Chapter 31 #2
“We’re fucked,” I was saying, and it was testimony to how seriously Oliver was taking my fuckedness that he didn’t bother to call me out for saying fuck in front of Jaz. “I had one job and I fucking fucked it.”
“Your job,” Oliver told me in his most everything-is-all-right-and-you-are-wonderful voice, “was to rebuild, with no notice, bridges that another man had burned a decade ago. You did as well as anybody could have.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, which I double-appreciated on account of Jaz being his favourite human now.
Jaz had no words of consolation for me herself, but I took the fact that she wasn’t telling me that actually no, I was a shit person who had done shit as her own brand of sympathy.
“Well.” I tried to remain stoic and philosophical, which were two things I was, of course, extremely good at remaining. “We planned around this, right?”
Oliver nodded. “We did. We don’t need two incomes.”
“Three incomes,” Jaz reminded us, and I genuinely couldn’t tell if she was being bitter or consoling. “You get cash for me, too, remember.”
“You see,” continued Oliver, still soothing. “It’s not even really a financial hit.”
Sniffling slightly, I looked over at Spud. “I’m going to make you so many tiny outfits. With, like, hats. Adorable hats.”
“You’re fucking not,” Jaz told me on Spud’s behalf, and Spud backed her up with a low growl.
“Hey,” I protested, “I’m having a bad day. You don’t get to be snarky at me when I’m having a bad day.”
“You don’t really get to be snarky with anybody,” Oliver added. “Kindness costs nothing.”
Jaz considered this. “Yeah, but rudeness don’t cost nothing neither and it’s more fun.”
“Jasmine…” Oliver was just beginning to shift to stern mode when my phone went off.
And, of course, it was Saint.
“Sorry.” I sighed. “I’m not unemployed yet, so I should probably take this.”
I went into the hall and then through to the study so that Jaz and Oliver wouldn’t have to listen to whatever my half of the conversation with Saint was going to sound like. Though probably what it would sound like was me saying Yes, yes, whatever you want like a spineless prick.
“Need a ride,” Saint said, with no other greeting.
And, while that was annoying, I did still have his car. “Where are you?”
“Nick.”
“Nick who?”
For a moment the line was quiet. Then, “Was that a joke?”
It had been a long evening. “No?”
“I’m in nick. The nick. The slammer. Chokey. The clink. The big house. The naughty box. Peel’s penthouse. Room One No Fun.”
I was about to ask him if there was anybody else he could possibly call, but I stopped myself. Because the answer was almost certainly “no.” I would’ve felt sorry for him if not for the tiny, tiny detail that he was ruining my life.
Then a further detail occurred to me. “Hang on, are you still in Droitwich?”
“Course.”
That was two hours away. That was a four hour round trip. That was a completely unreasonable thing for anyone to ask anyone. Especially if the first anyone had made the second anyone do that trip once already.
“Okay,” I said, too tired to argue. “Text me an address. I’ll be there.”
In some ways, it almost felt fitting that this sputum glob of a day should have such a rancid fucking ending.
* * *
I’d hoped that seeing Saint walking out of a police station would feel a tiny bit satisfying. It would mean that at least his actions had mildly inconvenienced him.
Temporarily.
Though probably not as much as they’d inconvenienced Celvestune Primary School, the arresting officers, the staff at the police station, anybody who’d been unfortunate enough to be put in an adjoining cell, or, for that matter, me.
“Hey.” With an infuriatingly matey smile, Saint jumped into the passenger side. I’d sort of assumed he’d be the kind of guy who insisted on driving, but thinking about it, he was from a background where chauffeurs were normal. “Thanks for the pickup.”
“No problem.”
“Fucking pigs,” he said to nobody in particular.
I gave a kind of “Yeah” out of principle, but Saint didn’t seem to give a shit one way or the other.
“So,” he asked, “we on?”
“On?”
“For the reunion.” He threw actual horns. “Rancid Sputum together again.”
Keeping my eyes firmly on the road, I tried to give a measured response. “Saint”—I kept my voice as calm and level as I could manage—“of the four original members of Rancid Sputum, one is you.”
“Right.” He nodded as if that was good enough to end the conversation.
“One is dead.”
“Drawback,” Saint admitted.
“One quit music to become a primary school teacher, and when you went to see him, you punched him in the face and got arrested.”
“Part of the life. You get drunk, you get loud, somebody gets his face broken, you play the gig anyway.”
“When you’re twenty-five and in the Sex Pistols,” I agreed. “Not when you’re sixty-eight and, I’m going to keep saying this because I really think you need to adjust your expectations around it, the deputy headteacher of a primary school in Droitwich Spa.”
“You can take the man out of the metal, Luc,” Saint declared, on the basis of no evidence. “You can’t take the metal out of the man.”
Eyes on the road. Eyes on the road. We were on the M40 now, and if I played it smart, I’d make it home without either one of us strangling the other.
I didn’t play it smart. “One,” I said, “I’m pretty sure that’s meaningless. Two, he didn’t agree to do the gig. And neither did Richard.”
In my peripheral vision, I caught the look of shock on Saint’s face. “Not Jism too. There’s no way.”
“Please at least call him Rik.”
Saint, as ever, wasn’t listening. “I’m telling you, Luc, if you knew Jism like I know Jism, you wouldn’t swallow it.”
I gritted my teeth. “For the last time, Richard Smoddle—much like Michael Giffard—doesn’t want to be in Rancid Sputum anymore. He doesn’t think there’s anything in it for him.”
“But what about the music?”
This was beyond exasperating. I’d failed to save my job, and now I was having to save the ego of the man I’d failed to save my job from. “He doesn’t care about the music, Saint. Also—and there really isn’t a nice way to put this, so I’m going to have to stop trying—he fucking hates you.”
“Jism?” said Saint, unbelieving.
“Yes. Rik Jism hates you. Properly, actually, seriously thinks-you’re-a-terrible-person-style hates you.”
“Jism?” said Saint again, as if he was a stuck and mildly pornographic record.
“Yes.” My jaw creaked beneath the sheer sustained pressure of my teeth gritting. “Jism.”
“That bastard.”
I made a noncommittally affirming sound. And for a little while we drove on in silence.
“That fucking sellout.”
I made an even more noncommittally affirming sound, and we drove on in silence just a little more.
“You know his real name’s Smoddle?”
I’d used it to his face. Within the last half hour. It was pretty likely that I knew more about Richard Smoddle than Saint ever had. “I do, in fact, know that.”
“Jism was my idea,” Saint told me. I coloured myself completely unsurprised. “I said to him, ‘Rick, people hear Jism, they know you’re coming for them.’”
I made a sound so noncommittal it wasn’t even especially affirming. I just carried on driving. We’d made it through Warwick and were coming up to Northend.
“Well, fuck him.”
I nodded.
“Fuck them both.”
I nodded again.
“And fuck this whole reunion festival.”
I nodded one last time and then realised this was probably my last chance to save my job. And by chance, I meant a thing’s chance in a place where that kind of thing would have a notable lack of chances. “Look, wait a min—”
“Shut it down, Luc. It was a noble effort, but some dreams were never meant to be.”
And that was it. Up until right then, I don’t think I’d really been letting myself believe that this might not work.
Because as I’d painstakingly taught myself over the past five years, I was really good at this kind of thing.
The plan had always been to pitch the idea as an ego project, then bring it home on the strength of actually organising a good concert.
But I had fatally underestimated the size of Saint’s ego.
Most people were okay if you just named a library after them—they didn’t also expect you to let them write all the books.
In hindsight, it had been over the moment Saint had shown up on my doorstep in his fucking terrible mirror shades and demanded we get the band back together.
Although admittedly, maybe telling him directly to his face that his former bandmates hated him might not have been the best call either.
Northend was behind us now, and I tried my best to pull it together because I had the other half of this miserable fucking drive to turn this around..
“What if,” I tried, “what if you could, like, show them you could do it alone?”
“I’m not a solo act, Luc. I need…” He groped for the right phrase and, because the actual right phrase was people who’ll do everything I tell them to, steadfastly refused to find it.
“But think of the platform you could give to young, up-and-coming bands who want to be just like you.” Given the circumstances, I was pretty proud of myself for that one. That was some medical-grade bullshit right there.
“Kids today don’t have the ambition,” Saint said, with the self-assurance of a man who had gone through life assuming that what was true and what was convenient for him were the same thing.
“Right, but—”
“My mind’s made up. If they’re out, I’m out, and if I’m out, you’re out.”
It was tempting, so tempting, to just pull the car to the side of the road and ditch him there and then. But that wouldn’t have been professional.
Then again, professional had got me precisely fuck all so far.
I slammed on the brakes, letting the car come screeching to a halt in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of a motorway in the middle of, of—fuck, where even was I? “You know what. That’s the way you want it? Fine.”
It had sounded less childish in my head.
Saint gaped at me, too surprised to be betrayed and too betrayed to be surprised. “The fuck, Luc?”
I didn’t bother answering. I just got out the car and walked away. And Saint, being Saint, came straight after me, leaving the Cadillac right where I’d left it, door hanging open, a traffic jam already building up behind it.
“The fuck, Luc?” he repeated as he trailed after me.
Not wanting an irate peer following me all the way to—to wherever I was going, into a service station it looked like—shouting The fuck, Luc every twenty paces, I stopped, turned, and with great dignity and self-possession, replied, “The fuck.”
“The fuck?”
I almost wanted to see how much of a conversation we could have using only the words fuck and the, especially because in a weird way this was probably the closest Saint and I had got to understanding each other.
But it did eventually reach the point where you needed verbs.
“You’re firing me, Saint. I don’t have to pretend to like you anymore. ”
He put his hands up in a gesture of ironic disbelief. “Oh right, because everybody hates Saint. Because Saint is such a prick, yah?”
I was beginning to suspect that if I got out of this with my career intact, it would only be because Saint’s mind couldn’t actually encompass the idea of people having an issue with him.
“Grow the fuck up, you selfish, self-absorbed, self-deluding, overgrown teenager. You know you’re old enough to be my dad, right? ”
“Yeah, and you’re acting like mine.”
I was sure he’d meant that as a burn. “What, trying to run a beetle charity? Yes, it’s my job. Have you not been paying attention?”
“Man.” Saint sounded a level of disappointed he had no right to sound. “I thought you were cool.”
I actually laughed in his face. “Oh. My. God. Are you trying to peer-pressure me? We aren’t peers. You’re a peer, but that’s not the same thing.”
“You know I don’t believe in hereditary privilege,” replied Saint.
It was predictable. So predictable that I could probably have had the whole pointless argument in my head without him even being there.
I opened my mouth to reply and then stopped because what was the point?
I didn’t know much about the music of Rancid Sputum, but I sure as hell knew this song.
There were some people—like Saint, like good old Jon Fleming—who were so wrapped up in themselves that even calling them out on it was just feeding their egos.
It felt weirdly freeing to finally put that lesson into practice.
To tell myself someone wasn’t worth the effort and actually believe it.
“Fuck off, Saint.” I turned my back on him. “You’re boring.”
Probably I shouldn’t have expected Saint to have more self-respect than to unironically yell “Don’t walk away from me” as I walked away from him. But he kept shouting, and I kept walking, my heart beating faster and my feet keeping pace.
Fuck.
The reality was, I’d had nothing to lose. Saint was going to keep throwing his toys out of the pram, and if I kept giving them back to him, all I was going to get for my trouble was a teddy bear in the face.
But also fuck.
This was it.
Even if CRAPPstonbury went ahead, CRAPP wouldn’t last past the end of the year. And then what would happen to Alex and Barbara and Rhys and Dr. Fairclough? What would happen to the UK’s population of Trypocopris vernalis and the soon-to-be unaerated soils of its moorland habitats?
What would happen to me?