Chapter 43
“What,” said Priya. “The fuck. Is this?”
What the fuck was me, Mum, Judy, a trailer filled with professional-grade music-performing shit, an open-topped car that had been built in the last century, and a ditch.
“I blame the dogs,” Judy insisted.
Oh yes, me, Mum, Judy, a trailer filled with professional-grade music-performing shit, an open-topped car that had been built in the last century, a ditch, and all of Judy’s dogs.
I should have seen this coming. Or should I have seen this coming?
I’d offered to arrange transportation to CRAPPstonbury, and when Mum had said Judy was taking care of it, I’d assumed she was going to take care of it by literally any other method other than hitching a large wagon to the back of her tiny car and driving it too fast down roads that were too narrow on surfaces that were too skiddy around corners that were too tight.
After ten minutes of that, the ditch had come almost as a relief.
The window of the truck rolled down, and Jaz stuck her head out. “Why did you even bring the dogs?” she asked.
“Never mind the dogs.” I glared at Priya. “Why did you bring my foster daughter?”
“She wanted to come,” Priya told me. “Said she could help.”
“I wanted to see how badly you’d fucked this up,” Jaz clarified. “I think the answer is loads?”
Walking the fine line between parental and professional, I approached the truck. “Jaz, you were meant to stay with Oliver and your mum.”
“I know. But it’s really boring right now. It’s just portaloos and people setting stuff up.”
I felt a weird tug of pride that, in the last few months, Maisie’s visits had got routine enough that Jaz felt comfortable bailing in the middle of one to watch me humiliate myself.
“For your information,” Mum was saying, still in the ditch, “this is not a fuckup. The legends of the rock ’n’ roll, we do not have fuckups. We have stories.”
Jaz jumped down from the truck and ran to help Mum back onto solid ground. I, meanwhile, did my best to wrangle dogs and instruments and bits of cable I didn’t understand out of the half-overturned trailer pile and into a more sensible vehicle.
“You know,” I told Jaz as she and Mum took charge of kit-shifting, leaving me with just the dogs, “I didn’t want you down here for a reason. You helping with my job, my actual job I get paid actual money for, is really…child-labour-y. It isn’t going to look good at our next review meeting.”
She didn’t seem especially impressed at that. “If they was going to take me away, they’d have done it by now. Reckon you’re stuck with me.”
“Okay, but it’s also probably, like, exploitative and shit.”
Priya dumped the remains of a broken guitar into the flatbed. “No, she’s earning valuable work experience. This right here”—she made an expansive gesture covering the chaos around us and the idyllic, if lightly manure-scented, countryside around that—“this is a future in events management.”
“I mean,” said Jaz, “if he can do it.”
“Hey. I worked very hard on this and used a lot of valuable skills I’ve earned over my years as a professional fundraiser.”
Jaz was giving me an I call bullshit look.
“And also, I made a lot of it up as I went along and had a ton of support from my much more competent friends.”
“Fucking right.” Priya helped Mum into the back of the truck. “By the way, so we’re clear, not taking the dogs.”
Judy, who had been standing by the side of the road through all of this with the same placid, slightly detached air I saw a lot in Alex, snapped back to earth.
“Hmm, what? Oh no, shouldn’t think so. If you’re sorted for transportation, I’ll probably walk up to the field.
It’ll do the girls good to stretch their legs.
” She glared at one dog in particular. “Won’t it, Camilla? ”
“Are you sure, Judy?” asked Mum. “It is a very long way, and although I do not like to be saying it, you are not as young as you used to be.”
“Pish posh.” Judy took a deep lungful of bracing country air.
“Been doing longer walks than this my whole life, and I won’t stop until they put me in a box.
In fact”—she started climbing over a stile with her dogs gathering behind her—“I’ll race you.
You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and all that. ”
Priya leaned on her truck with her arms folded. “You know the low road is death, right?”
I paused, arms full of amp. “Hang on, what?”
Priya turned to me. “It’s like, you try to come back alive, but I’ll get killed fighting the English and then I’ll get brought back and buried in Scotland and I won’t care I’m dead on account of how my girlfriend dumped me up by Loch Lomond.”
“How do you even know that?” I deposited the amp in the back. It might not have been an amp. It was a box with knobs on it.
But Judy was already stomping across fields and calling over her shoulder, “That high road is looking longer all the time.”
“Do not get killed fighting the English,” Mum yelled after her. “Vive the Auld Alliance.”
With Mum’s musical paraphernalia packed, those of us who weren’t taking the low road that was possibly death back to CRAPPstonbury clambered into the truck, and we set out on the higher, less fatal, but longer and windier roads through the little country lanes of Surrey.
“I’m just saying,” I insisted to Priya on the drive, “it sounds made up.”
“What else would the low road be?”
“I don’t know. The M6?”
“Google says it’s death,” Jaz said from the back seat.
Mum, who was sitting beside her, made a wise older-lady noise. “All folk songs are about death, Luc. Or fucking. Sometimes both.”
“‘All Around My Hat’?” I tried.
“The willow is a symbol of mourning,” replied Mum. “Also in some versions, she leaves her true love for another man, so there is fucking in it too.”
Jaz looked up from her phone as if she’d had a very important thought. “What about ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’?”
“That,” Mum told her sternly, “is not a folk song. It is a comic song by Lonnie Donegan.”
“Folk songs’ve got to start somewhere,” Jaz pointed out.
But Mum wasn’t letting that one slide. “When it becomes about death or fucking, then it becomes a folk song.”
“Mum,” I pleaded. “Don’t encourage Jaz to try and make ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ about death or fucking. Also, let’s all stop saying about fucking in front of my fourteen-year-old.”
“What if the dustman,” said Priya, who, like Oliver, was annoyingly good at the whole keeping-your-eyes-on-the-road thing, “is actually Charon?”
“Then,” Mum conceded, “that would make it a folk song.” And just when I thought I’d got away with it, she added, “Especially if Charon is fucking.”
* * *
The CRAPPstonbury site was already buzzing, even though technically nobody should have been arriving for another few hours.
The stages had been set up, the bands—and a lot of bands had come out of the woodwork now that this was also the start of the Odile O’Donnell Comeback Tour—were messing with instruments and bickering, both of which I understood to be pretty normal parts of the creative process.
Oliver, Maisie, and Spud met us as we piled out of Priya’s truck into the venue field. Spud bounded over happily and, indeed, yappily, but Maisie looked honestly dazed.
“Oh my God,” she said, “you’re Odile O’Donnell.”
Jaz literally cringed. “Mum! Don’t embarrass me.”
I was pretty damned stressed with all the CRAPPstonbury chaos, but I glanced up at Oliver then, and we took a moment to share how much it meant that Jaz had got to the point where her mother was an embarrassment, instead of something lost and locked away from her.
Mum—who was looking more like Odile O’Donnell now than I’d ever seen her, with dark eyes and big hair that had come through the ditch experience looking intentionally dishevelled—patted Jaz on the shoulder. “Jas, you did not tell me your mother was a fan.”
Grinding one toe into the dirt, Jaz made didn’t-think-it-was-important noises.
It was weird, unsettlingly weird, seeing somebody interacting with my mum like she was an honest-to-shit famous person, but Maisie seemed straight-up starstruck. Looking slightly downwards, she said, “Welcome Ghosts got me through a really hard time in my life.”
“That is a coincidence,” said Mum, “because it got me through a hard time in my life too. I am going to need to go and get ready for my set soon, but if you and Jas would like to come with me…”
“Mum,” I said, “child labour laws are a thing.”
She waved a hand. “Not when you are famous.”
“I think yes, even when you’re famous.”
“I’m fine,” said Jaz. “You want me to carry something?”
“Actually”—Maisie stuffed her hands in her pockets—“I might…I might bail.”
I’d sort of been expecting this. Maisie had been doing better recently, but there was better and there was able to cope with a festival crowd. Still, it hit Jaz hard, and, while she tried to hide her disappointment, she didn’t quite manage it.
“That’s completely understandable,” Oliver Olivered into the breach. “I’m finding it quite overwhelming myself, and it’s only going to get more hectic as the day goes on.”
Maisie shrugged. “Yeah.”
“And,” he added, “we’ll see you next week?”
“Yeah,” Jaz echoed. “Next week?”
“Of course,” replied Maisie. Who meant it every time and who was sticking to it a lot more these days. “And I’ll be okay for a bit longer. Just…not sure for how long.”
“You can go sit down in the refreshment tent if you need a breather,” I offered. “They know you’re with me, so it won’t be a problem.”
“I was actually going to head that way anyway.” Oliver gently brought Spud to heel. “If you’d like me and Spud to accompany you?”
Maisie nodded. “That’d probably be good. A bit of shade, you know.”
“Okay.” I did my best to appear cool, calm, and in control of the situation. “Civilians and Spud to the refreshment tent. Mum, head backstage. I’ll get someone to get the truck unloaded. Someone who isn’t a child.”
“Not a child,” muttered Jaz.
“Legally,” said Oliver, “you very much are.”