll do some very bad things to the UK’s soil aeration.”
Richard Smoddle stared at me silently. Then he carried on staring at me silently.
Eventually, the silent staring got so intense that I found myself saying, “Um. Well?”
“Just waiting,” Richard Smoddle not-really-explained.
He really wanted me to say, For what? and this was definitely a give-the-client-what-they’re-after situation. “For what?”
“For you to get to the part where this is my problem.”
Meeting Mr. Giffard, who for all his half-buried toffery had actually heard of CRAPP, actually cared about what we did, and actually seemed not to be an absolute piece of shit, had lulled me into a false sense of security. “I thought you might, y’know, want to help?”
“He’s always like this,” Jaz added. “It’s not just you.”
“Why would I want to help that arrogant fuck Hilary de Lancy?” asked Richard Smoddle.
“Old times’ sake?”
It was a long shot. I’d been gambling on all old men on some level wanting to recapture their youths, no matter how shitty. As someone whose old-manhood was less comfortably distant than it once was, and whose youth had been deeply shitty, I should have known better.
“Let me tell you about old times.” Richard Smoddle leaned forward, suddenly sounding a whole lot more Rik Jism-y.
“Old times was me, MagiMix, and Gary the Cosmic Fuckstone following Saint around like a sack of pricks with us doing whatever the fuck he said and him doing whatever the fuck he wanted. And you know what I learned from that?”
“That it’s a bad idea to form major life philosophies based on your interaction with one unpleasant person in the eighties and nineties?” I suggested hopefully.
Jaz hadn’t seemed to be paying attention. Mostly she’d been looking around Richard Smoddle’s apartment like it was a spaceship. But now, with Spud nestled on her lap, she said, “That if you were going to be a lonely miserable bastard anyway, you’d rather be a rich lonely miserable bastard.”
Richard Smoddle did a got-it-in-one finger-snap-point-thing. At Jaz, not at me. “For years, all Saint talked about was fighting the power and fucking the system and how we didn’t need anything except the music. Well, guess what?”
I nodded. “It’s a lot easier to not need anything except the music when your dad’s an earl?”
“Yup. Saint taught me that I needed to look out for myself because no other fucker would. So I’m going to ask you again. Why is your job at your charity my problem?”
I had no good answers. Or rather I had answers that might have been good in other contexts like The ecosystem is all interconnected and our work really does make a material impact or my old standby of Donating to obscure charities will impress your hipster friends, but there was no way I could pretend that helping me and CRAPP out of a bind was in Richard Smoddle’s direct self-interest.
So I opened my mouth, hoping something brilliant would come out. “We can probably swing you free food?”
* * *
Back at home, I sat on the sofa with my head in my hands, Oliver concernedly beside me and Jaz in the armchair with Spud, not exactly revelling in my misery because she didn’t really do revelling, but certainly not in any way brought down by it.