Chapter 43 #2
She half smiled in that way she got when she was gearing up to take on Oliver, like she wasn’t sure yet if she was baiting him or playing with him. “Legally, it’s okay for security blokes to put kids in handcuffs.”
“Fair point. Although I personally like to think I’d avoid exploiting underage workers even if it were legally permissible.”
I watched them wending through the gathering crowds, wishing I could join them.
Because this was shaping up to be an okay festival, and it would have been nice to sit under the marquee, drinking craft beers on a summer afternoon and hanging out with my, y’know, my family.
Except the okayness of the festival relied on me not doing that. And, instead, doing my job.
I activated the walkie-talkie I had clipped to my collar. “Alex, can you—”
“Twaddle here,” returned Alex. And then after a long enough pause that I was just about to reply, he added, “Over.”
I sighed. “One, you don’t have to do the over thing. Two, you’re doing the over thing wrong.”
“Over,” said Alex.
“Stop saying over.”
“Stop saying what? Over.”
“Over.”
“Didn’t hear that. Just got the over part. Over.”
“I want you”—I spoke very clearly and very slowly—“to stop saying the word over, by which I—”
“Which word? Over.”
“Alex, I need you to get a truck unloaded.”
“So I should stop saying truck? Please confirm? Over.”
“No.”
“No, don’t say truck? Or no, do say truck. Over?”
“Alex,” I tried again, wondering—as I always did—if this was somehow my fault. “I need you to get someone to unload a truck—”
“That’s going to be bally difficult to do if I can’t say truck. Over.”
“You can say truck,” I yelled. “You can say everything except over.”
“Everything except what? Over.”
The channel crackled. “I’ve got someone on it,” said Barbara Clench, from wherever she was. Which, unlike every other member of the team, was almost certainly where she was meant to be.
“Thanks, Barbara,” I said.
“Over,” said Alex.
“How are sales looking?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Alex. “Over.”
“Cautiously healthy,” said Barbara Clench. “Between presales, the gate, and CRAPP’s other sources of income, we should get another year, maybe eighteen months. But obviously we’ll know more when it’s all over.”
“When it’s all what?” trilled Alex. “Over.”
There was a long silence. “Out,” said Barbara very deliberately.
I sank down on another knobby box that may or may not have been an amp, and sucked in a deep, anxious breath.
That was probably the best news I could have received that didn’t quite qualify as good news.
I hadn’t sunk us, but I hadn’t saved us, either, and I didn’t know how to feel about that.
Like, did I really want to spend the next however-long of my life jumping from scheme to scheme, desperately trying to keep a failing charity alive?
On the other hand, walking away or just letting it die seemed shitty.
Still, it could have been worse. At least since Saint had dropped out, I didn’t have to deal with—
“Luc Fleming!” Saint’s voice rang across the field. “Why the fuck am I not on the set list?”
I should have known. Of course he’d show up. Of course he’d expect to be playing. “You told me you weren’t coming,” I pointed out.
“That’s just industry talk. Where’s Odile?”
“Setting up. Look, the thing is, Saint—”
I didn’t get any further because there was yet more yelling. The other two living members of Rancid Sputum were tromping across the field towards us, Rik Jism currently shouting some very rude things at a security guard who was trying to make him leave.
“I told you,” Saint bellowed at his former bandmates, “you’re not welcome.”
MagiMix had dragged out his old—very old, judging from the fit—punk rocker gear and was now bearing down on us in ripped jeans and a leather-jacket-over-bare-chest combo that was a lot harder to get away with on a primary school headteacher. “You think we just come and go when you tell us to?”
“I think you had your chance,” Saint replied, “and you fucking blew it.”
I quietly explained to the security guard that Rik and Mix were—if you really stretched the point—with me, which freed up Jism to join the party.
Because after all, what party didn’t need more Jism?
He’d also repunked himself for the occasion, his hair spiked and his piercings—of which there were many—back in.
Thankfully, he did have a shirt on. “We fucking blew it? You fucking blew it, mate.”
“The fuck I did.”
I confronted the Rancid Sputum reunion with what I hoped was an “in charge” face rather than a “screw you” face. “For the last time, what are you all doing here?”
“They,” replied Saint immediately, “are trying to horn in on my big moment.”
“And what big moment is that?” I asked, even though Saint was immune to sarcasm.
He just stared at me. “Opening for Odile.”
“Why would you think you’re opening for Odile?” It felt weird calling her that instead of Mum. “The last time we spoke, you told me to shut down the whole festival, and I told you to fuck off.”
Rik Jism was glancing between us like a squirrel at a tennis match. “Hang on. What he said to me was that Odile was playing the shitbug festival, and she’d asked him to open for her and he was going to do it without us.”
“Why would my mum even have heard of you?” I exploded at the same time Saint spread his hands in an infuriating gesture of oops and drawled out, “What I actually said was, she’ll want us to open for her.”
“Well, she’ll won’t.” I shut that down with more gusto than grammar.
Saint was still refusing to believe he hadn’t got his way. But MagiMix hadn’t got to be the deputy headteacher of Celvestune Primary School by being slow or stubborn. “Oh, of fucking course. I should have fucking known.”
While MagiMix was reserving his anger for Saint, Rik Jism wasn’t so discerning. He got very, very up in my face and poked his finger into my chest. “So there’s no gig?”
I stepped just slightly out of poking range. “No, there’s no gig. You didn’t want a gig.”
“I didn’t want a gig when there was nothing in it for me,” Rik Jism corrected me. “Opening for Odile is something for me.”
“But apparently,” added MagiMix, who I realised was still wearing his glasses, making the old-school rocker-boy look even less convincing than it could have been, “not something we’re getting. Which is a shame because I was really hoping to be able to put this in the newsletter.”
“You want to put a punk gig you played shirtless next to a guy called Jism in a primary school newsletter?” I asked.
MagiMix looked down at his bare torso. “Maybe I should put a top on.”
Saint turned around and put a hand on MagiMix’s chest. “Hold on. The Mix does not put a top on.”
“As far as you were concerned, the Mix wasn’t playing the gig at all ten seconds ago,” Rik Jism pointed out. “Neither was I.”
“Also, there is no gig,” I added.
Sometimes I wondered how Saint didn’t give himself whiplash with how quickly he changed direction. “Hey, we’re here,” he said, “and we are Rancid fucking Sputum. If we’re going to do this thing, we do it hard.”
“Not too hard,” clarified MagiMix. “I am still needed in school on Monday.”
Rik Jism rolled his eyes. “Fuck me, when did you get to be such a lightweight?”
“When I joined an industry that doesn’t run on cocaine and sexual harassment?”
“Hey, I dropped out of the music business too,” Rik Jism replied.
“I wasn’t talking about the music business. I know what those big-city firms are like.”
It looked like Rik Jism was about to protest, but in the end he said, “You know what? Fair.”
“Nobody is doing anything,” I tried to explain. “Hard or other—”
“Obviously”—Saint had jumped headfirst into a lake of delusion and seemed to be taking his bandmates with him—“we’ll open with ‘Fuck the Man, Fuck the System.’”
“Actually,” said MagiMix, “this might wind up online, and parents from my school might see it, so I’d rather like to limit the number of f-bombs if at all possible.”
Rik Jism coughed into his hand in a way that sounded a lot like Pussy.
“Could you change it? To perhaps ‘Eff the Man, Eff the System,’” suggested MagiMix.
I privately bet myself that Saint would tell him radio edits were for sellouts.
“Radio edits are for sellouts,” Saint told him.
Rik Jism patted Saint on the back. “Saint, mate, it’s not selling out if you’re not being paid.”
“How about ‘Shit in Thatcher’s Mouth’?” Saint tried.
“Not super topical,” pointed out Rik Jism. “And if Teacher Boy here has a problem with fuck, he probably also has a problem with shit.”
“‘Wanking to Picasso’?”
MagiMix gave a thoughtful nod. “Yeah, we can do ‘Wanking.’”
Saint smiled. “‘Paradise in a Nun’s Gash’?”
“Quite a lot of religious students.” MagiMix sounded very apologetic. “Might be hard to explain.”
“‘Come on Eileen.’”
“No!” That time the no had come from Rik and Mix simultaneously.
I shouldn’t have been getting involved, especially because this was a hypothetical list for a set that wasn’t going to happen, but I also couldn’t help myself. “What’s wrong with ‘Come on Eileen’? It’s a disco classic, isn’t it?”
“You’re thinking of a different ‘Come on Eileen.’” Rik Jism’s voice had a note of warning in it.
“Fucking Dexys stole the title from us,” explained Saint.
MagiMix folded his leather-jacketed arms over his otherwise exposed nipples. “With a time machine,” he added, “because that’s the only way they could have released their song in 1982 when you didn’t write the Sputum version until 1987.”
Saint sneered. “That Kevin Rowland’s a tricky bastard.”
Before they could drift any further down memory lane, I cut them off. “I’m going to say this one last time. There is no gig. You are not playing. Rancid Sputum will not be opening for Odile or for anybody.”
Saint finally heard me. And he didn’t like what he heard. “Hold on. This is my fucking festival.”
I’d really hoped telling him to fuck off once would be enough.
Then again, Rik Jism and MagiMix had hoped that too.
“It’s CRAPP’s festival. The money to set it up came from your dad and other doners; the money it’s making belongs to the charity and not to you.
You don’t have any authority here, Saint. ”
“Hey,” Saint protested, “I’m not into institutional power.”
I tried to adopt an assertive posture. Then realised I looked like a wanker and stopped. “Good. Then this situation shouldn’t be a problem for you.” Having made my point, I glanced at Jism and MagiMix. “Richard, Michael, sorry you had a wasted trip.”
“You could’ve told us before we got into the set list,” complained Rik Jism.
“I think he sort of did,” said MagiMix.
Rik Jism, who, for an accountant, seemed to have a worryingly poor eye for detail, considered this. “Okay, yeah I suppose he might. Besides”—he glared at Saint—“it wouldn’t be the first time he’d got us invested in something that never happened.”
“Oh my God,” said Saint in the aggrieved tones of somebody who was definitely in the wrong but would never admit it, “you cannot still be angry about that.”
“I hitchhiked,” said Rik Jism, “from Kettering to fucking Prague.”
“There was a mix-up,” Saint protested. “Also, it was in 1992. Get over it.”
MagiMix gave me an apologetic look. “As you can see,” he said, “these things tend to happen a lot with Rancid Sputum.” He stroked his chin contemplatively. “There’s probably material for an assembly here.”
“What’s the lesson going to be?” Annoyingly, my brain decided to think about that. “‘Don’t count your punk rock concerts before they hatch’?”
“I think I might go with ‘Sometimes your friends will try to get you to do things you don’t think are a good idea, and you should listen to your instincts and/or parents.’”
Saint groaned heavily. “Fuck me, Mix. When did you get so fucking square?”
“At the exact point”—MagiMix drew himself up with a surprising amount of dignity for a man in his sixties with his nipples on display—“that I got confident enough to stop caring what other people thought of me.” His eyes alighted on something past my left shoulder. “Ooh, is that vegan pop-up?”
As MagiMix set off for Bronwyn’s tent, Rik Jism hesitated for a moment and then followed him, leaving me, Saint, and something that was probably an amp standing in ankle-deep mud in the middle of a field.
“They’ll be back,” said Saint. “They always come back.”
“Maybe they will,” I told him. “But let’s be clear: I don’t care.
I don’t care what they do. I don’t care what you do.
You can stay, you can go. It doesn’t matter.
But I have a festival to run.” I glanced across the field, where the first attendees were starting to grab food and stake out the good spots.
“A festival, I might add, that’s going pretty fucking well and—”
“Jones Bowen One to O’Donnell.” Rhys’s voice crackled breathlessly over the walkie-talkie. “Jones Bowen One to O’Donnell.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “Yes?”
“Are you receiving me?”
I’d been told walkie-talkies were a really useful thing to use if you were running a big event. And that was probably true—if you weren’t working with the kind of people who thought the moment you gave them a radio you’d inducted them into the French Resistance. “Clearly I’m receiving you.”
“Thank goodness. You need to come at once. There’s a terrible problem.”
“What kind of problem?” I asked, with a sense of doom settling over me like an unfashionable cagoule.
“Well, it’s a bit hard to explain,” said Rhys Jones Bowen. “But it involves two male voice choirs, some chains, and an awfully large number of portable lavatories.”