Chapter 44 #2
To my surprise, he didn’t yell anything back. He just sat there with his head down and his hands clasped one inside the other.
I approached him the way you might approach a normally aggressive dog that you’d found vomiting in the corner of your garden. “You okay?” I tried again.
“The guys are off eating jackfruit hot dogs,” he said. “You were right. They hate me.”
Yeah, they do seemed unnecessarily mean. “Hate’s a strong word—”
“Okay, but they really, really don’t like me.” An almost hopeful look crossed his face. “Hey, do you think there’s a song in that?”
“Already was one.”
He frowned a frown of utter defeat. “Fuck. Why does that always happen to me?”
“Have you considered,” I began very, very cautiously, “that perhaps original music production isn’t your single greatest strength?”
As down as he was clearly feeling, Saint still gave me a challenging look. “And what is my single greatest strength?”
“You’re…very passionate?”
He looked away, and then said, half addressing me and half addressing fate itself, “You mean I’m a talentless piece of shit who’s lived his whole life on Daddy’s millions and never built or done or achieved anything?”
That pretty much summed it up. But, once again, it felt unnecessarily mean to say so.
“That’s a…that’s a very negative way to put it.”
Slowly, he swivelled his head back towards me. “So how would you put it?”
“I suppose…we’re all dealt a particular hand in life. And you, well, you happened to get dealt a…”
“A really good one?” Saint replied. “One that I could have used to do anything, and in the end all I used it for was to piss around pretending to be a musician hoping that one day, maybe one fucking day, my old man would put his fucking bugs down for five seconds and—”
“Notice you?” I didn’t like to interrupt.
Especially when it was the putting-words-in-somebody’s-mouth kind of interrupting.
It would have been the last thing I’d do with Jaz because she was my kid—my foster kid—and I needed to let her grow and flourish and be her own person.
But Saint was nearly fucking seventy. He was as grown and as flourished as he was going to get.
Besides, I’d been right.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fucking stupid, right? Fucking stupid and fucking clichéd and not at all fucking rock ’n’ roll.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I reckon probably quite a lot of rock ’n’ roll is just people trying to get their dads’ attention.
Or their mums’. Or some boy or girl they liked at school.
I mean, I don’t think you spend your life standing on a big platform shouting Notice me if there isn’t somebody you want to notice you. ”
In my own humble opinion, I’d handled that one pretty well. Not that you’d know it, because Saint was totally ignoring me.
As was his right. Little flourishing flower that he was.
“Just once,” he said, kind of past me, “just once, I’d have liked him to say, ‘You know what, Hilary my boy, that song you did about Norman Tebbit’s ballsack, I was offended by it, but I respect you for having the guts to sing it anyway.’”
“Yeah.” I shrugged again. “I think all sons, in a way, want their dads to say something like that.” That was almost certainly untrue—I knew a whole range of men with a whole range of different relationships to their fathers, but I didn’t think Saint was the kind of guy who was much interested in discussing the spectrum of modern masculinity.
He was way too sigma. “I mean, not exactly like that,” I clarified.
“Like the Norman Tebbit’s ballsack thing is pretty specific. ”
“Wouldn’t even need to be the music,” Saint went on and went on ignoring me. “‘Good job bagging that grouse, Hilary.’ Wouldn’t even need to be about something I’d done. Could have been, ‘Hey, Hilary, haven’t seen you for a year, how was Eton?’”
And that…that felt a whole lot more universal. I knew people who didn’t give a shit what people said about their accomplishments. But being abandoned sucked. Though the jury was out on whether it sucked more to be abandoned by somebody who’d left, or by somebody who was still there.
“And now”—he heaved a deep, tragic sigh—“the bastard is fucking dead. And he’ll never say, ‘By the way, just in case you were wondering, you aren’t a complete fucking disgrace to your ancestors.
’ Fuck me, he’ll never even say, ‘Pass the sugar.’ He’ll never even have sugar. Because he’s fucking dead.”
And out of nowhere, he slumped sideways onto my shoulder and started crying. “He’s fucking dead, Luc. My fucking dad is fucking dead.”
This was not where I thought this day was going to go. I reluctantly gave him a pat and a platitude. “He had a good innings.”
“He’s fucking dead,” Saint repeated, like he’d only just realised. “Do you know how hard it is to stay angry at a man when he’s fucking dead?”
I’d find out when my own dad went. Except, actually, I wouldn’t. Because I wasn’t angry at Jon Fleming. I hadn’t been in a long time. “Well,” I said, “you do seem like you’re giving it a good go?”
Saint gave a wet snuffle. “I’ve spent nearly a year trying to…I don’t know…with the beetle charity and like… Fuck, I hated that beetle charity.”
“CRAPP,” I reminded him. “That’s the charity I work for.”
“Fuck,” he said for the I’d-honestly-stopped-countingth time. “And you did all this”—he looked around at CRAPPstonbury—“for me?”
“I mean if I’m honest,” I admitted, “I did it in a vain hope that I could trick you into thinking that your dad’s interests and yours remotely overlapped, which I don’t think they do.”
Saint pulled his teary, snotty head off my now teary and snotty shoulder. “Still, you did it.” He looked at me the way I think in his head he imagined he wished his father had looked at him. “You’re a man who does things, Luc Fleming.”
“O’Donnell,” I reminded him. “My name is O’Donnell. Like my mother.”
“My mother was a good woman,” Saint told me. “She’d be disgusted with the way I turned out.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” I said. And I was surprised at my own conviction.
“How do you know?”
“Because…because good people are never disgusted by somebody just…being themselves. You’ve not done anything wrong, Saint.
” Okay, that was a lie; he’d done a whole lot of things wrong, and if he hadn’t been a peer of the realm, there’d probably have been arrest records to prove it.
“You’ve lived a life that’s a bit…different, is all. Different isn’t bad.”
Nodding a little distractedly, Saint got to his feet. “Thanks,” he said, and he seemed to actually mean it. “You’ve…you’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“No problem.”
“And…”
I didn’t know what I was expecting from that and. But I got a fucking miracle.
“And you know what?” Saint went on. “I think I’ll keep the fucking beetle charity. At least until I can work…you know…work my shit out.”
“That’s very kind,” I said, only partly insincerely. “I think your mother would be proud.”
For a moment, it was like Saint didn’t know what to make of that. But in the end, he decided to believe it. “You’re a good man Luc Fl—Luc O’Donnell.”
Smiling at me, he threw up the devil horns one last time.
And he walked away.
* * *
Seven hours later, CRAPPstonbury was in full swing, and honestly, I was more stressed than I’d been at any point over the whole process.
Previously, my biggest concern had been that the whole thing just wouldn’t happen.
Now my biggest concern was that I had ten thousand people standing in a field, all of whom had paid a decent amount of money to get in, all of whom would want to be fed, entertained, and not trampled to death because I’d missed something on a health and safety briefing.
But apart from that, it was a good atmosphere.
As the Real Original Skenfrith Male Voice Choir made their way onto the stage to a much warmer reception than I’d have expected from a crowd who mostly hadn’t been following CRAPP events for half a decade, I took a moment to slip backstage—okay, backfield—and take a breather.
I sat down on one of those square boxes with knobs on that I was beginning to suspect might not be amps actually and reminded myself, very firmly, to breathe.
I’d got the reminder bit down, the breathing bit not so much, when Oliver stepped out from behind a different big box with knobs on whose level of ampness I couldn’t even begin to guess.
“There you are,” he said, resting a soothing hand on my back.
“Fuck. What’s gone wrong now?”
“Nothing. I just meant that I’ve been looking for you because you’re my boyfriend and I wanted to see you.”
“Oh.” That made sense. “Where’s Jaz?”
“With our dog and our friends. She’s fine.”
“And Maisie?”
“Left some time ago. Also fine.”
“Oh,” I said again. Honestly, without something to panic about, I had nothing.
After a moment or two of dealing with my nothing, Oliver sat down beside me, which made things a bit bum-over-the-edgy but was worth it for the closeness. “You’ve done a good job, Lucien.”
“Thanks. I guess I did, huh? And Saint might even let us keep running.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But you know it was never your job to save the entirety of C.R.A.P.P.?”
“Wow. I wish you’d told me that months ago, before I did all this.”
He laughed. “If you recall, I encouraged you to explore opportunities in the fast-growing field of Dogstagramming.”
“Don’t tempt me. Spud’s not safe from the sailor suit yet.”
“He will be if Jaz has anything to say about it.” We both fell silent for a second or two, or as silent as you could be with a Welsh male voice choir belting out “Men of Harlech” in the background. Then Oliver said, “You know I’m very proud of you, don’t you?”
“For doing something that wasn’t my job?”
“There are a lot of things that are nobody’s job but still need doing. And if more people stepped up and did them, the world would be a better place.”
“Like recycling and fostering and shit, right?”
“Particularly recycling. The other day, you put a paper bag full of orange peel into the general waste.”