Chapter 32 #2
“Right?” I nodded with her. “So now all I’ve got is a festival I’ve thrown together with a limited plan, hardly any acts, no marketing, and, if I’m lucky, adequate toilet facilities.
The whole thing is going to be a colossal waste of everybody’s time and energy unless it’s either so cool that Saint comes crawling back anyway or so successful we can tell him to shove his money up his arse. Neither of which is going to happen.”
“You don’t think you can make something that is cool and successful?” asked Mum, her natural sympathy on the brink of war with her natural overconfidence in my abilities.
“I’ve got a wedding band, a male voice choir with complicated internal politics, and, now I think about it, inappropriately high-end catering.”
Judy grinned. “Sounds like a recipe for a hell of an evening, if you ask me.”
“Does it sound like a recipe for giving lots and lots of money to an insect-themed charity?” I asked. “Because that’s what it really needs to be a recipe for.”
It took more consideration than I thought should have been necessary before Judy conceded, “No, more a recipe for waking up next morning in a haystack wearing someone else’s underthings.”
“Well then.” Mum had shifted into full here for you mode. Which I felt ambivalent about because I was past thirty now, and it seemed wrong to still need my mum to be there for me. Except I really needed my mum to be there for me. “What do you think you will need to make this festival work?”
My whole body made a gesture of surrender, because I had no idea and no idea where an idea would come from. “I don’t know? A miracle? Actual rock stars? Something like that episode of The Vicar of Dibley where Kylie Minogue shows up and opens their village fête for them?”
“I’m sorry, Luc,” said Mum, giving way more time to the suggestion than I’d expected or it had deserved. “Kylie has not liked me since I called her a ‘soap opera reject with no staying power’ in 1988. Retrospectively, that has not aged well. But in my defence, I was very high.”
Much as I loved Kylie, I hadn’t actually been banking on the Vicar of Dibley gambit. “Okay. We’ll put Kylie on the back burner.”
Mum, however, was still not ready to give up, either on me or my objectively doomed rock festival. “Is there really nothing I can do?”
I gave her a smile that aimed for wry and landed on pathetic. “Not unless you want to stage a surprise comeback tour using CRAPPstonbury as your first UK date and debuting a bunch of never-before-heard songs or something.”
Mum gave me that Gallic shrug I knew so well. “Okay.”
It took a while for my brain to catch up with my ears. “What do you mean okay?”
“I mean okay. I’ll stage a surprise comeback tour using CRAPPstonbury as my first UK date and debuting a bunch of never-before-heard songs or something.”
I wasn’t, at this stage, at all sure what my face was doing. It didn’t really know what expression was appropriate, so it was just kind of trying them on at random to see what fit. “Do you have a bunch of never-before-heard songs or something?”
“I suppose it depends,” Mum mused, “how many you think is a bunch.”
I hesitated. This was feeling simultaneously too much like a dream and way too real. “Um, more than three?”
“Oh.” Mum looked entirely chill. As if this wasn’t slowly inverting several distinct chunks of my world. “Then yes, I probably do have a bunch.”
“But…you gave up music?”
There was that shrug again. I was beginning to feel, Oliver aside, that I lived in a world of shruggers. “I gave up the life. Because I had a bad breakup and a baby and I’d said everything I wanted to say at the time. I never gave up music. You can’t give up music, not really.”
“So, what?” My voice had gone slightly hoarse. “You’ve been wanting to make a comeback all these years, but you haven’t because…because…” I hated having to think this, much less say it. “Because of me?”
Her expression shifted from whatever you need to get over yourself. “Luc, you’re my son. It embarrasses me when you’re an idiot.”
“I’m sorry. I just—”
“Stop it. I’ve been happy this whole time. I have a son I love and a friend I love who has dogs I put up with—”
“Steady on, old girl,” Judy protested. “Friendship only goes so far, you know. Love me, love my menagerie.”
“Shut up, Judy. I’m trying to have an emotional moment here.
” Mum turned back to me. “When you have lived the way I have lived,” she went on, “it stops being about wanting and not wanting. I had a career, and that was good. I had a family, and that was good as well. And for a time my family needed me not to be doing the tours, and so I was happy to not, and now my family may need me to do the tours again, and so I am happy to.”
I was having a lot of trouble following this. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe I’d been trying too hard and hanging on too tight just kind of in general. Kind of forever.
“Life is very nice,” Mum said, “when you let it be.”
“But, but—” I wasn’t really sure what I was protesting anymore. It may well have just been the principle of the thing. “What about—what if—”
“Did you just break your entire brain?” asked Jaz, coming back through from the kitchen with bowls of soup that smelled and tasted far better than anything any of the rest of us, with the possible exception of Judy, could have made.
“Luc is confused,” Mum explained, “because I have offered to kick off my new tour at his festival, and he thinks I am old and have gone past it.”
“I don’t think you’ve gone past it,” I said at once. “I just thought…I don’t know, that you’d put it behind you.”
“Well, I have. But lots of things are behind me. I still sometimes turn around and look at them.”
Jaz sat down on the arm of the sofa next to Mum, with a familiarity that felt strange to me. At once right and the tiniest bit jealous-making. “So where you going?”
“Going?” asked Mum, now at least joining me in Confusedville.
“On tour.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Mum looked momentarily contemplative. “The usual places, I expect. Unless they also think I am old and have gone past it.”
“Mum.” I was sounding the teeniest bit exasperated now. “Nobody thinks you’ve gone past it.”
“Bon.” Mum clapped her hands. “Then it is decided. I will launch a comeback tour, and it will begin at Luc’s festival and it will be called”—she glanced at Judy for inspiration—“what do you think, something that says, ‘Here I am, I am now in a different stage of my life to the one I was in before, but that stage is still important and so I have come to share it with you.’”
“Eras?” suggested Judy.
Mum nodded. “Parfait. It will be called the Eras tour.”
“I think that one’s taken,” I told her.
Mum’s face screwed up in older French lady displeasure. “Surely not.”
“Taylor Swift did it.”
“Oh well, that is very unfair of her. How many Eras can she have? She’s only twenty-two.”
“I think she’s substantially older than twenty-two,” I pointed out.
“No, she’s not. She has a song about it.”
“That song came out more than a decade ago.”
“Nooo,” declared Mum, looking suddenly distressed. “That is impossible.”
Before Mum could vanish down the where-has-the-time-gone rabbit hole I’d been trying very hard to stay away from since my thirtieth birthday, Jaz brought us back to practicalities. “Are you seriously going to start your big comeback at his festival?” She pointed a spoon at me.
“I’m sure Luc knows what he’s doing,” said Mum with mummian conviction.
“I think we’ve actually established pretty well that I don’t,” I replied.
Jaz nodded unsupportively. “That.”
And Mum made the loosest, most no-fucks-givenest shrug I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a lot of no-fucks-given shrugs. “Well. Then I’m sure I know what I’m doing.”
In a perfect world where I was a perfect son, my faith in my mother would have been as unshakeable and irrational as her faith in me.
But it wasn’t a perfect world and I was so far from perfect that if you looked up the word perfect in a dictionary, you’d read the definition of the word perfect and then think, On an unrelated note, that Luc guy is a bellend.
“But the festival’s in six months. You can’t throw a tour together in six months. ”
Mum just smiled. “Mon caneton,” she said, “you are forgetting. I may be old. I may live on a street called after a post office that isn’t there in a village with a very silly name, but deep down…
deep down I am a motherfucking force of nature.
” She finished the last of her soup and stood up.
“Now, Jas, it is time for your guitar lesson. And after that, I am going to make some calls.”