Chapter 44
I thought I’d done pretty well on the lavatorial front.
The number of portaloos I’d booked—very nice portaloos, for what it’s worth, the kinds of portaloos you wouldn’t mind using if you were also the sort of person who donated money to extremely middle-class conservation charities—was definitely adequate for the expected crowds, even with the late rush we’d experienced after the announcement of the Odile O’Donnell Comeback Tour.
Or at least they would have been if at least two dozen of them hadn’t been chained shut, with the beautifully rich but currently very angry voices of a Welsh male voice choir yelling from inside them.
“Alan Bowen,” a tall, thin man was saying outside the central toilet, “you are not coming out of there until you and your group of rebels and apostates relinquish all claim to the title of Skenfrith Male Voice Choir.”
“I will not, Bill Thomas,” Rhys’s uncle Alan replied, somewhat muffled, from within the confines of his portaloo. “You are a traitor, and I will never let a man like you sully the good name of the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir. Why, we’ve been on Songs of Praise, you know.”
“Oh, you and your Songs of Praise.” Bill Thomas threw his hands in the air. “That’s all you ever talked about. There’s a reason we all despised you in the end.”
We’d tried to stop the Skenfrith Male Voice Choir politics from boiling over. We’d even booked both of them to avoid either one taking it as an insult. Apparently, that had been a mistake. “Hi!” I crashed to a halt next to an extremely flustered Rhys Jones Bowen. “Can I help anybody with anything?”
Bill Thomas turned to me with a look of outrage that, frankly, I didn’t think a man who’d just locked a whole male voice choir in a row of portaloos had any business adopting. “You can,” he declared. “You can strike these pretenders from the lineup.”
“You can strike those usurpers from the lineup,” countered Uncle Alan.
“You see the impasse I’m at here,” I told both of them.
And both of them replied, “I do not.”
“It’s bad enough that they’re here at all,” Bill Thomas continued.
“But they have the gall to be performing under the name the Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir, when quite clearly the original choir is the version led by its duly appointed director, not the schismatic version led by a disgruntled former officeholder.”
Uncle Alan wasn’t taking that lying down.
Partly because he was stuck in a portaloo, so he didn’t have room.
“The Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir is the one made up of its original members under the guidance of its original director. The true travesty here is that you’re letting his lot perform under the name of the Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir. ”
“The Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir,” Bill Thomas shot back, “is the one led by its real director elected under its real charter that meets every week in the real church hall it’s been meeting in for forty years.”
Uncle Alan wasn’t taking that lying down either. “We meet in the same church hall.”
“But on a Tuesday. The Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir has never met on a Tuesday, and it never will.”
I cast my eyes over at Rhys Jones Bowen. “Help me out here?”
He looked a little surprised that I’d asked him. Probably because although I’d been working on myself very hard for the past several years, I was still in a lot of ways the same bellend he’d always known I was. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You’re primary festival organiser.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “This seems like it’s way more your area than mine.”
So Rhys squared up to the Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir. “Well, isn’t this a pretty pickle?”
Bill Thomas folded his arms. “It’s your uncle’s fault. He should have taken his defeat with good grace.”
“Good grace?” called out Uncle Alan from inside the stall. “How much good grace can a man have when he’s locked in a portaloo?”
“You know as well as I do,” replied Bill Thomas, “that this portaloo has been a long time coming.”
Rhys Jones Bowen shook his head. “Gentlemen,” he said in tones of abject disappointment.
“Is this any way for self-respecting choristers to behave? Why, in my view, you’re bringing shame on the whole institution of the Welsh male voice choir, and that, you will know, is not a thing I would say lightly. ”
Uncle Alan’s reply, when it came, was more than a bit huffy. “I don’t see what I’ve done wrong.”
“Oooh, Uncle Alan.” It turned out that Rhys had a better not-angry-just-disappointed voice than I did. “We all know that you’ve been needling Bill Thomas for years. Is it any wonder he went off the deep end?”
Bill Thomas didn’t quite say hah, but he did look ill-advisedly triumphant.
“And as for you.” Rhys Jones Bowen fixed him with a cold stare. “Chaining other choristers in toilets. Why, I’ve never seen the like in all my days. Let them all out at once, and we’ll talk about this like reasonable people.”
Somewhat chastened, the Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir grudgingly unchained the Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir from their lavatorial prisons.
When they were done, Uncle Alan and Bill Thomas stood next to each other, and Rhys Jones Bowen addressed them with such fierce disapproval I found myself slightly wilting.
“Will you two look at yourselves,” he declared. “I ask you”—here he stared at Uncle Alan—“what would Auntie Mabel say?”
Uncle Alan looked down. “Mabel doesn’t understand choir politics.”
“You may say that, Alan Bowen,” said Bill Thomas, “but your wife has a better head on her shoulders than you’ll ever have.”
“And I suppose”—Rhys Jones Bowen turned the same disappointed glare onto Bill Thomas—“that your Beryl would be extremely proud of the way you’ve conducted yourself today?”
The spectres of their spouses had brought the duelling choirmasters down slightly to earth, but not so far down they’d get their feet muddy. “I’m not having his lot go on first,” said Uncle Alan. “It’s demeaning.”
“And the same goes for me,” said Bill Thomas. “Only, you know, the other way around. And I’m not going on the little stage if he’s on the big one.”
“Nor me him,” added Uncle Alan. “But once again, with us being in the opposite positions.”
I closed my eyes for two seconds and hoped that I wasn’t missing something. “Okay, so you’re refusing to be on different stages?”
Bill Thomas and Uncle Alan both nodded. “Yes.”
“And you’re also refusing to be on the same stage if the other group goes before you.”
“That’s right,” they both confirmed.
“You’re being very difficult,” Rhys Jones Bowen told them.
“Okay,” I tried, “so if you won’t go on different stages or the same stage at different times, what if we put you on the same stage at once?”
“That wouldn’t work,” protested Bill Thomas.
“No,” agreed Uncle Alan. “We’re doing completely different set lists.”
If I was lucky, this would be typical CRAPP bullshit. I knew how to deal with typical CRAPP bullshit. “And what are those set lists, exactly?”
“Well,” said Bill Thomas, “we’re going to open with ‘You Raise Me Up,’ then do ‘Men of Harlech,’ ‘Myfanwy,’ and ‘Cwm Rhondda,’ and finish on ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.’”
Uncle Alan frowned. “Whereas we were going to start with ‘Men of Harlech,’ then do ‘Myfanwy,’ then do ‘Cwm Rhondda,’ and finish on ‘You Raise Me Up,’ leading into ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau.’”
“Are those,” I tried, “not the exact same songs?”
“Well yes,” conceded Uncle Alan, “but in different orders.”
I looked at Rhys for support, in case I was about to make a massive faux pas. “Can you not just change the order?”
“Suppose we did,” said Bill Thomas. “What then? I suppose you’d want us to both be on stage singing the same songs at the same time. With two different choirs. Nobody’s ever tried such a thing. What would it even sound like?”
“Won’t it sound like one big choir?” I suggested hopefully.
There was a long pause.
“You know,” Bill Thomas said eventually, “the bellend might have a point.”
“Think of it,” put in Rhys Jones Bowen, “as a sort of Super Group.”
Uncle Alan seemed to be rolling this idea around in his brain. “You mean, the Real Skenfrith Male Voice Choir and the Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir together in concert?” He turned to Bill Thomas. “What do you think?”
“I think,” Bill Thomas said, a smile beginning to spread across his face, “that we’d take over the bloomin’ world.” Then he took a moment to reflect. “Well, take over northeast Monmouthshire at least. Which is a good start.”
“But what would we call ourselves?” asked Uncle Alan.
Rhys Jones Bowen nodded sagely. “Funny you should ask that. How about the Real Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir?”
* * *
Having, with Rhys’s help, resolved the Great Male Voice Choir Feud, I had a precious thirty-five seconds to myself before Alex walkie-talkied me with the next crisis.
“Luc, Luc,” he babbled. “There’s a strange man hanging around the refreshment area. I’m pretty sure he’s homeless and he definitely has a knife.” He paused. “Over.”
My instinct was always to assume that the more certain Alex was about something, the less likely it was to be actually true. So I felt pretty confident that investigating this mysterious intruder wouldn’t get me stabbed.
And sure enough, when I got there, I found myself in a completely knife-free zone. I also seemed to be in a completely Alex-free zone, but then I realised that he was hiding behind a speaker like a cartoon spy.
“You see!” He pointed at the hunched, leather-jacketed figure sitting on a log just outside one of the refreshment tents.
How he’d thought a homeless man could afford those clothes or that much hair product I wasn’t sure.
Then again, Alex might have thought homeless meant had to let out one of his mansions.
“That,” I told Alex, “is the Earl of Spitalhamstead.”
Alex boggled. “But he looks like such an oi—”
I didn’t let him finish. “You okay, Saint?” I yelled out.